Title: The Invisible Censor
Author: Hackett, Francis
Language: English
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THE INVISIBLE CENSOR

By

FRANCIS HACKETT


    New York
    B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
    MCMXXI



    Copyright, 1921,
    by B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
    Printed in U. S. A.



    TO MY WIFE
    SIGNE TOKSVIG

    WHOSE LACK OF INTEREST IN THIS BOOK
    HAS BEEN MY CONSTANT DESPERATION



These sketches and articles appeared in the _New Republic_ and I am
indebted to the other editors for being allowed to reprint them.



Contents


  · THE INVISIBLE CENSOR
  · WHISKY
  · BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN
  · FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
  · AS AN ALIEN FEELS
  · SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
  · THE NEXT NEW YORK
  · CHICAGO
  · THE CLOUDS OF KERRY
  · HENRY ADAMS
  · THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
  · THE IRISH REVOLT
  · A LIMB OF THE LAW
  · A PERSONAL PANTHEON
  · NIGHT LODGING
  · YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC
  · THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID
  · WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
  · “WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE”
  · WAR EXPERTS
  · OKURA SEES NEWPORT
  · THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED
  · BLIND
  · “AND THE EARTH WAS DRY”
  · TELEGRAMS
  · OF PLEASANT THINGS
  · THE AVIATOR



THE INVISIBLE CENSOR


Not long ago I met a writer who happened to apply the word “cheap” to
Mr. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. It astonished me, because this was an
erudite, cultivated woman, a distinguished woman, and she meant what she
said.

A “cheap” effect, I assume, is commonly one that builds itself on a
false foundation. It may promise beautifully, but it never lives up to
its promise. Whether it is a house or a human character, a binding or a
book, it proves itself gimcrack and shoddy. It hasn’t the goods. And of
Eminent Victorians, as I remembered it (having read it to review it),
this was the last thing to be said. The book began by fitting
exquisitely, but it went on fitting exquisitely. It never pulled or
strained. And the memory of it wears like a glove.

Now why, after all, did I like this book so thoroughly, which my
distinguished friend thought so cheap? For many minor reasons of course,
as one likes anything—contributory reasons—but principally, as I
laboriously analyzed it, because in Eminent Victorians the invisible
censor was so perfectly understood. What seemed cheap to her ladyship
was, I do not doubt, the very thing that made Eminent Victorians seem so
precious to me—the deft disregard of appearances, the refusal to let
decorum stand in the way of our possessing the facts. This to my critic
was a proof that Mr. Strachey was imperceptive and vulgar—“common” the
ugly word is. To me it simply proved that he knew his game. What he
definitely disregarded, as so many felt, was not any decorum dear and
worth having. It was simply that decorum which to obey is to produce
falsification. The impeccable craft of Mr. Strachey was shown in his
evaluation, not his acceptance, of decorum. He did not take his
characters at their face value, while he did not do the other vulgar
thing, go through their careers with a muck-rake. In vivisecting them
(the awful thing to do, presumably), he never let them die on him. He
opened them out, but not cruelly or brutally. He did it as Mr. William
Johnston plays tennis or as Dr. Blake is said to operate or as Dr. Muck
conducts an orchestra or as Miss Kellerman dives. He did it for the best
result under the circumstances and with a form that comes of a real
command of the medium—genuine “good form.”

The essential achievement of Eminent Victorians is worth dwelling on
because in every book of social character the question of the invisible
censor is unavoidably present. By the censor I do not mean that poor
blinkered government official who decides on the facts that are worthy
of popular acquaintance. I mean a still more secret creature of still
more acute solicitude, who feels that social facts must be manicured and
pedicured before they are fit to be seen. He is not concerned with the
facts themselves but with their social currency. He is the supervisor of
what we say we do, the watchman over our version and our theoretical
estimate of ourselves. His object, as I suppose, is to keep up the good
old institutions, to set their example before the world, to govern the
imitative monkey in us. And to fulfill that object he continually
revises and blue-pencils the human legend. He is constantly at the elbow
of every man or woman who writes. An invisible, scarcely suspected of
existing, he is much more active, much more solidly intrenched, than the
legal censor whom liberals detest.

Every one is now more or less familiar with the Freudian censor, the
domesticated tribal agent whose function it seems to be to enforce the
tribal scruples and superstitions—to keep personal impulse where the
tribe thinks it belongs. This part of the ego—to give it a spatial
name—came in for a good deal of excited remonstrance in the early days
of popular Freudian talk. To-day, I think, the censor is seldom so
severely interpreted. In many cases there is clearly a savagery or a
stupidity which brings about “the balked disposition,” but it is being
admitted that the part which is regulated by the censor, the
“disposition” end of the ego, may not always be socially tolerable; and
as for the “balking,” there is a difference between blunt repressiveness
and enlightened regulation. Still, with all this acceptance of ethics,
the nature of the censorship has to be recognized—the true character of
the censor is so often not taste or conscience in any clear condition,
but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional bully. In
the censor as he appears in psycho-analytic literature there is
something of the archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic—all just as
likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is the thing in us which is
against license and anarchy.

In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor of whom Eminent
Victorians is so subversive, there are particularly these irrational and
ritualistic characteristics, these remnants of outgrown institutions,
these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed. Most biography,
especially official biography, is written with such a censor in mind,
under his very eye. Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and
stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him in mind. Hovering
behind Eminent Victorians we see agonized official biography, with its
finger on its lips, and the contrast is perhaps the chief delight that
Mr. Strachey affords. When Cardinal Manning’s pre-clerical marriage, for
example, came to be considered by Mr. Strachey, he did not obey the
conventional impulse, did not subordinate that fact of marriage as the
Catholic Church would wish it to be subordinated (as a matter of “good
taste,” of course). He gave to that extremely relevant episode its due
importance. And so Manning, for the first time for most people, took on
the look not so much of the saintly cardinal of official biography as of
a complex living man.

What does the censor care for this æsthetic result? Very little. What
the censor is chiefly interested in is, let us say, edification. He aims
by no means to give us access to the facts. He aims not at all to let us
judge for ourselves. With all his might he strives to relate the facts
under his supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever it
may be. And so, when facts come to light which do not chime in with his
prepossession, he does his best either to discredit them or to set them
down as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. And the policy that he
is serving is not æsthetic.

A theory of the æsthetic is now beside the point, but I am sure it would
move in a relation to human impulses very different from the relation of
the censor. The censor is thinking, presumably, of immediate law and
order, with its attendant conventions and respectabilities. The æsthetic
could not be similarly bound. It is not reckless of conduct, but surely
enormously reckless of decorum, with its conventions and
respectabilities clustering around the status quo. Hence the apparent
“revolt” of modernism, the insurrection of impulse against edification.

But there is more in Eminent Victorians than an amusing, impish refusal
to edify. There is the instructive contrast between the “censored
celebrity” and the uncensored celebrity disinterestedly observed.
Disinterestedly observed, for one thing, we get something in these
celebrities besides patriotism and mother-love and chastity and heroism.
We get hot impulses and cold calculations, brandy and treachery, the
imperious and the supine, glorious religiousness and silly family
prayers. And these things, though very unlike the products of official
photography, are closely related to impulses as we know them in
ourselves. To find them established for Mr. Strachey’s “eminent”
Victorians is to enjoy a constant dry humor, since the invisible censor,
the apostle of that expediency known as edification, stood at the very
heart of Victorianism.

This is possibly why Samuel Butler, in his autobiographical way, is so
remarkable as a Victorian. In the midst of innumerable edifying figures,
he declined to edify. When people said to him, “Honor thy father and thy
mother,” he answered in effect that his father was a pinhead theologian
who had wanted to cripple his mentality, and his mother was, to use his
own phrase, full of the seven deadly virtues. This was not decorous but
it had the merit of being true. And all the people whose unbidden
censors had been forcing good round impulses into stubborn parental
polygons immediately felt the relief of this revelation. Not all of them
confess it. When they have occasion to speak or write about “mothers”—as
if the biological act of parturition brings with it an unquestionable
“mother” psyche—most of them still allow the invisible censor to govern
them and represent them as having feelings not really their own. But
even this persistence of the censor could not deprive Samuel Butler of
his effectiveness. He has spoken out, regardless of edification, and
that sort of work cannot be undone.

A similar work is performed by such highly personal confessants as Marie
Bashkirtseff and W. N. P. Barbellion, and even by Mary MacLane. The
account that these impulsive human beings give of themselves is
sensational simply because it clashes with the strict preconception that
we are taught to establish. But only a man who remembers nothing or
admits nothing of his own impulses can deny the validity of theirs. The
thing that takes away from their interest, as one grows older, is the
unimportance of the censorship that agonizes them. Their documentary
value being their great value, they lose importance as more specific and
dramatic documents become familiar. And with psycho-analysis there has
been a huge increase in the evidence of hidden life. It is the
Montaignes who remain, the confessants who offer something besides a
psychological document—a transcendence which is not incoherent with
pain.

But these various confessions are significant. They indicate the
existence and the vitality of the censor. They show that in the simplest
matters we have not yet attained freedom of speech. Why? Because, I
imagine, the world is chock-full of assumptions as to conduct which,
while irrational and ritualistic and primitive, have all sorts of
sanctions thrown around them and must take a whole new art of education
to correct. Until this art it established and these assumptions are
automatically rectified, it will be impossible to exercise free speech
comfortably. An attempt may be made, of course, and indeed must be made,
but to succeed too well will for many years mean either being
exterminated or being ostracized.

It is not hard to show how each of us in turn becomes an agent of the
invisible censorship. You, for instance, may have a perfectly free mind
on the subject of suffrage, but you may have extremely strong views on
the subject of sex. (Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, to be specific, thinks
that Fielding is nothing but a “smutty” author.) Or you may think
yourself quite emancipated on the subject of sex-desires and be
hopelessly intolerant on the subject of the Bolsheviki. The French
Rights of Man held out, after all, for the sacred rights of property—and
the day before that, it was considered pretty advanced to believe in the
divine right of kings. It is not humanly possible, considering how
relative liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even convince
oneself of the necessity of examining them, and in every case we are
sure to be tempted to oppose certain novel ideas in the name of inertia,
respectability and decorum. To dissemble awkward facts, in such cases,
is much easier than to account for them—which is where the censor comes
in.

I do not say that it is possible to do away with every discipline, even
the rule-of-thumb of decorum. As a subservient middle-class citizen, I
believe in the regulation of impulse. But as an intellectual fact, the
use of the blue pencil in the interests of decorum is exceedingly inept.
Human impulses are much too lively to be extinguished by the denial of
expression. And if sane expression is denied to them, they’ll find
expression of another kind.

Decorum has its uses, especially on the plane of social intercourse. I
admit this all the more eagerly because I have seen much of one
brilliant human being who has practically no sense of opposition. If he
sees something that he wants, he helps himself. It may be the milk on
the lunch-table that was intended for Uncle George. It may be the new
volume from England that it took nine weeks to bring across. It may be
the company of some sensitive gentlewoman or the busy hour of the mayor
of Chicago. The object makes no visible difference to my friend. If he
wants it, he sticks out his hand and takes it. And if it comes loose, he
holds on.

Associated with this aggressiveness there is a good deal of purpose not
self-regarding. The man is by no means all greedy maw. But the thing
that distinguishes him is the quickness and frankness with which he
obeys his impulse. Between having an impulse and acting on it there lies
for him a miraculously short time.

In dealing with such a man, most people begin hilariously. Not all of
them keep up with him in the same heroic spirit. At first it is
extraordinarily stimulating to find a person who is so “creative,” who
sweeps so freely ahead. Soon the dull obligations, the tedious details,
begin to accumulate, and the man with the happy impulsiveness leaves all
these dull obligations to his struggling friends. His lack of decorum in
these respects is a source of hardship and misunderstanding, especially
where persons of less energy or more circumspection are attendant. In
his case, I admit, I see the raw problem of impulse, and I am glad to
see his impulse squelched.

But even this barbarian is preferable to the apathetic repressed human
beings by whom he is surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is
invaluable because “creative.” And he should never be blocked in: he
should at most be canalled.

The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illustrated in his
rational subordination of impulse, but in those subordinations that
violate human and social freedom. And the worst of them are the filmy,
the vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the opportunity of
truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently difficult picture-puzzle, but
what chance have we if the turnip-headed censor confiscates some
particularly indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike? On
reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to escape from those wax
effigies that we once believed to be statesmen—the kind of effigies of
which text-books and correct histories and correct biographies are full!
How we rejoice to escape from them, wondering that they had ever imposed
on us, wondering that teachers and pious families and loyal historians
ever lent themselves to this conspiracy against truth! But the horrible
fact is, Mr. Strachey is one in a million. He has only poked his finger
through the great spider-web of so-called “vital lies.”

Meanwhile, in the decorous and respectable biographies, the same old
“vital lies” are being told. The insiders, the initiated, the
disillusioned, are aware of them. They no longer subsist on them. They
read between the lines. And yet when the insiders see in print the true
facts—say, about Robert Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or John
Jones—these very insiders rush forward with a Mother Hubbard to fling
around the naked truth. We must not speak the truth. We must edify. We
must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced world.

It means that we need a revolution in education, nothing less. It means
that the truth must be taken out of the hands of the censor. We must be
prepared to shed oceans of ink.



WHISKY


It was a wet, gusty night and I had a lonely walk home. By taking the
river road, though I hated it, I saved two miles, so I sloshed ahead
trying not to think at all. Through the barbed wire fence I could see
the racing river. Its black swollen body writhed along with
extraordinary swiftness, breathlessly silent, only occasionally making a
swishing ripple. I did not enjoy looking at it. I was somehow afraid.

And there, at the end of the river road where I swerved off, a figure
stood waiting for me, motionless and enigmatic. I had to meet it or turn
back.

It was a quite young girl, unknown to me, with a hood over her head, and
with large unhappy eyes.

“My father is very ill,” she said without a word of introduction. “The
nurse is frightened. Could you come in and help?”

There was a gaunt house set back from the road, on a little slope. I
could see a wan light upstairs.

“The nurse is not scared,” the girl corrected, “but she is nervous. I
wish you could come.”

“Of course,” and on my very word she turned and led the way in.

The hall was empty. It had nothing in it except a discouraged oil lamp
on a dirty kitchen table. The shadowy stairs were bare. On my left on
the ground floor a woman with gray hair and rusty face and red-rimmed
eyes shuffled back into the shadows at my entry, a sort of ignoble
Niobe.

“That’s my mother,” the grave child explained. And to the retreating
slatternly figure the child called, “This man has come to help, Mother,”
as if men dropped from the sky.

She went up into the shadows and I followed. A flight of stairs, a long
creaking landing. Another flight of stairs. Stumbles. Another landing. A
stale aroma of cat. And a general sense that, although the staircase was
well made and the landings wide, there was not one stick of furniture in
the house.

As we approached the top floor we met fresher air and the pallid
emanation of a night-light. A figure stood waiting at the head of the
stairs.

This was a stout little nun, her face framed in creaking linen, and a
great rustle of robes and rosary beads whenever she moved. She began a
sharp whisper the minute we climbed to the landing.

“He’s awake. He’s out of his head. I’m glad you’ve come. Now, child, be
off to bed with you, like a good girl. This way, if you please.”

The child’s vast eyes accepted me. “I’ll go to Mother,” she said, and
she receded downstairs. The nun entered an open door to the right, and
again I meekly followed.

It was a room out of the fables. There was a tall fireplace facing the
door, with a slat of packing-case burning in it as well as the wind
would permit, and a solitary candle glimmering in a bottle, set on the
table at the head of the bed. Its uncertain light fell on the tousled
hair of a once kempt human being, now evidently a semi-maniac staring at
presences in the room. Down the chimney the wind came bluffing at
intervals, and the one high window querulously rattled. The center of
the room was the sick man’s burning eyes.

I walked through his view and he did not see me. The nun and myself
stood watching him from the head of the bed.

“Oh, he’s awful bad, you have no idea how bad he is; I’m afraid for him;
I am indeed. What am I to call you, Mister? Here, take this chair.”

Before I answered her she continued, in a whisper that slid along from
one _s_ to the next. “They said the doctor would be here at seven and
it’s nearly twelve as it is. He’s not coming. I wish he was here.”

The sick man seemed to see us. “That’s right now,” he said, whistling
his breath. “Bring me my clothes, I want to go home.”

The nun laid her arm on him. “Lean back now, dear, and it’ll be all
right, I’m telling you.” And she gently but ineffectually tried to press
him down.

The sick man turned his face on her, into the candlelight. He was long
unshaved, but the two things that struck me most, after the crop of gray
bristle, were the dry cavern of his mouth and the scalding intensity of
his eyes. I was terrified lest those eyes should alight on me, and yet I
gazed hard at him. His lips were flaked with yellow scales, and dry
mucus was in strings at the corners of his mouth. His night-shirt gaped
open, showing a very hairy black chest. He seemed a shrunken man, not a
very tall man, but his shoulders were broad and his chin very square. To
support his chin seemed the great effort of his jaws. It fell open on
him, giving him a vacant foolish expression, with his teeth so black and
irregular, and he tried his best to clamp his teeth tight. The working
of his jaws, however, scarcely interfered with his whistling breath or
his gasping words.

“They will be at the back door, I say. God!” a feeble scream and
whimper. “Bring me my clothes. You’re hiding them on me. Oh, why are you
hiding them on me? Can’t you give me my clothes?”

“You’re home now, dear. You’re home now,” the nurse assured him. “Isn’t
that your own clock on the mantel? Lie down now and I’ll make you a
comfortable drink and put you to sleep.”

“Boy, fetch me my coat.”

“Don’t mind him,” the nun turned to me, “but do you cover his feet.”

His feet had lost the gray blanket. They stared blankly up from the end
of the bed. I covered them snugly, glad to have something to do.

“It’s all the whisky in him,” the nun whispered when at last he went
limp and lay down. “It’s got to his brain. I thought he was over the
pneumonia, but that whisky has him saturated. The poor thing! The poor
thing!”

“Well, I must be going now,” the sick man ejaculated, and with one twist
of his body he was out of bed.

“Oh, keep yourself covered, for the love of God!” The poor nun ran after
him with the blanket as his old flannel night shirt fluttered up his
legs.

He staggered up to me fiercely, and his eyes razed my face.

“Fiddle your grandmother,” he muttered, “I’m off home, I tell you.”

“You can’t leave the room; it’s better for you to go back to bed,” and I
held him round with my arms.

“See here, you,” his yellow cheeks reddened with his passionate effort,
“you can’t hold me a prisoner any longer. Oh, Barrett, Barrett, what are
you doing to me to destroy me?”

I knew no Barrett, but the poor creature was shivering with anguish and
cold. I put my arms around him and tried to move him out of the draught
of the door. His thin arms closed on me at the first hint of force, and
he clenched with feverish vigor. I could feel his frail bones against
me, his bare ribs, his wild thumping heart.

“You can’t, you can’t. You can’t keep me prisoner....”

He struggled, his heart thumping me. Then in one instant he went slack.

We lifted him to the bed, and I felt under his shirt for the flutter of
his heart. His mouth had dropped open, his eyes were like a dead bird’s.

The little nun began, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” and other holy words,
while I groped helplessly over this fragile burned-out frame. Then I
remembered and I stumbled wild-minded to find that woman downstairs.

I went headlong through the darkness. At my knock the door opened, as if
by an unseen hand, and I saw, completely dressed, the pale little girl,
with her grave eyes.

“Your mother?” I asked.

The child stopped me sharply, “Is Father worse?”

“He’s worse,” I answered feebly. “You’d better—”

The child was brushed aside by her mother, who had stumbled forward from
inside. She looked at me vaguely.

The girl turned on her mother. “I’m going up to Father. Go inside.”

