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diff --git a/35091-8.txt b/35091-8.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a930980..0000000 --- a/35091-8.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: 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 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 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 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._ - -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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