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diff --git a/old/69426-0.txt b/old/69426-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ca3ce95..0000000 --- a/old/69426-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7233 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of a Literary Radical and -Other Essays, by Randolph Bourne - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world 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 -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays - -Author: Randolph Bourne - -Editor: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: November 26, 2022 [eBook #69426] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading - Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from - images generously made available by The Internet Archive) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL -AND OTHER ESSAYS *** - - - - - - HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL - - AND OTHER ESSAYS - - [Illustration: _RANDOLPH BOURNE_ - - _Drawn by Arthur G. Dove from the Death Mask by James Earle Fraser_] - - - - - _BY RANDOLPH BOURNE_ - - HISTORY OF A - LITERARY RADICAL - - AND OTHER ESSAYS - - EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION - - BY VAN WYCK BROOKS - - [Illustration] - - “_To write in favor of that - which the great interests of the - world are against is what I - conceive to be the duty and the - privilege of the intellectual._” - - PADRAIC COLUM - - NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXX - INC. - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. - - PRINTED IN U. S. A. - - - - - NOTE - - -Most of the papers included in this volume have already appeared in one -or another of the following magazines: _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The -Dial_, _The New Republic_, _The Seven Arts_, _The Yale Review_, _The -Columbia University Quarterly_, and are reprinted here with the kind -permission of the editors. - - - - - R. B. - - - Bitter-sweet, and a northwest wind - To sing his requiem, - Who was - Our Age, - And who becomes - An imperishable symbol of our ongoing, - For in himself - He rose above his body and came among us - Prophetic of the race, - The great hater - Of the dark human deformity - Which is our dying world, - The great lover - Of the spirit of youth - Which is our future’s seed.... - - JAMES OPPENHEIM. - - - - - INTRODUCTION - - -Randolph Bourne was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, May 30, 1886. -He died in New York, December 22, 1918. Between these two dates was -packed one of the fullest, richest, and most significant lives of the -younger generation. Its outward events can be summarized in a few -words. Bourne went to the public schools in his native town, and then -for some time earned his living as an assistant to a manufacturer of -automatic piano music. In 1909 he entered Columbia, graduating in 1913 -as holder of the Gilder Fellowship, which enabled him to spend a year -of study and investigation in Europe. In 1911 he had begun contributing -to _The Atlantic Monthly_, and his first book, “Youth and Life,” a -volume of essays, appeared in 1913. He was a member of the contributing -staff of _The New Republic_ during its first three years; later he -was a contributing editor of _The Seven Arts_ and _The Dial_. He had -published, in addition to his first collection of essays and a large -number of miscellaneous articles and book reviews, two other books, -“Education and Living” and “The Gary Schools.” At the time of his death -he was engaged on a novel and a study of the political future. - -It might be guessed from this that Bourne at thirty-two had not quite -found himself. His interests were indeed almost universal: he had -written on politics, economics, philosophy, education, literature. No -other of our younger critics had cast so wide a net, and Bourne had -hardly begun to draw the strings and count and sort his catch. He was -a working journalist, a literary freelance with connections often of -the most precarious kind, who contrived, by daily miracles of audacity -and courage, to keep himself serenely afloat in a society where his -convictions prevented him from following any of the ordinary avenues -of preferment and recognition. It was a feat never to be sufficiently -marvelled over; it would have been striking, in our twentieth century -New York, even in the case of a man who was not physically handicapped -as Bourne was. But such a life is inevitably scattering, and it was -only after the war had literally driven him in upon himself that he set -to work at the systematic harvesting of his thoughts and experiences. -He had not quite found himself, perhaps, owing to the extraordinary -range of interests for which he had to find a personal common -denominator; yet no other young American critic, I think, had exhibited -so clear a tendency, so coherent a body of desires. His personality -was not only unique, it was also absolutely expressive. I have had the -delightful experience of reading through at a sitting, so to say, the -whole mass of his uncollected writings, articles, essays, book reviews, -unprinted fragments, and a few letters, and I am astonished at the -way in which, like a ball of camphor in a trunk, the pungent savor of -the man spreads itself over every paragraph. Here was no anonymous -reviewer, no mere brilliant satellite of the radical movement losing -himself in his immediate reactions: one finds everywhere, interwoven in -the fabric of his work, the silver thread of a personal philosophy, the -singing line of an intense and beautiful desire. - -What was that desire? It was for a new fellowship in the youth of -America as the principle of a great and revolutionary departure in our -life, a league of youth, one might call it, consciously framed with -the purpose of creating, out of the blind chaos of American society, -a fine, free, articulate cultural order. That, as it seems to me, was -the dominant theme of all his effort, the positive theme to which he -always returned from his thrilling forays into the fields of education -and politics, philosophy and sociology. One finds it at the beginning -of his career in such essays as “Our Cultural Humility,” one finds it -at the end in the “History of a Literary Radical.” One finds it in that -pacifism which he pursued with such an obstinate and lonely courage and -which was the logical outcome of the checking and thwarting of those -currents of thought and feeling in which he had invested the whole -passion of his life. _Place aux jeunes_ might have been his motto: he -seemed indeed the flying wedge of the younger generation itself. - -I shall never forget my first meeting with him, that odd little -apparition with his vibrant eyes, his quick, birdlike steps and the -long black student’s cape he had brought back with him from Paris. -It was in November, 1914, and we never imagined then that the war -was going to be more than a slash, however deep, across the face of -civilization, we never imagined it was going to plough on and on until -it had uprooted and turned under the soil so many green shoots of -hope and desire in the young world. Bourne had published that radiant -book of essays on the Adventure of Life, the Two Generations, the -Excitement of Friendship, with its happy and confident suggestion of -the present as a sort of transparent veil hung up against the window of -some dazzling future, he had had his wanderyear abroad, and had come -home with that indescribable air of the scholar-gypsy, his sensibility -fresh, clairvoyant, matutinal, a philosopher of the _gaya scienza_, -his hammer poised over the rock of American philistinism, with never -a doubt in his heart of the waters of youth imprisoned there. One -divined him in a moment, the fine, mettlesome temper of his intellect, -his curiosity, his acutely critical self-consciousness, his aesthetic -flair, his delicate sense of personal relationships, his toughness -of fiber, his masterly powers of assimilation, his grasp of reality, -his burning convictions, his beautifully precise desires. Here was -Emerson’s “American scholar” at last, but radiating an infinitely -warmer, profaner, more companionable influence than Emerson had ever -dreamed of, an influence that savored rather of Whitman and William -James. He was the new America incarnate, with that stamp of a sort of -permanent youthfulness on his queer, twisted, appealing face. You felt -that in him the new America had suddenly found itself and was all astir -with the excitement of its first maturity. - -His life had prepared him for the rôle, for the physical disability -that had cut him off from the traditional currents and preoccupations -of American life had given him a poignant insight into the predicament -of all those others who, like him, could not adjust themselves to the -industrial machine--the exploited, the sensitive, the despised, the -aspiring, those, in short, to whom a new and very different America -was no academic idea but a necessity so urgent that it had begun to be -a reality. As detached as any young East Sider from the herd-unity of -American life, the colonial tradition, the “genteel tradition,” yet -passionately concerned with America, passionately caring for America, -he had discovered himself at Columbia, where so many strains of the -newer immigrant population meet one another in the full flood and -ferment of modern ideas. Shut in as he had been with himself and his -books, what dreams had passed through his mind of the possibilities of -life, of the range of adventures that are open to the spirit, of some -great collective effort of humanity! Would there never be room for -these things in America, was it not precisely the task of the young to -make room for them? Bourne’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been -doughty preachers and reformers: he had inherited a certain religious -momentum that thrust him now into the midst of the radical tide. Above -all, he had found companions who helped him to clarify his ideas -and grapple with his aims. Immigrants, many of them, of the second -generation, candidates for the “melting-pot” that had simply failed -to melt them, they trailed with them a dozen rich, diverse racial and -cultural tendencies which America seemed unable either to assimilate or -to suppress. Were they not, these newcomers of the eleventh hour, as -clearly entitled as the first colonials had been to a place in the sun -of the great experimental democracy upon which they were making such -strange new demands? They wanted a freer emotional life, a more vivid -intellectual life; oddly enough, it was they and not the hereditary -Americans, the “people of action,” who spoke of an “American culture” -and demanded it. Bourne had found his natural allies. Intensely -Anglo-Saxon himself, it was America he cared for, not the triumph of -the Anglo-Saxon tradition which had apparently lost itself in the -pursuit of a mechanical efficiency. It was a “trans-national” America -of which he caught glimpses now, a battleground of all the cultures, a -super-culture, that might perhaps, by some happy chance, determine the -future of civilization itself. - -It was with some such vision as this that he had gone abroad. If that -super-culture was ever to come it could only be through some prodigious -spiritual organization of the youth of America, some organization -that would have to begin with small and highly self-conscious groups; -these groups, moreover, would have to depend for a long time upon the -experience of young Europe. The very ideas of spiritual leadership, -the intellectual life, the social revolution were foreign to a modern -America that had submitted to the common mould of business enterprise; -even philosophers like Professor Dewey had had to assume a protective -coloration, and when people spoke of art they had to justify it as -an “asset.” For Bourne, therefore, the European tour was something -more than a preparation for his own life: he was like a bird in the -nesting season, gathering twigs and straw for a nest that was not to -be his but young America’s, a nest for which old America would have -to provide the bough! He was in search, in other words, of new ideas, -new attitudes, new techniques, personal and social, for which he was -going to demand recognition at home, and it is this that gives to his -“Impressions of Europe 1913-1914”--his report to Columbia as holder -of the Gilder Fellowship--an actuality that so perfectly survives the -war. Where can one find anything better in the way of social insight -than his pictures of radical France, of the ferment of the young -Italian soul, of the London intellectuals--Sidney Webb, lecturing -“with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward -children,” Shaw, “clean, straight, clear, and fine as an upland wind -and summer sun,” Chesterton, “gluttonous and thick, with something -tricky and unsavory about him”; of the Scandinavian note,--“one got -a sense in those countries of the most advanced civilization, yet -without sophistication, a luminous modern intelligence that selected -and controlled and did not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the chaos -of twentieth century possibility”? We see things in that white light -only when they have some deeply personal meaning for us, and Bourne’s -instinct had led him straight to his mark. Two complex impressions -he had gained that were to dominate all his later work. One was -the sense of what a national culture is, of its immense value and -significance as a source and fund of spiritual power even in a young -world committed to a political and economic internationalism. The -other was a keen realization of the almost apostolic rôle of the young -student class in perpetuating, rejuvenating, vivifying and, if need be, -creating this national consciousness. No young Hindu ever went back -to India, no young Persian or Ukrainian or Balkan student ever went -home from a European year with a more fervent sense of the chaos and -spiritual stagnation and backwardness of his own people, of the happy -responsibility laid upon himself and all those other young men and -women who had been touched by the modern spirit. - -It was a tremendous moment. Never had we realized so keenly the -spiritual inadequacy of American life: the great war of the cultures -left us literally gasping in the vacuum of our own provincialism, -colonialism, naïveté, and romantic self-complacency. We were in -much the same position as that of the Scandinavian countries during -the European wars of 1866-1870, if we are to accept George Brandes’ -description of it: “While the intellectual life languished, as a plant -droops in a close, confined place, the people were self-satisfied. They -rested on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed -they had dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated, -public in Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe. -They dreamed that by their idealism they would regenerate the foreign -nations. They dreamed that they were the free, mighty North, which -would lead the cause of the peoples to victory--and they woke up -unfree, impotent, ignorant.” It was through a great effort of social -introspection that Scandinavia had roused itself from the stupor of -this optimistic idealism, and at last a similar movement was on foot in -America. _The New Republic_ had started with the war, _The Masses_ was -still young, _The Seven Arts_ and the new _Dial_ were on the horizon. -Bourne found himself instantly in touch with the purposes of all these -papers, which spoke of a new class-consciousness, a sort of offensive -and defensive alliance of the younger intelligentsia and the awakened -elements of the labor groups. His audience was awaiting him, and no one -could have been better prepared to take advantage of it. - -It was not merely the exigencies of journalism that turned his mind at -first so largely to the problems of primary education. In Professor -Dewey’s theories, in the Gary Schools, he saw, as he could see it -nowhere else, the definite promise, the actual unfolding of the freer, -more individualistic, and at the same time more communistic social life -of which he dreamed. But even if he had not come to feel a certain -inadequacy in Professor Dewey’s point of view, I doubt if this field -of interest could have held him long. Children fascinated him; how -well he understood them we can see from his delightful “Ernest: or -Parent for a Day.” But Bourne’s heart was too insistently involved -in the situation of his own contemporaries, in the stress of their -immediate problems, to allow him to linger in these long hopes. This -young intelligentsia in whose ultimate unity he had had such faith--did -he not see it, moreover, as the war advanced, lapsing, falling apart -again, reverting into the ancestral attitudes of the tribe? Granted the -war, it was the business of these liberals to see that it was played, -as he said, “with insistent care for democratic values at home, and -unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace that -should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.” -Instead, the “allure of the martial” passed only to be succeeded by -the “allure of the technical,” and the “prudent, enlightened college -man,” cut in the familiar pattern, took the place of the value-creator, -the path-finder, the seeker of new horizons. Plainly, the younger -generation had not begun to find its own soul, had hardly so much as -registered its will for a new orientation of the American spirit. - -Had it not occurred before, this general reversion to type? The -whole first phase of the social movement had spent itself in a sort -of ineffectual beating of the air, and Bourne saw that only through -a far more heroic effort of criticism than had yet been attempted -could the young intelligentsia disentangle itself, prevail against -the mass-fatalism of the middle class, and rouse the workers out of -their blindness and apathy. Fifteen years ago a new breath had blown -over the American scene; people felt that the era of big business had -reached its climacteric, that a new nation was about to be born out -of the social settlements, out of the soil that had been harrowed and -swept by the muck-rakers, out of the spirit of service that animated -a whole new race of novelists, and a vast army of young men and young -women, who felt fluttering in their souls the call to some great -impersonal adventure, went forth to the slums and the factories and -the universities with a powerful but very vague desire to realize -themselves and to “do something” for the world. But one would have -said that movement had been born middle-aged, so earnest, so anxious, -so conscientious, so troubled, so maternal and paternal were the faces -of those young men and women who marched forth with so puzzled an -intrepidity; there was none of the tang and fire of youth in it, none -of the fierce glitter of the intellect; there was no joyous burning -of boats; there were no transfigurations, no ecstasies. There was -only a warm simmer of eager, evangelical sentiment that somehow never -reached the boiling-point and cooled rapidly off again, and that host -of tentative and wistful seekers found themselves as cruelly astray -as the little visionaries of the Children’s Crusade. Was not the -failure of that movement due almost wholly to its lack of critical -equipment? In the first place, it was too naïve and too provincial, -it was outside the main stream of modern activity and desire, it had -none of the reserves of power that result from being in touch with -contemporary developments in other countries. In the second place, it -had no realistic sense of American life: it ignored the facts of the -class struggle, it accepted enthusiastically illusions like that of -the “melting-pot,” it wasted its energy in attacking “bad” business -without realizing that the spirit of business enterprise is itself -the great enemy, it failed to see the need of a consciously organized -intellectual class or to appreciate the necessary conjunction in our -day of the intellectuals and the proletariat. Worst of all, it had no -personal psychology. Those crusaders of the “social consciousness” -were far from being conscious of themselves; they had never broken the -umbilical cord of their hereditary class, they had not discovered their -own individual lines of growth, they had no knowledge of their own -powers, no technique for using them effectively. Embarked in activities -that instantly revealed themselves as futile and fallacious, they -also found their loyalties in perpetual conflict with one another. -Inevitably their zeal waned and their energy ebbed away, and the tides -of uniformity and commercialism swept the American scene once more. - -No one had grasped all these elements of the social situation so firmly -as Bourne. He saw that we needed, first, a psychological interpretation -of these younger malcontents, secondly, a realistic study of our -institutional life, and finally, a general opening of the American -mind to the currents of contemporary desire and effort and experiment -abroad. And along each of these lines he did the work of a pioneer. - -Who, for example, had ever thought of exploring the soul of the -younger generation as Bourne explored it? He had planned a long -series of literary portraits of its types and personalities: half -a dozen of them exist (along with several of quite a different -character!--the keenest satires we have), enough to show us how -sensitively he responded to those detached, groping, wistful, yet -resolutely independent spirits whom he saw weaving the iridescent -fabric of the future. He who had so early divined the truth of Maurice -Barrès’ saying, that we never conquer the intellectual suffrages of -those who precede us in life, addressed himself exclusively to these -young spirits: he went out to meet them, he probed their obscurities; -one would have said that he was a sort of impresario gathering the -personnel of some immense orchestra, seeking in each the principle -of his own growth. He had studied his chosen minority with such -instinctive care that everything he wrote came as a personal message to -those, and those alone, who were capable of assimilating it; and that -is why, as we look over his writings to-day, we find them a sort of -corpus, a text full of secret ciphers, and packed with meaning between -the lines, of all the most intimate questions and difficulties and -turns of thought and feeling that make up the soul of young America. -He revealed us to ourselves, he intensified and at the same time -corroborated our desires; above all, he showed us what we had in common -and what new increments of life might arise out of the friction of our -differences. In these portraits he was already doing the work of the -novelist he might well have become,--he left two or three chapters -of a novel he had begun to write, in which “Karen” and “Sophronisba” -and “The Professor” would probably have appeared, along with a whole -battle-array of the older and younger generations; he was sketching -out the rôle some novelist might play in the parturition of the new -America. Everything for analysis, for self-discovery, for articulation, -everything to put the younger generation in possession of itself! -Everything to weave the tissue of a common understanding, to help the -growth and freedom of the spirit! There was something prophetic in -Bourne’s personality. In his presence one felt, in his writings one -realizes, that the army of youth is already assembling for “the effort -of reason and the adventure of beauty.” - -I shall say little of his work as a critic of institutions. It -is enough to point out that if such realistic studies as his -“Trans-National America” and his “Mirror of the Middle West” (a -perfect example, by the way, of his theory of the book review as an -independent enquiry with a central idea of its own), his papers on the -settlements and on sociological fiction had appeared fifteen years -ago, a vastly greater amount of effective energy might have survived -the break-up of the first phase of the social movement. When he showed -what mare’s-nests the settlements and the “melting-pot” theory and -the “spirit of service” are, and what snares for democracy lie in -Meredith Nicholson’s “folksiness,” he closed the gate on half the blind -alleys in which youth had gone astray; and he who had so delighted -in Veblen’s ruthless condensation of the mystical gases of American -business implied in every line he wrote that there is a gulf fixed -between the young intellectual and the unreformable “system.” The young -intellectual, henceforth, was an unclassed outsider, with a scent -all the more keenly sharpened for new trails because the old trails -were denied him, and for Bourne those new trails led straight, and by -the shortest possible route, to a society the very reverse of ours, -a society such as A.E. has described in the phrase, “democratic in -economics, aristocratic in thought,” to be attained through a coalition -of the thinkers and the workers. The task of the thinkers, of the -intelligentsia, in so far as they concerned themselves directly with -economic problems, was, in Bourne’s eyes, chiefly to _think_. It was a -new doctrine for American radicals; it precisely denoted their advance -over the evangelicism of fifteen years ago. “The young radical to-day,” -he wrote in one of his reviews, “is not asked to be a martyr, but he is -asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader.... The labor movement in -this country needs a philosophy, a literature, a constructive socialist -analysis and criticism of industrial relations. Labor will scarcely do -this thinking for itself. Unless middle-class radicalism threshes out -its categories and interpretations and undertakes this constructive -thought it will not be done.... The only way by which middle-class -radicalism can serve is by being fiercely and concentratedly -intellectual.” - -Finally, through Bourne more than through any other of our younger -writers one gained a sense of the stir of the great world, of the -currents and cross-currents of the contemporary European spirit, -behind and beneath the war, of the tendencies and experiences and -common aims and bonds of the younger generation everywhere. He was an -exception to what seems to be the general rule, that Americans who -are able to pass outside their own national spirit at all are apt to -fall headlong into the national spirit of some one other country: -they become vehement partisans of Latin Europe, or of England, or of -Germany and Scandinavia, or, more recently, of Russia. Bourne, with -that singular union of detachment and affectionate penetration which -he brought also to his personal relationships, had entered them all -with an equal curiosity, an impartial delight. If he had absorbed the -fine idealism of the English liberals, he understood also the more -elemental, the more emotional, the more positive urge of revolutionary -Russia. He was full of practical suggestions from the vast social and -economic laboratory of modern Germany. He had caught something also -from the intellectual excitement of young Italy; most of all, his -imagination had been captivated, as we can see from such essays as -“Mon Amie,” by the candor and the self-consciousness and the genius -for social introspection of radical France. And all these influences -were perpetually at play in his mind and in his writings. He was the -conductor of innumerable diverse inspirations, a sort of clearing-house -of the best living ideas of the time; through him the young writer and -the young thinker came into instant contact with whatever in the modern -world he most needed. And here again Bourne revealed his central aim. -He reviewed by choice, and with a special passion, what he called the -“epics of youthful talent that grows great with quest and desire.” It -is easy to see, in his articles on such books as “Pelle the Conqueror” -and Gorky’s Autobiography and “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,” -that what lured him was the common struggle and aspiration of youth -and poverty and the creative spirit everywhere, the sense of a new -socialized world groping its way upward. It was this rich ground-note -in all his work that made him, not the critic merely, but the leader. - -It is impossible to say, of course, what he would have become if -his life had been spared. The war had immensely stimulated his -“political-mindedness”: he was obsessed, during the last two years of -his life, with a sense of the precariousness of free thought and free -speech in this country; if they were cut off, he foresaw, the whole -enterprise, both of the social revolution and of the new American -culture, would perish of inanition; he felt himself at bay. Would he, -with all the additional provocation of a hopelessly bungled peace -settlement, have continued in the political field, as his unfinished -study on “The State” might suggest? Or would that activity, while -remaining vivid and consistent, have subsided into a second place -behind his more purely cultural interests? - -Personally, I like to think that he would have followed this second -course. He speaks in the “History of a Literary Radical” of “living -down the new orthodoxies of propaganda” as he and his friends had lived -down the old orthodoxies of the classics, and I believe that, freed -from the obsessions of the war, his criticism would have concentrated -more and more on the problem of evoking and shaping an American -literature as the nucleus of that rich, vital and independent national -life he had been seeking in so many ways to promote. Who that knew his -talents could have wished it otherwise? Already, except for the poets, -the intellectual energy of the younger generation has been drawn almost -exclusively into political interests; and the new era, which has begun -to draw so sharply the battle-line between radicals and reactionaries, -is certain only to increase this tendency. If our literary criticism -is always impelled sooner or later to become social criticism, it is -certainly because the future of our literature and art depends upon the -wholesale reconstruction of a social life all the elements of which are -as if united in a sort of conspiracy against the growth and freedom of -the spirit: we are in the position described by Ibsen in one of his -letters: “I do not think it is of much use to plead the cause of art -with arguments derived from its own nature, which with us is still so -little understood, or rather so thoroughly misunderstood.... My opinion -is that at the present time it is of no use to wield one’s weapons -_for_ art; one must simply turn them _against_ what is hostile to -art.” That is why Bourne, whose ultimate interest was always artistic, -found himself a guerilla fighter along the whole battlefront of the -social revolution. He was drawn into the political arena as a skilful -specialist, called into war service, is drawn into the practice of a -general surgery in which he may indeed accomplish much but at the price -of the suspension of his own uniqueness. Others, at the expiration -of what was for him a critical moment, the moment when all freedom -seemed to be at stake, might have been trusted to do his political -work for him; the whole radical tide was flowing behind him; his -unique function, meanwhile, was not political but spiritual. It was -the creation, the communication of what he called “the allure of fresh -and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural -styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling and feeling given fiber and -outline by intelligence.” Was it not to have been hoped, therefore, -that he would have revived, exemplified among these new revolutionary -conditions, and on behalf of them, the lapsed rôle of the man of -letters? - -For if he held a hammer in one hand, he held in the other a -divining-rod. He, if any one, in the days to come, would have -conjured out of our dry soil the green shoots of a beautiful and a -characteristic literature: he knew that soil so well, and why it was -dry, and how it ought to be irrigated! We have had no chart of our -cultural situation to compare with his “History of a Literary Radical,” -and certainly no one has combined with an analytical gift like his, -and an adoration for the instinct of workmanship, so burning an eye -for every stir of life and color on the drab American landscape. I -think of a sentence in one of his reviews: “The appearance of dramatic -imagination in any form in this country is something to make us all -drop our work and run to see.” That was the spirit which animated all -his criticism: is it not the spirit that creates out of the void the -thing it contemplates? - -To have known Randolph Bourne is indeed to have surprised some of the -finest secrets of the American future. But those who lived with him in -friendship will remember him for reasons that are far more personal, -and at the same time far more universal, than that: they will remember -him as the wondrous companion, the lyrical intellect, the transparent -idealist, most of all perhaps as the ingenuous and lonely child. It is -said that every writer possesses in his vocabulary one talismanic word -which he repeats again and again, half unconsciously, like a sort of -signature, and which reveals the essential secret of his personality. -In Bourne’s case the word is “wistful”; and those who accused him -of malice and bitterness, not realizing how instinctively we impute -these qualities to the physically deformed who are so dauntless in -spirit that they repel our pity, would do well to consider that secret -signature, sown like some beautiful wild flower over the meadow of -his writings, which no man can counterfeit, which is indeed the token -of their inviolable sincerity. He was a wanderer, the child of some -nation yet unborn, smitten with an inappeasable nostalgia for the -Beloved Community on the far side of socialism, he carried with him the -intoxicating air of that community, the mysterious aroma of all its -works and ways. “High philosophic thought infused with sensuous love,” -he wrote once, “is not this the one incorrigible dream that clutches -us?” It was the dream he had brought back from the bright future in -which he lived, the dream he summoned us to realize. And it issues now -like a gallant command out of the space left vacant by his passing. - - VAN WYCK BROOKS. - - - - - CONTENTS - - - INTRODUCTION, ix - - HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL, 1 - - OUR CULTURAL HUMILITY, 31 - - SIX PORTRAITS, 45 - FIRST--KAREN, 47 - SECOND--SOPHRONISBA, 57 - THIRD--MON AMIE, 66 - FOURTH--FERGUS, 82 - FIFTH--THE PROFESSOR, 91 - SIXTH--ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, 98 - - THIS OLDER GENERATION, 107 - - A MIRROR OF THE MIDDLE WEST, 128 - - ERNEST: OR PARENT FOR A DAY, 140 - - ON DISCUSSION, 168 - - THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER, 176 - - THE IMMANENCE OF DOSTOEVSKY, 188 - - THE ART OF THEODORE DREISER, 195 - - THE USES OF INFALLIBILITY, 205 - - IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE, 1913-14, 230 - - TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA, 266 - - FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL, 300 - - - - - HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL - - -For a man of culture, my friend Miro began his literary career in a -singularly unpromising way. Potential statesmen in log-cabins might -miraculously come in touch with all the great books of the world, but -the days of Miro’s young school life were passed in innocence of Homer -or Dante or Shakespeare, or any of the other traditional mind-formers -of the race. What Miro had for his nourishment, outside the Bible, -which was a magical book that you must not drop on the floor, or his -school-readers, which were like lightning flashes of unintelligible -scenes, was the literature that his playmates lent him--exploits of -British soldiers in Spain and the Crimea, the death-defying adventures -of young filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. Miro gave them a languid -perusing, and did not criticize their literary style. Huckleberry Finn -and Tom Sawyer somehow eluded him until he had finished college, and -no fresher tale of adventure drifted into his complacent home until -the era of “Richard Carvel” and “Janice Meredith” sharpened his wits -and gave him a vague feeling that there was such a thing as literary -art. The classics were stiffly enshrined behind glass doors that were -very hard to open--at least Hawthorne and Irving and Thackeray were -there, and Tennyson’s and Scott’s poems--but nobody ever discussed them -or looked at them. Miro’s busy elders were taken up with the weekly -_Outlook_ and _Independent_ and _Christian Work_, and felt they were -doing much for Miro when they provided him and his sister with _St. -Nicholas_ and _The Youth’s Companion_. It was only that Miro saw the -black books looking at him accusingly from the case, and a rudimentary -conscience, slipping easily over from Calvinism to culture, forced -him solemnly to grapple with “The Scarlet Letter” or “Marmion.” All -he remembers is that the writers of these books he browsed among used -a great many words and made a great fuss over shadowy offenses and -conflicts and passions that did not even stimulate his imagination with -sufficient force to cause him to ask his elders what it was all about. -Certainly the filibusters were easier. - -At school Miro was early impressed with the vast dignity of the -literary works and names he was compelled to learn. Shakespeare and -Goethe and Dante lifted their plaster heads frowningly above the -teacher’s, as they perched on shelves about the room. Much was said -of the greatness of literature. But the art of phonetics and the -complications of grammar swamped Miro’s early school years. It was not -until he reached the High School that literature began really to assume -that sacredness which he had heretofore felt only for Holy Scripture. -His initiation into culture was made almost a religious mystery by the -conscientious and harassed teacher. As the Deadwood Boys and Henty -and David Harum slipped away from Miro’s soul in the presence of -Milton’s “Comus” and Burke “On Conciliation,” a cultural devoutness -was engendered in him that never really died. At first it did not take -Miro beyond the stage where your conscience is strong enough to make -you uncomfortable, but not strong enough to make you do anything about -it. Miro did not actually become an omnivorous reader of great books. -But he was filled with a rich grief that the millions pursued cheap and -vulgar fiction instead of the best that has been thought and said in -the world. Miro indiscriminately bought cheap editions of the English -classics and read them with a certain patient incomprehension. - -As for the dead classics, they came to Miro from the hands of his -teachers with a prestige even vaster than the books of his native -tongue. No doubt ever entered his head that four years of Latin and -three years of Greek, an hour a day, were the important preparation he -needed for his future as an American citizen. No doubt ever hurt him -that the world into which he would pass would be a world where, as his -teacher said, Latin and Greek were a solace to the aged, a quickener -of taste, a refreshment after manual labor, and a clue to the general -knowledge of all human things. Miro would as soon have doubted the -rising of the sun as have doubted the wisdom of these serious, puckered -women who had the precious manipulation of his cultural upbringing in -their charge. Miro was a bright, if a rather vague, little boy, and a -fusion of brightness and docility gave him high marks in the school -where we went together. - -No one ever doubted that these marks expressed Miro’s assimilation -of the books we pored over. But he told me later that he had never -really known what he was studying. Cæsar, Virgil, Cicero, Xenophon, -Homer, were veiled and misty experiences to him. His mind was a moving -present, obliterating each day what it had read the day before, and -piercing into a no more comprehended future. He could at no time have -given any intelligible account of Æneas’s wanderings or what Cicero was -really inveighing against. The Iliad was even more obscure. The only -thing which impressed him deeply was an expurgated passage, which he -looked up somewhere else and found to be about Mars and Venus caught -in the golden bed. Cæsar seemed to be at war, and Xenophon wandering -somewhere in Asia Minor, with about the same lengthiness and hardship -as Miro suffered in reading him. The trouble, Miro thought afterwards, -was that these books were to his mind flickering lights in a vast -jungle of ignorance. He does not remember marvelling at the excessive -dulness of the stories themselves. He plodded his faithful way, using -them as his conscientious teachers did, as exercises in language. He -looked on Virgil and Cicero as essentially problems in disentangling -words which had unaccountably gotten into a bizarre order, and in -recognizing certain rather amusing and ingenious combinations, known as -“constructions.” Why these words took so irritating an order Miro never -knew, but he always connected the problem with those algebraic puzzles -he had elsewhere to unravel. Virgil’s words were further complicated -by being arranged in lines which one had to “scan.” Miro was pleased -with the rhythm, and there were stanzas that had a roll of their own. -But the inexorable translating that had to go on tore all this fabric -of poetry to pieces. His translations were impeccable, but, as he never -wrote them down, he had never before his eyes the consecutive story. - -Translations Miro never saw. He knew that they were implements of -deadly sin that boys used to cheat with. His horror of them was such -as a saint might feel towards a parody of the Bible. Just before Miro -left school, his sister in a younger class began to read a prose -translation of the Odyssey, and Miro remembers the scorn with which he -looked down on so sneaking an entrance into the temple of light. He -knew that not everyone could study Latin and Greek, and he learned to -be proud of his knowledge. When at last he had passed his examinations -for college--his Latin composition and grammar, his syntax and his -sight-reading, and his Greek composition and grammar, his Greek syntax -and sight-reading, and his translation of Gallic battles and Anabatic -frosts, and Dido’s farewell and Cicero’s objurgations--his zealous -rage did not abate. He even insisted on reading the Bucolics, while he -was away on his vacation, and a book or two in the Odyssey. His family -was a little chilled by his studiousness, but he knew well that he was -laying up cultural treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not -corrupt, neither do thieves break in and steal. - -Arrived at college, Miro expanded his cultural interests on the -approved lines. He read Horace and Plato, Lysias and Terence, -impartially, with faithful conscience. Horace was the most exciting -because of the parodies that were beginning to appear in the cleverer -newspapers. Miro scarcely knew whether to be amused or shocked at “Odi -Persicos” or “Integer Vitæ” done into current slang. The professors, -mild-mannered men who knew their place and kept it, never mentioned -these impudent adventures, but for Miro it was the first crack in -his Ptolemaic system of reverences. There came a time when his mind -began to feel replete, when this heavy pushing through the opaque -medium of dead language began to fatigue him. He should have been able -to read fluently, but there were always turning up new styles, new -constructions, to plague him. Latin became to him like a constant diet -of beefsteak, and Greek like a constant diet of fine wheaten bread. -They lost their taste. These witty poets and ostentatious orators--what -were they all about? What was their background? Where did they fit -into Miro’s life? The professors knew some history, but what did that -history mean? Miro found himself surfeited and dissatisfied. He began -to look furtively at translations to get some better English than he -was able to provide. The hair-splittings of Plato began to bore him -when he saw them in crystal-clear English, and not muffled in the -original Greek. His apostasy had begun. - -It was not much better in his study of English literature. Miro -was given a huge anthology, a sort of press-clipping bureau of -_belles-lettres_, from Chaucer to Arthur Symons. Under the direction -of a professor who was laying out a career for himself as poet--or -“modern singer,” as he expressed it--the class went briskly through -the centuries sampling their genius and tasting the various literary -flavors. The enterprise reminded Miro of those books of woollen samples -which one looks through when one is to have a suit of clothes made. -But in this case, the student did not even have the pleasure of seeing -the suit of clothes. All that was expected of him, apparently, was -that he should become familiar, from these microscopic pieces, with -the different textures and patterns. The great writers passed before -his mind like figures in a crowded street. There was no time for -preferences. Indeed the professor strove diligently to give each writer -his just due. How was one to appreciate the great thoughts and the -great styles if one began to choose violently between them, or attempt -any discrimination on grounds of their peculiar congeniality for -one’s own soul? Criticism had to spurn such subjectivity, scholarship -could not be wilful. The neatly arranged book of “readings,” with its -medicinal doses of inspiration, became the symbol of Miro’s education. - -These early years of college did not deprive Miro of his cultural -loyalty, but they deadened his appetite. Although almost inconceivably -docile, he found himself being bored. He had come from school a -serious boy, with more than a touch of priggishness in him, and a -vague aspiration to be a “man of letters.” He found himself becoming -a collector of literary odds-and-ends. If he did not formulate this -feeling clearly, he at least knew. He found that the literary life was -not as interesting as he had expected. He sought no adventures. When he -wrote, it was graceful lyrics or polite criticisms of William Collins -or Charles Lamb. These canonized saints of culture still held the field -for Miro, however. There was nothing between them and that popular -literature of the day that all good men bemoaned. Classic or popular, -“highbrow” or “lowbrow,” this was the choice, and Miro unquestioningly -took the orthodox heaven. In 1912 the most popular of Miro’s English -professors had never heard of Galsworthy, and another was creating a -flurry of scandal in the department by recommending Chesterton to his -classes. It would scarcely have been in college that Miro would have -learned of an escape from the closed dichotomy of culture. Bored with -the “classic,” and frozen with horror at the “popular,” his career as -a man of culture must have come to a dragging end if he had not been -suddenly liberated by a chance lecture which he happened to hear while -he was at home for the holidays. - -The literary radical who appeared before the Lyceum Club of Miro’s -village was none other than Professor William Lyon Phelps, and it is -to that evening of cultural audacity Miro thinks he owes all his later -emancipation. The lecturer grappled with the “modern novel,” and tossed -Hardy, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Meredith, even Trollope, into the minds of -the charmed audience with such effect that the virgin shelves of the -village library were ravished for days to come by the eager minds upon -whom these great names dawned for the first time. “Jude the Obscure” -and “Resurrection” were of course kept officially away from the vulgar, -but Miro managed to find “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil” and “Anna Karenina” -and “The Warden” and “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and “The Return of the -Native.” Later at college he explored the forbidden realms. It was as -if some devout and restless saint had suddenly been introduced to the -Apocrypha. A new world was opened to Miro that was neither “classic” -nor “popular,” and yet which came to one under the most unimpeachable -auspices. There was, at first, it is true, an air of illicit adventure -about the enterprise. The lecturer who made himself the missionary of -such vigorous and piquant doctrine had the air of being a heretic, or -at least a boy playing out of school. But Miro himself returned to -college a cultural revolutionist. His orthodoxies crumbled. He did not -try to reconcile the new with the old. He applied pick and dynamite to -the whole structure of the canon. Irony, humor, tragedy, sensuality, -suddenly appeared to him as literary qualities in forms that he could -understand. They were like oxygen to his soul. - -If these qualities were in the books he had been reading, he had never -felt them. The expurgated sample-books he had studied had passed too -swiftly over the Elizabethans to give him a sense of their lustiness. -Miro immersed himself voluptuously in the pessimism of Hardy. He fed on -the poignant torture of Tolstoi. While he was reading “Resurrection,” -his class in literature was making an “intensive” study of Tennyson. -It was too much. Miro rose in revolt. He forswore literary courses -forever, dead rituals in which anæmic priests mumbled their trite -critical commentary. Miro did not know that to naughtier critics even -Mr. Phelps might eventually seem a pale and timid Gideon, himself stuck -in moral sloughs. He was grateful enough for that blast of trumpets -which made his own scholastic walls fall down. - -The next stage in Miro’s cultural life was one of frank revolt. He -became as violent as a heretic as he had been docile as a believer. -Modern novels merely started the rift that widened into modern -ideas. The professors were of little use. Indeed, when Miro joined a -group of radicals who had started a new college paper, a relentless -vendetta began with the teachers. Miro and his friends threw over -everything that was mere literature. Social purpose must shine from -any writing that was to rouse their enthusiasm. Literary flavor was -to be permissible only where it made vivid high and revolutionary -thought. Tolstoi became their god, Wells their high priest. Chesterton -infuriated them. They wrote violent assaults upon him which began in -imitation of his cool paradoxicality and ended in incoherent ravings. -There were so many enemies to their new fervor that they scarcely knew -where to begin. There were not only the old tables of stone to destroy, -but there were new and threatening prophets of the eternal verities who -had to be exposed. The nineteenth century which they had studied must -be weeded of its nauseous moralists. The instructors consulted together -how they might put down the revolt, and bring these sinners back to the -faith of cultural scripture. - -It was of no avail. In a short time Miro had been converted from an -aspiration for the career of a cultivated “man of letters” to a fiery -zeal for artistic and literary propaganda in the service of radical -ideas. One of the results of this conversion was the discovery that he -really had no standards of critical taste. Miro had been reverential -so long that he had felt no preferences. Everything that was classic -had to be good to him. But now that he had thrown away the books that -were stamped with the mark of the classic mint, and was dealing with -the raw materials of letters, he had to become a critic and make -selection. It was not enough that a book should be radical. Some of -the books he read, though impeccably revolutionary as to ideas, were -clearly poor as literature. His muffled taste began to assert itself. -He found himself impressionable where before he had been only mildly -acquisitive. The literature of revolt and free speculation fired him -into a state of spiritual explosiveness. All that he read now stood out -in brighter colors and in sharper outlines than before. As he reached a -better