The woman’s will flickered and then expired. She pulled the door back
upon herself, shutting us into the hall. The child led and I followed
back upstairs.



BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN



I


Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia I had formed a conception of
him from the newspapers. First of all, he was a baseball player become
revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting, screaming vulgarian, a mob
orator who lashed himself and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap
religious fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were fables in slang. I
thought of him as vividly, torrentially abusive, and I thought of his
revival as an orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming in
full view to the public mourners’ bench. With the penitents I associated
the broken humanity of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her
knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding over a meeting
that was tossed like trees in a storm.

However this preconception was formed, it at least had the merit of
consistency. It was, that is to say, consistently inaccurate in every
particular.

Consider, in the first place, the orderliness of his specially
constructed Tabernacle. Built like a giant greenhouse in a single story,
it covers an immense area and seats fifteen thousand human beings.
Lighted at night by electricity as if by sunshine, the floor is a vast
garden of human faces, all turned to the small platform on which the
sloping tiers from behind converge. Around this auditorium, with its
forest of light wooden pillars and braces, runs a glass-inclosed alley,
and standing outside in the alley throng the spectators for whom there
are no seats. Except for the quiet ushers, the silent sawdust aisles are
kept free. Through police-guarded doors a thin trickle fills up the last
available seats, and this business is dispatched with little commotion.
Fully as many people wait to hear this single diminutive speaker as
attend a national political convention. In many ways the crowd suggests
a national convention; but both men and women are hatless, and their
attentiveness is exemplary.

It is, if the phrase is permitted, conspicuously a middle-class crowd.
It is the crowd that wears Cluett-Peabody collars, that reads the
Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. It is the crowd for
whom the nickel was especially coined, the nickel that pays carfare,
that fits in a telephone slot, that buys a cup of coffee or a piece of
pie, that purchases a shoeshine, that pays for a soda, that gets a stick
of Hershey’s chocolate, that made Woolworth a millionaire, that is spent
for chewing-gum or for a glass of beer. In that crowd are men and women
from every sect and every political party, ranging in color from the
pink of the factory superintendent’s bald head to the ebony of the
discreetly dressed negro laundress. A small proportion of professional
men and a small proportion of ragged labor is to be discerned, but the
general tone is simple, common-sense, practical, domestic America.
Numbers of young girls who might equally well be at the movies are to be
seen, raw-boned boys not long from the country, angular home-keeping
virgins of the sort that belong to sewing circles, neat young men who
suggest the Y. M. C. A., iron-gray mothers who recall the numbered
side-streets in Harlem or Brooklyn or Chicago West Side and who bring to
mind asthma and the price of eggs, self-conscious young clerks who are
half curious and partly starved for emotion, men over forty with
prominent Adam’s apple and the thin, strained look of lives fairly
care-worn and dutiful, citizens of the kind that with all their
heterogeneousness give to a jury its oddly characteristic effect,
fattish men who might be small shopkeepers with a single employee, the
single employee himself, the pretty girl who thinks the Rev. Mr.
Rhodeheaver so handsome, the prosaic girl whose chief perception is that
Mr. Sunday is so hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won’t be
swayed, the sedentary “providers” who cannot open their ears without
dropping their jaws. A collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one
may crudely say “average” mortals, some of them destined to catch
religion, more of them destined to catch an impression, and a few of
them, sitting near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a cold.

Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr. Sunday’s small platform
is a bower of lovely bouquets, and the first business is the
acknowledgment of these offerings. As a means of predisposing the
audience in Mr. Sunday’s favor nothing could be more genial. In the body
of the hall are seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute
is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver’s powerful, commonplace voice
invites them to recognition: “Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company
here?” All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren. “Fine,
fine. We’re glad to see yeh here. We’re glad to welcome yeh. And what
hymn would _you_ like to have?” In loud concert the Pittsburgh Plate
Glass Co. delegation shout: “Number forty-nine!” Mr. Rhodeheaver
humorously parodies the shout: “Number forty-nine! It’s a good ’un too.
Thank yeh, we’re glad to have yeh here.” Not only immense bouquets, but
gold pieces, boxes of handkerchiefs, long mirrors, all sorts of
presents, mainly from big corporations or their employees, are on the
tight platform. One present came from a mill, a box of towels, and with
it not only a warm, manly letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept “the
product of our industry,” but a little poetic tribute, expressing the
hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr. Sunday might have a good bath
and take comfort in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and liked
it, and gazed amiably at the towels.

The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thousand people had really
joined in them the effect would have been stupendous. As it was, they
were thrilling, but not completely. The audience was not half abandoned
enough.

Then, after a collection had been taken up for a local charity, Mr.
Sunday began with a prayer. A compact figure in an ordinary black
business suit, it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice that,
for all his athleticism, he was tired to the bone. He is fifty-three
years old and for nine weeks he had been delivering about fifteen
extremely intense sermons a week. His opening was almost adramatic. It
had the conservatism of fatigue, and it was only his evident
self-possession that canceled the fear he would fizzle.

The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me at first were Elbert Hubbard
and George M. Cohan. In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism
of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in his physical attitude
there was nothing of that greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and
swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman of his particular
line of wares.

Accompanying one of the presents there had been a letter referring to
Billy Sunday’s great work, “the moral uplift so essential to the
business and commercial supremacy of this city and this country.” As he
developed his homely moral sermon for his attentive middle-class
congregation, this gave the clew to his appeal. It did not seem to me
that he had one touch of divine poetry. He humored and argued and smote
for Christ as a commodity that would satisfy an enormous acknowledged
gap in his auditors’ lives. He was “putting over” Christ. In awakening
all the early memories of maternal admonition and counsel, the
consciousness of unfulfilled desires, of neglected ideals, the ache for
sympathy and understanding, he seemed like an insurance agent making a
text of “over the hill to the poorhouse.” He had at his finger tips all
the selling points of Christ. He gave to sin and salvation a practical
connotation. But while his words and actions apparently fascinated his
audience, while they laughed eagerly when he scored, and clapped him
warmly very often, to me he appealed no more than an ingenious electric
advertisement, a bottle picked out against the darkness pouring out a
foaming glass of beer.

And yet his heart seemed to be in it, as a salesman’s heart has to be in
it. Speaking the language of business enterprise, the language with
which the great majority were familiar, using his physical antics merely
as a device for clinching the story home, he gave to religion a great
human pertinence, and he made the affirmation of faith seem creditable
and easy. And he defined his own object so that a child could
understand. He was a recruiting officer, not a drill sergeant. He spoke
for faith in Christ; he left the rest to the clergy. And to the clergy
he said: “If you are too lazy to take care of the baby after it is born,
don’t blame the doctor.”

It was in his platform manners that Sunday recalled George M. Cohan.
When you hear that he goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations
of baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is not wild.
Needing to arrest the attention of an incredibly large number of people,
he adopts various evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It is a
physical language with which the vast majority have friendly heroic
associations, and for them, spoken so featly and gracefully, it works.
Grasping the edge of the platform table as if about to spring like a
tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives to his words a drive that makes
you tense in your seat. Whipping like a flash from one side of the table
to the other, he makes your mind keep unison with his body. He keys you
to the pitch that the star baseball player keys you, and although you
stiffen when he flings out the name of Christ as if he were sending a
spitball right into your teeth, you realize it is only an odd, apt,
popular conventionalization of the ordinary rhetorical gesture. Call it
his bag of tricks, deem it incongruous and stagey, but if Our Lady’s
Juggler is romantic in grand opera, he is not a whit more romantic than
this athlete who has adapted beautiful movements to an emphasis of
convictions to which the audience nods assent.

The dissuading devil was conjured by Sunday in his peroration, and then
he ended by thanking God for sending him his great opportunity, his vast
audience, his bouquets and his towels. When he finished, several hundred
persons trailed forward to shake hands and confess their faith—bringing
the total of “penitents” up to 35,135.

Bending with a smile to these men and women who intend to live in the
faith of Christ, Billy Sunday gives a last impression of kindliness,
sincerity, tired zeal. And various factory superintendents and employers
mingle benignly around, glad of a religion that puts on an aching social
system such a hot mustard plaster.



II


Oyster soup is a standard item in the money-making church supper. The
orphan oyster searching vainly for a playmate in an ocean of church soup
is a favorite object of Billy Sunday’s pity. He loves to caricature the
struggling church, with its time-serving, societyfied, tea-drinking,
smirking preachers. “The more oyster soup it takes to run a church,” he
shouts sarcastically, “the faster it runs to the devil.”

An attitude so scornful as this may seem highly unconventional to the
outsider. It leads him to think that Billy Sunday is a radical. The
agility with which the Rev. Billy climbs to the top of his pulpit and
then pops to the platform on all fours suggests a corresponding mental
agility. He must be a dangerous element in the church, the outsider
imagines; he must be a religious revolutionary. And then the outsider
beholds John Wanamaker or John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the platform
alongside the revivalist—pillars of society, prosperous and respectable
gentlemen who instinctively know their business.

Fond as his friends are of comparing Billy Sunday to Martin Luther or
John the Baptist, none of them pushes the comparison on the lines of
radicalism, and Sunday himself waives the claim to being considered
revolutionary. “I drive the same kind of nails all orthodox preachers
do,” he says in one of his sermons. “The only difference is that they
use a tack hammer and I use a sledge.” No one supposes that Martin
Luther could have said this. Sledge-hammer orthodoxy was not exactly the
distinguishing characteristic of Martin Luther. The conservatism of
Billy Sunday’s message is the first fact about him. Where he differs
from the orthodox preacher is not in his soul but in his resolution. He
has the mind of Martin Tupper rather than of Martin Luther, but it is
combined with that competent American aggressiveness which one finds in
a large way in George M. Cohan, Theodore Roosevelt, even Ty Cobb.
Theology does not interest Billy Sunday. He compares it to ping-pong and
compares himself to a jack-rabbit and says he knows as little about
theology as a jack-rabbit knows about ping-pong. What he cares about is
religious revival. He knows the church is in bitter need of revival. He
is out to administer digitalis, in his own phrase, instead of oyster
soup.

For many years the church has been waning, and Billy Sunday scorns the
effeminate, lily-handed efforts at resuscitation that the churchmen have
employed. To put pepperino into a religious campaign, to make
Christianity hum, requires more than cushioned pews, extra music, coffee
and macaroons. Had Billy Sunday been in the regular theatrical business
he would not have fussed with a little independent theatre. He would
have conducted a Hippodrome. To rival the profane world’s attractions he
sees no reason for rejecting the profane world’s methods. So tremendous
an object as curing an institution’s pernicious anæmia justifies the
most violent, outrageous experiment.

If Jesus Christ were a new automobile or an encyclopædia or a biscuit,
Billy Sunday would have varied the method he has employed in putting Him
over, but he would not have varied the spirit of his revival-enterprise
in any essential particular. His object, as he sees it, is to sell
Christ. It is an old story that from its economic organization society
takes its complexion. The Sunday revival takes its complexion from
business enterprise without a single serious change. There is one great
argument running all through Billy Sunday’s sermons—the argument that
salvation will prove a profitable investment—but much more clearly
derived from business than the ethics preached by Billy Sunday is the
method he has devised for promoting Jesus Christ. Even the quarrel
between “Ma” Sunday and the man who has lost the post-card concession is
an illustration of the far-reaching efficiency of the system. The point
is not that money is being made out of the system. “An effort to corrupt
Billy Sunday,” to use a paraphrase, “would be a work of supererogation,
besides being immoral.” If Billy Sunday has a large income, $75,000 or
$100,000 a year, it is not because he is mercenary. It is only because a
large income is part of the natural fruits of his promoting ability.
Left to himself, it is quite unlikely that Billy Sunday would care a
straw about his income, beyond enough to live well and to satisfy his
vanity about clothes. It is Mrs. Sunday who sees to it that her
promoter-husband is not left penniless by those Christian business men
who so delightedly utilize his services.

The backbone of Billy Sunday’s success is organization. When
organization has delivered the crowd, Billy is ready to sweat for it and
spit for it and war-whoop for it and dive for base before the devil can
reach him. He is ready to have “Rody” come on the programme with his
slide-trombone and to have any volunteer who wishes to do it hit the
sawdust-trail. But he does not let his success depend on any programme.
His audiences are, in great measure, contracted for in advance. It is in
grasping the necessity for this kind of preparedness, in taking from the
business world its lessons as to canvassing and advertising and
standardizing the goods, that Billy can afford to jeer at oyster soup.
As his authorized biographer complacently says, “John the Baptist was
only a voice: but Billy Sunday is a voice, plus a bewildering array of
committees and assistants and organized machinery. He has committees
galore to coöperate in his work: a drilled Army of the Lord. In the list
of Scranton workers that is before me I see tabulated an executive
committee, the directors, a prayer-meeting committee, an entertainment
committee, an usher committee, a dinner committee, a business women’s
committee, a building committee, a nursery committee, a personal
worker’s committee, a decorating committee, a shop-meetings
committee—and then a whole list of churches and religious organizations
in the city as ex officio workers!” In New York on April 9th there was a
private meeting of 7,000 personal workers, “another step in the
direction of greasing the campaign.”

Unless Billy Sunday had some skill as a performer he naturally could not
hold his place as a revivalist. His success consists largely, however,
in the legendary character that has been given him by all the agencies
that seek to promote this desperate revival of orthodox religion. His
acrobatic stunts on the platform are sufficiently shocking to make good
publicity. His much-advertised slang, repeated over and over, has a
similar sensational value. But the main point about him is the
dramatization of his own personality. His virility is perhaps his chief
stock-in-trade. No one, not Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much
on his personal militant masculinity. Although well over fifty, his
youthful prowess as a baseball-player is still a headline-item in his
story, and every sermon he preaches gives him a chance to prove he is
physically fit. In addition to this heroic characteristic there is his
fame as a self-made man. He is a plain man of the people, as he never
fails to insist. He carries “the malodors of the barnyard” with him. But
he has succeeded. The cost of his special tabernacle is one of his big
distinctions. The size of his collections is another. His personal
fortune, in spite of all criticism, is a third. Besides these heroic
attributes of strength and wealth there is his melodramatic simplicity
of mind. All of his sermons are “canned” and a great deal of the
material in them is borrowed, but he manages to deliver his message
straight from the shoulder, as if it were his own. There can be no doubt
that his shouting, his slang, his familiarity with Jesus, his
buttonholing old God, his slang-version of the Bible, do offend large
numbers of people. They arrest attention so successfully, even in these
cases, that they turn out to be well advised. There is nothing
spontaneous about these antics. They are switched on at the beginning of
a revival and switched off as it succeeds. They are Sunday’s native way
of lighting up the strait and narrow path with wriggling electric signs.

Billy Sunday has too much energy to stick completely fast in the mud of
conservatism. He is capable of advocating sex instruction for the young,
for example, and he permits himself the wild radicalism of woman
suffrage. But as regards vested interests and patriotism and war he is a
conservative, practically a troglodyte. What he attacks with fervor are
the delinquents in ordinary conduct, especially the people who lack
self-control. “Booze-hoisters” and card-players and tango-dancers and
cigarette-smokers are his pet abominations—genuine abominations.
Profanity, strange to say, is another evil that he fights with fire.
Honesty, sobriety, chastity—these are virtues that he exalts,
illustrating the horror of failing in them by means of innumerable
chromatic anecdotes. The devil he constantly attacks, though never with
real solemnity. “The devil has been practicing for six thousand years
and he has never had appendicitis, rheumatism or tonsillitis. If you get
to playing tag with the devil he will beat you every chip.” It is more
for spice and snap that he introduces the devil than to terrify his
public. The Bible is his serious theme, and he feels about it almost the
way Martin Tupper did:

    The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion volume,
    The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our Rights ...
    It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare
    A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible!
    —The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark,
    And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning,
    And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions,
    In spite of learned unbelief,—we hold it all plain truth:
    Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study;
    Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and Colenso ...
    The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian nation
    ...
    The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square,
    The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws ...
    Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salvation.

One of Billy Sunday’s boasts is that the liquor interests hate him.
“That dirty, stinking bunch of moral assassins hires men to sit in the
audience to hear me, to write down what I say and then try to find some
author who said something like it, and accuse me of having stolen my
ideas. I know that $30,000 was offered a man in New York City to write a
series of articles attacking me. All right; if you know anything about
me that you want to publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is a
dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole thing is a frame-up from A
to Izzard. I’ll fight them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a
pair of skates. By the grace of God, I’ve helped to make Colorado and
Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice
on the dirty gang that I’ll help to make the whole nation dry.” (New
York Times, April 19th, 1917.)

Assuming these points to be well taken, there is still great room to
doubt the deep religious effect of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like
William Allen White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf in
Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many hundred human beings
for moral stimulus in a time of need. In spite of the thousands who have
hit the sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that more
than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously affected by him.
The great majority of those who hit the trail are people who merely want
to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of seriousness or
“conversion.” The atmosphere of the tabernacle, bright with electric
light and friendly with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and
in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is seldom a contagious
note. His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a
remarkable public entertainer, and much that he says has keen humor and
verbal art and horse sense. But for all his militancy, for all his
pugnacious vociferation, he leaves an impression of being at once
violent and incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but not a
guide or a friend.

Still, as between Billy Sunday’s gymnastics and the average oyster soup,
Messrs. Wanamaker and Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday.
Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of carpets and socks, Socony
and Nujol, and if Christ could have been put over in the same way, by
live-wire salesmanship, Billy was the man.



FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET



I


“Though you do not know it, I have a soul. Behold, across the way, my
library. When the night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees
shake out their greenery against the white stonework, do you not catch a
suggestion of atmosphere, something of a mood? And the black cliffs
around, with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the width of them,
are they not monuments? I cleave brilliantly, up and down this dormant
city. It is for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plodding
milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speeding her lover’s motor. Heed
my long silences, my slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed. My
buildings come about me to muse and to commune. Receive, for once on
Fifth Avenue, the soul that is imprisoned in my stone and steel.”

It is not for the respectable, this polite communication. Theatre and
club and restaurant have long since disgorged these. New York has
masticated their money. They have done as they should and are restored
uptown. Even the old newswoman, she who had spent starving months in the
Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war, she has tottered
from her stand down by the station. The Hungarian waiter in Childs’ is
still there, still assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat
cakes, but that is off the avenue. It is three, the avenue is nearly
empty. It is ready to disclose its soul.

But before this subtle performance there is a preliminary. It is a very
self-respecting avenue and at three on a pleasant morning, when no one
is around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath. Perhaps a few
motors go by—a taxi rolling north, heavy with night thoughts, a tired
white face framed in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking
loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its suburban chores.
The Italian acolytes are impartial. They spray the wheels of a touring
car with gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a powerful stream
under the hubs of a Nassau News wagon trundling to a train. The avenue
must be refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nodding
approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must be prepared for the sun,
under bold lamps and timid stars.

A fine young morning, the watchman promises. A bit of wind whiffles the
water that is shot out from the white-wing’s hose, but it is clearing up
above and looks well for the day. The hour beckons memories for the
watchman—fine young mornings he used to have long ago, in Ireland, a boy
on his first adventure and he driving with the barley to Ross.

It is an empty street. The hose is wheeled away over the glistening
asphalt. The watchman disappears—he has a cozy nook beyond the ken of
time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pillow, to hide a diminished
head. With man accounted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to
the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion, the buildings have
their moment. Each tower stretches his proud height to the morning. The
stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed.



II


Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it cannot hold the virgin
morning forever. Its windows may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind
the walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” A saintly venerable horse seems to
know the injunction. Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it
usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord.

And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the prayer about clams, but
some one in Mount Vernon is destined to have them quickly. Out of the
mysterious south, racing against time, a little motor flits onward with
gaping barrels of clams. At a decent interval comes a heavier load of
fish. Great express wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest uses
of Fifth Avenue begin.

Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies. The grocer and the
greengrocer are early on their rounds. But an empty American News truck
confesses that eternal vigilance is the price of circulation. Its gait
is swifter than the gait of milkman or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and
dew are on the florist’s wheels: he has come whistling by the swamps of
Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs lightly past the juggernauts that
crush down.

Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His trucks hurl from Grand
Central to make the substations. But his is not the pride of place. Nor
is it coal or farmers’ feed that appropriates the middle of the street.
The noblest wagons, a long parade of them, announce the greater glory of
beer. The temperance advocate may shudder at the desecration of the
morning. He may observe “Hell Gate Brewery” and nod his sickly nod. But
there is something about this large preparedness for thirst that stills
the carping worm of conscience. It is good to see what solid, ample
caravans are required to replenish man with beer. It is not the single
glass that is glorious. It is not even the single car-load. It is the
steady, deliberate, ponderous procession that streams through the early
hours. Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy of beer-wagons.
It satisfied the faith that there was Design in creation, but the
Percheron is not needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness
about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer.



III


“Number, please?” She is anonymous, that inquirer. But behind her
anonymity there is humanity. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street caught
a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M.

She was up at five in the morning. She had a pang as she put on her
check suit, slightly darker than her check coat lined with pink. Her
little hat, however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked breakfast
while she set the table. Then she walked to the Third Avenue “L” with
her friend. They got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to
Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked along Forty-second
Street in time for them to do a brief window-shopping as they passed the
shirtwaists at Forsythe’s. Her friend’s bronze shoes she envied as they
crossed the little park back of the Library. On Sixth Avenue they
inspected the window at Bernstein’s. A slight argument engrossed them.
They hovered over the window, chirping not unlike the sparrows in Bryant
Park. Then, in a flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone
company to begin their “Number, please.”

An hour earlier laborers with dinner-pails had crossed Fifth Avenue, and
hatless Polish girls on their way to scrub. By seven o’clock the negro
porters and laborers were giving way to white-collar strap-hangers on
the elevateds and in the subway. It was getting to be the hour of
salesmen and salesgirls and office-boys and shop-subordinates and
clerks. The girls back of the scenes at the milliner’s, they go up Fifth
Avenue at seven, to take one side-street or another. The girl who sells
you a toothbrush in the drug-store hurries by the shop windows, herself
as neat as a model. Is it early? Myriads of men are pouring down
already. Besides, “’S use of kickin’? If you don’t like it, you can walk
out!”

The night-watchman is going home, and an old attendant from the Grand
Central. “Tired, Pop?” “Yeh, p’tty tired.” “What right’ve you to git
tired workin’ for a big corporation?” The oppressed wage-slave bellows,
“Ha, ha.”



IV


Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in the afternoon. The
diastole of travelers had spread all morning from Grand Central; the
systole is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in the
afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the suburbs, tearing their
way through the weaker streams that are drawn up by the neighboring
shops and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and Sherry’s and
Delmonico’s and the Manhattan and the Belmont are no longer columnar
monuments, holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human floods
which they suck in and spray out. The street itself is lost to memory
and vision. A swollen stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are
permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless bosom the
freight of curiosity and pride and favor. One might fancy, to gaze on
this mad throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered the
universe, worshipers of a machine.

It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles, the feminine hour.
A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming
from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this
period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative,
flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working
world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely
infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down
the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but
their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and
leisure. Many of the white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are not
white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend
the world is gay.

They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move
as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common
attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides.



V


For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. He stayed with his
friend the spider the round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider,
is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the scene-shifter and the
detective. Some day we should pitch a metropolitan observatory at the
corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,—some day, if we can find
the time.



AS AN ALIEN FEELS


Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that the United States existed.
My first dream of it came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay
flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. It was a Wild West
Show, and for years I associated America with the intoxication of the
circus and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. “Two a penny, two a
penny, large penny oranges! Buy away an’ ate away, large penny oranges!”
They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor of them and the fumes
of circus excitement gave me a first gay ribald sense of the United
States.

The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag uncle. He had sought
his fortune in America—sought it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a
horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd and delicious oaths.
“Gosh hell hang it” was his chief touch of American culture. He was a
“Yank” in local parlance, a frequently drunken Yank. His fine drooping
mustache too often drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I steadied
him home under the October stars and absorbed a long alcoholic reverie
on the Horseshoe Falls. As we slept together that night in the
rat-pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all the
horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver over the wonderments of
the Horseshoe Falls.

This, with an instilled idea that America and America alone could offer
“work,” foreshadowed the American landscape. It is the bald hope of work
that finally magnetizes us hither. But every dream and every loyalty was
with the unhappy land from which I came.

For many months the music of New York harbor spoke only of home. Every
outgoing steamer that opened its throat made me homesick. America was
New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new
duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a
living, and the art of eating at Childs’. At night the hall-bedroom near
Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for
amusement. The only women to say “dear,” the women who say it on the
street.

In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word
“settlement” gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was
somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. I had looked for it in
boarding-houses. I had looked for it in stenographic night-schools. I
had sought it in the blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long
jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among the street-walkers,
the first to proffer intimacy. And of course, not being clever enough, I
had overlooked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at home.

America dawned for me in a social settlement. It dawned for me as a
civilization and a faith. In all my first experiences of my employers I
got not one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was the language of
smartness, alertness, brightness, success, efficiency, and I tried to
learn it, but it was a difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were
lawyers, but they were interested in penmanship and ability to clean
ink-bottles. Some of them were business men, but they were interested in
ability to typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not their fault.
Ours was not an affair of the heart. But if it had not been for the
social settlement, I should still be an alien to the bone.

Till I knew a social settlement the American flag was still a flag on a
circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. The cheapness of the United States
was the message of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville and
Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, of the promenade on Broadway. In
the social settlement I came on something entirely different. Here on
the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of something besides success. The
house was saturated in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet.
A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make it musical. It was
thronged with Jews and Greeks and Italians and soulful visitors, to make
it restful. It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it easy.
But it was the first place in all America where there came to me a sense
of the intention of democracy, the first place where I found a flame by
which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer words about it. The men, I
learned, were mollycoddles, and the women were sexually unemployed. The
ruling class spoke of “unsettlement workers” with animosity, the
socialists of a mealy-mouthed compromise. Yet in that strange haven of
clear humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I had been
seeking—the knowledge that America had a soul.

How one discovers these things it is hard to put honestly. It is like
trying to recall the first fair wind of spring. But I know that slowly
and unconsciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed out the
asperity of alienism. There were Americans of many kinds in residence,
from Illinois, from Michigan, from New York, English-Americans,
Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, men who had
gone to Princeton and Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn
Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the Americanism was of a kind
that opened to the least pressure from without, and never shall I forget
the way these residents with their “North Side” friends had managed so
graciously to domesticate the annual festival of my own nationality.
That, strange though it may seem, is the more real sort of
Americanization Day.

From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing alien breathes in
American air, but I doubt if I should have ever known the meaning of
Walt Whitman had I not lived in that initiating home. It was easy in
later years to see new meanings in the American flag, to stand with
Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, but it was in the settlement I found the
sources from which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement, one was not
expected to believe that man’s proper place is on a Procrustean bed of
profiteering. A different tradition of America lived there, one in which
the earlier faiths had come through, in which the way to heaven was not
necessarily up a skyscraper. In New England, later, I found many ideas
of which the settlement was symptomatic, but as I imbibed them they were
“America” for me.

What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit
is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to
Lincoln’s normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to
understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come
there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without
exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe
have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of
the governed. But here among America’s governors and statesmen was a
simple authenticator of humane ideals. To inherit him becomes for the
European not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary of them in a
new. In the microcosm of the settlement perhaps Lincolnism is too
simple. Many of one’s promptest acquiescences are revised as one meets
and eats with the ruling class later on. But the salt of this American
soil is Lincoln. When one finds that, one is naturalized.

It is curious how the progress of naturalization becomes revealed to
one. I still recollect with a thrill the first time I attended a
national political convention and listened to the roll-call of the
States. “Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!” Empty names for many years, at
last they were filled with one clear concept, the concept of the
democratic experiment. “As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning walk”—the
living appeal to each state by name recalled Whitman’s generous amusing
scope. “Far breath’d land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez’d! The diverse!
The compact! The Pennsylvanian! The Virginian! The double Carolinian!”
The orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke Whitman. It was
intended, as it happened, to evoke votes for Taft and Sherman. But even
these men were parts of the democratic experiment. And the vastly
peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as the empurpled Penrose did not
answer. It was they who were the leaves of our grass.

In Whitman, as William James has shown, there is an arrant mysticism
which his own Democratic Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this
credulity as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an alien is
likely to enter if his first intimacy with America came in the aliens’
crêche. A settlement is a crêche for the step-children of Europe, and it
is hard not to credit America at large with some of the impulses which
make the settlement. Such, at any rate, is the tendency I experienced
myself.

With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United States? I think of
Lincoln and his effected mysticism by Union, union for the experiment,
and I feel alive within me a complete identification with this land. The
keenest realization of the nation reached me, as I recall, the first
time I saw the capitol in Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up
the hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets gleaming
after a warm shower. The plaza in front of the capitol was deserted. A
few high sentinel lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and
scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the dome. Standing apart
completely by myself, I felt as never before the union of which this
strength and simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the night, the
scent of April pervading it, gave to the lonely building a dignity such
as I had seldom felt before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and
achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, for a quiet faith in
the peoples and states that lay away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln,
I thought, had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night in April,
and felt the same promise of spring.



SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT


One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the pursuit of the secret of
life. That secret, however, is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible
to me, somewhere in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten, it taunts
my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making a lunge after it. But tied to
the ball there seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye fixes
the secret of life but it escapes my paw.

During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had it. It involved a great
deal of stern discipline. Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston
garters and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, hot baths
followed by rolling in the snow and jiu jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu
hinted at the very secret itself. Here was the crude West seeking to
slug its way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had only to lay
hold of life by the little finger to reduce it to squealing submission.
The sinister power of jiu jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn
it we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme of effortless
subtlety. A people with such an art, combined with ennobling
vegetarianism, must necessarily be a superior people. I privately
believed that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the Russian fleet.

Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my soul and supplanted it with
a colossal contempt for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already
protested. No nation could hope to take the field that subsisted on
heavy foods—such unclean things as sausages and beer. The secret of
world mastery was a diet of rice. “We all eat too much” became a fixed
conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a greater conviction—we all sleep too
much as well. This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett.
Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. We sleep ourselves stupid.
Who could not afford to lose a minute’s sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute
a day—who would miss it? And in 500 days you would have got down to the
classical forty winks. Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He
modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its successful
practicability. To cut down sleep and cut down food was the only way to
function like a superman.

Once started on this question of habits I spent a life of increasing
turmoil. From Plato I heard the word moderation, but from William Blake
I learned that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” From
Benjamin Franklin I gathered the importance of good habits, but William
James gleefully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. And then
came Scientific Management.

The concept of scientific management practically wrecked my life. I
discovered that there was a right way of doing everything and that I was
doing everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that we were all
astray about the simplest things. We did not know how to breathe
properly. We did not know how to sit properly. We did not know how to
walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was making us bald. We wore
pointed shoes: it was unfair to our little toe. But scientific
management did not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly pointed out
that “waste motions” were the chief characteristic of our lives.

One of the most fantastic persons in the world is the public official
who, before he can write a postal order or a tax receipt, has to make
preliminary curls of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific
eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our effective motions
could be registered on a visual target, our record would be found to
resemble that of savages who use ammunition without a sight on their
guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier’s marksmanship is wasteful,
we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that
fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms—waste
motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub
our eyes—more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the rest
of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific
management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with
the minimum of gesture. They believe that they complete the operation
under five minutes. But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that
under the inspection of the scientific manager their performance would
look as jagged as their razorblade under the microscope? The day will
probably arrive when a superman will shave with one superb motion, as
delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of an orange-skin in one long
unbroken peel.

In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the haphazard, unscrutinized
conduct of his morn. We pick up our paper without any suspicion that we
are about to commit intellectual felony. We do not know that the news
editor is in a conspiracy to play on our minds. If men gyrate too much
physically, they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start to
look over the news. It is not so much that they begin the day with
devouring the details of a murder or lull themselves with some excuse
for not reading a British note on the blockade. It is the fact that they
are led by a ring running through their instincts to obey the particular
editors they read.

Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand how the human
race has survived. Even conceding that I was normal, it is so much the
worse for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous breed. There is not
one important layman’s practice that we have organized with regard to
discipline and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying
bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting one’s hat and the
circumvolutions in putting links in one’s cuffs? How about the impulsive
child who wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a hug? The
discovery seemed chilly that everything could be scientifically managed,
everything could be perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at
the center of one’s life. But a fear of being chilly is a mark of
inferiority. It ill becomes a human machine.

Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours a day, with vague
longings to eat very little and sleep very little and master jiu jitsu
and breathe deep and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and give
up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically and save waste
motions in putting on my shirt, I happened to come across two European
thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling Shakespeare’s
knowledge of dead languages by my own knowledge of live ones, I could
not read these masters in the original to determine whether they blended
like oil and vinegar or fought like water and oil. But in the eagerness
of philosophic poverty I grasped just two delightful words from them,
“instinct” and “repression.” The metaphysician’s secret of life,
apparently, was to drop using one’s so-called intelligence so
frantically, to become more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena
and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put the Ten Commandments
in their place. To tell the truth, his detection of “repression” gave me
no tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the evolutionist turned
my thoughts away from the early worries of discipline. This is the
latest ball in the air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of
any tantalizing invisible string.



THE NEXT NEW YORK


You’d get awfully tired if I told you everything about my visit to New
York in A. D. 1991. Some things are too complicated even to refer to,
many things I’ve already forgotten, and a number of things I didn’t
understand. But as I had to return to my work as prison doctor in 1919
after a week of 1991 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest
you. I hope I can give them to you straight.

The people on the street took my eye the minute I arrived in town. They
looked so pleasing and they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at
present, with the long indoor working day and the mixture of embalmed
and storage and badly cooked food, the number of pasty-faced and
emaciated men and women is very high. I exempt the hearty sweating
classes like the structural iron workers and teamsters and porters and
even policemen. You could recruit a fine-looking club from the building
trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue and size up the
condition of the passers-by. You see shopgirls in thin cotton who are
under-weight, under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. You see
pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You see weary, fish-eyed mothers who
look as if every day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged
people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. A little earlier in the
afternoon it’s almost impossible to share the sidewalk with the squat
factory hands who overflow at the lunch hour. They’re hard to kill,
these poor fellows, but they’re a puny, stinking, stunted, ill-favored
horde. But the greater cleanliness of the people later on, and their
better clothes, doesn’t put them in a very different class. You hear a
good deal about the queens you see, but, really, the city streets of New
York in 1919, streaming with people who have dun clothes to match dun
faces, make you wonder what’s the use.

These people in 1991 were good to look at! The three-hour working day
had a lot to do with it, of course, and the basic economic changes. But
what leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge responsibility
that had gone to hygienists. I mean educational and administrative. In
1991, I found, people were really acting on the theory that you can’t
have civilization without sound bodies. The idea itself was as old as an
old joke, a platitude in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city
was working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this meant a total
revision of ordinary conduct.

Building the Panama Canal was a simple little job compared to making New
York hygienic. Thirty years must have been spent in getting the folks to
realize that no man and woman had any hygienic excuse for breeding
children within the city limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before
it was official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At first
mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were confiscated, but in the
end they came to see justice in the human version of the slogan, “an
acre and a cow.” It got rid of the good old city-bred medical formula
that the best way to handle pregnancy is to handle it as a pathological
condition. Of course this prohibition movement made all sorts of people
mad. A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long time on the score
of personal liberty. Women had private city babies where the inspectors
couldn’t get at them. You know, just like private whisky. But in the end
the prohibitionists won, and it had an enormous effect on cleaning up
Manhattan. It cut out all but the detached and the transient residents,
and with the breathing space rules, these were far less than you’d
suppose. Even with the great area of garden-roofs, the fixed residents
were not much more than 100,000.

This demobilization wasn’t special to New York. In other places there
were much more rigid “units.” Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit
size of cities in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous city
gave place to the “modern” unit, permanent residences within the city
never being open to families that had children under fourteen. For the
heads of such families, however, the transportation problem was
beautifully solved. Every unit city came to be so constructed that
within half an hour of the “fresh air and exercise” homes, men and women
could reach factories and warehouses in one direction, and offices and
courts and banks and exchanges in another. This was after they realized
the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, swift, freight
train took the place of most trucks, and of course the remaining trucks
shot up and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another thing that
interested me was the plexus of all the things that are to be exhibited.
This involved a great problem for New York before factories were
deported and the moving “H. G. Wells” sidewalks introduced. How to
economize time and space, and yet not produce too close a homogeneity,
too protein an intellectual and æsthetic and social diet, became a
fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell’s Island to summer
and winter art and music, with all the other islands utilized for
permanent exhibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. The
islands were made charming. I was quite struck over there, I think, on a
new island in Flushing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing,
where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on an endless belt,
that stopped when you wanted it to—the kind that art exhibitions adopted
for certain purposes. You see, the old department stores had passed away
as utterly as the delivery horse and display advertising and the
non-preventive physician. And the old game of “seasons” and fashions was
abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Condé Nast for the
undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing
consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly
early in life what they could and what they couldn’t do personally in
the use of color. No one thought of copying another’s color or design in
dress any more than of copying another’s oculist prescription. And with
the guild consultants always ready to help out the troubled buyer, the
business of shopping for clothes became as exciting and intelligent as
the pastime of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, backed up by
the guilds, a daring employment of color became generally favored. But a
big item in this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe
any costumes for people who needed medical care first. It was useless,
the guilds said, to decorate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed.

So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound body. In the hygienic
riots of 1936 some horrible lynchings took place. An expert from the
Chicago stockyards was then running the New York subways. He devised the
upper-berth system by which the space between people’s heads and the
roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up
passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a few thousand
citizens had failed to respond to the pulmotor which was kept at every
station to revive weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to
decent transportation became a real public issue. The hygienists made
the great popular mistake of trying to save the stockyards man. They
knew he had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing him and
showing he had always wanted to skin cats alive, they could put the
traction question on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of that
era took up the issue on the so-called popular side. He denounced the
hygienists as heartless experts and showed how science was really a
conspiracy in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted in
a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-analysis of all criminals,
but the bloody assassination of the leading hygienist of the day brought
about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge was allowed to serve
who wasn’t an expert in psychic work and hygiene. This decision was
greatly aided by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation of
criminal verdicts to the established neuroses of city magistrates. The
promise that this work would be extended and published as a supplement
to the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting the Bar. The
old pretensions of the Bar went rapidly to pieces when political use was
made of important psychological and physiological facts. The hygienists
spoke of “the mighty stream of morbid compulsion broadening down to more
morbid compulsion.” By 1950 no man with an Œdipus complex could even get
on the Real Estate ticket, and the utter collapse of militarism came
about with the magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent
armament advocates in the evil era.

I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance of prisons.
Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the
old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the
Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like
Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances
in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the
human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours
was a matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, even in
casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to
me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the
twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men
afraid to specify the sex diseases they were then cleaning up.
Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from
obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions
about conduct. “Think,” said one delightful youth to me, on my first day
in 1991, “think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological
laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical
well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think
of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet
test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about ‘the pursuit of
happiness,’ fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for
such indiscriminateness than we’d allow a day to go by without
swimming.”

