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diff --git a/35091-0.txt b/35091-0.txt index 9498bca..d6686d2 100644 --- a/35091-0.txt +++ b/35091-0.txt @@ -1,25 +1,4 @@ - The Invisible Censor - - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost -no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license. - -Title: The Invisible Censor - -Author: Francis Hackett - -Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #35091] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR *** - - - +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35091 *** Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net. @@ -4290,375 +4269,4 @@ THE AVIATOR THE END - - - - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR *** - - - - -A Word from Project Gutenberg - - -We will update this book if we find any errors. - -This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35091 - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one -owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and -you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission -and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license. - -Title: The Invisible Censor - -Author: Francis Hackett - -Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #35091] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR *** - - - - -Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.fadedpage.net. - -THE INVISIBLE CENSOR - -By - -FRANCIS HACKETT - - - New York - B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. - MCMXXI - - - - - Copyright, 1921, - by B. W. Huebsch, Inc. - Printed in U. S. A. - - - - - TO MY WIFE - SIGNE TOKSVIG - - WHOSE LACK OF INTEREST IN THIS BOOK - HAS BEEN MY CONSTANT DESPERATION - - - - -These sketches and articles appeared in the _New Republic_ and I am -indebted to the other editors for being allowed to reprint them. - - - - -Contents - - - - THE INVISIBLE CENSOR - - WHISKY - - BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN - - FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET - - AS AN ALIEN FEELS - - SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT - - THE NEXT NEW YORK - - CHICAGO - - THE CLOUDS OF KERRY - - HENRY ADAMS - - THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - - THE IRISH REVOLT - - A LIMB OF THE LAW - - A PERSONAL PANTHEON - - NIGHT LODGING - - YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC - - THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID - - WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS - - "WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE" - - WAR EXPERTS - - OKURA SEES NEWPORT - - THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED - - BLIND - - "AND THE EARTH WAS DRY" - - TELEGRAMS - - OF PLEASANT THINGS - - THE AVIATOR - - - - -THE INVISIBLE CENSOR - - -Not long ago I met a writer who happened to apply the word "cheap" to -Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians. It astonished me, because this was an -erudite, cultivated woman, a distinguished woman, and she meant what she -said. - -A "cheap" effect, I assume, is commonly one that builds itself on a -false foundation. It may promise beautifully, but it never lives up to -its promise. Whether it is a house or a human character, a binding or a -book, it proves itself gimcrack and shoddy. It hasn't the goods. And of -Eminent Victorians, as I remembered it (having read it to review it), -this was the last thing to be said. The book began by fitting -exquisitely, but it went on fitting exquisitely. It never pulled or -strained. And the memory of it wears like a glove. - -Now why, after all, did I like this book so thoroughly, which my -distinguished friend thought so cheap? For many minor reasons of course, -as one likes anything--contributory reasons--but principally, as I -laboriously analyzed it, because in Eminent Victorians the invisible -censor was so perfectly understood. What seemed cheap to her ladyship -was, I do not doubt, the very thing that made Eminent Victorians seem so -precious to me--the deft disregard of appearances, the refusal to let -decorum stand in the way of our possessing the facts. This to my critic -was a proof that Mr. Strachey was imperceptive and vulgar--"common" the -ugly word is. To me it simply proved that he knew his game. What he -definitely disregarded, as so many felt, was not any decorum dear and -worth having. It was simply that decorum which to obey is to produce -falsification. The impeccable craft of Mr. Strachey was shown in his -evaluation, not his acceptance, of decorum. He did not take his -characters at their face value, while he did not do the other vulgar -thing, go through their careers with a muck-rake. In vivisecting them -(the awful thing to do, presumably), he never let them die on him. He -opened them out, but not cruelly or brutally. He did it as Mr. William -Johnston plays tennis or as Dr. Blake is said to operate or as Dr. Muck -conducts an orchestra or as Miss Kellerman dives. He did it for the best -result under the circumstances and with a form that comes of a real -command of the medium--genuine "good form." - -The essential achievement of Eminent Victorians is worth dwelling on -because in every book of social character the question of the invisible -censor is unavoidably present. By the censor I do not mean that poor -blinkered government official who decides on the facts that are worthy -of popular acquaintance. I mean a still more secret creature of still -more acute solicitude, who feels that social facts must be manicured and -pedicured before they are fit to be seen. He is not concerned with the -facts themselves but with their social currency. He is the supervisor of -what we say we do, the watchman over our version and our theoretical -estimate of ourselves. His object, as I suppose, is to keep up the good -old institutions, to set their example before the world, to govern the -imitative monkey in us. And to fulfill that object he continually -revises and blue-pencils the human legend. He is constantly at the elbow -of every man or woman who writes. An invisible, scarcely suspected of -existing, he is much more active, much more solidly intrenched, than the -legal censor whom liberals detest. - -Every one is now more or less familiar with the Freudian censor, the -domesticated tribal agent whose function it seems to be to enforce the -tribal scruples and superstitions--to keep personal impulse where the -tribe thinks it belongs. This part of the ego--to give it a spatial -name--came in for a good deal of excited remonstrance in the early days -of popular Freudian talk. To-day, I think, the censor is seldom so -severely interpreted. In many cases there is clearly a savagery or a -stupidity which brings about "the balked disposition," but it is being -admitted that the part which is regulated by the censor, the -"disposition" end of the ego, may not always be socially tolerable; and -as for the "balking," there is a difference between blunt repressiveness -and enlightened regulation. Still, with all this acceptance of ethics, -the nature of the censorship has to be recognized--the true character of -the censor is so often not taste or conscience in any clear condition, -but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional bully. In -the censor as he appears in psycho-analytic literature there is -something of the archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic--all just -as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is the thing in us which -is against license and anarchy. - -In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor of whom Eminent -Victorians is so subversive, there are particularly these irrational and -ritualistic characteristics, these remnants of outgrown institutions, -these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed. Most biography, -especially official biography, is written with such a censor in mind, -under his very eye. Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and -stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him in mind. Hovering -behind Eminent Victorians we see agonized official biography, with its -finger on its lips, and the contrast is perhaps the chief delight that -Mr. Strachey affords. When Cardinal Manning's pre-clerical marriage, for -example, came to be considered by Mr. Strachey, he did not obey the -conventional impulse, did not subordinate that fact of marriage as the -Catholic Church would wish it to be subordinated (as a matter of "good -taste," of course). He gave to that extremely relevant episode its due -importance. And so Manning, for the first time for most people, took on -the look not so much of the saintly cardinal of official biography as of -a complex living man. - -What does the censor care for this sthetic result? Very little. What -the censor is chiefly interested in is, let us say, edification. He aims -by no means to give us access to the facts. He aims not at all to let us -judge for ourselves. With all his might he strives to relate the facts -under his supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever it -may be. And so, when facts come to light which do not chime in with his -prepossession, he does his best either to discredit them or to set them -down as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. And the policy that he -is serving is not sthetic. - -A theory of the sthetic is now beside the point, but I am sure it would -move in a relation to human impulses very different from the relation of -the censor. The censor is thinking, presumably, of immediate law and -order, with its attendant conventions and respectabilities. The sthetic -could not be similarly bound. It is not reckless of conduct, but surely -enormously reckless of decorum, with its conventions and -respectabilities clustering around the status quo. Hence the apparent -"revolt" of modernism, the insurrection of impulse against edification. - -But there is more in Eminent Victorians than an amusing, impish refusal -to edify. There is the instructive contrast between the "censored -celebrity" and the uncensored celebrity disinterestedly observed. -Disinterestedly observed, for one thing, we get something in these -celebrities besides patriotism and mother-love and chastity and heroism. -We get hot impulses and cold calculations, brandy and treachery, the -imperious and the supine, glorious religiousness and silly family -prayers. And these things, though very unlike the products of official -photography, are closely related to impulses as we know them in -ourselves. To find them established for Mr. Strachey's "eminent" -Victorians is to enjoy a constant dry humor, since the invisible censor, -the apostle of that expediency known as edification, stood at the very -heart of Victorianism. - -This is possibly why Samuel Butler, in his autobiographical way, is so -remarkable as a Victorian. In the midst of innumerable edifying figures, -he declined to edify. When people said to him, "Honor thy father and thy -mother," he answered in effect that his father was a pinhead theologian -who had wanted to cripple his mentality, and his mother was, to use his -own phrase, full of the seven deadly virtues. This was not decorous but -it had the merit of being true. And all the people whose unbidden -censors had been forcing good round impulses into stubborn parental -polygons immediately felt the relief of this revelation. Not all of them -confess it. When they have occasion to speak or write about -"mothers"--as if the biological act of parturition brings with it an -unquestionable "mother" psyche--most of them still allow the invisible -censor to govern them and represent them as having feelings not really -their own. But even this persistence of the censor could not deprive -Samuel Butler of his effectiveness. He has spoken out, regardless of -edification, and that sort of work cannot be undone. - -A similar work is performed by such highly personal confessants as Marie -Bashkirtseff and W. N. P. Barbellion, and even by Mary MacLane. The -account that these impulsive human beings give of themselves is -sensational simply because it clashes with the strict preconception that -we are taught to establish. But only a man who remembers nothing or -admits nothing of his own impulses can deny the validity of theirs. The -thing that takes away from their interest, as one grows older, is the -unimportance of the censorship that agonizes them. Their documentary -value being their great value, they lose importance as more specific and -dramatic documents become familiar. And with psycho-analysis there has -been a huge increase in the evidence of hidden life. It is the -Montaignes who remain, the confessants who offer something besides a -psychological document--a transcendence which is not incoherent with -pain. - -But these various confessions are significant. They indicate the -existence and the vitality of the censor. They show that in the simplest -matters we have not yet attained freedom of speech. Why? Because, I -imagine, the world is chock-full of assumptions as to conduct which, -while irrational and ritualistic and primitive, have all sorts of -sanctions thrown around them and must take a whole new art of education -to correct. Until this art it established and these assumptions are -automatically rectified, it will be impossible to exercise free speech -comfortably. An attempt may be made, of course, and indeed must be made, -but to succeed too well will for many years mean either being -exterminated or being ostracized. - -It is not hard to show how each of us in turn becomes an agent of the -invisible censorship. You, for instance, may have a perfectly free mind -on the subject of suffrage, but you may have extremely strong views on -the subject of sex. (Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, to be specific, thinks -that Fielding is nothing but a "smutty" author.) Or you may think -yourself quite emancipated on the subject of sex-desires and be -hopelessly intolerant on the subject of the Bolsheviki. The French -Rights of Man held out, after all, for the sacred rights of -property--and the day before that, it was considered pretty advanced to -believe in the divine right of kings. It is not humanly possible, -considering how relative liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even -convince oneself of the necessity of examining them, and in every case -we are sure to be tempted to oppose certain novel ideas in the name of -inertia, respectability and decorum. To dissemble awkward facts, in such -cases, is much easier than to account for them--which is where the -censor comes in. - -I do not say that it is possible to do away with every discipline, even -the rule-of-thumb of decorum. As a subservient middle-class citizen, I -believe in the regulation of impulse. But as an intellectual fact, the -use of the blue pencil in the interests of decorum is exceedingly inept. -Human impulses are much too lively to be extinguished by the denial of -expression. And if sane expression is denied to them, they'll find -expression of another kind. - -Decorum has its uses, especially on the plane of social intercourse. I -admit this all the more eagerly because I have seen much of one -brilliant human being who has practically no sense of opposition. If he -sees something that he wants, he helps himself. It may be the milk on -the lunch-table that was intended for Uncle George. It may be the new -volume from England that it took nine weeks to bring across. It may be -the company of some sensitive gentlewoman or the busy hour of the mayor -of Chicago. The object makes no visible difference to my friend. If he -wants it, he sticks out his hand and takes it. And if it comes loose, he -holds on. - -Associated with this aggressiveness there is a good deal of purpose not -self-regarding. The man is by no means all greedy maw. But the thing -that distinguishes him is the quickness and frankness with which he -obeys his impulse. Between having an impulse and acting on it there lies -for him a miraculously short time. - -In dealing with such a man, most people begin hilariously. Not all of -them keep up with him in the same heroic spirit. At first it is -extraordinarily stimulating to find a person who is so "creative," who -sweeps so freely ahead. Soon the dull obligations, the tedious details, -begin to accumulate, and the man with the happy impulsiveness leaves all -these dull obligations to his struggling friends. His lack of decorum in -these respects is a source of hardship and misunderstanding, especially -where persons of less energy or more circumspection are attendant. In -his case, I admit, I see the raw problem of impulse, and I am glad to -see his impulse squelched. - -But even this barbarian is preferable to the apathetic repressed human -beings by whom he is surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is -invaluable because "creative." And he should never be blocked in: he -should at most be canalled. - -The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illustrated in his -rational subordination of impulse, but in those subordinations that -violate human and social freedom. And the worst of them are the filmy, -the vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the opportunity of -truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently difficult picture-puzzle, but -what chance have we if the turnip-headed censor confiscates some -particularly indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike? On -reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to escape from those wax -effigies that we once believed to be statesmen--the kind of effigies of -which text-books and correct histories and correct biographies are full! -How we rejoice to escape from them, wondering that they had ever imposed -on us, wondering that teachers and pious families and loyal historians -ever lent themselves to this conspiracy against truth! But the horrible -fact is, Mr. Strachey is one in a million. He has only poked his finger -through the great spider-web of so-called "vital lies." - -Meanwhile, in the decorous and respectable biographies, the same old -"vital lies" are being told. The insiders, the initiated, the -disillusioned, are aware of them. They no longer subsist on them. They -read between the lines. And yet when the insiders see in print the true -facts--say, about Robert Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or -John Jones--these very insiders rush forward with a Mother Hubbard to -fling around the naked truth. We must not speak the truth. We must -edify. We must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced world. - -It means that we need a revolution in education, nothing less. It means -that the truth must be taken out of the hands of the censor. We must be -prepared to shed oceans of ink. - - - - -WHISKY - - -It was a wet, gusty night and I had a lonely walk home. By taking the -river road, though I hated it, I saved two miles, so I sloshed ahead -trying not to think at all. Through the barbed wire fence I could see -the racing river. Its black swollen body writhed along with -extraordinary swiftness, breathlessly silent, only occasionally making a -swishing ripple. I did not enjoy looking at it. I was somehow afraid. - -And there, at the end of the river road where I swerved off, a figure -stood waiting for me, motionless and enigmatic. I had to meet it or turn -back. - -It was a quite young girl, unknown to me, with a hood over her head, and -with large unhappy eyes. - -"My father is very ill," she said without a word of introduction. "The -nurse is frightened. Could you come in and help?" - -There was a gaunt house set back from the road, on a little slope. I -could see a wan light upstairs. - -"The nurse is not scared," the girl corrected, "but she is nervous. I -wish you could come." - -"Of course," and on my very word she turned and led the way in. - -The hall was empty. It had nothing in it except a discouraged oil lamp -on a dirty kitchen table. The shadowy stairs were bare. On my left on -the ground floor a woman with gray hair and rusty face and red-rimmed -eyes shuffled back into the shadows at my entry, a sort of ignoble -Niobe. - -"That's my mother," the grave child explained. And to the retreating -slatternly figure the child called, "This man has come to help, Mother," -as if men dropped from the sky. - -She went up into the shadows and I followed. A flight of stairs, a long -creaking landing. Another flight of stairs. Stumbles. Another landing. A -stale aroma of cat. And a general sense that, although the staircase was -well made and the landings wide, there was not one stick of furniture in -the house. - -As we approached the top floor we met fresher air and the pallid -emanation of a night-light. A figure stood waiting at the head of the -stairs. - -This was a stout little nun, her face framed in creaking linen, and a -great rustle of robes and rosary beads whenever she moved. She began a -sharp whisper the minute we climbed to the landing. - -"He's awake. He's out of his head. I'm glad you've come. Now, child, be -off to bed with you, like a good girl. This way, if you please." - -The child's vast eyes accepted me. "I'll go to Mother," she said, and -she receded downstairs. The nun entered an open door to the right, and -again I meekly followed. - -It was a room out of the fables. There was a tall fireplace facing the -door, with a slat of packing-case burning in it as well as the wind -would permit, and a solitary candle glimmering in a bottle, set on the -table at the head of the bed. Its uncertain light fell on the tousled -hair of a once kempt human being, now evidently a semi-maniac staring at -presences in the room. Down the chimney the wind came bluffing at -intervals, and the one high window querulously rattled. The center of -the room was the sick man's burning eyes. - -I walked through his view and he did not see me. The nun and myself -stood watching him from the head of the bed. - -"Oh, he's awful bad, you have no idea how bad he is; I'm afraid for him; -I am indeed. What am I to call you, Mister? Here, take this chair." - -Before I answered her she continued, in a whisper that slid along from -one _s_ to the next. "They said the doctor would be here at seven and -it's nearly twelve as it is. He's not coming. I wish he was here." - -The sick man seemed to see us. "That's right now," he said, whistling -his breath. "Bring me my clothes, I want to go home." - -The nun laid her arm on him. "Lean back now, dear, and it'll be all -right, I'm telling you." And she gently but ineffectually tried to press -him down. - -The sick man turned his face on her, into the candlelight. He was long -unshaved, but the two things that struck me most, after the crop of gray -bristle, were the dry cavern of his mouth and the scalding intensity of -his eyes. I was terrified lest those eyes should alight on me, and yet I -gazed hard at him. His lips were flaked with yellow scales, and dry -mucus was in strings at the corners of his mouth. His night-shirt gaped -open, showing a very hairy black chest. He seemed a shrunken man, not a -very tall man, but his shoulders were broad and his chin very square. To -support his chin seemed the great effort of his jaws. It fell open on -him, giving him a vacant foolish expression, with his teeth so black and -irregular, and he tried his best to clamp his teeth tight. The working -of his jaws, however, scarcely interfered with his whistling breath or -his gasping words. - -"They will be at the back door, I say. God!" a feeble scream and -whimper. "Bring me my clothes. You're hiding them on me. Oh, why are you -hiding them on me? Can't you give me my clothes?" - -"You're home now, dear. You're home now," the nurse assured him. "Isn't -that your own clock on the mantel? Lie down now and I'll make you a -comfortable drink and put you to sleep." - -"Boy, fetch me my coat." - -"Don't mind him," the nun turned to me, "but do you cover his feet." - -His feet had lost the gray blanket. They stared blankly up from the end -of the bed. I covered them snugly, glad to have something to do. - -"It's all the whisky in him," the nun whispered when at last he went -limp and lay down. "It's got to his brain. I thought he was over the -pneumonia, but that whisky has him saturated. The poor thing! The poor -thing!" - -"Well, I must be going now," the sick man ejaculated, and with one twist -of his body he was out of bed. - -"Oh, keep yourself covered, for the love of God!" The poor nun ran after -him with the blanket as his old flannel night shirt fluttered up his -legs. - -He staggered up to me fiercely, and his eyes razed my face. - -"Fiddle your grandmother," he muttered, "I'm off home, I tell you." - -"You can't leave the room; it's better for you to go back to bed," and I -held him round with my arms. - -"See here, you," his yellow cheeks reddened with his passionate effort, -"you can't hold me a prisoner any longer. Oh, Barrett, Barrett, what are -you doing to me to destroy me?" - -I knew no Barrett, but the poor creature was shivering with anguish and -cold. I put my arms around him and tried to move him out of the draught -of the door. His thin arms closed on me at the first hint of force, and -he clenched with feverish vigor. I could feel his frail bones against -me, his bare ribs, his wild thumping heart. - -"You can't, you can't. You can't keep me prisoner...." - -He struggled, his heart thumping me. Then in one instant he went slack. - -We lifted him to the bed, and I felt under his shirt for the flutter of -his heart. His mouth had dropped open, his eyes were like a dead bird's. - -The little nun began, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," and other holy words, -while I groped helplessly over this fragile burned-out frame. Then I -remembered and I stumbled wild-minded to find that woman downstairs. - -I went headlong through the darkness. At my knock the door opened, as if -by an unseen hand, and I saw, completely dressed, the pale little girl, -with her grave eyes. - -"Your mother?" I asked. - -The child stopped me sharply, "Is Father worse?" - -"He's worse," I answered feebly. "You'd better--" - -The child was brushed aside by her mother, who had stumbled forward from -inside. She looked at me vaguely. - -The girl turned on her mother. "I'm going up to Father. Go inside." - -The woman's will flickered and then expired. She pulled the door back -upon herself, shutting us into the hall. The child led and I followed -back upstairs. - - - - -BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN - - - -I - - -Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia I had formed a conception of -him from the newspapers. First of all, he was a baseball player become -revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting, screaming vulgarian, a mob -orator who lashed himself and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap -religious fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were fables in slang. I -thought of him as vividly, torrentially abusive, and I thought of his -revival as an orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming in -full view to the public mourners' bench. With the penitents I associated -the broken humanity of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her -knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding over a meeting -that was tossed like trees in a storm. - -However this preconception was formed, it at least had the merit of -consistency. It was, that is to say, consistently inaccurate in every -particular. - -Consider, in the first place, the orderliness of his specially -constructed Tabernacle. Built like a giant greenhouse in a single story, -it covers an immense area and seats fifteen thousand human beings. -Lighted at night by electricity as if by sunshine, the floor is a vast -garden of human faces, all turned to the small platform on which the -sloping tiers from behind converge. Around this auditorium, with its -forest of light wooden pillars and braces, runs a glass-inclosed alley, -and standing outside in the alley throng the spectators for whom there -are no seats. Except for the quiet ushers, the silent sawdust aisles are -kept free. Through police-guarded doors a thin trickle fills up the last -available seats, and this business is dispatched with little commotion. -Fully as many people wait to hear this single diminutive speaker as -attend a national political convention. In many ways the crowd suggests -a national convention; but both men and women are hatless, and their -attentiveness is exemplary. - -It is, if the phrase is permitted, conspicuously a middle-class crowd. -It is the crowd that wears Cluett-Peabody collars, that reads the -Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. It is the crowd for -whom the nickel was especially coined, the nickel that pays carfare, -that fits in a telephone slot, that buys a cup of coffee or a piece of -pie, that purchases a shoeshine, that pays for a soda, that gets a stick -of Hershey's chocolate, that made Woolworth a millionaire, that is spent -for chewing-gum or for a glass of beer. In that crowd are men and women -from every sect and every political party, ranging in color from the -pink of the factory superintendent's bald head to the ebony of the -discreetly dressed negro laundress. A small proportion of professional -men and a small proportion of ragged labor is to be discerned, but the -general tone is simple, common-sense, practical, domestic America. -Numbers of young girls who might equally well be at the movies are to be -seen, raw-boned boys not long from the country, angular home-keeping -virgins of the sort that belong to sewing circles, neat young men who -suggest the Y. M. C. A., iron-gray mothers who recall the numbered -side-streets in Harlem or Brooklyn or Chicago West Side and who bring to -mind asthma and the price of eggs, self-conscious young clerks who are -half curious and partly starved for emotion, men over forty with -prominent Adam's apple and the thin, strained look of lives fairly -care-worn and dutiful, citizens of the kind that with all their -heterogeneousness give to a jury its oddly characteristic effect, -fattish men who might be small shopkeepers with a single employee, the -single employee himself, the pretty girl who thinks the Rev. Mr. -Rhodeheaver so handsome, the prosaic girl whose chief perception is that -Mr. Sunday is so hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won't be -swayed, the sedentary "providers" who cannot open their ears without -dropping their jaws. A collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one -may crudely say "average" mortals, some of them destined to catch -religion, more of them destined to catch an impression, and a few of -them, sitting near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a cold. - -Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr. Sunday's small platform -is a bower of lovely bouquets, and the first business is the -acknowledgment of these offerings. As a means of predisposing the -audience in Mr. Sunday's favor nothing could be more genial. In the body -of the hall are seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute -is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver's powerful, commonplace voice -invites them to recognition: "Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company -here?" All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren. "Fine, -fine. We're glad to see yeh here. We're glad to welcome yeh. And what -hymn would _you_ like to have?" In loud concert the Pittsburgh Plate -Glass Co. delegation shout: "Number forty-nine!" Mr. Rhodeheaver -humorously parodies the shout: "Number forty-nine! It's a good 'un too. -Thank yeh, we're glad to have yeh here." Not only immense bouquets, but -gold pieces, boxes of handkerchiefs, long mirrors, all sorts of -presents, mainly from big corporations or their employees, are on the -tight platform. One present came from a mill, a box of towels, and with -it not only a warm, manly letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept "the -product of our industry," but a little poetic tribute, expressing the -hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr. Sunday might have a good bath -and take comfort in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and liked -it, and gazed amiably at the towels. - -The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thousand people had really -joined in them the effect would have been stupendous. As it was, they -were thrilling, but not completely. The audience was not half abandoned -enough. - -Then, after a collection had been taken up for a local charity, Mr. -Sunday began with a prayer. A compact figure in an ordinary black -business suit, it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice that, -for all his athleticism, he was tired to the bone. He is fifty-three -years old and for nine weeks he had been delivering about fifteen -extremely intense sermons a week. His opening was almost adramatic. It -had the conservatism of fatigue, and it was only his evident -self-possession that canceled the fear he would fizzle. - -The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me at first were Elbert Hubbard -and George M. Cohan. In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism -of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in his physical attitude -there was nothing of that greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and -swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman of his particular -line of wares. - -Accompanying one of the presents there had been a letter referring to -Billy Sunday's great work, "the moral uplift so essential to the -business and commercial supremacy of this city and this country." As he -developed his homely moral sermon for his attentive middle-class -congregation, this gave the clew to his appeal. It did not seem to me -that he had one touch of divine poetry. He humored and argued and smote -for Christ as a commodity that would satisfy an enormous acknowledged -gap in his auditors' lives. He was "putting over" Christ. In awakening -all the early memories of maternal admonition and counsel, the -consciousness of unfulfilled desires, of neglected ideals, the ache for -sympathy and understanding, he seemed like an insurance agent making a -text of "over the hill to the poorhouse." He had at his finger tips all -the selling points of Christ. He gave to sin and salvation a practical -connotation. But while his words and actions apparently fascinated his -audience, while they laughed eagerly when he scored, and clapped him -warmly very often, to me he appealed no more than an ingenious electric -advertisement, a bottle picked out against the darkness pouring out a -foaming glass of beer. - -And yet his heart seemed to be in it, as a salesman's heart has to be in -it. Speaking the language of business enterprise, the language with -which the great majority were familiar, using his physical antics merely -as a device for clinching the story home, he gave to religion a great -human pertinence, and he made the affirmation of faith seem creditable -and easy. And he defined his own object so that a child could -understand. He was a recruiting officer, not a drill sergeant. He spoke -for faith in Christ; he left the rest to the clergy. And to the clergy -he said: "If you are too lazy to take care of the baby after it is born, -don't blame the doctor." - -It was in his platform manners that Sunday recalled George M. Cohan. -When you hear that he goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations -of baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is not wild. -Needing to arrest the attention of an incredibly large number of people, -he adopts various evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It is a -physical language with which the vast majority have friendly heroic -associations, and for them, spoken so featly and gracefully, it works. -Grasping the edge of the platform table as if about to spring like a -tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives to his words a drive that makes -you tense in your seat. Whipping like a flash from one side of the table -to the other, he makes your mind keep unison with his body. He keys you -to the pitch that the star baseball player keys you, and although you -stiffen when he flings out the name of Christ as if he were sending a -spitball right into your teeth, you realize it is only an odd, apt, -popular conventionalization of the ordinary rhetorical gesture. Call it -his bag of tricks, deem it incongruous and stagey, but if Our Lady's -Juggler is romantic in grand opera, he is not a whit more romantic than -this athlete who has adapted beautiful movements to an emphasis of -convictions to which the audience nods assent. - -The dissuading devil was conjured by Sunday in his peroration, and then -he ended by thanking God for sending him his great opportunity, his vast -audience, his bouquets and his towels. When he finished, several hundred -persons trailed forward to shake hands and confess their faith--bringing -the total of "penitents" up to 35,135. - -Bending with a smile to these men and women who intend to live in the -faith of Christ, Billy Sunday gives a last impression of kindliness, -sincerity, tired zeal. And various factory superintendents and employers -mingle benignly around, glad of a religion that puts on an aching social -system such a hot mustard plaster. - - - -II - - -Oyster soup is a standard item in the money-making church supper. The -orphan oyster searching vainly for a playmate in an ocean of church soup -is a favorite object of Billy Sunday's pity. He loves to caricature the -struggling church, with its time-serving, societyfied, tea-drinking, -smirking preachers. "The more oyster soup it takes to run a church," he -shouts sarcastically, "the faster it runs to the devil." - -An attitude so scornful as this may seem highly unconventional to the -outsider. It leads him to think that Billy Sunday is a radical. The -agility with which the Rev. Billy climbs to the top of his pulpit and -then pops to the platform on all fours suggests a corresponding mental -agility. He must be a dangerous element in the church, the outsider -imagines; he must be a religious revolutionary. And then the outsider -beholds John Wanamaker or John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the platform -alongside the revivalist--pillars of society, prosperous and respectable -gentlemen who instinctively know their business. - -Fond as his friends are of comparing Billy Sunday to Martin Luther or -John the Baptist, none of them pushes the comparison on the lines of -radicalism, and Sunday himself waives the claim to being considered -revolutionary. "I drive the same kind of nails all orthodox preachers -do," he says in one of his sermons. "The only difference is that they -use a tack hammer and I use a sledge." No one supposes that Martin -Luther could have said this. Sledge-hammer orthodoxy was not exactly the -distinguishing characteristic of Martin Luther. The conservatism of -Billy Sunday's message is the first fact about him. Where he differs -from the orthodox preacher is not in his soul but in his resolution. He -has the mind of Martin Tupper rather than of Martin Luther, but it is -combined with that competent American aggressiveness which one finds in -a large way in George M. Cohan, Theodore Roosevelt, even Ty Cobb. -Theology does not interest Billy Sunday. He compares it to ping-pong and -compares himself to a jack-rabbit and says he knows as little about -theology as a jack-rabbit knows about ping-pong. What he cares about is -religious revival. He knows the church is in bitter need of revival. He -is out to administer digitalis, in his own phrase, instead of oyster -soup. - -For many years the church has been waning, and Billy Sunday scorns the -effeminate, lily-handed efforts at resuscitation that the churchmen have -employed. To put pepperino into a religious campaign, to make -Christianity hum, requires more than cushioned pews, extra music, coffee -and macaroons. Had Billy Sunday been in the regular theatrical business -he would not have fussed with a little independent theatre. He would -have conducted a Hippodrome. To rival the profane world's attractions he -sees no reason for rejecting the profane world's methods. So tremendous -an object as curing an institution's pernicious anmia justifies the -most violent, outrageous experiment. - -If Jesus Christ were a new automobile or an encyclopdia or a biscuit, -Billy Sunday would have varied the method he has employed in putting Him -over, but he would not have varied the spirit of his revival-enterprise -in any essential particular. His object, as he sees it, is to sell -Christ. It is an old story that from its economic organization society -takes its complexion. The Sunday revival takes its complexion from -business enterprise without a single serious change. There is one great -argument running all through Billy Sunday's sermons--the argument that -salvation will prove a profitable investment--but much more clearly -derived from business than the ethics preached by Billy Sunday is the -method he has devised for promoting Jesus Christ. Even the quarrel -between "Ma" Sunday and the man who has lost the post-card concession is -an illustration of the far-reaching efficiency of the system. The point -is not that money is being made out of the system. "An effort to corrupt -Billy Sunday," to use a paraphrase, "would be a work of supererogation, -besides being immoral." If Billy Sunday has a large income, $75,000 or -$100,000 a year, it is not because he is mercenary. It is only because a -large income is part of the natural fruits of his promoting ability. -Left to himself, it is quite unlikely that Billy Sunday would care a -straw about his income, beyond enough to live well and to satisfy his -vanity about clothes. It is Mrs. Sunday who sees to it that her -promoter-husband is not left penniless by those Christian business men -who so delightedly utilize his services. - -The backbone of Billy Sunday's success is organization. When -organization has delivered the crowd, Billy is ready to sweat for it and -spit for it and war-whoop for it and dive for base before the devil can -reach him. He is ready to have "Rody" come on the programme with his -slide-trombone and to have any volunteer who wishes to do it hit the -sawdust-trail. But he does not let his success depend on any programme. -His audiences are, in great measure, contracted for in advance. It is in -grasping the necessity for this kind of preparedness, in taking from the -business world its lessons as to canvassing and advertising and -standardizing the goods, that Billy can afford to jeer at oyster soup. -As his authorized biographer complacently says, "John the Baptist was -only a voice: but Billy Sunday is a voice, plus a bewildering array of -committees and assistants and organized machinery. He has committees -galore to coperate in his work: a drilled Army of the Lord. In the list -of Scranton workers that is before me I see tabulated an executive -committee, the directors, a prayer-meeting committee, an entertainment -committee, an usher committee, a dinner committee, a business women's -committee, a building committee, a nursery committee, a personal -worker's committee, a decorating committee, a shop-meetings -committee--and then a whole list of churches and religious organizations -in the city as ex officio workers!" In New York on April 9th there was a -private meeting of 7,000 personal workers, "another step in the -direction of greasing the campaign." - -Unless Billy Sunday had some skill as a performer he naturally could not -hold his place as a revivalist. His success consists largely, however, -in the legendary character that has been given him by all the agencies -that seek to promote this desperate revival of orthodox religion. His -acrobatic stunts on the platform are sufficiently shocking to make good -publicity. His much-advertised slang, repeated over and over, has a -similar sensational value. But the main point about him is the -dramatization of his own personality. His virility is perhaps his chief -stock-in-trade. No one, not Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much -on his personal militant masculinity. Although well over fifty, his -youthful prowess as a baseball-player is still a headline-item in his -story, and every sermon he preaches gives him a chance to prove he is -physically fit. In addition to this heroic characteristic there is his -fame as a self-made man. He is a plain man of the people, as he never -fails to insist. He carries "the malodors of the barnyard" with him. But -he has succeeded. The cost of his special tabernacle is one of his big -distinctions. The size of his collections is another. His personal -fortune, in spite of all criticism, is a third. Besides these heroic -attributes of strength and wealth there is his melodramatic simplicity -of mind. All of his sermons are "canned" and a great deal of the -material in them is borrowed, but he manages to deliver his message -straight from the shoulder, as if it were his own. There can be no doubt -that his shouting, his slang, his familiarity with Jesus, his -buttonholing old God, his slang-version of the Bible, do offend large -numbers of people. They arrest attention so successfully, even in these -cases, that they turn out to be well advised. There is nothing -spontaneous about these antics. They are switched on at the beginning of -a revival and switched off as it succeeds. They are Sunday's native way -of lighting up the strait and narrow path with wriggling electric signs. - -Billy Sunday has too much energy to stick completely fast in the mud of -conservatism. He is capable of advocating sex instruction for the young, -for example, and he permits himself the wild radicalism of woman -suffrage. But as regards vested interests and patriotism and war he is a -conservative, practically a troglodyte. What he attacks with fervor are -the delinquents in ordinary conduct, especially the people who lack -self-control. "Booze-hoisters" and card-players and tango-dancers and -cigarette-smokers are his pet abominations--genuine abominations. -Profanity, strange to say, is another evil that he fights with fire. -Honesty, sobriety, chastity--these are virtues that he exalts, -illustrating the horror of failing in them by means of innumerable -chromatic anecdotes. The devil he constantly attacks, though never with -real solemnity. "The devil has been practicing for six thousand years -and he has never had appendicitis, rheumatism or tonsillitis. If you get -to playing tag with the devil he will beat you every chip." It is more -for spice and snap that he introduces the devil than to terrify his -public. The Bible is his serious theme, and he feels about it almost the -way Martin Tupper did: - - The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion volume, - The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our Rights ... - It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare - A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible! - --The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark, - And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning, - And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions, - In spite of learned unbelief,--we hold it all plain truth: - Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study; - Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and Colenso ... - The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian nation - ... - The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square, - The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws ... - Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salvation. - -One of Billy Sunday's boasts is that the liquor interests hate him. -"That dirty, stinking bunch of moral assassins hires men to sit in the -audience to hear me, to write down what I say and then try to find some -author who said something like it, and accuse me of having stolen my -ideas. I know that $30,000 was offered a man in New York City to write a -series of articles attacking me. All right; if you know anything about -me that you want to publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is a -dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole thing is a frame-up from A -to Izzard. I'll fight them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a -pair of skates. By the grace of God, I've helped to make Colorado and -Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice -on the dirty gang that I'll help to make the whole nation dry." (New -York Times, April 19th, 1917.) - -Assuming these points to be well taken, there is still great room to -doubt the deep religious effect of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like -William Allen White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf in -Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many hundred human beings -for moral stimulus in a time of need. In spite of the thousands who have -hit the sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that more -than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously affected by him. -The great majority of those who hit the trail are people who merely want -to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of seriousness or -"conversion." The atmosphere of the tabernacle, bright with electric -light and friendly with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and -in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is seldom a contagious -note. His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a -remarkable public entertainer, and much that he says has keen humor and -verbal art and horse sense. But for all his militancy, for all his -pugnacious vociferation, he leaves an impression of being at once -violent and incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but not a -guide or a friend. - -Still, as between Billy Sunday's gymnastics and the average oyster soup, -Messrs. Wanamaker and Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday. -Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of carpets and socks, Socony -and Nujol, and if Christ could have been put over in the same way, by -live-wire salesmanship, Billy was the man. - - - - -FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET - - - -I - - -"Though you do not know it, I have a soul. Behold, across the way, my -library. When the night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees -shake out their greenery against the white stonework, do you not catch a -suggestion of atmosphere, something of a mood? And the black cliffs -around, with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the width of them, -are they not monuments? I cleave brilliantly, up and down this dormant -city. It is for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plodding -milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speeding her lover's motor. Heed -my long silences, my slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed. My -buildings come about me to muse and to commune. Receive, for once on -Fifth Avenue, the soul that is imprisoned in my stone and steel." - -It is not for the respectable, this polite communication. Theatre and -club and restaurant have long since disgorged these. New York has -masticated their money. They have done as they should and are restored -uptown. Even the old newswoman, she who had spent starving months in the -Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war, she has tottered -from her stand down by the station. The Hungarian waiter in Childs' is -still there, still assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat -cakes, but that is off the avenue. It is three, the avenue is nearly -empty. It is ready to disclose its soul. - -But before this subtle performance there is a preliminary. It is a very -self-respecting avenue and at three on a pleasant morning, when no one -is around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath. Perhaps a few -motors go by--a taxi rolling north, heavy with night thoughts, a tired -white face framed in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking -loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its suburban chores. -The Italian acolytes are impartial. They spray the wheels of a touring -car with gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a powerful stream -under the hubs of a Nassau News wagon trundling to a train. The avenue -must be refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nodding -approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must be prepared for the sun, -under bold lamps and timid stars. - -A fine young morning, the watchman promises. A bit of wind whiffles the -water that is shot out from the white-wing's hose, but it is clearing up -above and looks well for the day. The hour beckons memories for the -watchman--fine young mornings he used to have long ago, in Ireland, a -boy on his first adventure and he driving with the barley to Ross. - -It is an empty street. The hose is wheeled away over the glistening -asphalt. The watchman disappears--he has a cozy nook beyond the ken of -time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pillow, to hide a diminished -head. With man accounted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to -the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion, the buildings have -their moment. Each tower stretches his proud height to the morning. The -stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed. - - - -II - - -Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it cannot hold the virgin -morning forever. Its windows may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind -the walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life. - -"Give us this day our daily bread." A saintly venerable horse seems to -know the injunction. Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it -usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord. - -And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the prayer about clams, but -some one in Mount Vernon is destined to have them quickly. Out of the -mysterious south, racing against time, a little motor flits onward with -gaping barrels of clams. At a decent interval comes a heavier load of -fish. Great express wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest uses -of Fifth Avenue begin. - -Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies. The grocer and the -greengrocer are early on their rounds. But an empty American News truck -confesses that eternal vigilance is the price of circulation. Its gait -is swifter than the gait of milkman or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and -dew are on the florist's wheels: he has come whistling by the swamps of -Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs lightly past the juggernauts that -crush down. - -Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His trucks hurl from Grand -Central to make the substations. But his is not the pride of place. Nor -is it coal or farmers' feed that appropriates the middle of the street. -The noblest wagons, a long parade of them, announce the greater glory of -beer. The temperance advocate may shudder at the desecration of the -morning. He may observe "Hell Gate Brewery" and nod his sickly nod. But -there is something about this large preparedness for thirst that stills -the carping worm of conscience. It is good to see what solid, ample -caravans are required to replenish man with beer. It is not the single -glass that is glorious. It is not even the single car-load. It is the -steady, deliberate, ponderous procession that streams through the early -hours. Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy of beer-wagons. -It satisfied the faith that there was Design in creation, but the -Percheron is not needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness -about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer. - - - -III - - -"Number, please?" She is anonymous, that inquirer. But behind her -anonymity there is humanity. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street caught -a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M. - -She was up at five in the morning. She had a pang as she put on her -check suit, slightly darker than her check coat lined with pink. Her -little hat, however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked breakfast -while she set the table. Then she walked to the Third Avenue "L" with -her friend. They got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to -Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked along Forty-second -Street in time for them to do a brief window-shopping as they passed the -shirtwaists at Forsythe's. Her friend's bronze shoes she envied as they -crossed the little park back of the Library. On Sixth Avenue they -inspected the window at Bernstein's. A slight argument engrossed them. -They hovered over the window, chirping not unlike the sparrows in Bryant -Park. Then, in a flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone -company to begin their "Number, please." - -An hour earlier laborers with dinner-pails had crossed Fifth Avenue, and -hatless Polish girls on their way to scrub. By seven o'clock the negro -porters and laborers were giving way to white-collar strap-hangers on -the elevateds and in the subway. It was getting to be the hour of -salesmen and salesgirls and office-boys and shop-subordinates and -clerks. The girls back of the scenes at the milliner's, they go up Fifth -Avenue at seven, to take one side-street or another. The girl who sells -you a toothbrush in the drug-store hurries by the shop windows, herself -as neat as a model. Is it early? Myriads of men are pouring down -already. Besides, "'S use of kickin'? If you don't like it, you can walk -out!" - -The night-watchman is going home, and an old attendant from the Grand -Central. "Tired, Pop?" "Yeh, p'tty tired." "What right've you to git -tired workin' for a big corporation?" The oppressed wage-slave bellows, -"Ha, ha." - - - -IV - - -Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in the afternoon. The -diastole of travelers had spread all morning from Grand Central; the -systole is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in the -afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the suburbs, tearing their -way through the weaker streams that are drawn up by the neighboring -shops and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and Sherry's and -Delmonico's and the Manhattan and the Belmont are no longer columnar -monuments, holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human floods -which they suck in and spray out. The street itself is lost to memory -and vision. A swollen stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are -permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless bosom the -freight of curiosity and pride and favor. One might fancy, to gaze on -this mad throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered the -universe, worshipers of a machine. - -It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles, the feminine hour. -A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming -from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this -period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, -flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working -world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely -infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down -the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but -their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and -leisure. Many of the white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are not -white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend -the world is gay. - -They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move -as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common -attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides. - - - -V - - -For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. He stayed with his -friend the spider the round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider, -is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the scene-shifter and the -detective. Some day we should pitch a metropolitan observatory at the -corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,--some day, if we can -find the time. - - - - -AS AN ALIEN FEELS - - -Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that the United States existed. -My first dream of it came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay -flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. It was a Wild West -Show, and for years I associated America with the intoxication of the -circus and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. "Two a penny, two a -penny, large penny oranges! Buy away an' ate away, large penny oranges!" -They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor of them and the fumes -of circus excitement gave me a first gay ribald sense of the United -States. - -The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag uncle. He had sought -his fortune in America--sought it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a -horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd and delicious oaths. -"Gosh hell hang it" was his chief touch of American culture. He was a -"Yank" in local parlance, a frequently drunken Yank. His fine drooping -mustache too often drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I steadied -him home under the October stars and absorbed a long alcoholic reverie -on the Horseshoe Falls. As we slept together that night in the -rat-pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all the -horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver over the wonderments of -the Horseshoe Falls. - -This, with an instilled idea that America and America alone could offer -"work," foreshadowed the American landscape. It is the bald hope of work -that finally magnetizes us hither. But every dream and every loyalty was -with the unhappy land from which I came. - -For many months the music of New York harbor spoke only of home. Every -outgoing steamer that opened its throat made me homesick. America was -New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new -duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a -living, and the art of eating at Childs'. At night the hall-bedroom near -Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for -amusement. The only women to say "dear," the women who say it on the -street. - -In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word -"settlement" gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was -somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. I had looked for it in -boarding-houses. I had looked for it in stenographic night-schools. I -had sought it in the blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long -jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among the street-walkers, -the first to proffer intimacy. And of course, not being clever enough, I -had overlooked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at home. - -America dawned for me in a social settlement. It dawned for me as a -civilization and a faith. In all my first experiences of my employers I -got not one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was the language of -smartness, alertness, brightness, success, efficiency, and I tried to -learn it, but it was a difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were -lawyers, but they were interested in penmanship and ability to clean -ink-bottles. Some of them were business men, but they were interested in -ability to typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not their fault. -Ours was not an affair of the heart. But if it had not been for the -social settlement, I should still be an alien to the bone. - -Till I knew a social settlement the American flag was still a flag on a -circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. The cheapness of the United States -was the message of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville and -Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, of the promenade on Broadway. In -the social settlement I came on something entirely different. Here on -the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of something besides success. The -house was saturated in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet. -A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make it musical. It was -thronged with Jews and Greeks and Italians and soulful visitors, to make -it restful. It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it easy. -But it was the first place in all America where there came to me a sense -of the intention of democracy, the first place where I found a flame by -which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer words about it. The men, I -learned, were mollycoddles, and the women were sexually unemployed. The -ruling class spoke of "unsettlement workers" with animosity, the -socialists of a mealy-mouthed compromise. Yet in that strange haven of -clear humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I had been -seeking--the knowledge that America had a soul. - -How one discovers these things it is hard to put honestly. It is like -trying to recall the first fair wind of spring. But I know that slowly -and unconsciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed out the -asperity of alienism. There were Americans of many kinds in residence, -from Illinois, from Michigan, from New York, English-Americans, -Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, men who had -gone to Princeton and Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn -Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the Americanism was of a kind -that opened to the least pressure from without, and never shall I forget -the way these residents with their "North Side" friends had managed so -graciously to domesticate the annual festival of my own nationality. -That, strange though it may seem, is the more real sort of -Americanization Day. - -From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing alien breathes in -American air, but I doubt if I should have ever known the meaning of -Walt Whitman had I not lived in that initiating home. It was easy in -later years to see new meanings in the American flag, to stand with -Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, but it was in the settlement I found the -sources from which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement, one was not -expected to believe that man's proper place is on a Procrustean bed of -profiteering. A different tradition of America lived there, one in which -the earlier faiths had come through, in which the way to heaven was not -necessarily up a skyscraper. In New England, later, I found many ideas -of which the settlement was symptomatic, but as I imbibed them they were -"America" for me. - -What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit -is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to -Lincoln's normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to -understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come -there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without -exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe -have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of -the governed. But here among America's governors and statesmen was a -simple authenticator of humane ideals. To inherit him becomes for the -European not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary of them in a -new. In the microcosm of the settlement perhaps Lincolnism is too -simple. Many of one's promptest acquiescences are revised as one meets -and eats with the ruling class later on. But the salt of this American -soil is Lincoln. When one finds that, one is naturalized. - -It is curious how the progress of naturalization becomes revealed to -one. I still recollect with a thrill the first time I attended a -national political convention and listened to the roll-call of the -States. "Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!" Empty names for many years, at -last they were filled with one clear concept, the concept of the -democratic experiment. "As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning -walk"--the living appeal to each state by name recalled Whitman's -generous amusing scope. "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican -breez'd! The diverse! The compact! The Pennsylvanian! The Virginian! The -double Carolinian!" The orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke -Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke votes for Taft and -Sherman. But even these men were parts of the democratic experiment. And -the vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as the empurpled -Penrose did not answer. It was they who were the leaves of our grass. - -In Whitman, as William James has shown, there is an arrant mysticism -which his own Democratic Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this -credulity as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an alien is -likely to enter if his first intimacy with America came in the aliens' -crche. A settlement is a crche for the step-children of Europe, and it -is hard not to credit America at large with some of the impulses which -make the settlement. Such, at any rate, is the tendency I experienced -myself. - -With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United States? I think of -Lincoln and his effected mysticism by Union, union for the experiment, -and I feel alive within me a complete identification with this land. The -keenest realization of the nation reached me, as I recall, the first -time I saw the capitol in Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up -the hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets gleaming -after a warm shower. The plaza in front of the capitol was deserted. A -few high sentinel lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and -scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the dome. Standing apart -completely by myself, I felt as never before the union of which this -strength and simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the night, the -scent of April pervading it, gave to the lonely building a dignity such -as I had seldom felt before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and -achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, for a quiet faith in -the peoples and states that lay away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, -I thought, had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night in April, -and felt the same promise of spring. - - - - -SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT - - -One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the pursuit of the secret of -life. That secret, however, is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible -to me, somewhere in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten, it taunts -my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making a lunge after it. But tied to -the ball there seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye fixes -the secret of life but it escapes my paw. - -During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had it. It involved a great -deal of stern discipline. Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston -garters and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, hot baths -followed by rolling in the snow and jiu jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu -hinted at the very secret itself. Here was the crude West seeking to -slug its way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had only to lay -hold of life by the little finger to reduce it to squealing submission. -The sinister power of jiu jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn -it we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme of effortless -subtlety. A people with such an art, combined with ennobling -vegetarianism, must necessarily be a superior people. I privately -believed that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the Russian fleet. - -Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my soul and supplanted it with -a colossal contempt for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already -protested. No nation could hope to take the field that subsisted on -heavy foods--such unclean things as sausages and beer. The secret of -world mastery was a diet of rice. "We all eat too much" became a fixed -conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a greater conviction--we all sleep too -much as well. This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett. -Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. We sleep ourselves stupid. -Who could not afford to lose a minute's sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute -a day--who would miss it? And in 500 days you would have got down to the -classical forty winks. Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He -modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its successful -practicability. To cut down sleep and cut down food was the only way to -function like a superman. - -Once started on this question of habits I spent a life of increasing -turmoil. From Plato I heard the word moderation, but from William Blake -I learned that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From -Benjamin Franklin I gathered the importance of good habits, but William -James gleefully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. And then -came Scientific Management. - -The concept of scientific management practically wrecked my life. I -discovered that there was a right way of doing everything and that I was -doing everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that we were all -astray about the simplest things. We did not know how to breathe -properly. We did not know how to sit properly. We did not know how to -walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was making us bald. We wore -pointed shoes: it was unfair to our little toe. But scientific -management did not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly pointed out -that "waste motions" were the chief characteristic of our lives. - -One of the most fantastic persons in the world is the public official -who, before he can write a postal order or a tax receipt, has to make -preliminary curls of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific -eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our effective motions -could be registered on a visual target, our record would be found to -resemble that of savages who use ammunition without a sight on their -guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier's marksmanship is wasteful, -we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that -fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms--waste -motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub -our eyes--more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the -rest of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific -management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with -the minimum of gesture. They believe that they complete the operation -under five minutes. But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that -under the inspection of the scientific manager their performance would -look as jagged as their razorblade under the microscope? The day will -probably arrive when a superman will shave with one superb motion, as -delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of an orange-skin in one long -unbroken peel. - -In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the haphazard, unscrutinized -conduct of his morn. We pick up our paper without any suspicion that we -are about to commit intellectual felony. We do not know that the news -editor is in a conspiracy to play on our minds. If men gyrate too much -physically, they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start to -look over the news. It is not so much that they begin the day with -devouring the details of a murder or lull themselves with some excuse -for not reading a British note on the blockade. It is the fact that they -are led by a ring running through their instincts to obey the particular -editors they read. - -Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand how the human -race has survived. Even conceding that I was normal, it is so much the -worse for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous breed. There is not -one important layman's practice that we have organized with regard to -discipline and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying -bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting one's hat and the -circumvolutions in putting links in one's cuffs? How about the impulsive -child who wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a hug? The -discovery seemed chilly that everything could be scientifically managed, -everything could be perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at -the center of one's life. But a fear of being chilly is a mark of -inferiority. It ill becomes a human machine. - -Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours a day, with vague -longings to eat very little and sleep very little and master jiu jitsu -and breathe deep and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and give -up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically and save waste -motions in putting on my shirt, I happened to come across two European -thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling Shakespeare's -knowledge of dead languages by my own knowledge of live ones, I could -not read these masters in the original to determine whether they blended -like oil and vinegar or fought like water and oil. But in the eagerness -of philosophic poverty I grasped just two delightful words from them, -"instinct" and "repression." The metaphysician's secret of life, -apparently, was to drop using one's so-called intelligence so -frantically, to become more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena -and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put the Ten Commandments -in their place. To tell the truth, his detection of "repression" gave me -no tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the evolutionist turned -my thoughts away from the early worries of discipline. This is the -latest ball in the air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of -any tantalizing invisible string. - - - - -THE NEXT NEW YORK - - -You'd get awfully tired if I told you everything about my visit to New -York in A. D. 1991. Some things are too complicated even to refer to, -many things I've already forgotten, and a number of things I didn't -understand. But as I had to return to my work as prison doctor in 1919 -after a week of 1991 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest -you. I hope I can give them to you straight. - -The people on the street took my eye the minute I arrived in town. They -looked so pleasing and they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at -present, with the long indoor working day and the mixture of embalmed -and storage and badly cooked food, the number of pasty-faced and -emaciated men and women is very high. I exempt the hearty sweating -classes like the structural iron workers and teamsters and porters and -even policemen. You could recruit a fine-looking club from the building -trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue and size up the -condition of the passers-by. You see shopgirls in thin cotton who are -under-weight, under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. You see -pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You see weary, fish-eyed mothers who -look as if every day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged -people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. A little earlier in the -afternoon it's almost impossible to share the sidewalk with the squat -factory hands who overflow at the lunch hour. They're hard to kill, -these poor fellows, but they're a puny, stinking, stunted, ill-favored -horde. But the greater cleanliness of the people later on, and their -better clothes, doesn't put them in a very different class. You hear a -good deal about the queens you see, but, really, the city streets of New -York in 1919, streaming with people who have dun clothes to match dun -faces, make you wonder what's the use. - -These people in 1991 were good to look at! The three-hour working day -had a lot to do with it, of course, and the basic economic changes. But -what leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge responsibility -that had gone to hygienists. I mean educational and administrative. In -1991, I found, people were really acting on the theory that you can't -have civilization without sound bodies. The idea itself was as old as an -old joke, a platitude in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city -was working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this meant a total -revision of ordinary conduct. - -Building the Panama Canal was a simple little job compared to making New -York hygienic. Thirty years must have been spent in getting the folks to -realize that no man and woman had any hygienic excuse for breeding -children within the city limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before -it was official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At first -mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were confiscated, but in the -end they came to see justice in the human version of the slogan, "an -acre and a cow." It got rid of the good old city-bred medical formula -that the best way to handle pregnancy is to handle it as a pathological -condition. Of course this prohibition movement made all sorts of people -mad. A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long time on the score -of personal liberty. Women had private city babies where the inspectors -couldn't get at them. You know, just like private whisky. But in the end -the prohibitionists won, and it had an enormous effect on cleaning up -Manhattan. It cut out all but the detached and the transient residents, -and with the breathing space rules, these were far less than you'd -suppose. Even with the great area of garden-roofs, the fixed residents -were not much more than 100,000. - -This demobilization wasn't special to New York. In other places there -were much more rigid "units." Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit -size of cities in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous city -gave place to the "modern" unit, permanent residences within the city -never being open to families that had children under fourteen. For the -heads of such families, however, the transportation problem was -beautifully solved. Every unit city came to be so constructed that -within half an hour of the "fresh air and exercise" homes, men and women -could reach factories and warehouses in one direction, and offices and -courts and banks and exchanges in another. This was after they realized -the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, swift, freight -train took the place of most trucks, and of course the remaining trucks -shot up and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another thing that -interested me was the plexus of all the things that are to be exhibited. -This involved a great problem for New York before factories were -deported and the moving "H. G. Wells" sidewalks introduced. How to -economize time and space, and yet not produce too close a homogeneity, -too protein an intellectual and sthetic and social diet, became a -fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell's Island to summer -and winter art and music, with all the other islands utilized for -permanent exhibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. The -islands were made charming. I was quite struck over there, I think, on a -new island in Flushing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing, -where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on an endless belt, -that stopped when you wanted it to--the kind that art exhibitions -adopted for certain purposes. You see, the old department stores had -passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and display advertising and -the non-preventive physician. And the old game of "seasons" and fashions -was abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Cond Nast for the -undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing -consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly -early in life what they could and what they couldn't do personally in -the use of color. No one thought of copying another's color or design in -dress any more than of copying another's oculist prescription. And with -the guild consultants always ready to help out the troubled buyer, the -business of shopping for clothes became as exciting and intelligent as -the pastime of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, backed up by -the guilds, a daring employment of color became generally favored. But a -big item in this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe -any costumes for people who needed medical care first. It was useless, -the guilds said, to decorate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed. - -So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound body. In the hygienic -riots of 1936 some horrible lynchings took place. An expert from the -Chicago stockyards was then running the New York subways. He devised the -upper-berth system by which the space between people's heads and the -roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up -passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a few thousand -citizens had failed to respond to the pulmotor which was kept at every -station to revive weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to -decent transportation became a real public issue. The hygienists made -the great popular mistake of trying to save the stockyards man. They -knew he had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing him and -showing he had always wanted to skin cats alive, they could put the -traction question on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of that -era took up the issue on the so-called popular side. He denounced the -hygienists as heartless experts and showed how science was really a -conspiracy in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted in -a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-analysis of all criminals, -but the bloody assassination of the leading hygienist of the day brought -about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge was allowed to serve -who wasn't an expert in psychic work and hygiene. This decision was -greatly aided by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation of -criminal verdicts to the established neuroses of city magistrates. The -promise that this work would be extended and published as a supplement -to the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting the Bar. The -old pretensions of the Bar went rapidly to pieces when political use was -made of important psychological and physiological facts. The hygienists -spoke of "the mighty stream of morbid compulsion broadening down to more -morbid compulsion." By 1950 no man with an OEdipus complex could even -get on the Real Estate ticket, and the utter collapse of militarism came -about with the magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent -armament advocates in the evil era. - -I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance of prisons. -Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the -old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the -Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like -Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances -in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the -human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours -was a matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, even in -casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to -me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the -twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men -afraid to specify the sex diseases they were then cleaning up. -Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from -obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions -about conduct. "Think," said one delightful youth to me, on my first day -in 1991, "think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological -laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical -well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think -of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet -test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about 'the pursuit of -happiness,' fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for -such indiscriminateness than we'd allow a day to go by without -swimming." - -The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, what we call a girl. I -had nothing to say to her. But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was -so soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire's device I had once -seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement of a great factory building there -was a small electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was a -gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on which was strapped an -ordinary leather saddle. In front of the saddle there rose two thin -steel sticks, and out of them came thin leather reins. By means of a -clever arrangement of springs down below that responded to an electric -current, the whole mechanism was able to move up and down and backward -and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed to stir up your -gizzard in practically the same way as the motion of a horse. This was, -in fact, a synthetic horse, bearing the same sthetic relation to a real -horse that a phonograph song does to a real song that is poured out, so -to speak, in the sun. And here, in the bald basement cell with its two -barred basement windows (closed), the constipated millionaires take -their turns, whenever they can bear it, going through the canned motions -of a ride, staring with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front of -them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of Hygeia carried the -helot-captains of industry. And from that basement, from that heathen -symbol of perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary acceptance -of the human body and a primary law that its necessities be everywhere -observed. Not such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy years. -And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they had to have for the happiness -they long for. - - - - -CHICAGO[1] - - -A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality of towns. What -most people enjoy about a town is familiarity, not personality, and they -can give no penetrating account of their affection. "What is the finest -town in the world?" the New York reporters recently asked a young -recruit, eager for him to eulogize New York. "Why," he answered, "San -Malo, France. I was born there." That is the usual reason, perhaps the -best reason, why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is -autobiographical. - -But towns do have personality. Contrast London and New York, or Portland -and Norfolk, or Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has a -personality, and it would be obscurantism of the most modern kind to -pretend that there was no "soul" in Chicago either to like or to -dislike. People who have never lived in Chicago are usually content with -disliking it, and those who have seen it superficially, or smelled it in -passing when the stockyard factories were making glue, can seldom -understand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, of course, profess -to admire it, with the eagerness of anxious missionaries seeking to make -good with cannibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or Belfast, and -slipped into Chicago as into old slippers--men like Arnold Bennett and -George Bermingham--there are few outsiders who really feel at home. -Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant journey across the plains, -pondering that one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to restore -the city after the fire should be compelled to pay for his own ham and -eggs. He thought Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from it like a -sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. Wells thought it amazing, but -chiefly amazing as a lapse from civilization. All of these leave little -doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and -mean. It has size without spaciousness, opportunity without -imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A -sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious -where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and -vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining -smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its -beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town. - -But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; one must see it -altogether before one can define it; one can believe almost anything -monstrous from a partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is -supremely necessary--about three years as a minimum. Then its goodness -passeth all pre-matrimonial understanding; its essence is disclosed. - -Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far as time is concerned, -to speak of Chicago, and I think it would be churlish not to agree that -from the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city proud. All -old Chicagoans will recognize at once why Mr. Taylor should go back to -the beginning, and they will be delighted at the clarity with which the -early history is expounded, as well as the era before the Civil War. -They will also understand and rejoice over the repetition of grand old -names--Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, Uranus H. Crosby, -Sherman of the Sherman hotel, General Hart L. Stewart and Long John -Wentworth. In every town in the world there is, of course, a Long John -or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans will savor this reference to their own -familiar, and will delight in the snug feeling that they too "knew -Chicago when." Mr. Taylor is also dear to his townsmen when he harks -back to days before the Fire. In those days the West-siders were a -little superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter -and Paul, and the church-going folk could hear the "fast young men" -speeding trotting horses past the church doors. Such performances seemed -fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor himself drive his -high-steppers to the races at Washington Park, and did he not woo the -heart of the city where gilded youth cherished a "nod of recognition -from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. Rice." The dinners of -antelope steak and roast buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago -antedating the World's Fair that left strong traces into the twentieth -century, a Chicago that is commemorated with grace and kindliness in the -fair pages of this book. - -But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor's heart lingers among the -"marble-fronts" of his youth, this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such -fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better basis for -loving Chicago must be offered than the evidence that one teethed on it, -battered darling that it is. Mr. Taylor's better explanation, as I read -it, is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully and eagerly -with the New Englanders who made the town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters -and speculators, war widows and politicians and anarchists and -aliens--all these go into his perspective, as do the emergencies of the -Fire and the splendors of the Fair. But the marrow of his pride in -Chicago is his community with its origins in "men, like myself, of New -England blood, whose fathers felled our forests and tilled our prairie -land." Since the time he was born, he tells us, more than two million -people have been added to the population of Chicago. Only a fifth of the -Great West Side are now American-born, and the Lake Shore Drive was -still a cemetery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified West Side. -This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning of things. Hence he likes -to insist in his kindly spirit that Chicago's puritan "aristocracy" is -the source of Chicago altruism, that "the society of Chicago [is] more -puritanical than that of any great city in the world," and that "back of -Chicago's strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her founders -holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers being still a -potent factor in her life.... She possesses a New England conscience to -leaven her diverse character and make her truly--the pulse of America." - -Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest. -Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see -it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed -a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished -Chicago's big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had -no statesmanship in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an -inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a -destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business -enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its -remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality of that -enterprise is a main characteristic of the city, a characteristic barely -suggested by Mr. Taylor, not clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his -graceful drawings, so beautifully reproduced. - -One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor's pleasant picture, some -leaves from Upton Sinclair's Jungle, Jack London's Iron Heel, Frank -Norris's Pit, H. K. Webster's Great Adventure, the fiction of Edith -Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick and Will Paine and Weber Linn -and Sherwood Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl -Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one who looked at the City -Council ten years ago, for example, can forget the brutality of that -institution of collective life. - -They called the old-time aldermen the "gray wolves." They looked like -wolves, cold-eyed, grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side, -West side, North side, making the shaky tenements and black brothels and -sprawling immigrant-filled industries pay tribute in twenty ways. One -night, curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went to a place -that was glibly described as "the wickedest place in the world." It was -a saloon under the West side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At -first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its runty negro at the -raucous piano. But at last the regular customers collected; the sots, -the dead-beats, the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a fat -pallor, the woman without a nose.... They surrounded us, piled against -us, clawed us. And that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead's Satanic vision -of it revealed. - -But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves -it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an -essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the -access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an -adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and -hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a -frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of -succession and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all its philistinism, -there is the condition of hope that is half the spiritual battle, -whatever stockades the puritans try to build. It is that that makes one -lament the silence in Mr. Taylor's pleasant book. But the puritanical -tradition requires silence. Polite and refined, self-centered and -private-minded, attached to property and content within limitations, it -made visible Chicago what it is. - - [1] _Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G. - Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co._ - - - - -THE CLOUDS OF KERRY - - -It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes Kerry so wet. All the -reservoir of the Atlantic, at any rate, lies to the west and south, and -the prevailing winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry lifts its -mountains to those impinging winds--mountains that in the sunlight are a -living colorful presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the -constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly from the sea, soft -voluminous clouds gathered in their arms, and as they pass they sweep -their drooping veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy land. - -In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted at great intervals -on those lonely hillsides, but for the most part the habitations are in -the cooms or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel hills. The -soil on the mountains is washed away. The vestiture that remains is a -watery sedge, and it is only by garnering every handful of earth that -the tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms. Their fields, -often held in common, are so small as to be laughable, and deep drainage -trenches are dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting sunlight -between showers a light-green patch will loom magically in the distance, -witness to man's indefatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the -rocks. An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and if one goes -there one may find a typical tall spare countryman, bright of eye and -sharp of feature, housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood of -children. To build with his own hands a watertight house is the ambition -for which this man is slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready -there near the pit which he himself has dug for foundation. A yellowish -wife will perhaps be nursing the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed -hovel, and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible, and -admirable in more ways than he can ever dream of, one elf after another -will come out, bare-legged, sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from -far off at the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside man, -but his starvelings go down the boreen to the bare cold schoolhouse, to -be taught whatever the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their -minds of an education designed for civil service clerks. The children -may be seen down there if one passes at their playtime, kicking a rag -football with their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds. - -There was a time when the iron was deep in these farmers' souls. Eking -the marrow from the bones of the land, they were so poor that they had -nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their own tiny cattle, -the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle that alone can pick a living from that -ground. Until twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the hillside -men had never bought a pound of tea in their lives, or known what it was -to spend money for clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored -homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine sturdy middle-aged -farmers with a cut to their homemade clothes that reminds one of the -Bretons. It was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting nature for -grim life, that landlords took their rackrents--one of them, the Earl of -Kenmare, erecting a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of -Americans have admired. The fight against landlordism was bitter in -Kerry. I met one countryman who was evicted three times, but finally, -despite the remorseless protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in -a lean-to against the wall of the church. There were persecutions and -murders, the mailed hand of the law and the stealthy hand of the -assassin. Even to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure of -me he would not have spoken his mind. But when he was sure, he confided -with a winning smile that at last he had something to live for and work -for, a strip of land that was an "economic holding," determined by an -Estates Commission which has shouldered the landlord to one side and -estimated with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive -possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog. - -Why do they stay? But most of them have not stayed. Kerry has not -one-third the people to-day that it had seventy years ago. The -storekeeper in a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little -father of the people if there ever was one, yet had acted the dubious -rle of emigration agent, and had passed thousands of his countrymen on -to America. A few go to England. "For nine years," one hard-working -occupier mentioned to me, "I lived in the shadow of London Bridge." But -for Kerry, the next country to America, America is the land of golden -promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue, "hollow of the dock leaves," I -stopped to ask of a bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking -me the way to America. It is west they turn, away from the Empire that -"always foul-played us in the past, and I am afeard will foul-play us -again." - -"The next time you come, please God you'll bring us Home Rule." That is -the way they speak to you, if they trust you. They want government where -it cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of old. - -I went with a government inspector on one mission in Kerry. At the foot -of the forbidding western hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off -by two mountain streams. At times these streams were low enough to ford -with ease, but after a heavy rain the water would rise four or five feet -in a few hours and the streams would become impassable torrents. For the -sake of a widow whose hovel stood on this island the Commission -consented to build a little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at -either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons in weight, had -only just been planted when a rain came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy -block of cement had toppled over in the stream. This little catastrophe -was the first news conveyed by the paternal storekeeper to the inspector -on our arrival in town, and we walked out to see what could be done. - -Standing by the stream, we were visible to the expectant woman on the -hill. In the soft mournful light of the September afternoon I could see -her outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to learn her fate. -She came bare of head and bare of foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to -her bosom with one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body as she -leaned on her own pier and bent her deep eyes on us across the stream. -As she told in the slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of -the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those eyes to the -inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged in the water, as if to -contemn it for lying there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited -or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression bespoke the sternness -and gravity of her fight for existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant -fighter. She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have ever -beheld. - -If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the anxieties of the -winter. She seemed to look into them through the grayness of the failing -light. She foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race for her -children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying them across on her -back. And she clung to her children. - -"You have had trouble, my poor woman?" the inspector said, knowing that -her husband two years before had been drowned in the torrent. - -"Aye, indeed, your honor, 'tis I am the pity of the world. One year ago -my child was lost to me. It was in the night-time, he was taken with a -hemorrhage, with respects to your honor. I woke the children to have -them go for to bring the doctor, but it was too late an they returned. -He quenched in my arms, at the dead hour of night." - -"The pity of the world" she was in truth. The inspector could do nothing -until the ground was firm enough to support horses and tackle in the -spring. We walked back through the somber bog, the mountains seeming to -creep after us, and we speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To -the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there we came on another -aspect of that plaintive acquiescence so strong in the woman. Yes, the -storekeeper admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector was -right: Foley had failed about the bridge. "I'll haul him over," he said, -full of sympathy for the woman. And he would haul him over. And the pier -would lie there all winter. - -If the people could feel that this solicitude of the Estates Commission -were national, it would bind them to the government. But most of the -inspectors are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees, -well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between the lines. And so -Kerry remains with the old tradition of the government, suspicious of -its intentions, crediting what genuine services there are to the race of -native officials who alone have the intuition of Kerry's kind. - -They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend the Empire; that Empire -which meant landlords and land agents and rackrents for so many blind -and crushing years. They want those straight and stalwart and manly -fellows in the trenches. But Kerry knows what the trenches of Empire are -already. It has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs between -sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years it can remember. It is no -wonder Kerry cannot grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so -readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted a lease to live. - - - - -HENRY ADAMS[2] - - -Henry Adams was born with his name on the waiting list of Olympus, and -he lived up to it. He lived up to it part of the time in London, as -secretary to his father at the Embassy; part of the time at Harvard, -teaching history; most of the time in Washington, in La Fayette Square. -Shortly before he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the United -States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and Olympus were confused. But not -so long after 1838 the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to -control the country through the railroads there was an inevitable shift -in political gravity, and the center of power became Ohio. It was Henry -Adams's fate to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in power; and -Ohio did not comprehend Adams's credentials. Those credentials, -accordingly, were the subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor. -They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history, and Henry Adams -gave a dozen years to Jefferson and Madison. It was his humor afterwards -to say he had but three serious readers--Abram Hewitt, Wayne MacVeagh -and John Hay. His composure in the face of this coolness was, however, a -strange blending of serenities derived equally from the cosmos and from -La Fayette Square. He was not above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even -his autobiography, a true title to Olympus, was issued to a bare hundred -readers before his death, and was then deemed too incomplete to be made -public. It is made public now nominally for "students" but really for -the world that didn't know an Adams when it saw one. - -For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry Adams had the advantage -of full years and happy faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of -both. He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality which is a bad -tradition in English recollections. He saved himself from mere -recollections by taking the world as an educator and himself as an -experiment in education. His two big books were contrasted as -_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity_, -and _The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century -Multiplicity_. The stress on multiplicity was all the more important -because he considered himself eighteenth century to start with, and had, -in fact, the unity of simple Americanism at the beginning. - -Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of basil in this always -expanding tale of a development. There are points about the development, -about its acceptance of a "supersensual multiverse", which only a Karl -Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satisfactorily discuss or criticize. A -reader like myself gazes through the glass bottom of Adams's style into -unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths are clear and crisp. They -deserve to be investigated. But a "dynamic theory of history" is no -proper inhabitant of autobiography, and "the larger synthesis" is not -yet so domesticated as the plebeian idea of God. That Adams should -conduct his study to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent -culmination. A theory of life is the fit answer to the supersensual -riddle of living. But when the theory must be technical and even -professional, an autobiography has no climax in a theory. It is better -to revert, as Adams does, to the classic features of human drama: "Even -in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a -little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of -tone--but never hustled." It is enough to have the knowledge that along -certain lines the prime conceptions were shattered and the new -conceptions pushed forward, the tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in -the twentieth century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of -acceleration. - -Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams embraced the modernity -that gradually dawned on him and gave him his new view of life. Take his -fresh enthusiasm for world's fairs as a solitary example. One might -expect him to be bored by them, but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford -White and Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of America, and -Henry Adams soared over their obviousness to a perception of their -"acutely interesting" exhibits. He was after--something. If the Virgin -Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or St. Louis could give it to him -among the Jugo-Slavs and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done. -No vulgar prejudices held him back. He who could interpret the fight for -free silver without a sniff of impatience, who could study Grant without -the least filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his nose at -unfashionable faiths or to espouse fashionable heresies. He was after -education and any century back or forward was grist to his mill. And his -faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in it. "All one's life," -as he confesses grimly, "one had struggled for unity, and unity had -always won," yet "the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was -increasing, and threatened to increase beyond reason." Beyond reason, -then, it was reasonable to proceed, and the son of Ambassador Adams -moved from the sanctity of Union with his feet feeling what way they -must, and his eye on the star of truth. - -So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how keen it is. But there is -no single dullness, as I remember, in 505 large pages, and there are -portraits like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or the Adamses, -which have the economy and fidelity of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not, -nor is he a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct -expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and he can load a -sentence with a world of meaning. Take, for instance, the phrase in -which he denies unity to London society. "One wandered about in it like -a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of, -at dinner-time." He says of St. Gaudens that "he never laid down the -law, or affected the despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the -brutalities of his world." In a masterly chapter on woman, he summed up, -"The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of -rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak -revolted all history; it was a palontological falsehood that even an -Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, -if force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, -and the family must pay for it.... She must, like the man, marry -machinery." In Cambridge "the liveliest and most agreeable of men--James -Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, -Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a dozen others, who would have -made the joy of London or Paris--tried their best to break out and be -like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them -professors, and professors they had to be. While all these brilliant men -were greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it. Society -was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were there; but -society cannot be made up of elements--people who are expected to be -silent unless they have observations to make--and all the elements are -bound to remain apart if required to make observations." - -Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact, that Henry Adams -himself felt the necessity of making observations. He approached -autobiography buttoned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human beings he -had a real impulse to release himself, and to release himself in an -autobiography if nowhere else; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he -could no more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day than he -could dance like Nijinski. In so far as the Adamses were institutional -he could talk of them openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence -Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge and St. Gaudens as any -liberated host might reveal himself in the warm hour after dinner. But -this is not the Dionysiac tone of autobiography and Henry Adams was not -Dionysiac. He was not limitedly Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was -receptive, he was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the mere -mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the preface of this autobiography -raises doubts as to Henry Adams's evasive principle, "the object of -study is the garment, not the figure." The figure, Henry Adams's, had -nagging interest for Henry Adams, but something racial required him to -veil it. He could not, like a Rousseau or "like a whore, unpack his -heart with words." - -The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on the word "education." -Although he was nearly seventy when he laid the book aside and although -education means nothing if it means everything, the whole seventy years -were deliberately taken as devotion to a process, that process being -visualized much more as the interminable repetition of the educational -escalator itself than as the progress of the person who moves forward -with it. Moves forward to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams's -detachment that no escalator could move him forward anywhere because he -was not bound anywhere in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak -of his life as perpetually educational. One reason, of course, was his -economic security. There was no wolf to devour him if his education -proved incomplete. Faculty _qua_ faculty could remain a permanent -quandary to him, so long as he were not forced to be vocational, so long -as he could speculate on "a world that sensitive and timid natures could -regard without a shudder." - -The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, however, is one of the principal -fascinations of this altogether fascinating book. What was it that kept -Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay? What was it that sent him -from Boston to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres? The man was a capable and -ambitious man, if ever there was one. He was not merely erudite and -reflective and emancipatingly skeptical: he was also a man of the -largest inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man of the -nicest temper and the sanest style. How could such justesse go begging, -even in the United States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry -Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen he sat waiting for a -clientage that never came, while through a hole he could see a steady -crowd go pouring into the gilded doors across the way. The modest screen -was himself. He could not detach it. But the United States did not see -beyond the screen. A light behind a large globule of colored water could -at any moment distract it. And in England, for that matter, only the -Monckton Milneses kept the Delanes from brushing Adams away, like a fly. - -The question is, on what terms did Adams want life? It is characteristic -of him that he does not specify. But one gathers from his very reticence -that he had least use of all for an existence which required moral -multiplicity. Where he seems gravest and least self-superintending is in -those criticisms of his friends that indicate the sacrifice of -integrity. He was no prig. Not one bleat of priggishness is heard in all -his intricate censure of the eminent British statesmen who sapped the -Union. But there is a fund of significance in his criticism of Senator -Lodge's career, pages 418 and on, in which "the larger study was lost in -the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men." It is in -a less concerned tone that the New Yorker Roosevelt is discussed. "Power -when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all -Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more -than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the -range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs -to ultimate matter--the quality that medieval theology assigned to -God--he was pure act." Pure act Henry Adams was not. If Roosevelt -exhibited "the effect of unlimited power on limited mind," he himself -exhibited the contrary effect of limited power on unlimited mind. Why -his power remained so limited was the mystery. Was he a watched kettle -that could not boil? Or had he no fire in his belly? Or did the fire -fail to meet the kettle? Almost any problem of inhibition would be -simpler, but one could scarcely help ascribing something to that -refrigeration of enthusiasm which is the Bostonian's revenge on wanton -life force. Except for his opaline ethics, never glaring yet never -dulled, he is manifestly toned down to suit the most neurasthenic -exaction. Or, to put it more crudely, he is emotion Fletcherized to the -point of inanition. - -Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the autobiography is a -refutation of anmia. There was, indeed, something meager about Henry -Adams's soul, as there is something meager about a butterfly. But the -lack of sanguine or exuberant feeling, the lack of buoyancy and -enthusiasm, is merely a hint that one must classify, not a command that -one condemn. For all this book's parsimony, for all its psychological -silences and timidities, it is an original contribution, transcending -caste and class, combining true mind and matter. Compare its comment on -education to the comment of Joan and Peter--Henry Adams is to H. G. -Wells as triangulation to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations -which goes by the name of understanding was part of his very nature. -Unlike H. G. Wells, he was incapable of cant. He had no demagoguery, no -mob-oratory, no rhetoric. This enclosed him in himself to a dangerous -degree, bordered him on priggishness and on egoism. But he had too much -quality to succumb to these diseases of the sedentary soul. He survives, -and with greatness. - - [2] _The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: Houghton - Mifflin Co._ - - - - -THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - - -Sweet and wild, if you like, the first airs of spring, sweeter than -anything in later days; but when we make an analogy between spring and -youth and believe that the enchantment of one is the enchantment of the -other, are we not dreaming a dream? - -Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not a poet. Just because it -is formative and fugitive it evokes imagination; it has a bloom too -momentary to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it is seen. -In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses itself. It is a delicacy -as tender as the first green leaf, an innocence like the shimmering -dawn, "brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling -water and singing birds." People feel this when they accept youth as -immaculate and heed its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at -twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think that youth has -the air of spring about it, that spring is the morning of the gods. -Youth is so often handsome and straight and fearless; it has its -mysterious silences--its beings are beings of clear fire in high spaces, -kin with the naked stars. Yet there is in it something not less fiery -which is far more human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers on -board. - -As one grows older one is less impatient of the supposition that -innocence actually exists. It exists, even though mothers may not -properly interpret it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism -which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth is neither -innocence nor experience. It is a duel between innocence and experience, -with the attainments of experience guarded from older gaze. Human beings -take their contemporaries for granted, no one else: and neither teachers -nor superiors nor even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that -innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw around youth. - -If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its own innocence, the -coming of experience is all the more painful. The process of change is -seldom serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality. The -impressionable and histrionic youth has incessant disappointment in -trying misfit spiritual garments. The undisciplined faculty of -make-believe, which is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to -torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been earned and -self-acceptance begun. - -Do mature people try to help this? Do they remember their own -uncertainty and frustration? One of the high points in Mr. Trotter's -keen psychological study, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, -indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr. Trotter goes beyond Samuel -Butler and Edmund Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful -experience. He shows the forces at work behind the patronizing and -victimizing of the young. - - The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge and - experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man and to - surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or taste.... - - Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the - ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of age - and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history, - proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence and - enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immemorial - wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling of senile - decay. - -The day will come when our present barbaric attitude toward youth will -be altered. Before it can be altered, however, we must completely revise -our conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly innocent than -it is certainly happy, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounds -youth is not to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness. -Innocence, besides, can last too long. Every one has pitied stale -innocence. If a New York child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may -quite easily be shocking to older people. Already, without any -particular viciousness or precocity, he has accumulated a huge number of -undesirable impressions, and shoved them under the surface of his mind. -What, then, to do? The air of spring that is about him need not mislead -his guardians. They may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a -naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only one agent of -innocence, and not the most successful. Certainly not the most -successful for domesticating youth in the sphere that men and women -consider fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain innocent long -after it recognizes the example and feels the impulses of its elders, -the invitation will go unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or -see the moving pictures without realizing a discrepancy between conduct -and precept, which is one hint to precept to take off its bib. - -This knowingness is not quite what it seems to be. Youth is never so -young as when experienced. But those who must deal with it cannot lose -by making it more articulate, by saving it from the silly adult -exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this jealousy and pride -continually operates against youth in the name of dignity and -discipline. And so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction -that portrays youth as the spring time of the spirit; that pipes a song -about a lamb, and leads the lamb to slaughter. - - - - -THE IRISH REVOLT - - - "It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it is - altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven." - - ---- G. K. Chesterton in _The Crimes of England_, 1916. - -When a rebellion has failed men say it was wicked or foolish. It is, on -the contrary, wickedness and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise -against authority the measure of their act cannot be loyalty or -prudence. It is the character of the authority against which men revolt -that must shape one's mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on his -life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction on authority. Is it just -authority, representative, tolerable? The only revolt that is wicked or -foolish is the revolt against reasonable or tolerable authority. If -authority is not livable, revolt is a thousand times justified. - -The Irish rebellion was not prudent. Its imprudence did not weigh with -the men who took to arms. Had hope inspired them, they would have been -utterly insane. But hope did not inspire them. They longed for success; -they risked and expected death. The only consequence to us, wrote -Padraic Pearse before action, is that some of us may be launched into -eternity. "But who are we, that we should hesitate to die for Ireland? -Are not the claims of Ireland greater on us than any personal ones? Is -it fear that deters us from such an enterprise? Away with such fears. -Cowards die many times, the brave only die once." To strike a decisive -blow was the aspiration of the Irish rebels. But decisive or not, they -made up their minds to take action before the government succeeded in -attaching all their arms. - -In this rebellion there was no chance of material victory. Pearse, -MacDonagh, Connolly, Clark, Plunkett, O'Rahilly, O'Hanrahan, Daly, -Hobson, Casement, could only hope against hope. But their essential -objective was not a soldiery. It was an idea, the idea of unprotested -English authority in Ireland. It was to protest against the Irish -nation's remaining a Crown Colony of the British Empire that these men -raised their republican standard and under it shed their blood. In the -first process of that revolt few of them were immediately sacrificed. -Their fight was well planned. They made the most of their brief hour. -But when they were captured the authority they had opposed fulfilled -their expectations to the utmost. Before three army officers, without a -legal defender, each of the leaders was condemned by court-martial. -Their rebellion had been open. Their guilt was known and granted. They -met, as they expected to meet, death. - -The insurrection in Ireland is ended. A cold tribunal has finished by -piecework the task that the soldiers began. The British Empire is still -dominant in Dublin. But ruthless and remorseless behavior sharpens the -issue between authority and rebellion. Even men who naturally condemn -disorder feel impelled to scrutinize the authority which could -deliberately dispense such doom. If that authority deserved respect in -Ireland, if it stood for justice and the maintenance of right, its -exaction of the pound of flesh cannot be questioned. It does not -represent "frightfulness." It represents stern justice. Its hand should -be universally upheld. But if, on the other hand, English authority did -not deserve respect in Ireland, if it had forfeited its claims on these -Irishmen, then there is something to be made known and said about the -way in which this Empire can abuse its power. - -Between the Irish people and English authority, as every one knows, -there has been an interminable struggle. A tolerable solution of this -contest has only recently seemed in sight. The military necessity of -England has of itself precluded one solution, the complete independence -of Ireland. The desire for self-government in Ireland has opposed -another solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Between these two -goals the struggle has raged bitterly. But human beings cannot live -forever in profitless conflict. After many years the majority of the -English people took up and ratified the Irish claims to self-government. -In spite of the conservative element in England and the British element -in Ireland, the _modus vivendi_ of home rule was arranged. It is the -fate of this _modus vivendi_, accepted by the majority of Irishmen as a -reasonable commutation of their claims, that explains the recent -insurrection. These men who are dead were once for the most part Home -Rulers. Their rebellion came about as a sequel to the unjust and -dishonest handling of home rule. - -For thirty-five years home rule has been an issue in Great Britain. The -majority of the British people supported Gladstone during many home rule -sessions. The lower house of Parliament repeatedly passed the measure. -The House of Lords, however, turned a face of stone to Ireland. It icily -rejected Ireland's offer to compound her claims. This irreconcilable -attitude proved in the end so monstrous that English Liberalism -revolted. It threw its weight against the rigid body that denied it. It -compelled the House of Lords to accept the Parliament act, its scheme -for circumventing the peers' veto. Then, three times in succession, it -passed the home rule bill. - -Every one knows what happened. During the probation of the bill the -forces that could no longer avoid it constitutionally made up their -minds that they would defeat it unconstitutionally. Men left the House -of Lords and the House of Commons to raise troops in eastern Ulster. -These, not the Irish, were Germany's primary allies in the British -Isles. Cannon, machine guns, and rifles were shipped to Ireland. Every -possible descendant of the implanted settlers of Ireland was rallied. -Large numbers were openly recruited and armed. The Ulster leaders -pleaded they were loyal, but they insisted that the Liberals of England -did not and could not speak for the Empire. The only English authority -they recognized was an authority like-minded to themselves. Lord -Northcliffe joined with Lord Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and Lord -Willoughby de Broke and Lord Roberts and Sir Edward Carson and Bonar Law -to advise and stimulate rebellion. Some of the best British generals in -the army, to the delight of Germany, were definitely available as -leaders. A provisional government, with Carson as its premier, was -arranged for in 1911. The Unionist and Orange organizations pledged -themselves that under no conditions would they acknowledge a home rule -government or obey its decrees. In 1912 the Solemn Covenanters pledged -themselves "to refuse to recognize its authority." During this period -the government negotiated, but took no action. There were no -Nationalists under arms. - -If free men have a right to rebel, how can any one gainsay Ulster? It -was the Ulster contention that home rule would be unreasonable, -intolerable, and unjust. This was a prophecy, perhaps a natural and -credible prophecy. But it is not necessary to debate the Ulster -rebellion. It was a hard heritage of England's crime against Ireland. It -is enough to say that English authority refused to abandon the home rule -measure and in April, 1914, Mr. Asquith promised to vindicate the law. - -The British League for the support of Ulster had sent out "war calls." -The Ulster Unionist Council had appropriated $5,000,000 for volunteer -widows and orphans. Arms had been landed from America and, it was said, -from Germany. Carson had refused to "negotiate" any further. His -mobilization in 1914 became ominous. The government started in moving -troops to Ulster. The King intervened. Mr. Balfour inveighed against the -proposal to use troops. The army consulted with Carson. Generals French -and Ewart resigned. - -About this period, with Asquith and Birrell failing to put England's -pledges to the proof, the National Volunteers at last were being -organized. Mr. Asquith temporized further. At his behest John Redmond -peremptorily assumed control of the Volunteers. Their selected leader -was Professor MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the non-political Gaelic -revival. There was formal harmony until the European war was declared, -when Mr. Redmond sought to utilize the National Volunteers for -recruiting. This move made definite the purely national dedication of -the Irish Volunteers. - -Four events occurred in rapid succession to destroy the Irish -Volunteers' confidence in English authority. These were decisive events, -and yet events over which the Irish Volunteers could have no control. - -On July 10th, 1914, armed Ulster Volunteers marched through Belfast, and -Sir Edward Carson held the first meeting of his provisional government. - -On July 26th, 1914, the British troops killed three persons and wounded -thirty-two persons because rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, -subsequent to their futile attempt to intercept Irish Volunteer arms. - -On Sept. 19th, 1914, the home rule bill was signed, but its operation -indefinitely suspended. - -In May, 1915, Sir Edward Carson became a member of the British Cabinet. - -These events were endured by John Redmond. He had early accepted a -Fabian policy and put his trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the -price of maintaining the law they decreed. The more radical men in -Dublin were not so trusting. They had heard Asquith promise that no -permanent division of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned he -had bargained for it. They had heard him promise he would vindicate the -law, and they saw him sanction the defiant military leader as -commander-in-chief and the defiant civil leader as a minister of the -crown. With the vivid memory of British troops killing Irish citizens on -the streets of Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English honor. -They had no impulse to recruit for the defense on the Continent of an -Empire thus honorable. They looked back on the evil history they had -been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and to die. - -Irishmen like myself who believed in home rule and disbelieved in -revolution did not agree with this spirit. We thought southern Ireland -might persuade Ulster. We thought English authority was possibly weak -and shifty, but benign. We did not wish to see Ireland, in the words of -Professor MacNeill, go fornicating with Germany. When our brothers went -to the European war we took England's gratitude as heartfelt and her -repentance as deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest, torture, -rape, enforced subservience, ignorance, poverty, famine. But we listened -to G. K. Chesterton about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous Ireland: -"It was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment." - -All the deeper, then, the shock we received from the execution of our -men of finest mettle. They were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so -was De Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a calculation based -on the greater military strength of the Dutch. A government which had -negotiated with rebels in the North, which had allowed the retention of -arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in the Cabinet, could not mark an -eternal bias in its judgment of brave men whose legitimate -constitutional prospects it had raised high and then intolerably -suspended. But this English government, often cringing and supine, was -brave enough to slay one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in -the name of "justice," the judges in this rebellion being officers of an -army that had refused to stand against rebellion in Ulster. - -It is not in vain, however, that these poets and Gaelic scholars and -Republicans have stood blindfolded to be shot by English soldiers. Their -verdict on English authority was scarcely in fault. They estimated with -just contemptuousness the temper of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland -has long been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone from Ireland, -by the fulfillment of England's bond, the memory of this rebellion must -flourish. It testifies sadly but heroically that there are still -Irishmen who cannot be sold over the counter, Irishmen who set no -ultimate sanction on a dishonest authority, Irishmen who set no ultimate -value on their merely mortal lives. - - - - -A LIMB OF THE LAW - - -"Look here," said the policeman, tapping me on the chest, "Mrs. Trotsky -used to live up here above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And then -see what happens--she turns up in Stockholm with two million roubles." - -"Oh, I don't blame her. But ain't we all human--Socialists, Democrats, -Republicans? All we need is a chance." - -"I admit, Socialism has beautiful ideas. But are they practical? That's -what I ask. Now, pardon me, just a minute! Just one minute, please! -Socialism is a fine theory, but look at Emma Goldman. That woman had -seven lovers. Free love. Yes, many a time I've heard them, preaching the -children belonged to the state. Here's their argument, see, they say -that a man and a woman wants to get married but the man figures, have I -enough to support her? and the woman figures, how much has he got? and -the only thing for them to do in that case is to turn the children over -to the state. Now, I ask you, is that human?" - -"You say, a lot of these women in limousines practice free love without -preaching it. Oh, I don't deny it. And, look't here, I'm surprised there -isn't more bombs at that. Right here on the Avenue you see the cars in -one long procession all day, like every one was a millionaire, and three -blocks over you see people who haven't the means of livelihood, without -a shirt to their backs. I'm a public officer, as you might say, and -maybe it sounds queer what I'm going to say, but I'm afraid to have my -own children on the steps of the apartment house. I takes the -night-stick to them and I says, 'Beat it out of here, don't let the -landlord see you, or he'll raise the rent again.'" - -"You said it, something's rotten somewhere. What do you think of the -government holding back all that meat, just because the packers want it -fixed that way, and plenty of people on the Lower East Side there -willing to buy it all up--and at good prices too? But, no, it has to be -held back to suit the packers. And then they lower the price a little. -Because why? The government lets them have all that meat for what they -like." - -"It's the same way with the ice. Did you see what they done? The mayor -gets them all together, to prevent them boosting the price on it, and -it's fixed; they can't raise the price this summer to more than five -fifty a ton. They wait two days at the old price, and then they put it -at five fifty. Two days they wait, that's all." - -"Of course this is the best government in the world. I'll tell you what -proves it--all these foreigners coming over here. Look at that -soda-fountain man there. You heard him talk up for the Bolsheviki, -didn't you? Well, he hasn't much gray matter in here, but just the same -that fellow makes as much in three months as I get for a whole lousy -year. Three months, and he hasn't been here ten years. And my people -been here two hundred. But these immigrants come over ignorant and -uneducated, and only down in Kentucky and Tennessee are our people not -able to read and write. I hear down there they are regular tribes, -fighting each other and all that. Of course that soda-fountain man, he -couldn't associate with lots of the people I go with. If he walked in, -they'd look at him as much as to say, 'Who have we here?' But he rolls -up the coin just the same." - -"But the trouble with the Russian people, I'll tell you. Why, eighty per -cent of them can't read or write. Now I'll tell you what it's like. It's -like this: the Russian people is like a dog was tied up in the -back-yard, see, and then he was let loose and he run wild with joy all -over the place, and then it depended who was the first to whistle to -him, whee-whee, and Lenin and Trotsky they whistled, whee-whee, and the -Russian people came right to them. Of course I don't think it'll work. -They want to do away with money over there. You know, you want to buy a -shoeshine and you give a man a head of cabbage. That's impractical. And -then again the government can't own everything. It's all right for -public utilities, but you take and try to control everything and what'll -happen? It can't be done. What I say is, let a man earn a million or so, -and then say to him, anything over and above that million we take away, -see? And when he has his million he doesn't go on trying to monopolize -everything. But now, you have all these uneducated people around here, -and the more money they earn the worse they are." - -"I'll tell you. Right across the hall from where my wife and me live -there's a lovely woman, a Jewess, one of the nicest people you could -want to meet, and I'm in her house and she's in mine all the time, until -her husband comes home. But he's one of that kind, you know! The other -night he comes home with three friends and he says to me, 'Say, Charlie, -come on down to Long Island with us in the car for a week. I'll pay all -your expenses!' 'You will, eh,' I says. 'Now I'll tell you something. -That sort of thing don't go with me. In the first place, you know I -can't get leave to be away from the police department for a week; in the -second place, you know I can't leave my wife here; in the third place, -you know damn well I can't afford to go with you. I know your kind! You -have your three friends here and you want them to see what a great guy -you are. Well, I'll tell you what you are,' and I told him. Now he'll be -the same if he has a million. And I'll tell you another kind that hasn't -respectability. No, I mean decency. She was a big fat woman and her baby -was crying here the other day, and she opened her dress right there and -leaned down to feed the child. You know, just like that statue, I forget -the name. And all the little boys rubbering around. That's the class of -people you have to contend with around here in this place, with the air -full of fish guts they throw out of the windows, and everything." - -"But the German ones are different. Not that I want to praise the -Germans or the like of that, but they're self-respectful, you know. It's -the lack of education with them others--those others." - -"But you put the Socialists in power and what difference will it make? -I'm--I'm not against Socialism, I want you to understand. But there's -human nature!" - - - - -A PERSONAL PANTHEON - - -Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine, Clarence Day shied a -cocoanut at old Henri Fabre. Personally I had nothing against Henri. I -rather liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence said -publicly, "that old bird-artist, you don't have to admire him any -longer." Without waiting for further encouragement I bounced Henri off -the steps of my Pantheon. - -Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I admit, but nothing is so -important as to keep it from getting crowded with half-gods. For many -months my own Pantheon has been seriously congested. Most of the ancient -deities are still around--George Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom Hardy -and Sam Butler--and there is a long waiting list suggested by my -friends. Joseph Conrad has been sitting in the lobby for several years, -hungering for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated applications -from such varied persons as Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, -Anatole France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P. Shelley, John -Muir, George Washington and Mary Wollstonecraft. But with so many -occupants already installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed in, it -has been impossible to open the doors to newcomers. My gods are like the -office-holders--few die and none resign. And when a happy accident -occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel as one feels when -some third person is good enough to smash the jardinire. - -I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while. Two or three years ago he -swept into the Pantheon on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse -for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest gods I had ever -encountered. His smile, his long jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a -Tussaud figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and William Blakes. -I stood him in the corner when he first arrived, debating where to put -him, but at no time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young Teddy -Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did -Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all, had kept -Mr. Wilson from being a Republican? How did he differ intrinsically from -a Henry Stimson, a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton? The -pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had not the heart to enthrone -him; and never shall I enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the -flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and commonplace -humanity. He is President, as was Taft. So is he impressive. But the -expectation I had blown up for him is punctured. He would have been a -god, despite all my prejudice against his styles, if at any time he had -proved himself to be the resolute democrat. But the resolute democrat he -was not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating his chest -as well as he could, and he has to get out of my Pantheon. - -This eviction of the President relieves my feelings like a good spring -cleaning. To be con-structive gives me pleasure, but not half so much -pleasure as to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former mental -and spiritual habitations. A great many people are catholic. They have -hearts in which Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East Lynne. I -envy these people and their receptive natures, but my own chief joy is -to asphyxiate my young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage -of loyalty. - -There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I was unjust to Upton Sinclair -that I almost subscribed to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel, -Jimmie Higgins, I actually read it. - -"My best book," Mr. Sinclair assures the world. If that is really the -case, as I hope, I am happily emancipated from him forever. He is -something of an artist. He converts into his own kind of music the -muck-rake element in contemporary journalism. He is always a -propagandist, and out of religious finance or the war or high society or -the stockyards or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that -nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on such stimulants, one -ought to choose them carefully, and I'd much rather go straight to Billy -Sunday than take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on reading his -well-known health books, I nearly fasted nine days under his influence. -That is to say, I fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which I -dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced me that I was perhaps -a coarser organism than Mr. Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an -ordinary diet. But until I had a good reason for expelling this -uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always in danger of taking -him seriously. Now, I am glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am -safe. - -Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom Upton Sinclair is -nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion of Nietzsche was also -required. When we used to read the _New Age_ ten years ago, with Oscar -Levy's steady derision of everything and anything not Nietzschean, I had -a horrible sense of inadequacy, and I started out to read the Master's -works. It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and worm as I was, -I found Nietzsche upsetting all the other fellows in the Pantheon. He -and William Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity. -Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny stories. He was sulky with -George Meredith and frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss -Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but I voted him away. - -This Olympian problem does not seem to bother men like William Marion -Reedy. Mr. Reedy is the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee -Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism, Woodrow Wilson -and Theodore Roosevelt. He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile -salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops and publishers, and -he is genuinely himself with all of them. He finds the common -denominator in machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and without -turning a hair he moves from tropical to arctic conversation. He is at -home with Celtic fairies and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance -and St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe he has, it must be -a good deal like a Union depot, with gods coming in and departing on -every train and he himself holding a glorious reception at the -information booth. I am sure he can still see the silver lining to W. J. -Bryan and the presidential timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun -of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a good word for Freud. He has -nothing against Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity -puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies is called upon to slave -in their service, to rush here and there like a general practitioner, to -sleep with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at his head. How -does he find the energy to do it! I admire it. I marvel at men who -understand all and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore -Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt Whitman. Think of those -who have a good word to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am -sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a lot of much-needed -vitality. Give me a temple on a high hill, with a long drop down from -the exit. - - - - -NIGHT LODGING - - -It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim Gorki's Night -Lodging of "gloom." Gloomy plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one -of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a play like She Walked -in Her Sleep? That defunct comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle -race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies that. But to believe that a -somber play must necessarily be a "gloomy" play is like believing that -Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply isn't true, and to -suppose it is mentally inelastic. - -But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We say, Ah yes, -Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen, the man who bites on granite; or -Gorki, the Big Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are simply -human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions of the fifth grade. -This is itself an old story in criticism. Only the story has to be -re-told every time the New York newspaper critics are called upon to -characterize a serious drama. With a regularity as unfailing as the -moon, the New York critics reaffirm their conviction that a play -concerning derelict human beings must of course be squalid, sodden, -high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to believe and assert -such things, yet their belief and assertion are endemic in the New York -newspapers, like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps. - -Mr. Arthur Hopkins's presentation of Night Lodging at the Plymouth -Theatre may or may not be better than the presentation some time ago at -the German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the performance at the -German theatre and I am inclined to distrust the persons to whom the -German theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick with which to -whack the American theatre. But, better or worse than the German -performance, Mr. Hopkins's is to the good. It is a strong, firm, -spacious, capable performance, resting not so much on a few pinnacles as -on a general level of excellence. It is presented bravely. Making no -attempt to sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics, it allows -the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate every word and action of -the performance. The result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every -actor in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness. But the result -is viable, Russian or not. A sense of human incident and human presence -is quickly secured, and after that there comes a stream of events which -never loses its reality either in force or direction. The impact is -tremendous. Gorki inundates one's consciousness with these human -fortunes and misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while occasional -accents slip awry in the tumult of his creation, the substance of his -story finds one a corroborator--in a way that one simply never -corroborates depression or gloom. - -The men and women, who come together in this night lodging of a Russian -city, are of the emancipated kind that one sees on the benches in -Madison Square. They are recruited from the casual worker and the -non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the -criminals and the broken and the dclass. On the first evening when one -hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, one -realizes that their anarchism is bitter. They grate on one another, -sneer at one another, bawl at one another, tell one another to go to -hell. They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled them. They do -not understand or accept their fate. They are full of self-pity. They -are, in a word, one's tired and naked self. But this relaxed and wanton -selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps for his people the -freshness of childhood--a freshness charming in some cases, horrible in -others, but always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal -themselves in this nudity of common poverty! A woman in the corner is -coughing, coughing. She wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His -patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies a man half recovered -from a drunken brawl. He aches loudly with stale liquor and stale -wounds. In the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the wife of -the lodging-house keeper--a mistress from whom he pines to escape. The -"baron" sits in the shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary -sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor repeats the -medical verdict that his organism is poisoned with alcohol. "You mean -'organon,'" shouts another. "No, organism. My organism...." And so, -these lives sweep round and round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the -sport of the winds of heaven. - -Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical patriarchal wanderer. -Quite simply he fits into this life of the basement, but unlike the rest -he is no longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect in his -anarchism. And gradually the lives of the night lodging group around -him. He sits by the dying woman. He talks of women to the young thief, -and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning to the -young. He stands like an untroubled oak in the gales that toss the -others hither and thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets them all -with compassion, a man among children. - -He goes. His presence has not prevented the lodging-house keeper's wife -from driving the young man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented -that flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the young man really -loves. But though the old man departs he leaves after him a rent of blue -in the clouds that choke these people's lives. One after another the -night lodgers question life afresh under the wanderer's influence. The -tartar's arm is still smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is -still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The actor is still -alcoholic. But there is aroused in the night lodging the imperishable -dream of happiness, and no one is ready to quench it. - -Why is the grave and beautiful play _not_ gloomy? It is not enough to -say that the really gloomy play gives a naturalistic version of life -which the spectator rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the -falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows or in its discords -but in its absence of the vitamin of beauty. Many plays are denied truth -because their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied beauty -simply because their beauty is a stranger. Yet we know that truth or -beauty may be as sable as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a -waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the child of -ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, conventional ugliness. -It is the people who think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see -Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail in beholding life. It is -not poor in sympathy. - - - - -YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC - - -In 1912, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the public how Mr. Taft had -bitten the hand that fed him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft's rejoinder but -it was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further observations from the -colonel. Those were the days. Nothing but peace on earth and good will -among Republicans. - -About that time I happened to have lunch with a most attractive young -man, one of the first American aviators. He was such a clear-cut young -man, with trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said he to me, -"But how can these things be true? I can't understand it. If any one -else said these things you'd pay no attention to them, but both of these -men are fine men; they've both been president; and if these things they -say _are_ true, then neither of them can be such fine gentlemen. I can't -make it out, honestly." And he looked at me with a profundity of pained -inquiry. - -What could I say? What can you say when you meet with such simple faith? -It took years of primary school and Fourth of July and American history -to build up this conception of the American presidents, and now the -worst efforts of a president and an ex-president had only barely shaken -the top-structure. What was the good of forcing this youth to unlearn -everything he had learned? If I took away his faith in the divine office -of president, perhaps he might begin to lose his patriotism and his -willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps he might go on -and lose faith in the jury system, the institution of marriage, the -right of free speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance of -Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment. If I unhinged this -lad's faith, perhaps he would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther, -Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma Goldman--the "Goldman -Woman" as the Ochs man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed man -call her in their outbursts of American chivalry. I wanted no such arid -and lonely career for this splendid young man. I hated to think of his -wearing an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his fresh bloom to -be a subversive idealist like Eugene Debs. Much better, said I to -myself, that he should hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than -that he should repulse him and face life without him. So I gave the lad -soothing words and earnest though insincere glances, and he went his way -puzzled but greatly reassured. - -Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say that simple faith is all -very well, but a man ought to live in the real world and know his way -around. Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing situation. He -is compelled to evade uncomfortable facts. Very true. Quite right. -Exactly so. But is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of -being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a simpleton and yet a -wholesome man of action, a man of will and character and pep? What is -the good of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalatable -facts, if it confuses you and upsets you and undermines everything -you've been brought up to believe? What's the use? Voltaire may be all -right in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we all be Voltaires? - -If I stick up for good faith in the character of presidents, I know that -there will be a bad comeback. I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even -if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I therefore to give in -to them? I refuse to admit that there is nothing else than to destroy a -beautiful faith in the good that is everywhere. - -What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old argument of the war. -They say: Yes, your fine brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical -product of patriotism. And where were the prime examples of patriotism -to be found? In Germany. He happens, in your instance, to believe in the -divine office of the presidents. But it is much more characteristic of -him to be on his knees to the Kaiser. Yet consider how one-sided you -are. When he declares himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the -joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his reverence over the -Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when -it comes to an American you say, "Oh, don't let's destroy this beautiful -faith! How precious it is, how noble, how commendable! Hands off, -please." And you act in the same way toward the Constitution or the -Supreme Court. It's magnificent when the Germans come ahead with a -perfectly good new constitution, model 1920. But we must stick to the -brand of 1789, with the cow-catcher added in 1910. Hail to Our Iron -Constitution! And hail to the Old Man's Home down in Washington where -they hand out the uncontaminated economics that they themselves lisped -at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country. Straight from the source, -these old men got their inspiration, and they are a credit to the early -nineteenth century. You think we exaggerate your loyalty? You agree that -the simple faith of young Germans and young Turks can be highly -dangerous, but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young Americans? - -That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way; but hardly likely to -fool the intelligent, law-abiding, God-fearing citizen. Because no good -American could admit for one instant that the cases are on all fours. -America, after all, is a democracy. And when a young man starts out -having faith in a democracy he is in an altogether different position -from Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet Russians and people -like that. A democracy, whatever its faults, is founded in the interests -of all the people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple faith in it is -equivalent to simple faith in a first principle; and you cannot go -behind first principles. - -That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic. He thinks it is very -clever to question the things that are of the light in just the same -spirit that he questions things that are of the darkness. And of course -he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who cuts away the sound flesh rather -than the diseased flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive -not con-structive. - -And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion my fine young -aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning him, who can tell what the -consequences might have been? We know that during the war there were -grim duties to be performed by our young men--towns to be bombed where -it took excessive skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the -women and the children. If I had sapped this boy's faith even one -pulsation, perhaps he would have failed in his duty. - -You cannot be too careful how you lead people to rationalize. In this -world there is rationalism and plenty of it. But is there not also a -super-rationalism? And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism -when we _know_ we possess the true faith? - - - - -THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID[3] - - -The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so he had to pick his steps -with care. But at last he came to a French window, which he opened, and -sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was a poet, and that is what -young poets do. - -He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men go. Unformed, of -course--perhaps twenty minutes late and the hall only two-thirds full. -But he was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the gas. He was -from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, but he had long resided with an aunt -in Nebraska and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts and a lemon -tie. At Harvard--he went to Harvard--he had opened his bean with -considerable difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of temperament. -So that he could never stop himself when he beheld a passing star. - -The motion was full, with significant curves. It made him a little -air-sick at first, but he preferred air-sickness. He made no compromise -with the public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days that quickly -ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of -Venus on the main line. - -In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick their heels toward -Mercury, and utter startling cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the -menagerie, and they feed mathematical instructors through a hole in the -wall. This new participant had too much of the stern blood of the -Puritan in his rustproof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, but -when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of seventy years he felt a -little wishful, and permitted himself a trifling ululation. The local -cheer-leader heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard Acutist, and -there was joy in Asphodelia. - -A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping in the branches of -the cocoanut tree, and the river of green ink wearied him. So when the -next star swung around he slipped away from his pink duenna and crept -into the lattice-work to steal his passage home. - -Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He hung there lonely, in -his Reis underwear, aching in the void. - -He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he trans-shipped to New York in -ordinary ways, he prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue -course on Front Street. - -"My boy," said his uncle, "what do you want me to do for you? Speak the -word. You have been gone so long, and you were given up for lost." - -"Only one thing do I want," confessed the former Acutist. - -"And what might that be?" the uncle more circumspectly inquired. - -"Take me at once to the great simple embrace of wholesome Coney Island." - -So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped -from Acutism on to the Iron Boat. - -And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not -leave something to waft in the spaces of uncertainty? - - [3] Inscribed to the _Little Review_ - - - - -WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS - - -I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet. -At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my -dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not -ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to -take notes of William Butler Yeats? - -In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I -intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead -wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was -welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak. -His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and -remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them -for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some -sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he pronounced -his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his -words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was -indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished -conversation. Or, rather, monologue--for when I talked he suspended his -animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down. - -It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he'd write for it, -and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action -and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him -want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The -Playboy. The word "journalism" he uttered as a nun might utter -"vaudeville." He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to -Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court -gossip. Wouldn't it interest Wilde? "Ah, yes," responded Wilde, "I am -deeply interested in a court scandal at present." The journalist -(devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. "Yes," said -Wilde, "the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C." - -It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not -forget, however, pillars of the _Ladies' World_ edited by Oscar Wilde -which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the -end. - -Yeats's mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman. -Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a "fury of -preoccupation" would keep him from being caught in those activities that -lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but -into dialogues, "of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez." In -the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a -mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a -stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond -space and time. - -"And humanitarian writing," he concluded, with a weary limp motion of -his hand, "the writing of reformers, 'uplifters,' with a narrow view of -democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic." - -I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel's narrow antidemocracy and belief in -the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during -the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate nature. The -progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the -early Victorians. It was founded on "truisms" not really true. Whether -Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn't -know: possibly Mitchel was. - -Yeats's one political interest at that time, before the war, was the -Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British -democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and "this is -fortunate." I spoke of Jung's belief in England's national complex. He -was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted. -"The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration," he said, "and -Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so -there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson -has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for -a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a -better man than Lloyd George--less inflated. He is a moderate, not -puffed up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it -arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other people's sins his -business, and forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, -that is different." - -His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences. -In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more, -than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and -somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in -this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a -poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own -country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin -slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is -poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would -satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in -imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for -auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes, -but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination. -He agreed. "Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be -irreconcilable." - -It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the -deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen. -He said it was Allen's own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many -thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same -scale as their friends' children! And he kindled at this folly. "A woman -who marries an artist," he said with much animation, "is either a goose, -or mad, or a hero. If she's a goose, she drives him to earn money. If -she's mad she drives him mad. If she's a hero, they suffer together, and -they come out all right." - -Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that -the Pennsylvania station is "free from the vulgarity of advertisement"; -the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The -Dark Rosaleen and Hussey's Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the -effect that "courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art." Not -for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and -read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like -Hazlitt's meeting Coleridge. I could not say, "my heart, shut up in the -prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, -a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb -and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to -Coleridge." But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the -periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of -poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is -wise enough to treasure his words. - - - - -"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE" - - -Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great -detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came -a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a -rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the -ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as -quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was -to be seen. The skyscrapers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost -light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars -unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active, -beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky. - -I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could -it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A -U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind -was singularly lively for three a. m. - -Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains, -if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality -of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed, -death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put -yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really -bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel -Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation. -An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of -feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. -To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred--that would always -be a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, "proud punctilio." I -remembered the President's tender-minded words, "conduct our operations -as belligerents without passion," and his pledge of sincere friendship -to the German people: warfare without "the desire to bring any injury or -disadvantage upon them." Here, with the Germans' shell-fire plowing into -our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their -guns? - -Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about -this "bombardment," to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson -Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not -at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves -familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains -shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air. -Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud -reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so -distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless -inspection of the innocent sky! - -But that touch of panic, in the interest of our whole present patriotic -cultural attitude, was not to be lost. It is the touch, confessed or -unconfessed, that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward German art -and literature and science an attitude of appreciation and -reciprocation, without disloyalty, it must be in the presence of the -idea of shell-wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness is the -illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth and smug. It is Pharisaical. It -comes from that neutrality of the imagination which is another name for -selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake. - -A generation less prepared than our own for the mood of warfare it would -be difficult to imagine--less prepared, that is to say, by the situation -of our country or the color of our thought. To declare now that New York -has made no provision for the air-traffic of the future is not to arouse -any sense of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency was aroused -ten or fifteen years ago by the bass warnings of military men. It is not -too much to say that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have an -ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas Murray Butler and Elihu Root and -Andrew Carnegie were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel -Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was far more busy -enunciating the recall of judges--and he earned the Nobel Prize. Few -men, even two years ago, believed we would be sending great armies to -Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like Homer Lea had said that the -United States could not mobilize half a million soldiers for active -service in less than three years. And in the next place, we still felt -pacifically. We had lived domestic life too long ever to imagine our sky -black and our grass red. - -Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, this calm enjoyment of an -unearned increment of peace, there was never a greater dislocation of -standards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater problem of -readjustment. For England, at any rate, there was a closeness to the war -that helped to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, besides -the discrepancies in the entailment of services, there are enormous -discrepancies in sentiment to start with, and policies still to be -accepted and cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed or -reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances, is so much to -be looked for, especially with impetuous patriots demanding a new -password of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not at how many -outrages there are, but how few. - -Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of literary discussion, -naturally. "Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds; -the herd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his -flocks"; the critic of his books. But there is one kind of outrage that -requires to be discussed, from the point of view of culture, if only -because there is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be -subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally so-called, -of mutilating everything German; not only sequestering what may be -dangerous or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration -everything that has German origin or bears a German name. The quick -transformation of Bismarcks into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into -Caf New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously. The shudderings -at Germantown, Pa., and Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same -childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian artist is not -permitted to perform because, while we are not at war with Austria, she -is our enemy's ally. It is different when "the music of all German -composers will be swept from the programmes of scheduled concerts of the -Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh. 