balance, he began to feel the vigor of literary form, the value -of sincerity and freshness of style. He began to look for them keenly -in everything he read. It was long before Miro realized that enthusiasm -not docility had made him critical. He became a little proud of his -sensitive and discriminating reactions to the modern and the unsifted. - -This pursuit had to take place without any help from the college. -After Miro graduated, it is true that it became the fashion to study -literature as the record of ideas and not merely as a canon of sacred -books to be analyzed, commented upon, and absorbed. But no dent was -made upon the system in Miro’s time, and, the inventory of English -criticism not going beyond Stevenson, no college course went beyond -Stevenson. The Elizabethans had been exhumed and fumigated, but the -most popular attention went to the gallery of Victorians, who combined -moral soundness with literary beauty, and were therefore considered -wholesome food for young men. The instructors all remained in the state -of reverence which saw all things good that had been immemorially -taught. Miro’s own teacher was a fragile, earnest young man, whose -robuster parents had evidently seized upon his nature as a fortunate -pledge of what the family might produce in the way of an intellectual -flower that should surpass in culture and gentility the ambitions of -his parents. His studiousness, hopeless for his father’s career as -grocer, had therefore been capitalized into education. - -The product now shone forth as one of the most successful and -promising younger instructors in the department. He knew his subject. -Card-indexes filled his room, covering in detail the works, lives, -and deaths of the illustrious persons whom he expounded, as well as -everything that had been said about them in the way of appreciation or -interpretation. An endless number of lectures and courses could be -made from this bountiful store. He never tried to write himself, but he -knew all about the different kinds of writing, and when he corrected -the boys’ themes he knew infallibly what to tell them to avoid. Miro’s -vagaries scandalized his teacher all the more because during his first -year in college Miro had been generally noticed as one with the proper -sobriety and scholarly patience to graduate into a similar priestly -calling. Miro found scant sympathy in the young man. To the latter, -literary studies were a science not an art, and they were to be treated -with somewhat the same cold rigor of delimitation and analysis as -any other science. Miro felt his teacher’s recoil at the idea that -literature was significant only as the expression of personality or -as interpretation of some social movement. Miro saw how uneasy he -became when he was confronted with current literature. It was clear -that Miro’s slowly growing critical sense had not a counterpart in the -scholastic mind. - -When Miro and his friends abandoned literary studies, they followed -after the teachers of history and philosophy, intellectual arenas of -which the literary professors seemed scandalously ignorant. At this -ignorance Miro boiled with contempt. Here were the profitable clues -that would give meaning to dusty literary scholarship, but the scholars -had not the wits to seize them. They lived along, playing what seemed -to Miro a rather dreary game, when they were not gaping reverently at -ideas and forms which they scarcely had the genuine personality to -appreciate. Miro felt once and for all free of these mysteries and -reverences. He was to know the world as it has been and as it is. He -was to put literature into its proper place, making all “culture” -serve its apprenticeship for him as interpretation of things larger -than itself, of the course of individual lives and the great tides of -society. - -Miro’s later cultural life is not without interest. When he had -finished college and his architectural course, and was making headway -in his profession, his philosophy of the intellectual life began to -straighten itself out. Rapid as his surrender of orthodoxy had been, -it had taken him some time to live down that early education. He found -now that he would have to live down his heresies also, and get some -coherent system of tastes that was his own and not the fruit of either -docility or the zeal of propaganda. - -The old battles that were still going on helped Miro to realize his -modern position. It was a queer, musty quarrel, but it was enlisting -minds from all classes and of all intellectual fibers. The “classics” -were dying hard, as Miro recognized whenever he read, in the magazines, -attacks on the “new education.” He found that professors were still -taken seriously who declared in passion that without the universal -study of the Latin language in American schools all conceptions of -taste, standards, criticism, the historic sense itself, would vanish -from the earth. He found that even as late as 1917 professional men -were gathering together in solemn conclave and buttressing the “value -of the classics” with testimonials from “successful men” in a variety -of vocations. Miro was amused at the fact that the mighty studies once -pressed upon him so uncritically should now require, like the patent -medicines, testimonials as to their virtue. Bank presidents, lawyers, -and editors had taken the Latin language regularly for years, and had -found its effects painless and invigorating. He could not escape the -unconscious satire that such plump and prosperous Americans expressed -when they thought it admirable to save their cherished intellectual -traditions in any such fashion. - -Other conservatives Miro saw to be abandoning the line of opposition -to science, only to fall back on the line of a defensive against -“pseudo-science,” as they seemed to call whatever intellectual -interests had not yet become indubitably reputable. It was a line which -would hold them rather strongly for a time, Miro thought, because so -many of the cultural revolutionists agreed with them in hating some of -these arrogant and mechanical psychologies and sociologies that reduced -life to figures or organisms. But Miro felt also how obstructive was -their fight. If the “classics” had done little for him except to hold -his mind in an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous -taste, they seemed to have done little more for even the thorough -scholars. When professors had devoted scholarly lives to the “classics” -only to exhibit in their own polemics none of the urbanity and -intellectual command which were supposed by the believer somehow to -rub off automatically on the faithful student, Miro had to conclude an -absence of causal connection between the “classics” and the able modern -mind. When, moreover, critical power or creative literary work became -almost extinct among these defenders of the “old education,” Miro felt -sure that a revolution was needed in the materials and attitudes of -“culture.” - -The case of the defenders was all the weaker because their enemies were -not wanton infidels, ignorant of the holy places they profaned. They -were rather cultural “Modernists,” reforming the church from within. -They had the classic background, these young vandals, but they had -escaped from its flat and unoriented surface. Abreast of the newer -objective, impersonal standards of thinking, they saw the weakness of -these archaic minds which could only appeal to vested interests in -culture and testimonials from successful men. - -The older critics had long since disavowed the intention of -discriminating among current writers. These men, who had to have an -Academy to protect them, lumped the younger writers of verse and prose -together as “anarchic” and “naturalistic,” and had become, in these -latter days, merely peevish and querulous, protesting in favor of -standards that no longer represented our best values. Every one, in -Miro’s time, bemoaned the lack of critics, but the older critics seemed -to have lost all sense of hospitality and to have become tired and a -little spitefully disconsolate, while the newer ones were too intent on -their crusades against puritanism and philistinism to have time for a -constructive pointing of the way. - -Miro had a very real sense of standing at the end of an era. He and his -friends had lived down both their old orthodoxies of the classics and -their new orthodoxies of propaganda. Gone were the priggishness and -self-consciousness which had marked their teachers. The new culture -would be more personal than the old, but it would not be held as a -personal property. It would be democratic in the sense that it would -represent each person’s honest spontaneous taste. The old attitude was -only speciously democratic. The assumption was that if you pressed -your material long enough and winningly enough upon your culturable -public, they would acquire it. But the material was something handed -down, not grown in the garden of their own appreciations. Under -these conditions the critic and appreciator became a mere impersonal -register of orthodox opinion. The cultivated person, in conforming his -judgments to what was authoritatively taught him, was really a member -of the herd--a cultivated herd, it is true, but still a herd. It was -the mass that spoke through the critic and not his own discrimination. -These authoritative judgments might, of course, have come--probably -had come--to the herd through discerning critics, but in Miro’s time -judgment in the schools had petrified. One believed not because one -felt the original discernment, but because one was impressed by the -weight and reputability of opinion. At least so it seemed to Miro. - -Now just as the artists had become tired of conventions and were -breaking through into new and personal forms, so Miro saw the younger -critics breaking through these cultural conventions. To the elders -the result would seem mere anarchy. But Miro’s attitude did not want -to destroy, it merely wanted to rearrange the materials. He wanted no -more second-hand appreciations. No one’s cultural store was to include -anything that one could not be enthusiastic about. One’s acquaintance -with the best that had been said and thought should be encouraged--in -Miro’s ideal school--to follow the lines of one’s temperament. Miro, -having thrown out the old gods, found them slowly and properly coming -back to him. Some would always repel him, others he hoped to understand -eventually. But if it took wisdom to write the great books, did it not -also take wisdom to understand them? Even the Latin writers he hoped -to recover, with the aid of translations. But why bother with Greek -when you could get Euripides in the marvellous verse of Gilbert Murray? -Miro was willing to believe that no education was complete without at -least an inoculation of the virus of the two orthodoxies that he was -transcending. - -As Miro looked around the American scene, he wondered where the -critics were to come from. He saw, on the one hand, Mr. Mencken and -Mr. Dreiser and their friends, going heavily forth to battle with -the Philistines, glorying in pachydermatous vulgarisms that hurt the -polite and cultivated young men of the old school. And he saw these -violent critics, in their rage against puritanism, becoming themselves -moralists, with the same bigotry and tastelessness as their enemies. -No, these would never do. On the other hand, he saw Mr. Stuart P. -Sherman, in his youthful if somewhat belated ardor, revolting so -conscientiously against the “naturalism” and crude expression of -current efforts that, in his defense of _belles-lettres_, of the -fine tradition of literary art, he himself became a moralist of the -intensest brand, and as critic plumped for Arnold Bennett, because that -clever man had a feeling for the proprieties of human conduct. No, Mr. -Sherman would do even less adequately. His fine sympathies were as -much out of the current as was the specious classicism of Professor -Shorey. He would have to look for the critics among the young men who -had an abounding sense of life, as well as a feeling for literary form. -They would be men who had not been content to live on their cultural -inheritance, but had gone out into the modern world and amassed a fresh -fortune of their own. They would be men who were not squeamish, who did -not feel the delicate differences between “animal” and “human” conduct, -who were enthusiastic about Mark Twain and Gorki as well as Romain -Rolland, and at the same time were thrilled by Copeau’s theater. - -Where was a better program for culture, for any kind of literary -art? Culture as a living effort, a driving attempt both at sincere -expression and at the comprehension of sincere expression wherever it -was found! Appreciation to be as far removed from the “I know what -I like!” as from the textbook impeccability of taste! If each mind -sought its own along these lines, would not many find themselves -agreed? Miro insisted on liking Amy Lowell’s attempt to outline -the tendencies in American poetry in a form which made clear the -struggles of contemporary men and women with the tradition and -against “every affectation of the mind.” He began to see in the new -class-consciousness of poets the ending of that old division which -“culture” made between the chosen people and the gentiles. We were -now to form little pools of workers and appreciators of similar -temperaments and tastes. The little magazines that were starting up -became voices for these new communities of sentiment. Miro thought that -perhaps at first it was right to adopt a tentative superciliousness -towards the rest of the world, so that both Mr. Mencken with his -shudders at the vulgar Demos and Mr. Sherman with his obsession with -the sanely and wholesomely American might be shut out from influence. -Instead of fighting the Philistine in the name of freedom, or fighting -the vulgar iconoclast in the name of wholesome human notions, it might -be better to write for one’s own band of comprehenders, in order that -one might have something genuine with which to appeal to both the mob -of the “bourgeois” and the ferocious vandals who had been dividing -the field among them. Far better a quarrel among these intensely -self-conscious groups than the issues that had filled _The Atlantic_ -and _The Nation_ with their dreary obsolescence. Far better for the -mind that aspired towards “culture” to be told not to conform or -worship, but to search out its group, its own temperamental community -of sentiment, and there deepen appreciations through sympathetic -contact. - -It was no longer a question of being hospitable towards the work of -other countries. Miro found the whole world open to him, in these -days, through the enterprise of publishers. He and his friends felt -more sympathetic with certain groups in France and Russia than they -did with the variegated “prominent authors” of their own land. Winston -Churchill as a novelist came to seem more of an alien than Artzybashev. -The fact of culture being international had been followed by a sense of -its being. The old cultural attitude had been hospitable enough, but it -had imported its alien culture in the form of “comparative literature.” -It was hospitable only in trying to mould its own taste to the orthodox -canons abroad. The older American critic was mostly interested in -getting the proper rank and reverence for what he borrowed. The new -critic will take what suits his community of sentiment. He will want -to link up not with the foreign canon, but with that group which is -nearest in spirit with the effort he and his friends are making. The -American has to work to interpret and portray the life he knows. He -cannot be international in the sense that anything but the life in -which he is saturated, with its questions and its colors, can be the -material for his art. But he can be international--and must be--in the -sense that he works with a certain hopeful vision of a “young world,” -and with certain ideal values upon which the younger men, stained and -revolted by war, in all countries are agreeing. - -Miro wonders sometimes whether the direction in which he is tending -will not bring him around the circle again to a new classicism. The -last stage in the history of the man of culture will be that “classic” -which he did not understand and which his mind spent its youth in -overthrowing. But it will be a classicism far different from that which -was so unintelligently handed down to him in the American world. It -will be something worked out and lived into. Looking into the future -he will have to do what Van Wyck Brooks calls “inventing a usable -past.” Finding little in the American tradition that is not tainted -with sweetness and light and burdened with the terrible patronage of -bourgeois society, the new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and -Whitman and Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain eternal -human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom, and so build -out the future. If the classic means power with restraint, vitality -with harmony, a fusion of intellect and feeling, and a keen sense of -the artistic conscience, then the revolutionary world is coming out -into the classic. When Miro sees behind the minds of _The Masses_ group -a desire for form and for expressive beauty, and sees the radicals -following Jacques Copeau and reading Chekhov, he smiles at the thought -of the American critics, young and old, who do not know yet that they -are dead. - - - - - OUR CULTURAL HUMILITY - - -It was Matthew Arnold, read and reverenced by the generation -immediately preceding our own, who set to our eyes a definition and a -goal of culture which has become the common property of all our world. -To know the best that had been thought and said, to appreciate the -master-works which the previous civilizations had produced, to put our -minds and appreciations in contact with the great of all ages,--here -was a clear ideal which dissolved the mists in which the vaguenesses of -culture had been lost. And it was an ideal that appealed with peculiar -force to Americans. For it was a democratic ideal; every one who had -the energy and perseverance could reasonably expect to acquire by -taking thought that orientation of soul to which Arnold gave the magic -name of culture. And it was a quantitative ideal; culture was a matter -of acquisition--with appreciation and prayerfulness perhaps, but still -a matter of adding little by little to one’s store until one should -have a vision of that radiant limit, when one knew all the best that -had been thought and said and pictured in the world. - -I do not know in just what way the British public responded to Arnold’s -eloquence; if the prophetic wrath of Ruskin failed to stir them, it is -not probable that they were moved by the persuasiveness of Arnold. But -I do know that, coming at a time when America was producing rapidly an -enormous number of people who were “comfortably off,” as the phrase -goes, and who were sufficiently awake to feel their limitations, with -the broader horizons of Europe just opening on the view, the new -doctrine had the most decisive effect on our succeeding spiritual -history. The “land-of-liberty” American of the era of Dickens still -exists in the British weeklies and in observations of America by callow -young journalists, but as a living species he has long been extinct. -His place has been taken by a person whose pride is measured not by -the greatness of the “land of the free,” but by his own orientation in -Europe. - -Already in the nineties, our college professors and our artists were -beginning to require the seal of a European training to justify -their existence. We appropriated the German system of education. -Our millionaires began the collecting of pictures and the endowment -of museums with foreign works of art. We began the exportation of -school-teachers for a summer tour of Europe. American art and music -colonies sprang up in Paris and Berlin and Munich. The movement became -a rush. That mystical premonition of Europe, which Henry James tells -us he had from his earliest boyhood, became the common property of the -talented young American, who felt a certain starvation in his own land, -and longed for the fleshpots of European culture. But the bourgeoisie -soon followed the artistic and the semi-artistic, and Europe became so -much the fashion that it is now almost a test of respectability to have -traveled at least once abroad. - -Underlying all this vivacious emigration, there was of course a real -if vague thirst for “culture,” and, in strict accord with Arnold’s -definition, the idea that somehow culture could be imbibed, that from -the contact with the treasures of Europe there would be rubbed off -on us a little of that grace which had made the art. So for those -who could not travel abroad, our millionaires transported, in almost -terrifying bulk and at staggering cost, samples of everything that the -foreign galleries had to show. We were to acquire culture at any cost, -and we had no doubt that we had discovered the royal road to it. We -followed it, at any rate, with eye single to the goal. The naturally -sensitive, who really found in the European literature and arts some -sort of spiritual nourishment, set the pace, and the crowd followed at -their heels. - -This cultural humility of ours astonished and still astonishes Europe. -In England, where “culture” is taken very frivolously, the bated -breath of the American, when he speaks of Shakespeare or Tennyson or -Browning, is always cause for amusement. And the Frenchman is always a -little puzzled at the crowds who attend lectures in Paris on “How to -See Europe Intelligently,” or are taken in vast parties through the -Louvre. The European objects a little to being so constantly regarded -as the keeper of a huge museum. If you speak to him of culture, you -find him frankly more interested in contemporaneous literature and art -and music than in his worthies of the olden time, more interested -in discriminating the good of to-day than in accepting the classics. -If he is a cultivated person, he is much more interested usually in -quarreling about a living dog than in reverencing a dead lion. If he -is a French _lettré_, for instance, he will be producing a book on -the psychology of some living writer, while the Anglo-Saxon will be -writing another on Shakespeare. His whole attitude towards the things -of culture, be it noted, is one of daily appreciation and intimacy, not -that attitude of reverence with which we Americans approach alien art, -and which penalizes cultural heresy among us. - -The European may be enthusiastic, polemic, radiant, concerning his -culture; he is never humble. And he is, above all, never humble before -the culture of another country. The Frenchman will hear nothing but -French music, read nothing but French literature, and prefers his own -art to that of any other nation. He can hardly understand our almost -pathetic eagerness to learn of the culture of other nations, our -humility of worship in the presence of art that in no sense represents -the expression of any of our ideals and motivating forces. - -To a genuinely patriotic American this cultural humility of ours is -somewhat humiliating. In response to this eager inexhaustible interest -in Europe, where is Europe’s interest in us? Europe is to us the land -of history, of mellow tradition, of the arts and graces of life, of the -best that has been said and thought in the world. To Europe we are the -land of crude racial chaos, of skyscrapers and bluff, of millionaires -and “bosses.” A French philosopher visits us, and we are all eagerness -to get from him an orientation in all that is moving in the world of -thought across the seas. But does he ask about our philosophy, does -he seek an orientation in the American thought of the day? Not at -all. Our humility has kept us from forcing it upon his attention, and -it scarcely exists for him. Our advertising genius, so powerful and -universal where soap and biscuits are concerned, wilts and languishes -before the task of trumpeting our intellectual and spiritual products -before the world. Yet there can be little doubt which is the more -intrinsically worth advertising. But our humility causes us to be taken -at our own face value, and for all this patient fixity of gaze upon -Europe, we get little reward except to be ignored, or to have our -interest somewhat contemptuously dismissed as parasitic. - -And with justice! For our very goal and ideal of culture has made us -parasites. Our method has been exactly wrong. For the truth is that the -definition of culture, which we have accepted with such devastating -enthusiasm, is a definition emanating from that very barbarism from -which its author recoiled in such horror. If it were not that all our -attitude showed that we had adopted a quite different standard, it -would be the merest platitude to say that culture is not an acquired -familiarity with things outside, but an inner and constantly operating -taste, a fresh and responsive power of discrimination, and the -insistent judging of everything that comes to our minds and senses. It -is clear that such a sensitive taste cannot be acquired by torturing -our appreciations into conformity with the judgments of others, no -matter how “authoritative” those judgments may be. Such a method means -a hypnotization of judgment, not a true development of soul. - -At the back of Arnold’s definition is, of course, the implication -that if we have only learned to appreciate the “best,” we shall have -been trained thus to discriminate generally, that our appreciation of -Shakespeare will somehow spill over into admiration of the incomparable -art of Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson. This is, of course, exactly to reverse -the psychological process. A true appreciation of the remote and -the magnificent is acquired only after the judgment has learned to -discriminate with accuracy and taste between the good and bad, the -sincere and the false, of the familiar and contemporaneous art and -writing of every day. To set up an alien standard of the classics is -merely to give our lazy taste a resting-point, and to prevent forever -any genuine culture. - -This virus of the “best” rages throughout all our Anglo-Saxon campaign -for culture. Is it not a notorious fact that our professors of English -literature make no attempt to judge the work produced since the death -of the last consecrated saint of the literary canon,--Robert Louis -Stevenson? In strict accordance with Arnold’s doctrine, they are -waiting for the judgment upon our contemporaries which they call the -test of time, that is, an authoritative objective judgment, upon which -they can unquestioningly rely. Surely it seems as if the principle of -authority, having been ousted from religion and politics, had found -a strong refuge in the sphere of culture. This tyranny of the “best” -objectifies all our taste. It is a “best” that is always outside of -our native reactions to the freshnesses and sincerities of life, a -“best” to which our spontaneities must be disciplined. By fixing our -eyes humbly on the ages that are past, and on foreign countries, we -effectually protect ourselves from that inner taste which is the only -sincere “culture.” - -Our cultural humility before the civilizations of Europe, then, is the -chief obstacle which prevents us from producing any true indigenous -culture of our own. I am far from saying, of course, that it is not -necessary for our arts to be fertilized by the civilizations of other -nations past and present. The culture of Europe has arisen only from -such an extensive cross-fertilization in the past. But we have passed -through that period of learning, and it is time for us now to set up -our individual standards. We are already “heir of all the ages” through -our English ancestry, and our last half-century of European idolatry -has done for us all that can be expected. But, with our eyes fixed -on Europe, we continue to strangle whatever native genius springs -up. Is it not a tragedy that the American artist feels the imperative -need of foreign approval before he can be assured of his attainment? -Through our inability or unwillingness to judge him, through our -cultural humility, through our insistence on the objective standard, -we drive him to depend on a foreign clientèle, to live even in foreign -countries, where taste is more confident of itself and does not require -the label, to be assured of the worth of what it appreciates. - -The only remedy for this deplorable situation is the cultivation of -a new American nationalism. We need that keen introspection into the -beauties and vitalities and sincerities of our own life and ideals that -characterizes the French. The French culture is animated by principles -and tastes which are as old as art itself. There are “classics,” -not in the English and Arnoldian sense of a consecrated canon, -dissent from which is heresy, but in the sense that each successive -generation, putting them to the test, finds them redolent of those -qualities which are characteristically French, and so preserves them -as a precious heritage. This cultural chauvinism is the most harmless -of patriotisms; indeed it is absolutely necessary for a true life of -civilization. And it can hardly be too intense, or too exaggerated. -Such an international art exhibition as was held recently in New York, -with the frankly avowed purpose of showing American artists how bad -they were in comparison with the modern French, represents an appalling -degradation of attitude which would be quite impossible in any other -country. Such groveling humility can only have the effect of making us -feeble imitators, instead of making us assert, with all the power at -our command, the genius and individuality which we already possess in -quantity, if we would only see it. - -In the contemporary talent that Europe is exhibiting, or even in the -genius of the last half-century, one will go far to find greater poets -than our Walt Whitman, philosophers than William James, essayists -than Emerson and Thoreau, composers than MacDowell, sculptors than -Saint-Gaudens. In any other country such names would be focuses to -which interest and enthusiasms would converge, symbols of a national -spirit about which judgments and tastes would revolve. For none of -them could have been born in another country than our own. If some of -them had their training abroad, it was still the indigenous America -that their works expressed,--the American ideals and qualities, our -pulsating democracy, the vigor and daring of our pioneer spirit, our -sense of _camaraderie_, our dynamism, the big-heartedness of our -scenery, our hospitality to all the world. In the music of MacDowell, -the poetry of Whitman, the philosophy of James, I recognize a national -spirit, “l’esprit américain,” as superbly clear and gripping as -anything the culture of Europe has to offer us, and immensely more -stimulating, because of the very body and soul of to-day’s interests -and aspirations. - -To come to an intense self-consciousness of these qualities, to -feel them in the work of these masters, and to search for them -everywhere among the lesser artists and thinkers who are trying to -express the soul of this hot chaos of America,--this will be the -attainment of culture for us. Not to look on ravished while our -marvelous millionaires fill our museums with “old masters,” armor, and -porcelains, but to turn our eyes upon our own art for a time, shut -ourselves in with our own genius, and cultivate with an intense and -partial pride what we have already achieved against the obstacles of -our cultural humility. Only thus shall we conserve the American spirit -and saturate the next generation with those qualities which are our -strength. Only thus can we take our rightful place among the cultures -of the world, to which we are entitled if we would but recognize it. We -shall never be able to perpetuate our ideals except in the form of art -and literature; the world will never understand our spirit except in -terms of art. When shall we learn that “culture,” like the kingdom of -heaven, lies within us, in the heart of our national soul, and not in -foreign galleries and books? When shall we learn to be proud? For only -pride is creative. - - - - - SIX PORTRAITS - - -I--KAREN - -II--SOPHRONISBA - -III--MON AMIE - -IV--FERGUS - -V--THE PROFESSOR - -VI--ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS - - - - - KAREN - - -Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be -than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her -inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be -articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but -there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity -were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling -to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she -was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant -shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against -your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of -your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber -irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt -her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become -bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna -which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights -glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in -her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of -your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to -some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this -fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever. - -I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come -for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her -living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and -I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin -intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to -the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at -her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft -intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several -nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write -novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded -anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting -detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her -writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay, -and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your -soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable -false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my -interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport -between us which she was always anticipating--this seemed to make -up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly -George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove -adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult -in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking -over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of -epigram. Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their -hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy -the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth -working for. Karen did not think, she felt--in slow, sensuous outlines. -You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at -you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation -was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then -you quarreled. - -When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would -always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for -herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite -likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would -not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world -in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make -for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant -journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education, -the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to -appreciate this personal cult of Karen’s. She was so clearly finer -and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her, -that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even -if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured. -It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so -subject to sudden disaster. Karen’s notes were always a little more -brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support. -She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If -you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always -bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She -would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a -fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood, -and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were -tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of -personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but -you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul, -and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment. - -I am quite sure that Karen’s system of personal relations was platonic. -She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of -the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an -“affair.” She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much -interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama -of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever -hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow -copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would -have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate -for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch -of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite -intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal -virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious -she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an -impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her -up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who -violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of -playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared. -Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had -a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex, -her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be -breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places. - -Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged -against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could -rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness -and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she -spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for -them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen, -a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various -repellant “tones” or my failure to catch just the quality of certain -people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her “cads.” -They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been -impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual -ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness. -But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a -mood. She never recognized any of the naïve collisions of men and women. - -Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men. -She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they -slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end -of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state -suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and -serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had -affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She -felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the -exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate -from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man’s woman. She spoke -of the “human sex,” and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships. - -When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken -up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted -world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had -seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old -annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would -have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done -little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely -conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way, -was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any -one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not -acquired that mystic sense of “loyalty to woman” and did not believe -that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity. -Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been -spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the -women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly -discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in -to be mystically mingled with her circle. - -Naturally it is Karen’s married friends who cause her greatest concern. -Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine -tyranny. In the enemy’s country, under at least the nominal yoke, these -married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has -become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of -these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied -themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the -victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle, -inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of -woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they -see jealously adoring their wives. - -Karen still leaves trails of mystery and desire where she goes, but -it is as a woman’s woman that I see her now, and, I am ashamed to -say, ignore her. Men could not be crowded into her Jamesian world and -she has solved the problem by obliterating them. She will not live by -means of them. Since she does not know how to live with them she lives -without them. - - - - - SOPHRONISBA - - -I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined -her against the background of that impeccable New England town from -which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with -houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching -away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large -princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine -nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those -pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people. -This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid -of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals. -Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within. -Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families’ hands, -while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of -sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife -never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I -think there are other things in Sophronisba’s town, but these are the -things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from. - -Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than -she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated -her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was -her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who -exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap -them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged -childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly -homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it. - -No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the -chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should -unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures -you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without -the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college, -where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct -towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven -above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste. -She seems to have very dutifully taken her master’s degree in English -literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere -an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has -probably forgotten herself. - -For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin -stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been -invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who -desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of -the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little -teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position -with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the -dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate -her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is -the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can -be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling -freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba’s career has been an -indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very -hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game -with the odds against them. - -I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years, -and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives -into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by -a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the -great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed -checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down -with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off, -and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of -weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and -book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba’s articles that I should -like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness, -and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to -disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more -subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely. - -There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine -Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in -vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skilful sorties of -wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots -to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous -action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article -an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work -from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy. -Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of -writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One -would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But -her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no -sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice -that retains the least suggestion of a racy Eastern twang. With the -twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound -interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner -group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio -in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York -will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is -going to be bright. - -How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience -and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons -than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have -lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the -Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the -terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness -still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as -good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold -feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New -England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance. -In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of -the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba. -These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings -after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses -into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her -personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her -to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly -to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she -sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably -abstract, and--for Sophronisba--too unhumorous Fraülein assistant. What -Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated -into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before -journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often -give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of -her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus -sent flying. - -Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a -self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the -white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil -shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her -own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life -which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make -Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent -reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained -down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or -a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries -of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them -are. - -Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the -subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very -tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But -she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound -depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious -of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a -symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried -woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to -mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality -about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring, -and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto. -To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which -must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have -made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful -bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first. - - - - - MON AMIE - - - I - -She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but -she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine. -She belonged to that France which Jean-Christophe found in his friend -Olivier, a world of flashing ideas and enthusiasms, a golden youth of -ideals. - -She had picked me out for an exchange of conversation, as the custom -is, precisely because I had left my name at the Sorbonne as a person -who wrote a little. I had put this bait out, as it were, deliberately, -with the intention of hooking a mind that cared for a little more than -mere chatter, but I had hardly expected to find it in the form of a -young girl who, as she told me in her charmingly polished note, was -nineteen and had just completed her studies. - -These studies formed a useful introduction when she received me in -the little old-fashioned apartment in the Batignolles quarter on my -first visit. She had made them ever since she was five years old in -a wonderful old convent at Bourges; and in the town had lived her -grandmother, a very old lady, whom she had gone lovingly to see, as -often as she could be away from the watchful care of the nuns. In -her she had found her real mother, for her parents had been far away -in Brittany. When the old lady died, my friend had to face an empty -world, and to become acquainted all over again with a mother whom -she confessed she found “little sympathetic.” But she was a girl of -_devoir_, and she would do nothing to wound her. - -She told me one afternoon as we took our first walk through the dusky -richness of the Musée Cluny, that the shock of death had disclosed -to her how fleeting life was, how much she thought of death, and -how much she feared it. I used the lustiness of her grandmother’s -eighty-four years to convince her as to how long she might have to -postpone her dread, but her fragile youth seemed already to feel the -beating wings about her. As she talked, her expression had all that -wistful seriousness of the French face which has not been devitalized -by the city, that sense of the nearness of unutterable things which -runs, a golden thread, through their poetry. Though she had lived away -from Brittany, in her graver moments there was much in her of the -patient melancholy of the Breton. For her father’s people had been -sea-folk,--not fishermen, but pilots and navigators on those misty and -niggardly shores,--and the long defeat and ever-trustful suffering was -in her blood. She would interpret to me the homely pictures at the -Luxembourg which spoke of coast and peasant life; and her beautiful -articulateness brought the very soul of France out of the canvases of -Cottet and Breton and Carrière. She understood these people. - -But she was very various, and, if at first we plumbed together the -profoundest depths of her, we soon got into shallower waters. The -fluency of her thought outran any foreign medium, and made anything but -her flying French impossible. Her meager English had been learned from -some curious foreigner with an accent more German than French, and we -abandoned it by mutual consent. Our conversation became an exchange of -ideas and not of languages. Or rather her mind became the field where I -explored at will. - -I think I began by assuming a Catholic devotion in her, and implied -that her serious outlook on life might lead her into the church. She -scoffed unmitigatedly at this. The nuns were not unkindly, she said, -but they were hard and narrow and did not care for the theater and for -books, which she adored. - -She believed in God. “Et le théâtre!” I said, which delighted her -hugely. But these Christian virtues made unlovely characters and -cut one off so painfully from the fascinating moving world of ideas -outside. But surely after fourteen years of religious training and -Christian care, did she not believe in the Church, its priesthood and -its dogmas? - -She repudiated her faith with indescribable vivacity. A hardened -Anglo-Saxon agnostic would have shown more diffidence in denying -his belief in dogma or the Bible. As for the latter, she said, it -might do for children of five years. And the cutting sweep of that -“enfants de cinq ans” afforded me a revealing glimpse of that lucid -intelligence with which the French mind cuts through layers and strata -of equivocation and compromise. - -Most Frenchmen, if they lose their faith, go the swift and logical -road to atheism. Her loss was no childish dream or frenzy; she still -believed in God. But as for the Church and its priesthood,--she told -me, with malicious irony, and with the intelligence that erases -squeamishness, of a friend of hers who was the daughter of the priest -in charge of one of the largest Parisian churches. Would she confess -to a member of a priestly caste which thus broke faith? Confession was -odious anyway. She had been kept busy in school inventing sins. She -would go to church on Easter, but she would not take the Eucharist, -though I noticed a charming lapse when she crossed herself with holy -water as we entered Notre Dame one day. - -Where had she ever got such ideas, shut up in a convent?