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Title: Hey Rub-a-dub-dub
A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life
Author: Theodore Dreiser
Release Date: January 1, 2022 [eBook #67059]
Language: English
Produced by: Emmanuel Ackerman, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB ***
HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB
A BOOK OF THE MYSTERY AND
WONDER AND TERROR
OF LIFE
BOOKS BY
THEODORE DREISER
SISTER CARRIE
JENNIE GERHARDT
THE FINANCIER
THE TITAN
THE GENIUS
A TRAVELER AT FORTY
A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL
THE HAND OF THE POTTER
FREE AND OTHER STORIES
TWELVE MEN
HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB
A BOOK OF THE MYSTERY AND
WONDER AND TERROR
OF LIFE
By THEODORE DREISER
AUTHOR OF “SISTER CARRIE,” “THE HAND OF THE POTTER,”
“FREE AND OTHER STORIES,” “JENNIE
GERHARDT,” ETC.
[Illustration]
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
NEW YORK 1920
Copyright, 1920,
By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB 1
II. CHANGE 19
III. SOME ASPECTS OF OUR NATIONAL CHARACTER 24
IV. THE DREAM 60
V. THE AMERICAN FINANCIER 74
VI. THE TOIL OF THE LABORER 92
VII. PERSONALITY 107
VIII. A COUNSEL TO PERFECTION 115
IX. NEUROTIC AMERICA AND THE SEX IMPULSE 126
X. SECRECY--ITS VALUE 142
XI. IDEALS, MORALS, AND THE DAILY NEWSPAPER 152
XII. EQUATION INEVITABLE 157
XIII. PHANTASMAGORIA 182
XIV. ASHTORETH 201
XV. THE REFORMER 206
XVI. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE 212
XVII. MORE DEMOCRACY OR LESS? AN INQUIRY 225
XVIII. THE ESSENTIAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE 238
XIX. LIFE, ART AND AMERICA 252
XX. THE COURT OF PROGRESS 277
HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB
HEY, RUB-A-DUB-DUB!
(_Taken from the notes of the late John Paradiso_)
I have lived now to my fortieth year, and have seen a good deal of life.
Just now, because of a stretch of poverty, I am living across the river
from New York, in New Jersey, in sight of a splendid tower, the
Woolworth Building on the lower end of Manhattan, which lifts its
defiant spear of clay into the very maw of heaven. And although I am by
no means as far from it as is Fifth Avenue, still I am a dweller in one
of the shabbiest, most forlorn neighborhoods which the great metropolis
affords. About me dwell principally Poles and Hungarians, who palaver in
a lingo of which I know nothing and who live as I would despise to live,
poor as I am. For, after all, in my hall-bedroom, which commands the
river over the lumberyard, there is some attempt at intellectual
adornment, whereas outside and around me there is little more than dull
and to a certain extent aggrieved drudgery.
Not so very far from me is a church, a great yellow structure which
lifts its walls out of a ruck of cheap frame houses, and those muddy,
unpaved streets which are the pride of Jersey City and Hoboken. Here, if
I will, I can hear splendid masses intoned, see bright altars and
stained glass windows and people going to confession and burning votive
candles before images. And if I go of a Sunday, which I rarely do, I can
hear regularly that there is a Christ who died for men, and that He was
the son of the living God who liveth and reigneth world without end.
I have no quarrel with this doctrine. I can hear it in a hundred
thousand churches throughout the world. But I am one of those curious
persons who cannot make up their minds about anything. I read and read,
almost everything that I can lay hands on--history, politics,
philosophy, art. But I find that one history contradicts another, one
philosopher drives out another. Essayists, in the main, point out flaws
and paradoxes in the current conception of things; novelists, dramatists
and biographers spread tales of endless disasters, or silly illusions
concerning life, duty, love, opportunity and the like. And I sit here
and read and read, when I have time, wondering.
For, friends, I am a scrivener by trade--or try to be. Betimes, trying
to make up my mind what to say about life, I am a motorman on a
street-car at three dollars and twenty cents a day. I have been a handy
man in a junk shop, and wagon driver, anything you will, so long as
thereby I could keep body and soul together. I am not handsome, and
therefore not attractive to women probably--at any rate I appear not to
be--and in consequence am very much alone. Indeed, I am a great coward
when it comes to women. Their least frown or mood of indifference
frightens me and makes me turn inward to myself, where dwell innumerable
beautiful women who smile and nod and hang on my arm and tell me they
love me. Indeed, they whisper of scenes so beautiful and so comforting
that I know they are not, and never could be, true. And so, in my best
moments, I sit at my table and try to write stories which no doubt
equally necessitous editors find wholly unavailable.
The things which keep me thinking and thinking are, first, my social and
financial state; second, the difference between my point of view and
that of thousands of other respectable citizens, who, being able to make
up their minds, seem to find me queer, dull, recessive, or at any rate
unsuited to their tastes and pleasures. I look at them, and while I say,
“Well, thank heaven I am not like that,” still I immediately ask myself,
“Am I not all wrong? Should I not be happier if I, too, were like John
Spitovesky, or Jacob Feilchenfeld, or Vaclav Melka?”--some of my present
neighbors. For Spitovesky, to grow a little personal, is a small dusty
man who has a tobacco store around the corner, and who would, I
earnestly believe, run if he were threatened with a bath. He smokes his
own three-for-fives (Flor de Sissel Grass), and deposits much of the
ashes between his waistcoat and his gray striped cotton shirt. His hair,
sticking bushily out over his ears, looks as though it were heavily
peppered with golden snuff.
“Mr. Spitovesky,” I said to him one day not long since, “have you been
reading anything about the Colorado mining troubles?”
“I never read de papers,” he said with a shrug of his shoulder.
“No? Not at all?” I pursued.
“Dere is nodding in dem--lies mosdly. Somedimes I look ad de baseball
news in sommer.”
“Oh, I see,” I said hopelessly. Then, apropos of nothing, or because I
was curious as to my neighbors, “Are you a Catholic?”
“I doaned belong to no church. I doaned mix in no politics, neider. Some
hof de men aboud here get excided aboud politics; I got no time. I ’tend
to mine store.”
Seeing him stand for hours against his doorpost, or sitting out front
smoking while his darksome little wife peels potatoes or sews or fusses
with the children, I could never understand his “I got no time.”
In a related sense there are my friends Jacob Feilchenfeld and Vaclav
Melka, whom I sometimes envy because they are so different. The former,
the butcher to whom I run for chops and pigs’ feet for my landlady,
Mrs. Wscrinkuus; the latter the keeper of a spirituous emporium whose
windows read “Vynas, Scnapas.” Jacob, like every other honest butcher
worthy the name, is broad and beefy. He turns on me a friendly eye as he
inquires, “About so thick?” or suggests that he has some nice fresh
liver or beef tongue, things which he knows Mrs. Wscrinkuus likes. I can
sum up Mr. Feilchenfeld’s philosophy of life when I report that to every
intellectual advance I make he exclaims in a friendly enough way, “I
dunno,” or “I ain’t never heard about dot.”
My pride in a sturdy, passive acceptance of things, however, is nearly
realized in Vaclav Melka, the happy dispenser of “Vynas, Scnapsas.” He
also is frequently to be found leaning in his doorway in summer,
business being not too brisk during the daytime, surveying the world
with a reflective eye. He is dark, stocky, black-haired, black-eyed, a
good Pole with a head like a wooden peg, almost flat at the top, and
driven firmly albeit not ungracefully into his shoulders. He has a wife
who is a slattern and nearly a slave, and three children who seem to
take no noticeable harm from this saloon life. Leaning in coatless ease
against his sticky bar of an evening, he has laid down the law
concerning morals and ethics, thus: no lying or stealing--among friends;
no brawling or assaults or murdering for any save tremendous reasons of
passion; no truckling to priests or sisters who should mind their own
business.
“Did you ever read a book, Melka?” I once asked him. It was apropos of a
discussion as to a local brawl.
“Once. It was about a feller wot killed a woman. Mostly I ain’t got no
time to read. Once I was a bath-rubber, and I had time then, but that
was long ago. Books ain’t nutting for me.”
Melka states, however, that he was a fool to come here. “A feller wanted
me to take dis saloon, and here I am. I make a living. If my wife died
I would go back to my old job, I think.” He does not want his wife to
die, I am sure. It does not make that much difference.
But over the river from all this is another picture which disturbs me
even more than my present surroundings, because, as seen from here, it
is seemingly beautiful and inviting. Its tall walls are those of a
fabled city. I can almost hear the tinkle of endless wealth in banks,
the honks of automobiles, the fanfare of a great constructive trade
life. At night all its myriad lights seem to wink at me and exclaim,
“Why so incompetent? Why so idle, so poor? Why live in such a wretched
neighborhood? Why not cross over and join the great gay throng, make a
successful way for yourself? Why sit aside from this great game of
materiality and pretend to ignore it or to feel superior?”
And as I sit and think, so it seems to me. But, alas, I haven’t the
least faculty for making money, not the least. Plainly beyond are all
these wonderful things which are being done and made by men with that
kind of ability which I appear to lack. I have no material, constructive
sense. I can only think and write, in a way. I see these vast
institutions (there are great warehouses on this side, too) filled to
overflowing apparently with the financially interested and capable, but
I--I have not the least idea how to do anything likewise. Yet I am not
lazy. I toil over my stories or bounce out of bed and hurry to my work
of a morning. But I have never earned more than thirty-five dollars a
week in my whole life. No, I am not brilliant financially.
But the thing that troubles me most is the constant palaver going on in
the papers and everywhere concerning right, truth, duty, justice, mercy
and the like, things which I do not find expressed very clearly in my
own motives nor in the motives of those immediately about me; and also
the apparently earnest belief on the part of ever so many editors,
authors, social reformers, et cetera, that every person, however weak
or dull-appearing externally, contains within himself the seed or the
mechanism for producing endless energy and ability, providing he can
only be made to realize that he has it. In other words we are all
Napoleons, only we don’t know it. We are lazy Napoleons, idle Hannibals,
wasteful and indifferent John D. Rockefellers. Turn the pages of any
magazine--are there not advertisements of and treatises on How To Be
Successful, with the authors thereof offering to impart their knowledge
of how so to be for a comparative song?
Well, I am not one who can believe that. In my very humble estimation
people are not so. They are, in the main, as I see it, weak and limited,
exceedingly so, like Vaclav Melka or Mrs. Wscrinkuus, and to fill their
humble brains with notions of an impossible supremacy, if it could be
done, would be to send them forth to breast the ocean in a cockleshell.
And, yet, here on my table, borrowed from the local library for purposes
of idle or critical examination, is a silly book entitled “Take
It!”--“It” meaning “_the world!_”; and another “It’s Yours!”--the “It”
in this case meaning that same great world! All you have to do is to
decide so to do--and to try! Am I a fool to smile at this very stout
doctrine, to doubt whether you can get more than four quarts out of any
four-quart measure, if so much?
But to return to this same matter of right, truth, justice, mercy, so
freely advertised in these days and so clearly defined, apparently, in
every one’s mind as open paths by which they may proceed. In the main,
it seems to me that people are not concerned about right, or truth, or
justice, or mercy, or duty, as abstract principles or working rules, nor
do I believe that the average man knows clearly or even semi-clearly
what is meant by the words. His only relation to them, so far as I can
see, is that he finds them used in a certain reckless, thoughtless way
to represent some method of adjustment by which he would like to think
he is protected from assault or saved from misery, and so uses them
himself. His concern for them as related to the other individual is that
the other individual should not infringe on him, and I am now speaking
of the common unsuccessful mass as well as of the successful.