'The Philadelphia Orchestra -Association wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure to the -request of the Pittsburgh Association. The Philadelphia Orchestra -Association is heartily in accord with any movement directed by -patriotic motives.'" It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance to -culture, that suggests we have been surprised in this whole matter of -culture with our lamps untrimmed. - -In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have been unavoidably -surprised--so much so that our "proud punctilio" has been jogged -considerably loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any -pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to be. It used to be -possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign -magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare -possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally -involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its -complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy -is inhuman in this war. - -Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred might well go beyond the -fervor of the Inquisition, and the hope of exterminating the Germans as -a people might be universally entertained. But no one who has read -history to any purpose will trust too far to this particular -emotionality of the hour. To say this, in the middle of a righteous war, -may sound unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could be more -traitorous and seditious than Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Both -read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid -against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered--that of -neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe -unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses -come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall -suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the -Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through -his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that _he gives to both -North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the -offense came_, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine -attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? -Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war -may speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be said, 'The judgments -of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none; -with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see -the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the -nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and -for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a -just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." It is, -perhaps, like quoting the Lord's Prayer. And yet it is the neglected -wisdom of a man who had gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war. - -But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside humanity. We are -engaged in a war foreordained and necessary, a natural war. A war -inescapable, yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of -hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations as this is, -however, scarcely possible. It is too much, in the face of -superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of -culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our -own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent -nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is -at once called "rowdy" and "despicable." But in time of war it is part -of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to -clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making -railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. How far this -supervision of culture goes depends only on the degree of pressure. It -may go so far as to make the domination of political considerations, -state considerations, paramount in everything--precisely the victory -that democracy, hoping with Emerson that "we shall one day learn to -supersede politics by education," has most to fear. - -It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one -must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is -opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do -so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It -is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and -English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the -beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in -mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end. -But for the man who has partaken of democratic culture this "end" -involves democracy. All character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in -the will to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The only course -open to the man who is still concerned for democratic culture is to -remember the nobility of Lincoln's example--by concentrating on the -offenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty scourge of war, -to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred which will enrage our wounds. - - - - -WAR EXPERTS - - - "War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong arm. - Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in - modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive - factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are - technological exploits; exploits of technological science, - industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been - remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman's war, and the - gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as - it is played." - - ---- Thorstein Veblen in _The Nature of Peace_. - -Across a park in Washington I followed the leisurely stride of two -British officers. Their movement, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had -a military deliberation which became their veteran gray hairs. They were -in khaki uniforms and leather leggings, a red strip at the shoulder -marking them as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses and -tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn to the birds they were as -of a grander race of men. After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked -who they were and learned that one of them was simply a Canadian -lawyer--and that, being a judge advocate, he was obliged to boot and -spur himself in his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and down the -elevator in polished leggings, for the good of the cause. Never in his -life had he heard a machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything -more dangerous than his family carving knife. On inspection his -companion looked similarly martial. The only certain veteran in the -parklet was a shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the grass. - -Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing of this -description. It excites the romantic populace, composed of pedestrians -like myself, and serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine -order of values from which the shambling citizen is debarred. But back -of the window-dressing, the rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared -ovation and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different from these -appearances as roots are different from flowers. If I had ever supposed -that the gist of war was to be derived solely from contemplating -uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion when I overheard the cool -experts of war. - -These experts, such of them as I happened to overhear, had come with the -British mission to America, and they were far other than the common -notion of lords of war. The most impressive of them was a slight figure -who reminded me externally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw's -Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a don at Cambridge, a teacher -of economics, and he retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert -who counts on holding attention. It was not in him, as it is in so many -older pooh-bah professors, to expect a deference to personal garrulity; -but one gained an impression that no words were likely to be wasted on -vacuous listeners by a person with such steel-gray eyes. - -From London, since the beginning of the war, this concentrated man had -gone out of Paris, to Rome, to Petrograd, to join counsel with various -allies on the science of providing munitions. It would never have -occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced, sensitive, -quiet-voiced professor to work out the economic killing of cattle. Yet -almost as soon as he had volunteered in England he began on the task of -adapting industry to slaughter, and there was no doubt whatever that his -inclusive mind had procured the quick and effective killing of thousands -of human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen to him. He was -one of those men whom H. G. Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort -of man who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind as nimble as -quicksilver while he devised the soundest plan for launching the forces -of his sphere. There was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a -mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing of America for -destructiveness as an engineer might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel -with copper, and there was as little pretension in his manner as there -was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated, he was obviously a -university man, but he had come to the top by virtue of mental -equipment. "Mental equipment" means many things, but plainly he was not -of those remote academicians who go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He -managed his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt swing and drive -and bite of it could escape no one, and for all his almost plaintively -modest demeanor he had instant arresting power. It was he and a few men -like him who had made it feasible for amateur armies to loop round an -empire a burning rain of steel. - -This master of munitions was not the only schoolman who had demonstrated -brains. There was another professor, this time the purchaser of guns. He -had come to his rle from holding the kind of position that Matthew -Arnold once had held. A meager figure enough, superficially the -scholastic-dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of education was -no bad beginning for ordering a new department with small attention to -the tricks, of merchandise, but with every thought as to technological -detail. The conversation that went about did not seem to engage this -man, except as it turned on such engrossing topics as the necessity for -circumventing child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent cloud -that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged itself in lightning -decision which made no change in the obscurity from which it came. - -Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue I saw one late-working -member of the mission stop wearily to fend off American inquisition. A -training in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished exile a -permanent nostalgia for Olympus--and how Olympian the British Foreign -Office is, few Americans dare to behold. The candidature to this -interesting service of a great democracy is limited to a "narrow circle -of society" by various excellent devices, the first of which is that -official conditions of entry fix the amount of the private means -required at a minimum of 400 a year. "The primary qualification for the -diplomatic service," says one friendly interpreter of it, "is a capacity -to deal on terms of equality with considerable persons and their words -and works. Sometimes, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its -highest form, by something which is hardly examinable--by very great -intellectual powers. Ordinarily, however, this capacity is a result of -nurture in an atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is scarcely -too much to say that the present constitution of society provides this -atmosphere of independence only where there is financial independence. -In a very few cases freedom of mind and character is achieved elsewhere, -but then a great price, not measurable by money, has to be paid for -it--how great a price only those who have paid it know.... The 'property -qualification' is operative as a means of selecting a certain kind of -character; no readjustment of pay could be a substitute for it. -Undoubtedly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but the -limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice or of a mere -preference for wealth--it is a limitation imposed by the needs of the -diplomatic service, and those needs are national needs." Out of such a -remarkable background, so redolent of "the present constitution of -society," my exiled diplomat took his weary stand before prying writers -for the press. They wanted to know "the critical shrinking point." They -wished to discuss the "maximum theoretic availability." He had no answer -to make; he merely made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box that -he set at his feet there were undoubtedly treasured figures, priceless -information for Germany in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box -might have been solid metal for any effect it had on the conversation. -He was a kind of expert who took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; -who punctuated silence with, "Look here, you've got hold of absolutely -the wrong man.... Hanged if I know.... My dear sir, I haven't the very -faintest idea." - -And yet this member of a caste was only coming through because he too -was paying a technological price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and -rubber--there was nothing his country might need which did not occupy -him, staff officer of vital trafficking, throughout numbered nights. - -There were a few business men on the mission--mighty few considering -their lordship in times of peace. Most of the dominant figures either -from Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual who stood out -as rather an exception to the prevailing type. He was an older man whose -nature brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and high discourse -and a happy gigantic effervescence. If a reputation brayed too loudly at -him, he named its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him, he -called it detestable and cried to knock the English _Nation's_ head -against the _Manchester Guardian's_. Yet he was distinguished from most -of his colleagues as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. To -the organization of his country he had contributed one invaluable idea, -and each problem that came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow -immediate importance into the perspective of a natural philosophy. Not -fond of a prearranged system, he irked more than the run of his -countrymen at the stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great sweep -of vigor he would start at the proposition of handling war industry, for -example, on a basis not inadequate to the requirements; and out of his -running oration would come a wealth of such suggestions as spring only -from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind. - -These are a handful of England's experts in wartime. They do not bear -the brunt of the fight, like the soldiers, but the roots of the flower -of war are in just such depths as employ these hidden minds. - - - - -OKURA SEES NEWPORT - - -Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend of mine in Japan. Jack said -that Okura was taking two years off to study democracy, and would I -steer him around. I was delighted. I offered Okura his choice of the -great democratic scene, with myself as obedient personal conductor. He -was very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray manner, and he -asked if we could begin with Newport. I suspected a joke, but his eye -never twinkled, and so to Newport we went. - -The dirty little Newport railway station interested Okura. So did the -choked throat of Thames Street, with its mad crush of motors and -delivery wagons and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from the -meat market to the book shop and from the chemist's to the Boston Store. -I explained to Okura that this was not really Newport, only a small -sample of the ordinary shopping country town, with the real -exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind. Okura clucked an acceptance -of this remark, and our car wove its difficult way through the narrow -lane till we returned to Bellevue Avenue. - -The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded to Okura. He expected a -belle vue, not a good plain plutocratic American street. When I told him -what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied with its exhibition -of assorted architecture, and he broke into open comment. "So very -charming!" he cried politely. "So like postcards of Milwaukee by the -lake!" I enjoyed his nave enthusiasm and let it go. - -He wanted to know who lived on the avenue, and I told him all the names -I could think of. He had heard many of them, the samurai of America -being known to him as a matter of course, and he picked up new crumbs of -information with obvious gratitude. - -"Vanderbilt? Oh, yes." That was old. So were Astor and Belmont. - -After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. "I do not see the McAlpin -mansion." - -"The McAlpins? I have never heard of them," I murmured indulgently. - -"But that is one name I think I remember correctly," Okura answered with -visible anxiety. "The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the -Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not understand. Are not the -McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?" - -It was hard to convince Okura that this was not a Valhalla of hotel -proprietors, but at last he got it straight. We went back again as far -as the Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament. - -Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats up rather far--well, to be -frank, among the Jamestown and Saunderstown people. But happily we had -Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of the ladies sat facing the -tennis, some sat with their backs to it, and a great buzz of -conversation reverberated under the roof of the stand and billowed on to -the court. On the court two young men strove against each other with a -skill hardly to be matched in any other game, and occasionally, when -something eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple passed through the -crowd. But the applause was irregular. People had to be watched and -pointed out. It was important to note which human oyster bore the -largest pearl. The method of entry and exit was significant, and -significant the whole ritual of being politely superior to the game. - -Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately, and there was so much -conversation he was rather distracted. - -"I hope it does not annoy you?" I asked him. - -"Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so democratic!" - -At this point the umpire got off his perch, and came forward to entreat -the fine ladies. - -"I have asked you before to keep quiet," he wailed. "For God's sake, -will you stop talking?" - -"How very interesting," murmured Okura. - -"Yes," I said, "the religious motif." - -"Ah, yes!" he nodded, very gravely. - -Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play, and we decided to return to -the tournament; but first we took ourselves to Bailey's Beach. - -Bailey's Beach is a small section of the Atlantic littoral famous for -its seaweed. The seaweed is of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in -in large quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind and other -picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy carpet through which one -wades out to the more fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies -in their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching the more -adventurous sex pick his way out of the vegetable matter. In the -pavilion of the bathhouses sit still less adventurous groups. - -It took some time to explain to Okura why this beach, once devoted to -the collection of seaweed for manure, should now be dedicated to -bathing. But he grasped the main point, that it was a private beach. - -"Forgive me," he said, "I see no Jews." - -"That's all right," I answered. "You are studying democracy. There are -no Jews here. None allowed." - -"Oh!" he digested the fact. Then his eye brightened. "Ah, you have your -geisha girls at the swim-beach. How very charming!" - -"No," I corrected him. "Those are not our geisha girls. That is the -'shimmy set.' You know: people who are opposed to the daylight saving -act and the prohibition amendment." - -"Oh, I understand. Republicans," he nodded happily. - -As the Servants' Hour was approaching at Bailey's Beach, and as I had no -good explanation to give of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along -by the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by the walk, and by the -fact that it ran in front of these private houses, free to the public as -to the wind. Once or twice we went down below stone walls, with -everything above hidden from us, but this was exceptional. Okura thought -the walk a fine example of essential democracy. - -"And what are those long tubes?" he asked, as we gazed out toward -Portugal. - -"Sewer pipes," I said bluntly, looking at the great series of excretory -organs that these handsome democratic mansions pushed into the sea. - -"Are they considered beautiful?" asked Okura. - -"Quite," I told him. "They are one of the features provided strictly for -the public." - -"So kind!" said the acquiescent Japanese. - -We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose plutocracy was not entirely -intact, and but for one instructive incident it was an ordinary -civilized meal. That incident, however, shall live long in my memory -because of my inability to interpret it to Okura. - -We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat down, when the third -man was called to the telephone. - -He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his hostess, "I'm awfully -sorry, I've got to leave." - -His hostess looked apprehensive. "I hope it's nothing serious?" - -"Oh, not at all; please don't worry," he responded, plumping down his -napkin, "but I've just had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She's a man short -and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So long. Awfully sorry!" - -"What did that mean, please?" Okura inquired, as we hurried back to see -Kumagae play. - -"Do you mean, democratically?" - -"Yes." - -"I give it up," I retorted. - -"But Mr. Owen said you would want to interpret everything democratic to -me," Okura ventured on, "and is there not some secret here hidden from -me? I fear I am very stupid." - -Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not explain. - -"But," pressed Okura, "'the world has been made safe for democracy.' I -want so much to understand it. I fear I do not yet understand Newport." - -And he looked at me with his innocent eyes. - - - - -THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED - - -It is the boast of more than one proud author, popular or unpopular, -that he never reads any criticism of his own work. He knows from his -wife or his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists. Sometimes in -hurrying through the newspaper he catches sight of his unforgettable -name. Inadvertently he may read on, learning the drift of the comment -before he stops himself. But his rule is rigid. He never reads what the -critics say about him. - -Before an author comes to this admirable self-denial he has usually had -some experience of the ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he -started out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself, Of course I -don't profess to _like_ criticism. Nobody likes to be criticized. But I -hope I am big enough to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No -man can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but so long as -criticism is helpful, that's all a man has a right to ask. Is it meant -to be helpful? If so, shoot. - -After some experience of helpful criticism, it will often occur to the -sensitive author that he is not being completely understood. A man's ego -should certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn't a man a -right to his own style and his own personality? What is the use of -criticism that is based on the critic's dislike of the author's -personality? The critic who has a grudge against an author simply -because he thinks and feels in a certain way is scarcely likely to be -helpful. The author and the critic are not on common ground. And the -case is not improved by the very evident intrusion of the critic's -prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly obvious that a man with a -bias will see in a book just what he wants to see. If he is a -reactionary, he will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik he -will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use of reading criticism? -The critic merely holds the mirror up to his own nature, when he is not -content to reproduce the publisher's prepared review. - -The author goes on wondering, "What does he say about me?" But the -disappointments are too many. Once in a blue moon the critic -"understands" the author. He manages, that is to say, to do absolutely -the right thing by the author's ego. He strokes it hard and strokes it -the right way. After that he points out one or two of the things that -are handicapping the author's creative force, and he shows how easily -such handicaps can be removed. This is the helpful, appreciative, -perceptive critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty bristling -young egoists who want figs to grow on thistles and cabbages to turn -into roses, and who blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill. -These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest in the author. -They are only interested in themselves. And so, having tackled them in a -glow of expectation that has always died into sulky gloom, the author -quits reading criticism and satisfies his natural curiosity about -himself by calling up the publisher and inquiring after sales. - -For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without being able to point -to much better models. Critics are of course superior to most authors, -yet I do not know many critics who like to be criticized. It does not -matter whether they are thin-skinned literary critics or the hippopotami -of sociology. They don't like it, much. Some meet criticism with a sweet -resourcefulness. They choke down various emotions and become, oh, so -gently receptive. Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious -diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity that makes criticism -nothing less than a personal affront. And then there is the way of the -combative man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge to a -fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual circles is the man -who takes criticism on its merits and thinks it natural that he should -not only criticize but be criticized. - -The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in his ego. His frigid -reception of criticism corresponds to something like a secret terror of -it. His air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity: he hates -being called on to defend himself in anything like a rough-and-tumble -fight. He resents having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried -in the duel of dispute. - -To hand down judgments, often severe judgments, is part of the -pontifical character. But the business of meeting severe judgments is -not so palatable. As most men grow older and more padded in their -armchair-criticism, they feel that they become entitled to immunity. The -Elder Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they are, the more they -try to browbeat their critics. They see criticism as the critic's -fundamental inability to appreciate their position. - -If you are going to be criticized, how take it? The best preparation for -it is to establish good relations with your own ego first. If you -interpose your ego between your work and the critic you cannot help -being insulted and injured. The mere fact that you are being subjected -to criticism is almost an injury in itself. You must get to the point -where you realize the impregnability of your own admirable character. -Then the bumblings of the critic cannot do less than amuse you, and may -possibly be of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, yet he -started out rather indifferent to you, and the mere fact that he is -willing to criticize you is a proof that he has overcome the initial -inhumanity of the human race. This alone should help, but more than -that, you have the advantage of knowing he is an amateur on that topic -where you are most expert--namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps if -you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the beginning of the entente -between you is that he should always start out by appeasing your ego. - - - - -BLIND - - -He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He could tend the furnace and -help around the house--scour the bath-tub and clean windows--but for a -powerful man these were trivial chores. The trouble with him, as I soon -discovered, was complete and simple. He was blind. - -I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be blind, but it was terrible -to be blind and at the mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs. -Angier ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier of a woman, very tall -and very bony, with a virile voice and no touch of femininity except -false curls. She wore rusty black, with long skirts, and a tasseled -shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls. She hated her rooming-house -and every one in it. Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save -enough money out of her establishment to escape from it. To that end she -plugged the gaps in the bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the -furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief sacrifice on the -altar of her economy was Samuel Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was -blind and useless, he was dependent on her. When she called, he -literally ran to her, crying, "Coming, coming!" He might be out on the -window-sill, risking his poor neck to polish the windows that he would -never see, but, "Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I--would you be -so good--ah, you are very kind. Coming, Adelaide, just one moment...." -and he would paddle down stairs. She treated him like dirt. Sometimes -one would arrive during an interview between them. The spare, -gimlet-eyed Mrs. Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel to cringe -in every limb. He was a burly man with a thick beard, iron-gray, and his -sightless eyes were hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed -spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his voice booming -heartily, he was a cheerful, honest figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though -he was a most platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier -tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a water-bucket or -leaving a duster on the stairs or forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he -became infantile, tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always changed to a -sugared greeting as one was recognized. "Good e-e-evening, isn't it a -pleasant e-e-evening?" But the only value in speaking to Mrs. Angier was -that it permitted Samuel somehow to shamble away to the limbo of the -basement. - -Of course I wanted to know how, he became blind. Luckily, as Mrs. Angier -had prosperous relatives in another part of Chicago, she sometimes could -be counted on to be absent, and on those occasions or when she went to -church, Samuel haunted my room. He was unhappy unless he was at work, -and he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I really believe he -liked to chatter to me: and he was more than anxious to tell me how his -tragedy had befallen him. - -"Oh, dear, yes," he said to me, "it happened during the strike. They hit -me on the head, and left me unconscious. And I have never seen since, -not one thing." - -"Who hit you, Samuel?" - -"Who hit me? The blackguards who were out on strike, sir. They nearly -killed me with a piece of lead pipe. Oh, dear, yes." - -It seemed an unspeakable outrage to me, but in Samuel there was nothing -but a kind of healthy indignation. He was not bitter. He never raised -his voice above its easy reminiscent pitch. - -"But what did you do to them? Why did the strikers attack you? What -strike was it?" - -"I did nothing at all to them. But, you see, my horse slipped and when I -was helpless on the ground with my hip smashed, one of them knocked me -out. It was right up on the sidewalk. I had gone after them up on the -sidewalk, and I suppose the flags were so slippery that the horse came -down." - -"But what were you doing on a horse?" I asked in despair. - -"I was a volunteer policeman. These scoundrels were led by Debs, and we -were out to see that there was law and order in Chicago." - -"Oh, the Pullman strike. Were you railroading then?" - -"Railroading? No, sir, I was in the wholesale dry-goods business. We had -just started in in a small way. I was married only two years, to -Adelaide's younger sister. Ah, my accident brought on more trouble than -she could stand. She was very different from Adelaide, quite dainty and -lively, if you follow me. We were living at that time on Cottage Grove -Avenue, on the south side. I was building up the importing end of the -business, and then this thing came, and everything went to smash. They -gave me no compensation whatsoever, to make the thing worse." - -"But, Samuel, how did you come to be out against the strikers?" - -"And why shouldn't I be out, I'd like to know!" Samuel straightened up -from rubbing a chair, and pointed his rag at my voice. "These scoundrels -had nothing against Mr. Pullman. He treated them like a prince. But they -took the bit in their teeth, and once they break loose where are we? The -President didn't get shut of them till he sent in the troops. But I've -always contended that if we business men had taken the matter in hand -ourselves and nipped the trouble in the bud, we'd have had no such -lawlessness to deal with in the end. It is always the same. The business -men are the backbone of the community, but they don't recognize their -responsibility! Take the sword to those bullies and blackguards; that's -what I say!" - -The old man lifted both fists like a dauntless Samson, and fixed me with -his sightless eyes. He had paid hellishly for living up to his -convictions, and here they seemed absolutely unshaken. - -"That's all right, too, Samuel," I said, feebly enough, "but how do you -feel now? Nobody compensated you for being laid out in that big strike, -and your business was ruined, and here you are emptying the -waste-basket. How about that? I think it's fierce that you got injured, -but those men in the Pullman strike weren't out to break up society. -They were fighting for their rights, that's all. Don't you think so -now?" - -"_No_, sir. The solid class of the community must be depended upon to -preserve law and order. I think that it was the duty of the business men -of Chicago to put down ruffianism in that strike and to smite whenever -it raised its head. Smite it hip and thigh, as the saying is. Oh, no. -Young men have fine notions about these things, ha, ha! You'll excuse -me, won't you, but you can't allow violence and disorder to run riot and -then talk of men's 'rights' as an excuse. Ah, but it was a great -misfortune for me, I confess. It was the end of all my hopes. The -doctors thought at first that the sight might be restored, but I have -never seen a glimmer of light since. But we mustn't repine, must we? -That'd never do." - -"Samuel!" Mrs. Angier's sharp voice pierced the room. - -"Good gracious, back so soon. You'll excuse me, I'm sure.... Coming, -Adelaide, coming!" - -He groped for his bucket, with its seedy sponge all but submerged in the -dirty water. The water splashed a little as he hurriedly made for the -door. - -"Oh, dear," he muttered, "Adelaide won't like that!" - - - - -"AND THE EARTH WAS DRY" - - -Like all great ideas it seemed perfectly simple when Harrod first -disclosed it to his unimportant partner John Prentiss. - -"Of course we'll get back of it. We've got to," said Harrod, in the -sanctity of the directors' room. "You've been down to Hopeville on pay -day. It's the limit. Ordinary days there's practically no trouble. Pay -day's a madhouse. How many men, do you think, had to have the company -doctor last pay day?" - -"You don't expect me to answer, Robert," Prentiss replied mildly. -"You're telling me, you're not arguing with me." - -"Twenty-five, Prentiss, twenty-five drunken swine. What do you think -happened? I'll tell you. That doctor never stopped a minute taking -stitches, sewing on scalps, mending skulls. He was kept on the hop all -day and night all over the town. I'll tell you something more." The -sturdy Harrod rapped his fist on the mahogany table, leaning out of his -armchair. "The doctor's wife told me a Polack came to her shack at two -in the morning with half his thumb hanging off, bitten off in a drunken -brawl. What do you think she did, Prentiss? She amputated it herself, on -her own hook, just like a little soldier. She's got nerve, let me tell -you. But do you think we want to stand for any more of this? Not much. -Hopeville is going dry!" - -Mr. Harrod produced a gold pen-knife and nicked a cigar emphatically. He -brushed the tiny wedge of tobacco from his plump trouser leg on to the -bronze carpet. He lit his cigar and got up to have a little strut. - -Poor Prentiss looked at him as only a weedy Yankee can look at a man -whose cheeks are rosy with arrogant health. Why the stout Harrod who ate -and drank as he willed should be proclaiming prohibition, while the man -with a Balkan digestive apparatus should be a reluctant listener, no one -could have analyzed. It never would have occurred to Prentiss to be so -restlessly efficient. But Harrod was as simple as chanticleer. He'd made -up his mind. - -"We'll back Billy Sunday. His advance agent will be in town this week," -Mr. Harrod unfolded. "We'll put the whole industry behind him. Drink is -a constant source of inefficiency. It's an undeniable cause. When do we -have accidents? On Mondays, regularly. The men come back stupefied from -the rotgut they've been drinking, and it's simple luck if they don't set -fire to the mine. The Hopeville mine is perfectly safe. Except for that -one big disaster we had, it's one of the safest mines in the country. -But how can you call any mine safe if the fellows handling dynamite and -the men working the cage are just as likely as not to have a hangover? -We'll stop it. We'll make that town so dry that you can't find a beer -bottle in it. It took me some time to realize the common sense of this -situation, but it's as clear as daylight; it's ridiculously clear. We're -fools, Prentiss, that we didn't advocate prohibition twenty years ago." - -"Twenty years ago, Robert," Prentiss murmured, "you were checking coal -at the pit-head. You weren't so damned worried about evolving policies -for the mine owners twenty years ago." - -"Well, you know what I mean," Robert Harrod rejoined. - -"Perfectly," retorted Prentiss. "And I'm with you, though all the -perfumes of Arabia won't cleanse these little hands." - -That was the first gospel, so to speak, and Harrod was as good as his -word. He saw Sunday's advance agent, he rallied the industry, he lunched -with innumerable Christians and had a few painful but necessary -political conferences. The prohibitionist manager he discovered to be a -splendid fellow--direct, clean-cut, intelligent, indefatigable. The -whole great state was won to prohibition after a strenuous preparation -and a typically "bitter" campaign. - -And everything went well at Hopeville. At first, not unnaturally, there -was a good deal of rebellion. A few of the miners--you know Irish -miners, born trouble-makers--talked considerably. Something in them took -kindly to the relief from monotony that came with a periodic explosion, -and they muttered blasphemously about the prohibitionists, and time hung -heavy on their hands. A few of them pulled out, preceded by the gaunt -Scotchman who had run the bare "hotel" where most of the whisky was -consumed. These were led by a sullen compatriot of their own, a man who -once was a fine miner but who had proved his own best customer in the -liquor business and whose contour suggested that his body was trying -desperately to blow a bulb. One miner left for a neighboring state -(still wet) to purchase a pair of boots. He crawled back on foot after a -week, minus the new boots, plus a pawn-ticket, and most horribly chewed -by an unintelligent watchdog who had misunderstood his desire to borrow -a night's lodging in the barn. The drinking haunts were desolate -reminders of bygone entertainments for weeks after the law took effect, -and few of the younger men could look forward to tame amusement, -amusement that had no elysium in it, without a twinge of disgust. But on -the whole, Hopeville went dry with surprising simplicity. A great many -of the miners were neither English, Scotch, Cornish, Welsh nor Irish, -but Austrians and Italians and Poles, and these were not so inured to -drinking and biting each other as Mr. Harrod might have thought. The mud -in Hopeville, it is true, was often from nine inches to four feet deep, -and there were no named streets, and no known amusements, and a very -slim possibility of distraction for the unmarried men. After -prohibition, however, a far from unpleasant club house was founded, with -lots of "dangerous" reading material, and a segregated place for -homemade music, and bright lights and a fire, and a place to write -letters, and a pungent odor of something like syndicalism in the air. - -That was the beginning. The men did not detonate on pay day, except in -lively conversation. There was less diffused blasphemy. It concentrated -rather particularly on one or two eminent men. And when the virtues and -defects of these men were sufficiently canvassed, the "system" beyond -them was analyzed. Even the delight of the Hunkies in dirt, or the -meanness of certain bosses, began to be less engrossing than the exact -place in the terrestrial economy where Harrod and Prentiss got off. - -"Well, Robert," inquired the man of migraine, back in the home office, -"how is your precious prohibition working? It seems to me the doctor's -wife is the sole beneficiary so far." - -"Working?" the rubicund Harrod responded urgently. "I don't know what -we're going to do about it. You can't rely on the men for anything. A -few years ago, after all, they took their wages over to Mason and blew -it all in, or they soaked up enough rum in Hopeville to satisfy -themselves, and come back on the job. Now, what do they do? They quit -for two weeks when they want to. They quit for a month at a time. And -still they have a balance. You can't deal with such men. They're -infernally independent. They're impudent with prosperity. I never saw -anything like it. We can't stand it. I don't know what we're going to -do." - -"You're going to back the liquor trade, Robert, of course. That's simple -enough." - -"You may laugh, but it is too late, I tell you, the harm's done. We -can't remedy it. National prohibition is right on top of us. I don't -know what we'll do." - -"Sell 'em Bevo. That'll keep them conservative. Ever drink it?" - -"Bevo? Conservative? Prentiss, this is serious. These men are completely -out of hand." - -"Well, aren't they more efficient?" - -"Of course they're more efficient. They're too damnably efficient. They -wanted Hopeville drained and they're getting it drained. They'll insist -on having it paved next. They'll want hot and cold water. They'll want -bathtubs. That'll be the end." - -"The end? Come, Robert, perhaps only the beginning of the end." - -"It's very amusing to you, Prentiss, but you're in on this with me. -We've forced these working-men into prohibition, and now they're sober, -they're everlastingly sober. They're making demands and getting away -with it. We've got to go on or go under. Wake up, man. I've played my -cards. What can we do?" - -"What can we do? That is not the point now. Now the point is, what'll -_they_ do." - - - - -TELEGRAMS - - -In my simple world a cablegram is so rare that I should treasure the -mere envelope. I should not be likely to resurrect it. It would be -buried in a bureau, like a political badge or a cigar-cutter--but there -is a silly magpie in every man, and a cable I would preserve. To discuss -cablegrams or even cut-rate wireless, however, would be an affectation. -These are the orchids of communication. It is the ordinary telegram I -sing. - -There was a magnificence about a quick communication in the days before -the Western Union. Horsemen went galloping roughshod through scattering -villages. It was quite in order for a panting messenger to rush in, make -his special delivery, and drop dead. This has ceased to be his custom. -In Mr. Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class there is one omission. He -neglected to deal with that great adept in leisure, the messenger-boy. -"Messenger-boy" is a misnomer. He is either a puling infant or a tough, -exceedingly truculent little ogre of uncertain age and habit. His life -is consecrated. He cares for nothing except to disprove the axiom that a -straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Foreseeing -this cult of the messenger service, the designers of the modern American -city abandoned all considerations of beauty, mystery, and suggestion in -an heroic effort to circumvent the boy in blue. But the boy in blue -cannot be beaten. By what art he is selected I know not. Whether he is -attributable to environment or heredity I dare not guess. But with a -possible inferiority to his rival, the coat-room boy, and, of course, -nature's paradox the crab, he is supreme. - -It is not a telegram in its last stages that has magic. Much better for -the purposes of drama to have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not -a laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a telegram has magic. If -you are hardened you do not register. It is the fresh who have the -thrill. But no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever so -inured, there is one telegram, _the_ telegram, which will find your -core. - -Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while an important person, -usually a man but occasionally a woman, gets a handful of mail without -any sign of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even sorting out -the wires. Such persons are marked. They are in public life. It is -pardonable. There must be public men and public women. I should not ask -any one to give up his career for the peculiar ecstasies of the -telegram. But no one can deny that these persons have parted with an -essence of their being. What if I find a solitary notice? "It is under -your door." I bolt for the elevator, thrilled, alive. - -It may be suggested that my over-laden predecessors are not in public -life; that they are very distinguished, very wealthy personages, -receiving private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their -children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other of their -responsibilities, accessories, possessions. With every deference I -answer that you are mistaken. Unless their riches are in a stocking, -these are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels. Their title may -be secure, but not their peace of mind. Whatever they wish, they are -obliged to administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of gravitation -keeps pulling, pulling at their chandeliers. And so in some degree they -are connected with, open to, shared by, innumerable people. Without -necessarily being popular, they are in the center of populace. They have -to meet, if only to repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus being -public characters. It is often against their desires. But being called -upon to convert a part of their souls into a reception-room, a place -where people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it follows that -they give up some of their ecstatic privacy in order to retain the rest. -This I do not decry. For certain good and valuable considerations one -might be induced to barter some of one's own choice stock of privacy, -but for myself I should insist on retaining enough to keep up my -interest in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be dogged by -urgent brokers and punctilious butlers, no. - -"There's a telegram upstairs for you, sir." "A telegram? How long has it -been here?" "It came about half an hour ago." "Ah, thank you.... No, -never mind, I'm going upstairs." What may not this sort of banality -precede? Perhaps another banality, in ink. But not always. A telegram is -an arrow that is aimed to fly straight and drive deep. Whether from -friend or rival, whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the heart -is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the message has come, singing -enigmatically across the country. But there is a path that leaps out of -the dingy office to countless court-rooms, business buildings, homes, -hospitals. That office is truly a ganglion from which piercing -nerve-fibers curve into the last crevices of human lives. When you enter -it to send a telegram it may depress you. You submit your confidence -across a public counter. But what does it matter to a creature glazed by -routine? He enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of their -meaning. To him a word is not a bullet--just an inert little lump of -lead. - -Some messages come with a force not realizable. Tragedy dawns slowly. -The mind envisages, not apprehending. And then, for all the customary -world outside, one is penned in one's trouble alone. One remembers those -sailors who were imprisoned in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off -from escape, red-hot iron plates between them and the assuaging waters -on every side, they could see the free, could cry out to them, could -almost touch hands. But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a -slip of paper one may meet one's own. There are countries to-day where -the very word _telegram_ must threaten like a poisoned spear. And such -wounds as are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often -powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in suspense is worse than -dreadful certainty. But there are shocks which are irreparable. It is -cruel to break those shocks, crueler to deliver them. - -All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion, the telegram attends on -death, it attends no less eagerly on love and birth. "A boy arrived this -morning. Father and child doing well"--this is more frequently the tenor -of the wire. And the wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remember -Bernard Shaw's rebuff to Lady Randolph Churchill for asking him to -dinner? He had the vegetarian view of eating his "fellow-creatures." He -chided her for inviting a person of "my well-known habits." "Know -nothing of your habits," came the blithe retort, "hope they're better -than your manners." - -The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we struggled to put our all -in ten words--simple, at least, if not sensuous and passionate. Now the -day-letter and night-letter lead us into garrulity. No transition from -Greek to Byzantine could be worse than this. We should resist it. The -time will doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as austere -and frugal in our use of the telegram. But we should preserve this sign -of our Spartan manhood. Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of -long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive, virginal, terse. - - - - -OF PLEASANT THINGS - - -When I was a child we lived on the border of the town, and the road that -passed our windows went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under -the old city gateway and out through the mean city "lanes." The other -branch turned round our corner and ran into the countryside. Day and -night many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing. In the -day-time I took no pleasure in them, but when I awoke at night and the -thick silence was broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it -filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this enchantment. The -steady effort of the wheels, their rattle as they passed over the uneven -road, their crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute -pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a solitary lantern swings -underneath the wagon. In the old days the load might be coal, with the -colliery-man sitting hunched on the driver's seat, a battered -silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery, making a start at -dawn. Or it might be a load of singing harvest-women, hired in the -market square by the sweet light of the morning. But not the wagon or -the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so much as that honest, steady, -homely sound coming through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find -it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like it till I die. - -The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes, in lazy summer -evenings, I like the faint rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble -of the elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows and its -passengers relaxed and indolent after the exhausting day. Always I like -the moaning sounds from the river craft, carried so softly into the -town. But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are usually discords. I -hate bells--the sharp spinsterish telephone bell, the lugubrious church -bell, the clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the sleigh bell or -the dinner bell. - -I like the element of water. An imagist should write of the waters of -Lake Michigan which circle around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is -the hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths. When the sun shines on -the bottom, every pebble is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a -happy memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of Maine one has the -same visual delight in water as clear as crystal, and on the coast of -Ireland I have seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst or -thunder in a wall of emerald. On the southern shore of Long Island, who -has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as -apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that -Atlantic is drenching. - -The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate -the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured -walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a -lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are -barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A -little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak -cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out -on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at -nightfall has the same, or even a more therial, radiance. From the -hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor. -This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who -is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him. - -Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I like flowers, but seldom -cut flowers. The gathering of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily -wanton, and is it not hateful to see people coming home with dejected -branches of dogwood or broken autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already -rusting in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness of the meadow -or the solitude of a forsaken garden. Few things are so pleasant as to -find oneself all alone in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to -sea. The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones, the life -that trails so impudently across the path, the life that spawns in the -forgotten pond--this has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners. -Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient turtle, ourselves the -only living things within sight or sound. When the turtle wearied of -sunning himself he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily -paddled through waters laced down with scum. It was pleasant to see him, -a not too clean turtle in waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family -had been home the gardener would have scoured him. - -Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire--which I thank heaven I -am not, nor scarcely a millionth part of one--I should take pleasure in -the silent orderliness that shadowed me through my home. Those invisible -hands that patted out the pillows and shined the shoes and picked up -everything, even the Sunday newspapers--those I should enjoy. I should -enjoy especially the guardian angel who hid from me the casualties of -the laundry and put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is no -laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire the laundry is sent -and the laundry is sorted away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire; -I envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen sheets. - -The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude that life is in the -striving. Is this altogether true? I think not. Not for those menial -offices so necessary to our decent existence, so little decent in their -victims or themselves. But one does remember certain striving that -brought with it almost instant happiness, like the reward of the child -out coasting or the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding game. It -is pleasant to think of one's first delicious surrender to fatigue after -a long day's haul on a hot road. That surrender, in all one's joints, -with all one's driven will, is the ecstasy that even the Puritan allowed -himself. It is the nectar of the pioneer. In our civilization we take it -away from the workers, as we take the honey from the bees--but I wish to -think of things pleasant, not of our civilization. Fatigue of this -golden kind is unlike the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It -is the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it from games, even -golf, I think it is pleasant. It is the great charm that Englishmen -possess and understand. - -These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant things of the poet. -They barely leave the hall of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine, -is one who captures in the swift net of his imagination the wild -pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be flying presences quickly -lost to view. But every man must bag what he can in his own net, whether -he be rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my imagination to -keep from being snared by too many publicists and professors and persons -of political intent. These are invaluable servants of humanity, -admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But they fill the mind -with _-ations_. They pave the meadows with concrete; they lose the free -swing of pleasant things. - - - - -THE AVIATOR - - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - - I was the lark whose song was heard - When I was lost to sight, - I was the golden arrow loosed - To pierce the heart of night. - - I fled the little earth, I climbed - Above the rising sun, - I met the morning in a blaze - Before my hour was gone. - - I ran beyond the rim of space, - Its reins I flung aside, - Laughter was mine and mine was youth - And all my own was pride. - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - - From end to end I knew the way, - I had no doubt or fear; - The minutes were a forfeit paid - To fetch the landfall near. - - But all at once my heart I held, - My carol frozen died, - A white cloud laid her cheek to mine - And wove me to her side. - - Her icy fingers clasped my flesh, - Her hair drooped in my face, - And up we fell and down we rose - And twisted into space. - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - - Laughter was mine and mine was youth, - I pressed the edge of life, - I kissed the sun and raced the wind, - I found immortal strife. - - Out of myself I spent myself, - I lost the mortal share, - My grave is in the ashen plain, - My spirit in the air. - - Good-by, sweet pride of man that flew, - Sweet pain of man that bled, - I was the lark that spilled his heart, - The golden arrow sped. - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - -THE END - - - - - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR *** - - - - -A Word from Project Gutenberg - - -We will update this book if we find any errors. - -This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35091 - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one -owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and -you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission -and without paying copyright royalties. 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-
-.. meta::
- :PG.Id: 35091
- :PG.Title: The Invisible Censor
- :PG.Released: 2010-01-27
- :PG.Rights: Public Domain
- :PG.Producer: Roger Frank
- :PG.Producer: the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net
- :DC.Creator: Francis Hackett
- :DC.Title: The Invisible Censor
- :DC.Language: en
- :DC.Created: 1921
-
-=========================================================
- The Invisible Censor
-=========================================================
-
-.. _pg-header:
-
-.. container::
-
- .. style:: paragraph
- :class: noindent
-
- This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
- almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
- re-use it under the terms of the `Project Gutenberg License`_
- included with this eBook or online at
- http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-
- .. vspace:: 1
-
- .. _pg-machine-header:
-
- .. container::
-
- Title: The Invisible Censor
-
- Author: Francis Hackett
-
- Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #35091]
-
- Language: English
-
- Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
- .. vspace:: 1
-
- .. _pg-start-line:
-
- \*\*\* START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR \*\*\*
-
- .. vspace:: 4
-
- .. _pg-produced-by:
-
- .. container::
-
- Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net.
-
- .. vspace:: 1
-
-
-
-
-.. role:: chap
- :class: center larger
-
-.. class:: center larger bold
-
- | THE INVISIBLE CENSOR
-
-.. class:: center
-
- | By
-
-.. class:: center larger
-
- | FRANCIS HACKETT
- |
-
-.. image:: images/illus-emb.png
- :align: center
-
-.. class:: center
-
- |
- | New York
- | \B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
- | MCMXXI
- |
- |
- |
- |
- | Copyright, 1921,
- | by B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
- | Printed in U. S. A.
- |
- |
- |
- |
- | TO MY WIFE
- | SIGNE TOKSVIG
- |
- | WHOSE LACK OF INTEREST IN THIS BOOK
- | HAS BEEN MY CONSTANT DESPERATION
- |
- |
- |
-
- These sketches and articles appeared in the
- *New Republic* and I am indebted to the other
- editors for being allowed to reprint them.
-
-
-.. contents:: Contents
- :backlinks: none
- :depth: 1
-
-
-THE INVISIBLE CENSOR
-====================
-
-Not long ago I met a writer who happened to apply
-the word “cheap” to Mr. Strachey’s Eminent
-Victorians. It astonished me, because this was an
-erudite, cultivated woman, a distinguished woman,
-and she meant what she said.
-
-A “cheap” effect, I assume, is commonly one that
-builds itself on a false foundation. It may promise
-beautifully, but it never lives up to its promise.
-Whether it is a house or a human character, a binding
-or a book, it proves itself gimcrack and shoddy.
-It hasn’t the goods. And of Eminent Victorians, as
-I remembered it (having read it to review it), this
-was the last thing to be said. The book began by
-fitting exquisitely, but it went on fitting exquisitely.
-It never pulled or strained. And the memory of it
-wears like a glove.
-
-Now why, after all, did I like this book so thoroughly,
-which my distinguished friend thought so
-cheap? For many minor reasons of course, as one
-likes anything—contributory reasons—but principally,
-as I laboriously analyzed it, because in Eminent
-Victorians the invisible censor was so perfectly
-understood. What seemed cheap to her ladyship
-was, I do not doubt, the very thing that made Eminent
-Victorians seem so precious to me—the deft
-disregard of appearances, the refusal to let decorum
-stand in the way of our possessing the facts. This
-to my critic was a proof that Mr. Strachey was imperceptive and vulgar—“common” the ugly word
-is. To me it simply proved that he knew his game.
-What he definitely disregarded, as so many felt, was
-not any decorum dear and worth having. It was
-simply that decorum which to obey is to produce
-falsification. The impeccable craft of Mr. Strachey
-was shown in his evaluation, not his acceptance, of
-decorum. He did not take his characters at their
-face value, while he did not do the other vulgar
-thing, go through their careers with a muck-rake.
-In vivisecting them (the awful thing to do, presumably),
-he never let them die on him. He opened
-them out, but not cruelly or brutally. He did it as
-Mr. William Johnston plays tennis or as Dr. Blake
-is said to operate or as Dr. Muck conducts an orchestra
-or as Miss Kellerman dives. He did it for
-the best result under the circumstances and with a
-form that comes of a real command of the medium—genuine
-“good form.”
-
-The essential achievement of Eminent Victorians
-is worth dwelling on because in every book of social
-character the question of the invisible censor is unavoidably
-present. By the censor I do not mean
-that poor blinkered government official who decides
-on the facts that are worthy of popular acquaintance.
-I mean a still more secret creature of still
-more acute solicitude, who feels that social facts
-must be manicured and pedicured before they are fit
-to be seen. He is not concerned with the facts
-themselves but with their social currency. He is
-the supervisor of what we say we do, the watchman
-over our version and our theoretical estimate of
-ourselves. His object, as I suppose, is to keep up
-the good old institutions, to set their example before the world, to govern the imitative monkey in
-us. And to fulfill that object he continually revises
-and blue-pencils the human legend. He is constantly
-at the elbow of every man or woman who
-writes. An invisible, scarcely suspected of existing,
-he is much more active, much more solidly intrenched,
-than the legal censor whom liberals detest.
-
-Every one is now more or less familiar with the
-Freudian censor, the domesticated tribal agent
-whose function it seems to be to enforce the tribal
-scruples and superstitions—to keep personal impulse
-where the tribe thinks it belongs. This part of
-the ego—to give it a spatial name—came in for a
-good deal of excited remonstrance in the early days
-of popular Freudian talk. To-day, I think, the censor
-is seldom so severely interpreted. In many cases
-there is clearly a savagery or a stupidity which brings
-about “the balked disposition,” but it is being admitted
-that the part which is regulated by the censor,
-the “disposition” end of the ego, may not always be
-socially tolerable; and as for the “balking,” there
-is a difference between blunt repressiveness and enlightened
-regulation. Still, with all this acceptance
-of ethics, the nature of the censorship has to be recognized—the
-true character of the censor is so
-often not taste or conscience in any clear condition,
-but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional
-bully. In the censor as he appears in
-psycho-analytic literature there is something of the
-archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic—all just
-as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is
-the thing in us which is against license and anarchy.
-
-In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor
-of whom Eminent Victorians is so subversive, there
-are particularly these irrational and ritualistic characteristics,
-these remnants of outgrown institutions,
-these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed.
-Most biography, especially official biography, is written
-with such a censor in mind, under his very eye.
-Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and
-stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him
-in mind. Hovering behind Eminent Victorians we
-see agonized official biography, with its finger on
-its lips, and the contrast is perhaps the chief delight
-that Mr. Strachey affords. When Cardinal Manning’s
-pre-clerical marriage, for example, came to be
-considered by Mr. Strachey, he did not obey the conventional
-impulse, did not subordinate that fact of
-marriage as the Catholic Church would wish it to be
-subordinated (as a matter of “good taste,” of
-course). He gave to that extremely relevant episode
-its due importance. And so Manning, for
-the first time for most people, took on the look not so
-much of the saintly cardinal of official biography as
-of a complex living man.
-
-What does the censor care for this æsthetic
-result? Very little. What the censor is chiefly interested
-in is, let us say, edification. He aims by
-no means to give us access to the facts. He aims
-not at all to let us judge for ourselves. With all
-his might he strives to relate the facts under his
-supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever
-it may be. And so, when facts come to light
-which do not chime in with his prepossession, he does
-his best either to discredit them or to set them down
-as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. And
-the policy that he is serving is not æsthetic.
-
-A theory of the æsthetic is now beside the point,
-but I am sure it would move in a relation to human
-impulses very different from the relation of the censor.
-The censor is thinking, presumably, of immediate
-law and order, with its attendant conventions
-and respectabilities. The æsthetic could not
-be similarly bound. It is not reckless of conduct,
-but surely enormously reckless of decorum, with its
-conventions and respectabilities clustering around the
-status quo. Hence the apparent “revolt” of
-modernism, the insurrection of impulse against edification.
-
-But there is more in Eminent Victorians than an
-amusing, impish refusal to edify. There is the instructive
-contrast between the “censored celebrity”
-and the uncensored celebrity disinterestedly observed.
-Disinterestedly observed, for one thing, we
-get something in these celebrities besides patriotism
-and mother-love and chastity and heroism. We get
-hot impulses and cold calculations, brandy and
-treachery, the imperious and the supine, glorious religiousness
-and silly family prayers. And these
-things, though very unlike the products of official
-photography, are closely related to impulses as we
-know them in ourselves. To find them established
-for Mr. Strachey’s “eminent” Victorians is to enjoy
-a constant dry humor, since the invisible censor,
-the apostle of that expediency known as edification,
-stood at the very heart of Victorianism.
-
-This is possibly why Samuel Butler, in his autobiographical
-way, is so remarkable as a Victorian.
-In the midst of innumerable edifying figures, he declined
-to edify. When people said to him, “Honor
-thy father and thy mother,” he answered in effect
-that his father was a pinhead theologian who had
-wanted to cripple his mentality, and his mother was,
-to use his own phrase, full of the seven deadly
-virtues. This was not decorous but it had the merit
-of being true. And all the people whose unbidden
-censors had been forcing good round impulses into
-stubborn parental polygons immediately felt the relief
-of this revelation. Not all of them confess it.
-When they have occasion to speak or write about
-“mothers”—as if the biological act of parturition
-brings with it an unquestionable “mother”
-psyche—most of them still allow the invisible censor
-to govern them and represent them as having
-feelings not really their own. But even this persistence
-of the censor could not deprive Samuel
-Butler of his effectiveness. He has spoken out, regardless
-of edification, and that sort of work cannot
-be undone.
-
-A similar work is performed by such highly personal
-confessants as Marie Bashkirtseff and W. N.
-P. Barbellion, and even by Mary MacLane. The
-account that these impulsive human beings give of
-themselves is sensational simply because it clashes
-with the strict preconception that we are taught to
-establish. But only a man who remembers nothing
-or admits nothing of his own impulses can deny the
-validity of theirs. The thing that takes away from
-their interest, as one grows older, is the unimportance
-of the censorship that agonizes them. Their
-documentary value being their great value, they lose
-importance as more specific and dramatic documents
-become familiar. And with psycho-analysis there
-has been a huge increase in the evidence of hidden
-life. It is the Montaignes who remain, the confessants
-who offer something besides a psychological
-document—a transcendence which is not incoherent
-with pain.
-
-But these various confessions are significant.
-They indicate the existence and the vitality of the
-censor. They show that in the simplest matters we
-have not yet attained freedom of speech. Why?
-Because, I imagine, the world is chock-full of assumptions
-as to conduct which, while irrational and ritualistic
-and primitive, have all sorts of sanctions
-thrown around them and must take a whole new art
-of education to correct. Until this art it established
-and these assumptions are automatically rectified, it
-will be impossible to exercise free speech comfortably.
-An attempt may be made, of course, and indeed
-must be made, but to succeed too well will for
-many years mean either being exterminated or being
-ostracized.
-
-It is not hard to show how each of us in turn becomes
-an agent of the invisible censorship. You,
-for instance, may have a perfectly free mind on the
-subject of suffrage, but you may have extremely
-strong views on the subject of sex. (Miss Alice
-Stone Blackwell, to be specific, thinks that Fielding
-is nothing but a “smutty” author.) Or you may
-think yourself quite emancipated on the subject of
-sex-desires and be hopelessly intolerant on the subject
-of the Bolsheviki. The French Rights of Man
-held out, after all, for the sacred rights of property—and
-the day before that, it was considered pretty
-advanced to believe in the divine right of kings. It
-is not humanly possible, considering how relative
-liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even convince
-oneself of the necessity of examining them,
-and in every case we are sure to be tempted to oppose
-certain novel ideas in the name of inertia, respectability
-and decorum. To dissemble awkward
-facts, in such cases, is much easier than to account
-for them—which is where the censor comes in.
-
-I do not say that it is possible to do away with
-every discipline, even the rule-of-thumb of decorum.
-As a subservient middle-class citizen, I believe in
-the regulation of impulse. But as an intellectual
-fact, the use of the blue pencil in the interests of
-decorum is exceedingly inept. Human impulses are
-much too lively to be extinguished by the denial of
-expression. And if sane expression is denied to
-them, they’ll find expression of another kind.
-
-Decorum has its uses, especially on the plane of
-social intercourse. I admit this all the more
-eagerly because I have seen much of one brilliant
-human being who has practically no sense of opposition.
-If he sees something that he wants, he helps
-himself. It may be the milk on the lunch-table that
-was intended for Uncle George. It may be the new
-volume from England that it took nine weeks to
-bring across. It may be the company of some sensitive
-gentlewoman or the busy hour of the mayor of
-Chicago. The object makes no visible difference to
-my friend. If he wants it, he sticks out his hand
-and takes it. And if it comes loose, he holds on.
-
-Associated with this aggressiveness there is a good
-deal of purpose not self-regarding. The man is by
-no means all greedy maw. But the thing that distinguishes
-him is the quickness and frankness with
-which he obeys his impulse. Between having an impulse and acting on it there lies for him a miraculously
-short time.
-
-In dealing with such a man, most people begin
-hilariously. Not all of them keep up with him in
-the same heroic spirit. At first it is extraordinarily
-stimulating to find a person who is so “creative,”
-who sweeps so freely ahead. Soon the dull obligations,
-the tedious details, begin to accumulate, and
-the man with the happy impulsiveness leaves all these
-dull obligations to his struggling friends. His lack
-of decorum in these respects is a source of hardship
-and misunderstanding, especially where persons of
-less energy or more circumspection are attendant.
-In his case, I admit, I see the raw problem of impulse,
-and I am glad to see his impulse squelched.
-
-But even this barbarian is preferable to the
-apathetic repressed human beings by whom he is
-surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is
-invaluable because “creative.” And he should
-never be blocked in: he should at most be canalled.
-
-The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illustrated
-in his rational subordination of impulse, but
-in those subordinations that violate human and social
-freedom. And the worst of them are the filmy, the
-vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the
-opportunity of truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently
-difficult picture-puzzle, but what chance have we if
-the turnip-headed censor confiscates some particularly
-indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike?
-On reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to
-escape from those wax effigies that we once believed
-to be statesmen—the kind of effigies of which
-text-books and correct histories and correct biographies
-are full! How we rejoice to escape from
-them, wondering that they had ever imposed on us,
-wondering that teachers and pious families and loyal
-historians ever lent themselves to this conspiracy
-against truth! But the horrible fact is, Mr.
-Strachey is one in a million. He has only poked his
-finger through the great spider-web of so-called
-“vital lies.”
-
-Meanwhile, in the decorous and respectable biographies,
-the same old “vital lies” are being told.
-The insiders, the initiated, the disillusioned, are
-aware of them. They no longer subsist on them.
-They read between the lines. And yet when the
-insiders see in print the true facts—say, about Robert
-Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or
-John Jones—these very insiders rush forward with
-a Mother Hubbard to fling around the naked truth.
-We must not speak the truth. We must edify. We
-must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced
-world.
-
-It means that we need a revolution in education,
-nothing less. It means that the truth must be taken
-out of the hands of the censor. We must be prepared
-to shed oceans of ink.
-
-WHISKY
-======
-
-It was a wet, gusty night and I had a lonely walk
-home. By taking the river road, though I hated it,
-I saved two miles, so I sloshed ahead trying not to
-think at all. Through the barbed wire fence I
-could see the racing river. Its black swollen body
-writhed along with extraordinary swiftness, breathlessly
-silent, only occasionally making a swishing
-ripple. I did not enjoy looking at it. I was somehow
-afraid.
-
-And there, at the end of the river road where I
-swerved off, a figure stood waiting for me, motionless
-and enigmatic. I had to meet it or turn back.
-
-It was a quite young girl, unknown to me, with
-a hood over her head, and with large unhappy eyes.
-
-“My father is very ill,” she said without a word
-of introduction. “The nurse is frightened. Could
-you come in and help?”
-
-There was a gaunt house set back from the road,
-on a little slope. I could see a wan light upstairs.
-
-“The nurse is not scared,” the girl corrected,
-“but she is nervous. I wish you could come.”
-
-“Of course,” and on my very word she turned
-and led the way in.
-
-The hall was empty. It had nothing in it except a
-discouraged oil lamp on a dirty kitchen table. The
-shadowy stairs were bare. On my left on the
-ground floor a woman with gray hair and rusty face
-and red-rimmed eyes shuffled back into the shadows
-at my entry, a sort of ignoble Niobe.
-
-“That’s my mother,” the grave child explained.
-And to the retreating slatternly figure the child
-called, “This man has come to help, Mother,” as if
-men dropped from the sky.
-
-She went up into the shadows and I followed.
-A flight of stairs, a long creaking landing. Another
-flight of stairs. Stumbles. Another landing.
-A stale aroma of cat. And a general sense that,
-although the staircase was well made and the landings
-wide, there was not one stick of furniture in
-the house.
-
-As we approached the top floor we met fresher
-air and the pallid emanation of a night-light. A
-figure stood waiting at the head of the stairs.
-
-This was a stout little nun, her face framed in
-creaking linen, and a great rustle of robes and rosary
-beads whenever she moved. She began a sharp
-whisper the minute we climbed to the landing.
-
-“He’s awake. He’s out of his head. I’m glad
-you’ve come. Now, child, be off to bed with you,
-like a good girl. This way, if you please.”
-
-The child’s vast eyes accepted me. “I’ll go to
-Mother,” she said, and she receded downstairs.
-The nun entered an open door to the right, and
-again I meekly followed.
-
-It was a room out of the fables. There was a
-tall fireplace facing the door, with a slat of packing-case
-burning in it as well as the wind would permit,
-and a solitary candle glimmering in a bottle, set on
-the table at the head of the bed. Its uncertain
-light fell on the tousled hair of a once kempt human
-being, now evidently a semi-maniac staring at presences in the room. Down the chimney the wind
-came bluffing at intervals, and the one high window
-querulously rattled. The center of the room was
-the sick man’s burning eyes.
-
-I walked through his view and he did not see
-me. The nun and myself stood watching him from
-the head of the bed.
-
-“Oh, he’s awful bad, you have no idea how bad
-he is; I’m afraid for him; I am indeed. What am
-I to call you, Mister? Here, take this chair.”
-
-Before I answered her she continued, in a whisper
-that slid along from one *s* to the next. “They
-said the doctor would be here at seven and it’s
-nearly twelve as it is. He’s not coming. I wish
-he was here.”
-
-The sick man seemed to see us. “That’s right
-now,” he said, whistling his breath. “Bring me
-my clothes, I want to go home.”
-
-The nun laid her arm on him. “Lean back now,
-dear, and it’ll be all right, I’m telling you.” And
-she gently but ineffectually tried to press him down.
-
-The sick man turned his face on her, into the
-candlelight. He was long unshaved, but the two
-things that struck me most, after the crop of gray
-bristle, were the dry cavern of his mouth and the
-scalding intensity of his eyes. I was terrified lest
-those eyes should alight on me, and yet I gazed
-hard at him. His lips were flaked with yellow
-scales, and dry mucus was in strings at the corners
-of his mouth. His night-shirt gaped open, showing
-a very hairy black chest. He seemed a shrunken
-man, not a very tall man, but his shoulders were
-broad and his chin very square. To support his
-chin seemed the great effort of his jaws. It fell
-open on him, giving him a vacant foolish expression,
-with his teeth so black and irregular, and he tried
-his best to clamp his teeth tight. The working
-of his jaws, however, scarcely interfered with his
-whistling breath or his gasping words.
-
-“They will be at the back door, I say. God!”
-a feeble scream and whimper. “Bring me my
-clothes. You’re hiding them on me. Oh, why are
-you hiding them on me? Can’t you give me my
-clothes?”
-
-“You’re home now, dear. You’re home now,”
-the nurse assured him. “Isn’t that your own clock
-on the mantel? Lie down now and I’ll make you
-a comfortable drink and put you to sleep.”
-
-“Boy, fetch me my coat.”
-
-“Don’t mind him,” the nun turned to me, “but
-do you cover his feet.”
-
-His feet had lost the gray blanket. They stared
-blankly up from the end of the bed. I covered
-them snugly, glad to have something to do.
-
-“It’s all the whisky in him,” the nun whispered
-when at last he went limp and lay down. “It’s got
-to his brain. I thought he was over the pneumonia,
-but that whisky has him saturated. The poor
-thing! The poor thing!”
-
-“Well, I must be going now,” the sick man ejaculated,
-and with one twist of his body he was out of
-bed.
-
-“Oh, keep yourself covered, for the love of
-God!” The poor nun ran after him with the
-blanket as his old flannel night shirt fluttered up
-his legs.
-
-He staggered up to me fiercely, and his eyes
-razed my face.
-
-“Fiddle your grandmother,” he muttered, “I’m
-off home, I tell you.”
-
-“You can’t leave the room; it’s better for you to
-go back to bed,” and I held him round with my arms.
-
-“See here, you,” his yellow cheeks reddened with
-his passionate effort, “you can’t hold me a prisoner
-any longer. Oh, Barrett, Barrett, what are you doing
-to me to destroy me?”
-
-I knew no Barrett, but the poor creature was
-shivering with anguish and cold. I put my arms
-around him and tried to move him out of the
-draught of the door. His thin arms closed on me
-at the first hint of force, and he clenched with feverish
-vigor. I could feel his frail bones against me,
-his bare ribs, his wild thumping heart.
-
-“You can’t, you can’t. You can’t keep me
-prisoner....”
-
-He struggled, his heart thumping me. Then in
-one instant he went slack.
-
-We lifted him to the bed, and I felt under his
-shirt for the flutter of his heart. His mouth had
-dropped open, his eyes were like a dead bird’s.
-
-The little nun began, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,”
-and other holy words, while I groped helplessly
-over this fragile burned-out frame. Then I remembered
-and I stumbled wild-minded to find that woman
-downstairs.
-
-I went headlong through the darkness. At my
-knock the door opened, as if by an unseen hand,
-and I saw, completely dressed, the pale little girl,
-with her grave eyes.
-
-“Your mother?” I asked.
-
-The child stopped me sharply, “Is Father
-worse?”
-
-“He’s worse,” I answered feebly. “You’d
-better—”
-
-The child was brushed aside by her mother, who
-had stumbled forward from inside. She looked at
-me vaguely.
-
-The girl turned on her mother. “I’m going up
-to Father. Go inside.”
-
-The woman’s will flickered and then expired.
-She pulled the door back upon herself, shutting us
-into the hall. The child led and I followed back
-upstairs.
-
-BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN
-======================
-
-I
--
-
-Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia
-I had formed a conception of him from the newspapers.
-First of all, he was a baseball player become
-revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting,
-screaming vulgarian, a mob orator who lashed himself
-and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap religious
-fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were
-fables in slang. I thought of him as vividly, torrentially
-abusive, and I thought of his revival as an
-orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming
-in full view to the public mourners’ bench.
-With the penitents I associated the broken humanity
-of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her
-knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding
-over a meeting that was tossed like trees in
-a storm.
-
-However this preconception was formed, it at
-least had the merit of consistency. It was, that is
-to say, consistently inaccurate in every particular.
-
-Consider, in the first place, the orderliness of his
-specially constructed Tabernacle. Built like a giant
-greenhouse in a single story, it covers an immense
-area and seats fifteen thousand human beings.
-Lighted at night by electricity as if by sunshine, the
-floor is a vast garden of human faces, all turned
-to the small platform on which the sloping tiers
-from behind converge. Around this auditorium,
-with its forest of light wooden pillars and braces,
-runs a glass-inclosed alley, and standing outside in
-the alley throng the spectators for whom there are
-no seats. Except for the quiet ushers, the silent
-sawdust aisles are kept free. Through police-guarded
-doors a thin trickle fills up the last available
-seats, and this business is dispatched with little
-commotion. Fully as many people wait to hear
-this single diminutive speaker as attend a national
-political convention. In many ways the crowd suggests
-a national convention; but both men and women
-are hatless, and their attentiveness is exemplary.
-
-It is, if the phrase is permitted, conspicuously
-a middle-class crowd. It is the crowd that wears
-Cluett-Peabody collars, that reads the Ladies’ Home
-Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. It is the
-crowd for whom the nickel was especially coined,
-the nickel that pays carfare, that fits in a telephone
-slot, that buys a cup of coffee or a piece of pie,
-that purchases a shoeshine, that pays for a soda,
-that gets a stick of Hershey’s chocolate, that made
-Woolworth a millionaire, that is spent for chewing-gum
-or for a glass of beer. In that crowd are men
-and women from every sect and every political party,
-ranging in color from the pink of the factory superintendent’s
-bald head to the ebony of the discreetly
-dressed negro laundress. A small proportion of
-professional men and a small proportion of ragged
-labor is to be discerned, but the general tone is
-simple, common-sense, practical, domestic America.
-Numbers of young girls who might equally well be
-at the movies are to be seen, raw-boned boys not
-long from the country, angular home-keeping virgins
-of the sort that belong to sewing circles, neat young
-men who suggest the Y. M. C. A., iron-gray mothers
-who recall the numbered side-streets in Harlem or
-Brooklyn or Chicago West Side and who bring to
-mind asthma and the price of eggs, self-conscious
-young clerks who are half curious and partly starved
-for emotion, men over forty with prominent Adam’s
-apple and the thin, strained look of lives fairly care-worn
-and dutiful, citizens of the kind that with all
-their heterogeneousness give to a jury its oddly
-characteristic effect, fattish men who might be small
-shopkeepers with a single employee, the single employee
-himself, the pretty girl who thinks the Rev.
-Mr. Rhodeheaver so handsome, the prosaic girl
-whose chief perception is that Mr. Sunday is so
-hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won’t
-be swayed, the sedentary “providers” who cannot
-open their ears without dropping their jaws. A
-collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one may
-crudely say “average” mortals, some of them
-destined to catch religion, more of them destined
-to catch an impression, and a few of them, sitting
-near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a
-cold.
-
-Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr.
-Sunday’s small platform is a bower of lovely
-bouquets, and the first business is the acknowledgment
-of these offerings. As a means of predisposing
-the audience in Mr. Sunday’s favor nothing
-could be more genial. In the body of the hall are
-seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute
-is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver’s powerful,
-commonplace voice invites them to recognition:
-“Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company here?”
-All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren.
-“Fine, fine. We’re glad to see yeh here. We’re
-glad to welcome yeh. And what hymn would *you*
-like to have?” In loud concert the Pittsburgh
-Plate Glass Co. delegation shout: “Number forty-nine!”
-Mr. Rhodeheaver humorously parodies the
-shout: “Number forty-nine! It’s a good ’un too.
-Thank yeh, we’re glad to have yeh here.” Not only
-immense bouquets, but gold pieces, boxes of handkerchiefs,
-long mirrors, all sorts of presents, mainly
-from big corporations or their employees, are on
-the tight platform. One present came from a mill,
-a box of towels, and with it not only a warm, manly
-letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept “the product
-of our industry,” but a little poetic tribute, expressing
-the hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr.
-Sunday might have a good bath and take comfort
-in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and
-liked it, and gazed amiably at the towels.
-
-The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thousand
-people had really joined in them the effect
-would have been stupendous. As it was, they were
-thrilling, but not completely. The audience was
-not half abandoned enough.
-
-Then, after a collection had been taken up for a
-local charity, Mr. Sunday began with a prayer. A
-compact figure in an ordinary black business suit,
-it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice
-that, for all his athleticism, he was tired to the
-bone. He is fifty-three years old and for nine
-weeks he had been delivering about fifteen extremely
-intense sermons a week. His opening was almost
-adramatic. It had the conservatism of fatigue,
-and it was only his evident self-possession that canceled
-the fear he would fizzle.
-
-The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me
-at first were Elbert Hubbard and George M. Cohan.
-In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism
-of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in
-his physical attitude there was nothing of that
-greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and
-swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman
-of his particular line of wares.
-
-Accompanying one of the presents there had been
-a letter referring to Billy Sunday’s great work, “the
-moral uplift so essential to the business and commercial
-supremacy of this city and this country.”
-As he developed his homely moral sermon for his
-attentive middle-class congregation, this gave the
-clew to his appeal. It did not seem to me that he
-had one touch of divine poetry. He humored and
-argued and smote for Christ as a commodity that
-would satisfy an enormous acknowledged gap in his
-auditors’ lives. He was “putting over” Christ.
-In awakening all the early memories of maternal admonition
-and counsel, the consciousness of unfulfilled
-desires, of neglected ideals, the ache for sympathy
-and understanding, he seemed like an insurance
-agent making a text of “over the hill to the
-poorhouse.” He had at his finger tips all the selling
-points of Christ. He gave to sin and salvation
-a practical connotation. But while his words and
-actions apparently fascinated his audience, while
-they laughed eagerly when he scored, and clapped
-him warmly very often, to me he appealed no more
-than an ingenious electric advertisement, a bottle
-picked out against the darkness pouring out a foaming
-glass of beer.
-
-And yet his heart seemed to be in it, as a salesman’s
-heart has to be in it. Speaking the language
-of business enterprise, the language with which the
-great majority were familiar, using his physical
-antics merely as a device for clinching the story
-home, he gave to religion a great human pertinence,
-and he made the affirmation of faith seem creditable
-and easy. And he defined his own object so that
-a child could understand. He was a recruiting
-officer, not a drill sergeant. He spoke for faith
-in Christ; he left the rest to the clergy. And to the
-clergy he said: “If you are too lazy to take care
-of the baby after it is born, don’t blame the doctor.”