--Oh, they were -all perfectly obvious, were they not? Where would one not get them? -This amazing soul of modern France!--which pervades even the walls of -convents with its spirit of free criticism and its terrible play of -the intelligence; which will examine and ruthlessly cast aside, just -as my vibrant, dark-haired, fragile friend was casting aside, without -hypocrisy or scruple, whatever ideas do not seem to enhance the clear -life to be lived. - - - II - -Accustomed to grope and flounder in the mazes of the intellect, I found -her intelligence well-nigh terrifying. I would sit almost helplessly -and listen to her sparkle of talk. Her freedom knocked into pieces all -my little imagined world of French conventionalities and inhibitions. -How could this pale, dignified mother, to whom I was presented as she -passed hurriedly through the room one day, allow her to wander so -freely about Paris parks and museums with a foreign young man? Her -answer came superbly, with a flare of decision which showed me that -at least in one spot the eternal conflict of the generations had been -settled: “_Je me permets!_”--I allow myself. She gave me to understand -that for a while her mother had been difficult, but that there was no -longer any question of her “living her life”--_vivre sa vie_. And she -really thought that her mother, in releasing her from the useless -trammels, had become herself much more of an independent personality. -As for my friend, she dared, she took risks, she played with the -adventure of life. But she knew what was there. - -The motherly Anglo-Saxon frame of mind would come upon me, to see -her in the light of a poor ignorant child, filled with fantastic -ideals, all so pitifully untested by experience. How ignorant she was -of life, and to what pitfalls her daring freedom must expose her in -this unregenerate France! I tried and gave it up. As she talked,--her -glowing eyes, in which ideas seemed to well up brimming with feeling -and purpose, saying almost more than her words,--she seemed too -palpably a symbol of luminous youth, a flaming militant of the younger -generation, who by her courage would shrivel up the dangers that so -beset the timorous. She was French, and that fact by itself meant -that whole layers of equivocation had been cut through, whole sets of -intricacies avoided. - -In order to get the full shock of her individuality, I took her one -afternoon to a model little English tea-room on the rue de Rivoli, -where normal Britishers were reading _Punch_ and the _Spectator_ -over their jam and cake. The little flurry of disapprobation and the -hostile stare which our appearance elicited from the well-bred families -and discreet young men at the tables, the flaring incongruity of her -dark, lithe, inscrutable personality in this bland, vacuous British -atmosphere, showed me as could nothing else how hard was the gem-like -flame with which she burned. - -As we walked in the Luxembourg and along the quays, or sat on the -iron chairs in the gardens of the Parc Monceau or the Trocadéro, our -friendship became a sort of intellectual orgy. The difficulty of -following the pace of her flying tongue and of hammering and beating -my own thoughts into the unaccustomed French was fatiguing, but it was -the fascinating weariness of exploration. My first idle remarks about -God touched off a whole battery of modern ideas. None of the social -currents of the day seemed to have passed her by, though she had been -immured so long in her sleepy convent at Bourges. She had that same -interest and curiosity about other classes and conditions of life -which animates us here in America, and the same desire to do something -effective against the misery of poverty. - -I had teased her a little about her academic, untried ideas, and -in grave reproof she told me, one afternoon, as we stood--of all -places!--on the porch of the Little Trianon at Versailles, a touching -story of a family of the poorest of the Parisian poor, whom she and -her mother visited and helped to get work. She did not think charity -accomplished very much, and flamed at the word “Socialism,” although -she had not yet had its program made very clear to her. - -But mostly she was feminist,--an ardent disciple in that singularly -uncomplicated and happy march of the Frenchwomen, already so -practically emancipated, toward a definite social recognition of that -liberation. The normal Frenchwoman, in all but the richer classes, -is an economic asset to her country. And economic independence was -a cardinal dogma in my friend’s faith. She was already taking a -secretarial course, in order to ensure her ability to make her living; -and she looked forward quite eagerly to a career. - -Marriage was in considerable disfavor; it had still the taint of the -Church upon it, while the civil marriage seemed, with the only recently -surrendered necessary parental consent, to mark the subjection of the -younger to the older generation. These barriers were now removed, but -the evil savor of the institution lingered on. My friend, like all the -French intellectuals, was all for the “union libre,” but it would have -to be loyal unto death. It was all the more inspiring as an ideal, -because it would be perhaps hard to obtain. Men, she was inclined to -think, were usually _malhonnête_, but she might find some day a man of -complete sympathy and complete loyalty. But she did not care. Life was -life, freedom was freedom, and the glory of being a woman in the modern -world was enough for her. - -The French situation was perhaps quite as bad as it was pictured. -Friendship between a girl and a young man was almost impossible. -It was that they usually wished to love her. She did not mind them -on the streets. The students--oh, the students!--were frightfully -annoying; but perhaps one gave a _gifle_ and passed rapidly on. Her -parents, before she had become genuinely the captain of her soul, had -tried to marry her off in the orthodox French way. She had had four -proposals. Risking the clean candor of the French soul, I became -curious and audacious. So she dramatized for me, without a trace of -self-consciousness, a wonderful little scene of provincial manners. -The stiff young Frenchman making his stilted offer, her self-possessed -reluctance, her final refusal, were given in inimitable style. These -incidents, which in the life of a little American _bourgeoise_ would -have been crises or triumphs, and, at any rate, unutterably hoarded -secrets, were given with a cold frankness which showed refreshingly to -what insignificance marriage was relegated in her life. She wished, she -said, to _vivre sa vie_--to live her life. If marriage fitted in with -her living of her life, it might take her. It should never submerge -or deflect her. Countless Frenchwomen, in defiance of the strident -Anglo-Saxon belief, were able both to keep a household and to earn -their own living; and why not she also? She would always be free; and -her black eyes burned as they looked out so fearlessly into a world -that was to be all hers, because she expected nothing from it. - -About this world, she had few illusions. To its worldlinesses and -glitter she showed really a superb indifference. I brutally tried to -trap her into a confession that she spurned it only because it might -be closed to her through lack of money or prestige. Her eloquent eyes -almost slew me with vivacious denial. She despised these “dolls” whose -only business in life was to wear clothes. Her own sober black was -not affectation, but only her way of showing that she was more than a -_poupée_. She did not say it, but I quite appreciated, and I knew well -that she knew, how charming a _poupée_ she might have made. - -Several of her friends were gay and worldly. She spoke of them with -charming frankness, touching off, with a tone quite clean of malice, -all their little worthlessnesses and futilities. Some of this world, -indeed, shaded off into unimaginable _nuances_, but she was wholly -aware of its significance. In the inimitable French way, she disdained -to use its errors as a lever to elevate her own virtues. - - - III - -Her blazing candor lighted up for me every part of her world. We -skirted abysses, but the language helped us wonderfully through. French -has worn tracks in so many fields of experience where English blunders -either boorishly or sentimentally. French is made for illumination and -clear expression; it has kept its purity and crispness and can express, -without shamefacedness or bungling, attitudes and interpretations which -the Anglo-Saxon fatuously hides. - -My friend was dimly sensible of some such contrast. I think she had -as much difficulty in making me out as I had in making her out. -She was very curious as to how she compared with American girls. -She had once met one but had found her, though not a doll, yet not -_sympathique_ and little understandable. I had to tell my friend how -untranslatable she was. The Anglo-Saxon, I had to tell her, was apt to -be either a schoolchild or a middle-aged person. To the first, ideas -were strange and disturbing. To the second, they were a nuisance and -a bore. I almost assured her that in America she would be considered -a quite horrible portent. Her brimming idealism would make everybody -uncomfortable. The sensual delight which she took in thinking, the way -her ideas were all warmly felt and her feelings luminously expressed, -would adapt her badly to a world of school-children and tired business -men. I tried to go over for her the girls of her age whom I had -known. How charming they were to be sure, but, even when they had -ideas, how strangely inarticulate they sometimes were, and, if they -were articulate, how pedantic and priggish they seemed to the world -about them! And what forests of reticences and exaggerated values -there were, and curious illogicalities. How jealous they were of their -personalities, and what a suspicious and individualistic guard they -kept over their candor and sincerities! I was very gay and perhaps a -little cruel. - -She listened eagerly, but I think she did not quite understand. If one -were not frankly a doll, was not life a great swirl to be grappled with -and clarified, and thought and felt about? And as for her personality, -the more she gave the more she had. She would take the high risks of -friendship. - -To cross the seas and come upon my own enthusiasms and ideals vibrating -with so intense a glow seemed an amazing fortune. It was like coming -upon the same design, tinted in novel and picturesque colors of a -finer harmony. In this intellectual flirtation, carried on in _musée_ -and garden and on quay throughout that cloudless April, I began to -suspect some gigantic flattery. Was her enthusiasm sincere, and her -clean-cutting ideas, or had she by some subtle intuition anticipated -me? Did she think, or was it to be expected of me, that I should fall -in love with her? But perhaps there was a touch of the too foreign -in her personality. And if I had fallen in love, I know it would not -have been with herself. It would have been with the Frenchness of her, -and perhaps was. It would have been with the eternal youth of France -that she was. For she could never have been so very glowing if France -had not been full of her. Her charm and appeal were far broader than -herself. It took in all that rare spiritual climate where one absorbs -ideas and ideals as the earth drinks in rain. - -She was of that young France with its luminous understanding, its -personal verve, its light of expression, its way of feeling its ideas -and thinking its emotions, its deathless loyalty which betrays only at -the clutch of some deeper loyalty. She adored her country and all its -mystic values and aspirations. When she heard I was going to Germany, -she actually winced with pain. She could scarcely believe it. I fell -back at once to the position of a vulgar traveler, visiting even the -lands of the barbarians. They were her country’s enemies, and some day -they would attack. France awaited the onslaught fatalistically. She -did not want to be a man, but she wished that they would let women be -soldiers. If the war came, however, she would enlist at once as a Red -Cross nurse. She thrilled at the thought that perhaps there she could -serve to the uttermost. - -And the war has come, hot upon her enthusiasms. She must have been long -since in the field, either at the army stations, or moving about among -the hospitals of Paris, her heart full of pride and pity for the France -which she loved and felt so well, and of whose deathless spirit she -was, for me, at least, so glowing a symbol. - - - - - FERGUS - - -My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the -divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in -order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the -creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic -desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic -form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There -is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff -old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a -man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for -him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old -Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic -girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the -slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus -is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green -plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney, -its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of -an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that -would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and -his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat. - -The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was -brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to -be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of -his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future. -His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus -himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met -him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school. -The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced -him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he -looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent -their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in -their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an -exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and -he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance -broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted -reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in -the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music -notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand. - -Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory, -but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled -him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he -produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a -flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music, -somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages -of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a -pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there -was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine -study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not -instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two, -and he could not grasp or control it. - -When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was -insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours -of one’s every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the -privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I -had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to -offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple -board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest -of his pastoral day for writing music. - -Before I could communicate to him my friends’ reluctance to this -proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left -him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum, -discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him. -Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato -in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked -in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the -pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his -own historic galleries. - -When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon -him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with -Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed -persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in -his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his -helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble -world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had -never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather -as one who had been bereft of all these things. - -Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard -a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional -violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks -he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic -church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him -to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in -irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with -Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him. - -He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so -strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra -of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen -dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense -of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the -lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and -he gave the work up. - -All this time, I gathered, his parents had been restive over a certain -economic waste. They seemed to feel that his expensive musical -education should be capitalized more firmly and more profitably. His -mother had even deplored his lack of ambition. She had explored and -had discovered that one made much money as a “vaudeville act.” He had -obtained a trial at an Upper Bronx moving-picture vaudeville theater. -Fergus told me that the nervous girl who had gone on the stage before -him had been cut short in the middle of her “Fox-Trot Lullaby,” or -whatever her song was, by hostile yells from the audience. Fergus -himself went on in rather a depressed mood, and hardly did himself -justice. He played the Bach air, and a short movement from Brahms. He -did not, however, get that rapport with his audience which he felt the -successful vaudeville artist should feel. They had not yelled at him, -but they had refused to applaud, and the circuit manager had declined -to engage him. - -After this experience it occurred to Fergus that he liked to teach, -and that his training had made him a professional musician. His -personality, he felt, was not unfavorable. By beginning modestly he -saw no reason why he should not build up a clientèle and an honorable -competence. When I saw him a week later at the Music Settlement, he -told me that there was no longer any doubt that he had found his -lifework. His fees are very small and his pupils are exacting. He has -practised much besides. He told me the other day that teaching was -uninspiring drudgery. He had decided to give it up, and compose songs. - -Whenever I see Fergus I have a slight quickening of the sense of life. -His rich and rather somber personality makes all ordinary backgrounds -tawdry. He knows so exactly what he is doing and what he is feeling. I -do not think he reads very much, but he breathes in from the air around -him certain large aesthetic and philosophical ideas. There are many -philosophies and many artists, however, that he has never heard of, and -this ignorance of the concrete gives one a fine pleasure of impressing -him. One can pour into receptive ears judgments and enthusiasms that -have long ago been taken for granted by one’s more sophisticated -friends. His taste in art as in music is impeccable, and veers strongly -to the classics--Rembrandt and the Greeks, as Bach and Beethoven. - -Fergus has been in love, but he does not talk much about it. A girl in -his words is somewhat dark and inscrutable. She always has something -haunting and finely-toned about her, whoever she may be. I always think -of the clothed lady in the flowing silks, in Titian’s “Sacred and -Profane Love.” Yet withal Fergus gives her a touch of the allurement of -her nude companion. His reserve, I think, always keeps these persons -very dusky and distant. His chastity is a result of his fineness -of taste rather than of feeble desire or conscious control. That -impersonal passion which descends on people like Fergus in a sultry -cloud he tells me he contrives to work off into his violin. I sometimes -wonder if a little more of it with a better violin would have made him -an artist. - -But destiny has just clipped his wings so that he must live a life of -noble leisure instead of artistic creation. His unconscious interest -is the art of life. Against a background of Harlem flats and stodgy -bourgeois prejudices he works out this life of _otium cum dignitate_, -calm speculation and artistic appreciation that Nietzsche glorifies. -On any code that would judge him by the seven dollars a week which is -perhaps his average income he looks with cold disdain. He does not -demand that the world give him a living. He did not ask to come into -it, but being here he will take it with candor. Sometimes I think -he is very patient with life. Probably he is not happy. This is not -important. As his candor and his appreciations refresh me, I wonder -if the next best thing to producing works of art is not to be, like -Fergus, a work of art one’s self. - - - - - THE PROFESSOR - - -The Professor is a young man, but he had so obviously the misfortune -of growing up too early that he seems already like a mournful relic -of irrevocable days. His ardent youth was spent in that halcyon time -of the early nineteen-hundreds when all was innocence in the heart of -young America. “When I was in college,” the Professor often says, “all -this discussion of social questions was unknown to us. The growing -seriousness of the American college student is an inspiring phenomenon -in our contemporary life.” - -In those days the young men who felt an urge within them went in for -literature. It was still the time when Presbyterian clergymen and -courtly Confederate generals were contributing the inspiration of -their ripe scholarship to the younger generation. It was the time -when Brander Matthews still thrilled the world of criticism with his -scintillating Gallic wit and his cosmopolitan wealth of friendships. -The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these -literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they -knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and -felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout -the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or -sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from -men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the -scholar and the gentleman. - -The Professor’s sensitive talent soon asserted itself. With Wordsworth -he had absorbed himself into the circumambient life of nature and -made the great reconciliation between her and man. With Shelley he -had dared unutterable things and beaten his wings against the stars. -With Tennyson he had shuddered pensively on the brink of declining -faith. With Carlyle he had felt the call of duty, and all the revulsion -against a sordid and mechanical age. With Arnold he had sought the -sweetness and light which should come to him from knowing all the best -that had been said and thought in the world. The Professor had scarcely -begun to write verse before he found himself victor in a prize poetry -contest which had enlisted the talent of all the best poets of America. -He often tells his students of the intoxication of that evening when -he encircled the dim vaulted corridors of the college library, while -his excited brain beat out the golden couplets of the now celebrated -“Ganymede.” The success of this undergraduate stripling fell like -a thunderbolt upon the literary world. Already consecrated to the -scholar’s career, he found fallen upon him the miracle of the creative -artist. But Shelley and Keats had had their greatness very early, too. -And when, at the early age of twenty-three, the Professor published -his masterly doctoral dissertation on “The Anonymous Lyrics of the -Fourteenth Century,” he at once attained in the world of literary -scholarship the distinction that “Ganymede” had given him in the world -of poetry. - -His career has not frustrated those bright promises. His rare fusion -of scholarship and genius won him the chair of English Literature in -one of our most rapidly growing colleges, where he has incomparable -opportunities for influencing the ideals of the young men under him. -His courses are among the most popular in the college. Although -his special scholarly research has been devoted to pre-Elizabethan -literature, he is at home in all the ages. His lectures are models of -carefully weighed criticism. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give my -boys the spirit of the authors, and let them judge between them for -themselves.” Consequently, however much Swinburne may revolt him, the -Professor expounds the carnal and desperate message of that poet with -the same care which he gives to his beloved Wordsworth. “When they have -heard them all,” he told me once, “I can trust my boys to feel the -insufficiency of any purely materialistic interpretation of life.” - -Impeccable as is his critical taste where the classics are concerned, -he is reluctant about giving his opinion to those students who come -for a clue through the current literary maze. Stevenson was early -canonized, and the Professor speaks with charm and fulness upon him, -but G. B. S. and Galsworthy must wait. “Time, perhaps,” says the -Professor, “will put the seal of approval upon them. Meanwhile our -judgment can be only tentative.” His fine objectivity is shown in those -lists of the hundred best books of the year which he is sometimes -asked to compile for the Sunday newspapers. Rarely does a new author, -never does a young author, appear among them. Scholarly criticism, the -Professor feels, can scarcely be too cautious. - -The Professor’s inspiring influence upon his students, however, is not -confined to his courses. He has formed a little literary society in the -college, which meets weekly to discuss with him the larger cultural -issues of the time. Lately he has become interested in philosophy. -“In my day,” he once told me, “we young literary men did not study -philosophy.” But now, professor that he is, he goes to sit at the feet -of the great metaphysicians of his college. He has been immensely -stirred by the social and moral awakening of recent years. He willingly -allows discussions of socialism in his little society, but is inclined -to deprecate the fanaticism of college men who lose their sense of -proportion on social questions. But in his open-mindedness to radical -thought he is an inspiration to all who meet him. To be radical, he -tells his boys, is a necessary part of experience. In professorial -circles he is looked upon as a veritable revolutionist, for he -encourages the discussion of vital questions even in the classroom. -Questions such as evolution, capital punishment, free thought, -protection and education of women, furnish the themes for composition. -And from the essays of the masters--Macaulay, Huxley, John Stuart Mill -and Matthew Arnold--come the great arguments as freshly and as vitally -as of yore. Literature, says the Professor, is not merely language; it -is ideas. We must above all, he says, teach our undergraduates to think. - -Although the Professor is thus responsive to the best radicalisms of -the day, he does not let their shock break the sacred chalice of the -past. He is deeply interested in the religious life of his college. -A devout Episcopalian, he deplores the callousness of the present -generation towards the immemorial beauty of ritual and dogma. The -empty seats of the college chapel fill him with dismay. One of his -most beautiful poems pictures his poignant sensations as he comes -from a quiet hour within its dim, organ-haunted shadows out into the -sunlight, where the careless athletes are running bare-leggedly past -him, unmindful of the eternal things. - -I think I like the Professor best in his study at home, when he talks -on art and life with one or two respectful students. On the wall is -a framed autograph of Wordsworth, picked up in some London bookshop; -and a framed letter of appreciation from Richard Watson Gilder. On the -table stands a richly-bound volume of “Ganymede” with some of the very -manuscripts, as he has shown us, bound in among the leaves. His deep -and measured voice flows pleasantly on in anecdotes of the Authors’ -Club, or reminiscences of the golden past. As one listens, the glamor -steals upon one. This is the literary life, grave, respected, serene. -All else is hectic rush, modern ideas a futile babel. It is men like -the Professor who keep the luster of scholarship bright, who hold true -the life of the scholar and the gentleman as it was lived of old. In a -world of change he keeps the faith pure. - - - - - ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS - - -When Dr. Alexander Mackintosh Butcher was elected to the presidency -of Pluribus University ten years ago, there was general agreement -that in selecting a man who was not only a distinguished educator but -an executive of marked business ability the trustees had done honor -to themselves and their university as well as to the new president. -For Dr. Butcher had that peculiar genius which would have made him as -successful in Wall Street or in a governor’s chair as in the classroom. -Every alumnus of Pluribus knows the story told of the young Alexander -Mackintosh Butcher, standing at the age of twenty-two at the threshold -of a career. Eager, energetic, with a brilliant scholastic record -behind him, it was difficult to decide into what profession he should -throw his powerful talents. To his beloved and aged president the young -man went for counsel. “My boy,” said the good old man, “remember that -no profession offers nobler opportunities for service to humanity -than that of education.” And what should he teach? “Philosophy is the -noblest study of man.” And a professor of philosophy the young Butcher -speedily became. - -Those who were so fortunate as to study philosophy under him at -Pluribus will never forget how uncompromisingly he preached absolute -idealism, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, or how witheringly -he excoriated the mushroom philosophies which were springing up to -challenge the eternal verities. I have heard his old students remark -the secret anguish which must have been his when later, as president -of the university, he was compelled to entertain the famous Swiss -philosopher, Monsfilius, whose alluring empiricism was taking the -philosophic world by storm. - -Dr. Butcher’s philosophic acuteness is only equaled by his political -rectitude. Indeed, it is as philosopher-politician that he holds the -unique place he does in our American life, injecting into the petty -issues of the political arena the immutable principles of Truth. -Early conscious of his duty as a man and a citizen, he joined the -historic party which had earned the eternal allegiance of the nation -by rescuing it from slavery. By faithful service to the chiefs of his -state organization, first under the powerful Flatt, and later under the -well-known Harnes, himself college-bred and a political philosopher of -no mean merit, the young Dr. Butcher worked his way up through ward -captain to the position of district leader. The practical example -of Dr. Butcher, the scholar and educator, leaving the peace of his -academic shades to carry the banner in the service of his party ideals -of Prosperity and Protection has been an inspiration to thousands -of educated men in these days of civic cowardice. When, three years -ago, his long and faithful services were rewarded by the honor of -second place on the Presidential ticket which swept the great states -of Mormonia and Green Mountain, there were none of his friends and -admirers who felt that the distinction was undeserved. - -President Butcher is frequently called into the councils of the -party whenever there are resolutions to be drawn up or statements of -philosophic principle to be issued. He is in great demand also as -chairman of state conventions, which his rare academic distinction -lifts far above the usual level of such affairs. It was at one of -these conventions that he made the memorable speech in which he -drew the analogy between the immutability of Anglo-Saxon political -institutions and the multiplication table. To the applause of the keen -and hard-headed business men and lawyers who sat as delegates under -him, he scored with matchless satire the idea of progress in politics, -and demonstrated to their complete satisfaction that it was as absurd -to tinker with the fundamentals of our political system as it would be -to construct a new arithmetic. In such characteristic wisdom we have -the intellectual caliber of the man. - -This brilliant and profound address came only as the fruit of a -lifetime of thought on political philosophy. President Butcher’s -treatise on “Why We Should Never Change Any Form of Government” has -been worth more to thoughtful men than thousands of sermons on civic -righteousness. No one who has ever heard President Butcher’s rotund -voice discuss in a public address “those ideas and practices which have -been tried and tested by a thousand years of experience” will ever -allow his mind to dwell again on the progressive and disintegrating -tendencies of the day, nor will he have the heart again to challenge on -any subject the “decent respect for the common opinions of mankind.” - -President Butcher’s social philosophy is as sound as his political. -The flexibility of his mind is shown in the fact that, although an -immutabilist in politics, he is a staunch Darwinian in sociology. -Himself triumphantly fit, he never wearies of expressing his robust -contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth. His essay on “The -Insurrection of the Maladjusted” is already a classic in American -literature. The trenchant attack on modern social movements as the -impudent revolt of the unfit against those who, by their personal -merits and industry, have, like himself, achieved success, has been -a grateful bulwark to thousands who might otherwise have been swept -sentimentally from their moorings by those false guides who erect their -own weakness and failure into a criticism of society. - -Dr. Butcher’s literary eminence has not only won him a chair in the -American Academy of All the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophies, but has -made him almost as well known abroad as at home. He has lectured -before the learned societies of Lisbon on “The American at Home,” and -he has a wide circle of acquaintances in every capital in Europe. Most -of the foreign universities have awarded him honorary degrees. In spite -of his stout Americanism, Dr. Butcher has one of the most cosmopolitan -of minds. His essay on “The Cosmopolitan Intellect” has been translated -into every civilized language. With his admired friend, Owen Griffith, -he has collaborated in the latter’s endeavor to beat the swords of -industrial exploitation into the ploughshares of universal peace. He -has served in numerous capacities on Griffith’s many peace boards and -foundations, and has advised him widely and well how to distribute his -millions so as to prevent the recurrence of war in future centuries. - -Let it not be thought that, in recounting President Butcher’s public -life and services, I am minimizing his distinction as a university -administrator. As executive of one of the largest universities in -America, he has raised the position of college president to a dignity -surpassed by scarcely any office except President of the United States. -The splendid $125,000 mansion which President Butcher had the trustees -of Pluribus build for him on the heights overlooking the city, where -he entertains distinguished foreign guests with all the pomp worthy -of his high office, is the precise measure both of the majesty with -which he has endowed the hitherto relatively humble position, and the -appreciation of a grateful university. The relations between President -Butcher and the trustees of Pluribus have always been of the most -beautiful nature. The warm and profound intellectual sympathy which -he feels for the methods and practices of the financial and corporate -world, and the extensive personal affiliations he has formed with its -leaders, have made it possible to leave in his hands a large measure of -absolute authority. Huge endowments have made Pluribus under President -Butcher’s rule one of the wealthiest of our higher institutions of -learning. With a rare intuitive response to the spirit of the time, the -President has labored to make it the biggest and most comprehensive of -its kind. Already its schools are numbered by the dozens, its buildings -by the scores, its instructors by the hundreds, its students by the -thousands, its income by the millions, and its possessions by the tens -of millions. - -None who have seen President Butcher in the commencement exercises -of Pluribus can ever forget the impressiveness of the spectacle. His -resemblance to Henry VIII is more marked now that he has donned the -crimson gown and flat hat of the famous English university which gave -him the degree of LL.D. Seated in a high-backed chair--the historic -chair of the first colonial president of Pluribus--surrounded by tier -upon tier of his retinue of the thousand professors of the university, -President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher presents the degrees, and in his -emphatic voice warns the five thousand graduates before him against -everything new, everything untried, everything untested. - -Only one office could tempt President Butcher from his high estate. Yet -even those enthusiastic alumni and those devoted professors who long -to see him President of the United States have little hope of tempting -him from his duties to his alma mater. Having set his hand to the -plough, he must see Pluribus through her harvest season, and may God -prosper the work! So, beloved of all, alumni and instructors alike, the -idol of the undergraduates, a national oracle of Prosperity and Peace, -President Butcher passes to a green old age, a truly Olympian figure of -the time. - - - - - THIS OLDER GENERATION - - - I - -I read with ever-increasing wonder the guarded defenses and discreet -apologies for the older generation which keep filtering through -the essays of the _Atlantic_. I can even seem to detect a growing -decision of tone, a definite assurance of conviction, which seems to -imply that a rally has been undertaken against the accusations which -the younger generation, in its self-assurance, its irreverence for -the old conventions and moralities, its passion for the novel and -startling, seemed to be bringing against them. The first faint twinges -of conscience felt by the older generation have given place to renewed -homily. There is an evident anxiety to get itself put on record as -perfectly satisfied with its world, and desirous that its sons and -daughters should learn anew of those peculiar beauties in which it has -lived. Swept off its feet by the call to social service and social -reform, it is slowly regaining its foundation, and, slightly flushed, -and with garments somewhat awry, it proclaims again its belief in the -eternal verities of Protestant religion and conventional New England -morality. - -It is always an encouraging sign when people are rendered -self-conscious and are forced to examine the basis of their ideals. The -demand that they explain them to skeptics always makes for clarity. -When the older generation is put on the defensive, it must first -discover what convictions it has, and then sharpen them to their finest -point in order to present them convincingly. There are always too many -unquestioned things in the world, and for a person or class to have to -scurry about to find reasons for its prejudices is about as healthy -an exercise as one could wish for either of them. To be sure, the -reasons are rarely any more than _ex post facto_ excuses,--supports -and justifications for the prejudices rather than the causes thereof. -Reason itself is very seldom more than that. The important point is -that one should feel the need of a reason. This always indicates that -something has begun to slide, that the world is no longer so secure as -it was, that obvious truths no longer are obvious, that the world has -begun to bristle with question marks. - -One of the basic grievances of this older generation against the -younger of to-day, with its social agitation, its religious heresy, -its presumptive individuality, its economic restlessness, is that -all this makes it uncomfortable. When you have found growing older -to be a process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life, it is -decidedly disconcerting to have some youngster come along and point -out the irreconcilable things in the universe. Just as you have made -a tacit agreement to call certain things non-existent, it is highly -discommoding to have somebody shout with strident tones that they are -very real and significant. When, after much struggling and compromise, -you have got your world clamped down, it is discouraging to have a -gale arise which threatens to blow over all your structure. Through so -much of the current writing runs this quiet note of disapprobation. -These agnostic professors who unsettle the faith of our youth, these -“intellectuals who stick a finger in everybody’s pie in the name of -social justice,” these sensation-mongers who unveil great masses of -political and social corruption, these remorseless scientists who would -reveal so many of our reticences--why can’t they let us alone? Can they -not see that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world? - - - II - -Now I know this older generation which doth protest so much. I have -lived with it for the last fifteen years, ever since I began to wonder -whether all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I -was educated by it, grew up with it. I doubt if any generation ever -had a more docile pupil than I. What they taught me, I find they -still believe, or at least so many of them as have not gone over to -the enemy, or been captured by the militant youth of to-day. Or, as -seems rather likely, they no longer precisely believe, but they want -their own arguments to convince themselves. It is probable that when -we really believe a thing with all our hearts, we do not attempt to -justify it. Justification comes only when we are beginning to doubt it. - -By this older generation I mean, of course, the mothers and fathers and -uncles and aunts of the youth of both sexes between twenty and thirty -who are beginning their professional or business life. And I refer -of course to the comfortable or fairly comfortable American middle -class. Now this older generation has had a religion, a metaphysics, -an ethics, and a political and social philosophy, which have reigned -practically undisputed until the appearance of the present generation. -It has at least never felt called upon to justify itself. It has never -been directly challenged, as it is to-day. In order to localize this -generation still further, we must see it in its typical setting of -the small town or city, clustered about the institutions of church -and family. If we have any society which can be called “American,” it -is this society. Its psychology is American psychology; its soul is -America’s soul. - -This older generation, which I have known so well for fifteen years, -has a religion which is on the whole as pleasant and easy as could -be devised. Though its members are the descendants of the stern and -rugged old Puritans, who wrestled with the devil and stripped their -world of all that might seduce them from the awful service of God, -they have succeeded in straining away by a long process all the -repellent attitudes in the old philosophy of life. It is unfair to -say that the older generation believe in dogmas and creeds. It would -be more accurate to say that it does not disbelieve. It retains them -as a sort of guaranty of the stability of the faith, but leaves them -rather severely alone. It does not even make more than feeble efforts -to reinterpret them in the light of modern knowledge. They are useless, -but necessary. - -The foundation of this religion may be religious, but the -superstructure is almost entirely ethical. Most sermons of to-day are -little more than pious exhortations to good conduct. By good conduct -is meant that sort of action which will least disturb the normal -routine of modern middle-class life: common honesty in business life, -faithfulness to duty, ambition in business and profession, filial -obligation, the use of talents, and always and everywhere simple human -kindness and love. The old Puritan ethics, which saw in the least issue -of conduct a struggle between God and the devil, has become a mere code -for facilitating the daily friction of conventional life. - -Now one would indeed be churlish to find fault with this devout belief -in simple goodness, which characterizes the older generation. It is -only when these humble virtues are raised up into an all-inclusive -program for social reform and into a philosophy of life, that one -begins to question, and to feel afar the deep hostility of the older -generation to the new faith. - -Simple kindness, common honesty, filial obedience, it is evidently -still felt, will solve all the difficulties of personal and social -life. The most popular novels of the day are those in which the -characters do the most good to each other. The enormous success with -the older generation of _The Inside of the Cup_, _Queed_, and _V. -V.’s Eyes_, is based primarily on the fact that these books represent -a sublimated form of the good old American melodramatic moral sense. -And now comes along Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee with his _Crowds_,--what a -funny, individualized, personal-responsibility crowd he gives us, to -be sure,--and his panacea for modern social ills by the old solution -of applied personal virtue. Never a word about removing the barriers -of caste and race and economic inequality, but only an urging to step -over them. Never a trumpet-call to level the ramparts of privilege, -or build up the heights of opportunity, but only an appeal to extend -the charitable hand from the ramparts of heaven, or offer the kindly -patronage to the less fortunate, or--most dazzling of all--throw -away, in a frenzy of abandonment, life and fortune. Not to construct -a business organization where dishonesty would be meaningless, but to -be utopianly honest against the business world. In other words, the -older generation believes in getting all the luxury of the virtue of -goodness, while conserving all the advantages of being in a vicious -society. - -If there is any one characteristic which distinguishes the older -generation, it is this belief that social ills may be cured by personal -virtue. Its highest moral ideals are sacrifice and service. But the -older generation can never see how intensely selfish these ideals are, -in the most complete sense of the word selfish. What they mean always -is, “I sacrifice myself for you,” “I serve you,” not, “We coöperate -in working ceaselessly toward an ideal where all may be free and none -may be served or serve.” These ideals of sacrifice and service are -utterly selfish, because they take account only of the satisfaction -and moral consolidation of the doer. They enhance his moral value; -but what of the person who is served or sacrificed for? What of the -person who is done good to? If the feelings of sacrifice and service -were in any sense altruistic, the moral enhancement of the receiver -would be the object sought. But can it not be said that for every -individual virtuous merit secured by an act of sacrifice or service -on the part of the doer, there is a corresponding depression on the -part of the receiver? Do we not universally recognize this by calling -a person who is not conscious of