The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, what we call a girl. I
had nothing to say to her. But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was
so soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire’s device I had once
seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement of a great factory building there
was a small electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was a
gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on which was strapped an
ordinary leather saddle. In front of the saddle there rose two thin
steel sticks, and out of them came thin leather reins. By means of a
clever arrangement of springs down below that responded to an electric
current, the whole mechanism was able to move up and down and backward
and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed to stir up your
gizzard in practically the same way as the motion of a horse. This was,
in fact, a synthetic horse, bearing the same æsthetic relation to a real
horse that a phonograph song does to a real song that is poured out, so
to speak, in the sun. And here, in the bald basement cell with its two
barred basement windows (closed), the constipated millionaires take
their turns, whenever they can bear it, going through the canned motions
of a ride, staring with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front of
them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of Hygeia carried the
helot-captains of industry. And from that basement, from that heathen
symbol of perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary acceptance
of the human body and a primary law that its necessities be everywhere
observed. Not such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy years.
And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they had to have for the happiness
they long for.



CHICAGO¹


A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality of towns. What
most people enjoy about a town is familiarity, not personality, and they
can give no penetrating account of their affection. “What is the finest
town in the world?” the New York reporters recently asked a young
recruit, eager for him to eulogize New York. “Why,” he answered, “San
Malo, France. I was born there.” That is the usual reason, perhaps the
best reason, why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is
autobiographical.

But towns do have personality. Contrast London and New York, or Portland
and Norfolk, or Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has a
personality, and it would be obscurantism of the most modern kind to
pretend that there was no “soul” in Chicago either to like or to
dislike. People who have never lived in Chicago are usually content with
disliking it, and those who have seen it superficially, or smelled it in
passing when the stockyard factories were making glue, can seldom
understand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, of course, profess
to admire it, with the eagerness of anxious missionaries seeking to make
good with cannibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or Belfast, and
slipped into Chicago as into old slippers—men like Arnold Bennett and
George Bermingham—there are few outsiders who really feel at home.
Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant journey across the plains,
pondering that one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to restore
the city after the fire should be compelled to pay for his own ham and
eggs. He thought Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from it like a
sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. Wells thought it amazing, but
chiefly amazing as a lapse from civilization. All of these leave little
doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and
mean. It has size without spaciousness, opportunity without
imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A
sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious
where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and
vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining
smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its
beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town.

But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; one must see it
altogether before one can define it; one can believe almost anything
monstrous from a partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is
supremely necessary—about three years as a minimum. Then its goodness
passeth all pre-matrimonial understanding; its essence is disclosed.

Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far as time is concerned,
to speak of Chicago, and I think it would be churlish not to agree that
from the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city proud. All
old Chicagoans will recognize at once why Mr. Taylor should go back to
the beginning, and they will be delighted at the clarity with which the
early history is expounded, as well as the era before the Civil War.
They will also understand and rejoice over the repetition of grand old
names—Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, Uranus H. Crosby,
Sherman of the Sherman hotel, General Hart L. Stewart and Long John
Wentworth. In every town in the world there is, of course, a Long John
or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans will savor this reference to their own
familiar, and will delight in the snug feeling that they too “knew
Chicago when.” Mr. Taylor is also dear to his townsmen when he harks
back to days before the Fire. In those days the West-siders were a
little superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter
and Paul, and the church-going folk could hear the “fast young men”
speeding trotting horses past the church doors. Such performances seemed
fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor himself drive his
high-steppers to the races at Washington Park, and did he not woo the
heart of the city where gilded youth cherished a “nod of recognition
from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. Rice.” The dinners of
antelope steak and roast buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago
antedating the World’s Fair that left strong traces into the twentieth
century, a Chicago that is commemorated with grace and kindliness in the
fair pages of this book.

But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor’s heart lingers among the
“marble-fronts” of his youth, this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such
fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better basis for
loving Chicago must be offered than the evidence that one teethed on it,
battered darling that it is. Mr. Taylor’s better explanation, as I read
it, is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully and eagerly
with the New Englanders who made the town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters
and speculators, war widows and politicians and anarchists and
aliens—all these go into his perspective, as do the emergencies of the
Fire and the splendors of the Fair. But the marrow of his pride in
Chicago is his community with its origins in “men, like myself, of New
England blood, whose fathers felled our forests and tilled our prairie
land.” Since the time he was born, he tells us, more than two million
people have been added to the population of Chicago. Only a fifth of the
Great West Side are now American-born, and the Lake Shore Drive was
still a cemetery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified West Side.
This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning of things. Hence he likes
to insist in his kindly spirit that Chicago’s puritan “aristocracy” is
the source of Chicago altruism, that “the society of Chicago [is] more
puritanical than that of any great city in the world,” and that “back of
Chicago’s strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her founders
holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers being still a
potent factor in her life.... She possesses a New England conscience to
leaven her diverse character and make her truly—the pulse of America.”

Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest.
Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see
it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed
a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished
Chicago’s big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had
no statesmanship in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an
inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a
destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business
enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its
remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality of that
enterprise is a main characteristic of the city, a characteristic barely
suggested by Mr. Taylor, not clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his
graceful drawings, so beautifully reproduced.

One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor’s pleasant picture, some
leaves from Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, Jack London’s Iron Heel, Frank
Norris’s Pit, H. K. Webster’s Great Adventure, the fiction of Edith
Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick and Will Paine and Weber Linn
and Sherwood Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl
Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one who looked at the City
Council ten years ago, for example, can forget the brutality of that
institution of collective life.

They called the old-time aldermen the “gray wolves.” They looked like
wolves, cold-eyed, grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side,
West side, North side, making the shaky tenements and black brothels and
sprawling immigrant-filled industries pay tribute in twenty ways. One
night, curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went to a place
that was glibly described as “the wickedest place in the world.” It was
a saloon under the West side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At
first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its runty negro at the
raucous piano. But at last the regular customers collected; the sots,
the dead-beats, the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a fat
pallor, the woman without a nose.... They surrounded us, piled against
us, clawed us. And that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead’s Satanic vision
of it revealed.

But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves
it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an
essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the
access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an
adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and
hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a
frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of
succession and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all its philistinism,
there is the condition of hope that is half the spiritual battle,
whatever stockades the puritans try to build. It is that that makes one
lament the silence in Mr. Taylor’s pleasant book. But the puritanical
tradition requires silence. Polite and refined, self-centered and
private-minded, attached to property and content within limitations, it
made visible Chicago what it is.

   ¹ _Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G.
     Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co._



THE CLOUDS OF KERRY


It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes Kerry so wet. All the
reservoir of the Atlantic, at any rate, lies to the west and south, and
the prevailing winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry lifts its
mountains to those impinging winds—mountains that in the sunlight are a
living colorful presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the
constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly from the sea, soft
voluminous clouds gathered in their arms, and as they pass they sweep
their drooping veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy land.

In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted at great intervals
on those lonely hillsides, but for the most part the habitations are in
the cooms or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel hills. The
soil on the mountains is washed away. The vestiture that remains is a
watery sedge, and it is only by garnering every handful of earth that
the tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms. Their fields,
often held in common, are so small as to be laughable, and deep drainage
trenches are dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting sunlight
between showers a light-green patch will loom magically in the distance,
witness to man’s indefatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the
rocks. An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and if one goes
there one may find a typical tall spare countryman, bright of eye and
sharp of feature, housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood of
children. To build with his own hands a watertight house is the ambition
for which this man is slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready
there near the pit which he himself has dug for foundation. A yellowish
wife will perhaps be nursing the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed
hovel, and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible, and
admirable in more ways than he can ever dream of, one elf after another
will come out, bare-legged, sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from
far off at the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside man,
but his starvelings go down the boreen to the bare cold schoolhouse, to
be taught whatever the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their
minds of an education designed for civil service clerks. The children
may be seen down there if one passes at their playtime, kicking a rag
football with their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds.

There was a time when the iron was deep in these farmers’ souls. Eking
the marrow from the bones of the land, they were so poor that they had
nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their own tiny cattle,
the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle that alone can pick a living from that
ground. Until twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the hillside
men had never bought a pound of tea in their lives, or known what it was
to spend money for clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored
homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine sturdy middle-aged
farmers with a cut to their homemade clothes that reminds one of the
Bretons. It was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting nature for
grim life, that landlords took their rackrents—one of them, the Earl of
Kenmare, erecting a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of
Americans have admired. The fight against landlordism was bitter in
Kerry. I met one countryman who was evicted three times, but finally,
despite the remorseless protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in
a lean-to against the wall of the church. There were persecutions and
murders, the mailed hand of the law and the stealthy hand of the
assassin. Even to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure of
me he would not have spoken his mind. But when he was sure, he confided
with a winning smile that at last he had something to live for and work
for, a strip of land that was an “economic holding,” determined by an
Estates Commission which has shouldered the landlord to one side and
estimated with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive
possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog.

Why do they stay? But most of them have not stayed. Kerry has not
one-third the people to-day that it had seventy years ago. The
storekeeper in a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little
father of the people if there ever was one, yet had acted the dubious
rôle of emigration agent, and had passed thousands of his countrymen on
to America. A few go to England. “For nine years,” one hard-working
occupier mentioned to me, “I lived in the shadow of London Bridge.” But
for Kerry, the next country to America, America is the land of golden
promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue, “hollow of the dock leaves,” I
stopped to ask of a bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking
me the way to America. It is west they turn, away from the Empire that
“always foul-played us in the past, and I am afeard will foul-play us
again.”

“The next time you come, please God you’ll bring us Home Rule.” That is
the way they speak to you, if they trust you. They want government where
it cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of old.

I went with a government inspector on one mission in Kerry. At the foot
of the forbidding western hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off
by two mountain streams. At times these streams were low enough to ford
with ease, but after a heavy rain the water would rise four or five feet
in a few hours and the streams would become impassable torrents. For the
sake of a widow whose hovel stood on this island the Commission
consented to build a little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at
either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons in weight, had
only just been planted when a rain came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy
block of cement had toppled over in the stream. This little catastrophe
was the first news conveyed by the paternal storekeeper to the inspector
on our arrival in town, and we walked out to see what could be done.

Standing by the stream, we were visible to the expectant woman on the
hill. In the soft mournful light of the September afternoon I could see
her outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to learn her fate.
She came bare of head and bare of foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to
her bosom with one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body as she
leaned on her own pier and bent her deep eyes on us across the stream.
As she told in the slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of
the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those eyes to the
inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged in the water, as if to
contemn it for lying there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited
or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression bespoke the sternness
and gravity of her fight for existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant
fighter. She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have ever
beheld.

If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the anxieties of the
winter. She seemed to look into them through the grayness of the failing
light. She foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race for her
children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying them across on her
back. And she clung to her children.

“You have had trouble, my poor woman?” the inspector said, knowing that
her husband two years before had been drowned in the torrent.

“Aye, indeed, your honor, ’tis I am the pity of the world. One year ago
my child was lost to me. It was in the night-time, he was taken with a
hemorrhage, with respects to your honor. I woke the children to have
them go for to bring the doctor, but it was too late an they returned.
He quenched in my arms, at the dead hour of night.”

“The pity of the world” she was in truth. The inspector could do nothing
until the ground was firm enough to support horses and tackle in the
spring. We walked back through the somber bog, the mountains seeming to
creep after us, and we speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To
the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there we came on another
aspect of that plaintive acquiescence so strong in the woman. Yes, the
storekeeper admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector was
right: Foley had failed about the bridge. “I’ll haul him over,” he said,
full of sympathy for the woman. And he would haul him over. And the pier
would lie there all winter.

If the people could feel that this solicitude of the Estates Commission
were national, it would bind them to the government. But most of the
inspectors are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees,
well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between the lines. And so
Kerry remains with the old tradition of the government, suspicious of
its intentions, crediting what genuine services there are to the race of
native officials who alone have the intuition of Kerry’s kind.

They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend the Empire; that Empire
which meant landlords and land agents and rackrents for so many blind
and crushing years. They want those straight and stalwart and manly
fellows in the trenches. But Kerry knows what the trenches of Empire are
already. It has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs between
sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years it can remember. It is no
wonder Kerry cannot grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so
readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted a lease to live.



HENRY ADAMS²


Henry Adams was born with his name on the waiting list of Olympus, and
he lived up to it. He lived up to it part of the time in London, as
secretary to his father at the Embassy; part of the time at Harvard,
teaching history; most of the time in Washington, in La Fayette Square.
Shortly before he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the United
States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and Olympus were confused. But not
so long after 1838 the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to
control the country through the railroads there was an inevitable shift
in political gravity, and the center of power became Ohio. It was Henry
Adams’s fate to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in power; and
Ohio did not comprehend Adams’s credentials. Those credentials,
accordingly, were the subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor.
They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history, and Henry Adams
gave a dozen years to Jefferson and Madison. It was his humor afterwards
to say he had but three serious readers—Abram Hewitt, Wayne MacVeagh and
John Hay. His composure in the face of this coolness was, however, a
strange blending of serenities derived equally from the cosmos and from
La Fayette Square. He was not above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even
his autobiography, a true title to Olympus, was issued to a bare hundred
readers before his death, and was then deemed too incomplete to be made
public. It is made public now nominally for “students” but really for
the world that didn’t know an Adams when it saw one.

For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry Adams had the advantage
of full years and happy faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of
both. He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality which is a bad
tradition in English recollections. He saved himself from mere
recollections by taking the world as an educator and himself as an
experiment in education. His two big books were contrasted as
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity_,
and _The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century
Multiplicity_. The stress on multiplicity was all the more important
because he considered himself eighteenth century to start with, and had,
in fact, the unity of simple Americanism at the beginning.

Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of basil in this always
expanding tale of a development. There are points about the development,
about its acceptance of a “supersensual multiverse”, which only a Karl
Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satisfactorily discuss or criticize. A
reader like myself gazes through the glass bottom of Adams’s style into
unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths are clear and crisp. They
deserve to be investigated. But a “dynamic theory of history” is no
proper inhabitant of autobiography, and “the larger synthesis” is not
yet so domesticated as the plebeian idea of God. That Adams should
conduct his study to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent
culmination. A theory of life is the fit answer to the supersensual
riddle of living. But when the theory must be technical and even
professional, an autobiography has no climax in a theory. It is better
to revert, as Adams does, to the classic features of human drama: “Even
in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a
little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of
tone—but never hustled.” It is enough to have the knowledge that along
certain lines the prime conceptions were shattered and the new
conceptions pushed forward, the tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in
the twentieth century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of
acceleration.

Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams embraced the modernity
that gradually dawned on him and gave him his new view of life. Take his
fresh enthusiasm for world’s fairs as a solitary example. One might
expect him to be bored by them, but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford
White and Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of America, and
Henry Adams soared over their obviousness to a perception of their
“acutely interesting” exhibits. He was after—something. If the Virgin
Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or St. Louis could give it to him
among the Jugo-Slavs and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done.
No vulgar prejudices held him back. He who could interpret the fight for
free silver without a sniff of impatience, who could study Grant without
the least filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his nose at
unfashionable faiths or to espouse fashionable heresies. He was after
education and any century back or forward was grist to his mill. And his
faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in it. “All one’s life,”
as he confesses grimly, “one had struggled for unity, and unity had
always won,” yet “the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was
increasing, and threatened to increase beyond reason.” Beyond reason,
then, it was reasonable to proceed, and the son of Ambassador Adams
moved from the sanctity of Union with his feet feeling what way they
must, and his eye on the star of truth.

So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how keen it is. But there is
no single dullness, as I remember, in 505 large pages, and there are
portraits like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or the Adamses,
which have the economy and fidelity of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not,
nor is he a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct
expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and he can load a
sentence with a world of meaning. Take, for instance, the phrase in
which he denies unity to London society. “One wandered about in it like
a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of,
at dinner-time.” He says of St. Gaudens that “he never laid down the
law, or affected the despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the
brutalities of his world.” In a masterly chapter on woman, he summed up,
“The woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of
rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak
revolted all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that even an
Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that,
if force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field,
and the family must pay for it.... She must, like the man, marry
machinery.” In Cambridge “the liveliest and most agreeable of men—James
Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander,
Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a dozen others, who would have
made the joy of London or Paris—tried their best to break out and be
like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them
professors, and professors they had to be. While all these brilliant men
were greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it. Society
was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were there; but
society cannot be made up of elements—people who are expected to be
silent unless they have observations to make—and all the elements are
bound to remain apart if required to make observations.”

Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact, that Henry Adams
himself felt the necessity of making observations. He approached
autobiography buttoned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human beings he
had a real impulse to release himself, and to release himself in an
autobiography if nowhere else; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he
could no more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day than he
could dance like Nijinski. In so far as the Adamses were institutional
he could talk of them openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence
Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge and St. Gaudens as any
liberated host might reveal himself in the warm hour after dinner. But
this is not the Dionysiac tone of autobiography and Henry Adams was not
Dionysiac. He was not limitedly Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was
receptive, he was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the mere
mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the preface of this autobiography
raises doubts as to Henry Adams’s evasive principle, “the object of
study is the garment, not the figure.” The figure, Henry Adams’s, had
nagging interest for Henry Adams, but something racial required him to
veil it. He could not, like a Rousseau or “like a whore, unpack his
heart with words.”

The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on the word “education.”
Although he was nearly seventy when he laid the book aside and although
education means nothing if it means everything, the whole seventy years
were deliberately taken as devotion to a process, that process being
visualized much more as the interminable repetition of the educational
escalator itself than as the progress of the person who moves forward
with it. Moves forward to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams’s
detachment that no escalator could move him forward anywhere because he
was not bound anywhere in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak
of his life as perpetually educational. One reason, of course, was his
economic security. There was no wolf to devour him if his education
proved incomplete. Faculty _qua_ faculty could remain a permanent
quandary to him, so long as he were not forced to be vocational, so long
as he could speculate on “a world that sensitive and timid natures could
regard without a shudder.”

The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, however, is one of the principal
fascinations of this altogether fascinating book. What was it that kept
Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay? What was it that sent him
from Boston to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres? The man was a capable and
ambitious man, if ever there was one. He was not merely erudite and
reflective and emancipatingly skeptical: he was also a man of the
largest inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man of the
nicest temper and the sanest style. How could such justesse go begging,
even in the United States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry
Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen he sat waiting for a
clientage that never came, while through a hole he could see a steady
crowd go pouring into the gilded doors across the way. The modest screen
was himself. He could not detach it. But the United States did not see
beyond the screen. A light behind a large globule of colored water could
at any moment distract it. And in England, for that matter, only the
Monckton Milneses kept the Delanes from brushing Adams away, like a fly.

The question is, on what terms did Adams want life? It is characteristic
of him that he does not specify. But one gathers from his very reticence
that he had least use of all for an existence which required moral
multiplicity. Where he seems gravest and least self-superintending is in
those criticisms of his friends that indicate the sacrifice of
integrity. He was no prig. Not one bleat of priggishness is heard in all
his intricate censure of the eminent British statesmen who sapped the
Union. But there is a fund of significance in his criticism of Senator
Lodge’s career, pages 418 and on, in which “the larger study was lost in
the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men.” It is in
a less concerned tone that the New Yorker Roosevelt is discussed. “Power
when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all
Roosevelt’s friends know that his restless and combative energy was more
than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the
range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs
to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he
was pure act.” Pure act Henry Adams was not. If Roosevelt exhibited “the
effect of unlimited power on limited mind,” he himself exhibited the
contrary effect of limited power on unlimited mind. Why his power
remained so limited was the mystery. Was he a watched kettle that could
not boil? Or had he no fire in his belly? Or did the fire fail to meet
the kettle? Almost any problem of inhibition would be simpler, but one
could scarcely help ascribing something to that refrigeration of
enthusiasm which is the Bostonian’s revenge on wanton life force. Except
for his opaline ethics, never glaring yet never dulled, he is manifestly
toned down to suit the most neurasthenic exaction. Or, to put it more
crudely, he is emotion Fletcherized to the point of inanition.

Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the autobiography is a
refutation of anæmia. There was, indeed, something meager about Henry
Adams’s soul, as there is something meager about a butterfly. But the
lack of sanguine or exuberant feeling, the lack of buoyancy and
enthusiasm, is merely a hint that one must classify, not a command that
one condemn. For all this book’s parsimony, for all its psychological
silences and timidities, it is an original contribution, transcending
caste and class, combining true mind and matter. Compare its comment on
education to the comment of Joan and Peter—Henry Adams is to H. G. Wells
as triangulation to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations which
goes by the name of understanding was part of his very nature. Unlike H.
G. Wells, he was incapable of cant. He had no demagoguery, no
mob-oratory, no rhetoric. This enclosed him in himself to a dangerous
degree, bordered him on priggishness and on egoism. But he had too much
quality to succumb to these diseases of the sedentary soul. He survives,
and with greatness.

   ² _The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: Houghton
     Mifflin Co._



THE AGE OF INNOCENCE


Sweet and wild, if you like, the first airs of spring, sweeter than
anything in later days; but when we make an analogy between spring and
youth and believe that the enchantment of one is the enchantment of the
other, are we not dreaming a dream?

Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not a poet. Just because it
is formative and fugitive it evokes imagination; it has a bloom too
momentary to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it is seen.
In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses itself. It is a delicacy
as tender as the first green leaf, an innocence like the shimmering
dawn, “brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling
water and singing birds.” People feel this when they accept youth as
immaculate and heed its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at
twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think that youth has
the air of spring about it, that spring is the morning of the gods.
Youth is so often handsome and straight and fearless; it has its
mysterious silences—its beings are beings of clear fire in high spaces,
kin with the naked stars. Yet there is in it something not less fiery
which is far more human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers on
board.

As one grows older one is less impatient of the supposition that
innocence actually exists. It exists, even though mothers may not
properly interpret it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism
which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth is neither
innocence nor experience. It is a duel between innocence and experience,
with the attainments of experience guarded from older gaze. Human beings
take their contemporaries for granted, no one else: and neither teachers
nor superiors nor even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that
innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw around youth.

If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its own innocence, the
coming of experience is all the more painful. The process of change is
seldom serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality. The
impressionable and histrionic youth has incessant disappointment in
trying misfit spiritual garments. The undisciplined faculty of
make-believe, which is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to
torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been earned and
self-acceptance begun.

Do mature people try to help this? Do they remember their own
uncertainty and frustration? One of the high points in Mr. Trotter’s
keen psychological study, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War,
indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr. Trotter goes beyond Samuel
Butler and Edmund Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful
experience. He shows the forces at work behind the patronizing and
victimizing of the young.

    The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge and
    experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man and to
    surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or taste....

    Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the
    ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of age
    and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history,
    proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence and
    enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immemorial
    wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling of senile
    decay.

The day will come when our present barbaric attitude toward youth will
be altered. Before it can be altered, however, we must completely revise
our conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly innocent than
it is certainly happy, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounds
youth is not to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness.
Innocence, besides, can last too long. Every one has pitied stale
innocence. If a New York child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may
quite easily be shocking to older people. Already, without any
particular viciousness or precocity, he has accumulated a huge number of
undesirable impressions, and shoved them under the surface of his mind.
What, then, to do? The air of spring that is about him need not mislead
his guardians. They may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a
naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only one agent of
innocence, and not the most successful. Certainly not the most
successful for domesticating youth in the sphere that men and women
consider fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain innocent long
after it recognizes the example and feels the impulses of its elders,
the invitation will go unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or
see the moving pictures without realizing a discrepancy between conduct
and precept, which is one hint to precept to take off its bib.

This knowingness is not quite what it seems to be. Youth is never so
young as when experienced. But those who must deal with it cannot lose
by making it more articulate, by saving it from the silly adult
exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this jealousy and pride
continually operates against youth in the name of dignity and
discipline. And so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction
that portrays youth as the spring time of the spirit; that pipes a song
about a lamb, and leads the lamb to slaughter.



THE IRISH REVOLT


    “It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it is
    altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven.”

             ———— G. K. Chesterton in _The Crimes of England_, 1916.

When a rebellion has failed men say it was wicked or foolish. It is, on
the contrary, wickedness and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise
against authority the measure of their act cannot be loyalty or
prudence. It is the character of the authority against which men revolt
that must shape one’s mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on his
life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction on authority. Is it just
authority, representative, tolerable? The only revolt that is wicked or
foolish is the revolt against reasonable or tolerable authority. If
authority is not livable, revolt is a thousand times justified.

The Irish rebellion was not prudent. Its imprudence did not weigh with
the men who took to arms. Had hope inspired them, they would have been
utterly insane. But hope did not inspire them. They longed for success;
they risked and expected death. The only consequence to us, wrote
Padraic Pearse before action, is that some of us may be launched into
eternity. “But who are we, that we should hesitate to die for Ireland?
Are not the claims of Ireland greater on us than any personal ones? Is
it fear that deters us from such an enterprise? Away with such fears.
Cowards die many times, the brave only die once.” To strike a decisive
blow was the aspiration of the Irish rebels. But decisive or not, they
made up their minds to take action before the government succeeded in
attaching all their arms.

In this rebellion there was no chance of material victory. Pearse,
MacDonagh, Connolly, Clark, Plunkett, O’Rahilly, O’Hanrahan, Daly,
Hobson, Casement, could only hope against hope. But their essential
objective was not a soldiery. It was an idea, the idea of unprotested
English authority in Ireland. It was to protest against the Irish
nation’s remaining a Crown Colony of the British Empire that these men
raised their republican standard and under it shed their blood. In the
first process of that revolt few of them were immediately sacrificed.
Their fight was well planned. They made the most of their brief hour.
But when they were captured the authority they had opposed fulfilled
their expectations to the utmost. Before three army officers, without a
legal defender, each of the leaders was condemned by court-martial.
Their rebellion had been open. Their guilt was known and granted. They
met, as they expected to meet, death.

The insurrection in Ireland is ended. A cold tribunal has finished by
piecework the task that the soldiers began. The British Empire is still
dominant in Dublin. But ruthless and remorseless behavior sharpens the
issue between authority and rebellion. Even men who naturally condemn
disorder feel impelled to scrutinize the authority which could
deliberately dispense such doom. If that authority deserved respect in
Ireland, if it stood for justice and the maintenance of right, its
exaction of the pound of flesh cannot be questioned. It does not
represent “frightfulness.” It represents stern justice. Its hand should
be universally upheld. But if, on the other hand, English authority did
not deserve respect in Ireland, if it had forfeited its claims on these
Irishmen, then there is something to be made known and said about the
way in which this Empire can abuse its power.

Between the Irish people and English authority, as every one knows,
there has been an interminable struggle. A tolerable solution of this
contest has only recently seemed in sight. The military necessity of
England has of itself precluded one solution, the complete independence
of Ireland. The desire for self-government in Ireland has opposed
another solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Between these two
goals the struggle has raged bitterly. But human beings cannot live
forever in profitless conflict. After many years the majority of the
English people took up and ratified the Irish claims to self-government.
In spite of the conservative element in England and the British element
in Ireland, the _modus vivendi_ of home rule was arranged. It is the
fate of this _modus vivendi_, accepted by the majority of Irishmen as a
reasonable commutation of their claims, that explains the recent
insurrection. These men who are dead were once for the most part Home
Rulers. Their rebellion came about as a sequel to the unjust and
dishonest handling of home rule.

For thirty-five years home rule has been an issue in Great Britain. The
majority of the British people supported Gladstone during many home rule
sessions. The lower house of Parliament repeatedly passed the measure.
The House of Lords, however, turned a face of stone to Ireland. It icily
rejected Ireland’s offer to compound her claims. This irreconcilable
attitude proved in the end so monstrous that English Liberalism
revolted. It threw its weight against the rigid body that denied it. It
compelled the House of Lords to accept the Parliament act, its scheme
for circumventing the peers’ veto. Then, three times in succession, it
passed the home rule bill.

Every one knows what happened. During the probation of the bill the
forces that could no longer avoid it constitutionally made up their
minds that they would defeat it unconstitutionally. Men left the House
of Lords and the House of Commons to raise troops in eastern Ulster.
These, not the Irish, were Germany’s primary allies in the British
Isles. Cannon, machine guns, and rifles were shipped to Ireland. Every
possible descendant of the implanted settlers of Ireland was rallied.
Large numbers were openly recruited and armed. The Ulster leaders
pleaded they were loyal, but they insisted that the Liberals of England
did not and could not speak for the Empire. The only English authority
they recognized was an authority like-minded to themselves. Lord
Northcliffe joined with Lord Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and Lord
Willoughby de Broke and Lord Roberts and Sir Edward Carson and Bonar Law
to advise and stimulate rebellion. Some of the best British generals in
the army, to the delight of Germany, were definitely available as
leaders. A provisional government, with Carson as its premier, was
arranged for in 1911. The Unionist and Orange organizations pledged
themselves that under no conditions would they acknowledge a home rule
government or obey its decrees. In 1912 the Solemn Covenanters pledged
themselves “to refuse to recognize its authority.” During this period
the government negotiated, but took no action. There were no
Nationalists under arms.

If free men have a right to rebel, how can any one gainsay Ulster? It
was the Ulster contention that home rule would be unreasonable,
intolerable, and unjust. This was a prophecy, perhaps a natural and
credible prophecy. But it is not necessary to debate the Ulster
rebellion. It was a hard heritage of England’s crime against Ireland. It
is enough to say that English authority refused to abandon the home rule
measure and in April, 1914, Mr. Asquith promised to vindicate the law.

The British League for the support of Ulster had sent out “war calls.”
The Ulster Unionist Council had appropriated $5,000,000 for volunteer
widows and orphans. Arms had been landed from America and, it was said,
from Germany. Carson had refused to “negotiate” any further. His
mobilization in 1914 became ominous. The government started in moving
troops to Ulster. The King intervened. Mr. Balfour inveighed against the
proposal to use troops. The army consulted with Carson. Generals French
and Ewart resigned.

About this period, with Asquith and Birrell failing to put England’s
pledges to the proof, the National Volunteers at last were being
organized. Mr. Asquith temporized further. At his behest John Redmond
peremptorily assumed control of the Volunteers. Their selected leader
was Professor MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the non-political Gaelic
revival. There was formal harmony until the European war was declared,
when Mr. Redmond sought to utilize the National Volunteers for
recruiting. This move made definite the purely national dedication of
the Irish Volunteers.

Four events occurred in rapid succession to destroy the Irish
Volunteers’ confidence in English authority. These were decisive events,
and yet events over which the Irish Volunteers could have no control.

On July 10th, 1914, armed Ulster Volunteers marched through Belfast, and
Sir Edward Carson held the first meeting of his provisional government.

On July 26th, 1914, the British troops killed three persons and wounded
thirty-two persons because rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin,
subsequent to their futile attempt to intercept Irish Volunteer arms.

On Sept. 19th, 1914, the home rule bill was signed, but its operation
indefinitely suspended.

In May, 1915, Sir Edward Carson became a member of the British Cabinet.

These events were endured by John Redmond. He had early accepted a
Fabian policy and put his trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the
price of maintaining the law they decreed. The more radical men in
Dublin were not so trusting. They had heard Asquith promise that no
permanent division of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned he
had bargained for it. They had heard him promise he would vindicate the
law, and they saw him sanction the defiant military leader as
commander-in-chief and the defiant civil leader as a minister of the
crown. With the vivid memory of British troops killing Irish citizens on
the streets of Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English honor.
They had no impulse to recruit for the defense on the Continent of an
Empire thus honorable. They looked back on the evil history they had
been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and to die.

Irishmen like myself who believed in home rule and disbelieved in
revolution did not agree with this spirit. We thought southern Ireland
might persuade Ulster. We thought English authority was possibly weak
and shifty, but benign. We did not wish to see Ireland, in the words of
Professor MacNeill, go fornicating with Germany. When our brothers went
to the European war we took England’s gratitude as heartfelt and her
repentance as deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest, torture,
rape, enforced subservience, ignorance, poverty, famine. But we listened
to G. K. Chesterton about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous Ireland:
“It was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment.”

All the deeper, then, the shock we received from the execution of our
men of finest mettle. They were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so
was De Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a calculation based
on the greater military strength of the Dutch. A government which had
negotiated with rebels in the North, which had allowed the retention of
arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in the Cabinet, could not mark an
eternal bias in its judgment of brave men whose legitimate
constitutional prospects it had raised high and then intolerably
suspended. But this English government, often cringing and supine, was
brave enough to slay one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in
the name of “justice,” the judges in this rebellion being officers of an
army that had refused to stand against rebellion in Ulster.

It is not in vain, however, that these poets and Gaelic scholars and
Republicans have stood blindfolded to be shot by English soldiers. Their
verdict on English authority was scarcely in fault. They estimated with
just contemptuousness the temper of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland
has long been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone from Ireland,
by the fulfillment of England’s bond, the memory of this rebellion must
flourish. It testifies sadly but heroically that there are still
Irishmen who cannot be sold over the counter, Irishmen who set no
ultimate sanction on a dishonest authority, Irishmen who set no ultimate
value on their merely mortal lives.



A LIMB OF THE LAW


“Look here,” said the policeman, tapping me on the chest, “Mrs. Trotsky
used to live up here above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And then
see what happens—she turns up in Stockholm with two million roubles.”

“Oh, I don’t blame her. But ain’t we all human—Socialists, Democrats,
Republicans? All we need is a chance.”

“I admit, Socialism has beautiful ideas. But are they practical? That’s
what I ask. Now, pardon me, just a minute! Just one minute, please!
Socialism is a fine theory, but look at Emma Goldman. That woman had
seven lovers. Free love. Yes, many a time I’ve heard them, preaching the
children belonged to the state. Here’s their argument, see, they say
that a man and a woman wants to get married but the man figures, have I
enough to support her? and the woman figures, how much has he got? and
the only thing for them to do in that case is to turn the children over
to the state. Now, I ask you, is that human?”

“You say, a lot of these women in limousines practice free love without
preaching it. Oh, I don’t deny it. And, look’t here, I’m surprised there
isn’t more bombs at that. Right here on the Avenue you see the cars in
one long procession all day, like every one was a millionaire, and three
blocks over you see people who haven’t the means of livelihood, without
a shirt to their backs. I’m a public officer, as you might say, and
maybe it sounds queer what I’m going to say, but I’m afraid to have my
own children on the steps of the apartment house. I takes the
night-stick to them and I says, ‘Beat it out of here, don’t let the
landlord see you, or he’ll raise the rent again.’”

“You said it, something’s rotten somewhere. What do you think of the
government holding back all that meat, just because the packers want it
fixed that way, and plenty of people on the Lower East Side there
willing to buy it all up—and at good prices too? But, no, it has to be
held back to suit the packers. And then they lower the price a little.
Because why? The government lets them have all that meat for what they
like.”

“It’s the same way with the ice. Did you see what they done? The mayor
gets them all together, to prevent them boosting the price on it, and
it’s fixed; they can’t raise the price this summer to more than five
fifty a ton. They wait two days at the old price, and then they put it
at five fifty. Two days they wait, that’s all.”

“Of course this is the best government in the world. I’ll tell you what
proves it—all these foreigners coming over here. Look at that
soda-fountain man there. You heard him talk up for the Bolsheviki,
didn’t you? Well, he hasn’t much gray matter in here, but just the same
that fellow makes as much in three months as I get for a whole lousy
year. Three months, and he hasn’t been here ten years. And my people
been here two hundred. But these immigrants come over ignorant and
uneducated, and only down in Kentucky and Tennessee are our people not
able to read and write. I hear down there they are regular tribes,
fighting each other and all that. Of course that soda-fountain man, he
couldn’t associate with lots of the people I go with. If he walked in,
they’d look at him as much as to say, ‘Who have we here?’ But he rolls
up the coin just the same.”

“But the trouble with the Russian people, I’ll tell you. Why, eighty per
cent of them can’t read or write. Now I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s
like this: the Russian people is like a dog was tied up in the
back-yard, see, and then he was let loose and he run wild with joy all
over the place, and then it depended who was the first to whistle to
him, whee-whee, and Lenin and Trotsky they whistled, whee-whee, and the
Russian people came right to them. Of course I don’t think it’ll work.
They want to do away with money over there. You know, you want to buy a
shoeshine and you give a man a head of cabbage. That’s impractical. And
then again the government can’t own everything. It’s all right for
public utilities, but you take and try to control everything and what’ll
happen? It can’t be done. What I say is, let a man earn a million or so,
and then say to him, anything over and above that million we take away,
see? And when he has his million he doesn’t go on trying to monopolize
everything. But now, you have all these uneducated people around here,
and the more money they earn the worse they are.”

“I’ll tell you. Right across the hall from where my wife and me live
there’s a lovely woman, a Jewess, one of the nicest people you could
want to meet, and I’m in her house and she’s in mine all the time, until
her husband comes home. But he’s one of that kind, you know! The other
night he comes home with three friends and he says to me, ‘Say, Charlie,
come on down to Long Island with us in the car for a week. I’ll pay all
your expenses!’ ‘You will, eh,’ I says. ‘Now I’ll tell you something.
That sort of thing don’t go with me. In the first place, you know I
can’t get leave to be away from the police department for a week; in the
second place, you know I can’t leave my wife here; in the third place,
you know damn well I can’t afford to go with you. I know your kind! You
have your three friends here and you want them to see what a great guy
you are. Well, I’ll tell you what you are,’ and I told him. Now he’ll be
the same if he has a million. And I’ll tell you another kind that hasn’t
respectability. No, I mean decency. She was a big fat woman and her baby
was crying here the other day, and she opened her dress right there and
leaned down to feed the child. You know, just like that statue, I forget
the name. And all the little boys rubbering around. That’s the class of
people you have to contend with around here in this place, with the air
full of fish guts they throw out of the windows, and everything.”

“But the German ones are different. Not that I want to praise the
Germans or the like of that, but they’re self-respectful, you know. It’s
the lack of education with them others—those others.”

“But you put the Socialists in power and what difference will it make?
I’m—I’m not against Socialism, I want you to understand. But there’s
human nature!”



A PERSONAL PANTHEON


Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine, Clarence Day shied a
cocoanut at old Henri Fabre. Personally I had nothing against Henri. I
rather liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence said
publicly, “that old bird-artist, you don’t have to admire him any
longer.” Without waiting for further encouragement I bounced Henri off
the steps of my Pantheon.

Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I admit, but nothing is so
important as to keep it from getting crowded with half-gods. For many
months my own Pantheon has been seriously congested. Most of the ancient
deities are still around—George Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom Hardy
and Sam Butler—and there is a long waiting list suggested by my friends.
Joseph Conrad has been sitting in the lobby for several years, hungering
for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated applications from such
varied persons as Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, Anatole France,
Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P. Shelley, John Muir, George
Washington and Mary Wollstonecraft. But with so many occupants already
installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed in, it has been impossible
to open the doors to newcomers. My gods are like the office-holders—few
die and none resign. And when a happy accident occurs, like the
demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel as one feels when some third person is
good enough to smash the jardinière.

I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while. Two or three years ago he
swept into the Pantheon on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse
for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest gods I had ever
encountered. His smile, his long jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a
Tussaud figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and William Blakes.
I stood him in the corner when he first arrived, debating where to put
him, but at no time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young Teddy
Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did
Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all, had kept
Mr. Wilson from being a Republican? How did he differ intrinsically from
a Henry Stimson, a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton? The
pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had not the heart to enthrone
him; and never shall I enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the
flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and commonplace
humanity. He is President, as was Taft. So is he impressive. But the
expectation I had blown up for him is punctured. He would have been a
god, despite all my prejudice against his styles, if at any time he had
proved himself to be the resolute democrat. But the resolute democrat he
was not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating his chest
as well as he could, and he has to get out of my Pantheon.