Mrs. Wscrinkuus, poor woman, is stingy and slightly suspicious, although
she goes to church Sundays and believes that Christ’s Sermon on the
Mount is the living truth. She does not want any one to be mean to her;
she does not do anything mean to other people, largely because she has
no particular taste or capacity in that direction. Supposing I should
advise her to “Take It!” assure her that “It” was hers by right of
capability! What would become of _right_, _truth_, _justice_, _mercy_ in
that case?
Or, once more, let us take Jacob Feilchenfeld and John Spitovesky, who
care for no man beyond their trade and whose attitude toward right,
truth, mercy, justice is as above. Suppose I should tell them to take
“It,” or assure them that “It” was theirs? Of what import would the
message be? Vaclav Melka does favors only in return for favors. He does
not like priests because they are always taking up collections. If you
told him to take “It” he would proceed to take something away from the
very good priests first of all. Everywhere I find the common man imbued
with this feeling for self-protection and self-advancement. _Truth_ is
something that must be told to _him_; _justice_ is what _he_
deserves--although if it costs him nothing he will gladly see it
extended to the other fellow.
But do not think for one moment because I say this that I think myself
better or more deserving or wiser than any of these. As I said before, I
do not understand life, although I like it; I may even say that I like
this sharp, grasping scheme of things, and find that it works well.
Plainly it produces all the fine spectacles I see. If it had not been
for a certain hard, seeking ambition in Mr. Woolworth to get up and be
superior to his fellows, where would his splendid tower have come from?
It is only because I cannot understand why people cling so fatuitously
to the idea that there is some fixed idyllic scheme or moral order
handed down from on high, which is tender and charitable, punishes
so-called evil and always rewards so-called good, that I write this. If
it punishes evil, it is not all of the evil that I see. If it rewards
good, then much of the good that I admire goes wholly unrewarded, on
this earth at least.
But to return. The Catholics believe that Christ died on the Cross for
them, and that unless the Buddhists, Shintoists, Mohammedans, et cetera,
reform or find Christ they will be lost. Three hundred million
Mohammedans believe quite otherwise. Two hundred and fifty million
Buddhists believe something else. The Christian Scientists and Hicksites
believe still differently. Then there are historians who doubt the
authenticity of Christ (Gibbon; Vol. I, Chapters 15, 16). Where is a
moral order which puts a false interpretation on history as in the case
of sectarian literature (lists furnished on application), or allows
fetiches to flourish like the grass of the new year?
I will admit that in cases such as lying, stealing and the like there is
always a so-called moral thing to do or say when these so-called moral
principles or beatitudes are inveighed against. You have ridden on a
street-car; pay your fare. You have received five dollars from a given
man; return it. You have had endless favors from a given individual; do
not malign him. Such are the obvious and commonplace things with which
these great words are concerned; and in these prima facie cases these
so-called principles work well enough.
But take a case where temperament or body-needs or appetites fly in the
face of man-made order, where a great spirit-thirst stands out against a
life-made conviction. Here is a man-made law, and here is dire
necessity. On which side is Right? On which side God?
(1) A girl falls in love with a boy to whom the father takes an instant
dislike. The father is not better than the lover, just different. The
girl and boy are aflame (no chemical law of their invention, mind you),
and when the father opposes them they wed secretly. Result, rage. A weak
temperament on the part of the father (no invention of his own) causes
him to drink. On sight, in liquor, he kills the youth. The law says he
must be hung unless justified. A lie on the part of the girl defaming
the lover-husband will save the father. On which side now do right,
truth, justice, mercy stand?
(2) A man has a great trade idea. He sees where by combining fourteen
companies he can reduce cost of manufacture and sell a very necessary
product to the public at a reduced rate, the while he makes himself
rich. In the matter of principle and procedure (right, truth, justice,
etc.), since his competitors will not sell out, he is confronted by the
following propositions: (a) forming a joint stock company and permitting
them all to share in the profits; (b) giving them the idea, asking
nothing, and allowing them to form a company of their own, so helping
humanity; (c) making a secret combination with four or five and
underselling the others and so compel them to sell or quit; (d) doing
nothing, letting time and chance work and the public wait. Now it so
happens that the second and fourth are the only things that can be done
without opposition. He is a man of brains and ideals. What are his
rights, duties, privileges? Where do justice, mercy, truth, fit in here,
and how?
(3) A man’s son has committed a crime. The man realizes that owing to
deficiencies of his own he has never been able to give the boy a right
training or a fair chance. The law demands that he give up his son, even
though he loves him dearly and feels himself responsible. Where do
right, justice, mercy work here, and can they be made harmonious and
consonant?
These are but three of fifty instances out of the current papers which I
daily read. I have cited them to show how topsy-turvy the world seems to
me, how impossible of a fixed explanation or rule. Scarcely any two
individuals but will be at variance on these propositions. Yet the
religionists, the moralists, the editorial writers preach a faith and an
obvious line of duty which they label grandiosely “right” or “true,”
“just” or “merciful.” My observation and experience lead me to believe
that there is scarcely a so-called “sane,” right, merciful, true, just,
solution to anything. I know that many will cry in answer “Look at all
this great world! Look at all the interesting things made, the beautiful
things, the pleasures provided. Are not these the intelligent directive
product of a superior governing being, who is kind and merciful into the
bargain and who has our interests at heart? Can you doubt, when you
observe the exact laws that govern in mathematics, chemistry, physics,
that there is an intelligent, kindly ruling power, truthful, merciful,
etc?” My answer is: I can and do, for these things can be used as
readily against right, truth, justice, mercy, as we understand those
things, as they can for or with them. If you don’t believe this, and are
anti-German or anti-Japanese, or anti-anything else, see how those or
any other so-called inimical powers can use all these magnificent forces
or arts in its behalf and against the powers of light and worth such as
you understand and approve of. And when justice and mercy are tacked on
as attributes of this intelligence there is no possible appeal to
_human_ reason.
“But only look,” some one is sure to cry, “at some of the beautiful,
wonderful, helpful things which Divine Providence, or Life, or Force, or
Energy has provided now and here for man! Railroads; telegraphy; the
telephone; theaters; gas; electricity; clothing of all sorts;
newspapers; books; hotels; stores; fire departments; hospitals;
plumbing; the pleasures of love and sex; music.” An admirable list,
truly, and all provided by one struggling genius or another or by the
slow, cataclysmic processes of nature: fires, deaths and painful births.
Aside from the fact that all of these things can be and are used for
_evil_ as well as _good_ purposes (trust oppression, enemy wars and the
like), still it might as well be supplemented by such things as jails,
detectives, penitentiaries, courts of law--good or evil things, as you
choose to look at them. All of these things are good in the hands of
good people, evil in the hands of the evil, and nature seems not to care
which group uses them. A hospital will aid a scoundrel as readily as a
good man, and vice versa.
Common dust swept into our atmosphere makes our beautiful sunsets and
blue sky. Sidereal space, as we know it, is said to be one welter of
strangely flowing streams of rock and dust, a wretched mass made
attractive only by some vast compulsory coalition into a star. Stars
clash and blaze, and the whole great complicated system seems one
erosive, chaffering, bickering effort, with here and there a tendency to
stillness and petrifaction. This world as we know it, the human race and
the accompanying welter of animals and insects, do they not, aside from
momentary phases of delight and beauty, often strike you as dull,
aimless, cruel, useless? Are not the processes by which they are
produced or those by which they live (the Chicago slaughter-houses, for
instance), stark, relentless, brutal, shameful even?--life living on
life, the preying of one on another, the compulsory aging of all, the
hungers, thirsts, destroying losses and pains....
But I was talking of Jersey City and my difficulty in adjusting myself
to the life about me, thinking as I do. Yet such facts as I can gather
only confound me the more. Take the daily papers which I have been
reading to beguile my loneliness, and note that:
(1) Two old people who lived near me, after working hard for years to
supply themselves with a competence, were ruined by the failure of a
bank and were therefore forced to seek work. Not finding it, they were
compelled to make a choice between subsisting on charity and dying.
Desiring to be as agreeable to the world as possible and not to be a
burden to it, they chose death by gas, locking the doors of their bare
little home, stuffing paper and clothing into chinks and under doors and
windows, and turning on the gas, seated side-by-side and hand-in-hand.
Naturally the end came quickly enough, for Divine Mind has no objection
to ordinary illuminating gas killing any one. It did not inform any one
of their predicament. Impartial gas choked them as quickly as it would
have lighted the room, and yet at the same time, according to the same
papers, in this very same world----
(2) The sixteen-year-old son of a multi-millionaire real estate holder
was left over fifty million dollars by his fond father, who did not know
what else to do with it, the same son having not as yet exhibited any
capacity for handling the money wisely or having done anything to
deserve it save be the son of the aforesaid father.
(3) A somewhat bored group of Newport millionairesses give a dinner for
the pet dogs of their equally wealthy friends, one particular dog or
doggess being host or hostess.
(4) A Staten Island brewer worth twenty millions died of heart failure,
induced by undue joy over the fact that he had been elected snare
drummer of a shriners’ lodge, after spending thousands upon thousands in
organizing a band of his own and developing sufficient influence to
cause a shriners’ organization to tolerate him.
(5) A millionaire politician and horse-racer erected a
fifteen-thousand-dollar monument to a horse.
(6) An uneducated darkey, trying to make his way North, climbed upon the
carriage trucks of a Pullman attached to a fast express and was swept
North into a blizzard, where he was finally found dying of exhaustion,
and did die--arms and legs frozen--a victim of an effort to better his
condition.
Puzzle: locate Divine Mind, Light, Wisdom, Truth, Justice, Mercy in
these items.
By these same papers, covering several months or more, I saw where:
(1) Several people died waiting in line on bundle day for bundles of
cast-off clothing given by those who could not use the clothes any
longer--not such people as you and I, perhaps, but those who were sick,
or old, or weak.
(2) Mr. Ford, manufacturer of automobiles, was convinced that he could
reform any criminal or bad character by giving him or her plenty of work
to do at good wages and with the prospect of advancement; also that he
was earning too much and wished to divide with his fellow man.
(3) August Belmont and J. P. Morgan, Jr., noting this item, concluded
that they could not do anything for any one, intellectually, financially
or otherwise.
(4) An attendant in an Odd Fellows Home, having tired of some old
patients, chloroformed them all--a purely pagan, event and not possible
in an enlightened age and a Christian country.
(5) A priest, having murdered a girl and confessed to it, no way was
found to electrocute him because of his cloth. Men whose services and
aid he contemned insisted that he must be proved insane and not be
electrocuted, though he did not agree with them.
(6) A young soldier and his bride, but one day married, walk out to buy
furniture for their new home; a street fight in which three toughs
assail each other with pistols breaks out and before they can take to
cover a stray bullet instantly kills the soldier-husband. Subsequently
the bride becomes morbid and goes insane.
(7) In nearly all the countries of the late great war a day of prayer
for Divine intervention was indulged in, but prayer having been made and
not answered the combatants proceeded to make more and worse war--Divine
prohibition of combat, according to the Christian dogma, being no bar
nor of any avail.