this depression, a parasite, and the -person who is no longer capable of depression, a pauper? It is exactly -those free gifts, such as schools, libraries, and so forth, which are -impersonal or social, that we can accept gratefully and gladly; and it -is exactly because the ministrations of a Charity Organization Society -are impersonal and businesslike that they can be received willingly and -without moral depression by the poor. - -The ideal of duty is equally open to attack. The great complaint of -the younger against the older generation has to do with the rigidity -of the social relationships into which the younger find themselves -born. The world seems to be full of what may be called canalized -emotions. One is “supposed” to love one’s aunt or one’s grandfather -in a certain definite way, at the risk of being “unnatural.” One gets -almost a sense of the quantitative measurement of emotion. Perhaps the -greatest tragedy of family life is the useless energy that is expended -by the dutiful in keeping these artificial channels open, and the -correct amount of current running. It is exactly this that produces -most infallibly the rebellion of the younger generation. To hear that -one ought to love this or that person; or to hear loyalty spoken of, as -the older generation so often speaks of it, as if it consisted in an -allegiance to something which one no longer believes in,--this is what -soonest liberates those forces of madness and revolt which bewilder -spiritual teachers and guides. It is those dry channels of duty and -obligation through which no living waters of emotion flow that it is -the ideal of the younger generation to break up. They will have no -network of emotional canals which are not brimming, no duties which are -not equally loves. - -But when they are loves, you have duty no longer meaning very much. -Duty, like sacrifice and service, always implies a personal relation -of individuals. You are always doing your duty to somebody or -something. Always the taint of inequality comes in. You are morally -superior to the person who has duty done to him. If that duty is not -filled with good-will and desire, it is morally hateful, or at very -best, a necessary evil,--one of those compromises with the world which -must be made in order to get through it at all. But duty without -good-will is a compromise with our present state of inequality, and -to raise duty to the level of a virtue is to consecrate that state of -inequality forevermore. - - - III - -It is the same thing with service. The older generation has attempted -an insidious compromise with the new social democracy by combining the -words “social” and “service.” Under cover of the ideal of service it -tries to appropriate to itself the glory of social work, and succeeds -in almost convincing itself and the world that its Christianity has -always held the same ideal. The faithful are urged to extend their -activities. The assumption is that, by doing good to more individuals, -you are thereby becoming social. But to speak of “social democracy,” -which of course means a freely coöperating, freely reciprocating -society of equals, and “service,” together, is a contradiction of -terms. For, when you serve people or do good to them, you thereby -render yourself unequal with them. You insult the democratic ideal. -If the service is compulsory, it is menial and you are inferior. If -voluntary, you are superior. The difference, however, is only academic. -The entire Christian scheme is a clever but unsuccessful attempt to -cure the evils of inequality by transposing the values. The slave -serves gladly instead of servilely. That is, he turns his master -into a slave. That is why good Christian people can never get over -the idea that Socialism means simply the triumph of one class over -another. To-day the proletarian is down, the capitalist up. To-morrow -the proletarian will be up and the capitalist down. To pull down the -mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree is the highest -pitch to which Christian ethics ever attained. The failure of the older -generation to recognize a higher ethic, the ethic of democracy, is the -cause of all the trouble. - -The notorious Victorian era, which in its secret heart this older -generation still admires so much, accentuated all the latent -individualism of Christian ethics, and produced a code which, without -the rebellion of the younger generation, would have spiritually -guaranteed forever all moral caste divisions and inequalities of -modern society. The Protestant Church, in which this exaggerated ethic -was enshrined, is now paying heavily the price of this debauch of -ethical power. Its rapidly declining numbers show that human nature -has an invincible objection to being individually saved. The Catholic -Church, which saves men as members of the Beloved Community, and not -as individuals, flourishes. When one is saved by Catholicism, one -becomes a democrat, and not a spiritual snob and aristocrat, as one -does through Calvinism. The older generation can never understand that -superb loyalty which is loyalty to a community,--a loyalty which, -paradoxical as it may seem, nourishes the true social personality in -proportion as the individual sense is lessened. The Protestant Church -in its tenacious devotion to the personal ideal of a Divine Master--the -highest and most popular Christian ideal of to-day--shows how very far -it still is away from the ideals and ethics of a social democracy, a -life lived in the Beloved Community. - -The sense of self-respect is the very keystone of the personality in -whose defence all this individualistic philosophy has been carefully -built up. The Christian virtues date from ages when there was a vastly -greater number of morally depressed people than there is now. The -tenacious survival of these virtues can be due only to the fact that -they were valuable to the moral prestige of some class. Our older -generation, with its emphasis on duty, sacrifice, and service, shows us -very clearly what those interests were. I deliberately accuse the older -generation of conserving and greatly strengthening these ideals, as a -defensive measure. Morals are always the product of a situation; they -reflect a certain organization of human relations which some class or -group wishes to preserve. A moral code or set of ideals is always the -invisible spiritual sign of a visible social grace. In an effort to -retain the _status quo_ of that world of inequalities and conventions -in which they most comfortably and prosperously live, the older -generation has stamped, through all its agencies of family, church and -school, upon the younger generation, just those seductive ideals which -would preserve its position. These old virtues upon which, however, the -younger generation is already making guerilla warfare are simply the -moral support with which the older generation buttresses its social -situation. - -The natural barriers and prejudices by which our elders are cut -off from a freely flowing democracy are thus given a spiritual -justification, and there is added for our elders the almost sensual -luxury of leaping, by free grace, the barriers and giving themselves -away. But the price has to be paid. Just as profits, in the socialist -philosophy, are taken to be an abstraction from wages, through the -economic power which one class has over another, so the virtues of the -older generation may be said to be an abstraction from the virtue of -other classes less favorably situated from a moral or personal point of -view. Their swollen self-respect is at the expense of others. - -How well we know the type of man in the older generation who has been -doing good all his life! How his personality has thriven on it! How he -has ceaselessly been storing away moral fat in every cranny of his -soul! His goodness has been meat to him. The need and depression of -other people has been, all unconsciously to him, the air which he has -breathed. Without their compensating misfortune or sin, his goodness -would have wilted and died. If good people would earnestly set to -work to make the world uniformly healthy, courageous, beautiful, and -prosperous, the field of their vocation would be constantly limited, -and finally destroyed. That they so stoutly resist all philosophies -and movements which have these ends primarily in view is convincing -evidence of the fierce and jealous egoism which animates their so -plausibly altruistic spirit. One suspects that the older generation -does not want its vocation destroyed. It takes an heroic type of -goodness to undermine all the foundations on which our virtue rests. - -If then I object to the ethical philosophy of the older generation on -the ground that it is too individualistic, and, under the pretense -of altruism, too egoistic, I object to its general intellectuality -as not individual enough. Intellectually the older generation seems -to me to lead far too vegetative a life. It may be that this life -has been lived on the heights, that these souls have passed through -fires and glories, but there is generally too little objective -evidence of this subjective fact. If the intuition which accompanies -experience has verified all the data regarding God, the soul, the -family, and so forth,--to quote one of the staunchest defenders of the -generation,--this verification seems to have been obtained rather that -the issues might be promptly disposed of and forgotten. Certainly the -older generation is rarely interested in the profounder issues of life. -It never speaks of death,--the suggestion makes it uncomfortable. It -shies in panic at hints of sex-issues. It seems resolute to keep life -on as objective a plane as possible. It is no longer curious about -the motives and feelings of people. It seems singularly to lack the -psychological sense. If it gossips, it recounts actions, effects; it -rarely seeks to interpret. It tends more and more to treat human beings -as moving masses of matter instead of as personalities filled with -potent influence, or as absorbingly interesting social types, as I am -sure the younger generation does. - -The older generation seems no longer to generalize, although it -gives every evidence of having once prodigiously generalized, for -its world is all hardened and definite. There are the good and the -criminal, and the poor, the people who can be called nice, and the -ordinary people. The world is already plotted out. Now I am sure -that the generalizations of the truly philosophical mind are very -fluid and ephemeral. They are no sooner made than the mind sees their -insufficiency and has to break them up. A new cutting is made, only in -turn to be shaken and rearranged. This keeps the philosopher thinking -all the time, and it makes his world a very uncertain place. But he -at least runs no risk of hardening, and he has his eyes open to most -experience. - -I am often impressed with the fact that the older generation has grown -weary of thinking. It has simply put up the bars in its intellectual -shop-windows and gone off home to rest. It may well be that this is -because it has felt so much sorrow that it does not want to talk about -sorrow, or so much love that to interpret love tires it, or repulsed -so many rude blows of destiny that it has no interest in speaking of -destiny. Its flame may be low for the very reason that it has burned -so intensely. But how many of the younger generation would eagerly -long for such interpretations if the older would only reveal them! -And how little plausible is that experience when it is occasionally -interpreted! No, enthusiasm, passion for ideas, sensuality, religious -fervor,--all the heated weapons with which the younger generation -attacks the world, seem only to make the older generation uneasy. The -spirit, in becoming reconciled to life, has lost life itself. - -As I see the older generation going through its daily round of -business, church, and family life, I cannot help feeling that its -influence is profoundly pernicious. It has signally failed to broaden -its institutions for the larger horizon of the time. The church remains -a private club of comfortable middle-class families, while outside -there grows up without spiritual inspiration a heterogeneous mass of -people without ties, roots, or principles. The town changes from a -village to an industrial center, and church and school go through their -time-honored and listless motions. The world widens, society expands, -formidable crises appear, but the older generation does not broaden, or -if it does, the broadening is in no adequate proportion to our needs. -The older generation still uses the old ideas for the new problem. -Whatever new wine it finds must be poured into the old bottles. - -Where are the leaders among the older generation in America who, -with luminous faith and intelligence, are rallying around them the -disintegrated numbers of idealistic youth, as Bergson and Barrès -and Jaurès have done in France? A few years ago there seemed to be -a promise of a forward movement toward Democracy, led by embattled -veterans in a war against privilege. But how soon the older generation -became wearied in the march! What is left now of that shining army and -its leader? Must the younger generation eternally wait for the sign? - -The answer is, of course, that it will not wait. It must shoulder -the gigantic task of putting into practice its ideals and -revolutionary points of view as wholeheartedly and successfully as -our great-grandfathers applied theirs and tightened the philosophy -of life which imprisons the older generation. The shuddering fear -that we in turn may become weary, complacent, evasive, should be the -best preventive of that stagnation. We shall never have done looking -for the miracle, that it shall be given us to lighten, cheer, and -purify our “younger generation,” even as our older has depressed and -disintegrated us. - - - - - A MIRROR OF THE MIDDLE WEST - - -No Easterner, born forlornly within the sphere of New York, Boston, or -Philadelphia, can pass very far beyond the Alleghanies without feeling -that American civilization is here found in the full tide of believing -in itself. The flat countryside looks more ordered, more farmlike; the -Main Streets that flash by the car-windows somehow look more robust and -communal. There may be no less litter and scrubbiness; the clustered -houses of the towns may look even more flimsy, undistinguished, -well-worn; but it is a litter of aspiring order, a chaos which the -people are insensitive to because they are living in the light of a -hopeful future. The East has pretty much abandoned itself to the tides -of immigration and industrial change which have overwhelmed it: no one -really believes that anything startling will be done to bring about a -new heaven and a new earth. But the intelligence of the West seems to -live in apocalyptic sociological--not socialistic, however--dreams. -Architects and business men combine half-heartedly to “save New York” -from the horrors of the Jewish clothing-trade invasion, but Chicago -draws great maps and sketches of a city-planning that shall make it not -only habitable but radiant and palatial. - -Hope has not vanished from the East, but it has long since ceased -to be our daily diet. Europe has infected us perhaps with some of -its world-weariness. The East produces more skeptics and spiritual -malcontents than the West. For the Middle West seems to have -accomplished most of the things, industrial and political, that the -East has been trying to do, and it has done them better. The Middle -West is the apotheosis of American civilization, and like all successes -it is in no mood to be very critical of itself or very examinatory -as to the anatomy and physiology of its social being. No Easterner -with Meredith Nicholson’s human and literary experience would write -so complacently and cheerfully about his part of the country as Mr. -Nicholson writes about “The Valley of Democracy.” His self-confidence -is the very voice of the Middle West, telling us what it thinks of -itself. This, we say as we read, must be the inner candor which goes -with the West that we see with our eyes. So we like Mr. Nicholson’s -articles not so much for the information they give us as for the -attitudes they let slip, the unconscious revelations of what the people -he is talking for think important. - -It is not a book of justification, although he would rather anxiously -have us take not too seriously the political vagaries like Bryanism and -Progressivism. And he wishes us to miss none of the symphony orchestras -and art institutes that evidently now begin to grow like grasshoppers -on the prairies. He treats himself rather as an expositor, and he -is explicitly informational, almost as if for a foreign country. He -sometimes has an amusing air of having hastily read up and investigated -Western wonders and significances that have been not only common -material in the Eastern magazines, but matter of despairing admiration -on the part of those of us who are general improvers of mankind. He -is naïve about the greatness of Chicago, the vastness of agricultural -production, the ravages of culture among the middle classes. He is -almost the professional Westerner showing off his prize human stock. - -Mr. Nicholson does well to begin with the folksiness of the West. No -one who has experienced that fine open friendliness of the prosperous -Middle Westerner, that pleasant awareness of the alert and beneficent -world we live in, can deny that the Middle West is quite justified in -thinking of itself as the real heart of the nation. That belief in the -ultimate good sense, breadth of vision, and devotion to the common -good, of the “folks back home,” is in itself a guaranty of social -stability and of a prosperity which implies that things will never be -any different except as they slowly improve. Who can say that we have -no Gemüthlichkeit in America, when he runs up against this warm social -mixability which goes so far to compensate for the lack of intellectual -_nuances_ and spontaneous artistic sensibilities? - -Of course the Middle West has to pay for its social responsiveness -in a failure to create, at least in this day and generation, very -vigorous and diverse spiritual types. An excessive amiability, a genius -for adaptability will, in the end, put a premium on conformity. The -Westerner sincerely believes that he is more averse to conventionality -than the Easterner, but the latter does not find him so. The heretic -seems to have a much harder time of it in the West. Classes and -attitudes that have offended against the “folks’” codes may be actually -outlawed. When there are acute differences of opinion, as in the war, -society splits into bitter and irreconcilable camps, whereas in the -East the undesirables have been allowed to shade off towards limbo -in gradual degrees. When hatred and malice, too long starved by too -much “niceness,” do break out from the natural man, they may produce -those waves of persecution and vindictiveness which, coming from a so -recently pacifist West, astonished an East that was no less densely -saturated with aliens but was more conversant with the feeling that it -takes all kinds of people to make a world. Folksiness evidently has its -dark underlining in a tendency to be stampeded by herd-emotion. “Social -conscience” may become the duty to follow what the mob demands, and -democracy may come to mean that the individual feels himself somehow -expressed--his private tastes and intelligence--in whatever the crowd -chooses to do. - -I have followed Mr. Nicholson in his speaking of the Middle West as -if he thought of the region as a unit. He does speak as if he did, -but he does not really mean it. Much as he would like to believe in -the substantial equality of the people in the Valley of Democracy, he -cannot help letting us see that it is but one class that he has in -mind--his own, the prosperous people of the towns. He protests against -their being scornfully waved aside as bourgeoisie. “They constitute -the most interesting and admirable of our social strata.” And he is -quite right. Certainly this stratum is by far the most admirable of all -the middle classes of the world. It is true that “nowhere else have -comfort, opportunity, and aspiration produced the same combination.” He -marvels at the numbers of homes in the cities that cannot imaginably -be supported on less than five thousand a year. And it is these homes, -and their slightly more impoverished neighbors, who are for him the -“folks,” the incarnate Middle West. The proletarian does not exist for -him. The working-classes are merely so much cement, filling in the -bricks of the temple--or, better, folks in embryo, potential owners of -bungalows on pleasant suburban streets. Mr. Nicholson’s enthusiasm is -for the college-girl wife, who raises babies, attends women’s clubs, -and is not afraid to dispense with the unattainable servant. It is -for the good-natured and public-spirited business man, who goes into -politics because politics in the Middle West has always been concerned -with the prosperity of the business community. But about the economic -foundation of this class Mr. Nicholson sounds as innocent as a babe. - -Take his attitude towards the farmer. You gather from these pages -that in the Middle West the farmer is a somewhat unfortunate anomaly, -a shadow on the bright scene. Farming is scarcely even a respectable -profession: “the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western pioneers -are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling”! He -hints darkly at a decay in fiber. Only one chapter out of six is given -to the farmer, and that is largely occupied with the exertions of -state agencies, universities, to lift him out of his ignorance and -selfishness. The average farmer has few of the admirable qualities -of the Valley of Democracy. He is not “folksy”; he is suspicious, -conservative, somewhat embittered, little given to coöperation; -he even needed prodding with his Liberty bonds. In Mr. Nicholson’s -pages the farmer becomes a huge problem which lies on the brain and -conscience of a Middle West that can only act towards him in its best -moments like a sort of benevolent Charity Organization Society. “To -the average urban citizen,” says Mr. Nicholson, “farming is something -remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets in regions -that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or the window -of a limited train.” - -It would take whole volumes to develop the implications of that -sentence. Remember that that urban citizen is Mr. Nicholson’s Middle -West, and that the farmer comprises the huge bulk of the population. -Is this not interesting, the attitude of the prosperous minority of an -urban minority--a small but significant class which has in its hands -all the non-productive business and political power--towards the great -productive mass of the people? Could class division be revealed in -plainer terms? This Middle West of Mr. Nicholson’s class sees itself -as not only innocent of exploitation, but full of all the personal and -social virtues besides. But does the farmer see this class in this -light? He does not. And Mr. Veblen has given us in one of his books an -analysis of this society which may explain why: “The American country -town and small city,” he says, “is a business community, that is to -say it lives for and by business traffic, primarily of a merchandising -sort.... Municipal politics is conducted as in some sort a public -or overt extension of that private or covert organization of local -interests that watches over the joint pecuniary benefit of the local -businessmen. It is a means ... of safe-guarding the local business -community against interlopers and against any evasive tactics on the -part of the country population that serves as a host.... The country -town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its -beginning it is located and ‘developed’ as an enterprise of speculation -in land values; that is to say, it is a businesslike endeavor to get -something for nothing by engrossing as much as may be of the increment -of land values due to the increase of population and the settlement -and cultivation of the adjacent agricultural area. It never (hitherto) -loses this character of real-estate speculation. This affords a common -bond and a common ground of pecuniary interest, which commonly -masquerades under the name of public patriotism, public spirit, civic -pride, and the like.” - -In other words, Town, in the traditional American scheme of things, -is shown charging Country all the traffic will bear. It would be hard -to find a member of Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West--that minority urban -class--who was not owing his prosperity to some form of industrial -or real-estate speculation, of brokerage business enterprise, or -landlordism. This class likes to say sometimes that it is “carrying -the farmer.” It would be more like the truth to say that the farmer is -carrying this class. Country ultimately has to support Town; and Town, -by holding control of the channels of credit and market, can make the -farmer pay up to the hilt for the privilege of selling it his product. -And does. When the farmers, getting a sense of the true workings of the -society they live in, combine in a Non-Partisan League to control the -organism of market and credit, they find they have a bitter class war -on their hands. And the authentic voice of Mr. Nicholson here scolds -them roundly for their restlessness and sedition. In this ferocious -reaction of Town against Country’s socialistic efforts to give itself -economic autonomy, we get the betrayal of the social malaise of the -Middle West, a confession of the cleavage of latent class conflict in -a society as exploitative, as steeply tilted, as tragically extreme -in its poles of well-being, as any other modern society based on the -economic absolutism of property. - -A large part of the hopefulness, the spiritual comfort of the Middle -West, of its sturdy belief in itself, must be based on the inflexible -reluctance of its intelligentsia to any such set of ideas. However -thoroughly Marxian ideas may have saturated the thought of Europe -and become the intellectual explosive of social change, the Middle -West, as in this book, persists in its robust resistance to any such -analysis or self-knowledge. It is not that Mr. Nicholson’s attitudes -are not true. It is that they are so very much less than the whole -truth. They need to be supplemented by analysis set in the terms in -which the progressive minds of the rest of the world are thinking. -The intelligent Middle West needs to sacrifice a certain amount of -complacency in exchange for an understanding of the structure of -its own society. It would then realize that to read “The Valley of -Democracy” in conjunction with pages 315-323 of Veblen’s “Imperial -Germany and the Industrial Revolution” is to experience one of the most -piquant intellectual adventures granted to the current mind. - - - - - ERNEST: OR, PARENT FOR A DAY - - - I - -I had been talking rather loosely about the bringing-up of children. -They had been lately appearing to me in the guise of infinitely -prevalent little beings who impressed themselves almost too vividly -upon one’s consciousness. My summer vacation I had passed in a -household where a vivacious little boy of two years and a solemn little -boy of six months had turned their mother into a household slave. I had -seen walks, conversations, luncheons, and all the amenities of summer -civilized life, shot to pieces by the indomitable need of imperious -little children to be taken care of. Little boys who came running at -you smiling, stubbed their toes, and were instantly transformed into -wailing inconsolables; babies who woke importunately at ten o’clock in -the evening, and had to be brought down warm and blinking before the -fire; human beings who were not self-regulating, but to whom every -hard surface, every protuberance, was a menace to happiness, and in -whom every want and sensation was an order and claim upon somebody -else--these were new offerings to my smooth and independent existence. -They interested and perturbed me. - -The older little boy, with his sunny luxuriance of hair and cheek, -was always on the point of saying something novel and disconcerting. -The baby, with his deep black eyes, seemed to be waiting silently and -in soft anticipation for life. He would look at you so calmly and yet -so eagerly, and give you a pleasant satisfaction that just your mere -presence, your form, your movement, were etching new little lines on -his cortex, sending new little shoots of feeling through his nerves. -You were being part of his education just by letting his consciousness -look at you. I liked particularly to hold my watch to his ear, and -see the sudden grave concentration of his face, as he called all his -mind to the judgment of this arresting phenomenon. I would love to -accost him as he lay murmuring in his carriage, and to check his little -breakings into tears by quick movements of my hands. He would watch me -intently for a while until the fact of his little restless woe would -come upon him again. I was challenged then to something more startling, -and the woe would disappear in little short gasps. But I would find -that he was subject to the law of diminishing returns. The moment would -arrive when the woe submerged everything in a wail, and his mother -would have to be called to nurse or coddle him in the magical motherly -way. - -The baby I found perhaps more interesting than his little brother, -for the baby’s moods had more style to them. The brother could be -transformed from golden prattlingness to raging storm, with the most -disconcerting quickness. He could want the most irrational things with -an intensity that got itself expressed in hypnotic reiteration. Some -smoldering will-to-power in one’s self told one that a child should -never be given the thing that he most wanted; and yet in five minutes -one would have given him one’s soul, to be rid of the brazen rod which -he pounded through one. But I could not keep away from him. He and -his baby brother absorbed me, and when I contemplated their mother’s -life, I had many a solemn sense of the arduousness of being a parent. -I thought of the long years ahead of them, and the incalculability of -their manifestations. I shuddered and remained, gloating, I am afraid, -a little over the opportunity of enjoyment without responsibility. - -All these things I was recounting the other evening after dinner to a -group of friends who professionally look after the minds and bodies -of the neglected. I was explaining my absorption, and the perils -and merciless tyranny of the mother’s life, and my thankfulness at -having been so much in, and yet so much not of, the child-world. I -was not responsible, and the policeman mother could be called in at -any time to soothe or to quell. I could always maintain the amused -aloofness which is my usual attitude toward children. And I made the -point that parenthood must become less arduous after the child is a -self-regulating little organism, and can be trusted not to commit -suicide inadvertently over every threshold, can feed himself, dress -himself, and take himself reasonably around. I even suggested unwarily -that after five or six the tyranny was much mitigated. - -There was strong dissent. Just at that age, I was told, the real -responsibilities began. I was living in a fool’s paradise of -bachelordom if I thought that at six children were grown-up. One of the -women before the fire made it her business to get children adopted. I -had a sense of foreboding before she spoke. She promptly confirmed my -intuition by offering to endow me with an infant of six years, for a -day or for as long as I would take him. The hearty agreement of the -rest amazed and alarmed me. They seemed delighted at the thought of my -becoming parent for a day. I should have Ernest. They all knew Ernest; -and I should have him. They seemed to have no concern that he would not -survive my brief parenthood. It rather warmed and flattered me to think -that they trusted me. - -I had a sense of being caught in an inescapable net, prisoner of my own -theories. If children of six were no longer tyrants, the possession -of Ernest would not interfere with my work or my life. I had spoken -confidently. I had a reputation among my friends of speaking eloquently -about “the child.” And I always find it almost impossible to resist the -offer of new experience. I hesitated and was lost. I even found myself -naming the day for Ernest’s momentary adoption. And during all that -week I found it increasingly impossible to forget him. The night before -Ernest was to come I told myself that I could not believe that this -perilous thing was about to happen to me. I made no preparations to -receive Ernest in my tiny bachelor apartment. I felt that I was in the -hands of fate. - - - II - -I was not really surprised when fate knocked at the door next morning -in the person of my grinning friend, and swiftly left a well-bundled -little boy with me. I have rarely seen a young woman look as -maliciously happy as did his guide when she left, with the remark that -she couldn’t possibly come for Ernest that evening, but would take him -at nine o’clock on the morrow. My first quick resentment was stilled by -the thought that perhaps an official day was a day plus a night. But -Ernest loomed formidably at me. There would be problems of sleeping. -Was I a victim? Well, that is what parents were! They should not find -me weak. - -Ernest expressed no aversion to staying with me. He was cheerful, a -little embarrassed, incurious. The removal of his hat disclosed a -Dutch-cut of yellow hair, blue eyes, many little freckles, and an -expression of slightly quizzical good-humor. I really had not had the -least conception how big a boy of six was likely to be, and I found -comfort in the evidence that he was big enough to be self-regulating, -and yet deliciously small enough to be watched over. He could be played -with, and without danger of breaking him. - -Ernest sat passively on a chair and surveyed the room. I had thought a -little pedantically of exposing him to some Montessori apparatus. I had -got nothing, however. The room suddenly became very inane; the piano -a huge packing-box, the bookcases offensive, idiotic shelves. A silly -room to live in! A room practically useless for these new and major -purposes of life. I was ashamed of my surroundings, for I felt that -Ernest was surveying me with contempt and reproach. - -It suddenly seemed as if little boys must like to look at pictures. -Ernest had clambered up into a big chair, and was sitting flattened -against its back, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, and -a look of mild lassitude on his face. He took with some alacrity the -illustrated newspaper supplement which I gave him, but my conscience -tortured me a little as to whether his interest was the desperate -one of demanding something for his mind to feed on, however arid it -might be, or whether it was a genuine æsthetic response. He gave all -the pictures exactly the same amount of time, rubbing his hand over -each to make sure that it was flat, and he showed no desire to talk -about anything he had seen. Since most of the pictures were of war, -my pacifist spirit rebelled against dwelling on them. His celerity -dismayed me. It became necessary to find more pictures. I had a sudden -horror of an afternoon of picture-books, each devoured in increasingly -accelerated fashion. How stupid seemed my rows of dully printed books! -Not one of them could disgorge a picture, no matter how hard you shook -it. Despair seized me when I found only a German handbook of Greek -sculpture, and another of Michelangelo. In hopeful trepidation I began -on them. I wondered how long they would last. - -It was clearly an unfamiliar field to Ernest. My attempts to test his -classical knowledge were a failure. He recognized the Greeks as men -and women, but not as gods, and there were moments when I was afraid -he felt their nudity as indecent. He insisted on calling the Winged -Victory an angel. There had evidently been religion in Ernest’s career. -I told him that these were pictures of marble statues from Greece, -of gods and things, and I hurriedly sketched such myths as I could -remember in an attempt to overtake Ernest’s headlong rush of interest. -But he did not seem to listen, and he ended by calling every flowing -female form an angel. He laughed greatly at their missing arms and -heads. I do not think I quite impressed him with the Greek spirit. - -On Michelangelo there was chance to test his Biblical background. He -proved never to have heard of David, and took the story I told him -with a little amused and incredulous chortle. Moses was new to him, -and I could not make him feel the majesty of the horns and beard. -When we came to the Sistine I felt the constraint of theology. Should -I point out to him God and Adam and Eve, and so perhaps fix in his -infant mind an ineradicable theological bias? Now I understand the -temptation which every parent must suffer, to dose his child with easy -mythology. Something urged me to say, Adam was the first man and Eve -was the first woman, and get the vague glow of having imparted godly -information. But I am glad that I had the strength sternly to refrain, -hoping that Ernest was too intellectually robust to be trifled with. I -confined myself to pointing out the sweep of clouds, the majesty of the -prophets, the cracks in the plaster, the mighty forms of the sibyls. - -But with my last sibyl I was trapped. It smote my thought that there -were no more pictures. And Ernest’s passivity had changed. We were -sitting on the floor, and his limbs began to take on movement. He -crawled about, and I thought began to look menacingly at movable -objects on tables. My phobia of the combination of movable objects -and children returned. Parenthood suddenly seemed the most difficult -thing in the world. Ernest was not talking very much, and I doubted my -ability to hold him very long entranced in conversation. Imagination -came to my relief in the thought of a suburban errand. I remembered a -wonderful day when I myself had been taken by my uncle to the next town -on a journey--the long golden afternoon, the thundering expresses at -the station, the amazing watch which he had unaccountably presented me -with at the end of the day. Ernest should be taken to Brookfield. - -Our lunch had to be taken at the railroad station. Ernest climbed with -much puffing up to the high stool by the lunch-counter, and sat there -unsteadily and triumphantly while I tried to think what little boys ate -for their lunch. My decision for scrambled eggs and a glass of milk was -unwise. The excitement of feeding scrambled eggs to a slippery little -boy on top of a high stool was full of incredible thrills. The business -of preventing a deluge of milk whenever Ernest touched his glass forced -me to an intellectual concentration which quite made me forget my own -eating. Ernest himself seemed in a state of measureless satisfaction; -but the dizzy way in which he brandished his fork, the hairbreadth -escape of those morsels of food as they passed over the abyss of his -lap, the new and strange impression of smearedness one got from his -face, kept me in a state of absorption until I found we had but one -minute to catch our train. With Ernest clutching a large buttered roll -which he had decently refused to relinquish, we rushed through the -gates. - -When the candy-man came through the train, Ernest asked me in the most -detached tone in the world if I was going to buy any candy. And I asked -him with a similar dryness what his preferences in candy were. He -expressed a cool interest in lemon-drops. The marvelous way in which -Ernest did not eat those lemon-drops gave me a new admiration for his -self-control. He finished his buttered roll, gazed out of the window, -casually ate two or three lemon-drops, and then carefully closed -the box and put it in his pocket. I was almost jealous of Ernest’s -character. I recalled my incorrigible nibblings. I predicted for Ernest -a moral life. - -Our talk was mostly of the things that flashed past our eyes. I was -interested in Ernest’s intellectual background. Out of the waste of -sign-boards and salt-meadows there was occasionally disentangled a -river with boats or a factory or a lumber-yard which Ernest could be -called upon to identify. He was in great good humor, squirming on his -seat, and he took delight in naming things and in telling me of other -trips on the railroad he had taken. He did not ask where we were going. -I told him, but it seemed not especially to concern him. He was living -in life’s essential,--excitement,--and neither the future nor the past -mattered. He held his own ticket a little incredulously, but without -that sense of the importance of the business that I had looked for. I -found it harder and harder not to treat him as an intellectual equal. - -In Brookfield I became conscious of a desire to show Ernest off. I -was acquiring a proprietary interest in him. I was getting proud of -his good temper, his intelligence, his self-restraint, his capacity -for enjoying himself. I wanted to see my pride reflected in another -mind. I would take him to my wise old friend, Beulah. I knew how -pleasurably mystified she would be at my sudden possession of a chubby, -yellow-haired little boy of six. - -Ernest had a delightful hour on Beulah’s parlor floor. He turned -somersaults, he shouted, he played that I was an evil monster who was -trying to catch him. He would crawl up warily towards me and put his -hand on my sleepily outstretched palm. As I suddenly woke and seized -him, he would dart away in shrieks of fear and glee. When I caught -him, I would feel like a grim ogre indeed, for his face would cloud -and little tears shoot into his eyes, and his lips would curl in -mortal fear. And then I would let him go tugging and sprawling, and -he would yell with joy, and steal back with ever-renewed cunning and -watchfulness. When he had eaten Beulah’s cakes and drunk her cocoa, he -lay back in a big chair, glowing with rosiness, and still laughing at -the thought of his escape from my ogredom. - -Our minds played about him. I tried to tease Beulah into adopting him. -We spoke of his birth in a reformatory, and the apparently indomitable -way in which nature had erased this fact from his personality. We -wondered about his unknown mother, and his still more unknown father, -and what he would be and how either of us could help keeping him -forever. She pleaded her Man, I my poverty. But we were not convincing, -and I began to conceive a vague fear of Ernest’s adopting me, because I -could not let him go. - -And then it was time for the train. Ernest was very self-possessed. -His manners on leaving Beulah were those of an equal, parting from a -very old and jolly friend. The walk to the station gave me a sudden -realization how very badly the world was adapted to the needs of -little boys. Its measurements, its times, its lengths and its breadths -were grotesquely exaggerated. Ernest ploughed manfully along, but I -could feel the tug at my hand. Time would have to double itself for -him to reach the station in the allotted minutes. His legs were going -in great strides like those of the giant in seven-league boots, and -he was panting a little. I was cruel, and yet there was the train. I -felt myself a symbol of parenthood, earth-adjusted, fixed on an adult -goal, dragging little children panting through a world not their own. -“I’m ti-yerd!” said Ernest in so plaintive a voice that my heart smote -me. Nameless premonitions of what might ensue to Ernest from being -ti-yerd came upon me. I felt a vague dread of having already made -Ernest an invalid for life. But my adulthood must have triumphed, for -the train was caught. Ernest’s spirits revived on the reappearance of -the lemon-drops. And my heart leaped to hear him say that only his -legs were ti-yerd, and that now they were no longer so. The world had -diminished again to his size. - - - III - -Ernest ate his supper in great contentment at a little table by my -fireplace. The unaccustomed task of cooking it gave me new and vivid -thrills. And the intellectual concentration involved in heating soup -and making toast was so great as to lose me the pleasure of watching -Ernest draw. I had asked him in the morning if he liked to draw. He had -answered in such scorn that I had hastily called in Michelangelo. Now -I placed a pencil and many large sheets of paper negligently near him. -When I brought him his supper, he had covered them all with futuristic -men, houses, and horses. The floor was strewn with his work, and he -was magnificently casting it from him as he attacked these æsthetic -problems with fierce gusto. Only the sight of food quelled his artistic -rage. After supper, however, he did not return to them. Instead, he -became fascinated with the pillows of my couch, and piled them in a -line, with a whistling and shouting as of railroad trains. I wrote a -little, merely to show myself that this business of parenthood need -not devastate one’s life. But I found myself wondering acutely, in the -midst of an eloquent sentence, what time it was healthy for Ernest -to go to bed. I seemed to remember seven--incredible to me, and yet -perhaps meet for a child. It was already seven, but the vigor with -which he rejected my proposal startled me. His amiability all day had -been so irreproachable that I did not wish to strain it now. Yet I was -conscious of an approaching parental crisis. Suppose he did not want to -go to bed at all! - -When I next looked up, I found that he had compromised by falling -asleep in a curious diagonal and perilous position across his -pillows--the trainman asleep at the switch. In a position in which -nobody could sleep, Ernest slept with the face of an angel. Complexity! -Only a brute would wake him. Yet how did parents get their children to -bed? And then I thought of the intricacies of his clothes. I touched -him very gently; he jumped at me in a dazed way, with the quaintest, -“Oh, I don’t know what made me go to sleep!” and was off into the big -chair and helpless slumber. - -I repented of my brutality. I tried to read, but my parental conscience -again smote me. Ernest looked forlorn and maladjusted, his head -sinking down on his breast. I thought that Ernest would thank me now -for reminding him of his bed. He showed astonishing force of will. -I recoiled from the “I don’t want to go to bed!” which he hurled at -me. I tried reason. I called his attention to his uncomfortableness. -But he was unmoved, and insisted on going to sleep again after every -question. I hardened my heart a little. I saw that stern measures would -have to be adopted, Ernest’s little clothes taken off, Ernest inserted -into his flannel nightgown, and tucked into bed. Yet I had no idea -of the parental technique for such situations. Ernest had been quite -irresponsive to my appeal that all good little boys went to bed at -seven o’clock, and I could think of no further generalizations. Crisis -after so happy a day! Was this parenthood? - -The variety of buttons and hooks on Ernest’s outer and inner garments -bewildered me. Ernest’s dead sleepiness made the work difficult. But -finally his little body emerged from the midst, leaving me with the -feeling of one who has taken a watch apart and wonders dismayedly how -he will ever get it together again. Ernest, however, was not inclined -to permit the indignity of this disrobing without bitter protest. When -I urged his coöperation in putting on his nightgown, he became voluble. -The sunniness of his temper was clouded. His tone turned to harsh -bitterness. Little angry tears rolled down his cheeks, and he betrayed -his sense of extreme outrage with an “I don’t _want_ to put on my -nightgown!” hurled at me with so much of moral pain that I was chilled. -But it was too late. I could not unscramble Ernest. With a sinking -heart I had gently to thrust his little arms and legs into the warm -flannel, trundle him over the floor, bitter and sleepily protesting, -roll him into his bed, and cover him up. As he curled and snuggled into -the covers his tears dried as if by magic, the bitterness smoothed out -of his face, and all his griefs were forgotten. - - - IV - -In the next room I sat and read, a pleasant warmth of parental -protection in my heart. And then Ernest began to cough. It was no light -childish spasm, but a deep racking cough that froze my blood. There -had been a little cold in him when he came. I had taken him out into -the raw December air. I had overexerted him in my thoughtless haste. -Visions of a delirious and pneumonic child floated before me. Or what -was that dreadful thing called croup? I could not keep my thought on -my book. That racking cough came again and again. Ernest must be awake -and tossing feverishly. Yet when I looked in at him, he would be lying -peaceful and rosy, and the cough that tore him did not disturb his -slumbers. He must then be in a state of fatigue so extreme that even -the cough could not wake him. I reproached myself for dragging him -into the cold. How could I have led him on so long a journey, and let -him play with a strenuousness such as his days never knew! I foresaw -a lurid to-morrow: Ernest sick, myself helpless and ignorant, guilty -of a negligence that might be fatal. And as I watched him, he began to -show the most alarming tendency to fall out of bed. I did not dare to -move him, and yet his head moved ever more perilously near the edge. I -relied on a chair pushed close to the bed to save him. But I felt weary -and worn. What an exacting life, the parent’s! Could it be that every -evening provided such anxieties and problems and thrills? Could one let -one’s life become so engrossed? - -And then I remembered how every evening, when we went to bed, we -used to ask our mother if she was going to be home that evening, and -with what thankful security we sank back, knowing that we should be -protected through another night. Ernest had not seemed to care what -became of me. Having had no home and no parents, he had grown up into -a manly robustness. He did not ask what you were going to do with him. -He was all for the moment. He took the cash and let the credit go. It -was I who felt the panic and the insecurity. I envied Ernest. I saw -that contrary to popular mythology, there were advantages in being an -institutional orphan, provided you had been properly Binet-ed as of -normal intelligence and the State got you a decent boarding-mother. -How much bringing up Ernest had escaped! If his manners were not -polished, at least they were not uncouth. He had been a little shy -at first, nodding at questions with a smile, and throwing his head -against the chair. But there was nothing repressed about him, nothing -institutionalized, and certainly nothing artificial. - -His cough grew lighter, and as I looked at his yellow hair and the -angelic flush of his round cheeks, I thought of the horrid little -puppets that had been produced around me in conventional homes, -under model fathers and kind and devout mothers. How their fears and -inhibitions contrasted with Ernest’s directness! His bitter mood -at going to bed had a certain fine quality about it. I recalled -the _camaraderie_ we had established. The box of lemon-drops, only -half-exhausted, stared at me from the pocket of his little sweater. I -became proud of Ernest. I was enjoying again my vicarious parenthood. -What did that obscure and tangled heredity of his, or his most -problematical of futures, matter to him or to me? It was delightful -to adopt him thus imaginatively. If he turned out badly, could you -not ascribe it to his heredity, and if well, to your kindly nurture -and constant wisdom? Nothing else could be very much thought about, -perhaps, but for the moment Ernest seemed supremely worth thinking -about. There would be his education. And suddenly it seemed that I did -not know very much about educating a child. It would be too absorbing. -There would be no time for the making of a living. Ernest