This eviction of the President relieves my feelings like a good spring
cleaning. To be con-structive gives me pleasure, but not half so much
pleasure as to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former mental
and spiritual habitations. A great many people are catholic. They have
hearts in which Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East Lynne. I
envy these people and their receptive natures, but my own chief joy is
to asphyxiate my young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage
of loyalty.

There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I was unjust to Upton Sinclair
that I almost subscribed to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel,
Jimmie Higgins, I actually read it.

“My best book,” Mr. Sinclair assures the world. If that is really the
case, as I hope, I am happily emancipated from him forever. He is
something of an artist. He converts into his own kind of music the
muck-rake element in contemporary journalism. He is always a
propagandist, and out of religious finance or the war or high society or
the stockyards or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that
nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on such stimulants, one
ought to choose them carefully, and I’d much rather go straight to Billy
Sunday than take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on reading his
well-known health books, I nearly fasted nine days under his influence.
That is to say, I fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which I
dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced me that I was perhaps
a coarser organism than Mr. Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an
ordinary diet. But until I had a good reason for expelling this
uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always in danger of taking
him seriously. Now, I am glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am
safe.

Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom Upton Sinclair is
nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion of Nietzsche was also
required. When we used to read the _New Age_ ten years ago, with Oscar
Levy’s steady derision of everything and anything not Nietzschean, I had
a horrible sense of inadequacy, and I started out to read the Master’s
works. It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and worm as I was,
I found Nietzsche upsetting all the other fellows in the Pantheon. He
and William Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity.
Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny stories. He was sulky with
George Meredith and frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss
Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but I voted him away.

This Olympian problem does not seem to bother men like William Marion
Reedy. Mr. Reedy is the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee
Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism, Woodrow Wilson
and Theodore Roosevelt. He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile
salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops and publishers, and
he is genuinely himself with all of them. He finds the common
denominator in machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and without
turning a hair he moves from tropical to arctic conversation. He is at
home with Celtic fairies and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance
and St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe he has, it must be
a good deal like a Union depot, with gods coming in and departing on
every train and he himself holding a glorious reception at the
information booth. I am sure he can still see the silver lining to W. J.
Bryan and the presidential timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun
of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a good word for Freud. He has
nothing against Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity
puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies is called upon to slave
in their service, to rush here and there like a general practitioner, to
sleep with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at his head. How
does he find the energy to do it! I admire it. I marvel at men who
understand all and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore
Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt Whitman. Think of those
who have a good word to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am
sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a lot of much-needed
vitality. Give me a temple on a high hill, with a long drop down from
the exit.



NIGHT LODGING


It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim Gorki’s Night
Lodging of “gloom.” Gloomy plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one
of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a play like She Walked
in Her Sleep? That defunct comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle
race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies that. But to believe that a
somber play must necessarily be a “gloomy” play is like believing that
Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply isn’t true, and to
suppose it is mentally inelastic.

But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We say, Ah yes,
Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen, the man who bites on granite; or
Gorki, the Big Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are simply
human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions of the fifth grade.
This is itself an old story in criticism. Only the story has to be
re-told every time the New York newspaper critics are called upon to
characterize a serious drama. With a regularity as unfailing as the
moon, the New York critics reaffirm their conviction that a play
concerning derelict human beings must of course be squalid, sodden,
high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to believe and assert
such things, yet their belief and assertion are endemic in the New York
newspapers, like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps.

Mr. Arthur Hopkins’s presentation of Night Lodging at the Plymouth
Theatre may or may not be better than the presentation some time ago at
the German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the performance at the
German theatre and I am inclined to distrust the persons to whom the
German theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick with which to
whack the American theatre. But, better or worse than the German
performance, Mr. Hopkins’s is to the good. It is a strong, firm,
spacious, capable performance, resting not so much on a few pinnacles as
on a general level of excellence. It is presented bravely. Making no
attempt to sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics, it allows
the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate every word and action of
the performance. The result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every
actor in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness. But the result
is viable, Russian or not. A sense of human incident and human presence
is quickly secured, and after that there comes a stream of events which
never loses its reality either in force or direction. The impact is
tremendous. Gorki inundates one’s consciousness with these human
fortunes and misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while occasional
accents slip awry in the tumult of his creation, the substance of his
story finds one a corroborator—in a way that one simply never
corroborates depression or gloom.

The men and women, who come together in this night lodging of a Russian
city, are of the emancipated kind that one sees on the benches in
Madison Square. They are recruited from the casual worker and the
non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the
criminals and the broken and the déclassé. On the first evening when one
hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, one
realizes that their anarchism is bitter. They grate on one another,
sneer at one another, bawl at one another, tell one another to go to
hell. They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled them. They do
not understand or accept their fate. They are full of self-pity. They
are, in a word, one’s tired and naked self. But this relaxed and wanton
selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps for his people the
freshness of childhood—a freshness charming in some cases, horrible in
others, but always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal
themselves in this nudity of common poverty! A woman in the corner is
coughing, coughing. She wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His
patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies a man half recovered
from a drunken brawl. He aches loudly with stale liquor and stale
wounds. In the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the wife of
the lodging-house keeper—a mistress from whom he pines to escape. The
“baron” sits in the shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary
sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor repeats the
medical verdict that his organism is poisoned with alcohol. “You mean
‘organon,’” shouts another. “No, organism. My organism....” And so,
these lives sweep round and round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the
sport of the winds of heaven.

Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical patriarchal wanderer.
Quite simply he fits into this life of the basement, but unlike the rest
he is no longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect in his
anarchism. And gradually the lives of the night lodging group around
him. He sits by the dying woman. He talks of women to the young thief,
and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning to the
young. He stands like an untroubled oak in the gales that toss the
others hither and thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets them all
with compassion, a man among children.

He goes. His presence has not prevented the lodging-house keeper’s wife
from driving the young man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented
that flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the young man really
loves. But though the old man departs he leaves after him a rent of blue
in the clouds that choke these people’s lives. One after another the
night lodgers question life afresh under the wanderer’s influence. The
tartar’s arm is still smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is
still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The actor is still
alcoholic. But there is aroused in the night lodging the imperishable
dream of happiness, and no one is ready to quench it.

Why is the grave and beautiful play _not_ gloomy? It is not enough to
say that the really gloomy play gives a naturalistic version of life
which the spectator rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the
falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows or in its discords
but in its absence of the vitamin of beauty. Many plays are denied truth
because their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied beauty
simply because their beauty is a stranger. Yet we know that truth or
beauty may be as sable as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a
waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the child of
ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, conventional ugliness.
It is the people who think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see
Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail in beholding life. It is
not poor in sympathy.



YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC


In 1912, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the public how Mr. Taft had
bitten the hand that fed him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft’s rejoinder but
it was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further observations from the
colonel. Those were the days. Nothing but peace on earth and good will
among Republicans.

About that time I happened to have lunch with a most attractive young
man, one of the first American aviators. He was such a clear-cut young
man, with trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said he to me,
“But how can these things be true? I can’t understand it. If any one
else said these things you’d pay no attention to them, but both of these
men are fine men; they’ve both been president; and if these things they
say _are_ true, then neither of them can be such fine gentlemen. I can’t
make it out, honestly.” And he looked at me with a profundity of pained
inquiry.

What could I say? What can you say when you meet with such simple faith?
It took years of primary school and Fourth of July and American history
to build up this conception of the American presidents, and now the
worst efforts of a president and an ex-president had only barely shaken
the top-structure. What was the good of forcing this youth to unlearn
everything he had learned? If I took away his faith in the divine office
of president, perhaps he might begin to lose his patriotism and his
willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps he might go on
and lose faith in the jury system, the institution of marriage, the
right of free speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance of
Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment. If I unhinged this
lad’s faith, perhaps he would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther,
Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma Goldman—the “Goldman
Woman” as the Ochs man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed man
call her in their outbursts of American chivalry. I wanted no such arid
and lonely career for this splendid young man. I hated to think of his
wearing an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his fresh bloom to
be a subversive idealist like Eugene Debs. Much better, said I to
myself, that he should hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than
that he should repulse him and face life without him. So I gave the lad
soothing words and earnest though insincere glances, and he went his way
puzzled but greatly reassured.

Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say that simple faith is all
very well, but a man ought to live in the real world and know his way
around. Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing situation. He
is compelled to evade uncomfortable facts. Very true. Quite right.
Exactly so. But is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of
being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a simpleton and yet a
wholesome man of action, a man of will and character and pep? What is
the good of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalatable
facts, if it confuses you and upsets you and undermines everything
you’ve been brought up to believe? What’s the use? Voltaire may be all
right in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we all be Voltaires?

If I stick up for good faith in the character of presidents, I know that
there will be a bad comeback. I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even
if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I therefore to give in
to them? I refuse to admit that there is nothing else than to destroy a
beautiful faith in the good that is everywhere.

What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old argument of the war.
They say: Yes, your fine brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical
product of patriotism. And where were the prime examples of patriotism
to be found? In Germany. He happens, in your instance, to believe in the
divine office of the presidents. But it is much more characteristic of
him to be on his knees to the Kaiser. Yet consider how one-sided you
are. When he declares himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the
joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his reverence over the
Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when
it comes to an American you say, “Oh, don’t let’s destroy this beautiful
faith! How precious it is, how noble, how commendable! Hands off,
please.” And you act in the same way toward the Constitution or the
Supreme Court. It’s magnificent when the Germans come ahead with a
perfectly good new constitution, model 1920. But we must stick to the
brand of 1789, with the cow-catcher added in 1910. Hail to Our Iron
Constitution! And hail to the Old Man’s Home down in Washington where
they hand out the uncontaminated economics that they themselves lisped
at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country. Straight from the source,
these old men got their inspiration, and they are a credit to the early
nineteenth century. You think we exaggerate your loyalty? You agree that
the simple faith of young Germans and young Turks can be highly
dangerous, but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young Americans?

That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way; but hardly likely to
fool the intelligent, law-abiding, God-fearing citizen. Because no good
American could admit for one instant that the cases are on all fours.
America, after all, is a democracy. And when a young man starts out
having faith in a democracy he is in an altogether different position
from Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet Russians and people
like that. A democracy, whatever its faults, is founded in the interests
of all the people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple faith in it is
equivalent to simple faith in a first principle; and you cannot go
behind first principles.

That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic. He thinks it is very
clever to question the things that are of the light in just the same
spirit that he questions things that are of the darkness. And of course
he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who cuts away the sound flesh rather
than the diseased flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive
not con-structive.

And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion my fine young
aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning him, who can tell what the
consequences might have been? We know that during the war there were
grim duties to be performed by our young men—towns to be bombed where it
took excessive skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the women
and the children. If I had sapped this boy’s faith even one pulsation,
perhaps he would have failed in his duty.

You cannot be too careful how you lead people to rationalize. In this
world there is rationalism and plenty of it. But is there not also a
super-rationalism? And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism
when we _know_ we possess the true faith?



THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID³


The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so he had to pick his steps
with care. But at last he came to a French window, which he opened, and
sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was a poet, and that is what
young poets do.

He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men go. Unformed, of
course—perhaps twenty minutes late and the hall only two-thirds full.
But he was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the gas. He was
from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, but he had long resided with an aunt
in Nebraska and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts and a lemon
tie. At Harvard—he went to Harvard—he had opened his bean with
considerable difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of temperament.
So that he could never stop himself when he beheld a passing star.

The motion was full, with significant curves. It made him a little
air-sick at first, but he preferred air-sickness. He made no compromise
with the public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days that quickly
ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of
Venus on the main line.

In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick their heels toward
Mercury, and utter startling cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the
menagerie, and they feed mathematical instructors through a hole in the
wall. This new participant had too much of the stern blood of the
Puritan in his rustproof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, but
when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of seventy years he felt a
little wishful, and permitted himself a trifling ululation. The local
cheer-leader heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard Acutist, and
there was joy in Asphodelia.

A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping in the branches of
the cocoanut tree, and the river of green ink wearied him. So when the
next star swung around he slipped away from his pink duenna and crept
into the lattice-work to steal his passage home.

Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He hung there lonely, in
his Reis underwear, aching in the void.

He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he trans-shipped to New York in
ordinary ways, he prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue
course on Front Street.

“My boy,” said his uncle, “what do you want me to do for you? Speak the
word. You have been gone so long, and you were given up for lost.”

“Only one thing do I want,” confessed the former Acutist.

“And what might that be?” the uncle more circumspectly inquired.

“Take me at once to the great simple embrace of wholesome Coney Island.”

So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped
from Acutism on to the Iron Boat.

And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not
leave something to waft in the spaces of uncertainty?

   ³ Inscribed to the _Little Review_



WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS


I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet.
At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my
dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not
ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to
take notes of William Butler Yeats?

In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I
intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead
wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was
welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak.
His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and
remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them
for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some
sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he pronounced
his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his
words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was
indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished
conversation. Or, rather, monologue—for when I talked he suspended his
animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.

It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he’d write for it,
and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action
and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him
want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The
Playboy. The word “journalism” he uttered as a nun might utter
“vaudeville.” He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to
Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court
gossip. Wouldn’t it interest Wilde? “Ah, yes,” responded Wilde, “I am
deeply interested in a court scandal at present.” The journalist
(devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. “Yes,” said
Wilde, “the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C.”

It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not
forget, however, pillars of the _Ladies’ World_ edited by Oscar Wilde
which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the
end.

Yeats’s mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman.
Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a “fury of
preoccupation” would keep him from being caught in those activities that
lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but
into dialogues, “of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez.” In
the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a
mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a
stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond
space and time.

“And humanitarian writing,” he concluded, with a weary limp motion of
his hand, “the writing of reformers, ‘uplifters,’ with a narrow view of
democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic.”

I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel’s narrow antidemocracy and belief in
the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during
the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate nature. The
progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the
early Victorians. It was founded on “truisms” not really true. Whether
Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn’t
know: possibly Mitchel was.

Yeats’s one political interest at that time, before the war, was the
Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British
democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and “this is
fortunate.” I spoke of Jung’s belief in England’s national complex. He
was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted.
“The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration,” he said, “and
Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so
there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson
has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for
a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a
better man than Lloyd George—less inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed
up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it arises.... I
object to the uplifter who makes other people’s sins his business, and
forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, that is
different.”

His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences.
In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more,
than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and
somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in
this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a
poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own
country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin
slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is
poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would
satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in
imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for
auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes,
but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination.
He agreed. “Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be
irreconcilable.”

It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the
deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen.
He said it was Allen’s own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many
thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same
scale as their friends’ children! And he kindled at this folly. “A woman
who marries an artist,” he said with much animation, “is either a goose,
or mad, or a hero. If she’s a goose, she drives him to earn money. If
she’s mad she drives him mad. If she’s a hero, they suffer together, and
they come out all right.”

Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that
the Pennsylvania station is “free from the vulgarity of advertisement”;
the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The
Dark Rosaleen and Hussey’s Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the
effect that “courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art.” Not
for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and
read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like
Hazlitt’s meeting Coleridge. I could not say, “my heart, shut up in the
prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find,
a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb
and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to
Coleridge.” But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the
periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of
poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is
wise enough to treasure his words.



“WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE”


Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great
detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came
a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a
rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the
ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as
quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was
to be seen. The skyscrapers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost
light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars
unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active,
beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky.

I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could
it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A
U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind
was singularly lively for three a. m.

Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains,
if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality
of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed,
death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put
yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really
bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel
Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation.
An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of
feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia.
To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred—that would always be
a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, “proud punctilio.” I
remembered the President’s tender-minded words, “conduct our operations
as belligerents without passion,” and his pledge of sincere friendship
to the German people: warfare without “the desire to bring any injury or
disadvantage upon them.” Here, with the Germans’ shell-fire plowing into
our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their
guns?

Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about
this “bombardment,” to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson
Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not
at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves
familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains
shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air.
Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud
reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so
distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless
inspection of the innocent sky!

But that touch of panic, in the interest of our whole present patriotic
cultural attitude, was not to be lost. It is the touch, confessed or
unconfessed, that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward German art
and literature and science an attitude of appreciation and
reciprocation, without disloyalty, it must be in the presence of the
idea of shell-wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness is the
illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth and smug. It is Pharisaical. It
comes from that neutrality of the imagination which is another name for
selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake.

A generation less prepared than our own for the mood of warfare it would
be difficult to imagine—less prepared, that is to say, by the situation
of our country or the color of our thought. To declare now that New York
has made no provision for the air-traffic of the future is not to arouse
any sense of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency was aroused
ten or fifteen years ago by the bass warnings of military men. It is not
too much to say that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have an
ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas Murray Butler and Elihu Root and
Andrew Carnegie were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel
Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was far more busy
enunciating the recall of judges—and he earned the Nobel Prize. Few men,
even two years ago, believed we would be sending great armies to Europe
in 1917. In the first place, men like Homer Lea had said that the United
States could not mobilize half a million soldiers for active service in
less than three years. And in the next place, we still felt pacifically.
We had lived domestic life too long ever to imagine our sky black and
our grass red.

Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, this calm enjoyment of an
unearned increment of peace, there was never a greater dislocation of
standards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater problem of
readjustment. For England, at any rate, there was a closeness to the war
that helped to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, besides
the discrepancies in the entailment of services, there are enormous
discrepancies in sentiment to start with, and policies still to be
accepted and cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed or
reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances, is so much to
be looked for, especially with impetuous patriots demanding a new
password of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not at how many
outrages there are, but how few.

Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of literary discussion,
naturally. “Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds;
the herd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his
flocks”; the critic of his books. But there is one kind of outrage that
requires to be discussed, from the point of view of culture, if only
because there is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be
subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally so-called,
of mutilating everything German; not only sequestering what may be
dangerous or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration
everything that has German origin or bears a German name. The quick
transformation of Bismarcks into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into
Café New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously. The shudderings
at Germantown, Pa., and Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same
childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian artist is not
permitted to perform because, while we are not at war with Austria, she
is our enemy’s ally. It is different when “the music of all German
composers will be swept from the programmes of scheduled concerts of the
Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh. ‘The Philadelphia Orchestra
Association wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure to the
request of the Pittsburgh Association. The Philadelphia Orchestra
Association is heartily in accord with any movement directed by
patriotic motives.’” It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance to
culture, that suggests we have been surprised in this whole matter of
culture with our lamps untrimmed.

In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have been unavoidably
surprised—so much so that our “proud punctilio” has been jogged
considerably loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any
pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to be. It used to be
possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign
magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare
possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally
involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its
complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy
is inhuman in this war.

Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred might well go beyond the
fervor of the Inquisition, and the hope of exterminating the Germans as
a people might be universally entertained. But no one who has read
history to any purpose will trust too far to this particular
emotionality of the hour. To say this, in the middle of a righteous war,
may sound unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could be more
traitorous and seditious than Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: “Both
read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid
against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered—that of
neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. ‘Woe
unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses
come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall
suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through
his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that _he gives to both
North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the
offense came_, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war
may speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be said, ‘The judgments
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none;
with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see
the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the
nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and
for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a
just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” It is,
perhaps, like quoting the Lord’s Prayer. And yet it is the neglected
wisdom of a man who had gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war.