(8) A well-known Western financier and promoter of strong religious and
moralistic leanings, having projected and built a well-known railroad
and made it immensely prosperous by reducing the rates to the people of
his region was thereupon set upon by other financiers who wished to
secure his property for little or nothing, and being attacked by false
charges brought by a suborned stockholder and his road thrown into the
hands of a receiver by a compliant judge, was so injured financially
thereby as never to be able to recover his property. And those who
attacked him justified themselves on the ground that he was a
“rate-cutter” and so a disturbing element--a disturber of the peace and
profits of other railroads adjacent and elsewhere. His dying statement
(years later) was that American history would yet justify him and that
God governed for good, if one could wait long enough!
(9) One man was given one year for a cold, brutal manslaughter in New
York, whereas a whole family of colored people in the South was strung
up and riddled with bullets for so little as that one of them fought
with a deputy sheriff; while a woman who had shot another woman through
a window because of jealousy (aroused by her husband’s assumed
attentions to said woman) was acquitted and then went on the stage, the
general sentiment being that “one could not electrocute a woman.”
(10) The principal charities aid society of New York had spent and was
spending one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year on running
expenses, and something over ninety thousand dollars in actual relief
work, though it was explained that the hundred and fifty thousand
brought about much reference of worthy cases to other agencies and
private charities, a thing which could not otherwise have been done.
(11) It is immoral, un-Christian and illegitimate to have a child
without a husband, yet when six hundred thousand men are withdrawn from
England to fight the Germans and twenty thousand virgins become
war-brides it is proposed to legalize the children on the ground that it
is nevertheless moral to preserve the nation from extinction.
(12) A doctor may advise against child-birth when that experience would
endanger a woman or threaten her permanent disability, but if he gives
information or furnishes contraceptal means which would prevent the
trying situation he is guilty of a misdemeanor, subject to fine and the
ruin of his career.
(13) The president of one of the largest street railway corporations in
the world finds it wrong to fail to rise and give your seat to a woman,
but right to run so few cars as to make available seats for only
one-third of the traffic; wrong not to take extreme precaution in
stepping off or on a car or crossing the tracks, but right to leave the
cars without heat, the windows and floors dirty and the doors broken,
making anger, delay and haste contribute to inattention and unfairness;
wrong to read a newspaper wide open, to cross your legs or protrude your
feet too far, thereby inconveniencing your fellow-passenger, but right
to mulct the city, composed of these same passengers, of millions via
stolen franchises, watered stock, avoided taxes, the refusal of
transfers at principal intersections, to say nothing of the prevention
of fair competition via the jitney bus and other means which would
relieve traffic pressure, and all with no excuse save that the
corporation desires the money; and a tame public endures it with a
little ineffectual murmuring.
(14) A man has been found in a Western penitentiary who had been there
for twenty years and who had been sent there because of erroneous
circumstantial evidence, the real offender having confessed on his
death-bed.
(15) A certain landlord in New York compelled a certain family to move,
because, not they, but some of their visitors, wore shabby, hence
undesirable, clothes, thus lowering the social and material tone of the
apartment house in question and causing their distant but still watchful
fellow-tenants much distress of mind in being compelled to live in such
an atmosphere. This was a Riverside Drive apartment.
But need I cite more, really?
It is because of these things that I sit in my hall-bedroom, a great
panorama of beauty spread out before me, and in attempting to write of
this thing, life, find myself confused. I do not know how to work right,
truth, justice, mercy, etc., into these things, nor am I sure that life
would be as fascinating without them, as driving or forceful. The scenes
that I look upon here and everywhere are beautiful enough, sun, moon and
stars swinging in their courses, seemingly mathematically and with great
art or charm. I am willing to assume that their courses are calculated
and intelligent, but no more and no further. And the river at this
moment is begemmed with thousands of lights--a truly artistic and poetic
spectacle and one not to be gainsaid. By day it is gray, or blue, or
green, wondrous shades by turns; by night a jewel world. Gulls wheel
over it; tugs strain cheerily to and fro, emitting gorgeous plumes of
smoke. Snows, rains, warmths, colds come in endless variety, the endless
fillip which gives force and color to our days.
Still I am confused. For, on the one hand, here is Vaclav Melka, who
does not care much for this alleged charm; nor John Spitovesky; nor
Jacob Feilchenfeld; nor many, many others like them. On the other hand,
myself and many others like me, sitting and meditating on it, are so
spellbound that we have scarcely any thought wherewith to earn a
living. Life seems to prove but one thing to me, and that is that the
various statements concerning right, truth, justice, mercy are palaver
merely, an earnest and necessitous attempt, perhaps, at balance and
equation where all things are so very much unbalanced, paradoxical and
contradictory--the small-change names for a thing or things of which we
have not yet caught the meaning. History teaches me little save that
nothing is really dependable or assured, but all inexplicable and all
shot through with a great desire on the part of many to do or say
something by which they may escape the unutterable confusion of time and
the feebleness of earthly memory. Current action, it appears,
demonstrates much the same thing. Kings and emperors have risen and
gone. Generals and captains have warred and departed. Philosophers have
dreamed, poets have written; and I, mussing around among religions,
philosophies, fictions and facts can find nothing wherewith to solve my
vaulting egoism, no light, and no way to be anything more than the
humblest servitor.
Among so much that is tempestuous and glittering I merely occasionally
scrub and make bright my room. I look out at the river flowing by now,
after hundreds of millions of years of loneliness where there was
nothing but silence and waste (past so much now that is vivid, colorful,
human), and say to myself: Well, where there is so much order and love
of order in every one and everywhere there must be some great elemental
spirit holding for order of sorts, at any rate. Stars do not swing in
given orbits for nothing surely, or at least I might have faith to that
extent. But when I step out and encounter, as I daily do, lust and
greed, plotting and trapping, and envy and all uncharitableness,
including murder--all severely condemned by the social code, the Bible
and a thousand wise saws and laws--and also see, as I daily do, vast
schemes of chicane grinding the faces of the poor, and wars brutally
involving the death of millions whose lives are precious to them
because of the love of power on the part of some one or many, I am not
so sure. Illusions hold too many; lust and greed, vast and bleary-eyed,
dominate too many more. Ignorance, vast and almost unconquerable, hugs
and licks its chains in reverence. Brute strength sits empurpled and
laughs a throaty laugh.
Yet here is the great river--that is beautiful; and Mr. Woolworth’s
tower, a strange attempt on the part of man to seem more than he is; and
a thousand other evidences of hopes and dreams, all too frail perhaps
against the endless drag toward nothingness, but still lovely and
comforting. And yet here also is Vaclav Melka, who wants to be a
bath-rubber again! John Spitovesky, who doesn’t care; Jacob
Feilchenfeld, who never heard; and millions of others like them, and
I--I think and grow confused, and earn nineteen-twenty a week or
less--never more, apparently.
Come to think of it, is it not a wonder, holding such impossible views
as I do, that I earn anything at all?
CHANGE
If I were to preach any doctrine to the world it would be love of
change, or at least lack of fear of it. From the Bible I would quote:
“The older order changeth, giving place to the new,” and from Nietzsche:
“Learn to revalue your values.” The most inartistic and discouraging
phase of the visible scene, in so far as it relates to humanity, is its
tendency to stratification, stagnation and rigidity. Yet from somewhere,
fortunately, out of the demiurge there blows ever and anon a new breath,
quite as though humanity were an instrument through which a force were
calling for freshness and change. The old or unyielding die or crumble;
the unwitting young arise to take their places. By this same thing which
brings man into being is he ended before he becomes inelastic and
unpliable. Indeed, Nature constantly replaces her handiwork, quite as in
the case of the leaves on the trees, creating newer, greener, sappier
things. This is just as true of religions, theories, arts and
philosophies as it is of animals, races and individuals. Nothing is
fixed. The most convincing and stable thing that you know may well bear
inquiring scrutiny, even this law of change. Out of the well-springs of
the deep what may not arise?
I often think how foolishly humanity opposes change at times and how
steadily and uninterruptedly it flows in, altering the face of the
world. With how many astounding changes has not life been
visited--astounding only because life never seems to be prepared for the
astounding. Our little earth minds, being only seventy years in duration
and wise only by reason of the actual experience which can be crowded
into that time, cannot but view as astounding those larger natural
phenomena which in the endless duration of time come swiftly enough,
however incalculably slow they may seem to us. “For a thousand years in
thy sight are as but yesterday,” a million years but a day in geologic
time. But to a being whose duration is only seventy years, whose
thinking period about forty, how remote they seem, even impossible! If
one could live a thousand years the value of change in connection with
many things would appear swiftly enough, and the seemingly astounding
would become the natural and even the commonplace.
If one but observes the phenomena of geology and of biology one may see
how ready Nature is to quit one form of effort for another, once its
uselessness has become apparent, to drop a difficult tendency in one
direction and pursue an easier one in another. Indeed, the theory of the
pragmatist is seemingly well-emphasized at times by the disappearance of
some large and presumably successful species for reasons of difficulty
in connection with its sustenance, and the steady rise of some minor
creature whose wants are simple and not difficult to satisfy. And it is
not necessarily through æons and æons of time that those changes are
accomplished but almost instanter, as when behemoth ended and the great
auk puffed out. Man says to himself today, “I am the Lord of creation,”
but is he? A slight change in the chemistry of our atmosphere, so slight
that it might be scarcely noticeable, a change in the odor of the air or
the taste of the water, could soon end or debilitate him so as to make
him of no import whatsoever. It might be unfavorable to man and
favorable, let us say, to cats or spiders; then man, a sleepy stumbling
creature, would be devoured by his hungry, pagan house pet and the
theory of his domination disposed of. Remote? So was the rise of
Christianity. If you do not believe this read history, or note what
tragedies a slight trace of sewer gas can produce in your own household,
how smoke ends a corps of firemen, how water, too much heat, too much
cold, may destroy us all. And what star so humble that if it came near
enough could not effect one or another of these changes?
Deep below deep lie the mysteries, and theories flourish like weeds in a
garden--or let us call them flowers, for at times they are so artistic.
Arts spring out of the mysteries, but the arts themselves grow stale if
left to themselves. The thing that the individual should remember is
that he is a part of this vast restlessness, uncertainty and
opportunism. Life will have none of anything forever, neither Egypt nor
Greece nor Rome nor England nor America; it will not have anything of
one type of god, nor a fixed code of morals, nor a fixed conclusion as
to what is art, nor a method of living. We build up rules wherewith life
is to be governed, and behold!--some fine day the character of life
itself changes and our rules are worthless.
Many of us now dream that there is such a thing as justice, but
experience teaches us that it is an abstraction and that what we
actually see is an occasional compromise struck in an eternal battle.
Many believe that there is such a thing as truth, but, if there is, it
is not within the consciousness of man, for he has not the knowledge
wherewith to discern it. There is too much that he does not know to
permit him to say what is truth. Likewise, virtue and honesty go by the
boards as names merely, a system of weights and measures, balances
struck between man and man. They are symbols of something which man
would like to believe true and permanent. They represent a balance he
would like to strike between extremes on either hand, but they are only
important to him in his state here. Beyond him lie the deeps which may
know them not. All we can know is that we cannot know.