loomed before -my imagination in the guise of a pleasant peril. - -And then morning came. As soon as it was light Ernest could be -heard talking and chuckling to himself, with no hint of delirium or -pneumonia, or the bogies of the night. When I spoke he came running in -in his bare feet, and crawled in with me. He told me that in spite of -my valiant chair he had really fallen out of bed. He did not care, and -proceeded to jump over me in a vigorous acrobatic way. He did not even -cough, and I wondered if all the little sinister things of childhood -passed so easily with the night. It was impossible to remember my fears -as he tossed and shouted, the perfection of healthiness. Parenthood now -seemed almost too easy to bother with. - -Ernest caught sight of my dollar watch on the chair, and I saw that he -conceived a fatal and instantaneous passion. He listened to its tick, -shook it, ogled it amorously. He made little suggestive remarks about -liking it. I teased him with the fact that he could not tell time. -Ernest snorted at first in good-natured contempt at the artificial -rigidity of the process, but finally allowed himself to be persuaded -that I was not fooling him. And my heart swelled with the generosity -which I was about to practise in presenting him with this wonderful -watch. - -But it suddenly became time to dress, for my parental day was to end -at nine. And then I discovered that it was as hard to get Ernest into -his clothes as it was to get him out of them. It was intolerable to -him that he should leave his romp and the watch, and he shouted a No -to my every suggestion. A new parental crisis crashed upon me. What a -life of ingenuity and stratagem the parent had to lead! To spend half -one’s evening persuading a sleepy and bitter little boy to take off his -clothes, and half the morning in persuading a vivid and jubilant little -boy to put them on again--this was a life that taxed one’s personal -resources to the utmost. I reasoned with Ernest. I pointed out that -his kind friend was coming very soon, and that he must be ready. But -Ernest was obdurate. He would not even bathe. I pointed out the almost -universal practice of the human race of clothing themselves during -the early morning hours. Historic generalizations had no more effect -on Ernest in the morning than they had had in the evening. And with -a sudden stab I thought of the watch. That watch I knew would be an -Aladdin’s lamp to make Ernest my obedient slave. I had only to bribe -him with it, and he would bathe, dress, or do anything which I told him -to do. Here was the easy art of corruption by which parents got moral -clutches on their children! And I deliberately renounced it. I would -not bribe Ernest. Yet the mischief was done. So intuitive was his mind -that I felt guiltily that he already knew my readiness to give him the -watch if he would only dress. In that case, I should miss my moral -victory. I could not disappoint him, and I did not want to bribe him -inadvertently. - -There was another consideration which dismayed me. Even if Ernest -should prove amenable to reason or corruption, where was my ability to -reconstruct him? Unbuttoning a sleepy and scarcely resisting little -boy in the evening was quite different from constructively buttoning -a jumping and hilarious one in the morning. And time was flowing -dangerously on. Only a sudden theory of self-activity saved me. Could -Ernest perhaps dress himself? I caught him in one of his tumbles and -asked him. His mind was too full of excitement, to be working on -prosaic themes. And then I shot my bolt. “I don’t believe you know how -to dress yourself, do you?” To that challenge Ernest rose. “Hurry!” I -said, “and see how quickly you can dress. See if you can dress before -I can!” Ernest flew into the other room, and in an incredibly short -time appeared quite constructed except as to an occasional rear-button, -washed and shining, self-reliant, ready for the business of the day. I -glowed with the success of my parental generalship. I felt a sense of -power. But power gained in so adroit and harmless a way was safe. What -a parent I would make! How grateful I was to Ernest to be leaving me at -this height! - -I gave him the watch. Though he had longed, the fulfillment of his -desire struck him with incredulity. The event awed him. But I showed -him how to wind it, and seemed so indifferent to its fate that he -was reassured as to my sincerity. He recovered his poise. He sang as -he ate his breakfast. And when his guide and friend came, amused and -curious, he went off with her as unreluctantly as he had come, proud -and self-possessed, the master of himself. He strutted a little with -his watch, and he politely admitted that he had had a good time. - -I do not know whether Ernest ever thought of me again. He had been an -unconscious artist, for he had painted many new impressions on my soul. -He had been sent to me to test my theories of parenthood, but he had -driven away all thought of theory in the obsession of his demands. How -could I let him go so cheerily out of my door? It wasn’t at all because -I minded having my time absorbed, for I like people to absorb my time. -Why did I not cling to him, buy him from his protector, with a “Dear -boy, you shall never leave my pleasant rooms again”? Why did I not rush -after him down the street, stung by a belated remorse? I was conscious -enough that I was missing all the dramatic climax of the situation. I -was not acting at all as one does with tempting little orphan boys. -But that is the way life works. The heart fails, and the vast and -incalculable sea of responsibility drowns one in doubt. I let him go -with no more real hesitation than that with which he went. - -The later life of Ernest I feel will be one of sturdy self-reliance. -That all the aspects of his many-sided character did not become -apparent in the short time that I held him was clear from the report I -heard of a Christmas party to which he was invited a few weeks later. -Ernest, it seems, had broken loose with the fervor of a modern Europe -after its forty years of peace. He had seized chocolate cake, slapped -little girls, bitten the hand of the kind lady who fed him, and ended -by lying down on the floor and yelling in a self-reliant rage. Was this -the effect of a day with me? Or had I charmed and soothed him? I had a -pleasant shudder of power, wondering at my influence over him. - -The next I heard of Ernest was his departure for the home of an -adopting family in New Jersey, from which he was presently to be -shipped back for offenses unknown. My respect for Ernest rose even -higher. He would not fit in easily to any smug conventional family -life. He would not rest adopted until he was satisfied. I began to -wonder if, after all, we were not affinities. He had kept the peace -with me, he had derived stimulation from my society. Should I not have -called him back? Shall I not now? Shall I not want to see him with me -again? I wonder. - - - - - ON DISCUSSION - - -Graham Wallas, in his “Great Society,” wrote few more interesting -sentences than that in which he remarked the paucity of genuine -discussion around him, the lack of skill in meeting each others’ minds -which Englishmen show when they talk together. Particularly in this -country where mere talk is always contrasted unfavorably with action -is discussion rare. The only way we can justify our substitution of -talking for acting is to talk badly. And we like to talk badly. To put -into talk the deliberate effort which action demands would seem an -insufferable pedantry. Talk is one of the few unspecialized talents -still left in a mechanical world. The plain man resents any invasion -of this last preserve of freedom. He resents the demand that skill and -effort be put to work in raising talk into real discussion where points -are met and presuppositions are clarified and formulations made. So -conversation is left to grow wild as a common flower along the wayside -of our personal contacts. - -Yet this lack of art in discussion is not really due to lack of desire. -An inner need drives talk into something more formal. Discussion is -popular, and because it is popular it needs, in spite of the plain man, -a certain deliberate technique. One often stumbles on groups which have -met not because some problem has seized them all and will not let them -go until it is satisfied, but because they have felt a general craving -for talk. They find that their mental wheels will not rotate without -some corn to grind. In the revelation of what each person thinks it -important to discuss, one gets the attitude of his mind and the color -of his governing philosophy. Such a group is a kind of kindergarten -of discussion. Ostensibly equal and sympathetic in background and -approach, they show in very little time the startling diversity of -their actual equipment and mental framework. A score of people all -doing apparently the same quality of work in the professional world, -all enjoying a popular reputation, all backed by a college education, -all reacting constantly to each other in the intersecting world of -journalism, art, teaching, law, will often be found to show a lack -of mental sympathy so profound that one wonders how such people can -smilingly continue to seem to be living in the same world. They are -using the same words, but they are not using the same meanings, and -because they are not conscious that it is really meanings which they -should be exchanging, the discussion is apt to lose itself feebly as -in desert sands. What really emerges from most discussions, you find, -is an astonishing array of philosophical skeletons-in-the-closet which -stalk about the room unchallenged. Their owners are quite unconscious -of this fatal escape. Yet it takes little wit to discover rigid -platonists discoursing with pragmatists, minds whose first operation in -thinking is always to fix a moral judgment contending with remorseless -realists. Ideals are discussed when one man means by an ideal a -measuring-stick for human conduct, another a social goal towards -which he works. Concepts emerge which to half the company represent -a mental vacuum, and to the other half imply a warm blow of virtue. -World-philosophies which might be recognized are shabbily ignored. The -feeble sparring of their distorted shadows is taken for discussion, and -the company separates with a vague feeling of having occupied itself -for an evening with something profitably mental. - -All the time, however, it is these fundamental philosophies which -are the real antagonists, and not the concrete ideas which are the -subjects of discussion. A good discussion passes rapidly into an -examination of those presuppositions. It is more interested in charting -out the minds of the other talkers than in winning small victories or -getting agreements. Good discussion is a kind of detective uncovering -the hidden categories and secret springs of emotion that underlie -“opinions” on things. It seeks that common background and store of -meanings in which alone diverse opinions can really meet and operate. -We can no longer tolerate reasons which are only retrospective props -for action that was really impulsive in its origin. No more should -we tolerate in discussion that stubborn voicing of attitudes which -seem axiomatic to the speaker only because he has never examined the -structure of his own thought. It is popular nowadays to welcome the -expression of every new attitude. But a discussion should be tolerant -and hospitable only after the ground has been cleared. You must be -very sure that what you have to deal with is a real attitude and not -a counterfeit. Discussion remains mere talk if it remains content -with the expression of an “opinion” and does not put the expressor -to immediate cross-examination to discover in the name of what -Weltanschauung the opinion came. - -Discussion should be one of the most important things in the world, for -it is almost our only arena of thinking. It is here that all the jumble -of ideas and impressions that we get from reading and watching are -dramatically placed in conflict. Here only is there a genuine challenge -to put them into some sort of order. Without discussion intellectual -experience is only an exercise in a private gymnasium. It has never -been put to the test, never had to give an account of itself. It is -some such motive that impels people to discussion; though they are -too often content with the jousting of pasteboard knights. But a good -discussion is not only a conflict. It is fundamentally a coöperation. -It progresses towards some common understanding. This does not mean -that it must end in agreement. A discussion will have been adequate if -it has done no more than set the problem in its significant terms, or -even defined the purpose that makes such a setting significant. You -turn up things in your mind that would have remained buried without the -incision of some new idea. The effort to say exactly what you mean, -sharpening your idea to the point that will drive home to others, is -itself invigorating. A good discussion tones up your mind, concentrates -its loose particles, gives form and direction. When all say exactly -what they mean, then for the first time understanding--the goal of -discussion--is possible. - -Discussion demands a mutual trustfulness, a mutual candor. But this -very trustfulness makes discussion vulnerable. It is particularly open -to the attack of the person who sees in the group a forum. The physical -signs of such a misinterpretation are familiar. The eye becomes -slightly dilated, the voice more orotund. The suggestion develops -into an exposition, the exposition into an apologia or recrimination. -Discussion is slain. Another enemy is the person who sidetracks a -sentence and then proceeds in a leisurely way to unload its freight -into his own wagon. But in a good discussion the traffic is kept -constantly moving in both directions along a rather rigid line of -track, and the freight arrives somewhere. Some people have a fatal gift -of derailment. Wit is perhaps the most common means. Discussion has no -greater enemies than those who can catch an idea and touch it off into -a puff of smoke. Wit should salt a discussion but not explode it. - -Good discussion is so important that those who set about it may be -rather pedantic and self-conscious in their enterprise. One may acutely -realize himself as being, for the time, primarily a mind. He renounces -the seeming of personal advantage in an argument. He sincerely and -anxiously searches his intellectual stores in order to set down exactly -what he thinks in just the proportions and colors that he thinks it. He -studies what the others say, and tries to detect quickly the search for -advantage or the loose use of terminology. He insists that words and -phrases have meanings, and if they carry no meaning to him, he searches -indefatigably until he has found the word that does carry over the full -freight of significance intended. - -The rewards for such pedantry are found in a tone of clear thinking. -A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes -part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means -becoming more of a person. Ideas are stale things until they are -personally dramatized. The only good writers of opinion are those who -instinctively reproduce the atmosphere of discussion, whose sentences -have the tone of discussion with themselves or with an imagined group. -The impulse for discussion is an impulse towards the only environment -where creative thinking can be done. All the more reason why an -instinct for workmanship should come in to insure that thought does not -lose itself in feeble sparring or detached monologue. - - - - - THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER - - -To the modern young person who tries to live well there is no type so -devastating and harassing as the puritan. We cannot get away from him. -In his sight we always live. We finish with justifying our new paganism -against him, but we never quite lose consciousness of his presence. -Even Theodore Dreiser, who has always revolted from the puritan clutch, -finds it necessary now and then to tilt a lance against him. If there -were no puritans we should have to invent them. And if the pagan Mr. -Dreiser has to keep on through life fighting puritans, how much more -intrigued must we be who are only reformed puritans, and feel old -dangers stirring at every aggressive gesture of righteousness? For the -puritan is the most stable and persistent of types. It is scarcely a -question of a puritanical age and a pagan age. It is only a question of -more puritans or less puritans. Even the most emancipated generation -will find that it has only broken its puritanism up into compartments, -and balances sexual freedom--or better, perhaps, a pious belief in -sexual freedom--with a cult of efficiency and personal integrity which -is far more coercive than the most sumptuary of laws. Young people who -have given up all thought of “being good” anxiously celebrate a cult of -“making good.” And a superstition like eugenics threatens to terrorize -the new intelligentsia. - -Every new generation, in fact, contrives to find some new way of being -puritanical. Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice. -Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new -denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to -its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness -arises to bewilder and deflect the _essor_ towards life. Just when -convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a -sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men -coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to -the race. This means not only that our daily living is to be dampened -by the haunting thought of misery that we cannot personally prevent, -but that our thirst towards love-experience is to be discouraged and -turned aside into a concern for racial perfection. That is, we are -subtly persuaded against merely growing widely and loving intensely. We -become vague and mystified means toward nebulous and unreal ends. This -new puritanism will not let us be ends in ourselves, or let personality -be the chief value in life. It will almost let us sometimes. But it -always pulls us up somewhere. There is always a devil of inhibition to -interpose before our clean and naïve grasping of life. (You see, my -puritanism takes the form of a suspicion that there may be a personal -devil lurking in the universe.) - -This is why the puritan always needs to be thoroughly explained and -exposed. We must keep him before our eyes, recognize him as the real -enemy, no matter in what ideal disguise he lurks. We must learn how he -works, and what peculiar satisfactions he gets from his activity. For -he must get satisfaction or he would not be so prevalent. I accept the -dogma that to explain anybody we have to do little more than discover -just what contentment people are getting from what they do, or from -what they are permitting to happen to them, or even from what they are -flinging their will into trying to prevent happening to them. For, if -life is anything positive, it is the sense of control. In the puritan, -of course, we have the paradox how he can get satisfaction from -ruggedly and sternly subjecting himself and renouncing the world, the -flesh and the devil. There is a popular superstition that the puritan -has an extra endowment of moral force, that he reverses the natural -current of life, that he resists the drag of carnality down towards -hell, that his energy is thrown contra-satisfaction, that this control -is a real straddling of the nefarious way. But, of course, it is just -this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the -light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan -becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal -sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously -cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are -not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful -and usually devastating channels. The puritan is just as much of a -“natural” man as you or I. - -But we still have to explain how this lustful, headstrong creature -called man, spilling with greed, could so unabatedly throughout the -ages give up the primitive satisfaction of sex and food and drink and -gregariousness and act the ascetic and the glumly censorious. How could -an animal whose business was to feel powerful get power from being in -subjection and deprivation? Well, the puritan gets his sense of power -from a very cunningly organized satisfaction of two of his strongest -impulses,--the self-conscious personal impulses of being regarded and -being neglected. The puritan is no thwarted and depleted person. On the -contrary, he is rather a complete person, getting almost the maximum of -satisfaction out of these two apparently contradictory sentiments,--the -self-regarding and self-abasing. The pure autocrat would feed himself -wholly on the first, the pure slave would be only a human embodiment -of the second. But the pure puritan manages to make the most powerful -amalgam of both. - -What we may call the puritan process starts with the satisfaction of -the impulse for self-abasement (an impulse as primitive as any, for -in the long struggle for survival it was often just as necessary for -life to cower as it was to fight). It is only the puritan’s prestige -that has attached moral value to self-sacrifice, for there is nothing -intrinsic in it that makes it any more praiseworthy than lust. But -its pragmatic value is immense. When the puritan announces himself -as the least worthy of men, he not only predisposes in his favor the -naturally slavish people around him, but he neutralizes the aggressive -and self-regarding who would otherwise be moved to suppress him. He -renounces, he puts on meekness, he sternly regiments himself, he makes -himself unhappy in ways that are just not quite severe enough to -excite pity and yet run no risk of arousing any envy. If the puritan -does all this unconsciously, the effect is yet the same as if he were -deliberately plotting. To give his impulses of self-abasement full -play, he must, of course, exercise a certain degree of control. This -control, however, gives him little of that sense of power that makes -for happiness. Puritan moralists have always tried to make us believe -in this virtue of self-control. They forget to point out, however, that -it does not become a virtue until it has become idealized. Control over -self gives us little sense of control. It is the dreariest of all -satisfactions of the will to power. Not until we become _proud_ of our -self-control do we get satisfaction. The puritan only begins to reap -his satisfaction when the self-regarding impulse comes into play. - -Having given his self-abasing impulse free rein, he is now in a -position to exploit his self-regard. He has made himself right with -the weak and slavish. He has fortified himself with their alliance. -He now satisfies his self-regard by becoming proud of his humility -and enjoining it on others. If it were self-control alone that made -the puritan, he would not be as powerful as he is. Indeed he would -be no more than the mild ascetic, who is all abnegation because his -self-regarding mechanism is weak. But in the puritan both impulses are -strong. It is control over others that yields him his satisfactions -of power. He may stamp out his sex-desire, but his impulse to shatter -ideas that he does not like will flourish wild and wanton. To the true -puritan the beauty of unselfishness lies in his being able to enforce -it on others. He loves virtue not so much for its own sake as for its -being an instrument of his terrorism. - -The true puritan is at once the most unselfish and the most -self-righteous of men. There is nothing he will not do for you, give -up for you, suffer for you. But at the same time there is no cranny -of your world that he will not illuminate with the virtue of this -doing of his. His real satisfaction comes not from his action of -benevolence but from the moral of the tale. He need not boast about his -renunciation or his altruism. But in any true puritan atmosphere that -pride will be prevalent. Indeed, it is the oxygen of that atmosphere. -Wherever you come across that combination of selfless devotion with -self-righteousness, you have the essence of the puritan. Should you -come across the one without the other you would find not the puritan -but the saint. - -The puritan then gets the satisfaction of his will to power through -the turning of his self-abasement into purposes of self-regard. -Renunciation is the raw material for his positive sense of power. The -puritan gets his satisfaction exactly where the most carnal of natural -men gets his, out of the stimulation of his pride. And in a world -where renunciation has to happen to us whether we want it or not, the -puritan is in the most impressive strategic position. In economy of -energy he has it all over the head that is bloody but unbowed. For -the puritan is so efficient morally that he can bow his head and yet -exact control both out of the bowing and out of the prestige which his -bowing gives him, as well as out of the bowing which he can enforce on -others. The true puritan must become an evangelist. It is not enough -to renounce the stimulus to satisfaction which is technically known as -a “temptation.” The renouncing must be made into an ideal, the ideal -must be codified, promulgated, and, in the last analysis, enforced. -In the compelling of others to abstain, you have the final glut of -puritanical power. For in getting other people to renounce a thing -you thereby get renewed justification for your own renouncing. And -so the puritan may go on inexhaustibly rolling up his satisfactions, -one impulse reinforcing the other. The simultaneous play of these two -apparently inconsistent personal impulses makes the puritan type one of -the stablest in society. While the rest of us are longing for power the -puritan is enjoying his. And because the puritan is so well integrated -he almost always rules. The person whose satisfactions of control are -more various and more refined is on the defensive against him. - -The puritan gets his sense of power not in the harmless way of the -artist or the philosopher or the lover or the scientist, but in a -crude assault on that most vulnerable part of other people’s souls, -their moral sense. He is far more dangerous to those he converts than -to those he intimidates. For he first scares them into abandoning the -rich and sensuous and expressive impulses in life, and then teaches -them to be proud of having done so. We all have the potentiality of -the puritan within us. I remember suffering agonies at the age of ten -because my aunt used to bring me candy that had been wickedly purchased -on the Sabbath day. I forget whether I ate it or not, but that fact is -irrelevant. What counted was the guilt with which the whole universe -seemed to be stained. I need no other evidence of the irrational nature -of morality than this fact that children can be such dogged little -puritans, can be at the age of ten so sternly and intuitively righteous. - -The puritan is a case of arrested development. Most of us do grow -beyond him and find subtler ways of satisfying our desire for -power. And we do it because we never can quite take that step from -self-abasement to self-regard. We never can quite become proud of our -humility. Renunciation remains an actual going without, sacrifice a -real thwarting. If we value an experience and deliberately surrender -it, we are too naïve to pretend that there are compensations. There -is a loss. We are left with a vacuum. There _is_ only depression and -loss of control. Our self-regard is not quite elemental enough to get -stimulation from wielding virtue over others. I never feel so degraded -as when I have renounced. I had rather beat my head rhythmically and -endlessly against an unyielding wall. For the pagan often breaks -miraculously through the wall. But the puritan at his best can only -strut outside. - -Most of us, therefore, after we have had our puritan fling, sown our -puritan wild oats as it were, grow up into devout and progressing -pagans, cultivating the warmth of the sun, the deliciousness of -love-experience, the high moods of art. The puritans remain around us, -a danger and a threat. But they have value to us in keeping us acutely -self-conscious of our faith. They whet our ardor. Perhaps no one can be -really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan. - - - - - THE IMMANENCE OF DOSTOEVSKY - - -It is impossible not to think of Dostoevsky as a living author when -his books come regularly, as they are coming, to the American public -every few months. Our grandfathers sixty years ago are said to have -lived their imaginative lives in anticipation of the next instalment -of Dickens or Thackeray. I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in -this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian -will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from -Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening -of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our -forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far -more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have -once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic -fiction on which we were brought up. The lack of _nuance_, the hideous -normality of its people begin to depress you. When once you have a -sense of the illusion of “character,” when once you have felt the -sinister, irrational turn of human thoughts, and the subtle interplay -of impression and desire, and the crude impingement of circumstance, -you find yourself--unless you keep conscious watch--feeling a shade -of contempt for the Scott and Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray -and Trollope who were the authoritative showmen of life for our -middle-class relatives. You relegate such fiction to the level of -“movie” art, with its clean, pigeon-holed categories of the emotions, -and its “registering” of a few simple moods. - -You will, of course, be wrong in any such contempt, because these -novelists show a bewildering variety of types and a deep intuition -of the major movements of the soul. Dickens teems with irrational -creatures, with unconventional levels of life. But you can scarcely -contradict me when I say that neither Dickens nor his readers ever -forgot that these human patterns were queer. His appeal lies exactly -in the joyful irrelevance with which we take all these lapses from the -norm, in the pitiful tears which we can shed for human beings done -so obviously as they should not be done by. In reading these familiar -novelists we never lose our moral landmarks. No matter how great the -deviations a character shows, we are always conscious--or could be -conscious if we liked--of the exact amount of that deviation. The -charm of that nineteenth-century fiction, as in the work of belated -Victorians like Mr. Chesterton, lies in that duality between the -sane and the insane, the virtuous and the villainous, the sober and -the mischievous, the responsible and the irresponsible. There is no -falsification in this. These novelists were writing for an epoch that -really had stable “character,” standards, morals, that consistently saw -the world in a duality of body and spirit. They were a reflection of a -class that really had reticences, altruisms, and religious codes. - -Dostoevsky appeals to us to-day because we are trying to close up that -dualism. And our appreciation of him and the other modern Russians is -a mark of how far we have actually gone. It is still common to call -this fiction unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome. All that is meant by this -is that the sudden shock of a democratic, unified, intensely the mind -that thinks in the old dual terms as to be almost revolting. What -becomes more and more apparent to the readers of Dostoevsky, however, -is his superb modern healthiness. He is healthy because he has no -sense of any dividing line between the normal and the abnormal, or -even between the sane and the insane. I call this healthy because it -is so particularly salutary for our American imagination to be jolted -out of its stiltedness and preconceived notions of human psychology. -I admit that the shock is somewhat rough and rude. “The Idiot”, which -I have read only once, remains in my mind as a stream of fairly -incomprehensible people and unintelligible emotional changes. Yet I -feel that when I read it again I shall understand it. For Dostoevsky -has a strange, intimate power which breaks in your neat walls and shows -you how much more subtle and inconsequent your flowing life is than -even your introspection had thought. But for all his subtlety he is the -reverse of anything morbidly introspective. In his work you get the -full warm unity of emotional life without losing any of the detail of -the understanding analysis of the soul. - -This astounding mergence Dostoevsky actually seems to achieve. That -is what gives him the intimate power which distinguishes every story -of his from anything else you have ever read. Again he contrasts with -the classical novelists. For they are quite palpably outside their -subjects. You are never unaware of the author as telling the story. -He has always the air of the showman, unrolling his drama before -your eyes. His characters may be infinitely warm and human, but the -writer himself is somehow not in them. “Wuthering Heights” is the only -English story I think of that has something of the fierce, absorbed -intensity of Dostoevsky. In the great Russian you lose all sense of -the showman. The writer is himself the story; he is inextricably in -it. In narratives like “The Double” or “A Gentle Spirit” immanence -could go no further. The story seems to tell itself. Its strange, -breathless intimacy of mood follows faithfully every turn and quirk -of thought and feeling. Its tempo is just of that inner life we know, -with its ceaseless boring into the anxious future and its trails of -the unresolved past. These stories follow just that fluctuating line -of our conscious life with its depressions and satisfactions, its -striving always for a sense of control, its uneasiness. In Dostoevsky’s -novels it is not only the author that is immanent. The reader also -is absorbed. After reading “Crime and Punishment” you are yourself -the murderer. For days the odor of guilt follows you around. The -extravaganza of “The Double” pursues you like a vivid dream of your own. - -Such stories, however fantastic the problems of the soul, get deeply -into us. We cannot ignore them, we cannot take them irresponsibly. -We cannot read them for amusement, or even in detachment, as we can -our classics. We forget our categories, our standards, our notions of -human nature. All we feel is that we are tracing the current of life -itself. Dostoevsky is so much in his stories that we get no sense -of his attitude toward his characters or of his criticism of life. -Yet the after-impression is one of rich kindness, born of suffering -and imperfection, and of a truly religious reverence for all living -experience. Man as a being with his feet in the mud and his gaze turned -toward the stars, yet always indissolubly one in feet and eyes and -heart and brain! If we are strong enough to hear him, this is the -decisive force we need on our American creative outlook. - - - - - THE ART OF THEODORE DREISER - - -Theodore Dreiser has had the good fortune to evoke a peculiar quality -of pugnacious interest among the younger American intelligentsia -such as has been the lot of almost nobody else writing to-day unless -it be Miss Amy Lowell. We do not usually take literature seriously -enough to quarrel over it. Or else we take it so seriously that we -urbanely avoid squabbles. Certainly there are none of the vendettas -that rage in a culture like that of France. But Mr. Dreiser seems to -have made himself, particularly since the suppression of “The Genius,” -a veritable issue. Interesting and surprising are the reactions to -him. Edgar Lee Masters makes him a “soul-enrapt demi-urge, walking -the earth, stalking life”; Harris Merton Lyon saw in him a “seer of -inscrutable mien”; Arthur Davison Ficke sees him as master of a passing -throng of figures, “labored with immortal illusion, the terrible and -beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life”; Mr. Powys makes -him an epic philosopher of the “life-tide”; H. L. Mencken puts him -ahead of Conrad, with “an agnosticism that has almost passed beyond -curiosity.” On the other hand, an unhappy critic in _The Nation_ last -year gave Mr. Dreiser his place for all time in a neat antithesis -between the realism that was based on a theory of human conduct and the -naturalism that reduced life to a mere animal behavior. For Dreiser -this last special hell was reserved, and the jungle-like and simian -activities of his characters were rather exhaustively outlined. At the -time this antithesis looked silly. With the appearance of Mr. Dreiser’s -latest book, “A Hoosier Holiday,” it becomes nonsensical. For that wise -and delightful book reveals him as a very human critic of very common -human life, romantically sensual and poetically realistic, with an -artist’s vision and a thick, warm feeling for American life. - -This book gives the clue to Mr. Dreiser, to his insatiable curiosity -about people, about their sexual inclinations, about their dreams, -about the homely qualities that make them American. His memories give a -picture of the floundering young American that is so typical as to be -almost epic. No one has ever pictured this lower middle-class American -life so winningly, because no one has had the necessary literary skill -with the lack of self-consciousness. Mr. Dreiser is often sentimental, -but it is a sentimentality that captivates you with its candor. You -are seeing this vacuous, wistful, spiritually rootless, Middle-Western -life through the eyes of a naïve but very wise boy. Mr. Dreiser seems -queer only because he has carried along his youthful attitude in -unbroken continuity. He is fascinated with sex because youth is usually -obsessed with sex. He puzzles about the universe because youth usually -puzzles. He thrills to crudity and violence because sensitive youth -usually recoils from the savagery of the industrial world. Imagine -incorrigible, sensuous youth endowed with the brooding skepticism -of the philosopher who feels the vanity of life, and you have the -paradox of Mr. Dreiser. For these two attitudes in him support rather -than oppose each other. His spiritual evolution was out of a pious, -ascetic atmosphere into intellectual and personal freedom. He seems -to have found himself without losing himself. Of how many American -writers can this be said? And for this much shall be forgiven him,--his -slovenliness of style, his lack of _nuances_, his apathy to the finer -shades of beauty, his weakness for the mystical and the vague. Mr. -Dreiser suggests the over-sensitive temperament that protects itself -by an admiration for crudity and cruelty. His latest book reveals the -boyhood shyness and timidity of this Don Juan of novelists. Mr. Dreiser -is complicated, but he is complicated in a very understandable American -way, the product of the uncouth forces of small-town life and the vast -disorganization of the wider American world. As he reveals himself, it -is a revelation of a certain broad level of the American soul. - -Mr. Dreiser seems uncommon only because he is more naïve than most -of us. It is not so much that his pages swarm with sexful figures -as that he rescues sex for the scheme of personal life. He feels a -holy mission to slay the American literary superstition that men and -women are not sensual beings. But he does not brush this fact in the -sniggering way of the popular magazines. He takes it very seriously, -so much so that some of his novels become caricatures of desire. It -is, however, a misfortune that it has been Brieux and Freud and not -native Theodore Dreiser who has saturated the sexual imagination of the -younger American intelligentsia. It would have been far healthier to -absorb Mr. Dreiser’s literary treatment of sex than to go hysterical -over its pathology. Sex has little significance unless it is treated -in personally artistic, novelistic terms. The American tradition had -tabooed the treatment of those infinite gradations and complexities of -love that fill the literary imagination of a sensitive people. When -curiosity became too strong and reticence was repealed in America, -we had no means of articulating ourselves except in a deplorable -pseudo-scientific jargon that has no more to do with the relevance -of sex than the chemical composition of orange paint has to do with -the artist’s vision. Dreiser has done a real service to the American -imagination in despising the underworld and going gravely to the -business of picturing sex as it is lived in the personal relations -of bungling, wistful, or masterful men and women. He seemed strange -and rowdy only because he made sex human, and American tradition had -never made it human. It had only made it either sacred or vulgar, and -when these categories no longer worked, we fell under the dubious and -perverting magic of the psycho-analysts. - -In spite of his looseness of literary gait and heaviness of style -Dreiser seems a sincere groper after beauty. It is natural enough -that this should so largely be the beauty of sex. For where would a -sensitive boy, brought up in Indiana and in the big American cities, -get beauty expressed for him except in women? What does Mid-Western -America offer to the starving except its personal beauty? A few -landscapes, an occasional picture in a museum, a book of verse perhaps! -Would not all the rest be one long, flaunting offense of ugliness and -depression? “The ‘Genius,’” instead of being that mass of pornographic -horror which the Vice Societies repute it to be, is the story of a -groping artist whose love of beauty runs obsessingly upon the charm -of girlhood. Through different social planes, through business and -manual labor and the feverish world of artists, he pursues this lure. -Dreiser is refreshing in his air of the moral democrat, who sees life -impassively, neither praising nor blaming, at the same time that he -realizes how much more terrible and beautiful and incalculable life -is than any of us are willing to admit. It may be all _apologia_, but -it comes with the grave air of a mind that wants us to understand just -how it all happened. “Sister Carrie” will always retain the fresh -charm of a spontaneous working-out of mediocre, and yet elemental and -significant, lives. A good novelist catches hold of the thread of human -desire. Dreiser does this, and that is why his admirers forgive him so -many faults. - -If you like to speculate about personal and literary qualities that are -specifically American, Dreiser should be as interesting as any one now -writing in America. This becomes clearer as he writes more about his -youth. His hopelessly unorientated, half-educated boyhood is so typical -of the uncritical and careless society in which wistful American talent -has had to grope. He had to be spiritually a self-made man, work out -a philosophy of life, discover his own sincerity. Talent in America -outside of the ruling class flowers very late, because it takes so -long to find its bearings. It has had almost to create its own soil, -before it could put in its roots and grow. It is born shivering into -an inhospitable and irrelevant group. It has to find its own kind of -people and piece together its links of comprehension. It is a gruelling -and tedious task, but those who come through it contribute, like Vachel -Lindsay, creative work that is both novel and indigenous. The process -can be more easily traced in Dreiser than in almost anybody else. “A -Hoosier Holiday” not only traces the personal process, but it gives the -social background. The common life, as seen throughout the countryside, -is touched off quizzically, and yet sympathetically, with an artist’s -vision. Dreiser sees the American masses in their commonness and at -their pleasure as brisk, rather vacuous people, a little pathetic in -their innocence of the possibilities of life and their optimistic -trustfulness. He sees them ruled by great barons of industry, and yet -unconscious of their serfdom. He seems to love this countryside, and he -makes you love it. - -Dreiser loves, too, the ugly violent bursts of American industry,--the -flaming steel-mills and gaunt lakesides. “The Titan” and “The -Financier” are unattractive novels, but they are human documents of the -brawn of a passing American era. Those stenographic conversations, webs -of financial intrigue, bare bones of enterprise, insult our artistic -sense. There is too much raw beef, and yet it all has the taste and -smell of the primitive business-jungle it deals with. These crude and -greedy captains of finance with their wars and their amours had to be -given some kind of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a sort -of raw epic out of their lives. - -It is not only his feeling for these themes of crude power and sex and -the American common life that makes Dreiser interesting. His emphases -are those of a new America which is latently expressive and which must -develop its art before we shall really have become articulate. For -Dreiser is a true hyphenate, a product of that conglomerate Americanism -that springs from other roots than the English tradition. Do we realize -how rare it is to find a talent that is thoroughly American and wholly -un-English? Culturally we have somehow suppressed the hyphenate. -Only recently has he forced his way through the unofficial literary -censorship. The vers-librists teem with him, but Dreiser is almost the -first to achieve a largeness of utterance. His outlook, it is true, -flouts the American canons of optimism and redemption, but these -were never anything but conventions. There stirs in Dreiser’s books -a new American quality. It is not at all German. It is an authentic -attempt to make something artistic out of the chaotic materials that -lie around us in American life. Dreiser interests because we can watch -him grope and feel his clumsiness. He has the artist’s vision without -the sureness of the artist’s technique. That is one of the tragedies of -America. But his faults are those of his material and of uncouth bulk, -and not of shoddiness. He expresses an America that is in process of -forming. The interest he evokes is part of the eager interest we feel -in that growth. - - - - - THE USES OF INFALLIBILITY - - -Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned -in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which -to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried -everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote, -and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, _Apologia -Pro Vita Sua_, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective -sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism -brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most -emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In -that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable -ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times. -Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged -into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I -found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or -what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests -less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with -certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was -faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied -that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most -pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt. - -Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith -was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all -that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons -he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of -unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse -that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same -sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats -away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an -uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it -only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to -belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching -your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have -really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious -in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of -religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of -feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable -feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,--this is your state. The -more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma. -Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under -the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s -approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach -towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying -his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings. -Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic -state. - -How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the -reader of the _Apologia_. Popular impression is probably right that -he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and -sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this -to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was -not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the -thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a -cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism -which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay -in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world -seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could -not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The -tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of -Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent -form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his _Pensées_ -lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human -“pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty -an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed -him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of -intellectual religion. - -Dogma did not kill Newman, but it did not save him. He was not a -pagan, but he never became a saint. He never quite got rid of dogma. -And that is what so fascinates us in his religious technique. For his -_Apologia_, is really a subtle exposure of infallibility. It shows us -what the acute intellectuality of a mystic finds to do with dogma. -The goal towards which he tends is the utter bankruptcy of articulate -religion. And involved in it is the bankruptcy of institutional -religion. It is a religious bankruptcy that acts like modern commercial -bankruptcy. All material assets are relinquished, and you start again -in business on the old footing. You throw over your dogma but keep the -mystic experience, which can never be taken away from you. In this way -the Catholic Church becomes, or could become, eternal. Newman shows a -way just short of relinquishment. He uses infallibility to liquidate -his intellectual debts, and then becomes free of his creditors. - - - II - -How these attitudes are implied in the _Apologia_ I can only suggest -through the surprises that a reading brought. The contention had -always been that Newman’s apostasy was due to feebleness of will, to -a fatigue in the search for certitude that let him slip into the arms -of Mother Church. My Protestant training had persistently represented -every going over to Rome as a surrender of individual integrity. For -the sake of intellectual peace, one became content to stultify the -intellect and leave all thinking to the infallible Church. There -is nothing of intellectual fatigue, however, in Newman. His course -did not spring