-
-It was in his platform manners that Sunday recalled
-George M. Cohan. When you hear that he
-goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations of
-baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is
-not wild. Needing to arrest the attention of an
-incredibly large number of people, he adopts various
-evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It
-is a physical language with which the vast majority
-have friendly heroic associations, and for them,
-spoken so featly and gracefully, it works. Grasping
-the edge of the platform table as if about to
-spring like a tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives
-to his words a drive that makes you tense in your
-seat. Whipping like a flash from one side of the
-table to the other, he makes your mind keep unison
-with his body. He keys you to the pitch that the
-star baseball player keys you, and although you
-stiffen when he flings out the name of Christ as if
-he were sending a spitball right into your teeth, you
-realize it is only an odd, apt, popular conventionalization
-of the ordinary rhetorical gesture. Call it
-his bag of tricks, deem it incongruous and stagey,
-but if Our Lady’s Juggler is romantic in grand opera,
-he is not a whit more romantic than this athlete who
-has adapted beautiful movements to an emphasis of
-convictions to which the audience nods assent.
-
-The dissuading devil was conjured by Sunday in
-his peroration, and then he ended by thanking God
-for sending him his great opportunity, his vast audience,
-his bouquets and his towels. When he finished,
-several hundred persons trailed forward to
-shake hands and confess their faith—bringing the
-total of “penitents” up to 35,135.
-
-Bending with a smile to these men and women
-who intend to live in the faith of Christ, Billy
-Sunday gives a last impression of kindliness, sincerity,
-tired zeal. And various factory superintendents
-and employers mingle benignly around,
-glad of a religion that puts on an aching social
-system such a hot mustard plaster.
-
-II
---
-
-Oyster soup is a standard item in the money-making
-church supper. The orphan oyster searching
-vainly for a playmate in an ocean of church
-soup is a favorite object of Billy Sunday’s pity. He
-loves to caricature the struggling church, with its
-time-serving, societyfied, tea-drinking, smirking
-preachers. “The more oyster soup it takes to run
-a church,” he shouts sarcastically, “the faster it
-runs to the devil.”
-
-An attitude so scornful as this may seem highly
-unconventional to the outsider. It leads him to
-think that Billy Sunday is a radical. The agility
-with which the Rev. Billy climbs to the top of his
-pulpit and then pops to the platform on all fours
-suggests a corresponding mental agility. He must
-be a dangerous element in the church, the outsider
-imagines; he must be a religious revolutionary.
-And then the outsider beholds John Wanamaker or
-John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the platform alongside
-the revivalist—pillars of society, prosperous
-and respectable gentlemen who instinctively know
-their business.
-
-Fond as his friends are of comparing Billy Sunday
-to Martin Luther or John the Baptist, none
-of them pushes the comparison on the lines of radicalism,
-and Sunday himself waives the claim to being
-considered revolutionary. “I drive the same kind
-of nails all orthodox preachers do,” he says in one of
-his sermons. “The only difference is that they use
-a tack hammer and I use a sledge.” No one supposes
-that Martin Luther could have said this.
-Sledge-hammer orthodoxy was not exactly the distinguishing
-characteristic of Martin Luther. The
-conservatism of Billy Sunday’s message is the first
-fact about him. Where he differs from the orthodox
-preacher is not in his soul but in his resolution.
-He has the mind of Martin Tupper rather than of
-Martin Luther, but it is combined with that competent
-American aggressiveness which one finds in a
-large way in George M. Cohan, Theodore Roosevelt,
-even Ty Cobb. Theology does not interest
-Billy Sunday. He compares it to ping-pong and
-compares himself to a jack-rabbit and says he knows
-as little about theology as a jack-rabbit knows about
-ping-pong. What he cares about is religious revival.
-He knows the church is in bitter need of revival.
-He is out to administer digitalis, in his own
-phrase, instead of oyster soup.
-
-For many years the church has been waning, and
-Billy Sunday scorns the effeminate, lily-handed efforts
-at resuscitation that the churchmen have employed.
-To put pepperino into a religious campaign,
-to make Christianity hum, requires more
-than cushioned pews, extra music, coffee and
-macaroons. Had Billy Sunday been in the regular
-theatrical business he would not have fussed with
-a little independent theatre. He would have conducted
-a Hippodrome. To rival the profane
-world’s attractions he sees no reason for rejecting
-the profane world’s methods. So tremendous an
-object as curing an institution’s pernicious anæmia
-justifies the most violent, outrageous experiment.
-
-If Jesus Christ were a new automobile or an encyclopædia
-or a biscuit, Billy Sunday would have
-varied the method he has employed in putting Him
-over, but he would not have varied the spirit of
-his revival-enterprise in any essential particular.
-His object, as he sees it, is to sell Christ. It is an
-old story that from its economic organization society
-takes its complexion. The Sunday revival
-takes its complexion from business enterprise without
-a single serious change. There is one great
-argument running all through Billy Sunday’s sermons—the
-argument that salvation will prove a
-profitable investment—but much more clearly derived
-from business than the ethics preached by
-Billy Sunday is the method he has devised for promoting Jesus Christ. Even the quarrel between
-“Ma” Sunday and the man who has lost the post-card
-concession is an illustration of the far-reaching
-efficiency of the system. The point is not that
-money is being made out of the system. “An effort
-to corrupt Billy Sunday,” to use a paraphrase,
-“would be a work of supererogation, besides being
-immoral.” If Billy Sunday has a large income,
-$75,000 or $100,000 a year, it is not because he
-is mercenary. It is only because a large income is
-part of the natural fruits of his promoting ability.
-Left to himself, it is quite unlikely that Billy Sunday
-would care a straw about his income, beyond enough
-to live well and to satisfy his vanity about clothes.
-It is Mrs. Sunday who sees to it that her promoter-husband
-is not left penniless by those Christian
-business men who so delightedly utilize his services.
-
-The backbone of Billy Sunday’s success is organization.
-When organization has delivered the
-crowd, Billy is ready to sweat for it and spit for it
-and war-whoop for it and dive for base before the
-devil can reach him. He is ready to have “Rody”
-come on the programme with his slide-trombone and
-to have any volunteer who wishes to do it hit the
-sawdust-trail. But he does not let his success depend
-on any programme. His audiences are, in
-great measure, contracted for in advance. It is in
-grasping the necessity for this kind of preparedness,
-in taking from the business world its lessons
-as to canvassing and advertising and standardizing
-the goods, that Billy can afford to jeer at oyster
-soup. As his authorized biographer complacently
-says, “John the Baptist was only a voice: but Billy
-Sunday is a voice, plus a bewildering array of committees and assistants and organized machinery. He
-has committees galore to coöperate in his work: a
-drilled Army of the Lord. In the list of Scranton
-workers that is before me I see tabulated an executive
-committee, the directors, a prayer-meeting committee,
-an entertainment committee, an usher committee,
-a dinner committee, a business women’s
-committee, a building committee, a nursery committee,
-a personal worker’s committee, a decorating
-committee, a shop-meetings committee—and then
-a whole list of churches and religious organizations
-in the city as ex officio workers!” In New York
-on April 9th there was a private meeting of 7,000
-personal workers, “another step in the direction of
-greasing the campaign.”
-
-Unless Billy Sunday had some skill as a performer
-he naturally could not hold his place as a
-revivalist. His success consists largely, however,
-in the legendary character that has been given him
-by all the agencies that seek to promote this desperate
-revival of orthodox religion. His acrobatic
-stunts on the platform are sufficiently shocking to
-make good publicity. His much-advertised slang,
-repeated over and over, has a similar sensational
-value. But the main point about him is the dramatization
-of his own personality. His virility is perhaps
-his chief stock-in-trade. No one, not Mr.
-Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much on his personal
-militant masculinity. Although well over
-fifty, his youthful prowess as a baseball-player is
-still a headline-item in his story, and every sermon
-he preaches gives him a chance to prove he is
-physically fit. In addition to this heroic characteristic
-there is his fame as a self-made man. He is
-a plain man of the people, as he never fails to
-insist. He carries “the malodors of the barnyard”
-with him. But he has succeeded. The cost of his
-special tabernacle is one of his big distinctions.
-The size of his collections is another. His personal
-fortune, in spite of all criticism, is a third. Besides
-these heroic attributes of strength and wealth there
-is his melodramatic simplicity of mind. All of his
-sermons are “canned” and a great deal of the
-material in them is borrowed, but he manages to
-deliver his message straight from the shoulder, as
-if it were his own. There can be no doubt that his
-shouting, his slang, his familiarity with Jesus, his
-buttonholing old God, his slang-version of the Bible,
-do offend large numbers of people. They arrest
-attention so successfully, even in these cases, that
-they turn out to be well advised. There is nothing
-spontaneous about these antics. They are switched
-on at the beginning of a revival and switched off as
-it succeeds. They are Sunday’s native way of lighting
-up the strait and narrow path with wriggling
-electric signs.
-
-Billy Sunday has too much energy to stick completely
-fast in the mud of conservatism. He is
-capable of advocating sex instruction for the young,
-for example, and he permits himself the wild radicalism
-of woman suffrage. But as regards vested
-interests and patriotism and war he is a conservative,
-practically a troglodyte. What he attacks
-with fervor are the delinquents in ordinary conduct,
-especially the people who lack self-control.
-“Booze-hoisters” and card-players and tango-dancers
-and cigarette-smokers are his pet abominations—genuine
-abominations. Profanity, strange
-to say, is another evil that he fights with fire.
-Honesty, sobriety, chastity—these are virtues that
-he exalts, illustrating the horror of failing in them
-by means of innumerable chromatic anecdotes.
-The devil he constantly attacks, though never with
-real solemnity. “The devil has been practicing for
-six thousand years and he has never had appendicitis,
-rheumatism or tonsillitis. If you get to playing tag
-with the devil he will beat you every chip.” It is
-more for spice and snap that he introduces the devil
-than to terrify his public. The Bible is his serious
-theme, and he feels about it almost the way Martin
-Tupper did:
-
- | The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion volume,
- | The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our Rights ...
- | It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare
- | A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible!
- | —The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark,
- | And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning,
- | And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions,
- | In spite of learned unbelief,—we hold it all plain truth:
- | Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study;
- | Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and Colenso ...
- | The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian nation ...
- | The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square,
- | The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws ...
- | Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salvation.
-
-One of Billy Sunday’s boasts is that the liquor
-interests hate him. “That dirty, stinking bunch of
-moral assassins hires men to sit in the audience to
-hear me, to write down what I say and then try
-to find some author who said something like it, and
-accuse me of having stolen my ideas. I know that
-$30,000 was offered a man in New York City to
-write a series of articles attacking me. All right;
-if you know anything about me that you want to
-publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is
-a dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole
-thing is a frame-up from A to Izzard. I’ll fight
-them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a pair
-of skates. By the grace of God, I’ve helped to
-make Colorado and Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan
-and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice on
-the dirty gang that I’ll help to make the whole
-nation dry.” (New York Times, April 19th,
-1917.)
-
-Assuming these points to be well taken, there is
-still great room to doubt the deep religious effect
-of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like William Allen
-White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf
-in Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many
-hundred human beings for moral stimulus in a time
-of need. In spite of the thousands who have hit the
-sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that
-more than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously
-affected by him. The great majority of
-those who hit the trail are people who merely want
-to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of
-seriousness or “conversion.” The atmosphere of
-the tabernacle, bright with electric light and friendly
-with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and
-in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is
-seldom a contagious note. His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a remarkable
-public entertainer, and much that he says has keen
-humor and verbal art and horse sense. But for all
-his militancy, for all his pugnacious vociferation, he
-leaves an impression of being at once violent and
-incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but
-not a guide or a friend.
-
-Still, as between Billy Sunday’s gymnastics and
-the average oyster soup, Messrs. Wanamaker and
-Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday.
-Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of carpets
-and socks, Socony and Nujol, and if Christ
-could have been put over in the same way, by live-wire
-salesmanship, Billy was the man.
-
-FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
-====================================
-
-I
--
-
-“Though you do not know it, I have a soul.
-Behold, across the way, my library. When the
-night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees
-shake out their greenery against the white stonework,
-do you not catch a suggestion of atmosphere,
-something of a mood? And the black cliffs around,
-with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the
-width of them, are they not monuments? I cleave
-brilliantly, up and down this dormant city. It is
-for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plodding
-milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speeding
-her lover’s motor. Heed my long silences, my
-slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed.
-My buildings come about me to muse and to commune.
-Receive, for once on Fifth Avenue, the soul
-that is imprisoned in my stone and steel.”
-
-It is not for the respectable, this polite communication.
-Theatre and club and restaurant have
-long since disgorged these. New York has masticated
-their money. They have done as they should
-and are restored uptown. Even the old newswoman,
-she who had spent starving months in the
-Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war,
-she has tottered from her stand down by the station.
-The Hungarian waiter in Childs’ is still there, still
-assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat
-cakes, but that is off the avenue. It is three, the
-avenue is nearly empty. It is ready to disclose its
-soul.
-
-But before this subtle performance there is a preliminary.
-It is a very self-respecting avenue and
-at three on a pleasant morning, when no one is
-around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath.
-Perhaps a few motors go by—a taxi rolling north,
-heavy with night thoughts, a tired white face framed
-in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking
-loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its
-suburban chores. The Italian acolytes are impartial.
-They spray the wheels of a touring car with
-gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a powerful
-stream under the hubs of a Nassau News
-wagon trundling to a train. The avenue must be
-refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nodding
-approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must
-be prepared for the sun, under bold lamps and
-timid stars.
-
-A fine young morning, the watchman promises.
-A bit of wind whiffles the water that is shot out from
-the white-wing’s hose, but it is clearing up above
-and looks well for the day. The hour beckons
-memories for the watchman—fine young mornings
-he used to have long ago, in Ireland, a boy on his
-first adventure and he driving with the barley to
-Ross.
-
-It is an empty street. The hose is wheeled away
-over the glistening asphalt. The watchman disappears—he
-has a cozy nook beyond the ken of
-time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pillow,
-to hide a diminished head. With man accounted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to
-the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion,
-the buildings have their moment. Each tower
-stretches his proud height to the morning. The
-stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed.
-
-II
---
-
-Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it cannot
-hold the virgin morning forever. Its windows
-may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind the
-walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life.
-
-“Give us this day our daily bread.” A saintly
-venerable horse seems to know the injunction.
-Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it
-usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord.
-
-And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the
-prayer about clams, but some one in Mount Vernon
-is destined to have them quickly. Out of the mysterious
-south, racing against time, a little motor flits
-onward with gaping barrels of clams. At a decent
-interval comes a heavier load of fish. Great express
-wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest
-uses of Fifth Avenue begin.
-
-Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies.
-The grocer and the greengrocer are early on their
-rounds. But an empty American News truck confesses
-that eternal vigilance is the price of circulation.
-Its gait is swifter than the gait of milkman
-or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and dew are on
-the florist’s wheels: he has come whistling by the
-swamps of Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs
-lightly past the juggernauts that crush down.
-
-Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His
-trucks hurl from Grand Central to make the substations.
-But his is not the pride of place. Nor
-is it coal or farmers’ feed that appropriates the
-middle of the street. The noblest wagons, a long
-parade of them, announce the greater glory of beer.
-The temperance advocate may shudder at the desecration
-of the morning. He may observe “Hell
-Gate Brewery” and nod his sickly nod. But there
-is something about this large preparedness for thirst
-that stills the carping worm of conscience. It is
-good to see what solid, ample caravans are required
-to replenish man with beer. It is not the
-single glass that is glorious. It is not even the
-single car-load. It is the steady, deliberate, ponderous
-procession that streams through the early hours.
-Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy
-of beer-wagons. It satisfied the faith that there
-was Design in creation, but the Percheron is not
-needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness
-about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer.
-
-III
----
-
-“Number, please?” She is anonymous, that
-inquirer. But behind her anonymity there is humanity.
-Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street
-caught a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M.
-
-She was up at five in the morning. She had a
-pang as she put on her check suit, slightly darker
-than her check coat lined with pink. Her little hat,
-however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked
-breakfast while she set the table. Then she walked
-to the Third Avenue “L” with her friend. They
-got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to
-Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked
-along Forty-second Street in time for them to do a
-brief window-shopping as they passed the shirtwaists
-at Forsythe’s. Her friend’s bronze shoes she
-envied as they crossed the little park back of the
-Library. On Sixth Avenue they inspected the window
-at Bernstein’s. A slight argument engrossed
-them. They hovered over the window, chirping not
-unlike the sparrows in Bryant Park. Then, in a
-flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone
-company to begin their “Number, please.”
-
-An hour earlier laborers with dinner-pails had
-crossed Fifth Avenue, and hatless Polish girls on
-their way to scrub. By seven o’clock the negro
-porters and laborers were giving way to white-collar
-strap-hangers on the elevateds and in the subway.
-It was getting to be the hour of salesmen and salesgirls
-and office-boys and shop-subordinates and
-clerks. The girls back of the scenes at the milliner’s,
-they go up Fifth Avenue at seven, to take
-one side-street or another. The girl who sells you
-a toothbrush in the drug-store hurries by the shop
-windows, herself as neat as a model. Is it early?
-Myriads of men are pouring down already. Besides,
-“’S use of kickin’? If you don’t like it, you
-can walk out!”
-
-The night-watchman is going home, and an old attendant
-from the Grand Central. “Tired, Pop?”
-“Yeh, p’tty tired.” “What right’ve you to git
-tired workin’ for a big corporation?” The oppressed
-wage-slave bellows, “Ha, ha.”
-
-IV
---
-
-Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in
-the afternoon. The diastole of travelers had
-spread all morning from Grand Central; the systole
-is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in
-the afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the
-suburbs, tearing their way through the weaker
-streams that are drawn up by the neighboring shops
-and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and
-Sherry’s and Delmonico’s and the Manhattan and
-the Belmont are no longer columnar monuments,
-holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human
-floods which they suck in and spray out. The
-street itself is lost to memory and vision. A swollen
-stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are
-permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless
-bosom the freight of curiosity and pride and
-favor. One might fancy, to gaze on this mad
-throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered
-the universe, worshipers of a machine.
-
-It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles,
-the feminine hour. A little later there will be
-more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from
-work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to
-believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality,
-parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous,
-composed of many styles and many types.
-The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second
-Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification
-distinguishes those who turn up and down the
-Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them,
-or money, but their sense that there is romance in
-the appearance of money and leisure. Many of the
-white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are
-not white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth
-Avenue. One may pretend the world is gay.
-
-They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds
-on Fifth Avenue. They move as by personal will.
-But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common
-attractions govern them. There is a rhythm
-in these human tides.
-
-V
--
-
-For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects.
-He stayed with his friend the spider the
-round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider,
-is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the
-scene-shifter and the detective. Some day we should
-pitch a metropolitan observatory at the corner of
-Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,—some day,
-if we can find the time.
-
-AS AN ALIEN FEELS
-=================
-
-Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that
-the United States existed. My first dream of it
-came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay
-flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green.
-It was a Wild West Show, and for years I associated
-America with the intoxication of the circus
-and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges.
-“Two a penny, two a penny, large penny oranges!
-Buy away an’ ate away, large penny oranges!”
-They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor
-of them and the fumes of circus excitement gave me
-a first gay ribald sense of the United States.
-
-The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag
-uncle. He had sought his fortune in America—sought
-it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a
-horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd
-and delicious oaths. “Gosh hell hang it” was his
-chief touch of American culture. He was a
-“Yank” in local parlance, a frequently drunken
-Yank. His fine drooping mustache too often
-drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I
-steadied him home under the October stars and absorbed
-a long alcoholic reverie on the Horseshoe
-Falls. As we slept together that night in the rat-pattering
-loft, and as he absently appropriated all
-the horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver
-over the wonderments of the Horseshoe Falls.
-
-This, with an instilled idea that America and
-America alone could offer “work,” foreshadowed
-the American landscape. It is the bald hope of
-work that finally magnetizes us hither. But every
-dream and every loyalty was with the unhappy land
-from which I came.
-
-For many months the music of New York harbor
-spoke only of home. Every outgoing steamer that
-opened its throat made me homesick. America was
-New York, and New York was down town, and
-down town was a vortex of new duties. There I
-learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning
-a living, and the art of eating at Childs’. At night
-the hall-bedroom near Broadway, and the resourceless
-promenade up and down Broadway for amusement.
-The only women to say “dear,” the women
-who say it on the street.
-
-In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United
-States. The word “settlement” gave me my first
-puzzled intimation that there was somewhere a clew
-to this grim struggle down town. I had looked
-for it in boarding-houses. I had looked for it in
-stenographic night-schools. I had sought it in the
-blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long
-jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among
-the street-walkers, the first to proffer intimacy.
-And of course, not being clever enough, I had overlooked
-it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at
-home.
-
-America dawned for me in a social settlement.
-It dawned for me as a civilization and a faith. In
-all my first experiences of my employers I got not
-one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was
-the language of smartness, alertness, brightness, success,
-efficiency, and I tried to learn it, but it was a
-difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were lawyers,
-but they were interested in penmanship and
-ability to clean ink-bottles. Some of them were
-business men, but they were interested in ability to
-typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not
-their fault. Ours was not an affair of the heart.
-But if it had not been for the social settlement, I
-should still be an alien to the bone.
-
-Till I knew a social settlement the American flag
-was still a flag on a circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap.
-The cheapness of the United States was the message
-of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville
-and Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper,
-of the promenade on Broadway. In the social settlement
-I came on something entirely different.
-Here on the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of
-something besides success. The house was saturated
-in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet.
-A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make
-it musical. It was thronged with Jews and Greeks
-and Italians and soulful visitors, to make it restful.
-It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it
-easy. But it was the first place in all America
-where there came to me a sense of the intention of
-democracy, the first place where I found a flame
-by which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer
-words about it. The men, I learned, were mollycoddles,
-and the women were sexually unemployed.
-The ruling class spoke of “unsettlement workers”
-with animosity, the socialists of a mealy-mouthed
-compromise. Yet in that strange haven of clear
-humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I
-had been seeking—the knowledge that America had
-a soul.
-
-How one discovers these things it is hard to put
-honestly. It is like trying to recall the first fair
-wind of spring. But I know that slowly and unconsciously
-the atmosphere of the settlement thawed
-out the asperity of alienism. There were Americans
-of many kinds in residence, from Illinois, from
-Michigan, from New York, English-Americans,
-Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans,
-men who had gone to Princeton and
-Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn
-Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the
-Americanism was of a kind that opened to the least
-pressure from without, and never shall I forget the
-way these residents with their “North Side” friends
-had managed so graciously to domesticate the annual
-festival of my own nationality. That, strange
-though it may seem, is the more real sort of Americanization
-Day.
-
-From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing
-alien breathes in American air, but I doubt if I
-should have ever known the meaning of Walt Whitman
-had I not lived in that initiating home. It was
-easy in later years to see new meanings in the American
-flag, to stand with Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,
-but it was in the settlement I found the sources from
-which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement,
-one was not expected to believe that man’s proper
-place is on a Procrustean bed of profiteering. A
-different tradition of America lived there, one in
-which the earlier faiths had come through, in which
-the way to heaven was not necessarily up a skyscraper.
-In New England, later, I found many
-ideas of which the settlement was symptomatic, but
-as I imbibed them they were “America” for me.
-
-What it means to come at last into possession
-of Lincoln, whose spirit is so precious to the social
-settlement, is probably unintelligible to Lincoln’s
-normal inheritors. To understand this, however,
-is to understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries
-from which we come there have been men of
-such humane ideals, but they have almost without
-exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of
-the peoples of Europe have not been the governors
-of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of the
-governed. But here among America’s governors
-and statesmen was a simple authenticator of humane
-ideals. To inherit him becomes for the European
-not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary
-of them in a new. In the microcosm of the settlement
-perhaps Lincolnism is too simple. Many of
-one’s promptest acquiescences are revised as one
-meets and eats with the ruling class later on. But
-the salt of this American soil is Lincoln. When
-one finds that, one is naturalized.
-
-It is curious how the progress of naturalization
-becomes revealed to one. I still recollect with a
-thrill the first time I attended a national political
-convention and listened to the roll-call of the States.
-“Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!” Empty names
-for many years, at last they were filled with one
-clear concept, the concept of the democratic experiment.
-“As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning
-walk”—the living appeal to each state by name
-recalled Whitman’s generous amusing scope. “Far
-breath’d land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez’d!
-The diverse! The compact! The Pennsylvanian!
-The Virginian! The double Carolinian!” The
-orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke
-votes for Taft and Sherman. But even these men
-were parts of the democratic experiment. And the
-vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as
-the empurpled Penrose did not answer. It was they
-who were the leaves of our grass.
-
-In Whitman, as William James has shown, there
-is an arrant mysticism which his own Democratic
-Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this credulity
-as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an
-alien is likely to enter if his first intimacy with America
-came in the aliens’ crêche. A settlement is a
-crêche for the step-children of Europe, and it is
-hard not to credit America at large with some of
-the impulses which make the settlement. Such, at
-any rate, is the tendency I experienced myself.
-
-With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United
-States? I think of Lincoln and his effected mysticism
-by Union, union for the experiment, and I feel
-alive within me a complete identification with this
-land. The keenest realization of the nation reached
-me, as I recall, the first time I saw the capitol in
-Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up the
-hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets
-gleaming after a warm shower. The plaza in front
-of the capitol was deserted. A few high sentinel
-lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and
-scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the
-dome. Standing apart completely by myself, I felt
-as never before the union of which this strength and
-simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the
-night, the scent of April pervading it, gave to the
-lonely building a dignity such as I had seldom felt
-before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and
-achieved determination, for a purpose maintained,
-for a quiet faith in the peoples and states that lay
-away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, I thought,
-had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night
-in April, and felt the same promise of spring.
-
-SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
-=====================
-
-One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the
-pursuit of the secret of life. That secret, however,
-is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible to me, somewhere
-in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten,
-it taunts my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making
-a lunge after it. But tied to the ball there
-seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye
-fixes the secret of life but it escapes my paw.
-
-During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had
-it. It involved a great deal of stern discipline.
-Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston garters
-and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice,
-hot baths followed by rolling in the snow and jiu
-jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu hinted at the very secret
-itself. Here was the crude West seeking to slug its
-way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had
-only to lay hold of life by the little finger to reduce it
-to squealing submission. The sinister power of jiu
-jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn it
-we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme
-of effortless subtlety. A people with such an art,
-combined with ennobling vegetarianism, must necessarily
-be a superior people. I privately believed
-that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the
-Russian fleet.
-
-Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my
-soul and supplanted it with a colossal contempt
-for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already
-protested. No nation could hope to take the field
-that subsisted on heavy foods—such unclean things
-as sausages and beer. The secret of world mastery
-was a diet of rice. “We all eat too much” became
-a fixed conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a
-greater conviction—we all sleep too much as well.
-This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett.
-Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit.
-We sleep ourselves stupid. Who could not afford
-to lose a minute’s sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute
-a day—who would miss it? And in 500 days you
-would have got down to the classical forty winks.
-Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He
-modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its
-successful practicability. To cut down sleep and cut
-down food was the only way to function like a superman.
-
-Once started on this question of habits I spent a
-life of increasing turmoil. From Plato I heard the
-word moderation, but from William Blake I learned
-that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
-From Benjamin Franklin I gathered the
-importance of good habits, but William James gleefully
-told me to avoid all habits, even good ones.
-And then came Scientific Management.
-
-The concept of scientific management practically
-wrecked my life. I discovered that there was a
-right way of doing everything and that I was doing
-everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that
-we were all astray about the simplest things. We
-did not know how to breathe properly. We did
-not know how to sit properly. We did not know
-how to walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was
-making us bald. We wore pointed shoes: it was unfair
-to our little toe. But scientific management did
-not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly
-pointed out that “waste motions” were the chief
-characteristic of our lives.
-
-One of the most fantastic persons in the world is
-the public official who, before he can write a postal
-order or a tax receipt, has to make preliminary curls
-of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific
-eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our
-effective motions could be registered on a visual target,
-our record would be found to resemble that of
-savages who use ammunition without a sight on their
-guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier’s marksmanship
-is wasteful, we may well look to ourselves.
-Our life is peppered with motions that fly wide and
-wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms—waste
-motion! We ought to utilize that gesture
-for polishing our shoes. We rub our eyes—more
-foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday
-for the rest of the week. But it is in processes
-like shaving that scientific management is really
-needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave
-with the minimum of gesture. They believe that
-they complete the operation under five minutes.
-But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that
-under the inspection of the scientific manager their
-performance would look as jagged as their razorblade
-under the microscope? The day will probably
-arrive when a superman will shave with one superb
-motion, as delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of
-an orange-skin in one long unbroken peel.
-
-In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the
-haphazard, unscrutinized conduct of his morn. We
-pick up our paper without any suspicion that we are
-about to commit intellectual felony. We do not
-know that the news editor is in a conspiracy to play
-on our minds. If men gyrate too much physically,
-they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start
-to look over the news. It is not so much that they
-begin the day with devouring the details of a murder
-or lull themselves with some excuse for not reading
-a British note on the blockade. It is the fact
-that they are led by a ring running through their instincts
-to obey the particular editors they read.
-
-Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand
-how the human race has survived. Even
-conceding that I was normal, it is so much the worse
-for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous
-breed. There is not one important layman’s practice
-that we have organized with regard to discipline
-and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying
-bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting
-one’s hat and the circumvolutions in putting links
-in one’s cuffs? How about the impulsive child who
-wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a
-hug? The discovery seemed chilly that everything
-could be scientifically managed, everything could be
-perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at
-the center of one’s life. But a fear of being chilly
-is a mark of inferiority. It ill becomes a human
-machine.
-
-Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours
-a day, with vague longings to eat very little and
-sleep very little and master jiu jitsu and breathe deep
-and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and
-give up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically
-and save waste motions in putting on my
-shirt, I happened to come across two European
-thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling
-Shakespeare’s knowledge of dead languages
-by my own knowledge of live ones, I could not read
-these masters in the original to determine whether
-they blended like oil and vinegar or fought like water
-and oil. But in the eagerness of philosophic
-poverty I grasped just two delightful words from
-them, “instinct” and “repression.” The metaphysician’s
-secret of life, apparently, was to drop
-using one’s so-called intelligence so frantically, to become
-more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena
-and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put
-the Ten Commandments in their place. To tell the
-truth, his detection of “repression” gave me no
-tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the
-evolutionist turned my thoughts away from the early
-worries of discipline. This is the latest ball in the
-air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of
-any tantalizing invisible string.
-
-THE NEXT NEW YORK
-=================
-
-You’d get awfully tired if I told you everything
-about my visit to New York in A. D. 1991. Some
-things are too complicated even to refer to, many
-things I’ve already forgotten, and a number of things
-I didn’t understand. But as I had to return to my
-work as prison doctor in 1919 after a week of 1991
-I grasped a few top impressions that may interest
-you. I hope I can give them to you straight.
-
-The people on the street took my eye the minute
-I arrived in town. They looked so pleasing and
-they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at
-present, with the long indoor working day and the
-mixture of embalmed and storage and badly cooked
-food, the number of pasty-faced and emaciated men
-and women is very high. I exempt the hearty
-sweating classes like the structural iron workers and
-teamsters and porters and even policemen. You
-could recruit a fine-looking club from the building
-trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue
-and size up the condition of the passers-by. You
-see shopgirls in thin cotton who are under-weight,
-under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized.
-You see pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You
-see weary, fish-eyed mothers who look as if every
-day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged
-people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic.
-A little earlier in the afternoon it’s almost impossible
-to share the sidewalk with the squat factory hands
-who overflow at the lunch hour. They’re hard to
-kill, these poor fellows, but they’re a puny, stinking,
-stunted, ill-favored horde. But the greater
-cleanliness of the people later on, and their better
-clothes, doesn’t put them in a very different class.
-You hear a good deal about the queens you see, but,
-really, the city streets of New York in 1919, streaming
-with people who have dun clothes to match dun
-faces, make you wonder what’s the use.
-
-These people in 1991 were good to look at! The
-three-hour working day had a lot to do with it, of
-course, and the basic economic changes. But what
-leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge
-responsibility that had gone to hygienists. I mean
-educational and administrative. In 1991, I found,
-people were really acting on the theory that you
-can’t have civilization without sound bodies. The
-idea itself was as old as an old joke, a platitude
-in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city was
-working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this
-meant a total revision of ordinary conduct.
-
-Building the Panama Canal was a simple little
-job compared to making New York hygienic.
-Thirty years must have been spent in getting the
-folks to realize that no man and woman had any
-hygienic excuse for breeding children within the city
-limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before it was
-official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At
-first mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were
-confiscated, but in the end they came to see justice in
-the human version of the slogan, “an acre and a
-cow.” It got rid of the good old city-bred medical
-formula that the best way to handle pregnancy is to
-handle it as a pathological condition. Of course this
-prohibition movement made all sorts of people mad.
-A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long
-time on the score of personal liberty. Women had
-private city babies where the inspectors couldn’t get
-at them. You know, just like private whisky. But
-in the end the prohibitionists won, and it had an
-enormous effect on cleaning up Manhattan. It cut
-out all but the detached and the transient residents,
-and with the breathing space rules, these were far
-less than you’d suppose. Even with the great area
-of garden-roofs, the fixed residents were not much
-more than 100,000.
-
-This demobilization wasn’t special to New York.
-In other places there were much more rigid “units.”
-Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit size of cities
-in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous
-city gave place to the “modern” unit,
-permanent residences within the city never being
-open to families that had children under fourteen.
-For the heads of such families, however, the transportation
-problem was beautifully solved. Every
-unit city came to be so constructed that within half
-an hour of the “fresh air and exercise” homes, men
-and women could reach factories and warehouses
-in one direction, and offices and courts and banks and
-exchanges in another. This was after they realized
-the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless,
-swift, freight train took the place of most
-trucks, and of course the remaining trucks shot up
-and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another
-thing that interested me was the plexus of all
-the things that are to be exhibited. This involved a
-great problem for New York before factories were
-deported and the moving “H. G. Wells” sidewalks
-introduced. How to economize time and space, and
-yet not produce too close a homogeneity, too protein
-an intellectual and æsthetic and social diet, became
-a fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell’s
-Island to summer and winter art and music,
-with all the other islands utilized for permanent exhibitions
-gave the city directors a certain leeway.
-The islands were made charming. I was quite
-struck over there, I think, on a new island in Flushing
-Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing,
-where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on
-an endless belt, that stopped when you wanted it to—the
-kind that art exhibitions adopted for certain
-purposes. You see, the old department stores had
-passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and
-display advertising and the non-preventive physician.
-And the old game of “seasons” and fashions was
-abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Condé
-Nast for the undermining of the taste of shopgirls.
-The job of the purchasing consumer was steadily
-simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly early
-in life what they could and what they couldn’t do
-personally in the use of color. No one thought of
-copying another’s color or design in dress any more
-than of copying another’s oculist prescription. And
-with the guild consultants always ready to help out
-the troubled buyer, the business of shopping for
-clothes became as exciting and intelligent as the pastime
-of visiting a private exhibition. In this way,
-backed up by the guilds, a daring employment of
-color became generally favored. But a big item in
-this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe
-any costumes for people who needed medical
-care first. It was useless, the guilds said, to decorate
-a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed.
-
-So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound
-body. In the hygienic riots of 1936 some horrible
-lynchings took place. An expert from the Chicago
-stockyards was then running the New York subways.
-He devised the upper-berth system by which the
-space between people’s heads and the roof of the
-car could be used on express trains for hanging up
-passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a
-few thousand citizens had failed to respond to the
-pulmotor which was kept at every station to revive
-weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to
-decent transportation became a real public issue.
-The hygienists made the great popular mistake of
-trying to save the stockyards man. They knew he
-had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing
-him and showing he had always wanted to
-skin cats alive, they could put the traction question
-on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of
-that era took up the issue on the so-called popular
-side. He denounced the hygienists as heartless experts
-and showed how science was really a conspiracy
-in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted
-in a miserable set-back to the compulsory
-psycho-analysis of all criminals, but the bloody assassination
-of the leading hygienist of the day brought
-about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge
-was allowed to serve who wasn’t an expert in psychic
-work and hygiene. This decision was greatly aided
-by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation
-of criminal verdicts to the established neuroses
-of city magistrates. The promise that this work
-would be extended and published as a supplement to
-the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting
-the Bar. The old pretensions of the Bar
-went rapidly to pieces when political use was made of
-important psychological and physiological facts.
-The hygienists spoke of “the mighty stream of morbid
-compulsion broadening down to more morbid
-compulsion.” By 1950 no man with an Œdipus
-complex could even get on the Real Estate ticket, and
-the utter collapse of militarism came about with the
-magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent
-armament advocates in the evil era.
-
-I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance
-of prisons. Though I hate to confess
-it, I was a little amazed when I found that the old
-penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology
-of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did
-possess models of prisons like Sing Sing and Trenton
-and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances
-in the latter prisons were thought amusing.
-But the deformity of the human minds and the social
-systems that permitted such prisons as ours was a
-matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere,
-even in casual unspecialized groups. This general
-intelligence made it clear to me that social hygiene
-was never understood up to the middle of the
-twentieth century. The very name, after all, was
-appropriated by men afraid to specify the sex diseases
-they were then cleaning up. Puritanism, serviceable
-as it was in its time, had kept men from obtaining
-and examining the evidence necessary to right
-conclusions about conduct. “Think,” said one delightful
-youth to me, on my first day in 1991, “think
-of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological
-laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical well-being by the preposterous road of
-universal military service. Think of electing Congressmen
-in the old days without applying even the
-Binet test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing
-about ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ fair as that object
-is, and yet we should no more stand for such indiscriminateness
-than we’d allow a day to go by without
-swimming.”
-
-The youth, I should specify, was a female youth,
-what we call a girl. I had nothing to say to her.
-But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was so
-soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire’s device
-I had once seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement
-of a great factory building there was a small
-electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was
-a gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on
-which was strapped an ordinary leather saddle. In
-front of the saddle there rose two thin steel sticks,
-and out of them came thin leather reins. By means
-of a clever arrangement of springs down below that
-responded to an electric current, the whole mechanism
-was able to move up and down and backward
-and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed
-to stir up your gizzard in practically the same
-way as the motion of a horse. This was, in fact,
-a synthetic horse, bearing the same æsthetic relation
-to a real horse that a phonograph song does to a
-real song that is poured out, so to speak, in the sun.
-And here, in the bald basement cell with its two
-barred basement windows (closed), the constipated
-millionaires take their turns, whenever they can bear
-it, going through the canned motions of a ride, staring
-with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front
-of them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of
-Hygeia carried the helot-captains of industry. And
-from that basement, from that heathen symbol of
-perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary
-acceptance of the human body and a primary law
-that its necessities be everywhere observed. Not
-such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy
-years. And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they
-had to have for the happiness they long for.
-
-CHICAGO [1]_
-============
-
-A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality
-of towns. What most people enjoy about
-a town is familiarity, not personality, and they can
-give no penetrating account of their affection.
-“What is the finest town in the world?” the New
-York reporters recently asked a young recruit, eager
-for him to eulogize New York. “Why,” he answered,
-“San Malo, France. I was born there.”
-That is the usual reason, perhaps the best reason,
-why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is
-autobiographical.
-
-But towns do have personality. Contrast London
-and New York, or Portland and Norfolk, or
-Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has
-a personality, and it would be obscurantism of the
-most modern kind to pretend that there was no
-“soul” in Chicago either to like or to dislike. People
-who have never lived in Chicago are usually content
-with disliking it, and those who have seen it
-superficially, or smelled it in passing when the stockyard
-factories were making glue, can seldom understand
-why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors,
-of course, profess to admire it, with the eagerness of
-anxious missionaries seeking to make good with cannibals.
-But except for men who knew Bursley or
-Belfast, and slipped into Chicago as into old slippers—men
-like Arnold Bennett and George Bermingham—there
-are few outsiders who really feel
-at home. Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant
-journey across the plains, pondering that
-one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to
-restore the city after the fire should be compelled
-to pay for his own ham and eggs. He thought
-Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from
-it like a sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G.
-Wells thought it amazing, but chiefly amazing as a
-lapse from civilization. All of these leave little
-doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact,
-dirty, unruly and mean. It has size without spaciousness,
-opportunity without imaginativeness, action
-without climax, wealth without distinction. A
-sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though
-far from gracious where most characteristic; but for
-the most part it is shoddy, dingy and vulgar, making
-more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining
-smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from
-heaven. It is not for its beaux yeux that the outsider
-begins to love the town.
-
-But a great town is like the elephant of the fable;
-one must see it altogether before one can define it;
-one can believe almost anything monstrous from a
-partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is supremely
-necessary—about three years as a minimum.
-Then its goodness passeth all pre-matrimonial
-understanding; its essence is disclosed.
-
-Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far
-as time is concerned, to speak of Chicago, and I
-think it would be churlish not to agree that from
-the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city
-proud. All old Chicagoans will recognize at once
-why Mr. Taylor should go back to the beginning,
-and they will be delighted at the clarity with which
-the early history is expounded, as well as the era before
-the Civil War. They will also understand and
-rejoice over the repetition of grand old names—Gordon
-S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien,
-Uranus H. Crosby, Sherman of the Sherman hotel,
-General Hart L. Stewart and Long John Wentworth.
-In every town in the world there is, of
-course, a Long John or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans
-will savor this reference to their own familiar, and
-will delight in the snug feeling that they too “knew
-Chicago when.” Mr. Taylor is also dear to his
-townsmen when he harks back to days before the
-Fire. In those days the West-siders were a little
-superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral
-of Saints Peter and Paul, and the church-going folk
-could hear the “fast young men” speeding trotting
-horses past the church doors. Such performances
-seemed fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor
-himself drive his high-steppers to the races at Washington
-Park, and did he not woo the heart of the
-city where gilded youth cherished a “nod of recognition
-from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John
-A. Rice.” The dinners of antelope steak and roast
-buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago antedating
-the World’s Fair that left strong traces into
-the twentieth century, a Chicago that is commemorated
-with grace and kindliness in the fair pages of
-this book.
-
-But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor’s heart
-lingers among the “marble-fronts” of his youth,
-this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better
-basis for loving Chicago must be offered than the
-evidence that one teethed on it, battered darling that
-it is. Mr. Taylor’s better explanation, as I read it,
-is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully
-and eagerly with the New Englanders who made the
-town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters and speculators,
-war widows and politicians and anarchists and
-aliens—all these go into his perspective, as do the
-emergencies of the Fire and the splendors of the
-Fair. But the marrow of his pride in Chicago is
-his community with its origins in “men, like myself,
-of New England blood, whose fathers felled our
-forests and tilled our prairie land.” Since the time
-he was born, he tells us, more than two million people
-have been added to the population of Chicago.
-Only a fifth of the Great West Side are now American-born,
-and the Lake Shore Drive was still a cemetery
-when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified
-West Side. This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning
-of things. Hence he likes to insist in his
-kindly spirit that Chicago’s puritan “aristocracy”
-is the source of Chicago altruism, that “the society
-of Chicago [is] more puritanical than that of any
-great city in the world,” and that “back of Chicago’s
-strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her
-founders holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim
-Fathers being still a potent factor in her life....
-She possesses a New England conscience to
-leaven her diverse character and make her truly—the
-pulse of America.”
-
-Every bird takes what he finds to build his own
-spiritual nest. Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and
-wild and rude, but I prefer to see it as an impuritan.
-Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed
-a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished
-Chicago’s big little men. The triumvirate
-that Mr. Taylor mentions had no statesmanship
-in them. One was an admirable huckster, another
-an inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine
-who carved a destiny in ham. But these men gave
-themselves and their city to business enterprise in
-its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its
-remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality
-of that enterprise is a main characteristic of the city,
-a characteristic barely suggested by Mr. Taylor, not
-clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his graceful
-drawings, so beautifully reproduced.
-
-One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor’s
-pleasant picture, some leaves from Upton Sinclair’s
-Jungle, Jack London’s Iron Heel, Frank Norris’s
-Pit, H. K. Webster’s Great Adventure, the fiction of
-Edith Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick
-and Will Paine and Weber Linn and Sherwood
-Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and
-Carl Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one
-who looked at the City Council ten years ago, for
-example, can forget the brutality of that institution
-of collective life.
-
-They called the old-time aldermen the “gray
-wolves.” They looked like wolves, cold-eyed,
-grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side,
-West side, North side, making the shaky tenements
-and black brothels and sprawling immigrant-filled industries
-pay tribute in twenty ways. One night,
-curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went
-to a place that was glibly described as “the wickedest
-place in the world.” It was a saloon under the West
-side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At
-first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its
-runty negro at the raucous piano. But at last the
-regular customers collected; the sots, the dead-beats,
-the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a
-fat pallor, the woman without a nose.... They
-surrounded us, piled against us, clawed us. And
-that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead’s Satanic vision
-of it revealed.
-
-But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago
-is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from
-caste and cant which is so much an essential of democracy,
-the cordiality which comes with fraternity,
-the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago
-is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and
-passionate creator struggling with hucksters and
-hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the
-assassins of genius, a frontier against the Europe
-that meant an established order, an order of succession
-and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all
-its philistinism, there is the condition of hope that is
-half the spiritual battle, whatever stockades the puritans
-try to build. It is that that makes one lament
-the silence in Mr. Taylor’s pleasant book. But the
-puritanical tradition requires silence. Polite and refined,
-self-centered and private-minded, attached to
-property and content within limitations, it made
-visible Chicago what it is.
-
-.. [1] *Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G. Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.*
-
-THE CLOUDS OF KERRY
-===================
-
-It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes
-Kerry so wet. All the reservoir of the Atlantic,
-at any rate, lies to the west and south, and the prevailing
-winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry
-lifts its mountains to those impinging winds—mountains
-that in the sunlight are a living colorful
-presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the
-constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly
-from the sea, soft voluminous clouds gathered in
-their arms, and as they pass they sweep their drooping
-veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy
-land.
-
-In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted
-at great intervals on those lonely hillsides, but
-for the most part the habitations are in the cooms
-or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel
-hills. The soil on the mountains is washed away.
-The vestiture that remains is a watery sedge, and it
-is only by garnering every handful of earth that the
-tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms.
-Their fields, often held in common, are so small as
-to be laughable, and deep drainage trenches are
-dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting
-sunlight between showers a light-green patch will
-loom magically in the distance, witness to man’s indefatigable
-effort to achieve a holding amid the rocks.
-An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and
-if one goes there one may find a typical tall spare
-countryman, bright of eye and sharp of feature,
-housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood
-of children. To build with his own hands a watertight
-house is the ambition for which this man is
-slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready
-there near the pit which he himself has dug for
-foundation. A yellowish wife will perhaps be nursing
-the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed hovel,
-and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible,
-and admirable in more ways than he can ever dream
-of, one elf after another will come out, bare-legged,
-sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from far off at
-the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside
-man, but his starvelings go down the boreen
-to the bare cold schoolhouse, to be taught whatever
-the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their
-minds of an education designed for civil service
-clerks. The children may be seen down there if one
-passes at their playtime, kicking a rag football with
-their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds.
-
-There was a time when the iron was deep in these
-farmers’ souls. Eking the marrow from the
-bones of the land, they were so poor that they had
-nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their
-own tiny cattle, the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle
-that alone can pick a living from that ground. Until
-twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the
-hillside men had never bought a pound of tea in
-their lives, or known what it was to spend money for
-clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored
-homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine
-sturdy middle-aged farmers with a cut to their homemade
-clothes that reminds one of the Bretons. It
-was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting
-nature for grim life, that landlords took their rackrents—one
-of them, the Earl of Kenmare, erecting
-a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of Americans
-have admired. The fight against landlordism
-was bitter in Kerry. I met one countryman who was
-evicted three times, but finally, despite the remorseless
-protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in
-a lean-to against the wall of the church. There
-were persecutions and murders, the mailed hand of
-the law and the stealthy hand of the assassin. Even
-to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure
-of me he would not have spoken his mind. But
-when he was sure, he confided with a winning smile
-that at last he had something to live for and work
-for, a strip of land that was an “economic holding,”
-determined by an Estates Commission which has
-shouldered the landlord to one side and estimated
-with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive
-possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog.
-
-Why do they stay? But most of them have not
-stayed. Kerry has not one-third the people to-day
-that it had seventy years ago. The storekeeper in
-a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little
-father of the people if there ever was one, yet had
-acted the dubious rôle of emigration agent, and had
-passed thousands of his countrymen on to America.
-A few go to England. “For nine years,” one hard-working
-occupier mentioned to me, “I lived in the
-shadow of London Bridge.” But for Kerry, the
-next country to America, America is the land of
-golden promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue,
-“hollow of the dock leaves,” I stopped to ask of a
-bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking
-me the way to America. It is west they turn, away
-from the Empire that “always foul-played us in the
-past, and I am afeard will foul-play us again.”
-
-“The next time you come, please God you’ll bring
-us Home Rule.” That is the way they speak to you,
-if they trust you. They want government where it
-cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of
-old.
-
-I went with a government inspector on one mission
-in Kerry. At the foot of the forbidding western
-hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off
-by two mountain streams. At times these streams
-were low enough to ford with ease, but after a heavy
-rain the water would rise four or five feet in a few
-hours and the streams would become impassable torrents.
-For the sake of a widow whose hovel stood
-on this island the Commission consented to build a
-little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at
-either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons
-in weight, had only just been planted when a rain
-came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy block of
-cement had toppled over in the stream. This little
-catastrophe was the first news conveyed by the
-paternal storekeeper to the inspector on our arrival
-in town, and we walked out to see what could be
-done.
-
-Standing by the stream, we were visible to the
-expectant woman on the hill. In the soft mournful
-light of the September afternoon I could see her
-outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to
-learn her fate. She came bare of head and bare of
-foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to her bosom with
-one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body
-as she leaned on her own pier and bent her deep
-eyes on us across the stream. As she told in the
-slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of
-the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those
-eyes to the inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged
-in the water, as if to contemn it for lying
-there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited
-or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression
-bespoke the sternness and gravity of her fight for
-existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant fighter.
-She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have
-ever beheld.
-
-If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the
-anxieties of the winter. She seemed to look into
-them through the grayness of the failing light. She
-foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race
-for her children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying
-them across on her back. And she clung to her
-children.
-
-“You have had trouble, my poor woman?” the
-inspector said, knowing that her husband two years
-before had been drowned in the torrent.
-
-“Aye, indeed, your honor, ’tis I am the pity of the
-world. One year ago my child was lost to me. It
-was in the night-time, he was taken with a hemorrhage,
-with respects to your honor. I woke the
-children to have them go for to bring the doctor,
-but it was too late an they returned. He quenched
-in my arms, at the dead hour of night.”
-
-“The pity of the world” she was in truth. The
-inspector could do nothing until the ground was
-firm enough to support horses and tackle in the
-spring. We walked back through the somber bog,
-the mountains seeming to creep after us, and we
-speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To
-the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there
-we came on another aspect of that plaintive acquiescence
-so strong in the woman. Yes, the storekeeper
-admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector
-was right: Foley had failed about the bridge.
-“I’ll haul him over,” he said, full of sympathy for
-the woman. And he would haul him over. And
-the pier would lie there all winter.
-
-If the people could feel that this solicitude of the
-Estates Commission were national, it would bind
-them to the government. But most of the inspectors
-are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees,
-well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between
-the lines. And so Kerry remains with the
-old tradition of the government, suspicious of its
-intentions, crediting what genuine services there are
-to the race of native officials who alone have the
-intuition of Kerry’s kind.
-
-They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend
-the Empire; that Empire which meant landlords and
-land agents and rackrents for so many blind and
-crushing years. They want those straight and stalwart
-and manly fellows in the trenches. But Kerry
-knows what the trenches of Empire are already. It
-has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs
-between sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years
-it can remember. It is no wonder Kerry cannot
-grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so
-readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted
-a lease to live.
-
-HENRY ADAMS [2]_
-================
-
-Henry Adams was born with his name on the
-waiting list of Olympus, and he lived up to it. He
-lived up to it part of the time in London, as secretary
-to his father at the Embassy; part of the time
-at Harvard, teaching history; most of the time in
-Washington, in La Fayette Square. Shortly before
-he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the
-United States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and
-Olympus were confused. But not so long after 1838
-the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to
-control the country through the railroads there was
-an inevitable shift in political gravity, and the center
-of power became Ohio. It was Henry Adams’s fate
-to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in
-power; and Ohio did not comprehend Adams’s credentials.
-Those credentials, accordingly, were the
-subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor.
-They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history,
-and Henry Adams gave a dozen years to Jefferson
-and Madison. It was his humor afterwards to say
-he had but three serious readers—Abram Hewitt,
-Wayne MacVeagh and John Hay. His composure
-in the face of this coolness was, however, a strange
-blending of serenities derived equally from the cosmos
-and from La Fayette Square. He was not
-above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even his
-autobiography, a true title to Olympus, was issued
-to a bare hundred readers before his death, and was
-then deemed too incomplete to be made public. It
-is made public now nominally for “students” but
-really for the world that didn’t know an Adams when
-it saw one.
-
-For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry
-Adams had the advantage of full years and happy
-faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of both.
-He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality
-which is a bad tradition in English recollections.
-He saved himself from mere recollections by taking
-the world as an educator and himself as an experiment
-in education. His two big books were contrasted
-as *Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study
-of Thirteenth-Century Unity*, and *The Education of
-Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity*.
-The stress on multiplicity was all the more
-important because he considered himself eighteenth
-century to start with, and had, in fact, the unity of
-simple Americanism at the beginning.
-
-Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of
-basil in this always expanding tale of a development.
-There are points about the development, about its
-acceptance of a “supersensual multiverse”, which
-only a Karl Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satisfactorily
-discuss or criticize. A reader like myself
-gazes through the glass bottom of Adams’s style into
-unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths
-are clear and crisp. They deserve to be investigated.
-But a “dynamic theory of history” is no
-proper inhabitant of autobiography, and “the larger
-synthesis” is not yet so domesticated as the plebeian
-idea of God. That Adams should conduct his study
-to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent culmination.
-A theory of life is the fit answer to the supersensual
-riddle of living. But when the theory must
-be technical and even professional, an autobiography
-has no climax in a theory. It is better to revert, as
-Adams does, to the classic features of human drama:
-“Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should
-be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and
-infinite in wealth and depth of tone—but never
-hustled.” It is enough to have the knowledge that
-along certain lines the prime conceptions were shattered
-and the new conceptions pushed forward, the
-tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in the twentieth
-century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of
-acceleration.
-
-Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams
-embraced the modernity that gradually dawned on
-him and gave him his new view of life. Take his
-fresh enthusiasm for world’s fairs as a solitary example.
-One might expect him to be bored by them,
-but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford White and
-Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of
-America, and Henry Adams soared over their obviousness
-to a perception of their “acutely interesting”
-exhibits. He was after—something. If the
-Virgin Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or
-St. Louis could give it to him among the Jugo-Slavs
-and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done.
-No vulgar prejudices held him back. He who could
-interpret the fight for free silver without a sniff of
-impatience, who could study Grant without the least
-filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his
-nose at unfashionable faiths or to espouse fashionable heresies. He was after education and any century
-back or forward was grist to his mill. And
-his faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in
-it. “All one’s life,” as he confesses grimly, “one
-had struggled for unity, and unity had always won,”
-yet “the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased,
-was increasing, and threatened to increase beyond
-reason.” Beyond reason, then, it was reasonable to
-proceed, and the son of Ambassador Adams moved
-from the sanctity of Union with his feet feeling
-what way they must, and his eye on the star of
-truth.
-
-So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how
-keen it is. But there is no single dullness, as I remember,
-in 505 large pages, and there are portraits
-like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or
-the Adamses, which have the economy and fidelity
-of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not, nor is he
-a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct
-expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and
-he can load a sentence with a world of meaning.
-Take, for instance, the phrase in which he denies
-unity to London society. “One wandered about in
-it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab,
-to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time.” He says
-of St. Gaudens that “he never laid down the law,
-or affected the despot, or became brutalized like
-Whistler by the brutalities of his world.” In a
-masterly chapter on woman, he summed up, “The
-woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation,
-and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and
-the family. The idea that she was weak revolted
-all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that
-even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed
-at; but it was surely true that, if force were to be
-diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and
-the family must pay for it.... She must, like the
-man, marry machinery.” In Cambridge “the liveliest
-and most agreeable of men—James Russell
-Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son
-Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and
-a dozen others, who would have made the joy of
-London or Paris—tried their best to break out and
-be like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but
-society called them professors, and professors they
-had to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy
-for companionship, all were famished for want of it.
-Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The
-elements were there; but society cannot be made up
-of elements—people who are expected to be silent
-unless they have observations to make—and all the
-elements are bound to remain apart if required to
-make observations.”
-
-Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact,
-that Henry Adams himself felt the necessity of making
-observations. He approached autobiography
-buttoned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human
-beings he had a real impulse to release himself, and
-to release himself in an autobiography if nowhere
-else; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he could no
-more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day
-than he could dance like Nijinski. In so far as the
-Adamses were institutional he could talk of them
-openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence
-Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge
-and St. Gaudens as any liberated host might reveal
-himself in the warm hour after dinner. But this is
-not the Dionysiac tone of autobiography and Henry
-Adams was not Dionysiac. He was not limitedly
-Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was receptive, he
-was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the
-mere mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the preface
-of this autobiography raises doubts as to Henry
-Adams’s evasive principle, “the object of study is
-the garment, not the figure.” The figure, Henry
-Adams’s, had nagging interest for Henry Adams, but
-something racial required him to veil it. He could
-not, like a Rousseau or “like a whore, unpack his
-heart with words.”
-
-The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on
-the word “education.” Although he was nearly
-seventy when he laid the book aside and although
-education means nothing if it means everything, the
-whole seventy years were deliberately taken as devotion
-to a process, that process being visualized much
-more as the interminable repetition of the educational
-escalator itself than as the progress of the person
-who moves forward with it. Moves forward
-to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams’s
-detachment that no escalator could move him forward
-anywhere because he was not bound anywhere
-in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak
-of his life as perpetually educational. One reason,
-of course, was his economic security. There was no
-wolf to devour him if his education proved incomplete.
-Faculty *qua* faculty could remain a permanent
-quandary to him, so long as he were not forced
-to be vocational, so long as he could speculate on “a
-world that sensitive and timid natures could regard
-without a shudder.”
-
-The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, however,
-is one of the principal fascinations of this altogether fascinating book. What was it that kept
-Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay?
-What was it that sent him from Boston to Mont-Saint-Michel
-and Chartres? The man was a capable
-and ambitious man, if ever there was one. He
-was not merely erudite and reflective and emancipatingly
-skeptical: he was also a man of the largest
-inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man
-of the nicest temper and the sanest style. How
-could such justesse go begging, even in the United
-States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry
-Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen
-he sat waiting for a clientage that never came, while
-through a hole he could see a steady crowd go pouring
-into the gilded doors across the way. The
-modest screen was himself. He could not detach
-it. But the United States did not see beyond the
-screen. A light behind a large globule of colored
-water could at any moment distract it. And in
-England, for that matter, only the Monckton Milneses
-kept the Delanes from brushing Adams away,
-like a fly.
-
-The question is, on what terms did Adams want
-life? It is characteristic of him that he does not
-specify. But one gathers from his very reticence
-that he had least use of all for an existence which required
-moral multiplicity. Where he seems gravest
-and least self-superintending is in those criticisms
-of his friends that indicate the sacrifice of integrity.
-He was no prig. Not one bleat of priggishness
-is heard in all his intricate censure of the eminent
-British statesmen who sapped the Union. But there
-is a fund of significance in his criticism of Senator
-Lodge’s career, pages 418 and on, in which “the
-larger study was lost in the division of interests and
-the ambitions of fifth-rate men.” It is in a less
-concerned tone that the New Yorker Roosevelt
-is discussed. “Power when wielded by abnormal
-energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt’s
-friends know that his restless and combative
-energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more
-than any other man living within the range of notoriety,
-showed the singular primitive quality that belongs
-to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval
-theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”
-Pure act Henry Adams was not. If Roosevelt exhibited
-“the effect of unlimited power on limited
-mind,” he himself exhibited the contrary effect of
-limited power on unlimited mind. Why his power
-remained so limited was the mystery. Was he a
-watched kettle that could not boil? Or had he no
-fire in his belly? Or did the fire fail to meet the
-kettle? Almost any problem of inhibition would
-be simpler, but one could scarcely help ascribing
-something to that refrigeration of enthusiasm which
-is the Bostonian’s revenge on wanton life force. Except
-for his opaline ethics, never glaring yet never
-dulled, he is manifestly toned down to suit the most
-neurasthenic exaction. Or, to put it more crudely,
-he is emotion Fletcherized to the point of inanition.
-
-Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the
-autobiography is a refutation of anæmia. There
-was, indeed, something meager about Henry
-Adams’s soul, as there is something meager about a
-butterfly. But the lack of sanguine or exuberant
-feeling, the lack of buoyancy and enthusiasm, is
-merely a hint that one must classify, not a command
-that one condemn. For all this book’s parsimony,
-for all its psychological silences and timidities, it is
-an original contribution, transcending caste and class,
-combining true mind and matter. Compare its comment
-on education to the comment of Joan and Peter—Henry
-Adams is to H. G. Wells as triangulation
-to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations
-which goes by the name of understanding was part
-of his very nature. Unlike H. G. Wells, he was incapable
-of cant. He had no demagoguery, no mob-oratory,
-no rhetoric. This enclosed him in himself
-to a dangerous degree, bordered him on priggishness
-and on egoism. But he had too much quality
-to succumb to these diseases of the sedentary soul.