Therefore, what I would most earnestly advocate, if it were of any
importance so to do, would be love of change, for by change have come
all the spectacles, all the charms and all the creature comforts of
which our consciousness is aware. Life appears to be innately artistic
in all that it attempts, so that we need not trouble ourselves about
that; we can scarcely escape it. If there is a seeming love of order, of
stratification, of fixity, in connection with many things, an equally
unending force appears to be bent on change and variation, so that that
something within us which tends to rigid duty and stratification spells
suffering or disappointment for us in so far as we are unable to
counteract it. The caution, sprung from somewhere, to keep an open mind
is well-grounded in Nature’s tendency to change. Not to cling too
pathetically to a religion or a system of government or a theory of
morals or a method of living, but to be ready to abandon at a moment’s
notice is the apparent teaching of the ages--to be able to step out free
and willing to accept new and radically different conditions. This
apparently is the ideal state for the human mind. Not that anything so
much more perfect is in store (I, for one, do not believe that), but
that a different thing is at hand, always, outside your door, around the
corner, beyond the limits of the vision of even the philosopher and the
thinker. To be always ready, if such a thing were possible, to meet the
new and to know that it will be as valuable as the old--that is the
great thing. But what vain advice! for the experiences, the capacities,
the tendencies of man are not in his keeping. There is something
controlling, of which we are a part and not a part; there is a mystery
to which we belong yet which will not show to us its face. Only its
impulses burst upon us from day to day and from century to century,
making us weep from fear or regret, or faint with terror, or thrill wild
with joy. Out of the deeps they come--the realms we do not know. What is
Master? Who? What is He or It like? Only by the artistry and the terror
and the peace and the change through which it works can we guess, and
all names and fames and blames by which we qualify it are as nothing,
save that they brighten the face of its one outstanding tendency, which
we must accept whether we will or not--change.
SOME ASPECTS OF OUR NATIONAL CHARACTER
Our most outstanding phases, of course, are youth, optimism and
illusion. These run through everything we do, affect our judgments and
passions, our theories of life. As children we should all have had our
fill of these, and yet even at this late date and after the late war,
which should have taught us much, it is difficult for any of us to
overcome them. Still, no one can refuse to admire the youth and optimism
of America, however much they may resent its illusion. There is always
something so naïve about its method of procedure, so human and tolerant
at times; so loutish, stubborn and ignorantly insistent at others, as
when carpetbag government was forced on the South after the Civil War
and Jefferson Davis detained in prison for years after the war was over.
Great men and great events, so I was told in my youth, went to the
making of us. The dreams of justly dissatisfied and downtrodden souls
elsewhere, so our histories read, impelled them to seek in a new land
freedom from the tyrannies which had oppressed them abroad. Once here,
they were prepared to fight and die in order that the vision which had
led them forth might not end as an airy insubstantial nothing. For us
(fatalistically, at any rate, if not really) Columbus sailed from Palos
over the uncharted deep; Magellen rounded the Cape of Good Hope; and
Vasco da Gama, Cape Horn; Balboa discovered the Pacific, Hendrick Hudson
the Hudson; De Soto and Marquette the Mississippi. For us, especially
(although before that, great sociologic, economic and moral dreamers had
been at work), Locke, Paine, Von Humboldt, Voltaire, Fourier, de
Tocqueville, Rousseau thought and dreamed.
In our new land, fresh upon an unbroken soil, giant spirits swiftly
arose to testify to the significance of these dreams--Washington,
Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, intellectual and social
enthusiasts all--who saw a vision, or seemed to, and dreamed tremendous
dreams of the wonders to come to our nation and race, and because of it
and through it to the world at large. We, more than any other nation,
because ours was the youth and the strength, were to lift and maintain
aloft the banner of intellectual and spiritual freedom. We were to do
tremendous things, not for the human pocketbook but the human mind and
soul. Our children and our children’s children were to be free,
progressive, fearless, mentally and spiritually alert, entirely loosened
from the trammels and chains of superstition and the degradation of
poverty and want.
Well, it is quite true that we have done some things: fought wars for
our “rights”; freed the slaves (which, however, England did in her
territories before we did and without bloodshed); “liberated” Cuba (to
no exploitation since?); struggled with the Philippine and Mexican
problems (to no final solution however); and then helped to crush the
Kaiser without seeking gain for ourselves. However, it is also quite
true that at no time in our history has this ideal been quite realized,
even though in the hearts of a modest percentage of the population, as
can be most safely asserted, this has been a dominant and moving ideal.
Perhaps its realization is not within the possibilities of life. We are
all slaves essentially, and there have as yet been no measures devised
whereby strong and weak people will not be generated at one and the same
time side by side. But it is useless to say to the average American that
democracy is a dream and can never be realized. He will never believe
it. Wars come and go. Strong men arise and plot and conquer and
disappear. Weak men fail, and the poor are as much put upon here as
anywhere and ignored and laughed at; but in spite of all these facts
which endure in the face of every dream--of love, heaven, perfect
happiness as well as perfect liberty--the American goes on dreaming his
sweet dream, and will. Perhaps he already has all the democracy there
will ever be, because he believes that he has it.
Millions of Americans born on this soil or arriving here from other
lands believe thus. With them it was and perhaps still is a glowing and
enlivening thought that whether they were or not they were supposed to
be free. Their children and their children’s children somehow are to be
heirs to a magnificent and comforting land, one over which a wise and
generous form of government, the fruit of the dreams and genius of their
forefathers, their generosity and social aspiration, is to rule and
ensure all the blessings for which they had hoped and fought.
Well and good. The thing has substance enough even now in the face of
some setbacks and because of virgin soil and boundless untouched
opportunities, unharassed by war or slavery, which offer to physical
labor as well as to the imagination of those who come or who went before
us, great opportunity. Their success hitherto has been written into our
songs, our books, the public messages of our statesmen and patriots.
Even to this day, many who lack even a shadow of the substance of these
dreams are still dreaming, if not in their reality at least in their
possibility and eventuality here. I in my youth was one of these. I saw
in America what many others around me seemed to see: i. e., many if not
all of the things for which our forefathers fought and bled: generous,
protective and encouraging laws in all walks of life; an amazingly free
and unterrified press; a warm, sympathetic and encouraging educational
system reaching down to the poorest and humblest child and helping it to
rise and better its station; a real political referendum or ballot
system by which all projected laws and movements for the betterment and
control of the impulses and tendencies of the people were formulated and
with their consent;--and these seemed real enough.
Well?
Well, I still think we have a modicum of these things. The pressure of
the strong upon the weak is as yet not too grinding perhaps, and let us
hope may never be, although it is daily becoming sharper. The poor are
being put upon while being loudly told that they are not--fed on air and
kind words, as it were. The powerful are learning that the poor, here as
elsewhere, are either fools or, being poor, may not help themselves; a
very dangerous state of mind to begin with, I think.
* * * * *
Yes, in recent years a certain change has come over the spirit of our
original dreams. Our bright morning sky has been overcast with something
that was by no means foreseen by the charming and gracious idealists who
framed our Constitution and, better yet, our ideals. America, ungracious
as it may seem on the part of one who has prospered well enough in it,
is neither so free nor so liberal as many imagined it would be. Our
press, our school system, our laws, our political methods--do these
today answer to the incisive aspiration which was characteristic, or at
least was supposed to be characteristic, of the spirit of those who
generated the American Republic?
Let us see.
The fact is that what is supposed to be and what is true of American
history are two very different things. Because as a people we have
instinctively craved some things and have written it into a Constitution
that man is inalienably entitled to them, it does not follow that we
have them; although most Americans, I am inclined to fear, think so. If
I read American history aright, the men who drew up the Declaration of
Independence and framed our Constitution were men who, like ourselves
today, were in the grip of an ideal which had very little to do with
their own condition or the actual working necessities and conditions of
life as seen about them. Far from being democratic at that time America
was quite the reverse, a most stratified and nobility-aping nation with
feudal servants and thralls at the bottom and landed and all but titled
proprietors at the top (“History of the Great American Fortunes,”
Myers). But those same leaders and many followers appear to have been in
the grip of a time-spirit or movement which had its roots as far back in
time as the thirteenth century, when Europe seemed to give new birth or
breath to the pagan spirit and to revolt at the mummery and flummery of
kings and the gorgeous paraphernalia of a religious idea run completely
to seed. Hess and Bruno were but the fore-steppers of Luther. Bacon,
Locke, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Rousseau and Paine, had much to do with
the spirit of our American Constitution. Indeed, it is a question
whether the latter six, and especially Rousseau with his “Social
Contract,” his dream of a new social arrangement in which the State
should do so much more than it had ever before attempted to do for its
constituent units, are not the makers of the Declaration of
Independence. Yet nothing that Paine, Voltaire, Locke or Rousseau
dreamed or believed concerning the essential capacity of man to govern
himself is absolutely true. What is true is that autocracy or
single-headed government without genius and a love of humanity is
closely allied, or very likely to be, to tyranny; whereas democracy or
multiple-headed rotation in control is likely to prove even more
dangerous where it is merely dull. It has not even the advantage of
being spectacular and interesting. Whether the individual, thus
protected against tyranny, is likely to prove a greater and more useful
engine or mechanism for the development of more and better thought, more
beautiful dreams and ideals than the world ever had before, remains to
be seen. Dominant America, now in the saddle of the world, has an
opportunity to prove this.
But does history provide a single analogy? Scarcely. The older nations
were not built so much for the individual, that he might have life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed him, as for the
perpetuation and glory of the State itself, or the King thereof. This
was true of Athens and Sparta as well as the Roman Republic, and more
recently of Germany. It is very doubtful whether the modern republic is
made any more for the humble, single individual than the old-time
kingdom. Is not the modern trust-magnate or money-baron who taxes and
drives him by his wage arrangements and food extortion as much of a
King, or at least a medieval baron, as any such that ever lived? Take
Rockefeller, for example. How different is he, or others like
him--Morgan, for instance--to the Dons who in combination ruled Spain,
laughing at its King, or the money-lords who direct the policy of
England today, as did their equivalents in Russia and Germany before the
late war?
The truth is that it is given to few, if any, individuals of a nation to
understand it. By some it is assumed that the individual must rule. By
others the mass. Neither is true. The mass at times must be pitted
against the individual, and vice versa. But neither must disappear
entirely. That would spell death or slumber. It is also a question
whether any nation at any time ever collectively understands itself. Do
not some portions of its units always misunderstand other portions? Take
our part in the late great war. Sentimentally, a fair portion of
America’s integral units assumed that we entered the war to “free
humanity from slavery” and “to make the world safe for democracy,” a
very large order; but, to quote one of President Wilson’s later
utterances, it was for a somewhat different purpose, namely, “the
destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately and
secretly and of single choice disturb the peace of the world.” Well,
that is not exactly the same as making it safe for democracy--but
still--. The truth probably is that the nation, propelled by its
instinct for self-preservation, entered the war to make America safe. It
is not at all unlikely that sooner or later we should have gone to war
with Germany had there been no European war. Germany was known to regard
with avid eye many phases of this Western hemisphere, its resources,
institutions, pretensions; so America very practically, however
sentimental the reasons given may be, engaged herself on the side of
four or five powers of the first rank (some long friendly, others not
uniformly so) to protect her future interests.
From a practical point of view there were, and of course were sure to
be, many who disagreed with the somewhat sentimental interpretation of
all this. More than one person of authority at the time privately
ventured the opinion that in giving so much to aid Europe something
should have been done to secure for America its future integrity in the
Western hemisphere. “In so far as Mexico, Canada, the West Indies and
the Pacific are concerned,” wrote one authority, “should not everything
be done to further our interests there?” Canada, one would say, thinking
of a nation that should be looking reasonably well after its own
welfare, should be made at least sovereign--that is, independent of
Great Britain--and compelled to enter into commercial and definite
offensive and defensive alliances with us; the forts along our borders
dismantled and all plans to oppose us at any future time set aside.