from weariness of thinking. He had a most fluent and -flexible mind, and if he seemed to accept beliefs at which Protestants -thrilled with frightened incredulity, it was because such an acceptance -satisfied some deeper need, some surer craving. Read to-day, Newman -interests not because of the beliefs but because of this deeper desire. -He had a sure intuition of the uses of infallibility and intellectual -authority, and of their place in the scheme of things. This is his -significance for the modern mind. And he is the only one of the great -religious writers who seems to reach out to us and make contact with -our modern attitude. - -Newman loved dogma, but it was not dogma that he loved most. It was -not to quiet a heart that ached with doubt that he passed from the -Anglican to the Roman Church. As an Anglican Catholic he was quite as -sure of his doctrine as he was as a Roman Catholic. His most primitive -craving was not so much for infallibility as for legitimacy. It was -because the Roman Church was primitive, legitimate, authorized, and the -Anglican Church yawned in spots, that he made his reluctant choice. -His Anglican brothers would not let him show them the catholicity -of the Articles. They began to act schismatically, and there was -nothing to do but join the legitimate order and leave them to their -vulgar insufficiencies. This one gets from the _Apologia_. But this -craving, one feels, sprang not from cowardice but from a sense of -proportion. Newman was frankly a conservative. Here was a mind that -lived in the most exciting of all intellectual eras, when all the -acuteness of England was passing from orthodoxy to liberalism. Newman -deliberately went in the other direction. But he went because he -valued certain personal and spiritual things to which he saw the new -issues would be either wholly irrelevant or fatally confusing. One -of the best things in the _Apologia_ is the appendix on Liberalism, -where Newman, with the clarity of the perfect enemy, sums up the new -faith. Each proposition outrages some aspect of legitimacy which is -precious to him, yet his intuition--he wrote it not many years after -the Reform Bill--has put in classic form what is the Nicene Creed of -liberal religion. No liberal ever expressed liberalism so justly and -concisely. Newman understands this modern creed as perfectly as he -flouts it. So Pascal’s uncanny analysis of human pride led him only to -self-prostration. - -Why did Newman disdain liberalism? He understood it, and he did not -like it. His deathless virtue lies in his disconcerting honesty. The -air was full of strange new cries that he saw would arrest the Church. -She would have to explain, defend, interpret, on a scale far larger -than had been done for centuries. She would have to make adjustment -to a new era. Theology would be mingled with sociology. The church of -the spirit would be challenged with social problems, would be called -down into a battling arena of life. Newman’s intuition saw that the -challenge of liberalism meant a worried and harassed Church. He was -not interested in social and political questions. The old order had a -fixed charm for him. It soothed and sustained his life, and it was in -his own life that he was supremely interested. He loved dogma, but he -loved it as a priceless jewel that one does not wear. His emotion was -not really any more entangled in it than it was in social problems. -Given an established order that made his personal life possible, what -he was interested in was mystical meditation, the subtle and difficult -art of personal relations, and the exquisite ethical problems that -arise out of them. - -Newman’s position was one of sublime common-sense. He saw that the -Protestant Church would be engaged for decades in the doleful task of -reconciling the broadening science with the old religious dogma. He -knew that this was ludicrous. He saw that liberalism was incompatible -with dogma. But mostly he saw that the new social and scientific turn -of men’s thinking was incompatible with the mellowed mystical and -personal life where lay his true genius. So, with a luminous sincerity, -following the appeal of his talents, he passed into the infallible -Church which should be a casket for the riches of his personal life. -He was saved thus from the sin of schism, and from the sin of adding -to that hopeless confusion of intellectual tongues which embroiled the -English world for the rest of the century. The Church guaranteed the -established order beneath him, blotted out the sociological worries -around him, and removed the incubus of dogma above him. Legitimacy -and infallibility did not imprison his person or his mind. On the -contrary, they freed him, because they abolished futilities from his -life. Nothing is clearer from the _Apologia_ than Newman’s sense of the -hideous vulgarity of theological discussion. He uses infallibility to -purge himself of that vulgarity. He uses it in exactly the way that it -should rightly be employed. The common view is that dogma is entrusted -to the Church because its truth is of such momentous import as to make -fatal the risk of error through private judgment. The Church is the -mother who suckles us with the precious milk of doctrine without which -we should die. Through ecclesiastical infallibility dogma becomes the -letter and spirit of religion, bony structure and life-blood. - -But Newman’s use of infallibility was as a storage vault in which one -puts priceless securities. They are there for service when one wishes -to realize on their value. But in the business of daily living one -need not look at them from one year to another. Infallibility is the -strong lock of the safety-vault. It is a guarantee not of the value of -the wealth but of its protection. The wealth must have other grounds -for its valuableness, but one is assured that it will not be tampered -with. By surrendering all your dogmas to the keeper-Church, you win, -not certitude--for your treasures are no more certain inside the vault -than they are in your pocket--but assurance that you will not have to -see your life constantly interrupted by the need of defending them -against burglars, or of proving their genuineness for the benefit of -inquisitive and incredulous neighbors. The suspicion is irresistible -that Newman craved infallibility not because dogma was so supremely -significant to him, but because it was so supremely irrelevant. Nothing -could be more revealing than his acceptance of the doctrine of the -Immaculate Conception. He has no trouble whatever in believing this -belated and hotly-disdained dogma. Because it is essential to his -understanding of heaven and hell, eternity and the ineffable God? -On the contrary, because it is so quintessentially irrelevant to -anything that really entangles his emotions. His tone in acknowledging -his belief is airy, almost gay. He seems to feel no implications in -the belief. It merely rounds off a logical point in his theology. It -merely expresses in happy metaphor a poetical truth. To him there is no -tyranny in the promulgation of this new dogma. Infallibility, he seems -to suggest, removes from discussion ideas that otherwise one might be -weakly tempted to spend unprofitable hours arguing about. - -And nothing could be more seductive than his belief in -Transubstantiation. Science, of course, declares this transmutation -of matter impossible. But science deals only with phenomena. -Transubstantiation has to do not with phenomena but with -things-in-themselves. And what has science to say about the inner -reality of things? Science itself would be the first to disclaim any -such competence. Why, therefore, should not the Church know as much -as anybody about the nature of this thing-in-itself? Why is it not as -easy to believe the Church’s testimony as to the nature of things as -it is to believe any testimony? Such dogma is therefore unassailable -by science. And if it cannot be criticized it might just as well be -infallible. The papal guarantee does not invade science. It merely -prëempts an uncharted region. It infringes no intellectual rights. -It steps in merely to withdraw from discussion ideas which would -otherwise be misused. Infallibility Newman uses as a shelf upon which -to store away his glowing but pragmatically sterile theological ideas, -while down below in the arena are left for discussion the interesting -aspects of life. He is at great pains to tell us that the Church is -infallible only in her expressly declared doctrine. It is only over a -few and definite dogmas that she presides infallibly. You surrender to -infallibility only those cosmic ideas it would do you no good to talk -of anyway. In the vast overflowing world of urgent practical life you -are free to speculate as you will. Underneath the eternal serene of -dogma is the darting vivid web of casuistry. Relieved of the inanity -of theological discussion, the Catholic may use his intellect on the -human world about him. That is why we are apt to find in the Catholic -the acute psychologist, while the Protestant remains embroiled in weary -dialectics. - -Such a use of infallibility as Newman implies exposes the fallacy -of the Protestant position. For as soon as you have removed this -healthy check to theological embroilment you have opened the way to -intellectual corruption. As soon as you admit the right of individual -judgment in theological matters you have upset the balance between -dogma and life. The Catholic consigns his dogmas to the infallible -Church and speculates about the pragmatic issues of the dynamic -moral life. The Protestant on the other hand, encases himself in -an iron-bound morality and gives free rein to his fancy about the -eternal verities. The Catholic is empirical in ethics and dogmatic -in theology. The Protestant is dogmatic in ethics and more and more -empirical in theology. He speculates where it is futile to speculate, -because in supernatural matters you can never come by evidence to -any final, all-convincing truth. But he refuses to speculate where -a decent skepticism and a changing adjustment to human nature would -work out attitudes towards conduct that make for flowering and growth. -The Protestant infallibility of morals is the cruellest and least -defensible of all infallibilities. Protestantism passes most easily -into that fierce puritan form which constrains both conduct and belief. - -The Protestant inevitably gravitates either towards puritanism or -towards unitarianism. The one petrifies in a harsh and narrow moral -code, the ordering of conduct by the most elderly, least aesthetic, -dullest and gloomiest elements in the community. The other mingles in -endless controversy over the attributes of deity, the history of its -workings in the world, and the power of the supernatural. Religion -becomes a village sewing-society, in which each member’s life is -lived in the fearful sight of all the others, while the tongues clack -endlessly about rumors that can never be proved and that no one outside -will ever find the slightest interest in having proved. - -If the Catholic Church had used infallibility in the way that Newman -did, its influence could never have been accused of oppression. -There need never have been any warfare between theology and science. -Infallibility affords the Church an adroit way of continuing its -spiritual existence while it permits free speculation in science and -ethics to go on. Suppose the Church in its infallibility had not -stuck to dogma. Suppose the reformers had been successful, and the -Church had accepted early scientific truth. Suppose it had refused -any longer to insist on correctness in theological belief but had -insisted on correctness in scientific belief. Suppose the dogmas -of the Resurrection had made way for the first crude imperfect -generalizations in physics. Imagine the hideousness of a world where -scientific theories had been declared infallible by an all-powerful -Church! Our world’s safety lay exactly in the Church’s rejection of -science. If the Church had accepted science, scientific progress would -have been impossible. Progress was possible only by ignoring the -Church. Knowledge about the world could only advance through accepting -gratefully the freedom which the Church tacitly offered in all that -fallible field of the technique of earthly living. What progress we -have we owe not to any overcoming or converting of the Church but to a -scrupulous ignoring of her. - -In punishing heresy the Church worked with a sound intuition. For a -heretic is not a man who ignores the Church. He is one who tries to -mix his theology and science. He could not be a heretic unless he -were a victim of muddy thinking, and as a muddy thinker he is as much -a nuisance to secular society as he is to the Church against which -he rebels. He is the officious citizen who tries to break into the -storage-vault with the benevolent intention of showing that the jewels -are paste. But all he usually accomplishes is to set the whole town by -the ears. The constructive daily life of the citizens is interrupted -in a flood of idle gossip. It is as much to the interest of the -intelligent authorities, who have important communal projects on hand, -to suppress him as it is to the interest of the owner of the jewels. -Heresy is fundamentally the error of trying to reconcile new knowledge -with old dogma. The would-be heretic could far more wisely ignore -theology altogether and pursue his realistic knowledge in the aloofness -which it requires. If there is still any theological taint in him, he -should not dabble in science at all. If there is none, the Church will -scarcely feel itself threatened and he will not appear as a heretic. -On the pestiferousness of the heretic both the Church and the most -modern realist can agree. Let theology deal with its world of dogma. -Let science deal with its world of analysable and measurable fact. Let -them never touch hands or recognize even each other’s existence. - -The intellectual and spiritual chaos of the nineteenth century was -due to the prevalence of heresy which raged like an epidemic through -Europe. Minds which tried to test their new indubitable knowledge by -the presuppositions of faith were bound to be disordered and to spread -disorder around them. Faith and science tap different planes of the -soul, elicit different emotional currents. It is when the Church has -acted from full realization of this fact that it has remained strong. -Protestantism, trying to live in two worlds at the same time, has swept -thousands of excellent minds into a spiritual limbo where, in their -vague twilight realm of a modernity which has not quite sacrificed -theology, they have ceased to count for intellectual or spiritual light. - -Perhaps the most pathetic of heresies is the “modernism” which is -spreading through the French and Italian Church. For this effort to -bring unitarian criticism into Catholic theology, to make over the -dogmas from within, to apply reason to the unreasonable, is really -the least “modern” of enterprises. It is only a belated Protestant -reformation, and if it succeeds it could do little more than add -another Protestant sect to the existing multitude. It would not in -the least have modernized Catholicism, for the most modern attitude -which one can take towards the Church is to ignore it entirely, to -cease to feel its validity in the new humane, democratic world that is -our vision. In other words, to take towards it exactly the attitude -which it takes towards itself. This is its strength. It has never -hesitated to accept pragmatic truth that was discovered by others. -The Catholic makes use of whatever scientific, industrial, political, -sociological development works, and adjusts himself without discomfort -to a dynamic world. He makes no attempt at reconciliation with the -supernatural. A Catholic hospital uses all the latest medical science -without exhibiting the least concern over its infallible “truth.” It is -doubtful whether the Church ever attempted to prevent Catholics from -adopting anything as long as they did not bother whether it was “true” -or not. This is the real mischief, to get your infallible divine truth -confused with your pragmatic human truth. The “modernist” in setting -about this confusion simply courts that expulsion which is his. - -All this seemed to me implicit in the _Apologia_. But if the use Newman -made of infallibility destroys the Protestant position, it no less -destroys the Catholic. For if you use infallibility as a technique for -getting dogmas into a form in which they are easy to forget, you reduce -the Church from a repository of truth to a mere political institution. -When dogma is removed from discussion, religious truth becomes -irrelevant to life as it is commonly lived. The Church, therefore, can -touch life only through its political and organizing power, just as any -human institution touches life. It no longer touches it through the -divinely inspiring quality of its thought. Intellectually the Church -will only appeal to those cowed minds which have no critical power -and demand absolutism in thought. Spiritually it will appeal only to -temperaments like Newman’s which crave a guarantor for their mystic -life. Politically it will appeal to the subtle who want power through -the devious control over human souls. To few other types will it appeal. - -Newman unveils the true paradox of dogma. If, on the one hand, you -throw it open to individual judgment, you destroy it through the -futile wranglings of faith which can never be objectively solved. -If, on the other hand, you declare it infallible, you destroy it by -slowly sending it to oblivion. Infallibility gets rid of dogma just as -surely as does private judgment. Under the pretense of consolidating -the Church in its cosmic rôle, Newman, therefore, has really put it -in its proper parochial place as a pleasant grouping of souls who are -similarly affected by a collection of beautiful and vigorous poetic -ideas. Fundamentally, however, this grouping has no more universal -significance than any other, than a secret society or any religious -sect. - -Thus Newman unconsciously anticipates the most modern realist agnostic. -For the latter would agree that to relegate dogma to the storage-vault -of infallibility is exactly what ought to be done with dogma. At such -an infallible as Newman pictures no modern radical need balk. Newman’s -argument means little more than that infallibility is merely the -politest way of sending an idea to Nirvana. What more can the liberal -ask who is finished with theology and all its works? He can accept -this infallible in even another sense. For there is not a single -Christian doctrine in which he does not feel a kind of wild accuracy. -Every Christian dogma has a poetic vigor about it which might just as -well be called “true” because to deny its metaphorical power would -certainly be to utter an untruth. Indeed is not poetry the only “truth” -that can be called infallible? For scientific truth is constantly being -developed, revised, re-applied. It is only poetry that can think in -terms of absolutes. Science cannot because it is experimental. But -poetry may, because each soul draws its own meaning from the words. And -dogma is poetry. - -To render dogma infallible is to make it something that no longer -has to be fought for. This attitude ultimately undermines the whole -structure for belief. If it is only infallible ideas that we are to -believe, then belief loses all its moral force. It is no longer a -fierce struggle to maintain one’s intellectual position. Nothing is -at stake. One is not braced in faith with the hosts of hell assailing -one’s citadel. To the puritan, belief meant something to be gloweringly -and tenaciously held against the world, the flesh and the devil. But -Catholic belief, in the Newman atmosphere, is too sheltered, too safely -insured, to count excitingly. One only yawns over it, as his own deep -soul must have secretly yawned over it, and turns aside to the genuine -issues of life. But this is just what we should do with belief. We are -passing out of the faith era, and belief, as an intellectual attitude, -has almost ceased to play an active part in our life. In the scientific -attitude there is no place whatever for belief. We have no right to -“believe” anything unless it has been experimentally proved. But if it -has been proved, then we do not say we “believe” it, because this would -imply that an alternative was possible. All we do is to register our -common assent to the new truth’s incontrovertibility. Nor has belief -any place in the loose, indecisive issues of ordinary living. We have -to act constantly on insufficient evidence, on the best “opinion” we -can get. But opinion is not belief, and we are lost if we treat it so. -Belief is dogmatic, but opinion has value only when it is tentative, -questioning. The fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief -has given place to what may be called the higher plausibility. Stern, -rugged conviction which has no scientific background behind it is -coming to be dealt with rather impatiently by the modern mind. We have -difficulty in distinguishing it from prejudice. There is no hostility -to faith, if by “faith” we only mean an emotional core of desire -driving towards some ideal. But idealism is a very different thing from -belief. Belief is impelled from behind; it is sterile, fixed. Belief -has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse. An ideal, on the -other hand, is an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors -converge. It looks forward and pulls us along with it. It is ideals and -not beliefs that motivate the modern mind. It is meaningless to say -that we “believe” in our ideals. This separates our ideals from us. But -what they are is just the push of our temperaments towards perfection. -They are what is most inseparably and intrinsically ourselves. The -place of a belief which put truth outside of us and made virtue a hard -clinging to it has been taken by the idealism which merges us with the -growing end we wish to achieve. - -Newman illustrates the perpetual paradox of ecclesiasticism, that the -more devoutly you accept the Church the less important you make it. -As you press closer and closer to its mystic heart, its walls and -forms and ideas crumble and fade. The better Catholic you are, the -more insidious your vitiation of Catholicism. So that the Church has -remained strong only through its stout politicians and not through -its saints. As a casket for the precious jewel of mysticism, it -cannot die. But shorn of its political power it shrinks to a poetical -society of mystics, held together by the strong and earthy bond of -men who enjoy the easy expression of power over the least intelligent -and intellectually assertive masses in Western society. The Church -declines towards its natural limits. No attack on it, no undermining -of it from within, can destroy religious feeling, for that is an -organization of sentiments that are incarnate in man. Newman’s emotion, -whatever his mind may have done, reached through to this eternal heart. -Implicit in his intellect, however, is that demolition of religious -intellectuality which has freed our minds for the work of the future. -He was an unconscious pioneer. Ostensibly reactionary, he reveals in -his own _Apologia_ an anticipation of our modern outlook. His use of -infallibility insidiously destroys the foundations of belief. - - - - - IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE 1913-14[1] - - -It was my good fortune as holder of the Gilder Fellowship in this -University to spend in Europe the thirteen months immediately preceding -the war. I used the opportunity for extensive travel and general -acclimatization rather than for specialized research, and was thus -able to get an extensive survey of the European scheme on the eve of -a cataclysm from which it may emerge entirely altered. No one can -predict how truly that year will mark the “end of an era.” It seems -true, however, that most of the tendencies of democracy, social reform, -and international understanding, to whose development I gave my most -eager attention, have been snapped off like threads, perhaps never to -be pieced together again. And the material development, so striking in -Germany and Italy, the rebuilding of the cities and the undertaking of -vast communal projects, will be indefinitely checked, from sheer want -of capital, wasted in the war. - -[1] Report to the Trustees of Columbia University, 1914. - -No one was more innocent than I of the impending horror. In fact, -this menacing “armed camp” actually seemed to bristle in less sharply -defined lines when seen at close range. Public opinion seemed far -less violent than I had expected. In England there was the persistent -hostility to Compulsory Service, the gnawing compunction at the folly -of the Boer War, the complete subsidence of the panic over German -invasion. In France, there was the unyielding opposition to the new -three-years’ military law, culminating in the radical victory at -the April parliamentary elections, a clear national expression of -reluctance at the increased military expenditures; there was the superb -irony of the French press over the Zabern affair, where one would have -expected a raging chauvinism; there was the general public deprecation -of the activities of the royalists, and the constant discrediting of -their Alsace-Lorraine propaganda. In Italy I had seen the wild outburst -of reaction against the criminal Tripolitan war, and the great general -strike of June, a direct popular uprising against war and militarism. -Perhaps if I had spent the winter in Germany, I should have felt the -drift towards war, but even there all the opinion I heard was of some -gigantic slow-moving Slavic pressure, against which defence must be -made. And if public and press were full of blatant world-defiance, the -spirit certainly escaped my attention. My mind became quite reconciled -to the fact of “armed peace.” My imagination unconsciously began to -envisage armaments as mere frozen symbols of power, grim, menacing and -costly, yet little more than graphic expressions, in a language that -all the world could understand, of the relative strength and prestige -of the nations. In spite of the uniforms that sprinkled the sidewalks -and the wagon-trains that littered the streets, my imagination simply -refused to take them as dynamic. And there was little in press and -people to make me think that they themselves took them as dynamic. How -I should have acted if I had known of the imminence of the world-war -I do not know, but in the light of the event my rambles and interests -take on the aspect of the toddlings of an innocent child about the edge -of a volcano’s crater. - -I can give, however, a few indications of what such an innocent -mind might see and feel in Europe, this year of last breathless -hush before the explosion. I concerned myself with getting, first, -a clear impression of the physical body in which each country -clothed itself,--the aspect of town and countryside, villages, -farms, working-class quarters, factories, suburbs, plans of towns, -styles of architecture, characteristic types and ways of living, of -modern Europe; and, second, the attitudes, social and political, of -various classes, the social psychology of the different peoples. Such -acquisitions had, of course, to be the merest impressions. One could -not get “data”; one’s tour could be little more than a perpetual -“sizing-up.” The best one could do was to settle down in the various -capitals for a few months, immerse oneself in the newspapers, talk -with as many people as one could reach, read the contemporary novels -and plays, attend political meetings and meetings of social reformers, -go to church and court-house and school and library and university, -and watch the national life in action. One could only cut oneself off -from American interests, imagine that one had always lived in the -foreign city, and try, by a reach of sympathy and appreciation, to -assimilate the tone and spirit and attitudes of the people among whom -one was living. Such an effort may result only in the most fantastic -illusions. I am not trying to boast that I got any understanding of -European countries,--a matter of years of acquaintance and not of -months. I am merely indicating an attitude of approach. But it was an -attitude I found none too common among American students abroad. Among -the many who were conducting historical and political researches at -the libraries, I was never able to find any student interested in the -political meetings of the campaign, for instance, which I attended -with so much ardor, as a revelation of French social psychology. -The Americans I saw would have an enthusiasm for particular things, -perhaps, that they were interested in, a patronizing attitude towards -certain immoralities and inefficiencies that impressed them, but as for -a curiosity about the French mind and the French culture as a whole, I -could not find any interest that flowed along with mine. My curiosity, -therefore, had to go its own gait. I seemed to have a singular faculty -for not getting information. Unless one is fortunate enough to step -into a social group, one must dig one’s way along unaided. By means -of newspapers and magazines and guide-books, one hews out a little -passage towards the center of things. Slowly a definite picture is -built up of the culture and psychology of the people among whom one is -living. There is no way, however, of checking up one’s impressions. -One must rely on one’s intuition. Letters of introduction bring out -only class or professional attitudes. Very few people are socially -introspective enough to map out for you the mind of the society in -which they live. Only the French seem to have this self-consciousness -of their own traits, and the gift of expression, and that is why France -is incomparably the most interesting and enlightening country for the -amateur and curious American student to visit. - -These considerations suggest the fact that I wish to bring out,--that -my most striking impression was the extraordinary toughness and -homogeneity of the cultural fabric in the different countries, -England, France, Italy and Germany, that I studied. Each country was -a distinct unit, the parts of which hung together, and interpreted -each other, styles and attitudes, literature, architecture, and social -organization. This idea is of course a truism, yet brought up, as -most Americans are, I think, with the idea that foreigners are just -human beings living on other parts of the earth’s surface, “folks” -like ourselves with accidental differences of language and customs, -I was genuinely shocked to find distinct national temperaments, -distinct psychologies and attitudes, distinct languages that embodied, -not different sounds for the same meanings, but actually different -meanings. We really know all this; but when we write about the war, -for instance, we insensibly fall back to our old attitude. Most -American comment on the war, even the most intelligent, suggests a -complete ignorance of the fact that there is a German mind, and a -French mind and an English mind, each a whole bundle of attitudes -and interpretations that harmonize and support each other. And each -of these national minds feels its own reasons and emotions and -justifications to be cosmically grounded, just as we ourselves feel -that Anglo-Saxon morality is Morality, and Anglo-Saxon freedom Liberty. -We do, of course, more or less dimly recognize these differences of -national culture. We no longer think of other nations as “Barbarians,” -unless they have a national scheme which is as much of a challenge to -our own social inefficiency as is the German. We express our sense of -the difference by a constant belittling. Foreigners are not monsters, -but Lilliputians, dwarfs, playing with toys. We do not take other -cultures seriously. We tend to dwell on the amusing, the quaint, -the picturesque, rather than the intense emotional and intellectual -differences. The opportunity to immerse oneself in these various -cultures until one feels their powerful and homogeneous strength, -their meaning and depth, until one takes each with entire seriousness -and judges it, not in American terms, but in its own,--this is the -educative value of a rapid, superficial European year such as mine. -The only American book I have ever been able to find that deals with -a foreign country in this adequate sense is Mr. Brownell’s “French -Traits.” Almost all other writing, political, historical, descriptive, -about European countries, must be read with the constant realization -that the peculiar emotional and intellectual biases of the people, the -temperamental traits, the soul which animates all their activities and -expressions, have all been omitted from consideration by the author. - -I can only give fragmentary hints in this short article of the -incidents which built up my sense of these differences of national -cultures. London was the place where I had the best opportunities for -meeting people through letters of introduction. There were glimpses of -the Webbs at a meeting of the Fabian Society, which seems to retain the -allegiance of its old members rather than enlist the enthusiasm of the -younger generation. At their house Mr. Webb talked, as he lectures, -with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward -children, and Mrs. Webb, passive by his side, spoke only to correct -some slight slip on his part; there was another picture of her sweeping -into the _New Statesman_ office and producing a sudden panic of -reverent awe among the editorial staff. Lectures by Shaw and Chesterton -on succeeding nights--Shaw, clean, straight, clear and fine as an -upland wind and summer sun; Chesterton, gluttonous and thick, with -something tricky and unsavory about him--gave me a personal estimate -of their contrasted philosophies. Then there was Professor Hobhouse, -excessively judicial, with that high consciousness of excellence -which the Liberal professor seems to exude; Graham Wallas, with his -personal vivacity of expression and lack of any clear philosophy, -who considered the American sociologist a national disaster; H. G. -Wells, a suggestive talker, but very disappointing personally; John A. -Hobson, whom I cannot admire too much, a publicist with immense stores -of knowledge, poise of mind, and yet radical philosophy and gifts of -journalistic expression, a type that we simply do not seem to be able -to produce in this country. - -I expected to find the atmosphere of London very depressing. On the -contrary, a sort of fatuous cheerfulness seemed to reign everywhere on -the streets, in middle-class homes, even in the slums. This impressed -me as the prevailing tone of English life. Wells and Bennett seem to -have caught it exactly. As for the world that Mr. Galsworthy lives in, -though I looked hard for his people, I could find nothing with the -remotest resemblance. Such a tone of optimism is possible only to an -unimaginative people who are well schooled against personal reactions, -and against the depressing influences of environment--slums and fog -and a prevailing stodginess of middle-class life--that would affect -the moods of more impressionable peoples. In certain educated circles -this tone gave an impression of incorrigible intellectual frivolity. -London has fashions in talk. Significant discussion almost did not -exist. A running fire of ideational badinage, “good talk,” took its -place. Every idea tended to go up in smoke. You found your tone either -monstrously prophetic, as of a young Jeremiah sitting at the board, or -else unpleasantly cynical. Irony does not seem to be known in England. - -The impression one got from the newspapers and magazines and popular -books was of a sort of exuberant irrelevance, a vivacity of interest -about matters that seemed quite alien to the personal and social issues -of life as one knew it. There seemed indeed to be a direct avoidance -of these issues. One could never discover whether or how much an -Englishman “cared.” The national mind seemed to have made a sort of -permanent derangement of intellect from emotion. In no country is so -large a proportion of the literary product a mere hobby of leisurely -gentlemen whose interests are quite elsewhere. The literary supplements -of the newspapers used to contain the greatest collection of futilities -that I ever saw. One got the impression that the intellectual life of -the country was “hobbyized,” that ideas were taken as sports, just -as sports were taken as serious issues. This impression was rather -confirmed at Oxford, where the anthropologist, Marrett, turned out -to be a Jersey country gentleman, digging up prehistoric bones on -his place, and mentioning Chesterton as “entertaining writer--even -had him down here to lunch, but not a ‘gentleman,’ you know, not a -‘gentleman.’” Oxford itself seemed to be one long play of schoolboys -in the soft damp November air. Schiller, who gave me a delightful -morning, after I had attended his class where the boys came in their -black gowns and sat at primitive desks in the low room before a blazing -fire, from which one looked out on mouldering walls and dead ivy and -the pale morning sun and wan sweet decay, drew a wicked picture of the -dons satisfying their thwarted sporting instincts by putting their -boys through their intellectual paces and pitting them against each -other in scholastic competition like race-horses. Mr. McDougall, large -and with an Irish courtliness, I heard and liked, and Mr. L. P. Jacks -talked with me at Manchester College. A meeting of the Fabians at St. -John’s and a lecture by Mrs. Pember Reeves on “Coöperation” attracted -me, with her dramatic flaring out at the stolid audience for their -“English” lack of imagination--she came from New Zealand--the inanely -facetious comments of the dons, the lumbering discourses of certain -beefy burgesses from the local “Coöperative,” who had not followed well -the lady’s nimble thought. Every little incident of the Oxford week of -classes and rambles fitted into a picture of the place as a perfect -epitome of English life, past and present. It was even more than London -a world. - -Politically, London was dead that autumn. No parliament, and every one -weary of politics. The bitter Dublin strike dragged along with its -reverberations through the English labor situation, which showed unrest -and dissatisfaction with its leaders and much more of “syndicalist” -leaning than any one would admit. A debate, heard later in Paris, -hit the English labor situation off beautifully,--Longuet, arguing -that there was no syndicalism in England because all the leaders had -written him there wasn’t; Joyaux, arguing that there was, because the -unions were using forms of “direct action” and acting exactly “as if” -syndicalist ideas were spreading. - -The Lloyd George land campaign for the bettering of rural labor -conditions was beginning, but was arousing so little enthusiasm that, -with the intense dissatisfaction over the Insurance Acts that rose from -every class, one wondered if the energy of the Liberal social program -had about spent itself. The London press, solidly Tory--extraordinary -situation for a Liberal country--was finding, besides its social -grievances, the Ulster theme to play upon. Indefatigable industry, -worthy of a better cause, was apparently being exercised to drum up -reluctant English sentiment against Home Rule. All that autumn we lived -ostensibly on the brink of a civil war, whose first mutterings did not -even occur till the next July. - -The suffragettes were quiescent, but their big meetings at -Knightsbridge gave one a new insight into the psychology of the -movement. As one watched this fusion of the grotesque and the tragic, -these pale martyrs carried in amidst the reverent hush of a throng as -mystically religious as ever stood around the death-bed of a saint; or -as one heard the terrific roars of “Shame!” that went up at the mention -of wrongs done to women, one realized that one was in the presence of -English emotion, long starved and dried from its proper channels of -expression, and now breaking out irrepressibly into these new and wild -ways. It was the reverse side of the idolized English “reticence.” It -was a pleasant little commentary on the Victorian era. Suffragettism -is what you get when you turn your whole national psychic energy into -divorcing emotion from expression and from intellect. - -A hysterical Larkin meeting in Albert Hall; meetings of the Lansbury -people in the East End, with swarms of capped, cheerful, dirty, stodgy -British workmen; a big Churchill meeting at Alexandra Palace, from -which seventeen hecklers were thrown out, dully, one after the other, -on their heads, after terrific scrimmages in the audience; quieter -lectures at the Sociological Society, etc.; churches and law-courts, -and tutorial classes, and settlements, and garden cities, and talks -with many undistinguished people, rounded out my London impression, and -in December I moved my stage to Paris. - -The weeks of getting a hearing acquaintance with the language were -spent in reading sociology at the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, -exchanging conversation with students at the Sorbonne, and attending -still not understood lectures, in the hope that some day the electric -spark of apprehension might flash. I soon felt an intellectual -vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel -ideas, that integrated again the spiritual world as I knew it, and -wiped out those irrelevances and facetiousnesses and puzzle-interests -and sporting attitudes towards life, that so got on one’s nerves -in England. Here was also a democracy, not a society all shot into -intellectual and social castes, where one lived shut in with ideas and -attitudes that, like the proverbial ostrich, annihilated the rest of -the world. In England, unless you were a “social reformer,” you did -not know anything about anybody but your own class; in France there -seemed to be scarcely any social reformers, but everybody assumed an -intelligent interest in everything. In short, a democracy, where you -criticized everything and everybody, and neither attempted to “lift” -the “lower orders” nor “ordered yourself lowly and reverently towards -your betters.” There was a solid, robust air of equality, which one -felt in no other country, certainly not our own. The labor movement -had an air of helping itself, and its leaders showed an intellectuality -that ranked them with the professional men. In fact, the distinction -between the “intellectual” and the non-intellectual seems to have -quite broken down in France. Manners, styles of speech, pronunciation, -ideas, the terms in which things are phrased, seem to flow rather -freely over all the classes. Class-distinctions, which hit you in the -face in England and America--I mean, differences of manner and speech, -attitudes of contempt or admiration for other types--are much blurred. -The language has remained simple, pure, usable without the triteness -and vulgarity which dogs English, and which constitutes the most subtle -evidence of our inherent Anglo-Saxon snobbery. It was a new world, -where the values and the issues of life got reinstated for me into -something of their proper relative emphasis. - -With few letters of introduction, acclimatization was much more -difficult than in London. One had to hew one’s way around by the aid -of the newspapers. These are infinitely more expressive of every -shade of political opinion than is the London press. They provided -a complete education in the contemporary world. Supplemented by -the interesting symposiums in the reviews, and the mapping-out of -the various French intellectual worlds which the young _agrégés_ -and instructors I met were always eager to give me, the Paris press -provided a witty, interpretative daily articulation of the French -mind at work. It is a very self-conscious and articulate mind, -interested in the psychological artistic aspects of life rather than -the objective active aspects which appeal to the English. Life to -the Anglo-Saxon is what people are doing; to the Latin, rather the -stream of consciousness, what individuals and also what groups are -thinking and feeling. This all makes for clear thinking, constant -interpretation--I noticed that my young lawyer friend was all the -time saying “Voilà! mon explication!”--and an amount of what might be -called social introspection that makes France the easiest as well as -the most stimulating country to become acquainted with. The French are -right in telling you that their scholarship is not the collection of -insignificant facts, but the interpretation of significant ones, the -only kind of scholarship that is worth anything. - -In Paris, I continued my general policy of running down the various -social institutions, churches, courts, schools, political meetings, -model tenements, etc., in order to get, at least, a taste of French -society in operation. I poked about the various quarters of town and -countryside, and talked to as many people as I could meet. After the -lectures at the Sorbonne became intelligible, I followed the public -courses of Bouglé and Delacroix and Burkheim in sociology, and when -the campaign for the parliamentary election came I plunged into that, -following the bulletin boards of the parties, with their flaring -manifestoes--among them the royalists’ “A Bas La République!” calmly -left posted on the government’s own official bulletin-board, as -evidence of the most superb political tolerance I suppose any country -has ever shown!