-He survives, and with greatness.
-
-.. [2] *The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.*
-
-THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
-====================
-
-Sweet and wild, if you like, the first airs of
-spring, sweeter than anything in later days; but
-when we make an analogy between spring and
-youth and believe that the enchantment of one is
-the enchantment of the other, are we not dreaming
-a dream?
-
-Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not
-a poet. Just because it is formative and fugitive
-it evokes imagination; it has a bloom too momentary
-to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it
-is seen. In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses
-itself. It is a delicacy as tender as the first green
-leaf, an innocence like the shimmering dawn,
-“brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle
-of falling water and singing birds.” People feel
-this when they accept youth as immaculate and heed
-its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at
-twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think
-that youth has the air of spring about it, that spring
-is the morning of the gods. Youth is so often
-handsome and straight and fearless; it has its mysterious
-silences—its beings are beings of clear fire
-in high spaces, kin with the naked stars. Yet there
-is in it something not less fiery which is far more
-human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers
-on board.
-
-As one grows older one is less impatient of the
-supposition that innocence actually exists. It exists,
-even though mothers may not properly interpret
-it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism
-which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth
-is neither innocence nor experience. It is a duel
-between innocence and experience, with the attainments
-of experience guarded from older gaze. Human
-beings take their contemporaries for granted,
-no one else: and neither teachers nor superiors nor
-even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that
-innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw
-around youth.
-
-If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its
-own innocence, the coming of experience is all the
-more painful. The process of change is seldom
-serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality.
-The impressionable and histrionic youth has incessant
-disappointment in trying misfit spiritual garments.
-The undisciplined faculty of make-believe,
-which is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to
-torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been
-earned and self-acceptance begun.
-
-Do mature people try to help this? Do they
-remember their own uncertainty and frustration?
-One of the high points in Mr. Trotter’s keen psychological
-study, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and
-War, indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr.
-Trotter goes beyond Samuel Butler and Edmund
-Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful experience.
-He shows the forces at work behind the
-patronizing and victimizing of the young.
-
- The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge
- and experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man
- and to surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or
- taste....
-
- Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the
- ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of
- age and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history,
- proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence
- and enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immemorial
- wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling
- of senile decay.
-
-The day will come when our present barbaric attitude
-toward youth will be altered. Before it can
-be altered, however, we must completely revise our
-conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly
-innocent than it is certainly happy, and the
-conspiracy of silence that surrounds youth is not
-to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness.
-Innocence, besides, can last too long.
-Every one has pitied stale innocence. If a New York
-child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may quite
-easily be shocking to older people. Already, without
-any particular viciousness or precocity, he has
-accumulated a huge number of undesirable impressions,
-and shoved them under the surface of his
-mind. What, then, to do? The air of spring that
-is about him need not mislead his guardians. They
-may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a
-naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only
-one agent of innocence, and not the most successful.
-Certainly not the most successful for domesticating
-youth in the sphere that men and women consider
-fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain
-innocent long after it recognizes the example and
-feels the impulses of its elders, the invitation will go
-unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or
-see the moving pictures without realizing a discrepancy
-between conduct and precept, which is one
-hint to precept to take off its bib.
-
-This knowingness is not quite what it seems to
-be. Youth is never so young as when experienced.
-But those who must deal with it cannot lose by making
-it more articulate, by saving it from the silly
-adult exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this
-jealousy and pride continually operates against
-youth in the name of dignity and discipline. And
-so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction
-that portrays youth as the spring time of the spirit;
-that pipes a song about a lamb, and leads the lamb
-to slaughter.
-
-THE IRISH REVOLT
-================
-
- “It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it
- is altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven.”
-
- —G. K. Chesterton in *The Crimes of England*, 1916.
-
-When a rebellion has failed men say it was
-wicked or foolish. It is, on the contrary, wickedness
-and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise
-against authority the measure of their act cannot
-be loyalty or prudence. It is the character of the
-authority against which men revolt that must shape
-one’s mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on
-his life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction
-on authority. Is it just authority, representative,
-tolerable? The only revolt that is wicked or foolish
-is the revolt against reasonable or tolerable authority.
-If authority is not livable, revolt is a thousand
-times justified.
-
-The Irish rebellion was not prudent. Its imprudence
-did not weigh with the men who took to
-arms. Had hope inspired them, they would have
-been utterly insane. But hope did not inspire them.
-They longed for success; they risked and expected
-death. The only consequence to us, wrote Padraic
-Pearse before action, is that some of us may be
-launched into eternity. “But who are we, that we
-should hesitate to die for Ireland? Are not the
-claims of Ireland greater on us than any personal
-ones? Is it fear that deters us from such an enterprise?
-Away with such fears. Cowards die many
-times, the brave only die once.” To strike a decisive
-blow was the aspiration of the Irish rebels.
-But decisive or not, they made up their minds to
-take action before the government succeeded in attaching
-all their arms.
-
-In this rebellion there was no chance of material
-victory. Pearse, MacDonagh, Connolly, Clark,
-Plunkett, O’Rahilly, O’Hanrahan, Daly, Hobson,
-Casement, could only hope against hope. But their
-essential objective was not a soldiery. It was an
-idea, the idea of unprotested English authority in
-Ireland. It was to protest against the Irish nation’s
-remaining a Crown Colony of the British Empire
-that these men raised their republican standard and
-under it shed their blood. In the first process of that
-revolt few of them were immediately sacrificed.
-Their fight was well planned. They made the most
-of their brief hour. But when they were captured
-the authority they had opposed fulfilled their expectations
-to the utmost. Before three army officers,
-without a legal defender, each of the leaders was
-condemned by court-martial. Their rebellion had
-been open. Their guilt was known and granted.
-They met, as they expected to meet, death.
-
-The insurrection in Ireland is ended. A cold
-tribunal has finished by piecework the task that the
-soldiers began. The British Empire is still dominant
-in Dublin. But ruthless and remorseless behavior
-sharpens the issue between authority and rebellion.
-Even men who naturally condemn disorder feel impelled
-to scrutinize the authority which could deliberately
-dispense such doom. If that authority deserved respect in Ireland, if it stood for justice and
-the maintenance of right, its exaction of the pound
-of flesh cannot be questioned. It does not represent
-“frightfulness.” It represents stern justice. Its
-hand should be universally upheld. But if, on the
-other hand, English authority did not deserve respect
-in Ireland, if it had forfeited its claims on these
-Irishmen, then there is something to be made known
-and said about the way in which this Empire can
-abuse its power.
-
-Between the Irish people and English authority,
-as every one knows, there has been an interminable
-struggle. A tolerable solution of this contest has
-only recently seemed in sight. The military necessity
-of England has of itself precluded one solution,
-the complete independence of Ireland. The desire
-for self-government in Ireland has opposed another
-solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Between
-these two goals the struggle has raged bitterly.
-But human beings cannot live forever in
-profitless conflict. After many years the majority
-of the English people took up and ratified the Irish
-claims to self-government. In spite of the conservative
-element in England and the British element in
-Ireland, the *modus vivendi* of home rule was arranged.
-It is the fate of this *modus vivendi*, accepted
-by the majority of Irishmen as a reasonable
-commutation of their claims, that explains the recent
-insurrection. These men who are dead were once
-for the most part Home Rulers. Their rebellion
-came about as a sequel to the unjust and dishonest
-handling of home rule.
-
-For thirty-five years home rule has been an issue
-in Great Britain. The majority of the British people supported Gladstone during many home rule
-sessions. The lower house of Parliament repeatedly
-passed the measure. The House of Lords, however,
-turned a face of stone to Ireland. It icily rejected
-Ireland’s offer to compound her claims. This irreconcilable
-attitude proved in the end so monstrous
-that English Liberalism revolted. It threw its
-weight against the rigid body that denied it. It compelled
-the House of Lords to accept the Parliament
-act, its scheme for circumventing the peers’ veto.
-Then, three times in succession, it passed the home
-rule bill.
-
-Every one knows what happened. During the
-probation of the bill the forces that could no longer
-avoid it constitutionally made up their minds that
-they would defeat it unconstitutionally. Men left
-the House of Lords and the House of Commons to
-raise troops in eastern Ulster. These, not the Irish,
-were Germany’s primary allies in the British Isles.
-Cannon, machine guns, and rifles were shipped to
-Ireland. Every possible descendant of the implanted
-settlers of Ireland was rallied. Large numbers
-were openly recruited and armed. The Ulster
-leaders pleaded they were loyal, but they insisted
-that the Liberals of England did not and could not
-speak for the Empire. The only English authority
-they recognized was an authority like-minded to
-themselves. Lord Northcliffe joined with Lord
-Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and Lord Willoughby
-de Broke and Lord Roberts and Sir Edward
-Carson and Bonar Law to advise and stimulate
-rebellion. Some of the best British generals in
-the army, to the delight of Germany, were definitely
-available as leaders. A provisional government,
-with Carson as its premier, was arranged for in
-1911. The Unionist and Orange organizations
-pledged themselves that under no conditions would
-they acknowledge a home rule government or obey its
-decrees. In 1912 the Solemn Covenanters pledged
-themselves “to refuse to recognize its authority.”
-During this period the government negotiated, but
-took no action. There were no Nationalists under
-arms.
-
-If free men have a right to rebel, how can any
-one gainsay Ulster? It was the Ulster contention
-that home rule would be unreasonable, intolerable,
-and unjust. This was a prophecy, perhaps a natural
-and credible prophecy. But it is not necessary to
-debate the Ulster rebellion. It was a hard heritage
-of England’s crime against Ireland. It is enough
-to say that English authority refused to abandon
-the home rule measure and in April, 1914, Mr. Asquith
-promised to vindicate the law.
-
-The British League for the support of Ulster had
-sent out “war calls.” The Ulster Unionist Council
-had appropriated $5,000,000 for volunteer widows
-and orphans. Arms had been landed from America
-and, it was said, from Germany. Carson had
-refused to “negotiate” any further. His mobilization
-in 1914 became ominous. The government
-started in moving troops to Ulster. The King intervened.
-Mr. Balfour inveighed against the proposal
-to use troops. The army consulted with Carson.
-Generals French and Ewart resigned.
-
-About this period, with Asquith and Birrell failing
-to put England’s pledges to the proof, the National
-Volunteers at last were being organized. Mr.
-Asquith temporized further. At his behest John
-Redmond peremptorily assumed control of the
-Volunteers. Their selected leader was Professor
-MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the non-political
-Gaelic revival. There was formal harmony until
-the European war was declared, when Mr. Redmond
-sought to utilize the National Volunteers for
-recruiting. This move made definite the purely national
-dedication of the Irish Volunteers.
-
-Four events occurred in rapid succession to destroy
-the Irish Volunteers’ confidence in English authority.
-These were decisive events, and yet events
-over which the Irish Volunteers could have no control.
-
-On July 10th, 1914, armed Ulster Volunteers
-marched through Belfast, and Sir Edward Carson
-held the first meeting of his provisional government.
-
-On July 26th, 1914, the British troops killed three
-persons and wounded thirty-two persons because
-rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, subsequent
-to their futile attempt to intercept Irish
-Volunteer arms.
-
-On Sept. 19th, 1914, the home rule bill was signed,
-but its operation indefinitely suspended.
-
-In May, 1915, Sir Edward Carson became a member
-of the British Cabinet.
-
-These events were endured by John Redmond.
-He had early accepted a Fabian policy and put his
-trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the price
-of maintaining the law they decreed. The more
-radical men in Dublin were not so trusting. They
-had heard Asquith promise that no permanent division
-of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned
-he had bargained for it. They had heard him
-promise he would vindicate the law, and they saw
-him sanction the defiant military leader as commander-in-chief
-and the defiant civil leader as a minister
-of the crown. With the vivid memory of British
-troops killing Irish citizens on the streets of
-Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English
-honor. They had no impulse to recruit for the defense
-on the Continent of an Empire thus honorable.
-They looked back on the evil history they had
-been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and
-to die.
-
-Irishmen like myself who believed in home rule
-and disbelieved in revolution did not agree with this
-spirit. We thought southern Ireland might persuade
-Ulster. We thought English authority was
-possibly weak and shifty, but benign. We did not
-wish to see Ireland, in the words of Professor MacNeill,
-go fornicating with Germany. When our
-brothers went to the European war we took England’s
-gratitude as heartfelt and her repentance as
-deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest,
-torture, rape, enforced subservience, ignorance,
-poverty, famine. But we listened to G. K. Chesterton
-about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous
-Ireland: “It was to doubt whether we were worthy
-to kiss the hem of her garment.”
-
-All the deeper, then, the shock we received from
-the execution of our men of finest mettle. They
-were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so was De
-Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a
-calculation based on the greater military strength
-of the Dutch. A government which had negotiated
-with rebels in the North, which had allowed the
-retention of arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in
-the Cabinet, could not mark an eternal bias in its
-judgment of brave men whose legitimate constitutional
-prospects it had raised high and then intolerably
-suspended. But this English government,
-often cringing and supine, was brave enough to slay
-one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in
-the name of “justice,” the judges in this rebellion
-being officers of an army that had refused to stand
-against rebellion in Ulster.
-
-It is not in vain, however, that these poets and
-Gaelic scholars and Republicans have stood blindfolded
-to be shot by English soldiers. Their verdict
-on English authority was scarcely in fault.
-They estimated with just contemptuousness the temper
-of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland has long
-been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone
-from Ireland, by the fulfillment of England’s bond,
-the memory of this rebellion must flourish. It testifies
-sadly but heroically that there are still Irishmen
-who cannot be sold over the counter, Irishmen
-who set no ultimate sanction on a dishonest
-authority, Irishmen who set no ultimate value on
-their merely mortal lives.
-
-A LIMB OF THE LAW
-=================
-
-“Look here,” said the policeman, tapping me
-on the chest, “Mrs. Trotsky used to live up here
-above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And
-then see what happens—she turns up in Stockholm
-with two million roubles.”
-
-“Oh, I don’t blame her. But ain’t we all human—Socialists,
-Democrats, Republicans? All
-we need is a chance.”
-
-“I admit, Socialism has beautiful ideas. But are
-they practical? That’s what I ask. Now, pardon
-me, just a minute! Just one minute, please!
-Socialism is a fine theory, but look at Emma Goldman.
-That woman had seven lovers. Free love.
-Yes, many a time I’ve heard them, preaching the
-children belonged to the state. Here’s their argument,
-see, they say that a man and a woman wants
-to get married but the man figures, have I enough
-to support her? and the woman figures, how much
-has he got? and the only thing for them to do in
-that case is to turn the children over to the state.
-Now, I ask you, is that human?”
-
-“You say, a lot of these women in limousines
-practice free love without preaching it. Oh, I don’t
-deny it. And, look’t here, I’m surprised there isn’t
-more bombs at that. Right here on the Avenue you
-see the cars in one long procession all day, like every
-one was a millionaire, and three blocks over you see
-people who haven’t the means of livelihood, without
-a shirt to their backs. I’m a public officer, as you
-might say, and maybe it sounds queer what I’m going
-to say, but I’m afraid to have my own children
-on the steps of the apartment house. I takes the
-night-stick to them and I says, ‘Beat it out of here,
-don’t let the landlord see you, or he’ll raise the rent
-again.’”
-
-“You said it, something’s rotten somewhere.
-What do you think of the government holding back
-all that meat, just because the packers want it fixed
-that way, and plenty of people on the Lower East
-Side there willing to buy it all up—and at good
-prices too? But, no, it has to be held back to suit
-the packers. And then they lower the price a little.
-Because why? The government lets them have all
-that meat for what they like.”
-
-“It’s the same way with the ice. Did you see
-what they done? The mayor gets them all together,
-to prevent them boosting the price on it, and it’s
-fixed; they can’t raise the price this summer to more
-than five fifty a ton. They wait two days at the old
-price, and then they put it at five fifty. Two days
-they wait, that’s all.”
-
-“Of course this is the best government in the
-world. I’ll tell you what proves it—all these foreigners
-coming over here. Look at that soda-fountain
-man there. You heard him talk up for the
-Bolsheviki, didn’t you? Well, he hasn’t much gray
-matter in here, but just the same that fellow makes
-as much in three months as I get for a whole lousy
-year. Three months, and he hasn’t been here ten
-years. And my people been here two hundred.
-But these immigrants come over ignorant and uneducated, and only down in Kentucky and Tennessee
-are our people not able to read and write. I hear
-down there they are regular tribes, fighting each
-other and all that. Of course that soda-fountain
-man, he couldn’t associate with lots of the people I
-go with. If he walked in, they’d look at him as
-much as to say, ‘Who have we here?’ But he
-rolls up the coin just the same.”
-
-“But the trouble with the Russian people, I’ll
-tell you. Why, eighty per cent of them can’t read
-or write. Now I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s
-like this: the Russian people is like a dog was tied
-up in the back-yard, see, and then he was let loose
-and he run wild with joy all over the place, and
-then it depended who was the first to whistle to him,
-whee-whee, and Lenin and Trotsky they whistled,
-whee-whee, and the Russian people came right to
-them. Of course I don’t think it’ll work. They
-want to do away with money over there. You know,
-you want to buy a shoeshine and you give a man a
-head of cabbage. That’s impractical. And then
-again the government can’t own everything. It’s
-all right for public utilities, but you take and try
-to control everything and what’ll happen? It can’t
-be done. What I say is, let a man earn a million
-or so, and then say to him, anything over and above
-that million we take away, see? And when he has
-his million he doesn’t go on trying to monopolize
-everything. But now, you have all these uneducated
-people around here, and the more money they
-earn the worse they are.”
-
-“I’ll tell you. Right across the hall from where
-my wife and me live there’s a lovely woman, a Jewess,
-one of the nicest people you could want to meet,
-and I’m in her house and she’s in mine all the time,
-until her husband comes home. But he’s one of
-that kind, you know! The other night he comes
-home with three friends and he says to me, ‘Say,
-Charlie, come on down to Long Island with us in
-the car for a week. I’ll pay all your expenses!’
-‘You will, eh,’ I says. ‘Now I’ll tell you something.
-That sort of thing don’t go with me. In
-the first place, you know I can’t get leave to be away
-from the police department for a week; in the second
-place, you know I can’t leave my wife here; in the
-third place, you know damn well I can’t afford
-to go with you. I know your kind! You have
-your three friends here and you want them to see
-what a great guy you are. Well, I’ll tell you what
-you are,’ and I told him. Now he’ll be the same
-if he has a million. And I’ll tell you another kind
-that hasn’t respectability. No, I mean decency.
-She was a big fat woman and her baby was crying
-here the other day, and she opened her dress right
-there and leaned down to feed the child. You
-know, just like that statue, I forget the name. And
-all the little boys rubbering around. That’s the
-class of people you have to contend with around
-here in this place, with the air full of fish guts they
-throw out of the windows, and everything.”
-
-“But the German ones are different. Not that
-I want to praise the Germans or the like of that,
-but they’re self-respectful, you know. It’s the lack
-of education with them others—those others.”
-
-“But you put the Socialists in power and what
-difference will it make? I’m—I’m not against
-Socialism, I want you to understand. But there’s
-human nature!”
-
-A PERSONAL PANTHEON
-===================
-
-Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine,
-Clarence Day shied a cocoanut at old Henri Fabre.
-Personally I had nothing against Henri. I rather
-liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence
-said publicly, “that old bird-artist, you don’t
-have to admire him any longer.” Without waiting
-for further encouragement I bounced Henri off the
-steps of my Pantheon.
-
-Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I
-admit, but nothing is so important as to keep it from
-getting crowded with half-gods. For many months
-my own Pantheon has been seriously congested.
-Most of the ancient deities are still around—George
-Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom
-Hardy and Sam Butler—and there is a long waiting
-list suggested by my friends. Joseph Conrad
-has been sitting in the lobby for several years, hungering
-for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated
-applications from such varied persons as
-Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, Anatole
-France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P.
-Shelley, John Muir, George Washington and Mary
-Wollstonecraft. But with so many occupants already
-installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed
-in, it has been impossible to open the doors to newcomers.
-My gods are like the office-holders—few
-die and none resign. And when a happy accident
-occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel
-as one feels when some third person is good enough
-to smash the jardinière.
-
-I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while.
-Two or three years ago he swept into the Pantheon
-on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse
-for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest
-gods I had ever encountered. His smile, his long
-jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a Tussaud
-figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and
-William Blakes. I stood him in the corner when he
-first arrived, debating where to put him, but at no
-time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young
-Teddy Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did
-Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did Mr. Wadsworth
-and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all,
-had kept Mr. Wilson from being a Republican?
-How did he differ intrinsically from a Henry Stimson,
-a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton?
-The pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had
-not the heart to enthrone him; and never shall I
-enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the
-flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and
-commonplace humanity. He is President, as was
-Taft. So is he impressive. But the expectation I
-had blown up for him is punctured. He would have
-been a god, despite all my prejudice against his styles,
-if at any time he had proved himself to be the resolute
-democrat. But the resolute democrat he was
-not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating
-his chest as well as he could, and he has to
-get out of my Pantheon.
-
-This eviction of the President relieves my feelings
-like a good spring cleaning. To be con-structive
-gives me pleasure, but not half so much pleasure as
-to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former
-mental and spiritual habitations. A great many
-people are catholic. They have hearts in which
-Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East
-Lynne. I envy these people and their receptive
-natures, but my own chief joy is to asphyxiate my
-young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage
-of loyalty.
-
-There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I
-was unjust to Upton Sinclair that I almost subscribed
-to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel, Jimmie
-Higgins, I actually read it.
-
-“My best book,” Mr. Sinclair assures the world.
-If that is really the case, as I hope, I am happily
-emancipated from him forever. He is something of
-an artist. He converts into his own kind of music
-the muck-rake element in contemporary journalism.
-He is always a propagandist, and out of religious
-finance or the war or high society or the stockyards
-or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that
-nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on
-such stimulants, one ought to choose them carefully,
-and I’d much rather go straight to Billy Sunday than
-take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on
-reading his well-known health books, I nearly fasted
-nine days under his influence. That is to say, I
-fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which
-I dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced
-me that I was perhaps a coarser organism than Mr.
-Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an ordinary diet.
-But until I had a good reason for expelling this
-uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always
-in danger of taking him seriously. Now, I am
-glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am
-safe.
-
-Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom
-Upton Sinclair is nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion
-of Nietzsche was also required. When we
-used to read the *New Age* ten years ago, with Oscar
-Levy’s steady derision of everything and anything
-not Nietzschean, I had a horrible sense of inadequacy,
-and I started out to read the Master’s works.
-It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and
-worm as I was, I found Nietzsche upsetting all the
-other fellows in the Pantheon. He and William
-Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity.
-Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny
-stories. He was sulky with George Meredith and
-frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss
-Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but
-I voted him away.
-
-This Olympian problem does not seem to bother
-men like William Marion Reedy. Mr. Reedy is
-the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee
-Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism,
-Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
-He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile
-salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops
-and publishers, and he is genuinely himself with all
-of them. He finds the common denominator in
-machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and
-without turning a hair he moves from tropical to
-arctic conversation. He is at home with Celtic fairies
-and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance and
-St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe
-he has, it must be a good deal like a Union depot,
-with gods coming in and departing on every train
-and he himself holding a glorious reception at the
-information booth. I am sure he can still see the
-silver lining to W. J. Bryan and the presidential
-timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun
-of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a
-good word for Freud. He has nothing against
-Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity
-puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies
-is called upon to slave in their service, to rush
-here and there like a general practitioner, to sleep
-with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at
-his head. How does he find the energy to do it!
-I admire it. I marvel at men who understand all
-and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore
-Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt
-Whitman. Think of those who have a good word
-to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am
-sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a
-lot of much-needed vitality. Give me a temple on
-a high hill, with a long drop down from the exit.
-
-NIGHT LODGING
-=============
-
-It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim
-Gorki’s Night Lodging of “gloom.” Gloomy
-plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one
-of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a
-play like She Walked in Her Sleep? That defunct
-comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle
-race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies
-that. But to believe that a somber play must
-necessarily be a “gloomy” play is like believing that
-Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply
-isn’t true, and to suppose it is mentally inelastic.
-
-But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We
-say, Ah yes, Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen,
-the man who bites on granite; or Gorki, the Big
-Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are
-simply human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions
-of the fifth grade. This is itself an old
-story in criticism. Only the story has to be re-told
-every time the New York newspaper critics are called
-upon to characterize a serious drama. With a regularity
-as unfailing as the moon, the New York critics
-reaffirm their conviction that a play concerning derelict
-human beings must of course be squalid, sodden,
-high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to
-believe and assert such things, yet their belief and
-assertion are endemic in the New York newspapers,
-like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps.
-
-Mr. Arthur Hopkins’s presentation of Night
-Lodging at the Plymouth Theatre may or may not
-be better than the presentation some time ago at the
-German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the
-performance at the German theatre and I am inclined
-to distrust the persons to whom the German
-theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick
-with which to whack the American theatre. But,
-better or worse than the German performance, Mr.
-Hopkins’s is to the good. It is a strong, firm, spacious,
-capable performance, resting not so much on
-a few pinnacles as on a general level of excellence.
-It is presented bravely. Making no attempt to
-sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics,
-it allows the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate
-every word and action of the performance. The
-result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every actor
-in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness.
-But the result is viable, Russian or not. A sense of
-human incident and human presence is quickly secured,
-and after that there comes a stream of events
-which never loses its reality either in force or direction.
-The impact is tremendous. Gorki inundates
-one’s consciousness with these human fortunes and
-misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while
-occasional accents slip awry in the tumult of his
-creation, the substance of his story finds one a corroborator—in
-a way that one simply never corroborates
-depression or gloom.
-
-The men and women, who come together in this
-night lodging of a Russian city, are of the emancipated
-kind that one sees on the benches in Madison
-Square. They are recruited from the casual worker
-and the non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the criminals and the broken
-and the déclassé. On the first evening when one
-hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement,
-one realizes that their anarchism is bitter.
-They grate on one another, sneer at one another,
-bawl at one another, tell one another to go to hell.
-They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled
-them. They do not understand or accept their fate.
-They are full of self-pity. They are, in a word,
-one’s tired and naked self. But this relaxed and
-wanton selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps
-for his people the freshness of childhood—a freshness
-charming in some cases, horrible in others, but
-always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal
-themselves in this nudity of common poverty!
-A woman in the corner is coughing, coughing. She
-wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His
-patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies
-a man half recovered from a drunken brawl. He
-aches loudly with stale liquor and stale wounds. In
-the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the
-wife of the lodging-house keeper—a mistress from
-whom he pines to escape. The “baron” sits in the
-shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary
-sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor
-repeats the medical verdict that his organism is
-poisoned with alcohol. “You mean ‘organon,’”
-shouts another. “No, organism. My organism....”
-And so, these lives sweep round and
-round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the sport of
-the winds of heaven.
-
-Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical
-patriarchal wanderer. Quite simply he fits into this
-life of the basement, but unlike the rest he is no
-longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect
-in his anarchism. And gradually the lives of the
-night lodging group around him. He sits by the dying
-woman. He talks of women to the young thief,
-and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning
-to the young. He stands like an untroubled
-oak in the gales that toss the others hither and
-thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets
-them all with compassion, a man among children.
-
-He goes. His presence has not prevented the
-lodging-house keeper’s wife from driving the young
-man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented that
-flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the
-young man really loves. But though the old man
-departs he leaves after him a rent of blue in the
-clouds that choke these people’s lives. One after
-another the night lodgers question life afresh under
-the wanderer’s influence. The tartar’s arm is still
-smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is
-still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The
-actor is still alcoholic. But there is aroused in the
-night lodging the imperishable dream of happiness,
-and no one is ready to quench it.
-
-Why is the grave and beautiful play *not* gloomy?
-It is not enough to say that the really gloomy play
-gives a naturalistic version of life which the spectator
-rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the
-falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows
-or in its discords but in its absence of the vitamin
-of beauty. Many plays are denied truth because
-their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied
-beauty simply because their beauty is a stranger.
-Yet we know that truth or beauty may be as sable
-as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the
-child of ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental,
-conventional ugliness. It is the people who
-think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see
-Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail
-in beholding life. It is not poor in sympathy.
-
-YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC
-=====================
-
-In 1912, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the
-public how Mr. Taft had bitten the hand that fed
-him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft’s rejoinder but it
-was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further observations
-from the colonel. Those were the days.
-Nothing but peace on earth and good will among
-Republicans.
-
-About that time I happened to have lunch with a
-most attractive young man, one of the first American
-aviators. He was such a clear-cut young man, with
-trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said
-he to me, “But how can these things be true? I
-can’t understand it. If any one else said these things
-you’d pay no attention to them, but both of these men
-are fine men; they’ve both been president; and if
-these things they say *are* true, then neither of them
-can be such fine gentlemen. I can’t make it out, honestly.”
-And he looked at me with a profundity of
-pained inquiry.
-
-What could I say? What can you say when you
-meet with such simple faith? It took years of
-primary school and Fourth of July and American
-history to build up this conception of the American
-presidents, and now the worst efforts of a president
-and an ex-president had only barely shaken the top-structure.
-What was the good of forcing this youth
-to unlearn everything he had learned? If I took
-away his faith in the divine office of president, perhaps
-he might begin to lose his patriotism and his
-willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps
-he might go on and lose faith in the jury
-system, the institution of marriage, the right of free
-speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance
-of Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment.
-If I unhinged this lad’s faith, perhaps he
-would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther,
-Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma
-Goldman—the “Goldman Woman” as the Ochs
-man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed
-man call her in their outbursts of American chivalry.
-I wanted no such arid and lonely career for this
-splendid young man. I hated to think of his wearing
-an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his
-fresh bloom to be a subversive idealist like Eugene
-Debs. Much better, said I to myself, that he should
-hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than that he
-should repulse him and face life without him. So I
-gave the lad soothing words and earnest though insincere
-glances, and he went his way puzzled but
-greatly reassured.
-
-Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say
-that simple faith is all very well, but a man ought to
-live in the real world and know his way around.
-Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing
-situation. He is compelled to evade uncomfortable
-facts. Very true. Quite right. Exactly so. But
-is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of
-being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a
-simpleton and yet a wholesome man of action, a man
-of will and character and pep? What is the good
-of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalatable facts, if it confuses you and upsets you and
-undermines everything you’ve been brought up to believe?
-What’s the use? Voltaire may be all right
-in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we
-all be Voltaires?
-
-If I stick up for good faith in the character of
-presidents, I know that there will be a bad comeback.
-I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even
-if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I
-therefore to give in to them? I refuse to admit
-that there is nothing else than to destroy a beautiful
-faith in the good that is everywhere.
-
-What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old
-argument of the war. They say: Yes, your fine
-brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical product
-of patriotism. And where were the prime examples
-of patriotism to be found? In Germany.
-He happens, in your instance, to believe in the divine
-office of the presidents. But it is much more characteristic
-of him to be on his knees to the Kaiser.
-Yet consider how one-sided you are. When he declares
-himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the
-joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his
-reverence over the Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of
-Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when it comes
-to an American you say, “Oh, don’t let’s destroy
-this beautiful faith! How precious it is, how noble,
-how commendable! Hands off, please.” And you
-act in the same way toward the Constitution or the
-Supreme Court. It’s magnificent when the Germans
-come ahead with a perfectly good new constitution,
-model 1920. But we must stick to the brand of
-1789, with the cow-catcher added in 1910. Hail to
-Our Iron Constitution! And hail to the Old Man’s
-Home down in Washington where they hand out the
-uncontaminated economics that they themselves
-lisped at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country.
-Straight from the source, these old men got their
-inspiration, and they are a credit to the early nineteenth
-century. You think we exaggerate your
-loyalty? You agree that the simple faith of young
-Germans and young Turks can be highly dangerous,
-but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young
-Americans?
-
-That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way;
-but hardly likely to fool the intelligent, law-abiding,
-God-fearing citizen. Because no good American
-could admit for one instant that the cases are on all
-fours. America, after all, is a democracy. And
-when a young man starts out having faith in a democracy
-he is in an altogether different position from
-Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet
-Russians and people like that. A democracy, whatever
-its faults, is founded in the interests of all the
-people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple
-faith in it is equivalent to simple faith in a first
-principle; and you cannot go behind first principles.
-
-That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic.
-He thinks it is very clever to question the things
-that are of the light in just the same spirit that he
-questions things that are of the darkness. And of
-course he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who
-cuts away the sound flesh rather than the diseased
-flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive
-not con-structive.
-
-And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion
-my fine young aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning
-him, who can tell what the consequences
-might have been? We know that during the war
-there were grim duties to be performed by our young
-men—towns to be bombed where it took excessive
-skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the
-women and the children. If I had sapped this boy’s
-faith even one pulsation, perhaps he would have
-failed in his duty.
-
-You cannot be too careful how you lead people to
-rationalize. In this world there is rationalism and
-plenty of it. But is there not also a super-rationalism?
-And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism
-when we *know* we possess the true faith?
-
-THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID [3]_
-======================================================
-
-The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so
-he had to pick his steps with care. But at last
-he came to a French window, which he opened, and
-sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was
-a poet, and that is what young poets do.
-
-He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men
-go. Unformed, of course—perhaps twenty minutes
-late and the hall only two-thirds full. But he
-was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the
-gas. He was from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho,
-but he had long resided with an aunt in Nebraska
-and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts
-and a lemon tie. At Harvard—he went to
-Harvard—he had opened his bean with considerable
-difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of
-temperament. So that he could never stop himself
-when he beheld a passing star.
-
-The motion was full, with significant curves. It
-made him a little air-sick at first, but he preferred
-air-sickness. He made no compromise with the
-public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days
-that quickly ceased to be solar, he was rewarded.
-He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of Venus on the
-main line.
-
-In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick
-their heels toward Mercury, and utter startling
-cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the menagerie,
-and they feed mathematical instructors through
-a hole in the wall. This new participant had too
-much of the stern blood of the Puritan in his rustproof
-veins to kick more than one heel at a time,
-but when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of
-seventy years he felt a little wishful, and permitted
-himself a trifling ululation. The local cheer-leader
-heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard
-Acutist, and there was joy in Asphodelia.
-
-A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping
-in the branches of the cocoanut tree, and the
-river of green ink wearied him. So when the next
-star swung around he slipped away from his pink
-duenna and crept into the lattice-work to steal his
-passage home.
-
-Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He
-hung there lonely, in his Reis underwear, aching in
-the void.
-
-He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he
-trans-shipped to New York in ordinary ways, he
-prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue
-course on Front Street.
-
-“My boy,” said his uncle, “what do you want
-me to do for you? Speak the word. You have
-been gone so long, and you were given up for lost.”
-
-“Only one thing do I want,” confessed the former
-Acutist.
-
-“And what might that be?” the uncle more circumspectly
-inquired.
-
-“Take me at once to the great simple embrace
-of wholesome Coney Island.”
-
-So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit,
-the young poet stepped from Acutism on to the
-Iron Boat.
-
-And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?...
-But must we not leave something to waft in
-the spaces of uncertainty?
-
-.. [3] Inscribed to the *Little Review*
-
-WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
-====================
-
-I am sorry now not to have treasured every word
-that came from my poet. At the moment I disliked
-to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my dignity.
-But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook
-are not ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity.
-Why should I have hesitated to take notes
-of William Butler Yeats?
-
-In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his
-host agreed, and I intruded on him as far as Philadelphia.
-I say intruded: his forehead wrinkled in
-tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I
-was welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he
-was not unwilling to speak. His dark eyes, oblique
-and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and
-remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a
-secret. He opened them for utterance almost as in
-a dream. As if he were spokesman of some sacred
-book spread in front of him but raptly remembered,
-he pronounced his opinions seriously, occasionally
-raising his hands to fend his words. He was, I
-think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was
-indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished
-conversation. Or, rather, monologue—for
-when I talked he suspended his animation, like
-a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.
-
-It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked
-him if he’d write for it, and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action and that
-nothing except the last stage of exasperation could
-make him want to write for a journal as he had
-written about Blanco Posnet or The Playboy. The
-word “journalism” he uttered as a nun might utter
-“vaudeville.” He was reminded, he said, of an
-offer that was made to Oscar Wilde of the editorship
-of a fashion paper, to include court gossip.
-Wouldn’t it interest Wilde? “Ah, yes,” responded
-Wilde, “I am deeply interested in a court
-scandal at present.” The journalist (devourer of
-carrion, of course) was immediately eager.
-“Yes,” said Wilde, “the scandal of the Persian
-court in the year 400 B. C.”
-
-It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession.
-I could not forget, however, pillars of the
-*Ladies’ World* edited by Oscar Wilde which I used
-to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended
-in the end.
-
-Yeats’s mind was bemused by his recollection of his
-fellow-Irishman. Once he completed his lectures he
-would go home, and a “fury of preoccupation”
-would keep him from being caught in those activities
-that lead to occasional writing. His lectures would
-not go into essays but into dialogues, “of a man
-wandering through the antique city of Fez.” In the
-cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there
-was a mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of
-the moment, the gaze of a stranger to fashion who
-might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond
-space and time.
-
-“And humanitarian writing,” he concluded, with
-a weary limp motion of his hand, “the writing of
-reformers, ‘uplifters,’ with a narrow view of democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And
-truistic.”
-
-I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel’s narrow antidemocracy
-and belief in the non-existence of progress,
-such as he had argued in Virginia during the
-Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate
-nature. The progress he denied was a progress
-wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the early Victorians.
-It was founded on “truisms” not really
-true. Whether Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to
-repudiate these ideas he didn’t know: possibly Mitchel
-was.
-
-Yeats’s one political interest at that time, before
-the war, was the Irish question. He believed in
-home rule. He believed the British democracy was
-then definitely making the question its own, and
-“this is fortunate.” I spoke of Jung’s belief in
-England’s national complex. He was greatly interested.
-Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted.
-“The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration,”
-he said, “and Carson has stimulated this.
-His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so there
-cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with
-Redmond that Carson has gone ahead on a military
-conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for a party
-reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think
-Asquith is a better man than Lloyd George—less
-inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed up with big
-phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it
-arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other
-people’s sins his business, and forgets his chief business,
-his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, that is different.”
-
-His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a
-good deal of audiences. In his own audiences he
-found no one more eager, no one who knows more,
-than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He
-was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find
-prosperity go hand in hand with culture in this country.
-In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely
-to be a poor audience. Where it is good, the audience
-is good. In his own country the happiest woman he
-could name was a woman living in a Dublin slum
-whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies.
-Is poverty an evil? We should desire a
-condition of life which would satisfy the need for
-food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in imagination.
-The merchant builds himself a palace
-only for auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as
-rich as the merchant. I said yes, but that a brute or
-a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination.
-He agreed. “Life is the warring of forces and these
-forces seem to be irreconcilable.”
-
-It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty.
-I spoke of the deadness of so much of the work done
-by William Sharp and Grant Allen. He said it was
-Allen’s own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too
-many thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up
-their children on the same scale as their friends’
-children! And he kindled at this folly. “A
-woman who marries an artist,” he said with much
-animation, “is either a goose, or mad, or a hero.
-If she’s a goose, she drives him to earn money. If
-she’s mad she drives him mad. If she’s a hero, they
-suffer together, and they come out all right.”
-
-Phrases like this were not alone. There was the
-keen observation that the Pennsylvania station is
-“free from the vulgarity of advertisement”; the
-admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry
-except in The Dark Rosaleen and Hussey’s Ode; a
-generalization on Chicago to the effect that “courts
-love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art.” Not
-for a moment did this mind cease to move over the
-face of realities and read their legend and interpret
-its meaning. Meeting him was not like Hazlitt’s
-meeting Coleridge. I could not say, “my heart,
-shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has
-never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak
-to; but that my understanding also did not remain
-dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to
-express itself, I owe to Coleridge.” But the Yeats
-I met did not meet me. I remained on the periphery.
-Yet from what I learned there I can believe in
-the sesame of poets. I hope that some one to-day,
-nearer to him than a journalist, is wise enough to
-treasure his words.
-
-“WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE”
-=========================
-
-Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of
-bombardment. A great detonation tore the silence;
-an answering explosion shook it; then came a series
-of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look
-out on a rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip
-of sky to the south. In the ache of something not
-unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as quickly
-as I could what was happening. No result from the
-explosions was to be seen. The skyscrapers were
-gaunt and black, with a square of lost light in a room
-or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the
-stars unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered,
-insanely active, beyond the blank buildings,
-under the serene sky.
-
-I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it
-be on the river? Could it be gun practice, or was
-there really an interchange of gun-fire? A U-boat?
-An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained
-and my mind was singularly lively for three
-a. m.
-
-Long after your country has gone to war, I told
-myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sympathies,
-what may fairly be called a neutrality of the
-imagination. You are aware that there is fighting,
-bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the philosophic.
-You do not put yourself in the place of
-Americans under fire. But if this be really bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant
-how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem
-the supreme understander of the situation. An
-enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would
-run a girdle of feeling from New York to the remotest
-fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. To protect
-ourselves against the hysteria of hatred—that
-would always be a necessity. But I grimly remembered
-the phrase, “proud punctilio.” I remembered
-the President’s tender-minded words, “conduct
-our operations as belligerents without passion,”
-and his pledge of sincere friendship to the German
-people: warfare without “the desire to bring any
-injury or disadvantage upon them.” Here, with the
-Germans’ shell-fire plowing into our buildings and
-into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of
-their guns?
-
-Becoming awake enough to think about the war,
-I began to reason about this “bombardment,” to
-move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson Maxim-Cleveland
-Moffett zone. The detonations were
-continuing, but not at all sensationally, and soon
-they began to shape themselves familiarly, to sound
-remarkably like the round noises of trains shunting,
-from the New York Central, carried on clear dry
-November air. Soon, indeed, it became impossible
-to conceive that these loud reverberations from the
-Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so distorted
-by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my
-breathless inspection of the innocent sky!
-
-But that touch of panic, in the interest of our
-whole present patriotic cultural attitude, was not to
-be lost. It is the touch, confessed or unconfessed,
-that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward
-German art and literature and science an attitude
-of appreciation and reciprocation, without disloyalty,
-it must be in the presence of the idea of shell-wounds
-German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness
-is the illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth
-and smug. It is Pharisaical. It comes from that
-neutrality of the imagination which is another name
-for selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake.
-
-A generation less prepared than our own for the
-mood of warfare it would be difficult to imagine—less
-prepared, that is to say, by the situation of our
-country or the color of our thought. To declare
-now that New York has made no provision for the
-air-traffic of the future is not to arouse any sense
-of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency
-was aroused ten or fifteen years ago by the bass
-warnings of military men. It is not too much to say
-that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have
-an ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas
-Murray Butler and Elihu Root and Andrew Carnegie
-were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel
-Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was
-far more busy enunciating the recall of judges—and
-he earned the Nobel Prize. Few men, even two
-years ago, believed we would be sending great armies
-to Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like
-Homer Lea had said that the United States could
-not mobilize half a million soldiers for active service
-in less than three years. And in the next place,
-we still felt pacifically. We had lived domestic life
-too long ever to imagine our sky black and our grass
-red.
-
-Because of this mental unpreparedness for war,
-this calm enjoyment of an unearned increment of
-peace, there was never a greater dislocation of standards
-than our recent dislocation, and never a greater
-problem of readjustment. For England, at any
-rate, there was a closeness to the war that helped
-to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here,
-besides the discrepancies in the entailment of services,
-there are enormous discrepancies in sentiment
-to start with, and policies still to be accepted and
-cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed
-or reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances,
-is so much to be looked for, especially
-with impetuous patriots demanding a new password
-of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not
-at how many outrages there are, but how few.
-
-Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of
-literary discussion, naturally. “Let the sailor content
-himself with talking of the winds; the herd of
-his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of
-his flocks”; the critic of his books. But there is one
-kind of outrage that requires to be discussed, from
-the point of view of culture, if only because there
-is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be
-subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally
-so-called, of mutilating everything German;
-not only sequestering what may be dangerous
-or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration
-everything that has German origin or bears a
-German name. The quick transformation of Bismarcks
-into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into
-Café New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously.
-The shudderings at Germantown, Pa., and
-Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same
-childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian
-artist is not permitted to perform because, while we
-are not at war with Austria, she is our enemy’s ally.
-It is different when “the music of all German composers
-will be swept from the programmes of scheduled
-concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh.
-‘The Philadelphia Orchestra Association
-wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure
-to the request of the Pittsburgh Association. The
-Philadelphia Orchestra Association is heartily in accord
-with any movement directed by patriotic motives.’”
-It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance
-to culture, that suggests we have been surprised
-in this whole matter of culture with our lamps untrimmed.
-
-In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have
-been unavoidably surprised—so much so that our
-“proud punctilio” has been jogged considerably
-loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any
-pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to
-be. It used to be possible, even for men whose
-hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign magnanimous
-truces; but science has made another kind of
-warfare possible, and the civilian population of the
-modern State, totally involved in a catastrophe beyond
-all reckoning, falls from its complacency into
-a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the
-enemy is inhuman in this war.
-
-Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred
-might well go beyond the fervor of the Inquisition,
-and the hope of exterminating the Germans as a
-people might be universally entertained. But no one
-who has read history to any purpose will trust too
-far to this particular emotionality of the hour. To
-say this, in the middle of a righteous war, may sound
-unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could
-be more traitorous and seditious than Lincoln’s
-Second Inaugural Address: “Both read the same
-Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes
-his aid against the other.... The prayers of both
-could not be answered—that of neither has been
-answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.
-‘Woe unto the world because of offenses!
-for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
-to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we
-shall suppose that American slavery is one of those
-offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs
-come, but which, having continued through his appointed
-time, he now wills to remove, and that *he
-gives to both North and South this terrible war, as
-the woe due to those by whom the offense came*, shall
-we discern therein any departure from those divine
-attributes which the believers in a living God always
-ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently
-do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may
-speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be
-said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and
-righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none;
-with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as
-God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
-finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s
-wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the
-battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do
-all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting
-peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” It
-is, perhaps, like quoting the Lord’s Prayer. And
-yet it is the neglected wisdom of a man who had
-gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war.
-
-But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside
-humanity. We are engaged in a war foreordained
-and necessary, a natural war. A war inescapable,
-yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of
-hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations
-as this is, however, scarcely possible.
-It is too much, in the face of superstitions, anxieties,
-and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of culture
-to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to
-go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation
-of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as
-attacked The Playboy of the Western World in
-New York is at once called “rowdy” and “despicable.”
-But in time of war it is part of its morality,
-or immorality, that culture must be subordinate
-to clamor, and that even national sculpture must
-become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respectable
-and idealizing long feet. How far this supervision
-of culture goes depends only on the degree of
-pressure. It may go so far as to make the domination
-of political considerations, state considerations,
-paramount in everything—precisely the victory that
-democracy, hoping with Emerson that “we shall one
-day learn to supersede politics by education,” has
-most to fear.
-
-It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that
-is free, that one must seek the opposition to enemy
-culture, not in the culture that is opposed. Must
-one, on this account, think any peace a good peace?
-To do so is to show an immunity from the actual
-which is not to be envied. It is only necessary to
-imagine New York bombarded, as many French and
-English and Belgian and Russian towns have been
-bombarded since the beginning of the war, to realize
-the rush of resistance that is born in mankind, expedient
-for government to recruit and to rally to
-the end. But for the man who has partaken of democratic
-culture this “end” involves democracy. All
-character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in the will
-to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The
-only course open to the man who is still concerned
-for democratic culture is to remember the nobility
-of Lincoln’s example—by concentrating on the offenses
-rather than the persons that cause the mighty
-scourge of war, to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred
-which will enrage our wounds.
-
-WAR EXPERTS
-===========
-
- “War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong
- arm. Not that these attributes do not have their place
- and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the
- chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count
- in this warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological
- science, industrial appliances, and technological training.
- As has been remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman’s
- war, and the gentleman, as such, is no better than
- a marplot in the game as it is played.”
-
- —Thorstein Veblen in *The Nature of Peace*.
-
-Across a park in Washington I followed the
-leisurely stride of two British officers. Their movement,
-punctuated by long walking-sticks, had a military
-deliberation which became their veteran gray
-hairs. They were in khaki uniforms and leather
-leggings, a red strip at the shoulder marking them
-as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses
-and tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn
-to the birds they were as of a grander race of men.
-After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked who
-they were and learned that one of them was simply
-a Canadian lawyer—and that, being a judge advocate,
-he was obliged to boot and spur himself in
-his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and
-down the elevator in polished leggings, for the good
-of the cause. Never in his life had he heard a
-machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything more dangerous than his family carving knife.
-On inspection his companion looked similarly martial.
-The only certain veteran in the parklet was a
-shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the
-grass.
-
-Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing
-of this description. It excites the romantic populace,
-composed of pedestrians like myself, and
-serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine
-order of values from which the shambling citizen
-is debarred. But back of the window-dressing, the
-rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared ovation
-and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different
-from these appearances as roots are different
-from flowers. If I had ever supposed that the gist
-of war was to be derived solely from contemplating
-uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion
-when I overheard the cool experts of war.
-
-These experts, such of them as I happened to
-overhear, had come with the British mission to
-America, and they were far other than the common
-notion of lords of war. The most impressive
-of them was a slight figure who reminded me externally
-of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw’s
-Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a
-don at Cambridge, a teacher of economics, and he
-retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert
-who counts on holding attention. It was not in
-him, as it is in so many older pooh-bah professors,
-to expect a deference to personal garrulity; but one
-gained an impression that no words were likely to
-be wasted on vacuous listeners by a person with such
-steel-gray eyes.
-
-From London, since the beginning of the war, this
-concentrated man had gone out of Paris, to Rome,
-to Petrograd, to join counsel with various allies on
-the science of providing munitions. It would never
-have occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced,
-sensitive, quiet-voiced professor to work out
-the economic killing of cattle. Yet almost as soon
-as he had volunteered in England he began on the
-task of adapting industry to slaughter, and there was
-no doubt whatever that his inclusive mind had procured
-the quick and effective killing of thousands of
-human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen
-to him. He was one of those men whom H. G.
-Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort of man
-who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind
-as nimble as quicksilver while he devised the soundest
-plan for launching the forces of his sphere. There
-was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a
-mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing
-of America for destructiveness as an engineer
-might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel with copper,
-and there was as little pretension in his manner as
-there was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated,
-he was obviously a university man, but he
-had come to the top by virtue of mental equipment.
-“Mental equipment” means many things, but
-plainly he was not of those remote academicians who
-go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He managed
-his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt
-swing and drive and bite of it could escape no one,
-and for all his almost plaintively modest demeanor
-he had instant arresting power. It was he and a
-few men like him who had made it feasible for amateur
-armies to loop round an empire a burning rain
-of steel.
-
-This master of munitions was not the only schoolman
-who had demonstrated brains. There was another
-professor, this time the purchaser of guns.
-He had come to his rôle from holding the kind of
-position that Matthew Arnold once had held. A
-meager figure enough, superficially the scholastic-dyspeptic,
-he had shown that the bureaucracy of
-education was no bad beginning for ordering a new
-department with small attention to the tricks, of merchandise,
-but with every thought as to technological
-detail. The conversation that went about did not
-seem to engage this man, except as it turned on such
-engrossing topics as the necessity for circumventing
-child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent
-cloud that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged
-itself in lightning decision which made no
-change in the obscurity from which it came.
-
-Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue
-I saw one late-working member of the mission stop
-wearily to fend off American inquisition. A training
-in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished
-exile a permanent nostalgia for Olympus—and
-how Olympian the British Foreign Office is, few
-Americans dare to behold. The candidature to
-this interesting service of a great democracy is
-limited to a “narrow circle of society” by various
-excellent devices, the first of which is that official
-conditions of entry fix the amount of the private
-means required at a minimum of £400 a year.
-“The primary qualification for the diplomatic
-service,” says one friendly interpreter of it, “is a
-capacity to deal on terms of equality with considerable
-persons and their words and works. Sometimes,
-very rarely, this capacity is given, in its
-highest form, by something which is hardly examinable—by
-very great intellectual powers. Ordinarily,
-however, this capacity is a result of nurture in an
-atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is
-scarcely too much to say that the present constitution
-of society provides this atmosphere of independence
-only where there is financial independence. In a
-very few cases freedom of mind and character is
-achieved elsewhere, but then a great price, not
-measurable by money, has to be paid for it—how
-great a price only those who have paid it know....
-The ‘property qualification’ is operative as a means
-of selecting a certain kind of character; no readjustment
-of pay could be a substitute for it. Undoubtedly,
-as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but
-the limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice
-or of a mere preference for wealth—it is a limitation
-imposed by the needs of the diplomatic service,
-and those needs are national needs.” Out of such a
-remarkable background, so redolent of “the present
-constitution of society,” my exiled diplomat took his
-weary stand before prying writers for the press.
-They wanted to know “the critical shrinking point.”
-They wished to discuss the “maximum theoretic
-availability.” He had no answer to make; he merely
-made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box
-that he set at his feet there were undoubtedly
-treasured figures, priceless information for Germany
-in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box
-might have been solid metal for any effect it had on
-the conversation. He was a kind of expert who
-took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; who
-punctuated silence with, “Look here, you’ve got
-hold of absolutely the wrong man.... Hanged if
-I know.... My dear sir, I haven’t the very
-faintest idea.”
-
-And yet this member of a caste was only coming
-through because he too was paying a technological
-price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and rubber—there
-was nothing his country might need which did
-not occupy him, staff officer of vital trafficking,
-throughout numbered nights.
-
-There were a few business men on the mission—mighty
-few considering their lordship in times of
-peace. Most of the dominant figures either from
-Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual
-who stood out as rather an exception to the
-prevailing type. He was an older man whose nature
-brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and
-high discourse and a happy gigantic effervescence.
-If a reputation brayed too loudly at him, he named
-its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him,
-he called it detestable and cried to knock the English
-*Nation’s* head against the *Manchester Guardian’s*.
-Yet he was distinguished from most of his colleagues
-as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own.
-To the organization of his country he had contributed
-one invaluable idea, and each problem that
-came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow immediate
-importance into the perspective of a natural
-philosophy. Not fond of a prearranged system, he
-irked more than the run of his countrymen at the
-stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great
-sweep of vigor he would start at the proposition of
-handling war industry, for example, on a basis not
-inadequate to the requirements; and out of his running
-oration would come a wealth of such suggestions
-as spring only from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind.
-
-These are a handful of England’s experts in wartime.
-They do not bear the brunt of the fight, like
-the soldiers, but the roots of the flower of war are in
-just such depths as employ these hidden minds.
-
-OKURA SEES NEWPORT
-==================
-
-Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend
-of mine in Japan. Jack said that Okura was taking
-two years off to study democracy, and would
-I steer him around. I was delighted. I offered
-Okura his choice of the great democratic scene, with
-myself as obedient personal conductor. He was
-very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray
-manner, and he asked if we could begin with Newport.
-I suspected a joke, but his eye never twinkled,
-and so to Newport we went.
-
-The dirty little Newport railway station interested
-Okura. So did the choked throat of Thames Street,
-with its mad crush of motors and delivery wagons
-and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from
-the meat market to the book shop and from the
-chemist’s to the Boston Store. I explained to Okura
-that this was not really Newport, only a small sample
-of the ordinary shopping country town, with the
-real exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind.
-Okura clucked an acceptance of this remark, and our
-car wove its difficult way through the narrow lane till
-we returned to Bellevue Avenue.
-
-The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded
-to Okura. He expected a belle vue, not a good
-plain plutocratic American street. When I told him
-what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied
-with its exhibition of assorted architecture, and he
-broke into open comment. “So very charming!”
-he cried politely. “So like postcards of Milwaukee
-by the lake!” I enjoyed his naïve enthusiasm and
-let it go.
-
-He wanted to know who lived on the avenue,
-and I told him all the names I could think of. He
-had heard many of them, the samurai of America
-being known to him as a matter of course, and he
-picked up new crumbs of information with obvious
-gratitude.
-
-“Vanderbilt? Oh, yes.” That was old. So
-were Astor and Belmont.
-
-After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. “I do
-not see the McAlpin mansion.”
-
-“The McAlpins? I have never heard of them,”
-I murmured indulgently.
-
-“But that is one name I think I remember correctly,”
-Okura answered with visible anxiety.
-“The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the
-Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not
-understand. Are not the McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?”
-
-It was hard to convince Okura that this was not
-a Valhalla of hotel proprietors, but at last he got
-it straight. We went back again as far as the
-Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament.
-
-Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats
-up rather far—well, to be frank, among the Jamestown
-and Saunderstown people. But happily we
-had Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of
-the ladies sat facing the tennis, some sat with their
-backs to it, and a great buzz of conversation reverberated
-under the roof of the stand and billowed on
-to the court. On the court two young men strove
-against each other with a skill hardly to be matched
-in any other game, and occasionally, when something
-eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple
-passed through the crowd. But the applause was irregular.
-People had to be watched and pointed out.
-It was important to note which human oyster bore
-the largest pearl. The method of entry and exit
-was significant, and significant the whole ritual of
-being politely superior to the game.
-
-Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately,
-and there was so much conversation he was rather
-distracted.
-
-“I hope it does not annoy you?” I asked him.
-
-“Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so
-democratic!”
-
-At this point the umpire got off his perch, and
-came forward to entreat the fine ladies.
-
-“I have asked you before to keep quiet,” he
-wailed. “For God’s sake, will you stop talking?”
-
-“How very interesting,” murmured Okura.
-
-“Yes,” I said, “the religious motif.”
-
-“Ah, yes!” he nodded, very gravely.
-
-Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play,
-and we decided to return to the tournament; but first
-we took ourselves to Bailey’s Beach.
-
-Bailey’s Beach is a small section of the Atlantic
-littoral famous for its seaweed. The seaweed is
-of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in in large
-quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind
-and other picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy
-carpet through which one wades out to the more
-fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies in
-their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching
-the more adventurous sex pick his way out of the
-vegetable matter. In the pavilion of the bathhouses
-sit still less adventurous groups.
-
-It took some time to explain to Okura why this
-beach, once devoted to the collection of seaweed for
-manure, should now be dedicated to bathing. But
-he grasped the main point, that it was a private
-beach.
-
-“Forgive me,” he said, “I see no Jews.”
-
-“That’s all right,” I answered. “You are studying
-democracy. There are no Jews here. None
-allowed.”
-
-“Oh!” he digested the fact. Then his eye
-brightened. “Ah, you have your geisha girls at the
-swim-beach. How very charming!”
-
-“No,” I corrected him. “Those are not our
-geisha girls. That is the ‘shimmy set.’ You know:
-people who are opposed to the daylight saving act
-and the prohibition amendment.”
-
-“Oh, I understand. Republicans,” he nodded
-happily.
-
-As the Servants’ Hour was approaching at Bailey’s
-Beach, and as I had no good explanation to give
-of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along by
-the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by
-the walk, and by the fact that it ran in front of
-these private houses, free to the public as to the
-wind. Once or twice we went down below stone
-walls, with everything above hidden from us, but
-this was exceptional. Okura thought the walk a fine
-example of essential democracy.
-
-“And what are those long tubes?” he asked, as
-we gazed out toward Portugal.
-
-“Sewer pipes,” I said bluntly, looking at the great
-series of excretory organs that these handsome democratic
-mansions pushed into the sea.
-
-“Are they considered beautiful?” asked Okura.
-
-“Quite,” I told him. “They are one of the
-features provided strictly for the public.”
-
-“So kind!” said the acquiescent Japanese.
-
-We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose
-plutocracy was not entirely intact, and but for one
-instructive incident it was an ordinary civilized meal.
-That incident, however, shall live long in my memory
-because of my inability to interpret it to Okura.
-
-We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat
-down, when the third man was called to the telephone.
-
-He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his
-hostess, “I’m awfully sorry, I’ve got to leave.”
-
-His hostess looked apprehensive. “I hope it’s
-nothing serious?”
-
-“Oh, not at all; please don’t worry,” he responded,
-plumping down his napkin, “but I’ve just
-had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She’s a man short
-and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So
-long. Awfully sorry!”
-
-“What did that mean, please?” Okura inquired,
-as we hurried back to see Kumagae play.
-
-“Do you mean, democratically?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“I give it up,” I retorted.
-
-“But Mr. Owen said you would want to interpret
-everything democratic to me,” Okura ventured
-on, “and is there not some secret here hidden from
-me? I fear I am very stupid.”
-
-Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not explain.
-
-“But,” pressed Okura, “‘the world has been
-made safe for democracy.’ I want so much to
-understand it. I fear I do not yet understand Newport.”
-
-And he looked at me with his innocent eyes.
-
-THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED
-=============================
-
-It is the boast of more than one proud author,
-popular or unpopular, that he never reads any criticism
-of his own work. He knows from his wife or
-his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists.
-Sometimes in hurrying through the newspaper he
-catches sight of his unforgettable name. Inadvertently
-he may read on, learning the drift of the
-comment before he stops himself. But his rule is
-rigid. He never reads what the critics say about
-him.
-
-Before an author comes to this admirable self-denial
-he has usually had some experience of the
-ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he started
-out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself,
-Of course I don’t profess to *like* criticism. Nobody
-likes to be criticized. But I hope I am big enough
-to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No man
-can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but
-so long as criticism is helpful, that’s all a man has
-a right to ask. Is it meant to be helpful? If so,
-shoot.
-
-After some experience of helpful criticism, it will
-often occur to the sensitive author that he is not
-being completely understood. A man’s ego should
-certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn’t
-a man a right to his own style and his own personality? What is the use of criticism that is based
-on the critic’s dislike of the author’s personality?