But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside humanity. We are
engaged in a war foreordained and necessary, a natural war. A war
inescapable, yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of
hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations as this is,
however, scarcely possible. It is too much, in the face of
superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of
culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our
own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent
nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is
at once called “rowdy” and “despicable.” But in time of war it is part
of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to
clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making
railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. How far this
supervision of culture goes depends only on the degree of pressure. It
may go so far as to make the domination of political considerations,
state considerations, paramount in everything—precisely the victory that
democracy, hoping with Emerson that “we shall one day learn to supersede
politics by education,” has most to fear.

It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one
must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is
opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do
so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It
is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and
English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the
beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in
mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end.
But for the man who has partaken of democratic culture this “end”
involves democracy. All character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in
the will to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The only course
open to the man who is still concerned for democratic culture is to
remember the nobility of Lincoln’s example—by concentrating on the
offenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty scourge of war,
to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred which will enrage our wounds.



WAR EXPERTS


    “War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong arm.
    Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in
    modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive
    factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are
    technological exploits; exploits of technological science,
    industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been
    remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman’s war, and the
    gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as
    it is played.”

                     ———— Thorstein Veblen in _The Nature of Peace_.

Across a park in Washington I followed the leisurely stride of two
British officers. Their movement, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had
a military deliberation which became their veteran gray hairs. They were
in khaki uniforms and leather leggings, a red strip at the shoulder
marking them as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses and
tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn to the birds they were as
of a grander race of men. After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked
who they were and learned that one of them was simply a Canadian
lawyer—and that, being a judge advocate, he was obliged to boot and spur
himself in his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and down the
elevator in polished leggings, for the good of the cause. Never in his
life had he heard a machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything
more dangerous than his family carving knife. On inspection his
companion looked similarly martial. The only certain veteran in the
parklet was a shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the grass.

Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing of this
description. It excites the romantic populace, composed of pedestrians
like myself, and serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine
order of values from which the shambling citizen is debarred. But back
of the window-dressing, the rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared
ovation and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different from these
appearances as roots are different from flowers. If I had ever supposed
that the gist of war was to be derived solely from contemplating
uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion when I overheard the cool
experts of war.

These experts, such of them as I happened to overhear, had come with the
British mission to America, and they were far other than the common
notion of lords of war. The most impressive of them was a slight figure
who reminded me externally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw’s
Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a don at Cambridge, a teacher
of economics, and he retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert
who counts on holding attention. It was not in him, as it is in so many
older pooh-bah professors, to expect a deference to personal garrulity;
but one gained an impression that no words were likely to be wasted on
vacuous listeners by a person with such steel-gray eyes.

From London, since the beginning of the war, this concentrated man had
gone out of Paris, to Rome, to Petrograd, to join counsel with various
allies on the science of providing munitions. It would never have
occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced, sensitive,
quiet-voiced professor to work out the economic killing of cattle. Yet
almost as soon as he had volunteered in England he began on the task of
adapting industry to slaughter, and there was no doubt whatever that his
inclusive mind had procured the quick and effective killing of thousands
of human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen to him. He was
one of those men whom H. G. Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort
of man who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind as nimble as
quicksilver while he devised the soundest plan for launching the forces
of his sphere. There was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a
mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing of America for
destructiveness as an engineer might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel
with copper, and there was as little pretension in his manner as there
was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated, he was obviously a
university man, but he had come to the top by virtue of mental
equipment. “Mental equipment” means many things, but plainly he was not
of those remote academicians who go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He
managed his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt swing and drive
and bite of it could escape no one, and for all his almost plaintively
modest demeanor he had instant arresting power. It was he and a few men
like him who had made it feasible for amateur armies to loop round an
empire a burning rain of steel.

This master of munitions was not the only schoolman who had demonstrated
brains. There was another professor, this time the purchaser of guns. He
had come to his rôle from holding the kind of position that Matthew
Arnold once had held. A meager figure enough, superficially the
scholastic-dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of education was
no bad beginning for ordering a new department with small attention to
the tricks, of merchandise, but with every thought as to technological
detail. The conversation that went about did not seem to engage this
man, except as it turned on such engrossing topics as the necessity for
circumventing child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent cloud
that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged itself in lightning
decision which made no change in the obscurity from which it came.

Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue I saw one late-working
member of the mission stop wearily to fend off American inquisition. A
training in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished exile a
permanent nostalgia for Olympus—and how Olympian the British Foreign
Office is, few Americans dare to behold. The candidature to this
interesting service of a great democracy is limited to a “narrow circle
of society” by various excellent devices, the first of which is that
official conditions of entry fix the amount of the private means
required at a minimum of £400 a year. “The primary qualification for the
diplomatic service,” says one friendly interpreter of it, “is a capacity
to deal on terms of equality with considerable persons and their words
and works. Sometimes, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its
highest form, by something which is hardly examinable—by very great
intellectual powers. Ordinarily, however, this capacity is a result of
nurture in an atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is scarcely
too much to say that the present constitution of society provides this
atmosphere of independence only where there is financial independence.
In a very few cases freedom of mind and character is achieved elsewhere,
but then a great price, not measurable by money, has to be paid for
it—how great a price only those who have paid it know.... The ‘property
qualification’ is operative as a means of selecting a certain kind of
character; no readjustment of pay could be a substitute for it.
Undoubtedly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but the
limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice or of a mere
preference for wealth—it is a limitation imposed by the needs of the
diplomatic service, and those needs are national needs.” Out of such a
remarkable background, so redolent of “the present constitution of
society,” my exiled diplomat took his weary stand before prying writers
for the press. They wanted to know “the critical shrinking point.” They
wished to discuss the “maximum theoretic availability.” He had no answer
to make; he merely made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box that
he set at his feet there were undoubtedly treasured figures, priceless
information for Germany in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box
might have been solid metal for any effect it had on the conversation.
He was a kind of expert who took interrogation with pallid mournfulness;
who punctuated silence with, “Look here, you’ve got hold of absolutely
the wrong man.... Hanged if I know.... My dear sir, I haven’t the very
faintest idea.”

And yet this member of a caste was only coming through because he too
was paying a technological price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and
rubber—there was nothing his country might need which did not occupy
him, staff officer of vital trafficking, throughout numbered nights.

There were a few business men on the mission—mighty few considering
their lordship in times of peace. Most of the dominant figures either
from Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual who stood out
as rather an exception to the prevailing type. He was an older man whose
nature brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and high discourse
and a happy gigantic effervescence. If a reputation brayed too loudly at
him, he named its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him, he
called it detestable and cried to knock the English _Nation’s_ head
against the _Manchester Guardian’s_. Yet he was distinguished from most
of his colleagues as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. To
the organization of his country he had contributed one invaluable idea,
and each problem that came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow
immediate importance into the perspective of a natural philosophy. Not
fond of a prearranged system, he irked more than the run of his
countrymen at the stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great sweep
of vigor he would start at the proposition of handling war industry, for
example, on a basis not inadequate to the requirements; and out of his
running oration would come a wealth of such suggestions as spring only
from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind.

These are a handful of England’s experts in wartime. They do not bear
the brunt of the fight, like the soldiers, but the roots of the flower
of war are in just such depths as employ these hidden minds.



OKURA SEES NEWPORT


Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend of mine in Japan. Jack said
that Okura was taking two years off to study democracy, and would I
steer him around. I was delighted. I offered Okura his choice of the
great democratic scene, with myself as obedient personal conductor. He
was very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray manner, and he
asked if we could begin with Newport. I suspected a joke, but his eye
never twinkled, and so to Newport we went.

The dirty little Newport railway station interested Okura. So did the
choked throat of Thames Street, with its mad crush of motors and
delivery wagons and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from the
meat market to the book shop and from the chemist’s to the Boston Store.
I explained to Okura that this was not really Newport, only a small
sample of the ordinary shopping country town, with the real
exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind. Okura clucked an acceptance
of this remark, and our car wove its difficult way through the narrow
lane till we returned to Bellevue Avenue.

The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded to Okura. He expected a
belle vue, not a good plain plutocratic American street. When I told him
what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied with its exhibition
of assorted architecture, and he broke into open comment. “So very
charming!” he cried politely. “So like postcards of Milwaukee by the
lake!” I enjoyed his naïve enthusiasm and let it go.

He wanted to know who lived on the avenue, and I told him all the names
I could think of. He had heard many of them, the samurai of America
being known to him as a matter of course, and he picked up new crumbs of
information with obvious gratitude.

“Vanderbilt? Oh, yes.” That was old. So were Astor and Belmont.

After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. “I do not see the McAlpin
mansion.”

“The McAlpins? I have never heard of them,” I murmured indulgently.

“But that is one name I think I remember correctly,” Okura answered with
visible anxiety. “The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the
Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not understand. Are not the
McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?”

It was hard to convince Okura that this was not a Valhalla of hotel
proprietors, but at last he got it straight. We went back again as far
as the Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament.

Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats up rather far—well, to be
frank, among the Jamestown and Saunderstown people. But happily we had
Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of the ladies sat facing the
tennis, some sat with their backs to it, and a great buzz of
conversation reverberated under the roof of the stand and billowed on to
the court. On the court two young men strove against each other with a
skill hardly to be matched in any other game, and occasionally, when
something eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple passed through the
crowd. But the applause was irregular. People had to be watched and
pointed out. It was important to note which human oyster bore the
largest pearl. The method of entry and exit was significant, and
significant the whole ritual of being politely superior to the game.

Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately, and there was so much
conversation he was rather distracted.

“I hope it does not annoy you?” I asked him.

“Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so democratic!”

At this point the umpire got off his perch, and came forward to entreat
the fine ladies.

“I have asked you before to keep quiet,” he wailed. “For God’s sake,
will you stop talking?”

“How very interesting,” murmured Okura.

“Yes,” I said, “the religious motif.”

“Ah, yes!” he nodded, very gravely.

Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play, and we decided to return to
the tournament; but first we took ourselves to Bailey’s Beach.

Bailey’s Beach is a small section of the Atlantic littoral famous for
its seaweed. The seaweed is of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in
in large quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind and other
picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy carpet through which one
wades out to the more fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies
in their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching the more
adventurous sex pick his way out of the vegetable matter. In the
pavilion of the bathhouses sit still less adventurous groups.

It took some time to explain to Okura why this beach, once devoted to
the collection of seaweed for manure, should now be dedicated to
bathing. But he grasped the main point, that it was a private beach.

“Forgive me,” he said, “I see no Jews.”

“That’s all right,” I answered. “You are studying democracy. There are
no Jews here. None allowed.”

“Oh!” he digested the fact. Then his eye brightened. “Ah, you have your
geisha girls at the swim-beach. How very charming!”

“No,” I corrected him. “Those are not our geisha girls. That is the
‘shimmy set.’ You know: people who are opposed to the daylight saving
act and the prohibition amendment.”

“Oh, I understand. Republicans,” he nodded happily.

As the Servants’ Hour was approaching at Bailey’s Beach, and as I had no
good explanation to give of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along
by the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by the walk, and by the
fact that it ran in front of these private houses, free to the public as
to the wind. Once or twice we went down below stone walls, with
everything above hidden from us, but this was exceptional. Okura thought
the walk a fine example of essential democracy.

“And what are those long tubes?” he asked, as we gazed out toward
Portugal.

“Sewer pipes,” I said bluntly, looking at the great series of excretory
organs that these handsome democratic mansions pushed into the sea.

“Are they considered beautiful?” asked Okura.

“Quite,” I told him. “They are one of the features provided strictly for
the public.”

“So kind!” said the acquiescent Japanese.

We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose plutocracy was not entirely
intact, and but for one instructive incident it was an ordinary
civilized meal. That incident, however, shall live long in my memory
because of my inability to interpret it to Okura.

We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat down, when the third
man was called to the telephone.

He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his hostess, “I’m awfully
sorry, I’ve got to leave.”

His hostess looked apprehensive. “I hope it’s nothing serious?”

“Oh, not at all; please don’t worry,” he responded, plumping down his
napkin, “but I’ve just had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She’s a man short
and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So long. Awfully sorry!”

“What did that mean, please?” Okura inquired, as we hurried back to see
Kumagae play.

“Do you mean, democratically?”

“Yes.”

“I give it up,” I retorted.

“But Mr. Owen said you would want to interpret everything democratic to
me,” Okura ventured on, “and is there not some secret here hidden from
me? I fear I am very stupid.”

Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not explain.

“But,” pressed Okura, “‘the world has been made safe for democracy.’ I
want so much to understand it. I fear I do not yet understand Newport.”

And he looked at me with his innocent eyes.



THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED


It is the boast of more than one proud author, popular or unpopular,
that he never reads any criticism of his own work. He knows from his
wife or his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists. Sometimes in
hurrying through the newspaper he catches sight of his unforgettable
name. Inadvertently he may read on, learning the drift of the comment
before he stops himself. But his rule is rigid. He never reads what the
critics say about him.

Before an author comes to this admirable self-denial he has usually had
some experience of the ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he
started out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself, Of course I
don’t profess to _like_ criticism. Nobody likes to be criticized. But I
hope I am big enough to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No
man can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but so long as
criticism is helpful, that’s all a man has a right to ask. Is it meant
to be helpful? If so, shoot.

After some experience of helpful criticism, it will often occur to the
sensitive author that he is not being completely understood. A man’s ego
should certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn’t a man a
right to his own style and his own personality? What is the use of
criticism that is based on the critic’s dislike of the author’s
personality? The critic who has a grudge against an author simply
because he thinks and feels in a certain way is scarcely likely to be
helpful. The author and the critic are not on common ground. And the
case is not improved by the very evident intrusion of the critic’s
prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly obvious that a man with a
bias will see in a book just what he wants to see. If he is a
reactionary, he will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik he
will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use of reading criticism?
The critic merely holds the mirror up to his own nature, when he is not
content to reproduce the publisher’s prepared review.

The author goes on wondering, “What does he say about me?” But the
disappointments are too many. Once in a blue moon the critic
“understands” the author. He manages, that is to say, to do absolutely
the right thing by the author’s ego. He strokes it hard and strokes it
the right way. After that he points out one or two of the things that
are handicapping the author’s creative force, and he shows how easily
such handicaps can be removed. This is the helpful, appreciative,
perceptive critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty bristling
young egoists who want figs to grow on thistles and cabbages to turn
into roses, and who blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill.
These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest in the author.
They are only interested in themselves. And so, having tackled them in a
glow of expectation that has always died into sulky gloom, the author
quits reading criticism and satisfies his natural curiosity about
himself by calling up the publisher and inquiring after sales.

For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without being able to point
to much better models. Critics are of course superior to most authors,
yet I do not know many critics who like to be criticized. It does not
matter whether they are thin-skinned literary critics or the hippopotami
of sociology. They don’t like it, much. Some meet criticism with a sweet
resourcefulness. They choke down various emotions and become, oh, so
gently receptive. Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious
diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity that makes criticism
nothing less than a personal affront. And then there is the way of the
combative man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge to a
fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual circles is the man
who takes criticism on its merits and thinks it natural that he should
not only criticize but be criticized.

The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in his ego. His frigid
reception of criticism corresponds to something like a secret terror of
it. His air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity: he hates
being called on to defend himself in anything like a rough-and-tumble
fight. He resents having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried
in the duel of dispute.

To hand down judgments, often severe judgments, is part of the
pontifical character. But the business of meeting severe judgments is
not so palatable. As most men grow older and more padded in their
armchair-criticism, they feel that they become entitled to immunity. The
Elder Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they are, the more they
try to browbeat their critics. They see criticism as the critic’s
fundamental inability to appreciate their position.

If you are going to be criticized, how take it? The best preparation for
it is to establish good relations with your own ego first. If you
interpose your ego between your work and the critic you cannot help
being insulted and injured. The mere fact that you are being subjected
to criticism is almost an injury in itself. You must get to the point
where you realize the impregnability of your own admirable character.
Then the bumblings of the critic cannot do less than amuse you, and may
possibly be of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, yet he
started out rather indifferent to you, and the mere fact that he is
willing to criticize you is a proof that he has overcome the initial
inhumanity of the human race. This alone should help, but more than
that, you have the advantage of knowing he is an amateur on that topic
where you are most expert—namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps if
you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the beginning of the entente
between you is that he should always start out by appeasing your ego.



BLIND


He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He could tend the furnace and
help around the house—scour the bath-tub and clean windows—but for a
powerful man these were trivial chores. The trouble with him, as I soon
discovered, was complete and simple. He was blind.

I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be blind, but it was terrible
to be blind and at the mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs.
Angier ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier of a woman, very tall
and very bony, with a virile voice and no touch of femininity except
false curls. She wore rusty black, with long skirts, and a tasseled
shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls. She hated her rooming-house
and every one in it. Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save
enough money out of her establishment to escape from it. To that end she
plugged the gaps in the bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the
furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief sacrifice on the
altar of her economy was Samuel Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was
blind and useless, he was dependent on her. When she called, he
literally ran to her, crying, “Coming, coming!” He might be out on the
window-sill, risking his poor neck to polish the windows that he would
never see, but, “Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I—would you be so
good—ah, you are very kind. Coming, Adelaide, just one moment....” and
he would paddle down stairs. She treated him like dirt. Sometimes one
would arrive during an interview between them. The spare, gimlet-eyed
Mrs. Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel to cringe in every
limb. He was a burly man with a thick beard, iron-gray, and his
sightless eyes were hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed
spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his voice booming
heartily, he was a cheerful, honest figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though
he was a most platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier
tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a water-bucket or
leaving a duster on the stairs or forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he
became infantile, tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always changed to a
sugared greeting as one was recognized. “Good e-e-evening, isn’t it a
pleasant e-e-evening?” But the only value in speaking to Mrs. Angier was
that it permitted Samuel somehow to shamble away to the limbo of the
basement.

Of course I wanted to know how, he became blind. Luckily, as Mrs. Angier
had prosperous relatives in another part of Chicago, she sometimes could
be counted on to be absent, and on those occasions or when she went to
church, Samuel haunted my room. He was unhappy unless he was at work,
and he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I really believe he
liked to chatter to me: and he was more than anxious to tell me how his
tragedy had befallen him.

“Oh, dear, yes,” he said to me, “it happened during the strike. They hit
me on the head, and left me unconscious. And I have never seen since,
not one thing.”

“Who hit you, Samuel?”

“Who hit me? The blackguards who were out on strike, sir. They nearly
killed me with a piece of lead pipe. Oh, dear, yes.”

It seemed an unspeakable outrage to me, but in Samuel there was nothing
but a kind of healthy indignation. He was not bitter. He never raised
his voice above its easy reminiscent pitch.

“But what did you do to them? Why did the strikers attack you? What
strike was it?”

“I did nothing at all to them. But, you see, my horse slipped and when I
was helpless on the ground with my hip smashed, one of them knocked me
out. It was right up on the sidewalk. I had gone after them up on the
sidewalk, and I suppose the flags were so slippery that the horse came
down.”

“But what were you doing on a horse?” I asked in despair.

“I was a volunteer policeman. These scoundrels were led by Debs, and we
were out to see that there was law and order in Chicago.”

“Oh, the Pullman strike. Were you railroading then?”

“Railroading? No, sir, I was in the wholesale dry-goods business. We had
just started in in a small way. I was married only two years, to
Adelaide’s younger sister. Ah, my accident brought on more trouble than
she could stand. She was very different from Adelaide, quite dainty and
lively, if you follow me. We were living at that time on Cottage Grove
Avenue, on the south side. I was building up the importing end of the
business, and then this thing came, and everything went to smash. They
gave me no compensation whatsoever, to make the thing worse.”

“But, Samuel, how did you come to be out against the strikers?”