Again, all of the West Indies, so it was argued, now controlled by
European powers, should have been exacted or made independent under our
protection so as not to fall into the hands of our enemies in the
future. Should not, asked some, a halt have been called to European
aggression in China, the open door insisted upon?... The seas should
have been made absolutely neutral--policed by America, along with
others. A great, even dominant, merchant marine should have been built
up. Why the expenditure of endless blood and treasure, with no definite
strength added to the point of view--which the United States
represents--the right of her ideas as well as those of other people to
prosper and grow strong?
But witness what was actually done, where our chief interests lay:
Belgium, a country that had never been a completely sovereign State with
rights which were inalienable, but a State which was the product of the
fears of Europe, commanding our sympathies as though it had been
individual and free throughout history. It was torn from Holland by
England and France only as recently as 1830. England and France chose
its reigning house--the English Queen’s uncle, who was speedily married
to the daughter of the King of France. Yet with Ireland, India, Egypt,
the Philippines, the Boer Republic and other violated lands and
nationalities before us, the woes of this one country developed our
greatest interest. Japan guaranteed the neutrality of Korea, but annexed
it with the consent of the powers. England, before our very eyes,
suppressed attempts at “self-determination by smaller nations of their
rights” in Egypt, Ireland, India, the Boer Republic. Yet we thought
nothing, or at least did nothing. Yet the Balkans, for some peculiar
reason not easily to be explained, aroused another sentimental emotion
in us. Although one would have said the interest of America in the
question of what should become of Russia, Turkey and the Balkans was not
direct, and from an old-time practical and political point of view never
could be, yet America interfered there as elsewhere, laying down, or
attempting to, a rule for the future organization of Europe
(self-determination of nations!), and that without any referendum to the
American voter, any definite constitutional inquiry as to what _he_
thought of all this.
Yet the neglect of the latter, most important in a self-determining
democracy or republic, one would suppose, was passed over as nothing,
while it was assumed or preached by those in the lead, and in the face
of much repressed grumbling, that we were engaged unquestionably with
those who were nearest to and best for us intellectually, spiritually
and in every other way, nations which would seek, or had invariably
sought our welfare in the past. But history, of course, demonstrated
that this was not true and that such alliances were only momentarily
beneficial, if at all, and later were broken without so much as a
by-your-leave or a farewell. But did this serve to alter the state of
public feeling or illusion? By no means. In so far as England was
concerned it appeared to strengthen it, although this was the first time
she had ever been on our side (1776, 1812, 1865, 1896); (1897-8, the
Boer War). In all those instances we were anything but pro-British. So
again with France in 1788 and 1815, when we practically declared war on
her in favor of England, although she had reason to expect our sympathy
and aid. Our attitude toward Italy has varied, as it has toward Russia:
now friendly, now the reverse. Taking into consideration the brevity of
all international alliances one would have supposed that it would have
been the imperative duty of American statesmen to make sure that in the
course of a temporary alliance with European powers the best interests
of the American nation would not have been imperiled, but being powerful
and optimistic we assumed that our interests were safe enough, or, if
not, that we could make them so, and let it go at that. But supposing we
had not been so powerful? Would God, Justice, Mercy, Truth, Progress and
a number of other things invoked during the great argument, have been on
our side? All failure, some one has said, is due to but two things:
weakness and error. Suppose we had been weak? Or foolish?
* * * * *
A singular thing in connection with this same great war and the American
people, their history, is the attitude of this nation toward the
French, at this time and earlier. At the beginning of the war
America--Christian America--was decidedly opposed to the French, on
moral and intellectual grounds, their literature, their art, their
stage, their vile tendencies to naturalism in thought and deed. Even
before this, at the beginning of our history, the original Colonists,
although of various nationalities--English, French, Dutch, Swedish,
Spanish--were finally consolidated under English rule and a fairly
systematic warfare waged against the French and the Indians, whom both
the French and the English were employing by turns in their contest for
supremacy. Yet later, at the time of the dispute between the English and
the American Colonies, which ended in the Revolutionary War, French
sympathy, due to ancient antipathy to England as well as the intense
opposition to autocratic oppression in France, drew the Americans and
the French together in a bond of sympathy. The French sent various
Generals and Admirals (Rochambeau, Lafayette, Count d’Estaing, Count de
Grasse) to help the Americans on land and sea. Yet in 1788-9, when
France and Spain declared war on England, and especially later (after
the French Revolution in 1789) when the French were struggling to
maintain their democratic independence and England was seeking to put
the Bourbon rulers back on the throne of France, do you believe that
American sympathy was with the French? If you do, you don’t know
American history. Under the offensive and defensive agreement or treaty
entered into between France and the Colonies in 1778, when the latter
were struggling for their independence, it was confidently expected by
the French that the Americans would help them against England, but
nothing of the sort followed. When, in the belief that America must
sympathize with France, “democratic” societies, after the French model,
were organized throughout the States, and later Genet, the French
Minister to America, attempted to fit our privateers on American soil
and to establish admiralty ports for the condemnation of prizes, there
was great opposition to this. Only read the history of that period
(Burgess: “The Middle Period”; Babcock: “American Nationality”; Hart:
“American History Told by Contemporaries”). America, according to this
new attitude, was now to look out for itself, and in consonance with
this in 1793 Washington issued his famous Neutrality Proclamation,
leaving France to take care of herself. After the issuance of the
Proclamation, Genet, still believing that American sympathy must be with
France, appealed to the people and openly defied the Government. His
recall followed, of course.
Then followed a very curious state of affairs. The French
Revolutionists, angered by the official attitude of America, fell to
attacking American shipping, looking upon it as a hostile power aiding
England. American commissionaires, sent to adjust our relations with
France, were ignored and representatives of the Revolutionists (or so it
was claimed), using the initials “X Y Z,” demanded tribute and a bribe.
Hence the famous comment of William Pinckney, the American lawyer and
statesman, who said “Millions for defense, but not one cent for
tribute.” And that against our late ally, France!
President Adams laid the correspondence before Congress, and the whole
country was aroused. War with France was thought to be inevitable and
(1798) Washington was reappointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Owing
to the activity of French sympathizers in America and rabid criticisms
in the newspapers of the Government’s stand in this matter, the
Federalists, who were then in power and who had no sympathy for France,
secured the passage (1798) of the famous Alien and Sedition Laws. These
laws gave the Government power to banish “foreigners” (meaning the
French) from the country and to suppress obnoxious newspapers. Actual
warfare with France went on upon the sea! But these laws, being against
the then “fundamental ideas” of Americans in regard to free speech and
the right of asylum to immigrants, were regarded by enough of the people
as proving all the charges of tyranny urged against the Federalists, and
at the next election (1800) they were defeated. In the meantime Virginia
and Kentucky had resolved, owing to these same Alien and Sedition Laws,
that a State might nullify a law of the United States. Congress, because
of French attacks on our shipping, formulated the “Spoliation Claims,”
and it was not until Napoleon (1800), as First Consul of France, agreed
to abandon the French Claim that America was still bound by the treaty
of 1778 to aid her that these latter were abandoned and peace reached.
In other words, we refused France aid in her most trying hour. Yet
twelve years later, because of England’s continuous attacks upon our
ships and seamen, trying to prevent our dealing with France in any way,
we went to war with her--only she did not quit until the victory over
Napoleon removed the cause of her alleged grievances. One hundred years
later, as we have just seen (1914-19), although opposition to France on
moral grounds had been steadily growing in America, still in the contest
with Germany all the refused sympathy and gratitude of 1800 was revived
and France became once more the object of our tenderest solicitude. So
much for national moods and gratitudes.
* * * * *
Another curious phase of the late great war, as of all countries and
wars perhaps, but one which illustrates the American temperament rather
clearly, was the attitude of America to one and another phase of it, the
psychologic flounderings and back somersaults, as it were, concerning
one problem and another. For one thing, as we all perhaps remember, the
preliminary internal contest was for peace at any price practically, and
any one who suggested mobilizing a large army for self-defense (if
nothing more) was, if not a traitor, something of an undesirable
citizen. Mr. Wilson, if you will recall, was elected the second time on
the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War”; also before we entered the war we
were told what a blessing it was in one way, commercially at least.
Later, as Germany appeared to be winning and America was actually
threatened, the whole world had to be made “safe for democracy,” an
order so large that publicity was quietly refused it in all countries
outside the United States. But that was the sweet milk fed to Americans.
Later still, when it came to actually declaring war, although this is a
republic and the people are supposed to have a voice in deciding that
which they do, no willingness on the part of the authorities, executive
or legislative, to refer the matter back to the people for a vote, was
in evidence.
And once war was declared, the people were allowed or compelled to “take
out” whatever opposition they might feel in private thought, not public
or open opposition. It was openly admitted that a referendum might have
prevented a declaration of war, yet afterwards public complaint was
ruggedly suppressed--by the courts and officials, if not by the whole
people, astounding farces by way of law being perpetrated. Still later
on, when it came to “raising” troops, money and supplies (controlling
food), volunteer service in the first of these fields was swiftly
abandoned, and conscription, with all which that implied in the way of
force and putting down opposition to it, free speech as well as free
action, was used. “Public sentiment,” as fostered by an administrative
press bureau, to say nothing of much foreign propaganda, controlled or
overawed the papers. Overawing sentences, such as forty years in the
penitentiary, for circulating a pamphlet in opposition to the current
will of the Government, were uniformly handed down in all parts of the
nation by a judiciary whose independence, sanctity and what not were
supposed to be the bulwark of American liberty. But at whose request?
By what authority? The necessity of strict and impartial justice?
I am not quarreling with the process; I am showing the thin line of
difference between autocracy and democracy where necessity or passing
opinion favors one course of conduct or another. Later on, when
suggestions in regard to food-saving were rather freely ignored, the
“suggestions” became not only suggestions but restrictions and, to quote
the food administrator, “the restrictions will be voluntary, _but_ any
evasion will result in compulsory enforcement.” Similarly in connection
with bond-selling; the people were to lend and lend and lend because
they loved their country, but (I am quoting a leading administrative
organ) “the period has arrived (October, 1918) to discontinue wooing and
soft-soaping. God help the man who is found with filled pockets if the
war goes on because of a financial failure here.”
And it was not alone in such matters where some independence or at least
latitude might have been presupposed, but it extended to a press
censorship and an intolerance of opposing opinion which compared rather
favorably to darkest days of Russian autocracy. Although America is
always naïve and “free,” its innumerable blessings of tolerance and the
like prated of, still there was but one _publicly endured_ opinion in
relation to the conduct of the war, and that was pro-war. Any other form
of thought was rigidly put down, although in England and France one
might say one’s say with all but destructive freedom. One woman in New
York was actually fined for saying that “Ireland was as good as England
any day!” A booklet entitled “Shall Morgan Own the Earth?” and intended
to show how the war was profiting some individuals, was first
investigated by the Department of Justice and pronounced immune, then
later the author was urged “as a patriotic duty” to change the title;
still later, even under the milder title, it was refused the privilege
of the mails by the Postoffice Department and the author warned that
“to circulate it would subject you to ten years in prison. You know it
violates the Espionage Law.”