-The critic who has a grudge against an author simply
-because he thinks and feels in a certain way is
-scarcely likely to be helpful. The author and the
-critic are not on common ground. And the case is
-not improved by the very evident intrusion of the
-critic’s prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly obvious
-that a man with a bias will see in a book just
-what he wants to see. If he is a reactionary, he
-will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik
-he will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use
-of reading criticism? The critic merely holds the
-mirror up to his own nature, when he is not content
-to reproduce the publisher’s prepared review.
-
-The author goes on wondering, “What does he
-say about me?” But the disappointments are too
-many. Once in a blue moon the critic “understands”
-the author. He manages, that is to say,
-to do absolutely the right thing by the author’s ego.
-He strokes it hard and strokes it the right way.
-After that he points out one or two of the things
-that are handicapping the author’s creative force,
-and he shows how easily such handicaps can be removed.
-This is the helpful, appreciative, perceptive
-critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty
-bristling young egoists who want figs to grow on
-thistles and cabbages to turn into roses, and who
-blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill.
-These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest
-in the author. They are only interested in themselves.
-And so, having tackled them in a glow of
-expectation that has always died into sulky gloom,
-the author quits reading criticism and satisfies his
-natural curiosity about himself by calling up the publisher
-and inquiring after sales.
-
-For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without
-being able to point to much better models.
-Critics are of course superior to most authors, yet
-I do not know many critics who like to be criticized.
-It does not matter whether they are thin-skinned
-literary critics or the hippopotami of sociology.
-They don’t like it, much. Some meet criticism with
-a sweet resourcefulness. They choke down various
-emotions and become, oh, so gently receptive.
-Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious
-diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity
-that makes criticism nothing less than a personal
-affront. And then there is the way of the combative
-man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge
-to a fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual
-circles is the man who takes criticism on its
-merits and thinks it natural that he should not only
-criticize but be criticized.
-
-The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in
-his ego. His frigid reception of criticism corresponds
-to something like a secret terror of it. His
-air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity:
-he hates being called on to defend himself in anything
-like a rough-and-tumble fight. He resents
-having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried
-in the duel of dispute.
-
-To hand down judgments, often severe judgments,
-is part of the pontifical character. But the
-business of meeting severe judgments is not so
-palatable. As most men grow older and more
-padded in their armchair-criticism, they feel that
-they become entitled to immunity. The Elder
-Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they
-are, the more they try to browbeat their critics.
-They see criticism as the critic’s fundamental inability
-to appreciate their position.
-
-If you are going to be criticized, how take it?
-The best preparation for it is to establish good
-relations with your own ego first. If you interpose
-your ego between your work and the critic you cannot
-help being insulted and injured. The mere fact
-that you are being subjected to criticism is almost
-an injury in itself. You must get to the point where
-you realize the impregnability of your own admirable
-character. Then the bumblings of the critic
-cannot do less than amuse you, and may possibly be
-of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself,
-yet he started out rather indifferent to you, and the
-mere fact that he is willing to criticize you is a
-proof that he has overcome the initial inhumanity
-of the human race. This alone should help, but
-more than that, you have the advantage of knowing
-he is an amateur on that topic where you are most
-expert—namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps
-if you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the
-beginning of the entente between you is that he
-should always start out by appeasing your ego.
-
-BLIND
-=====
-
-He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He
-could tend the furnace and help around the house—scour
-the bath-tub and clean windows—but for a
-powerful man these were trivial chores. The
-trouble with him, as I soon discovered, was complete
-and simple. He was blind.
-
-I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be
-blind, but it was terrible to be blind and at the
-mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs. Angier
-ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier
-of a woman, very tall and very bony, with a virile
-voice and no touch of femininity except false curls.
-She wore rusty black, with long skirts, and a tasseled
-shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls.
-She hated her rooming-house and every one in it.
-Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save
-enough money out of her establishment to escape
-from it. To that end she plugged the gaps in the
-bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the
-furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief
-sacrifice on the altar of her economy was Samuel
-Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was blind and
-useless, he was dependent on her. When she called,
-he literally ran to her, crying, “Coming, coming!”
-He might be out on the window-sill, risking his poor
-neck to polish the windows that he would never see,
-but, “Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I—would you be so good—ah, you are very kind.
-Coming, Adelaide, just one moment....” and he
-would paddle down stairs. She treated him like
-dirt. Sometimes one would arrive during an interview
-between them. The spare, gimlet-eyed Mrs.
-Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel
-to cringe in every limb. He was a burly man with
-a thick beard, iron-gray, and his sightless eyes were
-hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed
-spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his
-voice booming heartily, he was a cheerful, honest
-figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though he was a most
-platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier
-tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a
-water-bucket or leaving a duster on the stairs or
-forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he became infantile,
-tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always
-changed to a sugared greeting as one was recognized.
-“Good e-e-evening, isn’t it a pleasant e-e-evening?”
-But the only value in speaking to Mrs.
-Angier was that it permitted Samuel somehow to
-shamble away to the limbo of the basement.
-
-Of course I wanted to know how, he became blind.
-Luckily, as Mrs. Angier had prosperous relatives in
-another part of Chicago, she sometimes could be
-counted on to be absent, and on those occasions
-or when she went to church, Samuel haunted my
-room. He was unhappy unless he was at work, and
-he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I
-really believe he liked to chatter to me: and he was
-more than anxious to tell me how his tragedy had
-befallen him.
-
-“Oh, dear, yes,” he said to me, “it happened
-during the strike. They hit me on the head, and
-left me unconscious. And I have never seen since,
-not one thing.”
-
-“Who hit you, Samuel?”
-
-“Who hit me? The blackguards who were out
-on strike, sir. They nearly killed me with a piece
-of lead pipe. Oh, dear, yes.”
-
-It seemed an unspeakable outrage to me, but in
-Samuel there was nothing but a kind of healthy indignation.
-He was not bitter. He never raised
-his voice above its easy reminiscent pitch.
-
-“But what did you do to them? Why did the
-strikers attack you? What strike was it?”
-
-“I did nothing at all to them. But, you see, my
-horse slipped and when I was helpless on the ground
-with my hip smashed, one of them knocked me out.
-It was right up on the sidewalk. I had gone after
-them up on the sidewalk, and I suppose the flags
-were so slippery that the horse came down.”
-
-“But what were you doing on a horse?” I asked
-in despair.
-
-“I was a volunteer policeman. These scoundrels
-were led by Debs, and we were out to see that
-there was law and order in Chicago.”
-
-“Oh, the Pullman strike. Were you railroading
-then?”
-
-“Railroading? No, sir, I was in the wholesale
-dry-goods business. We had just started in in a
-small way. I was married only two years, to Adelaide’s
-younger sister. Ah, my accident brought
-on more trouble than she could stand. She was
-very different from Adelaide, quite dainty and lively,
-if you follow me. We were living at that time on
-Cottage Grove Avenue, on the south side. I was
-building up the importing end of the business, and
-then this thing came, and everything went to smash.
-They gave me no compensation whatsoever, to make
-the thing worse.”
-
-“But, Samuel, how did you come to be out against
-the strikers?”
-
-“And why shouldn’t I be out, I’d like to know!”
-Samuel straightened up from rubbing a chair, and
-pointed his rag at my voice. “These scoundrels
-had nothing against Mr. Pullman. He treated
-them like a prince. But they took the bit in their
-teeth, and once they break loose where are we?
-The President didn’t get shut of them till he sent
-in the troops. But I’ve always contended that if
-we business men had taken the matter in hand ourselves
-and nipped the trouble in the bud, we’d have
-had no such lawlessness to deal with in the end. It
-is always the same. The business men are the backbone
-of the community, but they don’t recognize
-their responsibility! Take the sword to those
-bullies and blackguards; that’s what I say!”
-
-The old man lifted both fists like a dauntless
-Samson, and fixed me with his sightless eyes. He
-had paid hellishly for living up to his convictions,
-and here they seemed absolutely unshaken.
-
-“That’s all right, too, Samuel,” I said, feebly
-enough, “but how do you feel now? Nobody compensated
-you for being laid out in that big strike,
-and your business was ruined, and here you are
-emptying the waste-basket. How about that? I
-think it’s fierce that you got injured, but those men
-in the Pullman strike weren’t out to break up society.
-They were fighting for their rights, that’s
-all. Don’t you think so now?”
-
-“*No*, sir. The solid class of the community must
-be depended upon to preserve law and order. I
-think that it was the duty of the business men of
-Chicago to put down ruffianism in that strike and
-to smite whenever it raised its head. Smite it
-hip and thigh, as the saying is. Oh, no. Young
-men have fine notions about these things, ha, ha!
-You’ll excuse me, won’t you, but you can’t allow
-violence and disorder to run riot and then talk of
-men’s ‘rights’ as an excuse. Ah, but it was a great
-misfortune for me, I confess. It was the end of
-all my hopes. The doctors thought at first that the
-sight might be restored, but I have never seen a
-glimmer of light since. But we mustn’t repine, must
-we? That’d never do.”
-
-“Samuel!” Mrs. Angier’s sharp voice pierced
-the room.
-
-“Good gracious, back so soon. You’ll excuse me,
-I’m sure.... Coming, Adelaide, coming!”
-
-He groped for his bucket, with its seedy sponge
-all but submerged in the dirty water. The water
-splashed a little as he hurriedly made for the door.
-
-“Oh, dear,” he muttered, “Adelaide won’t like
-that!”
-
-“AND THE EARTH WAS DRY”
-=======================
-
-Like all great ideas it seemed perfectly simple
-when Harrod first disclosed it to his unimportant
-partner John Prentiss.
-
-“Of course we’ll get back of it. We’ve got to,”
-said Harrod, in the sanctity of the directors’ room.
-“You’ve been down to Hopeville on pay day. It’s
-the limit. Ordinary days there’s practically no
-trouble. Pay day’s a madhouse. How many men,
-do you think, had to have the company doctor last
-pay day?”
-
-“You don’t expect me to answer, Robert,” Prentiss
-replied mildly. “You’re telling me, you’re not
-arguing with me.”
-
-“Twenty-five, Prentiss, twenty-five drunken
-swine. What do you think happened? I’ll tell you.
-That doctor never stopped a minute taking stitches,
-sewing on scalps, mending skulls. He was kept on
-the hop all day and night all over the town. I’ll
-tell you something more.” The sturdy Harrod
-rapped his fist on the mahogany table, leaning out
-of his armchair. “The doctor’s wife told me a
-Polack came to her shack at two in the morning
-with half his thumb hanging off, bitten off in a
-drunken brawl. What do you think she did,
-Prentiss? She amputated it herself, on her own
-hook, just like a little soldier. She’s got nerve, let
-me tell you. But do you think we want to stand
-for any more of this? Not much. Hopeville is
-going dry!”
-
-Mr. Harrod produced a gold pen-knife and
-nicked a cigar emphatically. He brushed the tiny
-wedge of tobacco from his plump trouser leg on to
-the bronze carpet. He lit his cigar and got up to
-have a little strut.
-
-Poor Prentiss looked at him as only a weedy
-Yankee can look at a man whose cheeks are rosy
-with arrogant health. Why the stout Harrod who
-ate and drank as he willed should be proclaiming
-prohibition, while the man with a Balkan digestive
-apparatus should be a reluctant listener, no one
-could have analyzed. It never would have occurred
-to Prentiss to be so restlessly efficient. But Harrod
-was as simple as chanticleer. He’d made up his
-mind.
-
-“We’ll back Billy Sunday. His advance agent
-will be in town this week,” Mr. Harrod unfolded.
-“We’ll put the whole industry behind him. Drink
-is a constant source of inefficiency. It’s an undeniable
-cause. When do we have accidents? On
-Mondays, regularly. The men come back stupefied
-from the rotgut they’ve been drinking, and it’s
-simple luck if they don’t set fire to the mine. The
-Hopeville mine is perfectly safe. Except for that
-one big disaster we had, it’s one of the safest mines
-in the country. But how can you call any mine safe
-if the fellows handling dynamite and the men working
-the cage are just as likely as not to have a hangover?
-We’ll stop it. We’ll make that town so
-dry that you can’t find a beer bottle in it. It took
-me some time to realize the common sense of this
-situation, but it’s as clear as daylight; it’s ridiculously clear. We’re fools, Prentiss, that we didn’t
-advocate prohibition twenty years ago.”
-
-“Twenty years ago, Robert,” Prentiss murmured,
-“you were checking coal at the pit-head. You
-weren’t so damned worried about evolving policies
-for the mine owners twenty years ago.”
-
-“Well, you know what I mean,” Robert Harrod
-rejoined.
-
-“Perfectly,” retorted Prentiss. “And I’m with
-you, though all the perfumes of Arabia won’t cleanse
-these little hands.”
-
-That was the first gospel, so to speak, and Harrod
-was as good as his word. He saw Sunday’s advance
-agent, he rallied the industry, he lunched with
-innumerable Christians and had a few painful but
-necessary political conferences. The prohibitionist
-manager he discovered to be a splendid fellow—direct,
-clean-cut, intelligent, indefatigable. The
-whole great state was won to prohibition after a
-strenuous preparation and a typically “bitter” campaign.
-
-And everything went well at Hopeville. At first,
-not unnaturally, there was a good deal of rebellion.
-A few of the miners—you know Irish miners,
-born trouble-makers—talked considerably. Something
-in them took kindly to the relief from monotony
-that came with a periodic explosion, and they
-muttered blasphemously about the prohibitionists,
-and time hung heavy on their hands. A few of them
-pulled out, preceded by the gaunt Scotchman who
-had run the bare “hotel” where most of the
-whisky was consumed. These were led by a sullen
-compatriot of their own, a man who once was a fine
-miner but who had proved his own best customer in
-the liquor business and whose contour suggested
-that his body was trying desperately to blow a bulb.
-One miner left for a neighboring state (still wet)
-to purchase a pair of boots. He crawled back on
-foot after a week, minus the new boots, plus a pawn-ticket,
-and most horribly chewed by an unintelligent
-watchdog who had misunderstood his desire to borrow
-a night’s lodging in the barn. The drinking
-haunts were desolate reminders of bygone entertainments
-for weeks after the law took effect, and
-few of the younger men could look forward to tame
-amusement, amusement that had no elysium in it,
-without a twinge of disgust. But on the whole,
-Hopeville went dry with surprising simplicity. A
-great many of the miners were neither English,
-Scotch, Cornish, Welsh nor Irish, but Austrians
-and Italians and Poles, and these were not so inured
-to drinking and biting each other as Mr. Harrod
-might have thought. The mud in Hopeville, it is
-true, was often from nine inches to four feet deep,
-and there were no named streets, and no known
-amusements, and a very slim possibility of distraction
-for the unmarried men. After prohibition,
-however, a far from unpleasant club house was
-founded, with lots of “dangerous” reading material,
-and a segregated place for homemade music,
-and bright lights and a fire, and a place to write
-letters, and a pungent odor of something like syndicalism
-in the air.
-
-That was the beginning. The men did not detonate
-on pay day, except in lively conversation.
-There was less diffused blasphemy. It concentrated
-rather particularly on one or two eminent men.
-And when the virtues and defects of these men were
-sufficiently canvassed, the “system” beyond them
-was analyzed. Even the delight of the Hunkies in
-dirt, or the meanness of certain bosses, began to
-be less engrossing than the exact place in the terrestrial
-economy where Harrod and Prentiss got
-off.
-
-“Well, Robert,” inquired the man of migraine,
-back in the home office, “how is your precious
-prohibition working? It seems to me the doctor’s
-wife is the sole beneficiary so far.”
-
-“Working?” the rubicund Harrod responded
-urgently. “I don’t know what we’re going to do
-about it. You can’t rely on the men for anything.
-A few years ago, after all, they took their wages
-over to Mason and blew it all in, or they soaked up
-enough rum in Hopeville to satisfy themselves, and
-come back on the job. Now, what do they do?
-They quit for two weeks when they want to. They
-quit for a month at a time. And still they have a
-balance. You can’t deal with such men. They’re
-infernally independent. They’re impudent with
-prosperity. I never saw anything like it. We can’t
-stand it. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
-
-“You’re going to back the liquor trade, Robert,
-of course. That’s simple enough.”
-
-“You may laugh, but it is too late, I tell you,
-the harm’s done. We can’t remedy it. National
-prohibition is right on top of us. I don’t know what
-we’ll do.”
-
-“Sell ’em Bevo. That’ll keep them conservative.
-Ever drink it?”
-
-“Bevo? Conservative? Prentiss, this is serious.
-These men are completely out of hand.”
-
-“Well, aren’t they more efficient?”
-
-“Of course they’re more efficient. They’re too
-damnably efficient. They wanted Hopeville drained
-and they’re getting it drained. They’ll insist on
-having it paved next. They’ll want hot and cold
-water. They’ll want bathtubs. That’ll be the
-end.”
-
-“The end? Come, Robert, perhaps only the
-beginning of the end.”
-
-“It’s very amusing to you, Prentiss, but you’re
-in on this with me. We’ve forced these working-men
-into prohibition, and now they’re sober, they’re
-everlastingly sober. They’re making demands and
-getting away with it. We’ve got to go on or go
-under. Wake up, man. I’ve played my cards.
-What can we do?”
-
-“What can we do? That is not the point now.
-Now the point is, what’ll *they* do.”
-
-TELEGRAMS
-=========
-
-In my simple world a cablegram is so rare that
-I should treasure the mere envelope. I should not
-be likely to resurrect it. It would be buried in
-a bureau, like a political badge or a cigar-cutter—but
-there is a silly magpie in every man, and a cable
-I would preserve. To discuss cablegrams or even
-cut-rate wireless, however, would be an affectation.
-These are the orchids of communication. It is the
-ordinary telegram I sing.
-
-There was a magnificence about a quick communication
-in the days before the Western Union.
-Horsemen went galloping roughshod through scattering
-villages. It was quite in order for a panting
-messenger to rush in, make his special delivery, and
-drop dead. This has ceased to be his custom. In
-Mr. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class there is
-one omission. He neglected to deal with that great
-adept in leisure, the messenger-boy. “Messenger-boy”
-is a misnomer. He is either a puling
-infant or a tough, exceedingly truculent little ogre
-of uncertain age and habit. His life is consecrated.
-He cares for nothing except to disprove the axiom
-that a straight line is the shortest distance between
-two points. Foreseeing this cult of the messenger
-service, the designers of the modern American city
-abandoned all considerations of beauty, mystery, and
-suggestion in an heroic effort to circumvent the boy
-in blue. But the boy in blue cannot be beaten.
-By what art he is selected I know not. Whether
-he is attributable to environment or heredity I dare
-not guess. But with a possible inferiority to his
-rival, the coat-room boy, and, of course, nature’s
-paradox the crab, he is supreme.
-
-It is not a telegram in its last stages that has
-magic. Much better for the purposes of drama to
-have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not a
-laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a telegram
-has magic. If you are hardened you do not
-register. It is the fresh who have the thrill. But
-no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever
-so inured, there is one telegram, *the* telegram, which
-will find your core.
-
-Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while
-an important person, usually a man but occasionally
-a woman, gets a handful of mail without any sign
-of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even
-sorting out the wires. Such persons are marked.
-They are in public life. It is pardonable. There
-must be public men and public women. I should not
-ask any one to give up his career for the peculiar
-ecstasies of the telegram. But no one can deny that
-these persons have parted with an essence of their being.
-What if I find a solitary notice? “It is under
-your door.” I bolt for the elevator, thrilled, alive.
-
-It may be suggested that my over-laden predecessors
-are not in public life; that they are very
-distinguished, very wealthy personages, receiving
-private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their
-children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other
-of their responsibilities, accessories, possessions.
-With every deference I answer that you are mistaken. Unless their riches are in a stocking, these
-are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels.
-Their title may be secure, but not their peace of
-mind. Whatever they wish, they are obliged to
-administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of
-gravitation keeps pulling, pulling at their chandeliers.
-And so in some degree they are connected
-with, open to, shared by, innumerable people.
-Without necessarily being popular, they are in the
-center of populace. They have to meet, if only to
-repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus being
-public characters. It is often against their desires.
-But being called upon to convert a part of
-their souls into a reception-room, a place where
-people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it
-follows that they give up some of their ecstatic
-privacy in order to retain the rest. This I do not
-decry. For certain good and valuable considerations
-one might be induced to barter some of one’s
-own choice stock of privacy, but for myself I should
-insist on retaining enough to keep up my interest
-in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be
-dogged by urgent brokers and punctilious butlers,
-no.
-
-“There’s a telegram upstairs for you, sir.” “A
-telegram? How long has it been here?” “It
-came about half an hour ago.” “Ah, thank
-you.... No, never mind, I’m going upstairs.”
-What may not this sort of banality precede? Perhaps
-another banality, in ink. But not always. A
-telegram is an arrow that is aimed to fly straight
-and drive deep. Whether from friend or rival,
-whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the
-heart is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the
-message has come, singing enigmatically across the
-country. But there is a path that leaps out of the
-dingy office to countless court-rooms, business buildings,
-homes, hospitals. That office is truly a ganglion
-from which piercing nerve-fibers curve into the
-last crevices of human lives. When you enter it to
-send a telegram it may depress you. You submit
-your confidence across a public counter. But what
-does it matter to a creature glazed by routine? He
-enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of
-their meaning. To him a word is not a bullet—just
-an inert little lump of lead.
-
-Some messages come with a force not realizable.
-Tragedy dawns slowly. The mind envisages, not
-apprehending. And then, for all the customary
-world outside, one is penned in one’s trouble alone.
-One remembers those sailors who were imprisoned
-in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off from
-escape, red-hot iron plates between them and the
-assuaging waters on every side, they could see the
-free, could cry out to them, could almost touch hands.
-But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a
-slip of paper one may meet one’s own. There are
-countries to-day where the very word *telegram* must
-threaten like a poisoned spear. And such wounds as
-are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often
-powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in suspense
-is worse than dreadful certainty. But there
-are shocks which are irreparable. It is cruel to
-break those shocks, crueler to deliver them.
-
-All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion,
-the telegram attends on death, it attends no less
-eagerly on love and birth. “A boy arrived this
-morning. Father and child doing well”—this is
-more frequently the tenor of the wire. And the
-wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remember
-Bernard Shaw’s rebuff to Lady Randolph
-Churchill for asking him to dinner? He had the
-vegetarian view of eating his “fellow-creatures.”
-He chided her for inviting a person of “my well-known
-habits.” “Know nothing of your habits,”
-came the blithe retort, “hope they’re better than
-your manners.”
-
-The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we
-struggled to put our all in ten words—simple, at
-least, if not sensuous and passionate. Now the day-letter
-and night-letter lead us into garrulity. No
-transition from Greek to Byzantine could be worse
-than this. We should resist it. The time will
-doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as
-austere and frugal in our use of the telegram. But
-we should preserve this sign of our Spartan manhood.
-Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of
-long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive,
-virginal, terse.
-
-OF PLEASANT THINGS
-==================
-
-When I was a child we lived on the border of
-the town, and the road that passed our windows
-went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under
-the old city gateway and out through the mean city
-“lanes.” The other branch turned round our
-corner and ran into the countryside. Day and night
-many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing.
-In the day-time I took no pleasure in them,
-but when I awoke at night and the thick silence was
-broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it
-filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this
-enchantment. The steady effort of the wheels, their
-rattle as they passed over the uneven road, their
-crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute
-pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a
-solitary lantern swings underneath the wagon. In
-the old days the load might be coal, with the colliery-man
-sitting hunched on the driver’s seat, a battered
-silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery,
-making a start at dawn. Or it might be a load of
-singing harvest-women, hired in the market square
-by the sweet light of the morning. But not the
-wagon or the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so
-much as that honest, steady, homely sound coming
-through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find
-it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like
-it till I die.
-
-The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes,
-in lazy summer evenings, I like the faint
-rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble of the
-elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows
-and its passengers relaxed and indolent after the
-exhausting day. Always I like the moaning sounds
-from the river craft, carried so softly into the town.
-But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are
-usually discords. I hate bells—the sharp spinsterish
-telephone bell, the lugubrious church bell, the
-clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the
-sleigh bell or the dinner bell.
-
-I like the element of water. An imagist should
-write of the waters of Lake Michigan which circle
-around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is the
-hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths.
-When the sun shines on the bottom, every pebble
-is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a happy
-memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of
-Maine one has the same visual delight in water as
-clear as crystal, and on the coast of Ireland I have
-seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst
-or thunder in a wall of emerald. On the
-southern shore of Long Island, who has not seen
-the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy
-as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New
-York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching.
-
-The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty
-that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline
-except at night. In the day-time those punctured
-walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the
-river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare.
-Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren
-as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A little wisp of white steam may suggest
-humanity, but not these bleak cliffs themselves.
-At night, however, they become human. They
-look out on the black moving river with marigold
-eyes. And Madison Square at nightfall has the
-same, or even a more ætherial, radiance. From
-the hurried streets the walls of light seem like a
-deluge of fairy splendor. This is always a gay
-transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who
-is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him.
-
-Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I
-like flowers, but seldom cut flowers. The gathering
-of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily wanton,
-and is it not hateful to see people coming
-home with dejected branches of dogwood or broken
-autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already rusting
-in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness
-of the meadow or the solitude of a forsaken garden.
-Few things are so pleasant as to find oneself all alone
-in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to sea.
-The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones,
-the life that trails so impudently across the path,
-the life that spawns in the forgotten pond—this
-has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners.
-Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient
-turtle, ourselves the only living things within sight or
-sound. When the turtle wearied of sunning himself
-he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily
-paddled through waters laced down with scum. It
-was pleasant to see him, a not too clean turtle in
-waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family
-had been home the gardener would have scoured
-him.
-
-Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire—which
-I thank heaven I am not, nor scarcely a millionth
-part of one—I should take pleasure in the
-silent orderliness that shadowed me through my
-home. Those invisible hands that patted out the
-pillows and shined the shoes and picked up everything,
-even the Sunday newspapers—those I should
-enjoy. I should enjoy especially the guardian angel
-who hid from me the casualties of the laundry and
-put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is
-no laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire
-the laundry is sent and the laundry is sorted
-away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire; I
-envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen
-sheets.
-
-The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude
-that life is in the striving. Is this altogether true?
-I think not. Not for those menial offices so necessary
-to our decent existence, so little decent in their
-victims or themselves. But one does remember certain
-striving that brought with it almost instant happiness,
-like the reward of the child out coasting or
-the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding
-game. It is pleasant to think of one’s first delicious
-surrender to fatigue after a long day’s haul on a
-hot road. That surrender, in all one’s joints, with
-all one’s driven will, is the ecstasy that even the
-Puritan allowed himself. It is the nectar of the
-pioneer. In our civilization we take it away from
-the workers, as we take the honey from the bees—but
-I wish to think of things pleasant, not of our
-civilization. Fatigue of this golden kind is unlike
-the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It is
-the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it
-from games, even golf, I think it is pleasant. It is
-the great charm that Englishmen possess and understand.
-
-These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant
-things of the poet. They barely leave the hall
-of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine, is one
-who captures in the swift net of his imagination the
-wild pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be
-flying presences quickly lost to view. But every man
-must bag what he can in his own net, whether he be
-rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my
-imagination to keep from being snared by too many
-publicists and professors and persons of political intent.
-These are invaluable servants of humanity,
-admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But
-they fill the mind with *-ations*. They pave the
-meadows with concrete; they lose the free swing of
-pleasant things.
-
-THE AVIATOR
-===========
-
- | *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
- | *Kept me within his eye,*
- | *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
- | *And followed up the sky.*
- |
- | I was the lark whose song was heard
- | When I was lost to sight,
- | I was the golden arrow loosed
- | To pierce the heart of night.
- |
- | I fled the little earth, I climbed
- | Above the rising sun,
- | I met the morning in a blaze
- | Before my hour was gone.
- |
- | I ran beyond the rim of space,
- | Its reins I flung aside,
- | Laughter was mine and mine was youth
- | And all my own was pride.
- |
- | *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
- | *Kept me within his eye,*
- | *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
- | *And followed up the sky.*
- |
- | From end to end I knew the way,
- | I had no doubt or fear;
- | The minutes were a forfeit paid
- | To fetch the landfall near.
- |
- | But all at once my heart I held,
- | My carol frozen died,
- | A white cloud laid her cheek to mine
- | And wove me to her side.
- |
- | Her icy fingers clasped my flesh,
- | Her hair drooped in my face,
- | And up we fell and down we rose
- | And twisted into space.
- |
- | *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
- | *Kept me within his eye,*
- | *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
- | *And followed up the sky.*
- |
- | Laughter was mine and mine was youth,
- | I pressed the edge of life,
- | I kissed the sun and raced the wind,
- | I found immortal strife.
- |
- | Out of myself I spent myself,
- | I lost the mortal share,
- | My grave is in the ashen plain,
- | My spirit in the air.
- |
- | Good-by, sweet pride of man that flew,
- | Sweet pain of man that bled,
- | I was the lark that spilled his heart,
- | The golden arrow sped.
- |
- | *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
- | *Kept me within his eye,*
- | *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
- | *And followed up the sky.*
-
-.. class:: center
-
- THE END
-
-.. vspace:: 5
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-\*\*\* END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR \*\*\*
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diff --git a/35091-rst/images/illus-emb.png b/35091-rst/images/illus-emb.png Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index d8ff45b..0000000 --- a/35091-rst/images/illus-emb.png +++ /dev/null diff --git a/35091.txt b/35091.txt deleted file mode 100644 index c136169..0000000 --- a/35091.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4671 +0,0 @@ - The Invisible Censor - - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost -no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license. - -Title: The Invisible Censor - -Author: Francis Hackett - -Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #35091] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: US-ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR *** - - - - -Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.fadedpage.net. - -THE INVISIBLE CENSOR - -By - -FRANCIS HACKETT - - - New York - B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. - MCMXXI - - - - - Copyright, 1921, - by B. W. Huebsch, Inc. - Printed in U. S. A. - - - - - TO MY WIFE - SIGNE TOKSVIG - - WHOSE LACK OF INTEREST IN THIS BOOK - HAS BEEN MY CONSTANT DESPERATION - - - - -These sketches and articles appeared in the _New Republic_ and I am -indebted to the other editors for being allowed to reprint them. - - - - -Contents - - - - THE INVISIBLE CENSOR - - WHISKY - - BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN - - FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET - - AS AN ALIEN FEELS - - SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT - - THE NEXT NEW YORK - - CHICAGO - - THE CLOUDS OF KERRY - - HENRY ADAMS - - THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - - THE IRISH REVOLT - - A LIMB OF THE LAW - - A PERSONAL PANTHEON - - NIGHT LODGING - - YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC - - THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID - - WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS - - "WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE" - - WAR EXPERTS - - OKURA SEES NEWPORT - - THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED - - BLIND - - "AND THE EARTH WAS DRY" - - TELEGRAMS - - OF PLEASANT THINGS - - THE AVIATOR - - - - -THE INVISIBLE CENSOR - - -Not long ago I met a writer who happened to apply the word "cheap" to -Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians. It astonished me, because this was an -erudite, cultivated woman, a distinguished woman, and she meant what she -said. - -A "cheap" effect, I assume, is commonly one that builds itself on a -false foundation. It may promise beautifully, but it never lives up to -its promise. Whether it is a house or a human character, a binding or a -book, it proves itself gimcrack and shoddy. It hasn't the goods. And of -Eminent Victorians, as I remembered it (having read it to review it), -this was the last thing to be said. The book began by fitting -exquisitely, but it went on fitting exquisitely. It never pulled or -strained. And the memory of it wears like a glove. - -Now why, after all, did I like this book so thoroughly, which my -distinguished friend thought so cheap? For many minor reasons of course, -as one likes anything--contributory reasons--but principally, as I -laboriously analyzed it, because in Eminent Victorians the invisible -censor was so perfectly understood. What seemed cheap to her ladyship -was, I do not doubt, the very thing that made Eminent Victorians seem so -precious to me--the deft disregard of appearances, the refusal to let -decorum stand in the way of our possessing the facts. This to my critic -was a proof that Mr. Strachey was imperceptive and vulgar--"common" the -ugly word is. To me it simply proved that he knew his game. What he -definitely disregarded, as so many felt, was not any decorum dear and -worth having. It was simply that decorum which to obey is to produce -falsification. The impeccable craft of Mr. Strachey was shown in his -evaluation, not his acceptance, of decorum. He did not take his -characters at their face value, while he did not do the other vulgar -thing, go through their careers with a muck-rake. In vivisecting them -(the awful thing to do, presumably), he never let them die on him. He -opened them out, but not cruelly or brutally. He did it as Mr. William -Johnston plays tennis or as Dr. Blake is said to operate or as Dr. Muck -conducts an orchestra or as Miss Kellerman dives. He did it for the best -result under the circumstances and with a form that comes of a real -command of the medium--genuine "good form." - -The essential achievement of Eminent Victorians is worth dwelling on -because in every book of social character the question of the invisible -censor is unavoidably present. By the censor I do not mean that poor -blinkered government official who decides on the facts that are worthy -of popular acquaintance. I mean a still more secret creature of still -more acute solicitude, who feels that social facts must be manicured and -pedicured before they are fit to be seen. He is not concerned with the -facts themselves but with their social currency. He is the supervisor of -what we say we do, the watchman over our version and our theoretical -estimate of ourselves. His object, as I suppose, is to keep up the good -old institutions, to set their example before the world, to govern the -imitative monkey in us. And to fulfill that object he continually -revises and blue-pencils the human legend. He is constantly at the elbow -of every man or woman who writes. An invisible, scarcely suspected of -existing, he is much more active, much more solidly intrenched, than the -legal censor whom liberals detest. - -Every one is now more or less familiar with the Freudian censor, the -domesticated tribal agent whose function it seems to be to enforce the -tribal scruples and superstitions--to keep personal impulse where the -tribe thinks it belongs. This part of the ego--to give it a spatial -name--came in for a good deal of excited remonstrance in the early days -of popular Freudian talk. To-day, I think, the censor is seldom so -severely interpreted. In many cases there is clearly a savagery or a -stupidity which brings about "the balked disposition," but it is being -admitted that the part which is regulated by the censor, the -"disposition" end of the ego, may not always be socially tolerable; and -as for the "balking," there is a difference between blunt repressiveness -and enlightened regulation. Still, with all this acceptance of ethics, -the nature of the censorship has to be recognized--the true character of -the censor is so often not taste or conscience in any clear condition, -but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional bully. In -the censor as he appears in psycho-analytic literature there is -something of the archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic--all just -as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is the thing in us which -is against license and anarchy. - -In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor of whom Eminent -Victorians is so subversive, there are particularly these irrational and -ritualistic characteristics, these remnants of outgrown institutions, -these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed. Most biography, -especially official biography, is written with such a censor in mind, -under his very eye. Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and -stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him in mind. Hovering -behind Eminent Victorians we see agonized official biography, with its -finger on its lips, and the contrast is perhaps the chief delight that -Mr. Strachey affords. When Cardinal Manning's pre-clerical marriage, for -example, came to be considered by Mr. Strachey, he did not obey the -conventional impulse, did not subordinate that fact of marriage as the -Catholic Church would wish it to be subordinated (as a matter of "good -taste," of course). He gave to that extremely relevant episode its due -importance. And so Manning, for the first time for most people, took on -the look not so much of the saintly cardinal of official biography as of -a complex living man. - -What does the censor care for this aesthetic result? Very little. What -the censor is chiefly interested in is, let us say, edification. He aims -by no means to give us access to the facts. He aims not at all to let us -judge for ourselves. With all his might he strives to relate the facts -under his supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever it -may be. And so, when facts come to light which do not chime in with his -prepossession, he does his best either to discredit them or to set them -down as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. And the policy that he -is serving is not aesthetic. - -A theory of the aesthetic is now beside the point, but I am sure it -would move in a relation to human impulses very different from the -relation of the censor. The censor is thinking, presumably, of immediate -law and order, with its attendant conventions and respectabilities. The -aesthetic could not be similarly bound. It is not reckless of conduct, -but surely enormously reckless of decorum, with its conventions and -respectabilities clustering around the status quo. Hence the apparent -"revolt" of modernism, the insurrection of impulse against edification. - -But there is more in Eminent Victorians than an amusing, impish refusal -to edify. There is the instructive contrast between the "censored -celebrity" and the uncensored celebrity disinterestedly observed. -Disinterestedly observed, for one thing, we get something in these -celebrities besides patriotism and mother-love and chastity and heroism. -We get hot impulses and cold calculations, brandy and treachery, the -imperious and the supine, glorious religiousness and silly family -prayers. And these things, though very unlike the products of official -photography, are closely related to impulses as we know them in -ourselves. To find them established for Mr. Strachey's "eminent" -Victorians is to enjoy a constant dry humor, since the invisible censor, -the apostle of that expediency known as edification, stood at the very -heart of Victorianism. - -This is possibly why Samuel Butler, in his autobiographical way, is so -remarkable as a Victorian. In the midst of innumerable edifying figures, -he declined to edify. When people said to him, "Honor thy father and thy -mother," he answered in effect that his father was a pinhead theologian -who had wanted to cripple his mentality, and his mother was, to use his -own phrase, full of the seven deadly virtues. This was not decorous but -it had the merit of being true. And all the people whose unbidden -censors had been forcing good round impulses into stubborn parental -polygons immediately felt the relief of this revelation. Not all of them -confess it. When they have occasion to speak or write about -"mothers"--as if the biological act of parturition brings with it an -unquestionable "mother" psyche--most of them still allow the invisible -censor to govern them and represent them as having feelings not really -their own. But even this persistence of the censor could not deprive -Samuel Butler of his effectiveness. He has spoken out, regardless of -edification, and that sort of work cannot be undone. - -A similar work is performed by such highly personal confessants as Marie -Bashkirtseff and W. N. P. Barbellion, and even by Mary MacLane. The -account that these impulsive human beings give of themselves is -sensational simply because it clashes with the strict preconception that -we are taught to establish. But only a man who remembers nothing or -admits nothing of his own impulses can deny the validity of theirs. The -thing that takes away from their interest, as one grows older, is the -unimportance of the censorship that agonizes them. Their documentary -value being their great value, they lose importance as more specific and -dramatic documents become familiar. And with psycho-analysis there has -been a huge increase in the evidence of hidden life. It is the -Montaignes who remain, the confessants who offer something besides a -psychological document--a transcendence which is not incoherent with -pain. - -But these various confessions are significant. They indicate the -existence and the vitality of the censor. They show that in the simplest -matters we have not yet attained freedom of speech. Why? Because, I -imagine, the world is chock-full of assumptions as to conduct which, -while irrational and ritualistic and primitive, have all sorts of -sanctions thrown around them and must take a whole new art of education -to correct. Until this art it established and these assumptions are -automatically rectified, it will be impossible to exercise free speech -comfortably. An attempt may be made, of course, and indeed must be made, -but to succeed too well will for many years mean either being -exterminated or being ostracized. - -It is not hard to show how each of us in turn becomes an agent of the -invisible censorship. You, for instance, may have a perfectly free mind -on the subject of suffrage, but you may have extremely strong views on -the subject of sex. (Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, to be specific, thinks -that Fielding is nothing but a "smutty" author.) Or you may think -yourself quite emancipated on the subject of sex-desires and be -hopelessly intolerant on the subject of the Bolsheviki. The French -Rights of Man held out, after all, for the sacred rights of -property--and the day before that, it was considered pretty advanced to -believe in the divine right of kings. It is not humanly possible, -considering how relative liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even -convince oneself of the necessity of examining them, and in every case -we are sure to be tempted to oppose certain novel ideas in the name of -inertia, respectability and decorum. To dissemble awkward facts, in such -cases, is much easier than to account for them--which is where the -censor comes in. - -I do not say that it is possible to do away with every discipline, even -the rule-of-thumb of decorum. As a subservient middle-class citizen, I -believe in the regulation of impulse. But as an intellectual fact, the -use of the blue pencil in the interests of decorum is exceedingly inept. -Human impulses are much too lively to be extinguished by the denial of -expression. And if sane expression is denied to them, they'll find -expression of another kind. - -Decorum has its uses, especially on the plane of social intercourse. I -admit this all the more eagerly because I have seen much of one -brilliant human being who has practically no sense of opposition. If he -sees something that he wants, he helps himself. It may be the milk on -the lunch-table that was intended for Uncle George. It may be the new -volume from England that it took nine weeks to bring across. It may be -the company of some sensitive gentlewoman or the busy hour of the mayor -of Chicago. The object makes no visible difference to my friend. If he -wants it, he sticks out his hand and takes it. And if it comes loose, he -holds on. - -Associated with this aggressiveness there is a good deal of purpose not -self-regarding. The man is by no means all greedy maw. But the thing -that distinguishes him is the quickness and frankness with which he -obeys his impulse. Between having an impulse and acting on it there lies -for him a miraculously short time. - -In dealing with such a man, most people begin hilariously. Not all of -them keep up with him in the same heroic spirit. At first it is -extraordinarily stimulating to find a person who is so "creative," who -sweeps so freely ahead. Soon the dull obligations, the tedious details, -begin to accumulate, and the man with the happy impulsiveness leaves all -these dull obligations to his struggling friends. His lack of decorum in -these respects is a source of hardship and misunderstanding, especially -where persons of less energy or more circumspection are attendant. In -his case, I admit, I see the raw problem of impulse, and I am glad to -see his impulse squelched. - -But even this barbarian is preferable to the apathetic repressed human -beings by whom he is surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is -invaluable because "creative." And he should never be blocked in: he -should at most be canalled. - -The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illustrated in his -rational subordination of impulse, but in those subordinations that -violate human and social freedom. And the worst of them are the filmy, -the vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the opportunity of -truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently difficult picture-puzzle, but -what chance have we if the turnip-headed censor confiscates some -particularly indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike? On -reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to escape from those wax -effigies that we once believed to be statesmen--the kind of effigies of -which text-books and correct histories and correct biographies are full! -How we rejoice to escape from them, wondering that they had ever imposed -on us, wondering that teachers and pious families and loyal historians -ever lent themselves to this conspiracy against truth! But the horrible -fact is, Mr. Strachey is one in a million. He has only poked his finger -through the great spider-web of so-called "vital lies." - -Meanwhile, in the decorous and respectable biographies, the same old -"vital lies" are being told. The insiders, the initiated, the -disillusioned, are aware of them. They no longer subsist on them. They -read between the lines. And yet when the insiders see in print the true -facts--say, about Robert Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or -John Jones--these very insiders rush forward with a Mother Hubbard to -fling around the naked truth. We must not speak the truth. We must -edify. We must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced world. - -It means that we need a revolution in education, nothing less. It means -that the truth must be taken out of the hands of the censor. We must be -prepared to shed oceans of ink. - - - - -WHISKY - - -It was a wet, gusty night and I had a lonely walk home. By taking the -river road, though I hated it, I saved two miles, so I sloshed ahead -trying not to think at all. Through the barbed wire fence I could see -the racing river. Its black swollen body writhed along with -extraordinary swiftness, breathlessly silent, only occasionally making a -swishing ripple. I did not enjoy looking at it. I was somehow afraid. - -And there, at the end of the river road where I swerved off, a figure -stood waiting for me, motionless and enigmatic. I had to meet it or turn -back. - -It was a quite young girl, unknown to me, with a hood over her head, and -with large unhappy eyes. - -"My father is very ill," she said without a word of introduction. "The -nurse is frightened. Could you come in and help?" - -There was a gaunt house set back from the road, on a little slope. I -could see a wan light upstairs. - -"The nurse is not scared," the girl corrected, "but she is nervous. I -wish you could come." - -"Of course," and on my very word she turned and led the way in. - -The hall was empty. It had nothing in it except a discouraged oil lamp -on a dirty kitchen table. The shadowy stairs were bare. On my left on -the ground floor a woman with gray hair and rusty face and red-rimmed -eyes shuffled back into the shadows at my entry, a sort of ignoble -Niobe. - -"That's my mother," the grave child explained. And to the retreating -slatternly figure the child called, "This man has come to help, Mother," -as if men dropped from the sky. - -She went up into the shadows and I followed. A flight of stairs, a long -creaking landing. Another flight of stairs. Stumbles. Another landing. A -stale aroma of cat. And a general sense that, although the staircase was -well made and the landings wide, there was not one stick of furniture in -the house. - -As we approached the top floor we met fresher air and the pallid -emanation of a night-light. A figure stood waiting at the head of the -stairs. - -This was a stout little nun, her face framed in creaking linen, and a -great rustle of robes and rosary beads whenever she moved. She began a -sharp whisper the minute we climbed to the landing. - -"He's awake. He's out of his head. I'm glad you've come. Now, child, be -off to bed with you, like a good girl. This way, if you please." - -The child's vast eyes accepted me. "I'll go to Mother," she said, and -she receded downstairs. The nun entered an open door to the right, and -again I meekly followed. - -It was a room out of the fables. There was a tall fireplace facing the -door, with a slat of packing-case burning in it as well as the wind -would permit, and a solitary candle glimmering in a bottle, set on the -table at the head of the bed. Its uncertain light fell on the tousled -hair of a once kempt human being, now evidently a semi-maniac staring at -presences in the room. Down the chimney the wind came bluffing at -intervals, and the one high window querulously rattled. The center of -the room was the sick man's burning eyes. - -I walked through his view and he did not see me. The nun and myself -stood watching him from the head of the bed. - -"Oh, he's awful bad, you have no idea how bad he is; I'm afraid for him; -I am indeed. What am I to call you, Mister? Here, take this chair." - -Before I answered her she continued, in a whisper that slid along from -one _s_ to the next. "They said the doctor would be here at seven and -it's nearly twelve as it is. He's not coming. I wish he was here." - -The sick man seemed to see us. "That's right now," he said, whistling -his breath. "Bring me my clothes, I want to go home." - -The nun laid her arm on him. "Lean back now, dear, and it'll be all -right, I'm telling you." And she gently but ineffectually tried to press -him down. - -The sick man turned his face on her, into the candlelight. He was long -unshaved, but the two things that struck me most, after the crop of gray -bristle, were the dry cavern of his mouth and the scalding intensity of -his eyes. I was terrified lest those eyes should alight on me, and yet I -gazed hard at him. His lips were flaked with yellow scales, and dry -mucus was in strings at the corners of his mouth. His night-shirt gaped -open, showing a very hairy black chest. He seemed a shrunken man, not a -very tall man, but his shoulders were broad and his chin very square. To -support his chin seemed the great effort of his jaws. It fell open on -him, giving him a vacant foolish expression, with his teeth so black and -irregular, and he tried his best to clamp his teeth tight. The working -of his jaws, however, scarcely interfered with his whistling breath or -his gasping words. - -"They will be at the back door, I say. God!" a feeble scream and -whimper. "Bring me my clothes. You're hiding them on me. Oh, why are you -hiding them on me? Can't you give me my clothes?" - -"You're home now, dear. You're home now," the nurse assured him. "Isn't -that your own clock on the mantel? Lie down now and I'll make you a -comfortable drink and put you to sleep." - -"Boy, fetch me my coat." - -"Don't mind him," the nun turned to me, "but do you cover his feet." - -His feet had lost the gray blanket. They stared blankly up from the end -of the bed. I covered them snugly, glad to have something to do. - -"It's all the whisky in him," the nun whispered when at last he went -limp and lay down. "It's got to his brain. I thought he was over the -pneumonia, but that whisky has him saturated. The poor thing! The poor -thing!" - -"Well, I must be going now," the sick man ejaculated, and with one twist -of his body he was out of bed. - -"Oh, keep yourself covered, for the love of God!" The poor nun ran after -him with the blanket as his old flannel night shirt fluttered up his -legs. - -He staggered up to me fiercely, and his eyes razed my face. - -"Fiddle your grandmother," he muttered, "I'm off home, I tell you." - -"You can't leave the room; it's better for you to go back to bed," and I -held him round with my arms. - -"See here, you," his yellow cheeks reddened with his passionate effort, -"you can't hold me a prisoner any longer. Oh, Barrett, Barrett, what are -you doing to me to destroy me?" - -I knew no Barrett, but the poor creature was shivering with anguish and -cold. I put my arms around him and tried to move him out of the draught -of the door. His thin arms closed on me at the first hint of force, and -he clenched with feverish vigor. I could feel his frail bones against -me, his bare ribs, his wild thumping heart. - -"You can't, you can't. You can't keep me prisoner...." - -He struggled, his heart thumping me. Then in one instant he went slack. - -We lifted him to the bed, and I felt under his shirt for the flutter of -his heart. His mouth had dropped open, his eyes were like a dead bird's. - -The little nun began, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," and other holy words, -while I groped helplessly over this fragile burned-out frame. Then I -remembered and I stumbled wild-minded to find that woman downstairs. - -I went headlong through the darkness. At my knock the door opened, as if -by an unseen hand, and I saw, completely dressed, the pale little girl, -with her grave eyes. - -"Your mother?" I asked. - -The child stopped me sharply, "Is Father worse?" - -"He's worse," I answered feebly. "You'd better--" - -The child was brushed aside by her mother, who had stumbled forward from -inside. She looked at me vaguely. - -The girl turned on her mother. "I'm going up to Father. Go inside." - -The woman's will flickered and then expired. She pulled the door back -upon herself, shutting us into the hall. The child led and I followed -back upstairs. - - - - -BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN - - - -I - - -Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia I had formed a conception of -him from the newspapers. First of all, he was a baseball player become -revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting, screaming vulgarian, a mob -orator who lashed himself and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap -religious fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were fables in slang. I -thought of him as vividly, torrentially abusive, and I thought of his -revival as an orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming in -full view to the public mourners' bench. With the penitents I associated -the broken humanity of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her -knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding over a meeting -that was tossed like trees in a storm. - -However this preconception was formed, it at least had the merit of -consistency. It was, that is to say, consistently inaccurate in every -particular. - -Consider, in the first place, the orderliness of his specially -constructed Tabernacle. Built like a giant greenhouse in a single story, -it covers an immense area and seats fifteen thousand human beings. -Lighted at night by electricity as if by sunshine, the floor is a vast -garden of human faces, all turned to the small platform on which the -sloping tiers from behind converge. Around this auditorium, with its -forest of light wooden pillars and braces, runs a glass-inclosed alley, -and standing outside in the alley throng the spectators for whom there -are no seats. Except for the quiet ushers, the silent sawdust aisles are -kept free. Through police-guarded doors a thin trickle fills up the last -available seats, and this business is dispatched with little commotion. -Fully as many people wait to hear this single diminutive speaker as -attend a national political convention. In many ways the crowd suggests -a national convention; but both men and women are hatless, and their -attentiveness is exemplary. - -It is, if the phrase is permitted, conspicuously a middle-class crowd. -It is the crowd that wears Cluett-Peabody collars, that reads the -Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. It is the crowd for -whom the nickel was especially coined, the nickel that pays carfare, -that fits in a telephone slot, that buys a cup of coffee or a piece of -pie, that purchases a shoeshine, that pays for a soda, that gets a stick -of Hershey's chocolate, that made Woolworth a millionaire, that is spent -for chewing-gum or for a glass of beer. In that crowd are men and women -from every sect and every political party, ranging in color from the -pink of the factory superintendent's bald head to the ebony of the -discreetly dressed negro laundress. A small proportion of professional -men and a small proportion of ragged labor is to be discerned, but the -general tone is simple, common-sense, practical, domestic America. -Numbers of young girls who might equally well be at the movies are to be -seen, raw-boned boys not long from the country, angular home-keeping -virgins of the sort that belong to sewing circles, neat young men who -suggest the Y. M. C. A., iron-gray mothers who recall the numbered -side-streets in Harlem or Brooklyn or Chicago West Side and who bring to -mind asthma and the price of eggs, self-conscious young clerks who are -half curious and partly starved for emotion, men over forty with -prominent Adam's apple and the thin, strained look of lives fairly -care-worn and dutiful, citizens of the kind that with all their -heterogeneousness give to a jury its oddly characteristic effect, -fattish men who might be small shopkeepers with a single employee, the -single employee himself, the pretty girl who thinks the Rev. Mr. -Rhodeheaver so handsome, the prosaic girl whose chief perception is that -Mr. Sunday is so hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won't be -swayed, the sedentary "providers" who cannot open their ears without -dropping their jaws. A collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one -may crudely say "average" mortals, some of them destined to catch -religion, more of them destined to catch an impression, and a few of -them, sitting near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a cold. - -Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr. Sunday's small platform -is a bower of lovely bouquets, and the first business is the -acknowledgment of these offerings. As a means of predisposing the -audience in Mr. Sunday's favor nothing could be more genial. In the body -of the hall are seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute -is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver's powerful, commonplace voice -invites them to recognition: "Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company -here?" All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren. "Fine, -fine. We're glad to see yeh here. We're glad to welcome yeh. And what -hymn would _you_ like to have?" In loud concert the Pittsburgh Plate -Glass Co. delegation shout: "Number forty-nine!" Mr. Rhodeheaver -humorously parodies the shout: "Number forty-nine! It's a good 'un too. -Thank yeh, we're glad to have yeh here." Not only immense bouquets, but -gold pieces, boxes of handkerchiefs, long mirrors, all sorts of -presents, mainly from big corporations or their employees, are on the -tight platform. One present came from a mill, a box of towels, and with -it not only a warm, manly letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept "the -product of our industry," but a little poetic tribute, expressing the -hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr. Sunday might have a good bath -and take comfort in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and liked -it, and gazed amiably at the towels. - -The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thousand people had really -joined in them the effect would have been stupendous. As it was, they -were thrilling, but not completely. The audience was not half abandoned -enough. - -Then, after a collection had been taken up for a local charity, Mr. -Sunday began with a prayer. A compact figure in an ordinary black -business suit, it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice that, -for all his athleticism, he was tired to the bone. He is fifty-three -years old and for nine weeks he had been delivering about fifteen -extremely intense sermons a week. His opening was almost adramatic. It -had the conservatism of fatigue, and it was only his evident -self-possession that canceled the fear he would fizzle. - -The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me at first were Elbert Hubbard -and George M. Cohan. In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism -of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in his physical attitude -there was nothing of that greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and -swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman of his particular -line of wares. - -Accompanying one of the presents there had been a letter referring to -Billy Sunday's great work, "the moral uplift so essential to the -business and commercial supremacy of this city and this country." As he -developed his homely moral sermon for his attentive middle-class -congregation, this gave the clew to his appeal. It did not seem to me -that he had one touch of divine poetry. He humored and argued and smote -for Christ as a commodity that would satisfy an enormous acknowledged -gap in his auditors' lives. He was "putting over" Christ. In awakening -all the early memories of maternal admonition and counsel, the -consciousness of unfulfilled desires, of neglected ideals, the ache for -sympathy and understanding, he seemed like an insurance agent making a -text of "over the hill to the poorhouse." He had at his finger tips all -the selling points of Christ. He gave to sin and salvation a practical -connotation. But while his words and actions apparently fascinated his -audience, while they laughed eagerly when he scored, and clapped him -warmly very often, to me he appealed no more than an ingenious electric -advertisement, a bottle picked out against the darkness pouring out a -foaming glass of beer. - -And yet his heart seemed to be in it, as a salesman's heart has to be in -it. Speaking the language of business enterprise, the language with -which the great majority were familiar, using his physical antics merely -as a device for clinching the story home, he gave to religion a great -human pertinence, and he made the affirmation of faith seem creditable -and easy. And he defined his own object so that a child could -understand. He was a recruiting officer, not a drill sergeant. He spoke -for faith in Christ; he left the rest to the clergy. And to the clergy -he said: "If you are too lazy to take care of the baby after it is born, -don't blame the doctor." - -It was in his platform manners that Sunday recalled George M. Cohan. -When you hear that he goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations -of baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is not wild. -Needing to arrest the attention of an incredibly large number of people, -he adopts various evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It is a -physical language with which the vast majority have friendly heroic -associations, and for them, spoken so featly and gracefully, it works. -Grasping the edge of the platform table as if about to spring like a -tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives to his words a drive that makes -you tense in your seat. Whipping like a flash from one side of the table -to the other, he makes your mind keep unison with his body. He keys you -to the pitch that the star baseball player keys you, and although you -stiffen when he flings out the name of Christ as if he were sending a -spitball right into your teeth, you realize it is only an odd, apt, -popular conventionalization of the ordinary rhetorical gesture. Call it -his bag of tricks, deem it incongruous and stagey, but if Our Lady's -Juggler is romantic in grand opera, he is not a whit more romantic than -this athlete who has adapted beautiful movements to an emphasis of -convictions to which the audience nods assent. - -The dissuading devil was conjured by Sunday in his peroration, and then -he ended by thanking God for sending him his great opportunity, his vast -audience, his bouquets and his towels. When he finished, several hundred -persons trailed forward to shake hands and confess their faith--bringing -the total of "penitents" up to 35,135. - -Bending with a smile to these men and women who intend to live in the -faith of Christ, Billy Sunday gives a last impression of kindliness, -sincerity, tired zeal. And various factory superintendents and employers -mingle benignly around, glad of a religion that puts on an aching social -system such a hot mustard plaster. - - - -II - - -Oyster soup is a standard item in the money-making church supper. The -orphan oyster searching vainly for a playmate in an ocean of church soup -is a favorite object of Billy Sunday's pity. He loves to caricature the -struggling church, with its time-serving, societyfied, tea-drinking, -smirking preachers. "The more oyster soup it takes to run a church," he -shouts sarcastically, "the faster it runs to the devil." - -An attitude so scornful as this may seem highly unconventional to the -outsider. It leads him to think that Billy Sunday is a radical. The -agility with which the Rev. Billy climbs to the top of his pulpit and -then pops to the platform on all fours suggests a corresponding mental -agility. He must be a dangerous element in the church, the outsider -imagines; he must be a religious revolutionary. And then the outsider -beholds John Wanamaker or John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the platform -alongside the revivalist--pillars of society, prosperous and respectable -gentlemen who instinctively know their business. - -Fond as his friends are of comparing Billy Sunday to Martin Luther or -John the Baptist, none of them pushes the comparison on the lines of -radicalism, and Sunday himself waives the claim to being considered -revolutionary. "I drive the same kind of nails all orthodox preachers -do," he says in one of his sermons. "The only difference is that they -use a tack hammer and I use a sledge." No one supposes that Martin -Luther could have said this. Sledge-hammer orthodoxy was not exactly the -distinguishing characteristic of Martin Luther. The conservatism of -Billy Sunday's message is the first fact about him. Where he differs -from the orthodox preacher is not in his soul but in his resolution. He -has the mind of Martin Tupper rather than of Martin Luther, but it is -combined with that competent American aggressiveness which one finds in -a large way in George M. Cohan, Theodore Roosevelt, even Ty Cobb. -Theology does not interest Billy Sunday. He compares it to ping-pong and -compares himself to a jack-rabbit and says he knows as little about -theology as a jack-rabbit knows about ping-pong. What he cares about is -religious revival. He knows the church is in bitter need of revival. He -is out to administer digitalis, in his own phrase, instead of oyster -soup. - -For many years the church has been waning, and Billy Sunday scorns the -effeminate, lily-handed efforts at resuscitation that the churchmen have -employed. To put pepperino into a religious campaign, to make -Christianity hum, requires more than cushioned pews, extra music, coffee -and macaroons. Had Billy Sunday been in the regular theatrical business -he would not have fussed with a little independent theatre. He would -have conducted a Hippodrome. To rival the profane world's attractions he -sees no reason for rejecting the profane world's methods. So tremendous -an object as curing an institution's pernicious anaemia justifies the -most violent, outrageous experiment. - -If Jesus Christ were a new automobile or an encyclopaedia or a biscuit, -Billy Sunday would have varied the method he has employed in putting Him -over, but he would not have varied the spirit of his revival-enterprise -in any essential particular. His object, as he sees it, is to sell -Christ. It is an old story that from its economic organization society -takes its complexion. The Sunday revival takes its complexion from -business enterprise without a single serious change. There is one great -argument running all through Billy Sunday's sermons--the argument that -salvation will prove a profitable investment--but much more clearly -derived from business than the ethics preached by Billy Sunday is the -method he has devised for promoting Jesus Christ. Even the quarrel -between "Ma" Sunday and the man who has lost the post-card concession is -an illustration of the far-reaching efficiency of the system. The point -is not that money is being made out of the system. "An effort to corrupt -Billy Sunday," to use a paraphrase, "would be a work of supererogation, -besides being immoral." If Billy Sunday has a large income, $75,000 or -$100,000 a year, it is not because he is mercenary. It is only because a -large income is part of the natural fruits of his promoting ability. -Left to himself, it is quite unlikely that Billy Sunday would care a -straw about his income, beyond enough to live well and to satisfy his -vanity about clothes. It is Mrs. Sunday who sees to it that her -promoter-husband is not left penniless by those Christian business men -who so delightedly utilize his services. - -The backbone of Billy Sunday's success is organization. When -organization has delivered the crowd, Billy is ready to sweat for it and -spit for it and war-whoop for it and dive for base before the devil can -reach him. He is ready to have "Rody" come on the programme with his -slide-trombone and to have any volunteer who wishes to do it hit the -sawdust-trail. But he does not let his success depend on any programme. -His audiences are, in great measure, contracted for in advance. It is in -grasping the necessity for this kind of preparedness, in taking from the -business world its lessons as to canvassing and advertising and -standardizing the goods, that Billy can afford to jeer at oyster soup. -As his authorized biographer complacently says, "John the Baptist was -only a voice: but Billy Sunday is a voice, plus a bewildering array of -committees and assistants and organized machinery. He has committees -galore to cooperate in his work: a drilled Army of the Lord. In the -list of Scranton workers that is before me I see tabulated an executive -committee, the directors, a prayer-meeting committee, an entertainment -committee, an usher committee, a dinner committee, a business women's -committee, a building committee, a nursery committee, a personal -worker's committee, a decorating committee, a shop-meetings -committee--and then a whole list of churches and religious organizations -in the city as ex officio workers!" In New York on April 9th there was a -private meeting of 7,000 personal workers, "another step in the -direction of greasing the campaign." - -Unless Billy Sunday had some skill as a performer he naturally could not -hold his place as a revivalist. His success consists largely, however, -in the legendary character that has been given him by all the agencies -that seek to promote this desperate revival of orthodox religion. His -acrobatic stunts on the platform are sufficiently shocking to make good -publicity. His much-advertised slang, repeated over and over, has a -similar sensational value. But the main point about him is the -dramatization of his own personality. His virility is perhaps his chief -stock-in-trade. No one, not Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much -on his personal militant masculinity. Although well over fifty, his -youthful prowess as a baseball-player is still a headline-item in his -story, and every sermon he preaches gives him a chance to prove he is -physically fit. In addition to this heroic characteristic there is his -fame as a self-made man. He is a plain man of the people, as he never -fails to insist. He carries "the malodors of the barnyard" with him. But -he has succeeded. The cost of his special tabernacle is one of his big -distinctions. The size of his collections is another. His personal -fortune, in spite of all criticism, is a third. Besides these heroic -attributes of strength and wealth there is his melodramatic simplicity -of mind. All of his sermons are "canned" and a great deal of the -material in them is borrowed, but he manages to deliver his message -straight from the shoulder, as if it were his own. There can be no doubt -that his shouting, his slang, his familiarity with Jesus, his -buttonholing old God, his slang-version of the Bible, do offend large -numbers of people. They arrest attention so successfully, even in these -cases, that they turn out to be well advised. There is nothing -spontaneous about these antics. They are switched on at the beginning of -a revival and switched off as it succeeds. They are Sunday's native way -of lighting up the strait and narrow path with wriggling electric signs. - -Billy Sunday has too much energy to stick completely fast in the mud of -conservatism. He is capable of advocating sex instruction for the young, -for example, and he permits himself the wild radicalism of woman -suffrage. But as regards vested interests and patriotism and war he is a -conservative, practically a troglodyte. What he attacks with fervor are -the delinquents in ordinary conduct, especially the people who lack -self-control. "Booze-hoisters" and card-players and tango-dancers and -cigarette-smokers are his pet abominations--genuine abominations. -Profanity, strange to say, is another evil that he fights with fire. -Honesty, sobriety, chastity--these are virtues that he exalts, -illustrating the horror of failing in them by means of innumerable -chromatic anecdotes. The devil he constantly attacks, though never with -real solemnity. "The devil has been practicing for six thousand years -and he has never had appendicitis, rheumatism or tonsillitis. If you get -to playing tag with the devil he will beat you every chip." It is more -for spice and snap that he introduces the devil than to terrify his -public. The Bible is his serious theme, and he feels about it almost the -way Martin Tupper did: - - The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion volume, - The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our Rights ... - It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare - A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible! - --The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark, - And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning, - And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions, - In spite of learned unbelief,--we hold it all plain truth: - Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study; - Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and Colenso ... - The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian nation - ... - The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square, - The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws ... - Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salvation. - -One of Billy Sunday's boasts is that the liquor interests hate him. -"That dirty, stinking bunch of moral assassins hires men to sit in the -audience to hear me, to write down what I say and then try to find some -author who said something like it, and accuse me of having stolen my -ideas. I know that $30,000 was offered a man in New York City to write a -series of articles attacking me. All right; if you know anything about -me that you want to publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is a -dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole thing is a frame-up from A -to Izzard. I'll fight them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a -pair of skates. By the grace of God, I've helped to make Colorado and -Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice -on the dirty gang that I'll help to make the whole nation dry." (New -York Times, April 19th, 1917.) - -Assuming these points to be well taken, there is still great room to -doubt the deep religious effect of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like -William Allen White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf in -Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many hundred human beings -for moral stimulus in a time of need. In spite of the thousands who have -hit the sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that more -than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously affected by him. -The great majority of those who hit the trail are people who merely want -to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of seriousness or -"conversion." The atmosphere of the tabernacle, bright with electric -light and friendly with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and -in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is seldom a contagious -note. His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a -remarkable public entertainer, and much that he says has keen humor and -verbal art and horse sense. But for all his militancy, for all his -pugnacious vociferation, he leaves an impression of being at once -violent and incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but not a -guide or a friend. - -Still, as between Billy Sunday's gymnastics and the average oyster soup, -Messrs. Wanamaker and Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday. -Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of carpets and socks, Socony -and Nujol, and if Christ could have been put over in the same way, by -live-wire salesmanship, Billy was the man. - - - - -FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET - - - -I - - -"Though you do not know it, I have a soul. Behold, across the way, my -library. When the night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees -shake out their greenery against the white stonework, do you not catch a -suggestion of atmosphere, something of a mood? And the black cliffs -around, with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the width of them, -are they not monuments? I cleave brilliantly, up and down this dormant -city. It is for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plodding -milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speeding her lover's motor. Heed -my long silences, my slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed. My -buildings come about me to muse and to commune. Receive, for once on -Fifth Avenue, the soul that is imprisoned in my stone and steel." - -It is not for the respectable, this polite communication. Theatre and -club and restaurant have long since disgorged these. New York has -masticated their money. They have done as they should and are restored -uptown. Even the old newswoman, she who had spent starving months in the -Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war, she has tottered -from her stand down by the station. The Hungarian waiter in Childs' is -still there, still assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat -cakes, but that is off the avenue. It is three, the avenue is nearly -empty. It is ready to disclose its soul. - -But before this subtle performance there is a preliminary. It is a very -self-respecting avenue and at three on a pleasant morning, when no one -is around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath. Perhaps a few -motors go by--a taxi rolling north, heavy with night thoughts, a tired -white face framed in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking -loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its suburban chores. -The Italian acolytes are impartial. They spray the wheels of a touring -car with gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a powerful stream -under the hubs of a Nassau News wagon trundling to a train. The avenue -must be refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nodding -approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must be prepared for the sun, -under bold lamps and timid stars. - -A fine young morning, the watchman promises. A bit of wind whiffles the -water that is shot out from the white-wing's hose, but it is clearing up -above and looks well for the day. The hour beckons memories for the -watchman--fine young mornings he used to have long ago, in Ireland, a -boy on his first adventure and he driving with the barley to Ross. - -It is an empty street. The hose is wheeled away over the glistening -asphalt. The watchman disappears--he has a cozy nook beyond the ken of -time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pillow, to hide a diminished -head. With man accounted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to -the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion, the buildings have -their moment. Each tower stretches his proud height to the morning. The -stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed. - - - -II - - -Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it cannot hold the virgin -morning forever. Its windows may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind -the walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life. - -"Give us this day our daily bread." A saintly venerable horse seems to -know the injunction. Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it -usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord. - -And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the prayer about clams, but -some one in Mount Vernon is destined to have them quickly. Out of the -mysterious south, racing against time, a little motor flits onward with -gaping barrels of clams. At a decent interval comes a heavier load of -fish. Great express wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest uses -of Fifth Avenue begin. - -Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies. The grocer and the -greengrocer are early on their rounds. But an empty American News truck -confesses that eternal vigilance is the price of circulation. Its gait -is swifter than the gait of milkman or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and -dew are on the florist's wheels: he has come whistling by the swamps of -Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs lightly past the juggernauts that -crush down. - -Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His trucks hurl from Grand -Central to make the substations. But his is not the pride of place. Nor -is it coal or farmers' feed that appropriates the middle of the street. -The noblest wagons, a long parade of them, announce the greater glory of -beer. The temperance advocate may shudder at the desecration of the -morning. He may observe "Hell Gate Brewery" and nod his sickly nod. But -there is something about this large preparedness for thirst that stills -the carping worm of conscience. It is good to see what solid, ample -caravans are required to replenish man with beer. It is not the single -glass that is glorious. It is not even the single car-load. It is the -steady, deliberate, ponderous procession that streams through the early -hours. Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy of beer-wagons. -It satisfied the faith that there was Design in creation, but the -Percheron is not needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness -about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer. - - - -III - - -"Number, please?" She is anonymous, that inquirer. But behind her -anonymity there is humanity. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street caught -a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M. - -She was up at five in the morning. She had a pang as she put on her -check suit, slightly darker than her check coat lined with pink. Her -little hat, however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked breakfast -while she set the table. Then she walked to the Third Avenue "L" with -her friend. They got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to -Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked along Forty-second -Street in time for them to do a brief window-shopping as they passed the -shirtwaists at Forsythe's. Her friend's bronze shoes she envied as they -crossed the little park back of the Library. On Sixth Avenue they -inspected the window at Bernstein's. A slight argument engrossed them. -They hovered over the window, chirping not unlike the sparrows in Bryant -Park. Then, in a flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone -company to begin their "Number, please." - -An hour earlier laborers with dinner-pails had crossed Fifth Avenue, and -hatless Polish girls on their way to scrub. By seven o'clock the negro -porters and laborers were giving way to white-collar strap-hangers on -the elevateds and in the subway. It was getting to be the hour of -salesmen and salesgirls and office-boys and shop-subordinates and -clerks. The girls back of the scenes at the milliner's, they go up Fifth -Avenue at seven, to take one side-street or another. The girl who sells -you a toothbrush in the drug-store hurries by the shop windows, herself -as neat as a model. Is it early? Myriads of men are pouring down -already. Besides, "'S use of kickin'? If you don't like it, you can walk -out!" - -The night-watchman is going home, and an old attendant from the Grand -Central. "Tired, Pop?" "Yeh, p'tty tired." "What right've you to git -tired workin' for a big corporation?" The oppressed wage-slave bellows, -"Ha, ha." - - - -IV - - -Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in the afternoon. The -diastole of travelers had spread all morning from Grand Central; the -systole is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in the -afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the suburbs, tearing their -way through the weaker streams that are drawn up by the neighboring -shops and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and Sherry's and -Delmonico's and the Manhattan and the Belmont are no longer columnar -monuments, holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human floods -which they suck in and spray out. The street itself is lost to memory -and vision. A swollen stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are -permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless bosom the -freight of curiosity and pride and favor. One might fancy, to gaze on -this mad throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered the -universe, worshipers of a machine. - -It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles, the feminine hour. -A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming -from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this -period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, -flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working -world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely -infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down -the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but -their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and -leisure. Many of the white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are not -white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend -the world is gay. - -They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move -as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common -attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides. - - - -V - - -For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. He stayed with his -friend the spider the round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider, -is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the scene-shifter and the -detective. Some day we should pitch a metropolitan observatory at the -corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,--some day, if we can -find the time. - - - - -AS AN ALIEN FEELS - - -Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that the United States existed. -My first dream of it came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay -flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. It was a Wild West -Show, and for years I associated America with the intoxication of the -circus and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. "Two a penny, two a -penny, large penny oranges! Buy away an' ate away, large penny oranges!" -They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor of them and the fumes -of circus excitement gave me a first gay ribald sense of the United -States. - -The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag uncle. He had sought -his fortune in America--sought it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a -horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd and delicious oaths. -"Gosh hell hang it" was his chief touch of American culture. He was a -"Yank" in local parlance, a frequently drunken Yank. His fine drooping -mustache too often drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I steadied -him home under the October stars and absorbed a long alcoholic reverie -on the Horseshoe Falls. As we slept together that night in the -rat-pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all the -horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver over the wonderments of -the Horseshoe Falls. - -This, with an instilled idea that America and America alone could offer -"work," foreshadowed the American landscape. It is the bald hope of work -that finally magnetizes us hither. But every dream and every loyalty was -with the unhappy land from which I came. - -For many months the music of New York harbor spoke only of home. Every -outgoing steamer that opened its throat made me homesick. America was -New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new -duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a -living, and the art of eating at Childs'. At night the hall-bedroom near -Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for -amusement. The only women to say "dear," the women who say it on the -street. - -In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word -"settlement" gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was -somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. I had looked for it in -boarding-houses. I had looked for it in stenographic night-schools. I -had sought it in the blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long -jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among the street-walkers, -the first to proffer intimacy. And of course, not being clever enough, I -had overlooked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at home. - -America dawned for me in a social settlement. It dawned for me as a -civilization and a faith. In all my first experiences of my employers I -got not one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was the language of -smartness, alertness, brightness, success, efficiency, and I tried to -learn it, but it was a difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were -lawyers, but they were interested in penmanship and ability to clean -ink-bottles. Some of them were business men, but they were interested in -ability to typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not their fault. -Ours was not an affair of the heart. But if it had not been for the -social settlement, I should still be an alien to the bone. - -Till I knew a social settlement the American flag was still a flag on a -circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. The cheapness of the United States -was the message of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville and -Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, of the promenade on Broadway. In -the social settlement I came on something entirely different. Here on -the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of something besides success. The -house was saturated in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet. -A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make it musical. It was -thronged with Jews and Greeks and Italians and soulful visitors, to make -it restful. It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it easy. -But it was the first place in all America where there came to me a sense -of the intention of democracy, the first place where I found a flame by -which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer words about it. The men, I -learned, were mollycoddles, and the women were sexually unemployed. The -ruling class spoke of "unsettlement workers" with animosity, the -socialists of a mealy-mouthed compromise. Yet in that strange haven of -clear humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I had been -seeking--the knowledge that America had a soul. - -How one discovers these things it is hard to put honestly. It is like -trying to recall the first fair wind of spring. But I know that slowly -and unconsciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed out the -asperity of alienism. There were Americans of many kinds in residence, -from Illinois, from Michigan, from New York, English-Americans, -Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, men who had -gone to Princeton and Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn -Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the Americanism was of a kind -that opened to the least pressure from without, and never shall I forget -the way these residents with their "North Side" friends had managed so -graciously to domesticate the annual festival of my own nationality. -That, strange though it may seem, is the more real sort of -Americanization Day. - -From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing alien breathes in -American air, but I doubt if I should have ever known the meaning of -Walt Whitman had I not lived in that initiating home. It was easy in -later years to see new meanings in the American flag, to stand with -Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, but it was in the settlement I found the -sources from which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement, one was not -expected to believe that man's proper place is on a Procrustean bed of -profiteering. A different tradition of America lived there, one in which -the earlier faiths had come through, in which the way to heaven was not -necessarily up a skyscraper. In New England, later, I found many ideas -of which the settlement was symptomatic, but as I imbibed them they were -"America" for me. - -What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit -is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to -Lincoln's normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to -understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come -there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without -exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe -have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of -the governed. But here among America's governors and statesmen was a -simple authenticator of humane ideals. To inherit him becomes for the -European not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary of them in a -new. In the microcosm of the settlement perhaps Lincolnism is too -simple. Many of one's promptest acquiescences are revised as one meets -and eats with the ruling class later on. But the salt of this American -soil is Lincoln. When one finds that, one is naturalized. - -It is curious how the progress of naturalization becomes revealed to -one. I still recollect with a thrill the first time I attended a -national political convention and listened to the roll-call of the -States. "Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!" Empty names for many years, at -last they were filled with one clear concept, the concept of the -democratic experiment. "As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning -walk"--the living appeal to each state by name recalled Whitman's -generous amusing scope. "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican -breez'd! The diverse! The compact! The Pennsylvanian! The Virginian! The -double Carolinian!" The orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke -Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke votes for Taft and -Sherman. But even these men were parts of the democratic experiment. And -the vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as the empurpled -Penrose did not answer. It was they who were the leaves of our grass. - -In Whitman, as William James has shown, there is an arrant mysticism -which his own Democratic Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this -credulity as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an alien is -likely to enter if his first intimacy with America came in the aliens' -creche. A settlement is a creche for the step-children of Europe, and it -is hard not to credit America at large with some of the impulses which -make the settlement. Such, at any rate, is the tendency I experienced -myself. - -With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United States? I think of -Lincoln and his effected mysticism by Union, union for the experiment, -and I feel alive within me a complete identification with this land. The -keenest realization of the nation reached me, as I recall, the first -time I saw the capitol in Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up -the hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets gleaming -after a warm shower. The plaza in front of the capitol was deserted. A -few high sentinel lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and -scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the dome. Standing apart -completely by myself, I felt as never before the union of which this -strength and simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the night, the -scent of April pervading it, gave to the lonely building a dignity such -as I had seldom felt before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and -achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, for a quiet faith in -the peoples and states that lay away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, -I thought, had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night in April, -and felt the same promise of spring. - - - - -SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT - - -One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the pursuit of the secret of -life. That secret, however, is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible -to me, somewhere in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten, it taunts -my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making a lunge after it. But tied to -the ball there seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye fixes -the secret of life but it escapes my paw. - -During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had it. It involved a great -deal of stern discipline. Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston -garters and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, hot baths -followed by rolling in the snow and jiu jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu -hinted at the very secret itself. Here was the crude West seeking to -slug its way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had only to lay -hold of life by the little finger to reduce it to squealing submission. -The sinister power of jiu jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn -it we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme of effortless -subtlety. A people with such an art, combined with ennobling -vegetarianism, must necessarily be a superior people. I privately -believed that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the Russian fleet. - -Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my soul and supplanted it with -a colossal contempt for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already -protested. No nation could hope to take the field that subsisted on -heavy foods--such unclean things as sausages and beer. The secret of -world mastery was a diet of rice. "We all eat too much" became a fixed -conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a greater conviction--we all sleep too -much as well. This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett. -Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. We sleep ourselves stupid. -Who could not afford to lose a minute's sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute -a day--who would miss it? And in 500 days you would have got down to the -classical forty winks. Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He -modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its successful -practicability. To cut down sleep and cut down food was the only way to -function like a superman. - -Once started on this question of habits I spent a life of increasing -turmoil. From Plato I heard the word moderation, but from William Blake -I learned that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From -Benjamin Franklin I gathered the importance of good habits, but William -James gleefully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. And then -came Scientific Management. - -The concept of scientific management practically wrecked my life. I -discovered that there was a right way of doing everything and that I was -doing everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that we were all -astray about the simplest things. We did not know how to breathe -properly. We did not know how to sit properly. We did not know how to -walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was making us bald. We wore -pointed shoes: it was unfair to our little toe. But scientific -management did not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly pointed out -that "waste motions" were the chief characteristic of our lives. - -One of the most fantastic persons in the world is the public official -who, before he can write a postal order or a tax receipt, has to make -preliminary curls of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific -eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our effective motions -could be registered on a visual target, our record would be found to -resemble that of savages who use ammunition without a sight on their -guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier's marksmanship is wasteful, -we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that -fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms--waste -motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub -our eyes--more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the -rest of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific -management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with -the minimum of gesture. They believe that they complete the operation -under five minutes. But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that -under the inspection of the scientific manager their performance would -look as jagged as their razorblade under the microscope? The day will -probably arrive when a superman will shave with one superb motion, as -delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of an orange-skin in one long -unbroken peel. - -In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the haphazard, unscrutinized -conduct of his morn. We pick up our paper without any suspicion that we -are about to commit intellectual felony. We do not know that the news -editor is in a conspiracy to play on our minds. If men gyrate too much -physically, they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start to -look over the news. It is not so much that they begin the day with -devouring the details of a murder or lull themselves with some excuse -for not reading a British note on the blockade. It is the fact that they -are led by a ring running through their instincts to obey the particular -editors they read. - -Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand how the human -race has survived. Even conceding that I was normal, it is so much the -worse for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous breed. There is not -one important layman's practice that we have organized with regard to -discipline and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying -bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting one's hat and the -circumvolutions in putting links in one's cuffs? How about the impulsive -child who wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a hug? The -discovery seemed chilly that everything could be scientifically managed, -everything could be perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at -the center of one's life. But a fear of being chilly is a mark of -inferiority. It ill becomes a human machine. - -Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours a day, with vague -longings to eat very little and sleep very little and master jiu jitsu -and breathe deep and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and give -up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically and save waste -motions in putting on my shirt, I happened to come across two European -thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling Shakespeare's -knowledge of dead languages by my own knowledge of live ones, I could -not read these masters in the original to determine whether they blended -like oil and vinegar or fought like water and oil. But in the eagerness -of philosophic poverty I grasped just two delightful words from them, -"instinct" and "repression." The metaphysician's secret of life, -apparently, was to drop using one's so-called intelligence so -frantically, to become more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena -and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put the Ten Commandments -in their place. To tell the truth, his detection of "repression" gave me -no tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the evolutionist turned -my thoughts away from the early worries of discipline. This is the -latest ball in the air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of -any tantalizing invisible string. - - - - -THE NEXT NEW YORK - - -You'd get awfully tired if I told you everything about my visit to New -York in A. D. 1991. Some things are too complicated even to refer to, -many things I've already forgotten, and a number of things I didn't -understand. But as I had to return to my work as prison doctor in 1919 -after a week of 1991 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest -you. I hope I can give them to you straight. - -The people on the street took my eye the minute I arrived in town. They -looked so pleasing and they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at -present, with the long indoor working day and the mixture of embalmed -and storage and badly cooked food, the number of pasty-faced and -emaciated men and women is very high. I exempt the hearty sweating -classes like the structural iron workers and teamsters and porters and -even policemen. You could recruit a fine-looking club from the building -trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue and size up the -condition of the passers-by. You see shopgirls in thin cotton who are -under-weight, under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. You see -pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You see weary, fish-eyed mothers who -look as if every day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged -people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. A little earlier in the -afternoon it's almost impossible to share the sidewalk with the squat -factory hands who overflow at the lunch hour. They're hard to kill, -these poor fellows, but they're a puny, stinking, stunted, ill-favored -horde. But the greater cleanliness of the people later on, and their -better clothes, doesn't put them in a very different class. You hear a -good deal about the queens you see, but, really, the city streets of New -York in 1919, streaming with people who have dun clothes to match dun -faces, make you wonder what's the use. - -These people in 1991 were good to look at! The three-hour working day -had a lot to do with it, of course, and the basic economic changes. But -what leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge responsibility -that had gone to hygienists. I mean educational and administrative. In -1991, I found, people were really acting on the theory that you can't -have civilization without sound bodies. The idea itself was as old as an -old joke, a platitude in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city -was working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this meant a total -revision of ordinary conduct. - -Building the Panama Canal was a simple little job compared to making New -York hygienic. Thirty years must have been spent in getting the folks to -realize that no man and woman had any hygienic excuse for breeding -children within the city limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before -it was official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At first -mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were confiscated, but in the -end they came to see justice in the human version of the slogan, "an -acre and a cow." It got rid of the good old city-bred medical formula -that the best way to handle pregnancy is to handle it as a pathological -condition. Of course this prohibition movement made all sorts of people -mad. A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long time on the score -of personal liberty. Women had private city babies where the inspectors -couldn't get at them. You know, just like private whisky. But in the end -the prohibitionists won, and it had an enormous effect on cleaning up -Manhattan. It cut out all but the detached and the transient residents, -and with the breathing space rules, these were far less than you'd -suppose. Even with the great area of garden-roofs, the fixed residents -were not much more than 100,000. - -This demobilization wasn't special to New York. In other places there -were much more rigid "units." Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit -size of cities in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous city -gave place to the "modern" unit, permanent residences within the city -never being open to families that had children under fourteen. For the -heads of such families, however, the transportation problem was -beautifully solved. Every unit city came to be so constructed that -within half an hour of the "fresh air and exercise" homes, men and women -could reach factories and warehouses in one direction, and offices and -courts and banks and exchanges in another. This was after they realized -the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, swift, freight -train took the place of most trucks, and of course the remaining trucks -shot up and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another thing that -interested me was the plexus of all the things that are to be exhibited. -This involved a great problem for New York before factories were -deported and the moving "H. G. Wells" sidewalks introduced. How to -economize time and space, and yet not produce too close a homogeneity, -too protein an intellectual and aesthetic and social diet, became a -fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell's Island to summer -and winter art and music, with all the other islands utilized for -permanent exhibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. The -islands were made charming. I was quite struck over there, I think, on a -new island in Flushing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing, -where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on an endless belt, -that stopped when you wanted it to--the kind that art exhibitions -adopted for certain purposes. You see, the old department stores had -passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and display advertising and -the non-preventive physician. And the old game of "seasons" and fashions -was abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Conde Nast for the -undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing -consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly -early in life what they could and what they couldn't do personally in -the use of color. No one thought of copying another's color or design in -dress any more than of copying another's oculist prescription. And with -the guild consultants always ready to help out the troubled buyer, the -business of shopping for clothes became as exciting and intelligent as -the pastime of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, backed up by -the guilds, a daring employment of color became generally favored. But a -big item in this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe -any costumes for people who needed medical care first. It was useless, -the guilds said, to decorate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed. - -So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound body. In the hygienic -riots of 1936 some horrible lynchings took place. An expert from the -Chicago stockyards was then running the New York subways. He devised the -upper-berth system by which the space between people's heads and the -roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up -passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a few thousand -citizens had failed to respond to the pulmotor which was kept at every -station to revive weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to -decent transportation became a real public issue. The hygienists made -the great popular mistake of trying to save the stockyards man. They -knew he had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing him and -showing he had always wanted to skin cats alive, they could put the -traction question on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of that -era took up the issue on the so-called popular side. He denounced the -hygienists as heartless experts and showed how science was really a -conspiracy in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted in -a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-analysis of all criminals, -but the bloody assassination of the leading hygienist of the day brought -about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge was allowed to serve -who wasn't an expert in psychic work and hygiene. This decision was -greatly aided by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation of -criminal verdicts to the established neuroses of city magistrates. The -promise that this work would be extended and published as a supplement -to the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting the Bar. The -old pretensions of the Bar went rapidly to pieces when political use was -made of important psychological and physiological facts. The hygienists -spoke of "the mighty stream of morbid compulsion broadening down to more -morbid compulsion." By 1950 no man with an OEdipus complex could even -get on the Real Estate ticket, and the utter collapse of militarism came -about with the magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent -armament advocates in the evil era. - -I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance of prisons. -Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the -old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the -Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like -Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances -in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the -human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours -was a matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, even in -casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to -me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the -twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men -afraid to specify the sex diseases they were then cleaning up. -Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from -obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions -about conduct. "Think," said one delightful youth to me, on my first day -in 1991, "think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological -laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical -well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think -of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet -test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about 'the pursuit of -happiness,' fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for -such indiscriminateness than we'd allow a day to go by without -swimming." - -The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, what we call a girl. I -had nothing to say to her. But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was -so soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire's device I had once -seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement of a great factory building there -was a small electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was a -gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on which was strapped an -ordinary leather saddle. In front of the saddle there rose two thin -steel sticks, and out of them came thin leather reins. By means of a -clever arrangement of springs down below that responded to an electric -current, the whole mechanism was able to move up and down and backward -and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed to stir up your -gizzard in practically the same way as the motion of a horse. This was, -in fact, a synthetic horse, bearing the same aesthetic relation to a -real horse that a phonograph song does to a real song that is poured -out, so to speak, in the sun. And here, in the bald basement cell with -its two barred basement windows (closed), the constipated millionaires -take their turns, whenever they can bear it, going through the canned -motions of a ride, staring with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in -front of them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of Hygeia carried the -helot-captains of industry. And from that basement, from that heathen -symbol of perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary acceptance -of the human body and a primary law that its necessities be everywhere -observed. Not such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy years. -And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they had to have for the happiness -they long for. - - - - -CHICAGO[1] - - -A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality of towns. What -most people enjoy about a town is familiarity, not personality, and they -can give no penetrating account of their affection. "What is the finest -town in the world?" the New York reporters recently asked a young -recruit, eager for him to eulogize New York. "Why," he answered, "San -Malo, France. I was born there." That is the usual reason, perhaps the -best reason, why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is -autobiographical. - -But towns do have personality. Contrast London and New York, or Portland -and Norfolk, or Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has a -personality, and it would be obscurantism of the most modern kind to -pretend that there was no "soul" in Chicago either to like or to -dislike. People who have never lived in Chicago are usually content with -disliking it, and those who have seen it superficially, or smelled it in -passing when the stockyard factories were making glue, can seldom -understand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, of course, profess -to admire it, with the eagerness of anxious missionaries seeking to make -good with cannibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or Belfast, and -slipped into Chicago as into old slippers--men like Arnold Bennett and -George Bermingham--there are few outsiders who really feel at home. -Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant journey across the plains, -pondering that one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to restore -the city after the fire should be compelled to pay for his own ham and -eggs. He thought Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from it like a -sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. Wells thought it amazing, but -chiefly amazing as a lapse from civilization. All of these leave little -doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and -mean. It has size without spaciousness, opportunity without -imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A -sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious -where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and -vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining -smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its -beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town. - -But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; one must see it -altogether before one can define it; one can believe almost anything -monstrous from a partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is -supremely necessary--about three years as a minimum. Then its goodness -passeth all pre-matrimonial understanding; its essence is disclosed. - -Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far as time is concerned, -to speak of Chicago, and I think it would be churlish not to agree that -from the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city proud. All -old Chicagoans will recognize at once why Mr. Taylor should go back to -the beginning, and they will be delighted at the clarity with which the -early history is expounded, as well as the era before the Civil War. -They will also understand and rejoice over the repetition of grand old -names--Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, Uranus H. Crosby, -Sherman of the Sherman hotel, General Hart L. Stewart and Long John -Wentworth. In every town in the world there is, of course, a Long John -or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans will savor this reference to their own -familiar, and will delight in the snug feeling that they too "knew -Chicago when." Mr. Taylor is also dear to his townsmen when he harks -back to days before the Fire. In those days the West-siders were a -little superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter -and Paul, and the church-going folk could hear the "fast young men" -speeding trotting horses past the church doors. Such performances seemed -fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor himself drive his -high-steppers to the races at Washington Park, and did he not woo the -heart of the city where gilded youth cherished a "nod of recognition -from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. Rice." The dinners of -antelope steak and roast buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago -antedating the World's Fair that left strong traces into the twentieth -century, a Chicago that is commemorated with grace and kindliness in the -fair pages of this book. - -But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor's heart lingers among the -"marble-fronts" of his youth, this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such -fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better basis for -loving Chicago must be offered than the evidence that one teethed on it, -battered darling that it is. Mr. Taylor's better explanation, as I read -it, is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully and eagerly -with the New Englanders who made the town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters -and speculators, war widows and politicians and anarchists and -aliens--all these go into his perspective, as do the emergencies of the -Fire and the splendors of the Fair. But the marrow of his pride in -Chicago is his community with its origins in "men, like myself, of New -England blood, whose fathers felled our forests and tilled our prairie -land." Since the time he was born, he tells us, more than two million -people have been added to the population of Chicago. Only a fifth of the -Great West Side are now American-born, and the Lake Shore Drive was -still a cemetery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified West Side. -This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning of things. Hence he likes -to insist in his kindly spirit that Chicago's puritan "aristocracy" is -the source of Chicago altruism, that "the society of Chicago [is] more -puritanical than that of any great city in the world," and that "back of -Chicago's strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her founders -holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers being still a -potent factor in her life.... She possesses a New England conscience to -leaven her diverse character and make her truly--the pulse of America." - -Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest. -Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see -it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed -a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished -Chicago's big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had -no statesmanship in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an -inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a -destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business -enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its -remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality of that -enterprise is a main characteristic of the city, a characteristic barely -suggested by Mr. Taylor, not clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his -graceful drawings, so beautifully reproduced. - -One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor's pleasant picture, some -leaves from Upton Sinclair's Jungle, Jack London's Iron Heel, Frank -Norris's Pit, H. K. Webster's Great Adventure, the fiction of Edith -Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick and Will Paine and Weber Linn -and Sherwood Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl -Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one who looked at the City -Council ten years ago, for example, can forget the brutality of that -institution of collective life. - -They called the old-time aldermen the "gray wolves." They looked like -wolves, cold-eyed, grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side, -West side, North side, making the shaky tenements and black brothels and -sprawling immigrant-filled industries pay tribute in twenty ways. One -night, curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went to a place -that was glibly described as "the wickedest place in the world." It was -a saloon under the West side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At -first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its runty negro at the -raucous piano. But at last the regular customers collected; the sots, -the dead-beats, the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a fat -pallor, the woman without a nose.... They surrounded us, piled against -us, clawed us. And that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead's Satanic vision -of it revealed. - -But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves -it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an -essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the -access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an -adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and -hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a -frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of -succession and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all its philistinism, -there is the condition of hope that is half the spiritual battle, -whatever stockades the puritans try to build. It is that that makes one -lament the silence in Mr. Taylor's pleasant book. But the puritanical -tradition requires silence. Polite and refined, self-centered and -private-minded, attached to property and content within limitations, it -made visible Chicago what it is. - - [1] _Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G. - Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co._ - - - - -THE CLOUDS OF KERRY - - -It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes Kerry so wet. All the -reservoir of the Atlantic, at any rate, lies to the west and south, and -the prevailing winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry lifts its -mountains to those impinging winds--mountains that in the sunlight are a -living colorful presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the -constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly from the sea, soft -voluminous clouds gathered in their arms, and as they pass they sweep -their drooping veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy land. - -In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted at great intervals -on those lonely hillsides, but for the most part the habitations are in -the cooms or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel hills. The -soil on the mountains is washed away. The vestiture that remains is a -watery sedge, and it is only by garnering every handful of earth that -the tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms. Their fields, -often held in common, are so small as to be laughable, and deep drainage -trenches are dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting sunlight -between showers a light-green patch will loom magically in the distance, -witness to man's indefatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the -rocks. An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and if one goes -there one may find a typical tall spare countryman, bright of eye and -sharp of feature, housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood of -children. To build with his own hands a watertight house is the ambition -for which this man is slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready -there near the pit which he himself has dug for foundation. A yellowish -wife will perhaps be nursing the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed -hovel, and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible, and -admirable in more ways than he can ever dream of, one elf after another -will come out, bare-legged, sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from -far off at the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside man, -but his starvelings go down the boreen to the bare cold schoolhouse, to -be taught whatever the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their -minds of an education designed for civil service clerks. The children -may be seen down there if one passes at their playtime, kicking a rag -football with their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds. - -There was a time when the iron was deep in these farmers' souls. Eking -the marrow from the bones of the land, they were so poor that they had -nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their own tiny cattle, -the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle that alone can pick a living from that -ground. Until twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the hillside -men had never bought a pound of tea in their lives, or known what it was -to spend money for clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored -homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine sturdy middle-aged -farmers with a cut to their homemade clothes that reminds one of the -Bretons. It was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting nature for -grim life, that landlords took their rackrents--one of them, the Earl of -Kenmare, erecting a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of -Americans have admired. The fight against landlordism was bitter in -Kerry. I met one countryman who was evicted three times, but finally, -despite the remorseless protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in -a lean-to against the wall of the church. There were persecutions and -murders, the mailed hand of the law and the stealthy hand of the -assassin. Even to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure of -me he would not have spoken his mind. But when he was sure, he confided -with a winning smile that at last he had something to live for and work -for, a strip of land that was an "economic holding," determined by an -Estates Commission which has shouldered the landlord to one side and -estimated with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive -possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog. - -Why do they stay? But most of them have not stayed. Kerry has not -one-third the people to-day that it had seventy years ago. The -storekeeper in a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little -father of the people if there ever was one, yet had acted the dubious -role of emigration agent, and had passed thousands of his countrymen on -to America. A few go to England. "For nine years," one hard-working -occupier mentioned to me, "I lived in the shadow of London Bridge." But -for Kerry, the next country to America, America is the land of golden -promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue, "hollow of the dock leaves," I -stopped to ask of a bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking -me the way to America. It is west they turn, away from the Empire that -"always foul-played us in the past, and I am afeard will foul-play us -again." - -"The next time you come, please God you'll bring us Home Rule." That is -the way they speak to you, if they trust you. They want government where -it cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of old. - -I went with a government inspector on one mission in Kerry. At the foot -of the forbidding western hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off -by two mountain streams. At times these streams were low enough to ford -with ease, but after a heavy rain the water would rise four or five feet -in a few hours and the streams would become impassable torrents. For the -sake of a widow whose hovel stood on this island the Commission -consented to build a little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at -either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons in weight, had -only just been planted when a rain came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy -block of cement had toppled over in the stream. This little catastrophe -was the first news conveyed by the paternal storekeeper to the inspector -on our arrival in town, and we walked out to see what could be done. - -Standing by the stream, we were visible to the expectant woman on the -hill. In the soft mournful light of the September afternoon I could see -her outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to learn her fate. -She came bare of head and bare of foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to -her bosom with one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body as she -leaned on her own pier and bent her deep eyes on us across the stream. -As she told in the slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of -the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those eyes to the -inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged in the water, as if to -contemn it for lying there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited -or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression bespoke the sternness -and gravity of her fight for existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant -fighter. She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have ever -beheld. - -If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the anxieties of the -winter. She seemed to look into them through the grayness of the failing -light. She foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race for her -children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying them across on her -back. And she clung to her children. - -"You have had trouble, my poor woman?" the inspector said, knowing that -her husband two years before had been drowned in the torrent. - -"Aye, indeed, your honor, 'tis I am the pity of the world. One year ago -my child was lost to me. It was in the night-time, he was taken with a -hemorrhage, with respects to your honor. I woke the children to have -them go for to bring the doctor, but it was too late an they returned. -He quenched in my arms, at the dead hour of night." - -"The pity of the world" she was in truth. The inspector could do nothing -until the ground was firm enough to support horses and tackle in the -spring. We walked back through the somber bog, the mountains seeming to -creep after us, and we speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To -the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there we came on another -aspect of that plaintive acquiescence so strong in the woman. Yes, the -storekeeper admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector was -right: Foley had failed about the bridge. "I'll haul him over," he said, -full of sympathy for the woman. And he would haul him over. And the pier -would lie there all winter. - -If the people could feel that this solicitude of the Estates Commission -were national, it would bind them to the government. But most of the -inspectors are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees, -well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between the lines. And so -Kerry remains with the old tradition of the government, suspicious of -its intentions, crediting what genuine services there are to the race of -native officials who alone have the intuition of Kerry's kind. - -They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend the Empire; that Empire -which meant landlords and land agents and rackrents for so many blind -and crushing years. They want those straight and stalwart and manly -fellows in the trenches. But Kerry knows what the trenches of Empire are -already. It has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs between -sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years it can remember. It is no -wonder Kerry cannot grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so -readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted a lease to live. - - - - -HENRY ADAMS[2] - - -Henry Adams was born with his name on the waiting list of Olympus, and -he lived up to it. He lived up to it part of the time in London, as -secretary to his father at the Embassy; part of the time at Harvard, -teaching history; most of the time in Washington, in La Fayette Square. -Shortly before he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the United -States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and Olympus were confused. But not -so long after 1838 the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to -control the country through the railroads there was an inevitable shift -in political gravity, and the center of power became Ohio. It was Henry -Adams's fate to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in power; and -Ohio did not comprehend Adams's credentials. Those credentials, -accordingly, were the subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor. -They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history, and Henry Adams -gave a dozen years to Jefferson and Madison. It was his humor afterwards -to say he had but three serious readers--Abram Hewitt, Wayne MacVeagh -and John Hay. His composure in the face of this coolness was, however, a -strange blending of serenities derived equally from the cosmos and from -La Fayette Square. He was not above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even -his autobiography, a true title to Olympus, was issued to a bare hundred -readers before his death, and was then deemed too incomplete to be made -public. It is made public now nominally for "students" but really for -the world that didn't know an Adams when it saw one. - -For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry Adams had the advantage -of full years and happy faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of -both. He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality which is a bad -tradition in English recollections. He saved himself from mere -recollections by taking the world as an educator and himself as an -experiment in education. His two big books were contrasted as -_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity_, -and _The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century -Multiplicity_. The stress on multiplicity was all the more important -because he considered himself eighteenth century to start with, and had, -in fact, the unity of simple Americanism at the beginning. - -Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of basil in this always -expanding tale of a development. There are points about the development, -about its acceptance of a "supersensual multiverse", which only a Karl -Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satisfactorily discuss or criticize. A -reader like myself gazes through the glass bottom of Adams's style into -unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths are clear and crisp. They -deserve to be investigated. But a "dynamic theory of history" is no -proper inhabitant of autobiography, and "the larger synthesis" is not -yet so domesticated as the plebeian idea of God. That Adams should -conduct his study to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent -culmination. A theory of life is the fit answer to the supersensual -riddle of living. But when the theory must be technical and even -professional, an autobiography has no climax in a theory. It is better -to revert, as Adams does, to the classic features of human drama: "Even -in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a -little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of -tone--but never hustled." It is enough to have the knowledge that along -certain lines the prime conceptions were shattered and the new -conceptions pushed forward, the tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in -the twentieth century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of -acceleration. - -Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams embraced the modernity -that gradually dawned on him and gave him his new view of life. Take his -fresh enthusiasm for world's fairs as a solitary example. One might -expect him to be bored by them, but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford -White and Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of America, and -Henry Adams soared over their obviousness to a perception of their -"acutely interesting" exhibits. He was after--something. If the Virgin -Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or St. Louis could give it to him -among the Jugo-Slavs and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done. -No vulgar prejudices held him back. He who could interpret the fight for -free silver without a sniff of impatience, who could study Grant without -the least filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his nose at -unfashionable faiths or to espouse fashionable heresies. He was after -education and any century back or forward was grist to his mill. And his -faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in it. "All one's life," -as he confesses grimly, "one had struggled for unity, and unity had -always won," yet "the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was -increasing, and threatened to increase beyond reason." Beyond reason, -then, it was reasonable to proceed, and the son of Ambassador Adams -moved from the sanctity of Union with his feet feeling what way they -must, and his eye on the star of truth. - -So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how keen it is. But there is -no single dullness, as I remember, in 505 large pages, and there are -portraits like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or the Adamses, -which have the economy and fidelity of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not, -nor is he a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct -expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and he can load a -sentence with a world of meaning. Take, for instance, the phrase in -which he denies unity to London society. "One wandered about in it like -a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of, -at dinner-time." He says of St. Gaudens that "he never laid down the -law, or affected the despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the -brutalities of his world." In a masterly chapter on woman, he summed up, -"The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of -rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak -revolted all history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even an -Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, -if force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, -and the family must pay for it.... She must, like the man, marry -machinery." In Cambridge "the liveliest and most agreeable of men--James -Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, -Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a dozen others, who would have -made the joy of London or Paris--tried their best to break out and be -like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them -professors, and professors they had to be. While all these brilliant men -were greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it. Society -was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were there; but -society cannot be made up of elements--people who are expected to be -silent unless they have observations to make--and all the elements are -bound to remain apart if required to make observations." - -Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact, that Henry Adams -himself felt the necessity of making observations. He approached -autobiography buttoned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human beings he -had a real impulse to release himself, and to release himself in an -autobiography if nowhere else; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he -could no more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day than he -could dance like Nijinski. In so far as the Adamses were institutional -he could talk of them openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence -Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge and St. Gaudens as any -liberated host might reveal himself in the warm hour after dinner. But -this is not the Dionysiac tone of autobiography and Henry Adams was not -Dionysiac. He was not limitedly Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was -receptive, he was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the mere -mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the preface of this autobiography -raises doubts as to Henry Adams's evasive principle, "the object of -study is the garment, not the figure." The figure, Henry Adams's, had -nagging interest for Henry Adams, but something racial required him to -veil it. He could not, like a Rousseau or "like a whore, unpack his -heart with words." - -The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on the word "education." -Although he was nearly seventy when he laid the book aside and although -education means nothing if it means everything, the whole seventy years -were deliberately taken as devotion to a process, that process being -visualized much more as the interminable repetition of the educational -escalator itself than as the progress of the person who moves forward -with it. Moves forward to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams's -detachment that no escalator could move him forward anywhere because he -was not bound anywhere in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak -of his life as perpetually educational. One reason, of course, was his -economic security. There was no wolf to devour him if his education -proved incomplete. Faculty _qua_ faculty could remain a permanent -quandary to him, so long as he were not forced to be vocational, so long -as he could speculate on "a world that sensitive and timid natures could -regard without a shudder." - -The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, however, is one of the principal -fascinations of this altogether fascinating book. What was it that kept -Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay? What was it that sent him -from Boston to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres? The man was a capable and -ambitious man, if ever there was one. He was not merely erudite and -reflective and emancipatingly skeptical: he was also a man of the -largest inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man of the -nicest temper and the sanest style. How could such justesse go begging, -even in the United States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry -Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen he sat waiting for a -clientage that never came, while through a hole he could see a steady -crowd go pouring into the gilded doors across the way. The modest screen -was himself. He could not detach it. But the United States did not see -beyond the screen. A light behind a large globule of colored water could -at any moment distract it. And in England, for that matter, only the -Monckton Milneses kept the Delanes from brushing Adams away, like a fly. - -The question is, on what terms did Adams want life? It is characteristic -of him that he does not specify. But one gathers from his very reticence -that he had least use of all for an existence which required moral -multiplicity. Where he seems gravest and least self-superintending is in -those criticisms of his friends that indicate the sacrifice of -integrity. He was no prig. Not one bleat of priggishness is heard in all -his intricate censure of the eminent British statesmen who sapped the -Union. But there is a fund of significance in his criticism of Senator -Lodge's career, pages 418 and on, in which "the larger study was lost in -the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men." It is in -a less concerned tone that the New Yorker Roosevelt is discussed. "Power -when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all -Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more -than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the -range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs -to ultimate matter--the quality that medieval theology assigned to -God--he was pure act." Pure act Henry Adams was not. If Roosevelt -exhibited "the effect of unlimited power on limited mind," he himself -exhibited the contrary effect of limited power on unlimited mind. Why -his power remained so limited was the mystery. Was he a watched kettle -that could not boil? Or had he no fire in his belly? Or did the fire -fail to meet the kettle? Almost any problem of inhibition would be -simpler, but one could scarcely help ascribing something to that -refrigeration of enthusiasm which is the Bostonian's revenge on wanton -life force. Except for his opaline ethics, never glaring yet never -dulled, he is manifestly toned down to suit the most neurasthenic -exaction. Or, to put it more crudely, he is emotion Fletcherized to the -point of inanition. - -Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the autobiography is a -refutation of anaemia. There was, indeed, something meager about Henry -Adams's soul, as there is something meager about a butterfly. But the -lack of sanguine or exuberant feeling, the lack of buoyancy and -enthusiasm, is merely a hint that one must classify, not a command that -one condemn. For all this book's parsimony, for all its psychological -silences and timidities, it is an original contribution, transcending -caste and class, combining true mind and matter. Compare its comment on -education to the comment of Joan and Peter--Henry Adams is to H. G. -Wells as triangulation to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations -which goes by the name of understanding was part of his very nature. -Unlike H. G. Wells, he was incapable of cant. He had no demagoguery, no -mob-oratory, no rhetoric. This enclosed him in himself to a dangerous -degree, bordered him on priggishness and on egoism. But he had too much -quality to succumb to these diseases of the sedentary soul. He survives, -and with greatness. - - [2] _The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: Houghton - Mifflin Co._ - - - - -THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - - -Sweet and wild, if you like, the first airs of spring, sweeter than -anything in later days; but when we make an analogy between spring and -youth and believe that the enchantment of one is the enchantment of the -other, are we not dreaming a dream? - -Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not a poet. Just because it -is formative and fugitive it evokes imagination; it has a bloom too -momentary to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it is seen. -In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses itself. It is a delicacy -as tender as the first green leaf, an innocence like the shimmering -dawn, "brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling -water and singing birds." People feel this when they accept youth as -immaculate and heed its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at -twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think that youth has -the air of spring about it, that spring is the morning of the gods. -Youth is so often handsome and straight and fearless; it has its -mysterious silences--its beings are beings of clear fire in high spaces, -kin with the naked stars. Yet there is in it something not less fiery -which is far more human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers on -board. - -As one grows older one is less impatient of the supposition that -innocence actually exists. It exists, even though mothers may not -properly interpret it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism -which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth is neither -innocence nor experience. It is a duel between innocence and experience, -with the attainments of experience guarded from older gaze. Human beings -take their contemporaries for granted, no one else: and neither teachers -nor superiors nor even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that -innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw around youth. - -If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its own innocence, the -coming of experience is all the more painful. The process of change is -seldom serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality. The -impressionable and histrionic youth has incessant disappointment in -trying misfit spiritual garments. The undisciplined faculty of -make-believe, which is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to -torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been earned and -self-acceptance begun. - -Do mature people try to help this? Do they remember their own -uncertainty and frustration? One of the high points in Mr. Trotter's -keen psychological study, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, -indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr. Trotter goes beyond Samuel -Butler and Edmund Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful -experience. He shows the forces at work behind the patronizing and -victimizing of the young. - - The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge and - experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man and to - surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or taste.... - - Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the - ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of age - and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history, - proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence and - enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immemorial - wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling of senile - decay. - -The day will come when our present barbaric attitude toward youth will -be altered. Before it can be altered, however, we must completely revise -our conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly innocent than -it is certainly happy, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounds -youth is not to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness. -Innocence, besides, can last too long. Every one has pitied stale -innocence. If a New York child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may -quite easily be shocking to older people. Already, without any -particular viciousness or precocity, he has accumulated a huge number of -undesirable impressions, and shoved them under the surface of his mind. -What, then, to do? The air of spring that is about him need not mislead -his guardians. They may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a -naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only one agent of -innocence, and not the most successful. Certainly not the most -successful for domesticating youth in the sphere that men and women -consider fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain innocent long -after it recognizes the example and feels the impulses of its elders, -the invitation will go unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or -see the moving pictures without realizing a discrepancy between conduct -and precept, which is one hint to precept to take off its bib. - -This knowingness is not quite what it seems to be. Youth is never so -young as when experienced. But those who must deal with it cannot lose -by making it more articulate, by saving it from the silly adult -exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this jealousy and pride -continually operates against youth in the name of dignity and -discipline. And so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction -that portrays youth as the spring time of the spirit; that pipes a song -about a lamb, and leads the lamb to slaughter. - - - - -THE IRISH REVOLT - - - "It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it is - altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven." - - ---- G. K. Chesterton in _The Crimes of England_, 1916. - -When a rebellion has failed men say it was wicked or foolish. It is, on -the contrary, wickedness and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise -against authority the measure of their act cannot be loyalty or -prudence. It is the character of the authority against which men revolt -that must shape one's mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on his -life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction on authority. Is it just -authority, representative, tolerable? The only revolt that is wicked or -foolish is the revolt against reasonable or tolerable authority. If -authority is not livable, revolt is a thousand times justified. - -The Irish rebellion was not prudent. Its imprudence did not weigh with -the men who took to arms. Had hope inspired them, they would have been -utterly insane. But hope did not inspire them. They longed for success; -they risked and expected death. The only consequence to us, wrote -Padraic Pearse before action, is that some of us may be launched into -eternity. "But who are we, that we should hesitate to die for Ireland? -Are not the claims of Ireland greater on us than any personal ones? Is -it fear that deters us from such an enterprise? Away with such fears. -Cowards die many times, the brave only die once." To strike a decisive -blow was the aspiration of the Irish rebels. But decisive or not, they -made up their minds to take action before the government succeeded in -attaching all their arms. - -In this rebellion there was no chance of material victory. Pearse, -MacDonagh, Connolly, Clark, Plunkett, O'Rahilly, O'Hanrahan, Daly, -Hobson, Casement, could only hope against hope. But their essential -objective was not a soldiery. It was an idea, the idea of unprotested -English authority in Ireland. It was to protest against the Irish -nation's remaining a Crown Colony of the British Empire that these men -raised their republican standard and under it shed their blood. In the -first process of that revolt few of them were immediately sacrificed. -Their fight was well planned. They made the most of their brief hour. -But when they were captured the authority they had opposed fulfilled -their expectations to the utmost. Before three army officers, without a -legal defender, each of the leaders was condemned by court-martial. -Their rebellion had been open. Their guilt was known and granted. They -met, as they expected to meet, death. - -The insurrection in Ireland is ended. A cold tribunal has finished by -piecework the task that the soldiers began. The British Empire is still -dominant in Dublin. But ruthless and remorseless behavior sharpens the -issue between authority and rebellion. Even men who naturally condemn -disorder feel impelled to scrutinize the authority which could -deliberately dispense such doom. If that authority deserved respect in -Ireland, if it stood for justice and the maintenance of right, its -exaction of the pound of flesh cannot be questioned. It does not -represent "frightfulness." It represents stern justice. Its hand should -be universally upheld. But if, on the other hand, English authority did -not deserve respect in Ireland, if it had forfeited its claims on these -Irishmen, then there is something to be made known and said about the -way in which this Empire can abuse its power. - -Between the Irish people and English authority, as every one knows, -there has been an interminable struggle. A tolerable solution of this -contest has only recently seemed in sight. The military necessity of -England has of itself precluded one solution, the complete independence -of Ireland. The desire for self-government in Ireland has opposed -another solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Between these two -goals the struggle has raged bitterly. But human beings cannot live -forever in profitless conflict. After many years the majority of the -English people took up and ratified the Irish claims to self-government. -In spite of the conservative element in England and the British element -in Ireland, the _modus vivendi_ of home rule was arranged. It is the -fate of this _modus vivendi_, accepted by the majority of Irishmen as a -reasonable commutation of their claims, that explains the recent -insurrection. These men who are dead were once for the most part Home -Rulers. Their rebellion came about as a sequel to the unjust and -dishonest handling of home rule. - -For thirty-five years home rule has been an issue in Great Britain. The -majority of the British people supported Gladstone during many home rule -sessions. The lower house of Parliament repeatedly passed the measure. -The House of Lords, however, turned a face of stone to Ireland. It icily -rejected Ireland's offer to compound her claims. This irreconcilable -attitude proved in the end so monstrous that English Liberalism -revolted. It threw its weight against the rigid body that denied it. It -compelled the House of Lords to accept the Parliament act, its scheme -for circumventing the peers' veto. Then, three times in succession, it -passed the home rule bill. - -Every one knows what happened. During the probation of the bill the -forces that could no longer avoid it constitutionally made up their -minds that they would defeat it unconstitutionally. Men left the House -of Lords and the House of Commons to raise troops in eastern Ulster. -These, not the Irish, were Germany's primary allies in the British -Isles. Cannon, machine guns, and rifles were shipped to Ireland. Every -possible descendant of the implanted settlers of Ireland was rallied. -Large numbers were openly recruited and armed. The Ulster leaders -pleaded they were loyal, but they insisted that the Liberals of England -did not and could not speak for the Empire. The only English authority -they recognized was an authority like-minded to themselves. Lord -Northcliffe joined with Lord Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and Lord -Willoughby de Broke and Lord Roberts and Sir Edward Carson and Bonar Law -to advise and stimulate rebellion. Some of the best British generals in -the army, to the delight of Germany, were definitely available as -leaders. A provisional government, with Carson as its premier, was -arranged for in 1911. The Unionist and Orange organizations pledged -themselves that under no conditions would they acknowledge a home rule -government or obey its decrees. In 1912 the Solemn Covenanters pledged -themselves "to refuse to recognize its authority." During this period -the government negotiated, but took no action. There were no -Nationalists under arms. - -If free men have a right to rebel, how can any one gainsay Ulster? It -was the Ulster contention that home rule would be unreasonable, -intolerable, and unjust. This was a prophecy, perhaps a natural and -credible prophecy. But it is not necessary to debate the Ulster -rebellion. It was a hard heritage of England's crime against Ireland. It -is enough to say that English authority refused to abandon the home rule -measure and in April, 1914, Mr. Asquith promised to vindicate the law. - -The British League for the support of Ulster had sent out "war calls." -The Ulster Unionist Council had appropriated $5,000,000 for volunteer -widows and orphans. Arms had been landed from America and, it was said, -from Germany. Carson had refused to "negotiate" any further. His -mobilization in 1914 became ominous. The government started in moving -troops to Ulster. The King intervened. Mr. Balfour inveighed against the -proposal to use troops. The army consulted with Carson. Generals French -and Ewart resigned. - -About this period, with Asquith and Birrell failing to put England's -pledges to the proof, the National Volunteers at last were being -organized. Mr. Asquith temporized further. At his behest John Redmond -peremptorily assumed control of the Volunteers. Their selected leader -was Professor MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the non-political Gaelic -revival. There was formal harmony until the European war was declared, -when Mr. Redmond sought to utilize the National Volunteers for -recruiting. This move made definite the purely national dedication of -the Irish Volunteers. - -Four events occurred in rapid succession to destroy the Irish -Volunteers' confidence in English authority. These were decisive events, -and yet events over which the Irish Volunteers could have no control. - -On July 10th, 1914, armed Ulster Volunteers marched through Belfast, and -Sir Edward Carson held the first meeting of his provisional government. - -On July 26th, 1914, the British troops killed three persons and wounded -thirty-two persons because rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, -subsequent to their futile attempt to intercept Irish Volunteer arms. - -On Sept. 19th, 1914, the home rule bill was signed, but its operation -indefinitely suspended. - -In May, 1915, Sir Edward Carson became a member of the British Cabinet. - -These events were endured by John Redmond. He had early accepted a -Fabian policy and put his trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the -price of maintaining the law they decreed. The more radical men in -Dublin were not so trusting. They had heard Asquith promise that no -permanent division of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned he -had bargained for it. They had heard him promise he would vindicate the -law, and they saw him sanction the defiant military leader as -commander-in-chief and the defiant civil leader as a minister of the -crown. With the vivid memory of British troops killing Irish citizens on -the streets of Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English honor. -They had no impulse to recruit for the defense on the Continent of an -Empire thus honorable. They looked back on the evil history they had -been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and to die. - -Irishmen like myself who believed in home rule and disbelieved in -revolution did not agree with this spirit. We thought southern Ireland -might persuade Ulster. We thought English authority was possibly weak -and shifty, but benign. We did not wish to see Ireland, in the words of -Professor MacNeill, go fornicating with Germany. When our brothers went -to the European war we took England's gratitude as heartfelt and her -repentance as deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest, torture, -rape, enforced subservience, ignorance, poverty, famine. But we listened -to G. K. Chesterton about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous Ireland: -"It was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment." - -All the deeper, then, the shock we received from the execution of our -men of finest mettle. They were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so -was De Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a calculation based -on the greater military strength of the Dutch. A government which had -negotiated with rebels in the North, which had allowed the retention of -arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in the Cabinet, could not mark an -eternal bias in its judgment of brave men whose legitimate -constitutional prospects it had raised high and then intolerably -suspended. But this English government, often cringing and supine, was -brave enough to slay one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in -the name of "justice," the judges in this rebellion being officers of an -army that had refused to stand against rebellion in Ulster. - -It is not in vain, however, that these poets and Gaelic scholars and -Republicans have stood blindfolded to be shot by English soldiers. Their -verdict on English authority was scarcely in fault. They estimated with -just contemptuousness the temper of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland -has long been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone from Ireland, -by the fulfillment of England's bond, the memory of this rebellion must -flourish. It testifies sadly but heroically that there are still -Irishmen who cannot be sold over the counter, Irishmen who set no -ultimate sanction on a dishonest authority, Irishmen who set no ultimate -value on their merely mortal lives. - - - - -A LIMB OF THE LAW - - -"Look here," said the policeman, tapping me on the chest, "Mrs. Trotsky -used to live up here above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And then -see what happens--she turns up in Stockholm with two million roubles." - -"Oh, I don't blame her. But ain't we all human--Socialists, Democrats, -Republicans? All we need is a chance." - -"I admit, Socialism has beautiful ideas. But are they practical? That's -what I ask. Now, pardon me, just a minute! Just one minute, please! -Socialism is a fine theory, but look at Emma Goldman. That woman had -seven lovers. Free love. Yes, many a time I've heard them, preaching the -children belonged to the state. Here's their argument, see, they say -that a man and a woman wants to get married but the man figures, have I -enough to support her? and the woman figures, how much has he got? and -the only thing for them to do in that case is to turn the children over -to the state. Now, I ask you, is that human?" - -"You say, a lot of these women in limousines practice free love without -preaching it. Oh, I don't deny it. And, look't here, I'm surprised there -isn't more bombs at that. Right here on the Avenue you see the cars in -one long procession all day, like every one was a millionaire, and three -blocks over you see people who haven't the means of livelihood, without -a shirt to their backs. I'm a public officer, as you might say, and -maybe it sounds queer what I'm going to say, but I'm afraid to have my -own children on the steps of the apartment house. I takes the -night-stick to them and I says, 'Beat it out of here, don't let the -landlord see you, or he'll raise the rent again.'" - -"You said it, something's rotten somewhere. What do you think of the -government holding back all that meat, just because the packers want it -fixed that way, and plenty of people on the Lower East Side there -willing to buy it all up--and at good prices too? But, no, it has to be -held back to suit the packers. And then they lower the price a little. -Because why? The government lets them have all that meat for what they -like." - -"It's the same way with the ice. Did you see what they done? The mayor -gets them all together, to prevent them boosting the price on it, and -it's fixed; they can't raise the price this summer to more than five -fifty a ton. They wait two days at the old price, and then they put it -at five fifty. Two days they wait, that's all." - -"Of course this is the best government in the world. I'll tell you what -proves it--all these foreigners coming over here. Look at that -soda-fountain man there. You heard him talk up for the Bolsheviki, -didn't you? Well, he hasn't much gray matter in here, but just the same -that fellow makes as much in three months as I get for a whole lousy -year. Three months, and he hasn't been here ten years. And my people -been here two hundred. But these immigrants come over ignorant and -uneducated, and only down in Kentucky and Tennessee are our people not -able to read and write. I hear down there they are regular tribes, -fighting each other and all that. Of course that soda-fountain man, he -couldn't associate with lots of the people I go with. If he walked in, -they'd look at him as much as to say, 'Who have we here?' But he rolls -up the coin just the same." - -"But the trouble with the Russian people, I'll tell you. Why, eighty per -cent of them can't read or write. Now I'll tell you what it's like. It's -like this: the Russian people is like a dog was tied up in the -back-yard, see, and then he was let loose and he run wild with joy all -over the place, and then it depended who was the first to whistle to -him, whee-whee, and Lenin and Trotsky they whistled, whee-whee, and the -Russian people came right to them. Of course I don't think it'll work. -They want to do away with money over there. You know, you want to buy a -shoeshine and you give a man a head of cabbage. That's impractical. And -then again the government can't own everything. It's all right for -public utilities, but you take and try to control everything and what'll -happen? It can't be done. What I say is, let a man earn a million or so, -and then say to him, anything over and above that million we take away, -see? And when he has his million he doesn't go on trying to monopolize -everything. But now, you have all these uneducated people around here, -and the more money they earn the worse they are." - -"I'll tell you. Right across the hall from where my wife and me live -there's a lovely woman, a Jewess, one of the nicest people you could -want to meet, and I'm in her house and she's in mine all the time, until -her husband comes home. But he's one of that kind, you know! The other -night he comes home with three friends and he says to me, 'Say, Charlie, -come on down to Long Island with us in the car for a week. I'll pay all -your expenses!' 'You will, eh,' I says. 'Now I'll tell you something. -That sort of thing don't go with me. In the first place, you know I -can't get leave to be away from the police department for a week; in the -second place, you know I can't leave my wife here; in the third place, -you know damn well I can't afford to go with you. I know your kind! You -have your three friends here and you want them to see what a great guy -you are. Well, I'll tell you what you are,' and I told him. Now he'll be -the same if he has a million. And I'll tell you another kind that hasn't -respectability. No, I mean decency. She was a big fat woman and her baby -was crying here the other day, and she opened her dress right there and -leaned down to feed the child. You know, just like that statue, I forget -the name. And all the little boys rubbering around. That's the class of -people you have to contend with around here in this place, with the air -full of fish guts they throw out of the windows, and everything." - -"But the German ones are different. Not that I want to praise the -Germans or the like of that, but they're self-respectful, you know. It's -the lack of education with them others--those others." - -"But you put the Socialists in power and what difference will it make? -I'm--I'm not against Socialism, I want you to understand. But there's -human nature!" - - - - -A PERSONAL PANTHEON - - -Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine, Clarence Day shied a -cocoanut at old Henri Fabre. Personally I had nothing against Henri. I -rather liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence said -publicly, "that old bird-artist, you don't have to admire him any -longer." Without waiting for further encouragement I bounced Henri off -the steps of my Pantheon. - -Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I admit, but nothing is so -important as to keep it from getting crowded with half-gods. For many -months my own Pantheon has been seriously congested. Most of the ancient -deities are still around--George Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom Hardy -and Sam Butler--and there is a long waiting list suggested by my -friends. Joseph Conrad has been sitting in the lobby for several years, -hungering for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated applications -from such varied persons as Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, -Anatole France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P. Shelley, John -Muir, George Washington and Mary Wollstonecraft. But with so many -occupants already installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed in, it -has been impossible to open the doors to newcomers. My gods are like the -office-holders--few die and none resign. And when a happy accident -occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel as one feels when -some third person is good enough to smash the jardiniere. - -I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while. Two or three years ago he -swept into the Pantheon on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse -for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest gods I had ever -encountered. His smile, his long jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a -Tussaud figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and William Blakes. -I stood him in the corner when he first arrived, debating where to put -him, but at no time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young Teddy -Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did -Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all, had kept -Mr. Wilson from being a Republican? How did he differ intrinsically from -a Henry Stimson, a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton? The -pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had not the heart to enthrone -him; and never shall I enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the -flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and commonplace -humanity. He is President, as was Taft. So is he impressive. But the -expectation I had blown up for him is punctured. He would have been a -god, despite all my prejudice against his styles, if at any time he had -proved himself to be the resolute democrat. But the resolute democrat he -was not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating his chest -as well as he could, and he has to get out of my Pantheon. - -This eviction of the President relieves my feelings like a good spring -cleaning. To be con-structive gives me pleasure, but not half so much -pleasure as to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former mental -and spiritual habitations. A great many people are catholic. They have -hearts in which Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East Lynne. I -envy these people and their receptive natures, but my own chief joy is -to asphyxiate my young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage -of loyalty. - -There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I was unjust to Upton Sinclair -that I almost subscribed to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel, -Jimmie Higgins, I actually read it. - -"My best book," Mr. Sinclair assures the world. If that is really the -case, as I hope, I am happily emancipated from him forever. He is -something of an artist. He converts into his own kind of music the -muck-rake element in contemporary journalism. He is always a -propagandist, and out of religious finance or the war or high society or -the stockyards or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that -nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on such stimulants, one -ought to choose them carefully, and I'd much rather go straight to Billy -Sunday than take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on reading his -well-known health books, I nearly fasted nine days under his influence. -That is to say, I fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which I -dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced me that I was perhaps -a coarser organism than Mr. Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an -ordinary diet. But until I had a good reason for expelling this -uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always in danger of taking -him seriously. Now, I am glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am -safe. - -Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom Upton Sinclair is -nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion of Nietzsche was also -required. When we used to read the _New Age_ ten years ago, with Oscar -Levy's steady derision of everything and anything not Nietzschean, I had -a horrible sense of inadequacy, and I started out to read the Master's -works. It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and worm as I was, -I found Nietzsche upsetting all the other fellows in the Pantheon. He -and William Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity. -Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny stories. He was sulky with -George Meredith and frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss -Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but I voted him away. - -This Olympian problem does not seem to bother men like William Marion -Reedy. Mr. Reedy is the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee -Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism, Woodrow Wilson -and Theodore Roosevelt. He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile -salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops and publishers, and -he is genuinely himself with all of them. He finds the common -denominator in machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and without -turning a hair he moves from tropical to arctic conversation. He is at -home with Celtic fairies and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance -and St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe he has, it must be -a good deal like a Union depot, with gods coming in and departing on -every train and he himself holding a glorious reception at the -information booth. I am sure he can still see the silver lining to W. J. -Bryan and the presidential timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun -of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a good word for Freud. He has -nothing against Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity -puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies is called upon to slave -in their service, to rush here and there like a general practitioner, to -sleep with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at his head. How -does he find the energy to do it! I admire it. I marvel at men who -understand all and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore -Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt Whitman. Think of those -who have a good word to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am -sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a lot of much-needed -vitality. Give me a temple on a high hill, with a long drop down from -the exit. - - - - -NIGHT LODGING - - -It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim Gorki's Night -Lodging of "gloom." Gloomy plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one -of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a play like She Walked -in Her Sleep? That defunct comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle -race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies that. But to believe that a -somber play must necessarily be a "gloomy" play is like believing that -Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply isn't true, and to -suppose it is mentally inelastic. - -But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We say, Ah yes, -Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen, the man who bites on granite; or -Gorki, the Big Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are simply -human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions of the fifth grade. -This is itself an old story in criticism. Only the story has to be -re-told every time the New York newspaper critics are called upon to -characterize a serious drama. With a regularity as unfailing as the -moon, the New York critics reaffirm their conviction that a play -concerning derelict human beings must of course be squalid, sodden, -high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to believe and assert -such things, yet their belief and assertion are endemic in the New York -newspapers, like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps. - -Mr. Arthur Hopkins's presentation of Night Lodging at the Plymouth -Theatre may or may not be better than the presentation some time ago at -the German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the performance at the -German theatre and I am inclined to distrust the persons to whom the -German theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick with which to -whack the American theatre. But, better or worse than the German -performance, Mr. Hopkins's is to the good. It is a strong, firm, -spacious, capable performance, resting not so much on a few pinnacles as -on a general level of excellence. It is presented bravely. Making no -attempt to sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics, it allows -the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate every word and action of -the performance. The result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every -actor in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness. But the result -is viable, Russian or not. A sense of human incident and human presence -is quickly secured, and after that there comes a stream of events which -never loses its reality either in force or direction. The impact is -tremendous. Gorki inundates one's consciousness with these human -fortunes and misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while occasional -accents slip awry in the tumult of his creation, the substance of his -story finds one a corroborator--in a way that one simply never -corroborates depression or gloom. - -The men and women, who come together in this night lodging of a Russian -city, are of the emancipated kind that one sees on the benches in -Madison Square. They are recruited from the casual worker and the -non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the -criminals and the broken and the declasse. On the first evening when one -hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, one -realizes that their anarchism is bitter. They grate on one another, -sneer at one another, bawl at one another, tell one another to go to -hell. They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled them. They do -not understand or accept their fate. They are full of self-pity. They -are, in a word, one's tired and naked self. But this relaxed and wanton -selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps for his people the -freshness of childhood--a freshness charming in some cases, horrible in -others, but always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal -themselves in this nudity of common poverty! A woman in the corner is -coughing, coughing. She wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His -patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies a man half recovered -from a drunken brawl. He aches loudly with stale liquor and stale -wounds. In the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the wife of -the lodging-house keeper--a mistress from whom he pines to escape. The -"baron" sits in the shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary -sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor repeats the -medical verdict that his organism is poisoned with alcohol. "You mean -'organon,'" shouts another. "No, organism. My organism...." And so, -these lives sweep round and round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the -sport of the winds of heaven. - -Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical patriarchal wanderer. -Quite simply he fits into this life of the basement, but unlike the rest -he is no longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect in his -anarchism. And gradually the lives of the night lodging group around -him. He sits by the dying woman. He talks of women to the young thief, -and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning to the -young. He stands like an untroubled oak in the gales that toss the -others hither and thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets them all -with compassion, a man among children. - -He goes. His presence has not prevented the lodging-house keeper's wife -from driving the young man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented -that flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the young man really -loves. But though the old man departs he leaves after him a rent of blue -in the clouds that choke these people's lives. One after another the -night lodgers question life afresh under the wanderer's influence. The -tartar's arm is still smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is -still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The actor is still -alcoholic. But there is aroused in the night lodging the imperishable -dream of happiness, and no one is ready to quench it. - -Why is the grave and beautiful play _not_ gloomy? It is not enough to -say that the really gloomy play gives a naturalistic version of life -which the spectator rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the -falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows or in its discords -but in its absence of the vitamin of beauty. Many plays are denied truth -because their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied beauty -simply because their beauty is a stranger. Yet we know that truth or -beauty may be as sable as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a -waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the child of -ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, conventional ugliness. -It is the people who think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see -Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail in beholding life. It is -not poor in sympathy. - - - - -YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC - - -In 1912, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the public how Mr. Taft had -bitten the hand that fed him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft's rejoinder but -it was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further observations from the -colonel. Those were the days. Nothing but peace on earth and good will -among Republicans. - -About that time I happened to have lunch with a most attractive young -man, one of the first American aviators. He was such a clear-cut young -man, with trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said he to me, -"But how can these things be true? I can't understand it. If any one -else said these things you'd pay no attention to them, but both of these -men are fine men; they've both been president; and if these things they -say _are_ true, then neither of them can be such fine gentlemen. I can't -make it out, honestly." And he looked at me with a profundity of pained -inquiry. - -What could I say? What can you say when you meet with such simple faith? -It took years of primary school and Fourth of July and American history -to build up this conception of the American presidents, and now the -worst efforts of a president and an ex-president had only barely shaken -the top-structure. What was the good of forcing this youth to unlearn -everything he had learned? If I took away his faith in the divine office -of president, perhaps he might begin to lose his patriotism and his -willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps he might go on -and lose faith in the jury system, the institution of marriage, the -right of free speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance of -Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment. If I unhinged this -lad's faith, perhaps he would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther, -Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma Goldman--the "Goldman -Woman" as the Ochs man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed man -call her in their outbursts of American chivalry. I wanted no such arid -and lonely career for this splendid young man. I hated to think of his -wearing an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his fresh bloom to -be a subversive idealist like Eugene Debs. Much better, said I to -myself, that he should hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than -that he should repulse him and face life without him. So I gave the lad -soothing words and earnest though insincere glances, and he went his way -puzzled but greatly reassured. - -Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say that simple faith is all -very well, but a man ought to live in the real world and know his way -around. Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing situation. He -is compelled to evade uncomfortable facts. Very true. Quite right. -Exactly so. But is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of -being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a simpleton and yet a -wholesome man of action, a man of will and character and pep? What is -the good of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalatable -facts, if it confuses you and upsets you and undermines everything -you've been brought up to believe? What's the use? Voltaire may be all -right in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we all be Voltaires? - -If I stick up for good faith in the character of presidents, I know that -there will be a bad comeback. I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even -if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I therefore to give in -to them? I refuse to admit that there is nothing else than to destroy a -beautiful faith in the good that is everywhere. - -What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old argument of the war. -They say: Yes, your fine brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical -product of patriotism. And where were the prime examples of patriotism -to be found? In Germany. He happens, in your instance, to believe in the -divine office of the presidents. But it is much more characteristic of -him to be on his knees to the Kaiser. Yet consider how one-sided you -are. When he declares himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the -joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his reverence over the -Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when -it comes to an American you say, "Oh, don't let's destroy this beautiful -faith! How precious it is, how noble, how commendable! Hands off, -please." And you act in the same way toward the Constitution or the -Supreme Court. It's magnificent when the Germans come ahead with a -perfectly good new constitution, model 1920. But we must stick to the -brand of 1789, with the cow-catcher added in 1910. Hail to Our Iron -Constitution! And hail to the Old Man's Home down in Washington where -they hand out the uncontaminated economics that they themselves lisped -at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country. Straight from the source, -these old men got their inspiration, and they are a credit to the early -nineteenth century. You think we exaggerate your loyalty? You agree that -the simple faith of young Germans and young Turks can be highly -dangerous, but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young Americans? - -That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way; but hardly likely to -fool the intelligent, law-abiding, God-fearing citizen. Because no good -American could admit for one instant that the cases are on all fours. -America, after all, is a democracy. And when a young man starts out -having faith in a democracy he is in an altogether different position -from Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet Russians and people -like that. A democracy, whatever its faults, is founded in the interests -of all the people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple faith in it is -equivalent to simple faith in a first principle; and you cannot go -behind first principles. - -That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic. He thinks it is very -clever to question the things that are of the light in just the same -spirit that he questions things that are of the darkness. And of course -he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who cuts away the sound flesh rather -than the diseased flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive -not con-structive. - -And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion my fine young -aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning him, who can tell what the -consequences might have been? We know that during the war there were -grim duties to be performed by our young men--towns to be bombed where -it took excessive skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the -women and the children. If I had sapped this boy's faith even one -pulsation, perhaps he would have failed in his duty. - -You cannot be too careful how you lead people to rationalize. In this -world there is rationalism and plenty of it. But is there not also a -super-rationalism? And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism -when we _know_ we possess the true faith? - - - - -THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID[3] - - -The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so he had to pick his steps -with care. But at last he came to a French window, which he opened, and -sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was a poet, and that is what -young poets do. - -He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men go. Unformed, of -course--perhaps twenty minutes late and the hall only two-thirds full. -But he was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the gas. He was -from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, but he had long resided with an aunt -in Nebraska and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts and a lemon -tie. At Harvard--he went to Harvard--he had opened his bean with -considerable difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of temperament. -So that he could never stop himself when he beheld a passing star. - -The motion was full, with significant curves. It made him a little -air-sick at first, but he preferred air-sickness. He made no compromise -with the public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days that quickly -ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of -Venus on the main line. - -In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick their heels toward -Mercury, and utter startling cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the -menagerie, and they feed mathematical instructors through a hole in the -wall. This new participant had too much of the stern blood of the -Puritan in his rustproof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, but -when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of seventy years he felt a -little wishful, and permitted himself a trifling ululation. The local -cheer-leader heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard Acutist, and -there was joy in Asphodelia. - -A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping in the branches of -the cocoanut tree, and the river of green ink wearied him. So when the -next star swung around he slipped away from his pink duenna and crept -into the lattice-work to steal his passage home. - -Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He hung there lonely, in -his Reis underwear, aching in the void. - -He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he trans-shipped to New York in -ordinary ways, he prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue -course on Front Street. - -"My boy," said his uncle, "what do you want me to do for you? Speak the -word. You have been gone so long, and you were given up for lost." - -"Only one thing do I want," confessed the former Acutist. - -"And what might that be?" the uncle more circumspectly inquired. - -"Take me at once to the great simple embrace of wholesome Coney Island." - -So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped -from Acutism on to the Iron Boat. - -And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not -leave something to waft in the spaces of uncertainty? - - [3] Inscribed to the _Little Review_ - - - - -WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS - - -I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet. -At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my -dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not -ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to -take notes of William Butler Yeats? - -In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I -intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead -wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was -welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak. -His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and -remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them -for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some -sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he pronounced -his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his -words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was -indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished -conversation. Or, rather, monologue--for when I talked he suspended his -animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down. - -It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he'd write for it, -and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action -and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him -want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The -Playboy. The word "journalism" he uttered as a nun might utter -"vaudeville." He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to -Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court -gossip. Wouldn't it interest Wilde? "Ah, yes," responded Wilde, "I am -deeply interested in a court scandal at present." The journalist -(devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. "Yes," said -Wilde, "the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C." - -It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not -forget, however, pillars of the _Ladies' World_ edited by Oscar Wilde -which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the -end. - -Yeats's mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman. -Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a "fury of -preoccupation" would keep him from being caught in those activities that -lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but -into dialogues, "of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez." In -the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a -mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a -stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond -space and time. - -"And humanitarian writing," he concluded, with a weary limp motion of -his hand, "the writing of reformers, 'uplifters,' with a narrow view of -democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic." - -I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel's narrow antidemocracy and belief in -the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during -the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate nature. The -progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the -early Victorians. It was founded on "truisms" not really true. Whether -Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn't -know: possibly Mitchel was. - -Yeats's one political interest at that time, before the war, was the -Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British -democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and "this is -fortunate." I spoke of Jung's belief in England's national complex. He -was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted. -"The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration," he said, "and -Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so -there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson -has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for -a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a -better man than Lloyd George--less inflated. He is a moderate, not -puffed up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it -arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other people's sins his -business, and forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, -that is different." - -His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences. -In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more, -than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and -somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in -this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a -poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own -country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin -slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is -poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would -satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in -imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for -auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes, -but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination. -He agreed. "Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be -irreconcilable." - -It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the -deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen. -He said it was Allen's own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many -thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same -scale as their friends' children! And he kindled at this folly. "A woman -who marries an artist," he said with much animation, "is either a goose, -or mad, or a hero. If she's a goose, she drives him to earn money. If -she's mad she drives him mad. If she's a hero, they suffer together, and -they come out all right." - -Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that -the Pennsylvania station is "free from the vulgarity of advertisement"; -the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The -Dark Rosaleen and Hussey's Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the -effect that "courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art." Not -for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and -read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like -Hazlitt's meeting Coleridge. I could not say, "my heart, shut up in the -prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, -a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb -and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to -Coleridge." But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the -periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of -poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is -wise enough to treasure his words. - - - - -"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE" - - -Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great -detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came -a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a -rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the -ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as -quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was -to be seen. The skyscrapers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost -light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars -unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active, -beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky. - -I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could -it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A -U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind -was singularly lively for three a. m. - -Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains, -if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality -of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed, -death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put -yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really -bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel -Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation. -An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of -feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. -To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred--that would always -be a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, "proud punctilio." I -remembered the President's tender-minded words, "conduct our operations -as belligerents without passion," and his pledge of sincere friendship -to the German people: warfare without "the desire to bring any injury or -disadvantage upon them." Here, with the Germans' shell-fire plowing into -our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their -guns? - -Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about -this "bombardment," to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson -Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not -at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves -familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains -shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air. -Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud -reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so -distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless -inspection of the innocent sky! - -But that touch of panic, in the interest of our whole present patriotic -cultural attitude, was not to be lost. It is the touch, confessed or -unconfessed, that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward German art -and literature and science an attitude of appreciation and -reciprocation, without disloyalty, it must be in the presence of the -idea of shell-wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness is the -illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth and smug. It is Pharisaical. It -comes from that neutrality of the imagination which is another name for -selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake. - -A generation less prepared than our own for the mood of warfare it would -be difficult to imagine--less prepared, that is to say, by the situation -of our country or the color of our thought. To declare now that New York -has made no provision for the air-traffic of the future is not to arouse -any sense of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency was aroused -ten or fifteen years ago by the bass warnings of military men. It is not -too much to say that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have an -ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas Murray Butler and Elihu Root and -Andrew Carnegie were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel -Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was far more busy -enunciating the recall of judges--and he earned the Nobel Prize. Few -men, even two years ago, believed we would be sending great armies to -Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like Homer Lea had said that the -United States could not mobilize half a million soldiers for active -service in less than three years. And in the next place, we still felt -pacifically. We had lived domestic life too long ever to imagine our sky -black and our grass red. - -Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, this calm enjoyment of an -unearned increment of peace, there was never a greater dislocation of -standards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater problem of -readjustment. For England, at any rate, there was a closeness to the war -that helped to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, besides -the discrepancies in the entailment of services, there are enormous -discrepancies in sentiment to start with, and policies still to be -accepted and cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed or -reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances, is so much to -be looked for, especially with impetuous patriots demanding a new -password of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not at how many -outrages there are, but how few. - -Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of literary discussion, -naturally. "Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds; -the herd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his -flocks"; the critic of his books. But there is one kind of outrage that -requires to be discussed, from the point of view of culture, if only -because there is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be -subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally so-called, -of mutilating everything German; not only sequestering what may be -dangerous or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration -everything that has German origin or bears a German name. The quick -transformation of Bismarcks into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into -Cafe New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously. The shudderings -at Germantown, Pa., and Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same -childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian artist is not -permitted to perform because, while we are not at war with Austria, she -is our enemy's ally. It is different when "the music of all German -composers will be swept from the programmes of scheduled concerts of the -Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh. 'The Philadelphia Orchestra -Association wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure to the -request of the Pittsburgh Association. The Philadelphia Orchestra -Association is heartily in accord with any movement directed by -patriotic motives.'" It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance to -culture, that suggests we have been surprised in this whole matter of -culture with our lamps untrimmed. - -In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have been unavoidably -surprised--so much so that our "proud punctilio" has been jogged -considerably loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any -pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to be. It used to be -possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign -magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare -possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally -involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its -complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy -is inhuman in this war. - -Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred might well go beyond the -fervor of the Inquisition, and the hope of exterminating the Germans as -a people might be universally entertained. But no one who has read -history to any purpose will trust too far to this particular -emotionality of the hour. To say this, in the middle of a righteous war, -may sound unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could be more -traitorous and seditious than Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Both -read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid -against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered--that of -neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe -unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses -come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall -suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the -Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through -his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that _he gives to both -North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the -offense came_, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine -attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? -Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war -may speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be said, 'The judgments -of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none; -with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see -the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the -nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and -for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a -just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." It is, -perhaps, like quoting the Lord's Prayer. And yet it is the neglected -wisdom of a man who had gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war. - -But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside humanity. We are -engaged in a war foreordained and necessary, a natural war. A war -inescapable, yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of -hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations as this is, -however, scarcely possible. It is too much, in the face of -superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of -culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our -own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent -nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is -at once called "rowdy" and "despicable." But in time of war it is part -of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to -clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making -railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. How far this -supervision of culture goes depends only on the degree of pressure. It -may go so far as to make the domination of political considerations, -state considerations, paramount in everything--precisely the victory -that democracy, hoping with Emerson that "we shall one day learn to -supersede politics by education," has most to fear. - -It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one -must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is -opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do -so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It -is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and -English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the -beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in -mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end. -But for the man who has partaken of democratic culture this "end" -involves democracy. All character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in -the will to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The only course -open to the man who is still concerned for democratic culture is to -remember the nobility of Lincoln's example--by concentrating on the -offenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty scourge of war, -to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred which will enrage our wounds. - - - - -WAR EXPERTS - - - "War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong arm. - Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in - modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive - factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are - technological exploits; exploits of technological science, - industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been - remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman's war, and the - gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as - it is played." - - ---- Thorstein Veblen in _The Nature of Peace_. - -Across a park in Washington I followed the leisurely stride of two -British officers. Their movement, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had -a military deliberation which became their veteran gray hairs. They were -in khaki uniforms and leather leggings, a red strip at the shoulder -marking them as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses and -tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn to the birds they were as -of a grander race of men. After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked -who they were and learned that one of them was simply a Canadian -lawyer--and that, being a judge advocate, he was obliged to boot and -spur himself in his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and down the -elevator in polished leggings, for the good of the cause. Never in his -life had he heard a machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything -more dangerous than his family carving knife. On inspection his -companion looked similarly martial. The only certain veteran in the -parklet was a shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the grass. - -Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing of this -description. It excites the romantic populace, composed of pedestrians -like myself, and serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine -order of values from which the shambling citizen is debarred. But back -of the window-dressing, the rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared -ovation and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different from these -appearances as roots are different from flowers. If I had ever supposed -that the gist of war was to be derived solely from contemplating -uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion when I overheard the cool -experts of war. - -These experts, such of them as I happened to overhear, had come with the -British mission to America, and they were far other than the common -notion of lords of war. The most impressive of them was a slight figure -who reminded me externally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw's -Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a don at Cambridge, a teacher -of economics, and he retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert -who counts on holding attention. It was not in him, as it is in so many -older pooh-bah professors, to expect a deference to personal garrulity; -but one gained an impression that no words were likely to be wasted on -vacuous listeners by a person with such steel-gray eyes. - -From London, since the beginning of the war, this concentrated man had -gone out of Paris, to Rome, to Petrograd, to join counsel with various -allies on the science of providing munitions. It would never have -occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced, sensitive, -quiet-voiced professor to work out the economic killing of cattle. Yet -almost as soon as he had volunteered in England he began on the task of -adapting industry to slaughter, and there was no doubt whatever that his -inclusive mind had procured the quick and effective killing of thousands -of human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen to him. He was -one of those men whom H. G. Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort -of man who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind as nimble as -quicksilver while he devised the soundest plan for launching the forces -of his sphere. There was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a -mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing of America for -destructiveness as an engineer might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel -with copper, and there was as little pretension in his manner as there -was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated, he was obviously a -university man, but he had come to the top by virtue of mental -equipment. "Mental equipment" means many things, but plainly he was not -of those remote academicians who go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He -managed his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt swing and drive -and bite of it could escape no one, and for all his almost plaintively -modest demeanor he had instant arresting power. It was he and a few men -like him who had made it feasible for amateur armies to loop round an -empire a burning rain of steel. - -This master of munitions was not the only schoolman who had demonstrated -brains. There was another professor, this time the purchaser of guns. He -had come to his role from holding the kind of position that Matthew -Arnold once had held. A meager figure enough, superficially the -scholastic-dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of education was -no bad beginning for ordering a new department with small attention to -the tricks, of merchandise, but with every thought as to technological -detail. The conversation that went about did not seem to engage this -man, except as it turned on such engrossing topics as the necessity for -circumventing child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent cloud -that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged itself in lightning -decision which made no change in the obscurity from which it came. - -Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue I saw one late-working -member of the mission stop wearily to fend off American inquisition. A -training in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished exile a -permanent nostalgia for Olympus--and how Olympian the British Foreign -Office is, few Americans dare to behold. The candidature to this -interesting service of a great democracy is limited to a "narrow circle -of society" by various excellent devices, the first of which is that -official conditions of entry fix the amount of the private means -required at a minimum of L400 a year. "The primary qualification for the -diplomatic service," says one friendly interpreter of it, "is a capacity -to deal on terms of equality with considerable persons and their words -and works. Sometimes, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its -highest form, by something which is hardly examinable--by very great -intellectual powers. Ordinarily, however, this capacity is a result of -nurture in an atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is scarcely -too much to say that the present constitution of society provides this -atmosphere of independence only where there is financial independence. -In a very few cases freedom of mind and character is achieved elsewhere, -but then a great price, not measurable by money, has to be paid for -it--how great a price only those who have paid it know.... The 'property -qualification' is operative as a means of selecting a certain kind of -character; no readjustment of pay could be a substitute for it. -Undoubtedly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but the -limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice or of a mere -preference for wealth--it is a limitation imposed by the needs of the -diplomatic service, and those needs are national needs." Out of such a -remarkable background, so redolent of "the present constitution of -society," my exiled diplomat took his weary stand before prying writers -for the press. They wanted to know "the critical shrinking point." They -wished to discuss the "maximum theoretic availability." He had no answer -to make; he merely made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box that -he set at his feet there were undoubtedly treasured figures, priceless -information for Germany in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box -might have been solid metal for any effect it had on the conversation. -He was a kind of expert who took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; -who punctuated silence with, "Look here, you've got hold of absolutely -the wrong man.... Hanged if I know.... My dear sir, I haven't the very -faintest idea." - -And yet this member of a caste was only coming through because he too -was paying a technological price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and -rubber--there was nothing his country might need which did not occupy -him, staff officer of vital trafficking, throughout numbered nights. - -There were a few business men on the mission--mighty few considering -their lordship in times of peace. Most of the dominant figures either -from Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual who stood out -as rather an exception to the prevailing type. He was an older man whose -nature brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and high discourse -and a happy gigantic effervescence. If a reputation brayed too loudly at -him, he named its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him, he -called it detestable and cried to knock the English _Nation's_ head -against the _Manchester Guardian's_. Yet he was distinguished from most -of his colleagues as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. To -the organization of his country he had contributed one invaluable idea, -and each problem that came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow -immediate importance into the perspective of a natural philosophy. Not -fond of a prearranged system, he irked more than the run of his -countrymen at the stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great sweep -of vigor he would start at the proposition of handling war industry, for -example, on a basis not inadequate to the requirements; and out of his -running oration would come a wealth of such suggestions as spring only -from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind. - -These are a handful of England's experts in wartime. They do not bear -the brunt of the fight, like the soldiers, but the roots of the flower -of war are in just such depths as employ these hidden minds. - - - - -OKURA SEES NEWPORT - - -Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend of mine in Japan. Jack said -that Okura was taking two years off to study democracy, and would I -steer him around. I was delighted. I offered Okura his choice of the -great democratic scene, with myself as obedient personal conductor. He -was very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray manner, and he -asked if we could begin with Newport. I suspected a joke, but his eye -never twinkled, and so to Newport we went. - -The dirty little Newport railway station interested Okura. So did the -choked throat of Thames Street, with its mad crush of motors and -delivery wagons and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from the -meat market to the book shop and from the chemist's to the Boston Store. -I explained to Okura that this was not really Newport, only a small -sample of the ordinary shopping country town, with the real -exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind. Okura clucked an acceptance -of this remark, and our car wove its difficult way through the narrow -lane till we returned to Bellevue Avenue. - -The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded to Okura. He expected a -belle vue, not a good plain plutocratic American street. When I told him -what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied with its exhibition -of assorted architecture, and he broke into open comment. "So very -charming!" he cried politely. "So like postcards of Milwaukee by the -lake!" I enjoyed his naive enthusiasm and let it go. - -He wanted to know who lived on the avenue, and I told him all the names -I could think of. He had heard many of them, the samurai of America -being known to him as a matter of course, and he picked up new crumbs of -information with obvious gratitude. - -"Vanderbilt? Oh, yes." That was old. So were Astor and Belmont. - -After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. "I do not see the McAlpin -mansion." - -"The McAlpins? I have never heard of them," I murmured indulgently. - -"But that is one name I think I remember correctly," Okura answered with -visible anxiety. "The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the -Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not understand. Are not the -McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?" - -It was hard to convince Okura that this was not a Valhalla of hotel -proprietors, but at last he got it straight. We went back again as far -as the Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament. - -Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats up rather far--well, to be -frank, among the Jamestown and Saunderstown people. But happily we had -Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of the ladies sat facing the -tennis, some sat with their backs to it, and a great buzz of -conversation reverberated under the roof of the stand and billowed on to -the court. On the court two young men strove against each other with a -skill hardly to be matched in any other game, and occasionally, when -something eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple passed through the -crowd. But the applause was irregular. People had to be watched and -pointed out. It was important to note which human oyster bore the -largest pearl. The method of entry and exit was significant, and -significant the whole ritual of being politely superior to the game. - -Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately, and there was so much -conversation he was rather distracted. - -"I hope it does not annoy you?" I asked him. - -"Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so democratic!" - -At this point the umpire got off his perch, and came forward to entreat -the fine ladies. - -"I have asked you before to keep quiet," he wailed. "For God's sake, -will you stop talking?" - -"How very interesting," murmured Okura. - -"Yes," I said, "the religious motif." - -"Ah, yes!" he nodded, very gravely. - -Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play, and we decided to return to -the tournament; but first we took ourselves to Bailey's Beach. - -Bailey's Beach is a small section of the Atlantic littoral famous for -its seaweed. The seaweed is of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in -in large quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind and other -picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy carpet through which one -wades out to the more fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies -in their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching the more -adventurous sex pick his way out of the vegetable matter. In the -pavilion of the bathhouses sit still less adventurous groups. - -It took some time to explain to Okura why this beach, once devoted to -the collection of seaweed for manure, should now be dedicated to -bathing. But he grasped the main point, that it was a private beach. - -"Forgive me," he said, "I see no Jews." - -"That's all right," I answered. "You are studying democracy. There are -no Jews here. None allowed." - -"Oh!" he digested the fact. Then his eye brightened. "Ah, you have your -geisha girls at the swim-beach. How very charming!" - -"No," I corrected him. "Those are not our geisha girls. That is the -'shimmy set.' You know: people who are opposed to the daylight saving -act and the prohibition amendment." - -"Oh, I understand. Republicans," he nodded happily. - -As the Servants' Hour was approaching at Bailey's Beach, and as I had no -good explanation to give of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along -by the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by the walk, and by the -fact that it ran in front of these private houses, free to the public as -to the wind. Once or twice we went down below stone walls, with -everything above hidden from us, but this was exceptional. Okura thought -the walk a fine example of essential democracy. - -"And what are those long tubes?" he asked, as we gazed out toward -Portugal. - -"Sewer pipes," I said bluntly, looking at the great series of excretory -organs that these handsome democratic mansions pushed into the sea. - -"Are they considered beautiful?" asked Okura. - -"Quite," I told him. "They are one of the features provided strictly for -the public." - -"So kind!" said the acquiescent Japanese. - -We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose plutocracy was not entirely -intact, and but for one instructive incident it was an ordinary -civilized meal. That incident, however, shall live long in my memory -because of my inability to interpret it to Okura. - -We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat down, when the third -man was called to the telephone. - -He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his hostess, "I'm awfully -sorry, I've got to leave." - -His hostess looked apprehensive. "I hope it's nothing serious?" - -"Oh, not at all; please don't worry," he responded, plumping down his -napkin, "but I've just had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She's a man short -and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So long. Awfully sorry!" - -"What did that mean, please?" Okura inquired, as we hurried back to see -Kumagae play. - -"Do you mean, democratically?" - -"Yes." - -"I give it up," I retorted. - -"But Mr. Owen said you would want to interpret everything democratic to -me," Okura ventured on, "and is there not some secret here hidden from -me? I fear I am very stupid." - -Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not explain. - -"But," pressed Okura, "'the world has been made safe for democracy.' I -want so much to understand it. I fear I do not yet understand Newport." - -And he looked at me with his innocent eyes. - - - - -THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED - - -It is the boast of more than one proud author, popular or unpopular, -that he never reads any criticism of his own work. He knows from his -wife or his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists. Sometimes in -hurrying through the newspaper he catches sight of his unforgettable -name. Inadvertently he may read on, learning the drift of the comment -before he stops himself. But his rule is rigid. He never reads what the -critics say about him. - -Before an author comes to this admirable self-denial he has usually had -some experience of the ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he -started out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself, Of course I -don't profess to _like_ criticism. Nobody likes to be criticized. But I -hope I am big enough to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No -man can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but so long as -criticism is helpful, that's all a man has a right to ask. Is it meant -to be helpful? If so, shoot. - -After some experience of helpful criticism, it will often occur to the -sensitive author that he is not being completely understood. A man's ego -should certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn't a man a -right to his own style and his own personality? What is the use of -criticism that is based on the critic's dislike of the author's -personality? The critic who has a grudge against an author simply -because he thinks and feels in a certain way is scarcely likely to be -helpful. The author and the critic are not on common ground. And the -case is not improved by the very evident intrusion of the critic's -prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly obvious that a man with a -bias will see in a book just what he wants to see. If he is a -reactionary, he will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik he -will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use of reading criticism? -The critic merely holds the mirror up to his own nature, when he is not -content to reproduce the publisher's prepared review. - -The author goes on wondering, "What does he say about me?" But the -disappointments are too many. Once in a blue moon the critic -"understands" the author. He manages, that is to say, to do absolutely -the right thing by the author's ego. He strokes it hard and strokes it -the right way. After that he points out one or two of the things that -are handicapping the author's creative force, and he shows how easily -such handicaps can be removed. This is the helpful, appreciative, -perceptive critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty bristling -young egoists who want figs to grow on thistles and cabbages to turn -into roses, and who blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill. -These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest in the author. -They are only interested in themselves. And so, having tackled them in a -glow of expectation that has always died into sulky gloom, the author -quits reading criticism and satisfies his natural curiosity about -himself by calling up the publisher and inquiring after sales. - -For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without being able to point -to much better models. Critics are of course superior to most authors, -yet I do not know many critics who like to be criticized. It does not -matter whether they are thin-skinned literary critics or the hippopotami -of sociology. They don't like it, much. Some meet criticism with a sweet -resourcefulness. They choke down various emotions and become, oh, so -gently receptive. Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious -diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity that makes criticism -nothing less than a personal affront. And then there is the way of the -combative man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge to a -fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual circles is the man -who takes criticism on its merits and thinks it natural that he should -not only criticize but be criticized. - -The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in his ego. His frigid -reception of criticism corresponds to something like a secret terror of -it. His air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity: he hates -being called on to defend himself in anything like a rough-and-tumble -fight. He resents having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried -in the duel of dispute. - -To hand down judgments, often severe judgments, is part of the -pontifical character. But the business of meeting severe judgments is -not so palatable. As most men grow older and more padded in their -armchair-criticism, they feel that they become entitled to immunity. The -Elder Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they are, the more they -try to browbeat their critics. They see criticism as the critic's -fundamental inability to appreciate their position. - -If you are going to be criticized, how take it? The best preparation for -it is to establish good relations with your own ego first. If you -interpose your ego between your work and the critic you cannot help -being insulted and injured. The mere fact that you are being subjected -to criticism is almost an injury in itself. You must get to the point -where you realize the impregnability of your own admirable character. -Then the bumblings of the critic cannot do less than amuse you, and may -possibly be of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, yet he -started out rather indifferent to you, and the mere fact that he is -willing to criticize you is a proof that he has overcome the initial -inhumanity of the human race. This alone should help, but more than -that, you have the advantage of knowing he is an amateur on that topic -where you are most expert--namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps if -you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the beginning of the entente -between you is that he should always start out by appeasing your ego. - - - - -BLIND - - -He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He could tend the furnace and -help around the house--scour the bath-tub and clean windows--but for a -powerful man these were trivial chores. The trouble with him, as I soon -discovered, was complete and simple. He was blind. - -I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be blind, but it was terrible -to be blind and at the mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs. -Angier ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier of a woman, very tall -and very bony, with a virile voice and no touch of femininity except -false curls. She wore rusty black, with long skirts, and a tasseled -shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls. She hated her rooming-house -and every one in it. Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save -enough money out of her establishment to escape from it. To that end she -plugged the gaps in the bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the -furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief sacrifice on the -altar of her economy was Samuel Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was -blind and useless, he was dependent on her. When she called, he -literally ran to her, crying, "Coming, coming!" He might be out on the -window-sill, risking his poor neck to polish the windows that he would -never see, but, "Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I--would you be -so good--ah, you are very kind. Coming, Adelaide, just one moment...." -and he would paddle down stairs. She treated him like dirt. Sometimes -one would arrive during an interview between them. The spare, -gimlet-eyed Mrs. Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel to cringe -in every limb. He was a burly man with a thick beard, iron-gray, and his -sightless eyes were hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed -spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his voice booming -heartily, he was a cheerful, honest figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though -he was a most platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier -tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a water-bucket or -leaving a duster on the stairs or forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he -became infantile, tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always changed to a -sugared greeting as one was recognized. "Good e-e-evening, isn't it a -pleasant e-e-evening?" But the only value in speaking to Mrs. Angier was -that it permitted Samuel somehow to shamble away to the limbo of the -basement. - -Of course I wanted to know how, he became blind. Luckily, as Mrs. Angier -had prosperous relatives in another part of Chicago, she sometimes could -be counted on to be absent, and on those occasions or when she went to -church, Samuel haunted my room. He was unhappy unless he was at work, -and he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I really believe he -liked to chatter to me: and he was more than anxious to tell me how his -tragedy had befallen him. - -"Oh, dear, yes," he said to me, "it happened during the strike. They hit -me on the head, and left me unconscious. And I have never seen since, -not one thing." - -"Who hit you, Samuel?" - -"Who hit me? The blackguards who were out on strike, sir. They nearly -killed me with a piece of lead pipe. Oh, dear, yes." - -It seemed an unspeakable outrage to me, but in Samuel there was nothing -but a kind of healthy indignation. He was not bitter. He never raised -his voice above its easy reminiscent pitch. - -"But what did you do to them? Why did the strikers attack you? What -strike was it?" - -"I did nothing at all to them. But, you see, my horse slipped and when I -was helpless on the ground with my hip smashed, one of them knocked me -out. It was right up on the sidewalk. I had gone after them up on the -sidewalk, and I suppose the flags were so slippery that the horse came -down." - -"But what were you doing on a horse?" I asked in despair. - -"I was a volunteer policeman. These scoundrels were led by Debs, and we -were out to see that there was law and order in Chicago." - -"Oh, the Pullman strike. Were you railroading then?" - -"Railroading? No, sir, I was in the wholesale dry-goods business. We had -just started in in a small way. I was married only two years, to -Adelaide's younger sister. Ah, my accident brought on more trouble than -she could stand. She was very different from Adelaide, quite dainty and -lively, if you follow me. We were living at that time on Cottage Grove -Avenue, on the south side. I was building up the importing end of the -business, and then this thing came, and everything went to smash. They -gave me no compensation whatsoever, to make the thing worse." - -"But, Samuel, how did you come to be out against the strikers?" - -"And why shouldn't I be out, I'd like to know!" Samuel straightened up -from rubbing a chair, and pointed his rag at my voice. "These scoundrels -had nothing against Mr. Pullman. He treated them like a prince. But they -took the bit in their teeth, and once they break loose where are we? The -President didn't get shut of them till he sent in the troops. But I've -always contended that if we business men had taken the matter in hand -ourselves and nipped the trouble in the bud, we'd have had no such -lawlessness to deal with in the end. It is always the same. The business -men are the backbone of the community, but they don't recognize their -responsibility! Take the sword to those bullies and blackguards; that's -what I say!" - -The old man lifted both fists like a dauntless Samson, and fixed me with -his sightless eyes. He had paid hellishly for living up to his -convictions, and here they seemed absolutely unshaken. - -"That's all right, too, Samuel," I said, feebly enough, "but how do you -feel now? Nobody compensated you for being laid out in that big strike, -and your business was ruined, and here you are emptying the -waste-basket. How about that? I think it's fierce that you got injured, -but those men in the Pullman strike weren't out to break up society. -They were fighting for their rights, that's all. Don't you think so -now?" - -"_No_, sir. The solid class of the community must be depended upon to -preserve law and order. I think that it was the duty of the business men -of Chicago to put down ruffianism in that strike and to smite whenever -it raised its head. Smite it hip and thigh, as the saying is. Oh, no. -Young men have fine notions about these things, ha, ha! You'll excuse -me, won't you, but you can't allow violence and disorder to run riot and -then talk of men's 'rights' as an excuse. Ah, but it was a great -misfortune for me, I confess. It was the end of all my hopes. The -doctors thought at first that the sight might be restored, but I have -never seen a glimmer of light since. But we mustn't repine, must we? -That'd never do." - -"Samuel!" Mrs. Angier's sharp voice pierced the room. - -"Good gracious, back so soon. You'll excuse me, I'm sure.... Coming, -Adelaide, coming!" - -He groped for his bucket, with its seedy sponge all but submerged in the -dirty water. The water splashed a little as he hurriedly made for the -door. - -"Oh, dear," he muttered, "Adelaide won't like that!" - - - - -"AND THE EARTH WAS DRY" - - -Like all great ideas it seemed perfectly simple when Harrod first -disclosed it to his unimportant partner John Prentiss. - -"Of course we'll get back of it. We've got to," said Harrod, in the -sanctity of the directors' room. "You've been down to Hopeville on pay -day. It's the limit. Ordinary days there's practically no trouble. Pay -day's a madhouse. How many men, do you think, had to have the company -doctor last pay day?" - -"You don't expect me to answer, Robert," Prentiss replied mildly. -"You're telling me, you're not arguing with me." - -"Twenty-five, Prentiss, twenty-five drunken swine. What do you think -happened? I'll tell you. That doctor never stopped a minute taking -stitches, sewing on scalps, mending skulls. He was kept on the hop all -day and night all over the town. I'll tell you something more." The -sturdy Harrod rapped his fist on the mahogany table, leaning out of his -armchair. "The doctor's wife told me a Polack came to her shack at two -in the morning with half his thumb hanging off, bitten off in a drunken -brawl. What do you think she did, Prentiss? She amputated it herself, on -her own hook, just like a little soldier. She's got nerve, let me tell -you. But do you think we want to stand for any more of this? Not much. -Hopeville is going dry!" - -Mr. Harrod produced a gold pen-knife and nicked a cigar emphatically. He -brushed the tiny wedge of tobacco from his plump trouser leg on to the -bronze carpet. He lit his cigar and got up to have a little strut. - -Poor Prentiss looked at him as only a weedy Yankee can look at a man -whose cheeks are rosy with arrogant health. Why the stout Harrod who ate -and drank as he willed should be proclaiming prohibition, while the man -with a Balkan digestive apparatus should be a reluctant listener, no one -could have analyzed. It never would have occurred to Prentiss to be so -restlessly efficient. But Harrod was as simple as chanticleer. He'd made -up his mind. - -"We'll back Billy Sunday. His advance agent will be in town this week," -Mr. Harrod unfolded. "We'll put the whole industry behind him. Drink is -a constant source of inefficiency. It's an undeniable cause. When do we -have accidents? On Mondays, regularly. The men come back stupefied from -the rotgut they've been drinking, and it's simple luck if they don't set -fire to the mine. The Hopeville mine is perfectly safe. Except for that -one big disaster we had, it's one of the safest mines in the country. -But how can you call any mine safe if the fellows handling dynamite and -the men working the cage are just as likely as not to have a hangover? -We'll stop it. We'll make that town so dry that you can't find a beer -bottle in it. It took me some time to realize the common sense of this -situation, but it's as clear as daylight; it's ridiculously clear. We're -fools, Prentiss, that we didn't advocate prohibition twenty years ago." - -"Twenty years ago, Robert," Prentiss murmured, "you were checking coal -at the pit-head. You weren't so damned worried about evolving policies -for the mine owners twenty years ago." - -"Well, you know what I mean," Robert Harrod rejoined. - -"Perfectly," retorted Prentiss. "And I'm with you, though all the -perfumes of Arabia won't cleanse these little hands." - -That was the first gospel, so to speak, and Harrod was as good as his -word. He saw Sunday's advance agent, he rallied the industry, he lunched -with innumerable Christians and had a few painful but necessary -political conferences. The prohibitionist manager he discovered to be a -splendid fellow--direct, clean-cut, intelligent, indefatigable. The -whole great state was won to prohibition after a strenuous preparation -and a typically "bitter" campaign. - -And everything went well at Hopeville. At first, not unnaturally, there -was a good deal of rebellion. A few of the miners--you know Irish -miners, born trouble-makers--talked considerably. Something in them took -kindly to the relief from monotony that came with a periodic explosion, -and they muttered blasphemously about the prohibitionists, and time hung -heavy on their hands. A few of them pulled out, preceded by the gaunt -Scotchman who had run the bare "hotel" where most of the whisky was -consumed. These were led by a sullen compatriot of their own, a man who -once was a fine miner but who had proved his own best customer in the -liquor business and whose contour suggested that his body was trying -desperately to blow a bulb. One miner left for a neighboring state -(still wet) to purchase a pair of boots. He crawled back on foot after a -week, minus the new boots, plus a pawn-ticket, and most horribly chewed -by an unintelligent watchdog who had misunderstood his desire to borrow -a night's lodging in the barn. The drinking haunts were desolate -reminders of bygone entertainments for weeks after the law took effect, -and few of the younger men could look forward to tame amusement, -amusement that had no elysium in it, without a twinge of disgust. But on -the whole, Hopeville went dry with surprising simplicity. A great many -of the miners were neither English, Scotch, Cornish, Welsh nor Irish, -but Austrians and Italians and Poles, and these were not so inured to -drinking and biting each other as Mr. Harrod might have thought. The mud -in Hopeville, it is true, was often from nine inches to four feet deep, -and there were no named streets, and no known amusements, and a very -slim possibility of distraction for the unmarried men. After -prohibition, however, a far from unpleasant club house was founded, with -lots of "dangerous" reading material, and a segregated place for -homemade music, and bright lights and a fire, and a place to write -letters, and a pungent odor of something like syndicalism in the air. - -That was the beginning. The men did not detonate on pay day, except in -lively conversation. There was less diffused blasphemy. It concentrated -rather particularly on one or two eminent men. And when the virtues and -defects of these men were sufficiently canvassed, the "system" beyond -them was analyzed. Even the delight of the Hunkies in dirt, or the -meanness of certain bosses, began to be less engrossing than the exact -place in the terrestrial economy where Harrod and Prentiss got off. - -"Well, Robert," inquired the man of migraine, back in the home office, -"how is your precious prohibition working? It seems to me the doctor's -wife is the sole beneficiary so far." - -"Working?" the rubicund Harrod responded urgently. "I don't know what -we're going to do about it. You can't rely on the men for anything. A -few years ago, after all, they took their wages over to Mason and blew -it all in, or they soaked up enough rum in Hopeville to satisfy -themselves, and come back on the job. Now, what do they do? They quit -for two weeks when they want to. They quit for a month at a time. And -still they have a balance. You can't deal with such men. They're -infernally independent. They're impudent with prosperity. I never saw -anything like it. We can't stand it. I don't know what we're going to -do." - -"You're going to back the liquor trade, Robert, of course. That's simple -enough." - -"You may laugh, but it is too late, I tell you, the harm's done. We -can't remedy it. National prohibition is right on top of us. I don't -know what we'll do." - -"Sell 'em Bevo. That'll keep them conservative. Ever drink it?" - -"Bevo? Conservative? Prentiss, this is serious. These men are completely -out of hand." - -"Well, aren't they more efficient?" - -"Of course they're more efficient. They're too damnably efficient. They -wanted Hopeville drained and they're getting it drained. They'll insist -on having it paved next. They'll want hot and cold water. They'll want -bathtubs. That'll be the end." - -"The end? Come, Robert, perhaps only the beginning of the end." - -"It's very amusing to you, Prentiss, but you're in on this with me. -We've forced these working-men into prohibition, and now they're sober, -they're everlastingly sober. They're making demands and getting away -with it. We've got to go on or go under. Wake up, man. I've played my -cards. What can we do?" - -"What can we do? That is not the point now. Now the point is, what'll -_they_ do." - - - - -TELEGRAMS - - -In my simple world a cablegram is so rare that I should treasure the -mere envelope. I should not be likely to resurrect it. It would be -buried in a bureau, like a political badge or a cigar-cutter--but there -is a silly magpie in every man, and a cable I would preserve. To discuss -cablegrams or even cut-rate wireless, however, would be an affectation. -These are the orchids of communication. It is the ordinary telegram I -sing. - -There was a magnificence about a quick communication in the days before -the Western Union. Horsemen went galloping roughshod through scattering -villages. It was quite in order for a panting messenger to rush in, make -his special delivery, and drop dead. This has ceased to be his custom. -In Mr. Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class there is one omission. He -neglected to deal with that great adept in leisure, the messenger-boy. -"Messenger-boy" is a misnomer. He is either a puling infant or a tough, -exceedingly truculent little ogre of uncertain age and habit. His life -is consecrated. He cares for nothing except to disprove the axiom that a -straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Foreseeing -this cult of the messenger service, the designers of the modern American -city abandoned all considerations of beauty, mystery, and suggestion in -an heroic effort to circumvent the boy in blue. But the boy in blue -cannot be beaten. By what art he is selected I know not. Whether he is -attributable to environment or heredity I dare not guess. But with a -possible inferiority to his rival, the coat-room boy, and, of course, -nature's paradox the crab, he is supreme. - -It is not a telegram in its last stages that has magic. Much better for -the purposes of drama to have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not -a laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a telegram has magic. If -you are hardened you do not register. It is the fresh who have the -thrill. But no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever so -inured, there is one telegram, _the_ telegram, which will find your -core. - -Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while an important person, -usually a man but occasionally a woman, gets a handful of mail without -any sign of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even sorting out -the wires. Such persons are marked. They are in public life. It is -pardonable. There must be public men and public women. I should not ask -any one to give up his career for the peculiar ecstasies of the -telegram. But no one can deny that these persons have parted with an -essence of their being. What if I find a solitary notice? "It is under -your door." I bolt for the elevator, thrilled, alive. - -It may be suggested that my over-laden predecessors are not in public -life; that they are very distinguished, very wealthy personages, -receiving private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their -children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other of their -responsibilities, accessories, possessions. With every deference I -answer that you are mistaken. Unless their riches are in a stocking, -these are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels. Their title may -be secure, but not their peace of mind. Whatever they wish, they are -obliged to administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of gravitation -keeps pulling, pulling at their chandeliers. And so in some degree they -are connected with, open to, shared by, innumerable people. Without -necessarily being popular, they are in the center of populace. They have -to meet, if only to repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus being -public characters. It is often against their desires. But being called -upon to convert a part of their souls into a reception-room, a place -where people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it follows that -they give up some of their ecstatic privacy in order to retain the rest. -This I do not decry. For certain good and valuable considerations one -might be induced to barter some of one's own choice stock of privacy, -but for myself I should insist on retaining enough to keep up my -interest in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be dogged by -urgent brokers and punctilious butlers, no. - -"There's a telegram upstairs for you, sir." "A telegram? How long has it -been here?" "It came about half an hour ago." "Ah, thank you.... No, -never mind, I'm going upstairs." What may not this sort of banality -precede? Perhaps another banality, in ink. But not always. A telegram is -an arrow that is aimed to fly straight and drive deep. Whether from -friend or rival, whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the heart -is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the message has come, singing -enigmatically across the country. But there is a path that leaps out of -the dingy office to countless court-rooms, business buildings, homes, -hospitals. That office is truly a ganglion from which piercing -nerve-fibers curve into the last crevices of human lives. When you enter -it to send a telegram it may depress you. You submit your confidence -across a public counter. But what does it matter to a creature glazed by -routine? He enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of their -meaning. To him a word is not a bullet--just an inert little lump of -lead. - -Some messages come with a force not realizable. Tragedy dawns slowly. -The mind envisages, not apprehending. And then, for all the customary -world outside, one is penned in one's trouble alone. One remembers those -sailors who were imprisoned in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off -from escape, red-hot iron plates between them and the assuaging waters -on every side, they could see the free, could cry out to them, could -almost touch hands. But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a -slip of paper one may meet one's own. There are countries to-day where -the very word _telegram_ must threaten like a poisoned spear. And such -wounds as are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often -powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in suspense is worse than -dreadful certainty. But there are shocks which are irreparable. It is -cruel to break those shocks, crueler to deliver them. - -All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion, the telegram attends on -death, it attends no less eagerly on love and birth. "A boy arrived this -morning. Father and child doing well"--this is more frequently the tenor -of the wire. And the wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remember -Bernard Shaw's rebuff to Lady Randolph Churchill for asking him to -dinner? He had the vegetarian view of eating his "fellow-creatures." He -chided her for inviting a person of "my well-known habits." "Know -nothing of your habits," came the blithe retort, "hope they're better -than your manners." - -The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we struggled to put our all -in ten words--simple, at least, if not sensuous and passionate. Now the -day-letter and night-letter lead us into garrulity. No transition from -Greek to Byzantine could be worse than this. We should resist it. The -time will doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as austere -and frugal in our use of the telegram. But we should preserve this sign -of our Spartan manhood. Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of -long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive, virginal, terse. - - - - -OF PLEASANT THINGS - - -When I was a child we lived on the border of the town, and the road that -passed our windows went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under -the old city gateway and out through the mean city "lanes." The other -branch turned round our corner and ran into the countryside. Day and -night many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing. In the -day-time I took no pleasure in them, but when I awoke at night and the -thick silence was broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it -filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this enchantment. The -steady effort of the wheels, their rattle as they passed over the uneven -road, their crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute -pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a solitary lantern swings -underneath the wagon. In the old days the load might be coal, with the -colliery-man sitting hunched on the driver's seat, a battered -silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery, making a start at -dawn. Or it might be a load of singing harvest-women, hired in the -market square by the sweet light of the morning. But not the wagon or -the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so much as that honest, steady, -homely sound coming through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find -it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like it till I die. - -The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes, in lazy summer -evenings, I like the faint rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble -of the elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows and its -passengers relaxed and indolent after the exhausting day. Always I like -the moaning sounds from the river craft, carried so softly into the -town. But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are usually discords. I -hate bells--the sharp spinsterish telephone bell, the lugubrious church -bell, the clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the sleigh bell or -the dinner bell. - -I like the element of water. An imagist should write of the waters of -Lake Michigan which circle around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is -the hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths. When the sun shines on -the bottom, every pebble is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a -happy memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of Maine one has the -same visual delight in water as clear as crystal, and on the coast of -Ireland I have seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst or -thunder in a wall of emerald. On the southern shore of Long Island, who -has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as -apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that -Atlantic is drenching. - -The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate -the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured -walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a -lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are -barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A -little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak -cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out -on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at -nightfall has the same, or even a more aetherial, radiance. From the -hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor. -This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who -is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him. - -Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I like flowers, but seldom -cut flowers. The gathering of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily -wanton, and is it not hateful to see people coming home with dejected -branches of dogwood or broken autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already -rusting in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness of the meadow -or the solitude of a forsaken garden. Few things are so pleasant as to -find oneself all alone in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to -sea. The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones, the life -that trails so impudently across the path, the life that spawns in the -forgotten pond--this has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners. -Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient turtle, ourselves the -only living things within sight or sound. When the turtle wearied of -sunning himself he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily -paddled through waters laced down with scum. It was pleasant to see him, -a not too clean turtle in waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family -had been home the gardener would have scoured him. - -Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire--which I thank heaven I -am not, nor scarcely a millionth part of one--I should take pleasure in -the silent orderliness that shadowed me through my home. Those invisible -hands that patted out the pillows and shined the shoes and picked up -everything, even the Sunday newspapers--those I should enjoy. I should -enjoy especially the guardian angel who hid from me the casualties of -the laundry and put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is no -laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire the laundry is sent -and the laundry is sorted away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire; -I envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen sheets. - -The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude that life is in the -striving. Is this altogether true? I think not. Not for those menial -offices so necessary to our decent existence, so little decent in their -victims or themselves. But one does remember certain striving that -brought with it almost instant happiness, like the reward of the child -out coasting or the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding game. It -is pleasant to think of one's first delicious surrender to fatigue after -a long day's haul on a hot road. That surrender, in all one's joints, -with all one's driven will, is the ecstasy that even the Puritan allowed -himself. It is the nectar of the pioneer. In our civilization we take it -away from the workers, as we take the honey from the bees--but I wish to -think of things pleasant, not of our civilization. Fatigue of this -golden kind is unlike the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It -is the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it from games, even -golf, I think it is pleasant. It is the great charm that Englishmen -possess and understand. - -These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant things of the poet. -They barely leave the hall of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine, -is one who captures in the swift net of his imagination the wild -pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be flying presences quickly -lost to view. But every man must bag what he can in his own net, whether -he be rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my imagination to -keep from being snared by too many publicists and professors and persons -of political intent. These are invaluable servants of humanity, -admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But they fill the mind -with _-ations_. They pave the meadows with concrete; they lose the free -swing of pleasant things. - - - - -THE AVIATOR - - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - - I was the lark whose song was heard - When I was lost to sight, - I was the golden arrow loosed - To pierce the heart of night. - - I fled the little earth, I climbed - Above the rising sun, - I met the morning in a blaze - Before my hour was gone. - - I ran beyond the rim of space, - Its reins I flung aside, - Laughter was mine and mine was youth - And all my own was pride. - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - - From end to end I knew the way, - I had no doubt or fear; - The minutes were a forfeit paid - To fetch the landfall near. - - But all at once my heart I held, - My carol frozen died, - A white cloud laid her cheek to mine - And wove me to her side. - - Her icy fingers clasped my flesh, - Her hair drooped in my face, - And up we fell and down we rose - And twisted into space. - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - - Laughter was mine and mine was youth, - I pressed the edge of life, - I kissed the sun and raced the wind, - I found immortal strife. - - Out of myself I spent myself, - I lost the mortal share, - My grave is in the ashen plain, - My spirit in the air. - - Good-by, sweet pride of man that flew, - Sweet pain of man that bled, - I was the lark that spilled his heart, - The golden arrow sped. - - _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ - _Kept me within his eye,_ - _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ - _And followed up the sky._ - -THE END - - - - - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR *** - - - - -A Word from Project Gutenberg - - -We will update this book if we find any errors. - -This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35091 - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one -owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and -you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission -and without paying copyright royalties. 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