--and attending the disorderly meetings held in the -dingy playrooms of the public schoolhouses or in crowded cafés. French -freedom of speech has been struggled for too long not to be prized -when won, and the refusal to silence interrupters made each meeting a -contest of wits and eloquence between the speaker and his audience. The -most extraordinary incident of “fair play” I ever saw--Anglo-Saxons -simply do not know what “fair play” is--was at one of Bouglé’s -meetings, where the chairman allowed one of his political opponents, -who had repeatedly interrupted Bouglé, to take the platform and hold -it for half an hour, attacking Bouglé and stating his own creed. When -he had finished Bouglé took him up point by point, demolished him, and -went on with his own exposition. This at his own meeting, called by his -own Radical Party, to forward his candidature! When I left at 12:45 A. -M. the meeting was still in progress. At a Socialist meeting an old -Catholic, looking exactly like Napoleon III, was allowed to hold forth -for several minutes from a chair, until the impatient audience howled -him off. _Young normaliennes_, representing the suffrage movement, -appeared at meetings of all the parties, and were given the platform -to plead the cause of women as long as the crowd would listen. These -young girls were treated exactly as men; there was no trace of either -chivalry or vulgarity, the audience reacted directly and intensely to -their ideas and not to them. The first impulse of a Frenchman actually -seems to be, when he hears something he doesn’t like, not to stop -the other fellow’s mouth, but to answer him, and not with a taunt, -or disarming wit, but with an argument. In the Chamber of Deputies -the same spirit prevailed. The only visible signs of parliamentary -order were Deschanel’s clashing of his big bell and his despairing -“Voulez-vous écouter! Voulez-vous écouter!” The speaker in the tribune -held it as long as he was permitted by his hearers; his interrupter -would himself be interrupted and would exchange words across the -chamber while the official speaker looked resignedly on. The Left would -go off as one man in violent explosions of wrath, shake their fists -at the Center, call out epithets. Yet this was a dull session that -I saw, only a matter of raising the pay of generals. Certainly the -campaign of that election against the new Three Years’ Military Law -seems very far away now. The crowd outside the Mairie of the Vᵐᵉ the -night of the election shouting “A--Bas--Les-Trois-Ans,” in the same -rhythmic way that the law-students a few weeks earlier had marched down -rue St. Jacques yelling “Cail--laux--as-sassin!” knew no more than I -how soon they would need this defence of more soldiers. The cheers of -the crowd as the splendid cortege of the English sovereigns swept -along the streets seem more important than they did to me at the time. -Doumergue’s stand-pat ministry, with which my stay in Paris almost -exactly coincided, and during which the income-tax, lay-instruction, -and proportional representation issues slowly made progress, appears -now in the light of a holding everything safe till the election was -over, and the President could stem the tide of reaction against the new -military laws. France was waiting for the blow to fall that might be -mortal. - -On the first of May I was in Nîmes, delightful Southern city,--where -gaunt Protestants gave out tracts in the cars, and newspapers devoted -to bull-fighting graced the news-stands,--reading the big red posters -of the socialist mayor, summoning all the workmen to leave off work and -come out to celebrate the International. Indeed a foreign land! - -I arrived in Genoa the evening the Kaiser landed from Corfu, and -witnessed the pompous and important event. In Pisa, I stepped into -a demonstration of students, who were moving rapidly about the city -closing the schools and making speeches to each other, as a protest -against harsh treatment of Italians by the Austrian government in -Trieste, the passionate _leit motiv_ of Italia Irredenta that runs -through all current Italian thought and feeling. In Florence I began to -understand “futurism,” that crude and glaring artistic expression which -arises from the intolerable ennui of the ancient art with which the -young Italian is surrounded, the swarms of uncritical foreigners, the -dead museums. That Mona Lisa smile of Florence drove me soon to Rome, -where I sensed the real Italy, with its industrial and intellectual -ferment, its new renaissance of the twentieth century. - -Rome is not a city, it is a world. Every century, from the first to the -twentieth, has left its traces. It is the one city in Europe to study -western civilization, an endless source of suggestion, stimulation and -delight. It is the one city where the ancient and the ultra-modern live -side by side, both brimming over with vitality. The Church and the most -advanced and determined body of social revolutionists living side by -side; the Vatican galleries faced by the futurist; a statue of Ferrer -just outside Bernini’s colonnade; rampant democracy confronting Prince -Colonnas and Borgheses; Renaissance palaces, and blocks of monstrous -apartments built in the mad speculation after 1870; all the tendencies -and ideas of all Europe contending there in Rome, at once the most -ancient and the most modern city we know. What is a month in Rome! - -I could do little more than disentangle the political currents, get -familiar with certain names in the intellectual world, and plot -out the city, historically and sociologically, after a fashion. A -noted psychologist, Dr. Assagioli in Florence, had gone over the -philosophical situation for me; and in Rome, Professor Pettazoni of -the university told me of the political tendencies. A young Modernist -priest, discharged from his theological professorship for suspected -connection with the “Programma,” who talked about as much English as I -did Italian, proved very friendly and informing, and gave me a sense -of that vast subterranean, resistless, democratizing and liberalizing -movement in the Church. Various types, Italian cavalry officers, -professors of pedagogy, Sicilian lawyers, an emotional law student -from Lecce, who took me to the university and talked republicanism to -me, passed through the pension. And in Rome anyway you simply seeped -Italy in, from the newspapers, as vivid and varied as those in Paris, -and the host of little democratic and political weeklies, most of -them recent, but fervent and packed with ideas that indicated a great -ferment of young intellectual Italy. The young Florentine Papini gives -in his picturesque books the picture of the Italian soul struggling -with French, English and German ideas, and trying to hew some sort -of order out of the chaos. One got the impression that Nietzsche was -raging through the young Italian mind. But I was all for the candor and -sympathy and personality of this expression. Papers like “La Voce,” -published by Papini’s friends, have an idealistic sweep such as we -simply cannot imagine or, I suppose, appreciate in this country. I had -touched a different national mind. Expressions which seem wild to us -fell there into their proper and interpretative order. - -My impression was that almost anything might happen in Italy. While -I was in Rome, the Pope was drawing protests from even the most -conservative clerical dailies for his obscurantism. The country seemed -to be disillusionizing itself about representative government, which, -though it had become perfectly democratic, and had the most sweeping -program of social reform, was clumsy and ineffective, and had utterly -failed to carry out the popular hopes. The Crown scarcely seemed to be -taken much more seriously than in Norway. Republican sentiment cropped -up in unexpected places. Nationalism grew apace, cleverly stimulated -by the new capitalistic bourgeoisie and the new industry, which first -impressed you as you came through the long string of gayly-colored, -swarming factory towns on the coast between Ventimiglia and Genoa. -Political parties, Nationalist, Constitutionalist, Republican, -Socialist, etc., seemed as numerous as in France, but there was not the -same fluctuation, for the expert governmental hand kept a majority, in -the Camera. This body gave little of the impression of dignity that one -had felt in the French Chamber. One felt that while in Italy democratic -feeling was almost as genuine and universal as in France, political -democracy had by no means proved its worth. That Latin passion for -intellectual sincerity and articulation--that quality which makes the -Latin the most sympathetic and at the same time the most satisfactory -person in the world, because you can always know that his outward -expression bears some relation to his inward feeling--had resulted, as -in France, in the duplication of parties, which were constantly holding -congresses and issuing programs, and then splitting up into dissentient -groups. This trait may be unfortunate politically; but it certainly -makes for sincerity and intelligence, and all the other virtues which -our Anglo-Saxon two-party system is well devised to destroy. - -This Latin quality of not being reticent, of reacting directly and -truthfully, had its most dramatic expression in the great general -strike of June, which I witnessed in Rome. Disgust and chagrin at -the Tripolitan war, a general reaction against militarism, had been -slowly accumulating in the working classes, and the smouldering feeling -was touched off into a revolutionary explosion by the shooting of -two demonstrators at Ancona by the police on the festival day of the -Statuto. This was followed in Rome, as in most of the other cities -of Italy, by a complete suspension of work. No cars or wagons moved -for three days; no shops or stores opened their doors; none of the -public services were performed; the only newspaper was a little red -“bolletino” which told of the riots of the day before. One did nothing -but walk the garbage-littered streets, past the shuttered windows and -barricaded doors, and watch the long lines of infantry surrounding -the public squares, and the mounted carabinieri holding the Piazza -del Popolo, to prevent meetings and demonstrations. The calm spirit -of the troops, surrounded by the excited crowds, was admirable. And -the overwhelming expression of social solidarity displayed by this -suspended city made one realize that here were radical classes that had -the courage of their convictions. On the third day, the conservative -classes recovered their breath, and I saw the slightly fearful -demonstration of shouting youths who moved down the Via del Tritone -while great Italian flags swung out from one window after another, -greeted with wild hand-clapping from every thronged bourgeois balcony. -The next day the darting trolley-cars told the strike was over, but -two days later I alighted at the Naples station into a fortress held -by Bersaglieri against a mob who had been trying all day to burn the -station. The shooting kept us inside until the last rioters were -dispersed, and the great protest was over, though it was days before -the people of the Romagna, where railroads and telegraphs were cut, -were convinced that the monarchy had not fallen and a republic been -proclaimed. The government had kept very quiet, except for the floods -of oratory that rolled through the Camera; if it had not, there might -have been a real revolution, instead of merely the taste and thrill of -one. - -My last political experience in Italy was election night in Venice, -with the triumph of the conservatives, who had made no bones of the -economic interpretation of politics, but had placarded the city with -posters recalling to gondolieri, hotel-keepers and shop-keepers, the -exact amount of money they had lost by reason of the general strike and -the wild scurry of foreigners out of the country. This rather appalling -sum was apparently a final and clinching argument, and we heard the -gratitude of the Patriarch from his balcony by San Marco expressed to -the citizens who had “saved” their country. Such incidents are symbols -of the candors and delights of the Latin temperament and of everything -in the Latin countries. - -Switzerland, besides its holidaying, contributed the Bern Exposition, -the intensely significant spectacle of a nation looking at itself. -If, as was said, every Swiss schoolchild saw the exposition not once -but three times, our day was one of those times. All Switzerland was -there studying and enjoying itself. In this little epitome of its life, -one had a sense of the refreshing value of living in a small country -where its activities and spirit could all, in some sort of fashion, be -grasped, understood, contemplated, as one might a large picture. Most -suggestive, perhaps, were the great water-power development projects, -electrical engineering schemes, and mountain railroading, planned ahead -in a broad way for fifty years or so. A country that knew what it was -about, that knew how to use its resources for large social ends! - -My German tour of the last two weeks of July, cut short by the war, -was more definitely sociological. I had been through the Rhine country -to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Munich, the preceding summer. This trip -went straight north from Friedrichshafen to Berlin. There were the -famous town-planned cities to be seen, and housing-schemes, which I had -followed rather closely in all the countries, and a general “sizing-up” -of German “Kultur.” I missed my settling down in Berlin; newspapers -and people had to be taken on the wing. But then the German spirit and -expression was much more familiar to me through study than had been the -French and Italian. My most striking impression was of the splendor of -the artistic renaissance, as shown particularly in the new architecture -and household and decorative and civic art. These new and opulent -styles are gradually submerging that fearful debauch of bad taste which -followed the French war, and which makes the business quarters of the -German cities so hideous. But the newer quarters, monuments, public -buildings of the last ten years have a massive, daring style which -marks an epoch in art. I have yet to come across an American who likes -this most recent German architecture; but to me buildings like the -University at Jena, the Stuttgart theater, the Tietz shops, etc., with -their heavy concrete masses and soaring lines, speak of perfectly new -and indigenous ideas. And if artistic creation is a mark of a nation’s -vitality, the significance of this fine flare and splurge of German -style, the endless fecundity of decorative design in printing and -furniture, etc., the application of design to the laying out of towns -and suburbs, the careful homogeneity and integrity of artistic idea, -should not be overlooked. These things are fertile, are exhilarating -and make for the enhancement of life. The Germans are acting exactly -as if they no longer believed, as we do, that a high quality of urban -life can be developed in a rag-tag chaos of undistinguished styles and -general planlessness. - -Specifically, I visited the municipal workingmen’s cottages in Ulm -and saw the town-planning charts of the city in the office of the -_Stadtbaurat_; the huge apartments, municipally built and owned, -in Munich; the big _Volksbad_ in Nuremberg, and the garden-city -workingmen’s suburb at Lichtenhof, with the schoolchildrens’ garden -allotments; the model garbage-disposal plant at Furth, a miracle of -scientific resource and economy; the extraordinary model municipal -slaughter-house at Dresden, so characteristically German with its -_Schlachthof_ and _Direktorhaus_ at the entrance; and, lastly the -famous garden-city of Hellerau, inferior, however, on the whole, to -the English Hampstead Suburb at Golders Green. Towns like Rothenburg -and Nordlingen were little laboratories of mediæval and modern -town-planning. The _Stadtbaurat_ at Rothenburg went over for us the -development of the city, and gave us considerable insight into the -government, policy and spirit of a typical little German municipality. -Undemocratic in political form, yet ultra-democratic in policy and -spirit, scientific, impartial, giving the populace--who seemed to have -no sense of being excluded from “rights”--what they really wanted, far -more truly than our democracies seem to be able to secure, this epitome -of the German political scheme served to convince us that we were in a -world where our ordinary neat categories of political thought simply -didn’t apply. It was futile to attempt an interpretation in Anglo-Saxon -terms. There was no objective evidence of the German groaning under -“autocracy” and “paternalism.” One found oneself for the first time in -the presence of a government between whom and the people there seemed -to exist some profound and subtle sympathy, a harmony of spirit and -ends. - -It was dramatic to sweep up through the endless billowing fields and -carefully tended forests and imposing factory towns--Germany, caught at -mid-summer, in the full tide of prosperity--and come into Berlin on -the morning of “the historic day,” July 31st, 1914, with the agitated -capital on the brink of war; to see the arrival of the Kaiser and -the princes at the Schloss; to watch the Crown Prince’s automobile -blocked twenty feet away from us by the cheering crowd;--“der _wahre_ -Kriegesmann,” as the papers were calling him in contemptuous contrast -to his peaceful father; to hear the speech of the latter--grim, -staccato-voiced, helmeted figure, very symbol of war--from the balcony -of the palace; to watch next day the endless files of reservists -marching through the streets to the casernes to “einkleiden”; and -then to hear the finally fatal news of Russia’s refusal with the -swarming crowds on Unter den Linden, hysterical from both fervor and -anxiety. If ever there was a tense and tragic moment, when destiny -seemed concentrated into a few seconds of time, it was that 5 P. M. on -the afternoon of August first, at the corner of Unter den Linden and -Friedrichstrasse, in Berlin. - -A midnight flight to Sweden, with a motley horde of scared Russians -and Scandinavians, and two weeks in the distressed and anxious -northern countries ended my year. Nothing but the war; regiments -of flaxen-haired Danish boys, mobilizing along the country roads of -Denmark, the _Landsturm_ lolling along the Stockholm streets, even the -Norwegians drilling against none knew what possible attack. The heavens -had fallen. An interview with Herr Branting, the Swedish Socialist -leader, and the depth of his personal feeling and the moving eloquence -with which he went over the wreck of socialist and humanitarian hopes, -gave us the vividest sense of the reverberations of the shock on a -distinguished cosmopolitan mind. The librarian of the Royal Library -in Copenhagen, the pastor of the Swedish church, and the editor of -“Dagens Nyheter,” in Stockholm, whom we were able to talk with, very -kindly answered our questions on Scandinavian affairs. And we have -the pleasantest memories of Herr Hambro in Christiania, editor of -the leading Conservative daily, who had just finished La Follette’s -autobiography, and would have preferred to talk about America even -to showing us how the Radical parties in Norway were lording it over -their opponents. One got the sense in these countries of the most -advanced civilization, yet without sophistication, a luminous modern -intelligence that selected and controlled and did not allow itself to -be overwhelmed by the chaos of twentieth-century possibility. There -was a mood of both gravity and charm about the quality of the life -lived, something rather more Latin than Teutonic. This is an intuition, -reinforced by a sense that nowhere had I seen so many appealing people -as on the streets of Copenhagen. Valid or not, it was the pleasantest -of intuitions with which to close my year. - -This sketch, I find, has, in fact, turned out much more impressionistic -than I intended. But impressions are not meant to be taken as dogmas. -I saw nothing that thousands of Americans have not seen; I cannot -claim to have brought back any original contribution. There was only -the sense of intimate acquaintance to be gained, that feeling of -at-homeness which makes intelligible the world. To the University which -made possible the rare opportunity of acquaintance with these various -countries and cultures, the contact with which has been so incompletely -suggested in this sketch, my immeasurable thanks! - - - - - TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA - - -No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public -opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The -discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien -population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought -out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs. We -have had to watch hard-hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at -the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer -at patriots like Mary Antin who write about “our forefathers.” We -have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned -by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in -this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles, -while in the same breath they insist that the alien shall be forcibly -assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestioningly -label “American.” - -As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this -country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had -marked out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were -thwarting our prophecies. The truth became culpable. We blamed the -war, we blamed the Germans. And then we discovered with a moral shock -that these movements had been making great headway before the war even -began. We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it -might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they -became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, -to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural -traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of -washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely -real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, -did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or -Polish. - -To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take -a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong -cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and -colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to -admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure -of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what -Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal -has been broad or narrow--whether perhaps the time has not come to -assert a higher ideal than the “melting-pot.” Surely we cannot be -certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations -within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, -we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency. -We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own -terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate -machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political -naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it -neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that -America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and -not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were -the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This -is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and -general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal. - - -I - -Mary Antin is right when she looks upon our foreign-born as the -people who missed the Mayflower and came over on the first boat they -could find. But she forgets that when they did come it was not upon -other Mayflowers, but upon a “Maiblume,” a “Fleur de Mai,” a “Fior di -Maggio,” a “Majblomst.” These people were not mere arrivals from the -same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved, but strangers -to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had -to take place. For they brought with them their national and racial -characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the -contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to -make its way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a -level where it satisfied the accredited norms of social success. - -We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if -distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some -other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with -motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be -assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the -culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention -of “giving themselves without reservation” to the new country. They -came to get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape -from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make -their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework. -Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been -accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were -conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the -objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their -social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial -people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in spite of -the “Revolution,” our whole legal and political system remained more -English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England -itself law developed to meet the needs of the changing times. - -It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief -obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples--the order -of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun--to -save us from our own stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate -Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is -raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a -socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities -are being educated in the amazing schools of Gary. I do not believe -that this process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle -of Japan’s sudden jump from mediævalism to post-modernism should have -destroyed that superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who -are to “evolve.” We are dealing with their children, who, with that -education we are about to have, will start level with all of us. Let us -cease to think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent -in certain peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of -inferior civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated. These -peoples in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are -now that concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become -in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal. - -We are not dealing with static factors, but with fluid and dynamic -generations. To contrast the older and the newer immigrants and see -the one class as democratically motivated by love of liberty, and -the other by mere money-getting, is not to illuminate the future. To -think of earlier nationalities as culturally assimilated to America, -while we picture the later as a sodden and resistive mass, makes -only for bitterness and misunderstanding. There may be a difference -between these earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither -in motive for coming nor in strength of cultural allegiance to the -homeland. The truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to -the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the -ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American States. -English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English -literary reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities, -have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers’ -breasts. The distinctively American spirit--pioneer, as distinguished -from the reminiscently English--that appears in Whitman and Emerson -and James, has had to exist on sufferance alongside of this other -cult, unconsciously belittled by our cultural makers of opinion. No -country has perhaps had so great indigenous genius which had so little -influence on the country’s traditions and expressions. The unpopular -and dreaded German-American of the present day is a beginning amateur -in comparison with those foolish Anglophiles of Boston and New York -and Philadelphia whose reversion to cultural type sees uncritically -in England’s cause the cause of Civilization, and, under the guise of -ethical independence of thought, carries along European traditions -which are no more “American” than the German categories themselves. - -It speaks well for German-American innocence of heart or else for its -lack of imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a “Tu -quoque!” If there were to be any hyphens scattered about, clearly they -should be affixed to those English descendants who had had centuries of -time to be made American where the German had had only half a century. -Most significantly has the war brought out of them this alien virus, -showing them still loving English things, owing allegiance to the -English Kultur, moved by English shibboleths and prejudice. It is only -because it has been the ruling class in this country that bestowed the -epithets that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of “hyphenated -English-Americans.” But even our quarrels with England have had the -bad temper, the extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman of -to-day nags us and dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly intimate -way in which he dislikes the Australian, or as we may dislike our -younger brothers. He still thinks of us incorrigibly as “colonials.” -America--official, controlling, literary, political America--is -still, as a writer recently expressed it, “culturally speaking, a -self-governing dominion of the British Empire.” - -The non-English American can scarcely be blamed if he sometimes -thinks of the Anglo-Saxon predominance in America as little more than -a predominance of priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first -immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased -to be the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in -transforming that colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly -woven fabric of native culture. Colonials from the other nations have -come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture -which should startle them out of their colonialism, and consequently -they looked back to their mother-country, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon -immigrant was looking back to his. What has been offered the newcomer -has been the chance to learn English, to become a citizen, to salute -the flag. And those elements of our ruling classes who are responsible -for the public schools, the settlements, all the organizations for -amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be proud of the -care and labor which they have devoted to absorbing the immigrant. -His opportunities the immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost a -pathetic eagerness to make his way in the new land without friction or -disturbance. The common language has made not only for the necessary -communication, but for all the amenities of life. - -If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases, so long as -one does not interfere with others, the immigrant has found freedom, -and the ruling element has been singularly liberal in its treatment -of the invading hordes. But if freedom means a democratic coöperation -in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social -institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not been free, and -the Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race -is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own -culture upon the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has -been so mild and, indeed, semi-conscious does not alter its quality. -And the war has brought out just the degree to which that purpose of -“Americanizing,” that is to say, “Anglo-Saxonizing,” the immigrant has -failed. - -For the Anglo-Saxon now in his bitterness to turn upon the other -peoples, talk about their “arrogance,” scold them for not being melted -in a pot which never existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose -which lay at the bottom of his heart. It betrays too the possession -of a racial jealousy similar to that of which he is now accusing the -so-called “hyphenates.” Let the Anglo-Saxon be proud enough of the -heroic toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation. But let -him ask himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants, -where he would have been living to-day. To those of us who see in the -exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red _leit-motif_ of our -civilization, the settling of the country presents a great social drama -as the waves of immigration broke over it. - -Let the Anglo-Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these -races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the -non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which -has remained the most distinctively “American,” the South. Let him -ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes -Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how -superior this native civilization is to the great “alien” states of -Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have -self-consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while -being outwardly and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how -much more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social leadership has come -out of these alien states than out of all the truly American ones. The -South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still -remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed -culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally -sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like -the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin -and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a -new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and -Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new -potency. The process has not been at all the fancied “assimilation” -of the Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their -assimilation of us--I speak as an Anglo-Saxon. The foreign cultures -have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous -Americanism, but have remained distinct but coöperating to the greater -glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native -“Americanism” around them. - -What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities -should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. -Already we have far too much of this insipidity,--masses of people -who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor -nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country -seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its -schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central cultural -nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible -gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost. -Our cities are filled with these half-breeds who retain their foreign -names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they -have actually been changed into New Englanders or Middle Westerners. It -does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that, -letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have -substituted for it only the most rudimentary American--the American -culture of the cheap newspaper, the “movies,” the popular song, the -ubiquitous automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them -assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done -its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill -with dread at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is -accepted as Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal -is to melt the different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor -product as the satisfying result of their alchemy. - -Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the -self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these -fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his -fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous -to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a -mere elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports -the Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the -Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics. Just so -surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture -do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual -country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those -of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes -of American life. The influences at the center of the nuclei are -centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which -mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign-born retains -this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American -community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal, -anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who -came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and -jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with -its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the -absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns, -our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces -of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our -time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the -other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating -force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our -loose, free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious -folk-tradition and folk-style hold the people to a line. - -The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this purpose -be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan can be ours. -But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we -not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from -the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual -toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and -dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted -Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered -in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here -inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not -fuse. - -America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of -imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of -so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old -nationalism,--belligerent, exclusive, in-breeding, the poison of which -we are witnessing now in Europe,--is to make patriotism a hollow sham, -and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a -follower and not a leader of nations. - - - II - -If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give -up the search for our native “American” culture. With the exception of -the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to -be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American -culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of -cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made -it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This -will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous -genius that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry, -philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough, -American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are -least understanded of the people. If the American note is bigness, -action, the objective as contrasted with the reflective life, where -is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our fiction, -the peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity, -are somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and -mediocre. American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting -into impressive artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor -is it any better in architecture, the least romantic and subjective -of all the arts. We are inarticulate of the very values which we -profess to idealize. But in the finer forms--music, verse, the essay, -philosophy--the American genius puts forth work equal to any of its -contemporaries. Just in so far as our American genius has expressed -the pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward-looking drive of a -colonial empire, is it representative of that whole America of the many -races and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm. -And only as that pioneer note is sounded can we really speak of the -American culture. As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the -“melting-pot,” our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was -something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light -of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox -that our American cultural tradition lies in the future. It will be -what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of -attacking the future with a new key. - -Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to become -something utterly different from the nationalisms of twentieth-century -Europe. This wave of reactionary enthusiasm to play the orthodox -nationalistic game which is passing over the country is scarcely vital -enough to last. We cannot swagger and thrill to the same national -self-feeling. We must give new edges to our pride. We must be content -to avoid the unnumbered woes that national patriotism has brought in -Europe, and that fiercely heightened pride and self-consciousness. -Alluring as this is, we must allow our imaginations to transcend -this scarcely veiled belligerency. We can be serenely too proud to -fight if our pride embraces the creative forces of civilization which -armed contest nullifies. We can be too proud to fight if our code of -honor transcends that of the schoolboy on the playground surrounded -by his jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and creative, and -not the mere jealous and negative protectiveness against metaphysical -violations of our technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth that -in one American flows the mystic blood of all our country’s sacred -honor, freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the -signal for turning our whole nation into that clan-feud of horror -and reprisal which would be war, then we find ourselves back among -the musty schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any pragmatic and -realistic America of the twentieth century. - -We should hold our gaze to what America has done, not what mediæval -codes of dueling she has failed to observe. We have transplanted -European modernity to our soil, without the spirit that inflames it -and turns all its energy into mutual destruction. Out of these foreign -peoples there has somehow been squeezed the poison. An America, -“hyphenated” to bitterness, is somehow non-explosive. For, even if -we all hark back in sympathy to a European nation, even if the war -has set every one vibrating to some emotional string twanged on the -other side of the Atlantic, the effect has been one of almost dramatic -harmlessness. - -What we have really been witnessing, however unappreciatively, in -this country has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs. In -that arena of friction which has been the most dramatic--between the -hyphenated German-American and the hyphenated English-American--there -have emerged rivalries of philosophies which show up deep traditional -attitudes, points of view which accurately reflect the gigantic issues -of the war. America has mirrored the spiritual issues. The vicarious -struggle has been played out peacefully here in the mind. We have seen -the stout resistiveness of the old moral interpretation of history -on which Victorian England throve and made itself great in its own -esteem. The clean and immensely satisfying vision of the war as a -contest between right and wrong; the enthusiastic support of the Allies -as the incarnation of virtue-on-a-rampage; the fierce envisaging of -their selfish national purposes as the ideals of justice, freedom and -democracy--all this has been thrown with intensest force against the -German realistic interpretations in terms of the struggle for power and -the virility of the integrated State. America has been the intellectual -battleground of the nations. - - - III - -The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American -democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever -American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will -have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto -encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find -that we have all unawares been building up the first international -nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous -nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal, -however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and -tendency have moved us further and further away. What we have achieved -has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of -foreign cultures, from which the sting of devastating competition has -been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature, -the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved -that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character -substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the -sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of -misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the -outlines are already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new -orientation of the American mind in the world. - -It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this -cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful -purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study -of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic -geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people -of no other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is -still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, -but of many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown -into cosmopolitanism, and his motherhood is not one nation, but all -who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague -sympathy which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world--a -sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of war--may be the -modern American’s, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the -American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His -provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his -imagination. - -Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a -vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among -his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the -acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them -he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the -children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his -old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious -to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so -provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from -the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has -scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes -a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for -unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton -philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He -may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all -the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at -least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential -to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western -world of ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar -evolution. America has burned most of the baser metal also from them. -Meeting now with this common American background, all of them may yet -retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national -spiritual slants. They are more valuable and interesting to each other -for being different, yet that difference could not be creative were it -not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given them and -which they all equally possess. - -A college where such a spirit is possible even to the smallest degree, -has within itself already the seeds of this international intellectual -world of the future. It suggests that the contribution of America will -be an intellectual internationalism which goes far beyond the mere -exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries and the cold recording of -facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy which is not satisfied until -it has got at the heart of the different cultural expressions, and -felt as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but it will make -understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite -and not divide. - -Against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself “patriotism” -and the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself “preparedness” -the cosmopolitan ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold -it are for a policy of drift. They, too, long passionately for an -integrated and disciplined America. But they do not want one which is -integrated only for domestic economic exploitation of the workers or -for predatory economic imperialism among the weaker peoples. They do -not want one that is integrated by coercion or militarism, or for the -truculent assertion of a mediæval code of honor and of doubtful rights. -They believe that the most effective integration will be one which -coördinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward -working out together the place of America in the world-situation. They -demand for integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness -of enthusiasm and purpose which can only come when no national colony -within our America feels that it is being discriminated against or that -its cultural case is being prejudged. This strength of coöperation, -this feeling that all who are here may have a hand in the destiny of -America, will make for a finer spirit of integration than any narrow -“Americanism” or forced chauvinism. - -In this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual citizenship -which meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual citizenship -we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that international -citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we aspire. We have -assumed unquestioningly that mere participation in the political life -of the United States must cut the new citizen off from all sympathy -with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily transfer of devotion -from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort of moral -treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant -whom we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his -European home shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive, -just as narrow, and even less legitimate because it is founded on no -warm traditions of his own. Yet a nation like France is said to permit -a formal and legal dual citizenship even at the present time. Though a -citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his allegiance in favor of some -other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws when he returns. -Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new citizenships -he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and -right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the -formal institutional framework of his new country and indeed become -intensely loyal to it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What -makes up the fabric of his soul will always be of this Frenchness, -so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate he will always to some -degree dwell still in his native environment. - -Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practise a -dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American -who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in -love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy and -seeks to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least -a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels -himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this -expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his -native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of -the cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races -and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living -vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees -the new peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of -aliens, waiting to be “assimilated,” waiting to be melted down into -the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism. They are rather threads -of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves -into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an -Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be -moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in America -those wills-to-power are turned in a different direction into learning -how to live together. - -Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free -and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native -land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have -to accept the immigrant’s return for the same reason that we consider -justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien -who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land, -only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow -nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of -this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant -is often a missionary to an inferior civilization. - -This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled -laborers who have been pouring into the United States in the last -dozen years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them -return to spend their earnings in their own country or to serve -their country in war. But they return with an entirely new critical -outlook, and a sense of the superiority of American organization to the -primitive living around them. This continued passage to and fro has -already raised the material standard of living in many regions of these -backward countries. For these regions are thus endowed with exactly -what they need, the capital for the exploitation of their natural -resources, and the spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating -these laggard peoples from the very bottom of society up, awaking vast -masses to a new-born hope for the future. In the migratory Greek, -therefore, we have not the parasitic alien, the doubtful American -asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan interchange which is coming, -in spite of all war and national exclusiveness. - -Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and -traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this -cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American--and in this category -I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the -pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas--has the chance to -become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a -nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with -the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement -which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one -color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this -cosmopolitan vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut -ourselves with the raw product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb -the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to -admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns -us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an -ideal for an actual situation. Our question is, What shall we do with -our America? How are we likely to get the more creative America--by -confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or -broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been -vaguely sketching? - -We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and -moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing -the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it -is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of -Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of -our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held -the field as the expression of the new American’s new devotion. The -inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We -must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these -later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new -consciousness of what America means to them as a citizenship in the -world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel -for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until -we do away with this romantic gilding of the past. - -All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all -can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment -of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past, -which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities, -can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite, -which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more -warmly. - -To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a -younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration -into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which -should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but -infinitely strong. - - - - - FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL - - -Gilbert was almost six years old when they all--Mother, Olga, and -baby--went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his -expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements -and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is -smothering. Here was space and a new largeness in things. Gilbert was -freed forever from the back-street. - -Garna’s house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your -meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a -blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and -trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you -went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after -he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and -stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy -brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him. - -Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green, where the -water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out of its spout -over your shoes unless you were careful. And when they had finished -pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh, whether of fatigue -or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark kitchen, which you -entered down a flight of stone steps, there was another pump, but it -brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-water which to Gilbert -tasted uninteresting, and which he was not allowed to drink, but which -they carried in zinc pails up two long spidery flights, and for Aunt -Nan’s room, three, so that you could wash your face in the morning. -Only on wash-day was that pump interesting when the servant filled -great wooden tubs out of it, and created huge foamy waves in them, and -beat and rubbed, and then filled long clothes-lines with damp white -garments which coiled around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran -too close under them when you were playing. - -The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold in -winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open with -a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly to warm -his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it was close and -stuffy, for it was lighted only by two windows at the top which were -level with the ground and opened into a little depression, so that the -shutters would move freely. In the great thunder-storms of summer, -this hollow would fill with water and as Gilbert sat there eating his -lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the darting lightning, the -water would begin to stream over the sill and down the walls. Then -Annie would have to be hastily called, and with many ejaculations she -would throw her apron over her head, and rush out with a dish-pan to -bail out the hollow. Gilbert would stand on a chair and see dimly -through rain-streaming panes this huge slopping figure, throwing -pails of water into the path. But ordinarily nothing happened in the -dining-room. Sometimes in the summer, an odious snail or two would come -out of the walls and leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast -closet were stored rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which -Gilbert and Olga would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind -the dining-room was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its -glowing furnace, and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert -loved to spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the -ice-cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to -be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked -the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while Annie -shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by and saw the -blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on the whole, the -basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so hot when you stood -by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the little registers that -opened into the vast rooms above. And always, the year round, there was -that musty dining-room to descend into three times a day, with its old -frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its stained brown walls. - -Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him. Annie -changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely changed her -guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-street, -Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna’s house one naturally had a -servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert did not at first -understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this queer, whitish -young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who gave a sort of -growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always started incontinently, -with alacrity, to do something without knowing what it was. Gilbert -would come in from the garden into the fragrant kitchen on baking-day -to look for cookies, and find his mother moving about, with her -serious, anxious expression, while Annie sprawled about, cutting up -potatoes, and listening to his mother’s earnest expostulations. In -a few months there would be another Annie; her mouth was perhaps -crookeder and her hair yellower, but she would plunge clumsily about -in the same old way, and would take up her education not where the -other Annie had left off, but precisely in that brutish ignorance where -she had begun. To Gilbert’s mother, the living and successive tissue -of Annies became the absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed -in Annies. They were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which -Gilbert avoided when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of -this strong, docile creature, who relapsed in each transformation to -her original brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that -downstairs floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose -dull squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert -could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done. - -Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna’s house better. The front parlor was a -vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert penetrated -only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehensible. Here the -sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you entered the front -parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and you moved around -subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna never opened the windows, -and the shutters of the bay which looked towards the east were always -kept tightly closed. But in the back parlor on bright winter days you -sent the shade flying up to the top, and let the sun stream in over -the floor all the way to the monster of a horsehair-covered sofa which -stretched along the wall. - -Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it, and, -besides, you could not climb up its slippery edges very easily. And -once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide until you -would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and inhospitable -bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna’s feet, as she -rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never tip too far -back for fear of the grand-father’s clock that stood in the corner -behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck the hours. -Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike, for a minute -or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then a little later -would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the old clock, -as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song. When -Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for the whole -long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was prepared, it was -beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-room which rattled -off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert despised it, and would -have covered his ears if he had not thought it would be silly. - -Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother’s room, into -which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in winter, -though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it was -warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just off from -Mother’s room was a little room, with nothing in it but a huge bed, -where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which Gilbert’s clothes -were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one representing a donkey -in the midst of illimitable and ineffable summer pastures, and marked, -“Everything Lovely,” the other showing him in the blizzard before a -locked stabledoor, with “Nobody loves me!” Against the tall window, -at the foot of the bed, were rows and rows of shelves, on which stood -flower-pots all winter long, geraniums and begonias, and heliotrope -plants, so that they could catch the full warmth of the winter sun -and keep green for summer, when Mother took them out of the pots and -put them in rows in the garden again. The window was almost smothered -in rich greenery, and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a -winter morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the -leaves, he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted -tracery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads,--fierce dragomans -with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen with round -helmets, or animals such as Gilbert had seen at the Zoo--camels with -misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head of a lion. It was -very startling to wake up, lying on one’s back and gazing out where -this faint light appeared in the crevices between these weird figures. -The pleasant green plants with which they had gone to bed had given -place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be plants. But how could -plants look so terrifyingly like heads? Everywhere he looked there -appeared a bristling, clear shape. The window was a vast tracery of -strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure how real they were, and he -was always grateful when the advancing light gradually brought out the -greenness of the leaves, and finally threw them into relief, so that -the menacing head would finally dissolve into the utterly meaningless -juncture of two geranium blossoms, and the elephant trunk became a -familiar begonia frond. Then he was cheered, and he wondered how he had -ever seen anything else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could -make him see the things he had seen. - -It was in this room that Gilbert’s mother put the children to bed every -night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the door just -slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything was so cozy and -comfortable during the undressing. Then would come the frightening -thought, “Perhaps this comforting presence is going to be withdrawn!” -For sometimes you would wake up suddenly with a little clutch at the -heart. The dim light would be burning through the crack of the door, -but there would be a vast stillness. You knew that the house was empty, -that somehow it was the middle of a night that would never end, and -everybody, Garna, Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant -muffled cavern and would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little -round ball at your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail. -The light burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity, -of being lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were -infinitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a -little, and fell off asleep. - -Or if you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons of -time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs, and in a -minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were safe. And you -said, “Mother!” in a half-choking voice, while great waves of relief -and happiness surged through you, and you went sound asleep. So Gilbert -got in the habit of asking his mother every night whether she was going -out. And what assurance and peace there was when she said she was not! -He was safe, no matter how long the night lasted. - -In Gilbert’s new house, you could go upstairs in two ways--the -front-stairs, and the back-stairs. The front-stairs were very straight -and very long and very steep, and were covered with a thick carpet. -They went straight down to a little narrow hall and the front door. -The back-stairs were crooked and narrow and covered with oil-cloth. -They ran down to a little passageway which connected the back parlor -with the “side-door,” right at the opening of the dark, steep flight -that went down into the dining-room. All these regions and passages -in Gilbert’s house had names. Gilbert soon learned that he must never -go down the front-stairs, but must always use the back ones. But one -unfortunate day, his cousin George, who was eight, showed him the -delights of sliding down the banisters, and Gilbert, although he could -never walk down the front-stairs without a feeling of the most awful -guilt, let himself be seduced into this new and amazing adventure. The -rapturous slide down the long, straight, polished wood was so safe and -gave him such a thrill that he tried it again and again. But Olga, -who by this time was all of five years old, insisted on riding too, -and threatened so instant and tumultuous a devastation of tears, that -Gilbert and George, in a panic at being discovered, held her up and, -having adjusted her little legs and cautioned her as to the way one let -one’s fingers slide along the slippery rail, let her go. - -Now there was attached to the wall by a bracket a lamp, which Gilbert’s -legs just cleared, although he was always conscious of a fine potential -crash. But as Olga went slipping down the rail, it was inevitable that -she should choose just that place to fall off, which Gilbert had all -the morning been thrillingly avoiding. She fell floppily into the hall, -carrying the lamp-shade with her, and making a crash which brought -Mother and Annie from the kitchen and Garna from her room above. Then -there were tears and scoldings in a great flood, and a few reluctant -whacks; George was sent home, and the banisters were never slid on -again, at least not by Olga. Gilbert used them only as a special treat -to himself and only in his most unwatched moments. It was one instance -where his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of -that slide. - -Gilbert’s house, however, afforded few excitements. Garna’s big room -you did not often enter, though you might on Sunday while she was -putting on her veil and bonnet to take you to church. Gilbert did not -care very much how the rest of the family got to church, but it was one -of the most important things in his life that he should go with Garna. -At nine o’clock the church-bell would begin to ring, gayly, quickly, -sometimes the long peals almost falling over each other in their -eagerness. Then it would stop, with a final long echo. Now the whole -town knew that it was Sunday. Then at ten o’clock the great bell would -ring again, not quite so gayly nor so quickly, to let the people know -that there would be church that day. Then at twenty minutes after ten -the bell would begin its real earnestness,--slow and solemn strokes, -each one ringing its full sonorous note and dying away before the next -one began. - -At the first stroke of the ten o’clock bell, Gilbert would rush to -Garna’s room, where he would find her putting on her black silk dress -and little lace collar. Her black bonnet with its long crêpe veil, -which Gilbert soon learned meant that grandfather was dead, would be -spread out on the bed. When the last bell began to ring, and Garna had -not yet put on her bonnet, an icy fear gripped Gilbert’s heart. They -would be late! The maddening slowness with which Garna put the last -touches to her bonnet used to send Gilbert into a delirium of anxiety. -Finally they were out on the elm-shaded streets, Gilbert fairly tugging -and straining to get them there before service began. Mother and Olga -were always late, but that was because Olga cried. He could abandon -them. He did not know what would happen to Garna and him if they were -late, but he felt that it would be something namelessly awful. - -But they were never late. They would sit there in the pew several -minutes while the organ played and the great bell boomed outside, up in -the tower. Then the minister would come in, and a sense of security -and peace would steal over Gilbert, listening to the hymn and looking -up at Garna, so glossy and placid next him in the pew. - -In prayer-time, Gilbert would have liked to put his head down on the -pew-rail in front of him, just as Garna and all the other people did, -but he could not reach it. So he had to be content with ducking his -head into his hand, and holding his eyes very tightly shut until he -heard the “Amen” which sent them all upright again. Why people had to -conceal their faces while they prayed Gilbert did not know, but it gave -him a very solemn feeling to keep his eyes closed, and an even more -solemn one to open them surreptitiously and look over the wilderness of -bent backs. - -The ceiling was very far away, and very blue, with queer indented -squares that shot out reddish lines. Out of it came two enormous -chandeliers of brass, with a ring of lights around, which were -sometimes lighted on a dark day and made a chain of dancing lamplight. -There were galleries running down each side of the church, held up by -slender white pillars. Outside, just at the top of the pillars, ran a -narrow ledge. Gilbert’s imagination would perform perilous adventures -along that ledge. You would walk along, along, and around the back and -up the other side, dizzily perched above the congregation, clinging to -the brass rail, and you would come to the choir behind the minister’s -desk. From the ledge to the choir was a gap of a few feet, but Gilbert -saw himself jumping it, and his heart would beat faster. And then he -would return painfully, exhilaratedly, around that ledge, holding on so -tightly. - -When Gilbert got tired of this play he would look up at the strange -figures that were fastened to the under side of the ledge. They looked -like playing-cards, little square raised blocks marked with black -points, at regular intervals down the gallery. Gilbert sometimes -imagined that they were really cards, and that a hooded figure moving -down the aisles would touch them with a wand, and they would lose their -frozen state and fall to the floor. From where Gilbert sat, lines went -out from him in all directions: lines of the pews, lines of the aisle -ahead which went along under the gallery, angles of the walls, lines -of the windows. Sometimes, as his gaze wandered around the church, the -line of a pillar would coincide with the line of a window, and Gilbert -would hold them there together, getting a sudden satisfaction out of -holding them in coincidence, and letting them go reluctantly, only when -his eye would mount to the queer people in the gallery, whose bonnets -and eyes and noses you could just see over the brass railing. - -Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus’s family was away, Garna and -Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew that was as -big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for your feet. In -front of you was the clock, the face of which you could not see, for it -looked out straight towards the minister, but whose ticking you could -hear. Gilbert felt very public and self-conscious when he sat there, -under the high ceiling, with two long arms of the gallery, crowded with -its two tiers of people, stretching away on either hand. Yet it was -all very august, and religion seemed to have attained its most solemn -worthiness when you sat in Uncle Marcus’s pew. - -The minister was very large and very loud, and he wore a white tie. -Gilbert did not altogether like him when he laid his moist and unctuous -hand on Gilbert’s head, as he sometimes did in Sunday School. For -after you had gone to church with Garna, you let her go home, and you -stayed to Sunday School. You went into an old brick building, which -stood a little distance from the church. The light poured through the -big windows, and you could see the lilac-bushes outside. The room swam -with very fluffy little girls, but when they had sung several hymns, -Gilbert and half a dozen other little boys were shepherded into a -corner and sat on their little chairs in a circle around Miss Fogg, -while she taught them the lesson for the day. Gilbert always knew his -golden text, and he was often the only little boy who did. Miss Fogg -would smile at him, which would make him uncomfortable, and he would be -glad when they all stood up and marched around the room to drop their -pennies into a basket which Miss Fogg held while they sang: - - “Hear the pennies dropping, - Listen while they fall, - Every one for Jesus. - He will have them all.” - -Gilbert did not doubt that Jesus would have them all, and he was -not in the least interested in what Jesus did with them when he had -them. It was part of the ceremony, to which you resigned yourself -unquestioningly, and when the penny-dropping was over, Gilbert ran -home as fast as he could go, to the wonderful dinner of roast beef and -potatoes that Mother had for them on Sundays. - -Sunday School was a neutral, colorless event in his life. Every Sunday -as they left the Sunday School, each child would receive a little -leaflet; those who had known their golden texts would get a card with -a golden star on it. Gilbert always cried a little if he lost his card -while running home, and he cherished his leaflet for a day or two. But -he never tried to read it, and he soon mislaid his golden star. Good -boys, after they had got a prodigious number of golden stars, were -each supposed to receive as a reward a Bible all of his own. But when -Gilbert was seven years old, Garna gave him a beautiful thick black -Bible, with his name--Gilbert Shotwell Harden--stamped on the cover -in golden letters. Besides, it did not appeal to him to grub along -for a prize. Far better to have things, glorious, imposing, come to -you out of the blue sky. Once Aunt Shotwell promised him fifty cents -if he would learn the Westminster Catechism, but Gilbert never got -farther than “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him -forever.” Something obscure, unconscious, revolted in him at the base -commerciality of the transaction, and although he did not question that -this was the chief end of man indeed, he did not want to be bribed into -proclaiming it. - -Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam -had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built -and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac, -and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into -the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should -have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been -shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the -housetops;--all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to -obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday -School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was -expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in -his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them. - -Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg -would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong -drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could -hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized -exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as -a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and -wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked, -and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which -this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine -crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization -of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of -drinking down wine or beer. One of the golden texts was a special -favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great -éclat, in a broad, free-verse style: - - “Wine is a maw-aw-ker, - Strong drink is ray-ay-ging, - And whoever is deceived there-by-y, - Is not--wise!” - -But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He early -learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to save us from -our sins, and that this was the central fact of life. Garna told him -about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had lessons in the -New Testament. We must all love God very much, and especially Jesus, -who had done so much for us. And in the solemn Sunday afternoons, -when Gilbert was told to take his Bible and sit by the window in the -back-parlor and read a chapter, he would sometimes wonder if he loved -God enough, or if he loved Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with -a white beard, reclining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew -equally well as a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in -one arm, and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago, -and whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into his -mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God, and of -tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them? The pastor -was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and yet with his beard and -square head and loud words, there must be a faint resemblance. Gilbert -certainly did not like him. - -Much more nearly like God was his father’s father, whom he had once -been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-haired, -white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold and -repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert did not -feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought to, that it -was the most important thing in life that he could do. So he would sit -there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of loving. He would -grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix his thought on the -majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty soon, he would feel -that indeed he now loved God, and he would be kept from sin. Jesus, who -was tenderer, he might have found easier to love, but for the fact of -those lambs. Gilbert had never seen young men carrying lambs, and the -picture, whose authenticity he did not question, aroused no emotion -within him. But after he had come to love God, he tightened his heart -towards the benignant being in the blue robe. - -He was always present, because before every meal they would all put -down their heads, so that they breathed upon their plates, and they -would ask Jesus to bless their food. Sometimes Gilbert would say it, -sometimes Olga, and the food unblessed would have tasted bad in their -mouths. Gilbert would have had a vague presentiment of something evil. -Did Garna and Mother love God? Garna must, because every day she would -put on her gold-rimmed spectacles and read a chapter in her Bible, and -mother would kneel down with Gilbert and Olga at night while they said -their prayers, and often murmur something fervently with them. The -prayers, they understood, were addressed directly to God in heaven, -and were necessary if you were to show your gratitude to the Heavenly -Father and ensure for yourself a peaceful and secure night. You asked -God also to bless all those people you were fond of, and you knew that -if they should die before they woke, their souls also would be taken to -Heaven with yours. - -If it was only with painful effort that Gilbert in his early days of -church and Sunday School loved God and Jesus, whom did he love? Did he -love Mother? He did not know. He loved her very much at night when he -felt her protecting presence in the house, but in the daytime she was -a strange being who did not seem interested in Gilbert and Olga. She -spent most of her time with little brother, or, if he were asleep, she -would be lying stretched across the foot of the bed, with her face in -her hands. Often there were tears in her eyes, and if Gilbert wanted -her to do something for him, she would say piteously that she was not -well. There were no more walks on the village green, but this did not -make any difference to Gilbert, for the wonderful yard in which Garna’s -house stood was a region that could never be explored or exhausted. - -The one person that Gilbert knew he loved was Garna. You could not -always see her, for she would be shut up in her room; but when you were -let in, how inexhaustible she was, how comfortable you felt, playing -about on the floor while Garna sat always by the window, sewing, always -sewing, looking so wise and jolly and good out of her gold-rimmed -spectacles. Garna was always the same, and always good to be with and -look upon. Gilbert loved to sit in her lap, and touch her hair, brushed -to such silky smoothness and parted in the middle. As she bent over, he -would run both hands back over it from her forehead, and laugh as she -laughed and pretended to arrange it again. - -Gilbert liked to have Garna all to himself, and it was fortunate -that Olga was not much interested in Garna. She did not seem to half -appreciate her or her wonderful room. But once in a while she would -take a perverse desire to come in with Gilbert when he went to see -Garna. Olga would have to be prevented with all his weight and force. -How could he stand so outrageous an invasion of his rights? And Olga -would probably hit him, concentrating all her round little pugnacity -into one stout blow, and Gilbert would hit back, and Olga would scream, -and Mother would come running, and there would be many tears, and Eden -would be spoiled, if not altogether denied him, for that afternoon. On -the very threshold, Olga, who did not really care to be with Garna, had -ruined his day with her! Hateful little Olga! And all the time, Garna -would be inside, behind the closed door, serene, unheeding, letting -her daughter, Gilbert’s mother, settle the whole affair, as far away -as if she were in Pampelune. Gilbert felt the perversity of Fate, the -inexorable aloofness of the gods, the fragility of happiness. Going -eagerly to taste this sweet exhilaration of an afternoon with Garna, -the cup, without any warning whatever, would be fatally dashed from -his lips. But he could not have it shared with Olga! - -Between Garna’s chair and the window was a high, chintz-colored box -which opened into a voluminous cavern of sheets and white things. In -the corner just behind Garna’s chair was the tall secretary-desk, with -its big doors above that opened on shelves full of books, and its heavy -writing-lid which folded down and rested horizontally on two supports -that pulled out on each side. You could sit on the high chintz-box -and write on the secretaire. Gilbert thought this was one of the most -satisfactory spots in the whole world. At your right was the window -looking down through the black-walnut trees to the street below; just -behind you sat Garna, busily knitting or sewing; you had all the flat, -shiny surface of the lid to make your puzzles on, or practise writing, -or draw on; your legs hung down over the chintz-box, high above the -ground; you were shut in to the most delicious privacy. At the back -of the secretaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in -which Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and -account-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment Garna -gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pencils and -paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the depredations -of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, whenever he thought of -her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of lawlessness, of -restless and devastating mischief. Sometimes, to make sure that no one -interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in the doors. But -Garna did not like that very much, and it was awkward if Mother or Aunt -Nan really came and wanted to come in, and Garna had to wonder how the -doors could ever have become locked. - -In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and sit -sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his face -against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoulder, -and listen to Garna’s stories of when she was a little girl. Gilbert -learned about her father’s house in Burnham, which he should some day -see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now; about his -mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that came from the -West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the canal that was dug, -when she was a little girl, through their very front yard, and on -which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by, the grandfather of -those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch from the porch of the house -in the back-street, and which he had almost forgotten now that he had -come to live with Garna. - -So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow with -its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories until, -in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew nothing -until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna’s high bed. Every now -and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would be allowed -to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was from any other -sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in her big chair in the -back-parlor, it was with a “I’m going to sleep with you to-night!” Then -he would get, not into the hard little bed with Olga, but into the -great feathery soft bed in Garna’s room. He would sink off to sleep in -billows and oceans of soft pillows and sheets. Along towards morning -he would half wake, perhaps, and there would be the huge, comforting, -dear presence of Garna filling the bed beside him, as he lay pressed -against her warm night-gown. And when he woke again, Mother would be -there standing by the side of the bed, and she would whisk him off to -her room to be dressed. And life would go on as before. - -Aunt Nan seemed to love Garna as much as Gilbert did. And she liked -Gilbert. Often, on summer days, she would take him up to her room -in the third-story, a region to which Gilbert never ventured alone, -for there were queer, pitchy-black closets and alcoves that led far -back under the sloping roof, and contained trunks and boxes, in which -and behind which you never knew what menacing forces of evil might -be hidden. At the top of the stairs was a little hall, lighted by a -sky-light, through which you saw the blue sky. Aunt Nan’s room was -shaped like an L, but the ceiling on one side ran down so steeply that -Gilbert could stand against the wall and touch the line where it joined -the ceiling. Aunt Nan would fix up a pallet on the floor, soft and -comfortable, and on hot days Gilbert would roll half-naked on it, while -Aunt Nan rubbed his hot arms with a sweet-smelling balsam. Then she -would sit and read a great shiny new book, which Gilbert spelled out -as “Psychology. James.” She had several books on shelves over her desk, -and a great bunch of programs stuck together on an iron hook that hung -on the wall. In the winter Aunt Nan was not in the house. Mother said -she was a teacher, and lived in New York. - -Aunt Nan was very tall and slender and very straight, and she had very -black hair that came over her forehead in a kind of bang. She always -wore black and white dresses, and she always had a bright fierceness -about her that Gilbert liked. She was several years younger than -Mother, and she was very proud. There was a stiff exhilaration in her -walk and in her laugh that daunted Gilbert a little, but made him like -to be with her. Sometimes she would put the tennis-net across the green -lawn and play with a neighbor, darting so swiftly, like a long black -bird, across the green, hitting the ball so straight and true, and -blazing so fiercely with her black eyes when she missed, that Gilbert -sat enthralled, motionless, until the set was over and they went in -to supper. On those days he would help her mark the court, going to -the little barn and watching her fill the marker with white powdery -lime, and then helping her push it over the closely-mown grass. The -long summer days were full of Aunt Nan. She loved the garden, with its -flower-beds, and she loved to see the paths all clipped and weeded and -raked. Once a week, a black man would come from somewhere, and spend -the whole day with Aunt Nan, mowing the lawn, digging the vegetable -garden, and weeding the flowers. That was a glorious day for Gilbert -and for Aunt Nan. How much there was to be done. They all seemed to be -wrestling with the whole yard, to turn it up, to bring it to a bright, -shiny newness. At the end of the day, Gilbert would walk about the -garden on the gravelly paths with Aunt Nan to survey their handiwork. -She would be immensely contented. Her bright black eyes would soften; -she would be weary and her hands would be dirty, but Gilbert would feel -the peace that radiated from her at the sight of this freshly burnished -garden. The grass would be smooth like a carpet, the flower-beds and -the vegetable-garden all dark and tumbled with their upturned earth. -The paths would be straight brown indented tracks, or, where they went -around the house, beautifully curved tracks, with the marks of the -rake on the fine earth where George had worked it over. During the week -the grass would grow longer, the weeds shoot up in the flower-beds, -the paths become bedraggled at the edges, the grass grow up rank on -the lawns. But soon Saturday would come with George, and the fine -renovation would take place all over again. - -Aunt Nan was neat and quick in her movements. She had a cold scorn for -dirty faces and dirty hands, and Gilbert sometimes became a little -weary trying to satisfy her demands. He was always a little intimidated -by her, but at the same time fascinated by her vibrancy, her restless -passion. He loved to see her coming towards him, because he knew that -she would snatch him away to something interesting. But he was a little -fearful, too; subdued by that decisiveness that made him realize how -little what he wanted would count. She did not kiss or fondle Gilbert -much. She would take him on her lap and put her arms around him. - -Mother was never like that. She did not seem to know what she wanted. -Every incident was a crisis. Gilbert found that he and Olga could -resist her by delaying. Dirty faces could be grudgingly and slowly -cleaned. One could come in the utmost disapproving reluctance when one -was called. Mother was always distressed that you did not obey her; she -was always distressed about what to do with you. She would implore you -to be good, and you would be good with a certain chilly haughtiness, -because it seemed somewhat humiliating to see Mother so distressed and -uncertain. Olga did not usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert -soon got the habit of ignoring his mother’s expressed desires and -wearing out her decisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his -own desires. - -That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a domain, -a principality. It was years before he had really explored it -thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich and -bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in the -back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now that he -had found them, something down very deep in him told him that this was -what his restlessness and sadness had craved. - -You rushed out the side-door--for the front door was just as heavily -interdicted as the front stairs--and you tumbled into a bed of myrtles -and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick stalks and -grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the path were two -tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert’s shutter by his bed -when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the green, unbroken lawn, -covered with velvety grass that even the lawn-mower could not keep from -growing thick and soft like a carpet. The lawn went straight up towards -the neighbor’s fence, but just before it reached there it turned into -a long flower-bed, with rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that -climbed over and pretended that there was no fence there at all. To the -right, and up near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly -pines set in a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named “Three Trees -Grove.” The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious, -almost as big as Gilbert’s room. It could be turned into a house, or a -shop or a church, at a moment’s notice. The big trunks stretching up -above Gilbert’s head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he could -not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel. - -At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or -seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines -and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons, all -through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went every day -to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which the horses and -carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was alive, Garna told -him, they had their horses and Aunt Nan had ridden one of them, and so -had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas now. Gilbert could see traces -of the carriage road which had led out through the side-gate to the -side-street, but which was now all grass-grown. The barn was now full -of rakes and hoes and wheel-barrows, but there were deep bins where -still remained a peck or two of oats and a measure, and there was a -manger which swung back and forth from the stall to the bin, so you -could fill it and then turn it in to the horse. Gilbert wished that -there were still horses to play with, but it was fun turning the manger -and making Olga and Ethel pretend to be horses. - -If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant and -gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which by -this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of -blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the -broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that Gilbert -could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vegetables to -eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus’s barn and his garden. -Straight down back of Garna’s house, through the middle of the yard, -ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its own, and then past -the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it joined a path in Uncle -Marcus’s yard. Along the foot of the path, where it passed the garden, -was a row of rhubarb, and on the other side Aunt Nan’s sweet-peas, -which she planted every spring. On the other side of the path was an -open meadow where the grass was not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes -lay on cool summer days and looked up at great white clouds floating -past in the blue sky. Nearer the house you came to a wilderness of -fruit-trees, pears of all kinds and apples, and as you approached the -street the yard broke into flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to -the house grew lilies-of-the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which -Aunt Nan could take between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on. -Along the path which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink -and white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that -Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the whole -side of the yard was a beautiful japonica hedge, with its white and -red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smelling green -balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed in the hedge -that threw down their keys in the spring. And all along the front of -the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden fence just within -which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees, with their thin green -clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell in heaps on the ground. -Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the -barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the -covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them -on a stone. - -The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long torpor -when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sunlight in -Mother’s room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was only when -spring came, and he could run about and see the buds and the flowers -come out one after another, that he felt alive again. And it was good -in the endless summer days to have so much to attend to. He could be -playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have running in an undercurrent -of his mind the sense of the garden or the japonica hedge, or the -manger in the barn. He could go down to the cherry-tree to see if the -cherries were ripe, or to the currant-bushes, or he could prick his -fingers on the rose-bushes, or get himself stuck in the gum of the -pine-trees. The yard was a world, and only very dimly did he imagine -anything beyond it. What his mother did in the kitchen or about the -house only very dimly concerned him. What they had to live on never -entered his mind. His sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the -rebellions of Olga, or the calamities of weather which would keep -them all home from a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street -and gave them cookies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and -yellow-jackets. Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them -in the darkened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly, -insistently at them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to -sleep, the tædium vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave. -He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow -dreadfully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if -alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was taking -an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The -world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do. - -And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of -eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when -you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept -Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never -occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there -was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed -to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. The tædium -vitæ was transmuted into the colossal ennui of heaven. Not as a pearly -municipality of golden streets and white-robed choirs did Gilbert -imagine heaven, but always in the guise of those white clouds on which -God rode. He saw himself clearly, seated infinitely high above the -earth, to which he should never be able to come again. Perhaps there -was the intimation of a harp, but what seized Gilbert’s imagination -was the vast emptiness of the space around him, the disorientation -of everything. Time and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but -frozen; and in the hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body, -all alert and sensitive at every pore of time that dripped past him, -would be terribly conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this -immobile time in empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he -feared. On the contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the -clearest, most luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to -look at the sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which -you could look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really -blue or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like -a bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to have -been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness. And if in -this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating, that looked -solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert would sweep -again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps since that last -afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feeling of homelessness -and of fear would fall upon him. His play would flag until the clouds -drifted away again and he forgot that they had come. - -The first break in Gilbert’s world came when his mother decided that he -and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years old, and when -his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt at first rather -pleased at the idea of something so important. What would they teach -him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach him. He knew how to read and -write and he could spell all the words he wrote. He read all the books -he was given and sometimes looked into Hawthorne’s Wonder Tales, and -read a page or two. When he went back for the book, however, he would -forget where he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What -did it matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew his -multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all about -the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had known -since he was four or five, and what good did they do him? - -But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading her -out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the street. -Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and anxious -air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission. At -the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he -would carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any -horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling Olga -precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper green, under -the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron’s. - -To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take Miss -Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce eyes -touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two unlocked all -the latent cruelty in him. She was there to teach Gilbert and Olga -and the half-dozen other little children who came to the school-room -over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them. She knew that -children under seven needed to be taught to read and write and spell. -So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her hard and bitter -work. - -But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it seemed -absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle through -the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried painfully -to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced through the -words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he would say that -“retire” meant “go to bed,” because he had seen it mean that in a book -he had read. And Miss Waldron would say he was a saucy boy, and plead -with him to answer nicely. Then he would mimic her, and watch her fight -back the temper in her sad, fierce eyes. She would stand him in the -corner, with his back to the class, and he would look round and wink -at the other children to make them laugh. Miss Waldron’s sisters would -come up from the kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert -not to make the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a cookie if he -would be good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything, -and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o’clock, -and they all went home for the day. - - - - - Transcriber’s Notes - -Errors in punctuation have been fixed. - -Page 89: “large aethestic” changed to “large aesthetic” - -Page 93: “bright promsises” changed to “bright promises” - -Page 255: “capitalistic bourgeosie” changed to “capitalistic -bourgeoisie” - -Page 313: “Glbert would” changed to “Gilbert would” - -Page 321: “white cumulous” changed to “white cumulus” - -Page 336: “pricky tangle” changed to “prickly tangle” - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL -AND OTHER ESSAYS *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law 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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