“And why shouldn’t I be out, I’d like to know!” Samuel straightened up
from rubbing a chair, and pointed his rag at my voice. “These scoundrels
had nothing against Mr. Pullman. He treated them like a prince. But they
took the bit in their teeth, and once they break loose where are we? The
President didn’t get shut of them till he sent in the troops. But I’ve
always contended that if we business men had taken the matter in hand
ourselves and nipped the trouble in the bud, we’d have had no such
lawlessness to deal with in the end. It is always the same. The business
men are the backbone of the community, but they don’t recognize their
responsibility! Take the sword to those bullies and blackguards; that’s
what I say!”

The old man lifted both fists like a dauntless Samson, and fixed me with
his sightless eyes. He had paid hellishly for living up to his
convictions, and here they seemed absolutely unshaken.

“That’s all right, too, Samuel,” I said, feebly enough, “but how do you
feel now? Nobody compensated you for being laid out in that big strike,
and your business was ruined, and here you are emptying the
waste-basket. How about that? I think it’s fierce that you got injured,
but those men in the Pullman strike weren’t out to break up society.
They were fighting for their rights, that’s all. Don’t you think so
now?”

“_No_, sir. The solid class of the community must be depended upon to
preserve law and order. I think that it was the duty of the business men
of Chicago to put down ruffianism in that strike and to smite whenever
it raised its head. Smite it hip and thigh, as the saying is. Oh, no.
Young men have fine notions about these things, ha, ha! You’ll excuse
me, won’t you, but you can’t allow violence and disorder to run riot and
then talk of men’s ‘rights’ as an excuse. Ah, but it was a great
misfortune for me, I confess. It was the end of all my hopes. The
doctors thought at first that the sight might be restored, but I have
never seen a glimmer of light since. But we mustn’t repine, must we?
That’d never do.”

“Samuel!” Mrs. Angier’s sharp voice pierced the room.

“Good gracious, back so soon. You’ll excuse me, I’m sure.... Coming,
Adelaide, coming!”

He groped for his bucket, with its seedy sponge all but submerged in the
dirty water. The water splashed a little as he hurriedly made for the
door.

“Oh, dear,” he muttered, “Adelaide won’t like that!”



“AND THE EARTH WAS DRY”


Like all great ideas it seemed perfectly simple when Harrod first
disclosed it to his unimportant partner John Prentiss.

“Of course we’ll get back of it. We’ve got to,” said Harrod, in the
sanctity of the directors’ room. “You’ve been down to Hopeville on pay
day. It’s the limit. Ordinary days there’s practically no trouble. Pay
day’s a madhouse. How many men, do you think, had to have the company
doctor last pay day?”

“You don’t expect me to answer, Robert,” Prentiss replied mildly.
“You’re telling me, you’re not arguing with me.”

“Twenty-five, Prentiss, twenty-five drunken swine. What do you think
happened? I’ll tell you. That doctor never stopped a minute taking
stitches, sewing on scalps, mending skulls. He was kept on the hop all
day and night all over the town. I’ll tell you something more.” The
sturdy Harrod rapped his fist on the mahogany table, leaning out of his
armchair. “The doctor’s wife told me a Polack came to her shack at two
in the morning with half his thumb hanging off, bitten off in a drunken
brawl. What do you think she did, Prentiss? She amputated it herself, on
her own hook, just like a little soldier. She’s got nerve, let me tell
you. But do you think we want to stand for any more of this? Not much.
Hopeville is going dry!”

Mr. Harrod produced a gold pen-knife and nicked a cigar emphatically. He
brushed the tiny wedge of tobacco from his plump trouser leg on to the
bronze carpet. He lit his cigar and got up to have a little strut.

Poor Prentiss looked at him as only a weedy Yankee can look at a man
whose cheeks are rosy with arrogant health. Why the stout Harrod who ate
and drank as he willed should be proclaiming prohibition, while the man
with a Balkan digestive apparatus should be a reluctant listener, no one
could have analyzed. It never would have occurred to Prentiss to be so
restlessly efficient. But Harrod was as simple as chanticleer. He’d made
up his mind.

“We’ll back Billy Sunday. His advance agent will be in town this week,”
Mr. Harrod unfolded. “We’ll put the whole industry behind him. Drink is
a constant source of inefficiency. It’s an undeniable cause. When do we
have accidents? On Mondays, regularly. The men come back stupefied from
the rotgut they’ve been drinking, and it’s simple luck if they don’t set
fire to the mine. The Hopeville mine is perfectly safe. Except for that
one big disaster we had, it’s one of the safest mines in the country.
But how can you call any mine safe if the fellows handling dynamite and
the men working the cage are just as likely as not to have a hangover?
We’ll stop it. We’ll make that town so dry that you can’t find a beer
bottle in it. It took me some time to realize the common sense of this
situation, but it’s as clear as daylight; it’s ridiculously clear. We’re
fools, Prentiss, that we didn’t advocate prohibition twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years ago, Robert,” Prentiss murmured, “you were checking coal
at the pit-head. You weren’t so damned worried about evolving policies
for the mine owners twenty years ago.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” Robert Harrod rejoined.

“Perfectly,” retorted Prentiss. “And I’m with you, though all the
perfumes of Arabia won’t cleanse these little hands.”

That was the first gospel, so to speak, and Harrod was as good as his
word. He saw Sunday’s advance agent, he rallied the industry, he lunched
with innumerable Christians and had a few painful but necessary
political conferences. The prohibitionist manager he discovered to be a
splendid fellow—direct, clean-cut, intelligent, indefatigable. The whole
great state was won to prohibition after a strenuous preparation and a
typically “bitter” campaign.

And everything went well at Hopeville. At first, not unnaturally, there
was a good deal of rebellion. A few of the miners—you know Irish miners,
born trouble-makers—talked considerably. Something in them took kindly
to the relief from monotony that came with a periodic explosion, and
they muttered blasphemously about the prohibitionists, and time hung
heavy on their hands. A few of them pulled out, preceded by the gaunt
Scotchman who had run the bare “hotel” where most of the whisky was
consumed. These were led by a sullen compatriot of their own, a man who
once was a fine miner but who had proved his own best customer in the
liquor business and whose contour suggested that his body was trying
desperately to blow a bulb. One miner left for a neighboring state
(still wet) to purchase a pair of boots. He crawled back on foot after a
week, minus the new boots, plus a pawn-ticket, and most horribly chewed
by an unintelligent watchdog who had misunderstood his desire to borrow
a night’s lodging in the barn. The drinking haunts were desolate
reminders of bygone entertainments for weeks after the law took effect,
and few of the younger men could look forward to tame amusement,
amusement that had no elysium in it, without a twinge of disgust. But on
the whole, Hopeville went dry with surprising simplicity. A great many
of the miners were neither English, Scotch, Cornish, Welsh nor Irish,
but Austrians and Italians and Poles, and these were not so inured to
drinking and biting each other as Mr. Harrod might have thought. The mud
in Hopeville, it is true, was often from nine inches to four feet deep,
and there were no named streets, and no known amusements, and a very
slim possibility of distraction for the unmarried men. After
prohibition, however, a far from unpleasant club house was founded, with
lots of “dangerous” reading material, and a segregated place for
homemade music, and bright lights and a fire, and a place to write
letters, and a pungent odor of something like syndicalism in the air.

That was the beginning. The men did not detonate on pay day, except in
lively conversation. There was less diffused blasphemy. It concentrated
rather particularly on one or two eminent men. And when the virtues and
defects of these men were sufficiently canvassed, the “system” beyond
them was analyzed. Even the delight of the Hunkies in dirt, or the
meanness of certain bosses, began to be less engrossing than the exact
place in the terrestrial economy where Harrod and Prentiss got off.

“Well, Robert,” inquired the man of migraine, back in the home office,
“how is your precious prohibition working? It seems to me the doctor’s
wife is the sole beneficiary so far.”

“Working?” the rubicund Harrod responded urgently. “I don’t know what
we’re going to do about it. You can’t rely on the men for anything. A
few years ago, after all, they took their wages over to Mason and blew
it all in, or they soaked up enough rum in Hopeville to satisfy
themselves, and come back on the job. Now, what do they do? They quit
for two weeks when they want to. They quit for a month at a time. And
still they have a balance. You can’t deal with such men. They’re
infernally independent. They’re impudent with prosperity. I never saw
anything like it. We can’t stand it. I don’t know what we’re going to
do.”

“You’re going to back the liquor trade, Robert, of course. That’s simple
enough.”

“You may laugh, but it is too late, I tell you, the harm’s done. We
can’t remedy it. National prohibition is right on top of us. I don’t
know what we’ll do.”

“Sell ’em Bevo. That’ll keep them conservative. Ever drink it?”

“Bevo? Conservative? Prentiss, this is serious. These men are completely
out of hand.”

“Well, aren’t they more efficient?”

“Of course they’re more efficient. They’re too damnably efficient. They
wanted Hopeville drained and they’re getting it drained. They’ll insist
on having it paved next. They’ll want hot and cold water. They’ll want
bathtubs. That’ll be the end.”

“The end? Come, Robert, perhaps only the beginning of the end.”

“It’s very amusing to you, Prentiss, but you’re in on this with me.
We’ve forced these working-men into prohibition, and now they’re sober,
they’re everlastingly sober. They’re making demands and getting away
with it. We’ve got to go on or go under. Wake up, man. I’ve played my
cards. What can we do?”

“What can we do? That is not the point now. Now the point is, what’ll
_they_ do.”



TELEGRAMS


In my simple world a cablegram is so rare that I should treasure the
mere envelope. I should not be likely to resurrect it. It would be
buried in a bureau, like a political badge or a cigar-cutter—but there
is a silly magpie in every man, and a cable I would preserve. To discuss
cablegrams or even cut-rate wireless, however, would be an affectation.
These are the orchids of communication. It is the ordinary telegram I
sing.

There was a magnificence about a quick communication in the days before
the Western Union. Horsemen went galloping roughshod through scattering
villages. It was quite in order for a panting messenger to rush in, make
his special delivery, and drop dead. This has ceased to be his custom.
In Mr. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class there is one omission. He
neglected to deal with that great adept in leisure, the messenger-boy.
“Messenger-boy” is a misnomer. He is either a puling infant or a tough,
exceedingly truculent little ogre of uncertain age and habit. His life
is consecrated. He cares for nothing except to disprove the axiom that a
straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Foreseeing
this cult of the messenger service, the designers of the modern American
city abandoned all considerations of beauty, mystery, and suggestion in
an heroic effort to circumvent the boy in blue. But the boy in blue
cannot be beaten. By what art he is selected I know not. Whether he is
attributable to environment or heredity I dare not guess. But with a
possible inferiority to his rival, the coat-room boy, and, of course,
nature’s paradox the crab, he is supreme.

It is not a telegram in its last stages that has magic. Much better for
the purposes of drama to have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not
a laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a telegram has magic. If
you are hardened you do not register. It is the fresh who have the
thrill. But no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever so
inured, there is one telegram, _the_ telegram, which will find your
core.

Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while an important person,
usually a man but occasionally a woman, gets a handful of mail without
any sign of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even sorting out
the wires. Such persons are marked. They are in public life. It is
pardonable. There must be public men and public women. I should not ask
any one to give up his career for the peculiar ecstasies of the
telegram. But no one can deny that these persons have parted with an
essence of their being. What if I find a solitary notice? “It is under
your door.” I bolt for the elevator, thrilled, alive.

It may be suggested that my over-laden predecessors are not in public
life; that they are very distinguished, very wealthy personages,
receiving private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their
children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other of their
responsibilities, accessories, possessions. With every deference I
answer that you are mistaken. Unless their riches are in a stocking,
these are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels. Their title may
be secure, but not their peace of mind. Whatever they wish, they are
obliged to administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of gravitation
keeps pulling, pulling at their chandeliers. And so in some degree they
are connected with, open to, shared by, innumerable people. Without
necessarily being popular, they are in the center of populace. They have
to meet, if only to repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus being
public characters. It is often against their desires. But being called
upon to convert a part of their souls into a reception-room, a place
where people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it follows that
they give up some of their ecstatic privacy in order to retain the rest.
This I do not decry. For certain good and valuable considerations one
might be induced to barter some of one’s own choice stock of privacy,
but for myself I should insist on retaining enough to keep up my
interest in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be dogged by
urgent brokers and punctilious butlers, no.

“There’s a telegram upstairs for you, sir.” “A telegram? How long has it
been here?” “It came about half an hour ago.” “Ah, thank you.... No,
never mind, I’m going upstairs.” What may not this sort of banality
precede? Perhaps another banality, in ink. But not always. A telegram is
an arrow that is aimed to fly straight and drive deep. Whether from
friend or rival, whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the heart
is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the message has come, singing
enigmatically across the country. But there is a path that leaps out of
the dingy office to countless court-rooms, business buildings, homes,
hospitals. That office is truly a ganglion from which piercing
nerve-fibers curve into the last crevices of human lives. When you enter
it to send a telegram it may depress you. You submit your confidence
across a public counter. But what does it matter to a creature glazed by
routine? He enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of their
meaning. To him a word is not a bullet—just an inert little lump of
lead.

Some messages come with a force not realizable. Tragedy dawns slowly.
The mind envisages, not apprehending. And then, for all the customary
world outside, one is penned in one’s trouble alone. One remembers those
sailors who were imprisoned in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off
from escape, red-hot iron plates between them and the assuaging waters
on every side, they could see the free, could cry out to them, could
almost touch hands. But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a
slip of paper one may meet one’s own. There are countries to-day where
the very word _telegram_ must threaten like a poisoned spear. And such
wounds as are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often
powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in suspense is worse than
dreadful certainty. But there are shocks which are irreparable. It is
cruel to break those shocks, crueler to deliver them.

All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion, the telegram attends on
death, it attends no less eagerly on love and birth. “A boy arrived this
morning. Father and child doing well”—this is more frequently the tenor
of the wire. And the wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remember
Bernard Shaw’s rebuff to Lady Randolph Churchill for asking him to
dinner? He had the vegetarian view of eating his “fellow-creatures.” He
chided her for inviting a person of “my well-known habits.” “Know
nothing of your habits,” came the blithe retort, “hope they’re better
than your manners.”

The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we struggled to put our all
in ten words—simple, at least, if not sensuous and passionate. Now the
day-letter and night-letter lead us into garrulity. No transition from
Greek to Byzantine could be worse than this. We should resist it. The
time will doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as austere
and frugal in our use of the telegram. But we should preserve this sign
of our Spartan manhood. Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of
long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive, virginal, terse.



OF PLEASANT THINGS


When I was a child we lived on the border of the town, and the road that
passed our windows went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under
the old city gateway and out through the mean city “lanes.” The other
branch turned round our corner and ran into the countryside. Day and
night many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing. In the
day-time I took no pleasure in them, but when I awoke at night and the
thick silence was broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it
filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this enchantment. The
steady effort of the wheels, their rattle as they passed over the uneven
road, their crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute
pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a solitary lantern swings
underneath the wagon. In the old days the load might be coal, with the
colliery-man sitting hunched on the driver’s seat, a battered
silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery, making a start at
dawn. Or it might be a load of singing harvest-women, hired in the
market square by the sweet light of the morning. But not the wagon or
the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so much as that honest, steady,
homely sound coming through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find
it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like it till I die.

The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes, in lazy summer
evenings, I like the faint rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble
of the elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows and its
passengers relaxed and indolent after the exhausting day. Always I like
the moaning sounds from the river craft, carried so softly into the
town. But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are usually discords. I
hate bells—the sharp spinsterish telephone bell, the lugubrious church
bell, the clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the sleigh bell or
the dinner bell.

I like the element of water. An imagist should write of the waters of
Lake Michigan which circle around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is
the hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths. When the sun shines on
the bottom, every pebble is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a
happy memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of Maine one has the
same visual delight in water as clear as crystal, and on the coast of
Ireland I have seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst or
thunder in a wall of emerald. On the southern shore of Long Island, who
has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as
apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that
Atlantic is drenching.

The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate
the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured
walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a
lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are
barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A
little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak
cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out
on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at
nightfall has the same, or even a more ætherial, radiance. From the
hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor.
This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who
is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him.

Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I like flowers, but seldom
cut flowers. The gathering of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily
wanton, and is it not hateful to see people coming home with dejected
branches of dogwood or broken autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already
rusting in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness of the meadow
or the solitude of a forsaken garden. Few things are so pleasant as to
find oneself all alone in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to
sea. The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones, the life
that trails so impudently across the path, the life that spawns in the
forgotten pond—this has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners. Once
I shared a neglected garden with an ancient turtle, ourselves the only
living things within sight or sound. When the turtle wearied of sunning
himself he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily paddled
through waters laced down with scum. It was pleasant to see him, a not
too clean turtle in waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family had been
home the gardener would have scoured him.

Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire—which I thank heaven I am
not, nor scarcely a millionth part of one—I should take pleasure in the
silent orderliness that shadowed me through my home. Those invisible
hands that patted out the pillows and shined the shoes and picked up
everything, even the Sunday newspapers—those I should enjoy. I should
enjoy especially the guardian angel who hid from me the casualties of
the laundry and put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is no
laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire the laundry is sent
and the laundry is sorted away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire;
I envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen sheets.

The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude that life is in the
striving. Is this altogether true? I think not. Not for those menial
offices so necessary to our decent existence, so little decent in their
victims or themselves. But one does remember certain striving that
brought with it almost instant happiness, like the reward of the child
out coasting or the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding game. It
is pleasant to think of one’s first delicious surrender to fatigue after
a long day’s haul on a hot road. That surrender, in all one’s joints,
with all one’s driven will, is the ecstasy that even the Puritan allowed
himself. It is the nectar of the pioneer. In our civilization we take it
away from the workers, as we take the honey from the bees—but I wish to
think of things pleasant, not of our civilization. Fatigue of this
golden kind is unlike the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It
is the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it from games, even
golf, I think it is pleasant. It is the great charm that Englishmen
possess and understand.

These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant things of the poet.
They barely leave the hall of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine,
is one who captures in the swift net of his imagination the wild
pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be flying presences quickly
lost to view. But every man must bag what he can in his own net, whether
he be rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my imagination to
keep from being snared by too many publicists and professors and persons
of political intent. These are invaluable servants of humanity,
admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But they fill the mind
with _-ations_. They pave the meadows with concrete; they lose the free
swing of pleasant things.



THE AVIATOR


    _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_
    _Kept me within his eye,_
    _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_
    _And followed up the sky._

    I was the lark whose song was heard
    When I was lost to sight,
    I was the golden arrow loosed
    To pierce the heart of night.

      I fled the little earth, I climbed
      Above the rising sun,
      I met the morning in a blaze
      Before my hour was gone.

    I ran beyond the rim of space,
    Its reins I flung aside,
    Laughter was mine and mine was youth
    And all my own was pride.

      _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_
      _Kept me within his eye,_
      _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_
      _And followed up the sky._

    From end to end I knew the way,
    I had no doubt or fear;
    The minutes were a forfeit paid
    To fetch the landfall near.

      But all at once my heart I held,
      My carol frozen died,
      A white cloud laid her cheek to mine
      And wove me to her side.

    Her icy fingers clasped my flesh,
    Her hair drooped in my face,
    And up we fell and down we rose
    And twisted into space.

      _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_
      _Kept me within his eye,_
      _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_
      _And followed up the sky._

    Laughter was mine and mine was youth,
    I pressed the edge of life,
    I kissed the sun and raced the wind,
    I found immortal strife.

      Out of myself I spent myself,
      I lost the mortal share,
      My grave is in the ashen plain,
      My spirit in the air.

    Good-by, sweet pride of man that flew,
    Sweet pain of man that bled,
    I was the lark that spilled his heart,
    The golden arrow sped.

      _So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_
      _Kept me within his eye,_
      _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_
      _And followed up the sky._

THE END





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