And to what astounding fol-de-rol in regard to the conduct of all wars
in the future, if not in the past, were we not treated! There were to be
no more brutal wars of any kind anywhere. Ever! Oddly enough, the
horrors of the Civil War, especially the part of the Northern soldiers
in it, were entirely forgotten; also the “water cure” and “Hell Roaring
Jake Smith” of the Philippine campaign were forgotten--those natives,
for instance, who were stood up in rows and shot down one after another
by an officer with a revolver or who had water poured down their throats
and into their noses until they died of strangulation, because they
could not, or did not choose to, reveal that which possibly they did not
even know. Nations as well as individuals have short memories. Before we
entered the war it really looked as though a great war must necessarily
be fought with tooth-brushes, so great was the opposition to brutality.
Later we were never to fight any more wars at all, or if we did it was
all to be ended by one war. A little later one of our greatest agonies
was that we could not visit on the enemy something much more terrible
than they were visiting on us--national annihilation, no less. We could
not live in peace with autocracy--although, forsooth, we could live in
peace with the Japanese, the Chinese, the Imperial Russian Government
before it fell, England in India, England in Egypt--anything and
everything, indeed, save with a nation that did not fight as we did.
Never again were the erring nations to be restored to their old place in
the world. Between chortles over an immense trade increase, a finally
united railway system, new and better methods of food control, intensive
agriculture, lessons in self-denial and thought, still, and idiotic as
it may seem, the war was an unmixed evil; the Germans were all wrong.
“The passage of a thousand years will not obliterate the memory of
Germany’s crime. She will get her good name back when Judas does.” (I am
quoting from the Cincinnati Enquirer of March, 1918.) And this in the
face of the above-recited blessings pointed out in this very paper! What
are you to say for such a ragbag point of view, a national intelligence
that can blow hot and cold with the same breath?
Actually, it looked for a time as though America were suffering from
pernicious mental anemia. Its whole original significance as a
forward-pushing, clear-thinking nation appeared to have been clouded
over, and, not unlike the bee and the coral insect which apparently
serve only one or two purposes in life--the one to gather honey and
pollenize the flowers, the other to build a coral island--that it had
been invented by Nature to devise and manufacture machinery which it
should never have the courage or brains to apply to the limits of their
possibilities. It was as though the Germans and the English and the
Japanese, seeing the peculiar gifts and mental limitations of the
American, were to be permitted to use his gifts, quite as we use the
stored labor of the bee or the coral insect, and leave him to go on
moiling in his brainless mechanistic way. For the average American, who
could so easily invent a flying machine, a submarine, a range-finder for
guns, a revolving turret, a steel-protected battleship, a steamboat, and
what not, was being urged to believe, at first, that he had no heart for
their use and that he was “too proud to fight” or lacked the courage to
face the horrible grinding necessities of life; later that he was the
greatest fighter of all. Only, having proved that, he was still to
believe that he was here only to save the world, never by any chance to
further his own interests. His great inventions were to be put aside
like toys or sold to others or reserved for moral purposes only.
For note, up to the hour of sheer tragic compulsion, everything was,
and no doubt still is, to the average American, a matter of morality,
and morality, take note, in the limited sense in which he understood and
appreciated morals up to that time. You might invent a battleship
wherewith to defend yourself and kill other people, but if you used it
for any but a Christian or moral purpose, or the enemy who was
non-Christian got it (and used it) it was terrible, shameful, a moral
crime, not to be blotted out by a thousand years of expiation. To an
American, a machine, however deadly in intention, or its method of
slaying, was not to be used unless some distinctly moral end was to be
achieved by it. And he was to judge as to the moral end involved. But,
to his horror, he was finding and did find that the savage and the pagan
could get hold of his machine gun or his flying machine, or submarine,
or his battleship, or chemic invention of any kind, and turn it on him
without any moral compunction whatsoever--and to his still further
Christian horror it worked just as well for the savage or the pagan as
it did for him. Nature, or God, did not prevent the submarine from
discharging a torpedo at an unarmed merchantman any more than it aided
the firing of one from a Christian submarine at a pagan battleship. In
short, Nature seemed to be without Christianity or Christian morals, and
this shocked the American terribly. He found that he had to lay aside,
for the time being anyhow, his fine-spun theories and fight in any way
that he could, and he proceeded to do so. Whereupon, he won. But to the
American, nevertheless, and in spite of all this, Nature was and is
still strictly moral. She has fixed, definite and Christian ways by
which she works. Whenever the good American by any chance discovers that
Nature is betraying him in any way, not working according to the code as
handed down at Sinai, or the Mount in Palestine, he is horror-stricken!
What! Nature not working according to the Ten Commandments? The weak do
not inherit the earth? “Thou shalt not kill” not a universal law? “Thou
shalt not steal or commit adultery” not chemic or psychic truth running
through all nature? Who says so? Where is our God who told us these
things? Why does he not act in our behalf? Why does he not confound the
enemy in his blasphemies, destroy him, for flouting these fundamental
religious truths?
But behold, God does not, or did not act until the Americans, bestirring
themselves and laying aside their theorizing, proceeded to fight as do
the heathen. Then and then only, with the moral and exegetic rust rubbed
off and the good American, standing up vital and dangerous, did the tide
turn. Up to that hour the tide was indifferently going against him. The
heathen, noting his mood, had picked up the American’s subtle inventions
where he laid them down--fine, powerful, complete but immoral
instruments--and had used them for “immoral” purposes. And the machines
and the schemes of the American, moral though he thought they were,
worked just as well for the unmoral heathen as for himself. To his
pathetic horror and utter Christian decay he found that if he was to
succeed at all he must not only invent subtle and deadly things, but
apply them in the same spirit in which he invented them or other people
would--horrific Nature, working through other non-Christian nations
quite as effectively as it worked through good Christian Americans. In
other words, Nature was not Christian, not moral, in the sense that a
race or an organized society working to protect its selfish internal
arrangements and comforts may be, and no amount of energetic spouting on
this score helped him in the least. Nature, or God, or what you will,
showed that it cared no whit, not a snap of her or his fingers, what
becomes of man or an American with his theories, religious or otherwise,
unless he was able to protect himself. A man or a nation had to have
wealth and power to survive, and if the Germans had had more power they
would have survived, methods or means to the contrary notwithstanding.
Ten thousand pagan shrines did not save Rome from the pacifist
destruction which Christianity involved. Ten million Christian churches
spouting peace and non-warlike ways could not and did not save America
or any other country from a nation which put its faith in war and the
ruthless forces of Nature herself. Only greater war on our part could do
that, and did.
* * * * *
But let us consider some of America’s other equally potent and definite
moods or opinions in regard to some other things: the negro for one. By
the year 1700 slavery, which up to that time had been more or less a
matter of individual preference or taste, there being no general
Colonial agreement in regard to it, had become an economic institution
in Colonial life. A legalized status of Indian, white and negro servants
had preceded slavery in almost all, if not all, the English-maintained
colonies; but apparently it paid to make them slaves, and they were so
made in spite of the legal fact that they were not. Later the difference
in the industries of the several States made slavery more desirable in
some States than in others, and then the natural boundary lines of the
slave territory began to develop. Georgia and South Carolina especially
were clamoring for slave-labor on the tobacco, cotton and rice
plantations; whereas in the North it was found to be an unsatisfactory
system, and so there was early developed in those Colonies a sentiment
against a negro population and the institution of slavery in general. It
cannot be said that this was due entirely to the economic disadvantage
of keeping slaves in the North--there always existed some opposition to
slavery in the minds of individuals--but would it have been effective if
slave labor had been profitable--as profitable, say, as it was in the
South? Jefferson, for instance, wrote a denunciation of slavery into his
draft of the Declaration of Independence, but later, owing to its
probable effect on slave-holding Colonies, erased it. And negroes were
freely lynched and burned in New York City in 1712 and 1741 because they
were suspected of a desire to rebel against slavery. A public
slave-market was established in New York City as early as 1709!
Yet to hear the average Christian American of today or earlier talk of
slavery and its horrors and the great war fought to free the negro, you
might assume that he liked him. Far from it. Although a Northern
Congress (March 2d, 1867) attempted to impose universal manhood suffrage
on the South and (1875) passed a law forbidding discrimination against
negroes in inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places, aimed
principally at the South, still the negro has never been accepted in the
spirit of these laws either in the North or South. In any residence
neighborhood anywhere in America, when the black man begins to come in
the whites move out. Excellent as he may be, and I have known many who
were wholly admirable, he is not even wanted in the same churches or
schools. And the feeling, instead of growing less, becomes stronger.
Almost daily he is burned alive somewhere in America, and for all but
indifferent crimes. America may have fought and bled for his physical
freedom, but she does not want him about; and when, as in 1917 in East
St. Louis, employers attempted to use him to break a strike, he was
murdered (117 of him in that instance), his homes burned, his wives and
children driven out of the region; and in the far South, where one of
him has even so much as insulted a deputy sheriff, he has been done to
death, he and his entire family. Yet the American has no plan for the
negro--his threatening future here. He merely allows the question to go
begging, trusting to luck, no doubt. Puzzle: does the American citizen
want the negro, or doesn’t he?
* * * * *
Take once more the matter of the American and the idle, greedy or
predatory rich, as you please, and their attitude toward America, all
being citizens of the same land. Because a Colonial American once wrote
it down in our Declaration of Independence that men are created free and
equal, that they are, and _of right_ ought to be, entitled to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness at the hands of their
fellow-citizens and the world, the American ever since has been amazed
and troubled by the curious human or chemic contradictions of and
oppositions to this, not only in others but himself. Struggling along
trying to be free and happy he finds that he is constantly interfered
with by others who are doing the same thing, and that, Declaration of
Independence or no Declaration of Independence, the curious fact remains
that the strong, the ruthless, the shrewd get along as well here as they
do anywhere and that they are constantly developing ways and means of
undermining him and foreshortening his peace and happiness in favor of
their own.
Thus, in illustration: (1) A Federal judge (1919) ruled that although
Congress (1918) had forbidden any one to compel children of ten or more
years of age to labor in cotton mills, still it was unconstitutional for
Congress so to forbid and those who wished could so employ children.
Result, hundreds of thousands of children returned to eleven hours per
day factory labor.
(2) A New Jersey judge, one Gumere by name, ruled (1900) that a child’s
life, lost in an accident on a railroad or other public conveyance, was
not worth more than one dollar, the child not being as yet a source of
profit to its parents.
(3) An Ohio circuit judge (William H. Taft, afterwards President of the
United States) ruled (1893) that quitting work without the consent of
the employer was a criminal offense on the part of an employee.
(4) The Federal Supreme Court ruled (1908) that arbitration in labor
disputes is unconstitutional, therefore something which an employer may
not even enter upon with his employees.
(5) The Oregon Supreme Court decided (1903) that a citizen might be
legally held in duress (jailed) for one month without trial--this in the
face of explicit prohibition on the part of the American Constitution.
(6) The Massachusetts Supreme Court held in one dispute (1906) that
where conditions are unsatisfactory there is no remedy open to labor
save by individual and personal suit; union or combined action being
illegal or unconstitutional.
(7) Four magnates, two of them controlling the production and two the
distribution of milk for and in New York City, decided (January 10,
1919) that since they could not agree as to how the profits of the sale
of milk in New York City were to be divided among them, New York was to
have no milk until they could agree. Time of city without milk, one
month.
(8) One Barnet Baff, wholesale chicken merchant in New York City, was
murdered because he would not enter upon a scheme with other
chicken-wholesalers to fix prices and extort a higher profit from the
public. Secondary executors, but not primary instigators or murderers,
were caught and electrocuted.
(9) In Lachnor vs. New York (198 U. S. 45) a majority of the judges of
the New York Court of Appeals held unconstitutional a law limiting the
hours of labor of bakers, many of whom (women) were forced to toil
twelve hours daily in cellars to earn wages barely sufficient to keep
them alive. The Court held that this law was void because it interfered
with freedom of contract.
(10) In Ives vs. South Buffalo Ry. Co. (94 N. E. R. 431), a case in
which a railroad employee, crippled for life while at work and without
“contributory negligence,” sued for recompense, the New York Court of
Appeals unanimously decided that the law under which the suit was
brought was unconstitutional. The judges admitted the injustice, since
the man was helpless, but held the Constitution responsible.
... One might thus go forward for pages. I merely cite these in order to
present a few definite instances. The truth is that while the average
American imagines he is better looked after and more free here than he
would be elsewhere, it is more a matter of thought than anything else.
As to his daily earning and living capacity, while it is true that he
gets more pay he also pays more for what he buys. A rising scale of
wages has so regularly been accompanied by a lowering of the purchasing
power of the dollar that he has not been much comforted by higher wages.
In fact, the National Department of Labor (February, 1919), after
studying family budgets in various cities of the country, announced that
the then exorbitant cost of necessities bore heaviest on incomes of one
thousand dollars or _less_, although five per cent of the population
controlled ninety-five per cent of the wealth of the nation. And one
should further note the rising Protection policy of a hundred years,
under which the trusts flourished without any notable increase of wages
to the local consumer, and the local consumer paid uniformly higher
prices than those paid by foreigners for the same grade of goods, often
the very same goods made here and shipped abroad. This protection
explains the American multi-millionaire; also the American beggar and
his slum. It also explains the profiteer. If the average American has
had a little more of food and clothes than the men of some other
countries, he has also been confronted by the very irritating spectacle
of thousands upon thousands who have so much more than he has or can
get. He has been made to appear as poor as any churchmouse anywhere,
and, worst of all, his woes get but small attention from those who,
financially able to control his only medium of expression, the
newspapers, insist upon telling him that he is well and happy. If any
one should doubt this, let him consult, for one thing, the report of the
Federal Trade Commission appointed by Congress (Report handed down June,
1918), wherein it was charged and proved that large exactions and safe
profiteering permitted more than one giant concern to double, treble,
even quintuple, its capitalization and still earn from 100 to 227 per
cent in one instance. Coal, valued at five cents a ton in the ground,
was being sold for twenty-two dollars a ton in New York--not over two
hundred and fifty miles away. Milk was shoved up rapidly from seven to
seventeen-and-one-half cents a quart, and with no interference on the
part of any one and no effort to pool the wasteful competition and
duplication of systems which, on the other hand, were offered as an
excuse for the necessity of the more than 100 per cent increase. Wheat,
potatoes, meat, oil, sugar rose in proportion. There was no
corresponding increase in the wages, save to unionized labor (which was
the only form of labor in a position to demand a just share, and which
constituted but ten per cent of all employed). And these had to indulge
in three hundred and sixty-seven strikes in the first three years of the
war to effect even so much as a twenty per cent increase. (I am quoting
figures furnished by the United States Bureau of Labor.) When complaint
was made, one enthusiastic retort on the part of a corporation press was
that the natural law of supply and demand must be allowed to work, that
interference with exhorbitant prices meant curtailment of production at
the source. The poor producer, robbed of his just right to high prices
under a strenuous demand, would become discouraged and quit! On the
other hand, the producer was constantly complaining that he was getting
little more than before, while the rapidly increasing cost of labor was
cited as proving the need of a from 100 to a 1000 per cent increase on
everything--shoes, clothes, food, rent.
That is all simple and interesting enough when one accepts human nature
for what it is: a thing of rough balances and equations only or a
catch-as-catch-can struggle in which the strong or the shrewd survive
and the weak go under. But when, in the same land in which these things
occur, the air is full of a huge hubbub over the extreme merits of
democracy, and when at the same time any one who says anything against
profiteering or intimates that democracy as such may be subject to at
least some of the faults of autocracy is looked upon as an enemy, if not
an enemy alien, it becomes slightly anachronistic, to say the least.
* * * * *
It is also a matter of pride with most of us, frequently expressed in
disparagement of our European contemporaries, that we are a nation of
workers. To hold a position in any American community, so the thought
runs, a man must have a job. We do not conceal our contempt for the chap
who fails to go down to an office or a business every day. Often, of
course, our ostentatious _workers_ do go down but do very little work.
Still, somehow it is felt by the public at large that every man owes it
to the community or the nation to put in from six to ten hours outside
of the residential district doing something, if no more than twiddling
his thumbs. Hence the huge commuting armies oscillating to and fro,
between home and office or factory. And yet can it be said that American
commercial activity is so immensely more profitable than that of any
other nation? Or even as much so? During the late great war it was
actually proved that both Germany and England had shrewder and more
profitable business schemes and methods. The German plan for national
co-operative buying was one. Again, the superior efficiency of the
Germans and even the English was one of the facts which burst like a
flash of lightning out of a clear sky upon the astonished American, the
instantaneous skill with which all national resources--food, clothing,
transportation, man-power--were mobilized and put at the services of
the nation, the relative cheapness of it all, the efficiency with which
it was maneuvered once it was in the hands of the Government. Yet the
American business man as well as the American executive, while English
and French Commissionaires were instructing our factory masters and
“Captains of Industry,” had been bustling down to his desk each day, his
telephone to his ear, or racing from one directors’ meeting to
another--and the result to America was the largest war debt per capita
for time of service in the war and number of men involved of any nation
in the world, not even excepting Russia. Question: Is the American
business man as efficient as we think he is? As honest? As patriotic? Is
he?
* * * * *
Another curiosity of American character is, or was before the war, its
adoration of all things foreign. Everything abroad was, if it is not
now, excellent, priceless, beyond all praise or blame; whereas anything
native, or even occidental, was more or less worthless or
inconsiderable--even such things as the Andes and Amazon, as contrasted
with the Alps and the Nile; Brazil and Argentina, Mexico and the
Canadian snows were as nothing compared to Belgium or Turkey, the
Riviera, Asia, Africa. One cannot help smiling a little at times at the
grand manner with which the only moderately equipped foreigner,
intellectually or otherwise, has been permitted to walk abroad in
America and either sniff at or patronize all with which he comes in
contact as though it were nothing. And the pathetic desire of the
American to live up to what foreigners expected of him--even the waiters
of France or the middle class or gentry of England. And as for the
English lord, the French or Italian count, the Austrian or even German
baron, the Spanish grandee, the Russian prince or Turkish pasha--it is
folly to deny that he was--may be even yet, for all one knows--overcome
by his attentions. To the American they were inherently better, in some
strange sense, more versed in the ways of that great world which he
longed to explore. Let a restaurant advertise a French cuisine or cook;
a tailor say he is English; a beauty-parlor or dressmaker that it or she
or he is of Paris; a writer or artist that he is of French, Russian,
Italian, English extraction--creak goes the American knee and instanter
your native American is down on his marrowbones, his eyes rolled
heavenward. Of Paris! Of London! Of Rome! Of St. Petersburg! Of Vienna!
Ah! How many American fortunes have been re-banked in Europe to the
order of the thinnest of noble pretensions! What millions have not been
expended in an all but useless effort to take on the color and surface
veneer of European manners and culture! To this day a foreign make of
car, watch, cloth, is inherently better than that of any American
manufacture. Formerly foreign plays practically excluded the American
product--and rightly enough, in my judgment. We have been “raised” on
the foreign book, the foreign picture, the foreign object of art. The
Swiss, French or Austrian Alps--how for a hundred years at least have
they not outrivaled everything America has to offer!
And well enough, perhaps, since as yet America has no intellectual
atmosphere, no native art force wherewith to present its claim, even to
itself. A drab, and in places narrowly ignorant, people, imagining that
it is religious, moral, conservative--a thousand things that really it
is not. Since it is mental capacity that makes a country interesting to
itself and others, perhaps it is the drab attitude of the American
toward what he has and is which makes his land so uninteresting to
himself and others. Give him a different mental attitude, more
perspective, “punch,” daring in regard to life itself, and America would
soon take on a luster not outrivaled by that of any other land.
* * * * *
Let us contemplate in this connection another and, in so far as this
essay is concerned, final phase of the American mind--for I have
elsewhere dealt with moral narrowness--and that is his serious and, were
it not so pathetic and at times tragic, one might say, amusing, faith in
the ballot and what it will or can accomplish for him. Always, always he
is voting for some one--a mayor or a State legislator every year; a
congressman every two years, a senator every four or six; a governor
every two and a President every four years--and he is under the illusion
that thereby, by his vote, his choice of a candidate, he is running the
Government and maintaining his so-called liberties. The futility of his
vote in the late great war might have taught him something, if only he
were to be taught. To this day he has not discovered that, in the main,
he is merely voting for individuals thrust upon him by interests and
forces over which he has no control, never has had, and apparently never
can have, and the election or defeat of whom does not depend upon him or
the individuals about whom he is so excited. Mayors, governors, state
legislators, congressmen, senators, and even judges and presidents, come
and go, but the powerful interests at the top remain; and however much
the former may be imbued with a desire to do something for the rank and
file, the latter are there to revise or repress their emotions or
opinions, and the ordinary voter finds himself about where he was
before--of small force or weight in the vast welter of American
politics. In short, keen money-masters at the top long since learned
that a bare majority of votes anywhere, in or out of congress or a state
legislature, is sufficient to confer rule and that, apart from
convincing the intellect by sound argument, there were many, many ways
of bending the representatives of the people to their will. If this is
not true, how is it that five per cent of them have ninety-five per cent
of the wealth and the other ninety-five only five?
Those who have made a study of the history of the American judiciary
have stood in amaze before the evidence that nonelective branches of
the Government could so consistently, so openly and so contemptuously
undo the work of the elective branches (The Dred Scott decision; the
first nullification of the income tax; to cite only two). In what
American city would an outside corporation desiring real facilities or
privileges not deem itself lunatic not to see the individual local boss,
who holds no office of any kind but who is nevertheless the last
authority and can tell the local mayor and the local council, often the
local governor, what and how? And to whom does the local boss bow--the
local governor or national president? Not at all. He makes them, or
helps. He bows to but one force: money, the great national monied
interests, and none other. It is only when the financial powers at the
top fall out among themselves that the least of benefits accrue to the
people. It is always so, and has always been so. Equation--equation. The
monied individual against the mass; the mass against the monied
individual.
In what American city or state, pray, would a popular vote for any
franchise or improvement, however needful, be of any avail unless the
consent of the financial oligarchs at the top (in Wall Street
principally) were first obtained? So much is this a commonplace that
even the voters themselves would laugh at the suggestion of any power
lying in them to obtain any such thing. Before the Government
temporarily took over the railroads during the period of the great war,
Lucius Tuttle (a mere single illustration, this), president of the
Boston & Maine Railroad, controlled the political life of Maine, New
Hampshire and Vermont and lifted up or cast down, at his personal whim,
members of legislatures, governors, and United States senators. This is
a matter of record, not of rumor. The quondam Senator Chandler of New
Hampshire, one of the foremost senators of the nation of his day, was
thrown out of office on orders from Mr. Tuttle for the most
inconsequential exhibition of independence. And Mr. Tuttle took his
orders from Charles S. Mellen, president of the New York, New Haven &
Hartford Railroad; Mr. Mellen took his orders from J. Pierpont Morgan,
the elder, financial master of Wall Street. And Mr. Morgan took his
orders--from whom? God?
Is it not a commonplace of fact, recorded in every newspaper file in
America as well as every history worthy the name, that the Goulds,
Hills, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and such great banking
houses as Kuhn, Loeb & Company, absolutely ruled--via agents, attorneys,
lobbyists, paid legislators, governors and the like--the politics of the
states through which their roads passed? The little minnow voters
running here and there in schools might amuse themselves as they would
by voting for this, that or the other unimportant thing--a mayor, say,
or a governor or a president--but let any vital question appear,
something affecting the purse or privileges of the money-lords, and the
votes of the voters were cast out or miscounted, their elected
representatives suborned and made false to their oaths and pledges, the
judiciary ruled as the money interests dictated, the newspapers made to
cloud the issue with specious or false arguments, and even presidents
and parties faced about, leaving the dreaming, ambitious, hopeful voter
to dream on or to seek his so-called constitutional rights in some other
vain or ridiculous way. Money has always ruled America, and apparently
always will. As well ask five cents to contend with five billion dollars
as to ask an ordinary voter or business man of minor import to maintain
or obtain his so-called rights, privileges, hopes, dreams via the
ballot, or any other way. Even decent consideration for him or his
affairs from those above him financially has not in the main been
granted. He has been whipped and harried by the very rich as they chose;
and still, because he has the ballot and can go to the polls every once
in so often and cast it--and at such times as he is not whimpering over
his defeats--he imagines he rules!
* * * * *
The truth is that America has not as yet had an intelligence or a
culture worthy the name. It has no visible intellectual purpose, unless
it be that of getting money. What little so-called culture we have had,
if we have had any, has been borrowed from abroad--principally England,
which itself has needed to be revivified along the lines of true
culture; for it, too, as to its written and spoken professions at least,
has become puritan, pharisaic, religious and never has been democratic.
If you want to see America illustrated rather clearly as to its
cultural, or lack of cultural, results contemplate the American
millionaire. He had, if he has not now, the prevailing idea that money
is power; he worshiped and slaved for it in the hope that it would make
him wonderful in the eyes of all men.
But consider the pathetic result. He got it. A great war crisis arrived.
He wished to be useful with his great (and purely imaginary) power, to
do some significant thing which would help the world or at least his
country in its hour of stress. Had he the mental or spiritual equipment
to see or even feel what was needed? Or was he but one of that immense
class of American men and women who discovered in this crisis that
business somehow failed to fulfill their spiritual needs and reached out
from it, only to find themselves lost in a maze of wider relationships
for which they had no technique? Ford organized a peace ship! He, with a
little load of editors, journalists, preachers and what not, going to
Europe to “call the men out of the trenches by Christmas!” (1915). And
the wise American papers, especially in our Middle and Far West, full of
his praises, and the probability of success! It could be done! And that,
in the face of an amazing and subtle racial movement and propaganda,
with war and conquest as its under-stones, organizing in Germany since
the year 1813. The rest contented themselves with making more money. So
much for one American business giant’s success, and his intellectual
grasp on life!
* * * * *
Take yet another phase in conclusion. At the beginning of the great
world war we were constantly hearing talk of “the obligations laid upon
us,” “our duty to civilization,” the necessity for “making the world
safe for democracy,” when, as a matter of fact and according to our
chief spokesman’s own admission it was not until between the third and
fourth year of the war that we began to realize the true program or
purpose of the enemy and that some such enthusiasm as was at first
called for might be necessary! We talked of the time having come for us
“to play our part among the societies of the world”--and then sent a
Root and a Francis (corporation lawyers and agents both, and long since
discredited by the American people themselves) to argue with the
representatives of a torn and war-worn people seeking a new and better
form of social and political life. In the war itself it was apparently
assumed that “men, money and ships” (the old American idea of quantity,
you see, not ideas or wits wherewith to match the deepest schemes of our
adversaries as well as our friends) was the point. But life or
international politics and relations or diplomacy is something more than
that. It may, and did, require nothing less than a mobilization of new
characteristics and unique forces on the part of the pacifistic and
religious-minded American. It actually compelled him to open his brains
to the fact that life is more dark and mysterious than he had supposed,
more forceful and terrible and cruel than his petty little pacifistic
and puritanic dreams would previously have permitted him to believe. A
door was unlocked, a window opened, and looking out or in on the deeps
of Nature he saw--dimly enough even then, it must be admitted--what he
has not even yet digested; that Nature has no strict and God-given
rules, that nothing is really fixed; anything may arise, and that
within the bounds of an unknown arc of equation anything may
happen--anything.
But it took a world horror to crack the armor of smug, ignorant
self-sufficiency which has covered the average American from crown to
sole.
And has he learned? Does life really mean any more to him than it did
before? I wonder. As some one else has brilliantly said:
“The fierce, rudimentary mass mind of America, like that of some
inchoate, primeval monster, relentlessly concentrated in the appetite of
the moment, knows nothing as yet apparently of its own vast, inert,
almost nerveless body encrusted with parasites. One looks out to-day
over the immense vista of our society, stretching westward in a
succession of dreary steppes, and one realizes what it means to possess
no cultural initiative or tradition, filling in the interstices of
energy and maintaining a steady current of life over and above the ebb
and flow of individual necessity or animal appetite or purpose.” Money,
money, money. To build, build, build, in order to make more money, to
make a show, to be better than thou--financially only. It is told of the
quondam Russell Sage that he kept near him in his office a strongbox
containing $78,000,000 in what he called “gilt-edge” securities, the
which, whenever he wished to prove how wonderful he was and how great
his life had been, he brought forth and exclaimed: “There--there isn’t a
man in America who can show that many first-class stocks and bonds! Not
one!”
And there wasn’t, perhaps.
But what of it?
He died, and not knowing what to do with it (splendid testimony to the
American financial intellect), left it all to his wife; who, old and
ignorant herself and not knowing what to do with it, but fearing its
senseless distribution, left it, after various benefactions to sectarian
schools and much influence brought to bear, to the Russell Sage
Foundation. And the Russell Sage Foundation, not knowing exactly what to
do with it, has been “investigating,” and re-investigating and
re-re-investigating ever since, this, that and the other, with a view to
finding out what it should do with it, what one thing, if any, to help.
And what great thing, if any, has the Russell Sage Foundation done?
Well, America, in its own peculiar and interesting way, may find itself
intellectually. As an old char-woman who worked for me remarked, “I’m
not so dumb than I look.” So, possibly and probably, America.
To be sure, a new country must at first borrow its culture from
somewhere. One does not come by such a thing instanter and out of a silk
hat. Still here is a nation now three hundred years old; it has one
hundred and twenty millions of people, if not more; it has as great, and
in their way forceful, cities as exist anywhere on the globe; its
architecture is already most imposing and fast attaining a splendor
hitherto never equaled by any land; a far better and more satisfying
mechanical equipment is here than in any nation elsewhere. We have, in
so far as material facilities are concerned, more and better
opportunities for genuine culture than are now available to the mass
anywhere. Then, why are we so bent, I should like to know, upon more
money, and, when not that, upon idealistically misinterpreting life? The
few genuine thinkers that America has thus far produced are taboo: Poe,
Whitman, Twain. Only in one field, finance--not in war, politics, the
arts and sheer intellect--do our essential individuals compare favorably
with those of other lands. In the main we are too idealistic or
illusioned in all but our material affairs. But why all the delusion in
re the ordinary intellectual facts of life? No single nation has more of
wealth, courage, industry, or more impressive varieties of scenery, be
it of mountains, lakes, valleys, the coast. We should be, and for all I
know are (although the signs are not numerous), at the opening of an
era of art and letters such as the world in none of its great periods
has surpassed. Yet in spite of all this, and in so far as the mass and
its ostensible leaders are concerned, we are intellectually dull and
unperceiving in regard to all the basic facts of life. All men are still
honest, kind and true (or should be) in America; all women pure as
driven snow (or should be) in America. The Sermon on the Mount is our
real Constitution; the Ten Commandments our only laws. We all do justly,
think kindly, and it is only bad men from the world without, strangers
and evil-thinkers, who come from heaven knows where--for our
intellectual and spiritual cosmogony does not admit them--to cause us
trouble.
America in its own good time may come to a great end. And again it may
not. It may be--who knows?--a mere money machine, a honey-gatherer like
the bee, a material welter like Rome, without the slightest vision as to
what to do or how to act once it has its great store. Other and shrewder
nations, far less able financially or physically, may yet lead the giant
by the hand, pull him around by the nose. He may be psychologically the
same as the wealthy heir to whom life’s pains and doubts are and remain
unknown, who, being pulled in upon expensive pleasures or the ventures
of others and given a superficial reason, is cheerfully willing to pay
the bill and depart.
Well, if so be, so be. Who can help it? Nature, if not man, has a way
however, if not wisdom. In the course of time She disposes of nations
and their dreams, as well as man and his, by rotting them and their
material splendors back into primal chemical substances and forces and
forgetting them. Rome has gone; Greece has gone; and many, many another.
But speaking for a nation that wishes to stand forth mentally
significant among the peoples of the earth, that wishes to lead or at
least be among those that lead, must not thought--intelligent, artistic,
accurate vision--be among its primary characteristics? And is it not
possible that as with individuals so with nations--where the power to
think is lacking failure follows? Sometimes, and in view of the careers
of various nations past and still present, one is hounded by the thought
that as with individuals so with nations; some are born fools, live
fools, and die fools. And may not America perchance be one such?
One hopes not.
But--
THE DREAM
SCENE: _The vicinity of 115th Street and Broadway, New York City,
on a warm, lowery May night. Time, 11.15._
_Approach along Broadway from 116th Street George Paul Syphers,
Professor of Chemistry; Forbes Mitchell, Professor of Philosophy;
Abner Barrett, Professor of Physics. Syphers is medium in height,
slim, fiery, black-whiskered, barbered to perfection. He is
loquacious and demonstrative. Mitchell is attenuated, humped, gray.
He is quite old. Barrett is fifty, blonde, bald, heavy, silent._
SYPHERS
(_As they reach the corner._) Well, I turn off here. That was an
interesting discussion we had, eh? The fact is, Mitchell, as I told you
the other day, I have passed out of my old materialistic point of view
to a certain extent--not entirely--but now I see more order in things
than I once did--a necessary if mechanistic order. It seems more or less
inescapable to me, doesn’t it to you?
MITCHELL
(_Doubtfully_.) Well, yes, I might say--only--of course----
BARRETT
(_Dogmatically._) I do not see how any one can doubt law. Everything
obeys law of one kind and another.
SYPHERS
Quite so! Quite so! Law, of course. Everything obeys a law or laws of
one kind and another. Nevertheless, there are so many confusing
contradictions. Laws seem to conflict at times, don’t you think, even
in chemical and sidereal space. You don’t deny that, do you?
BARRETT
Still, more knowledge might prove them to be anything but contradictory.
SYPHERS
Well, I admit that, too. Only I was merely suggesting that I see more
definite order than I once did. A few years ago I could see nothing but
disorder, chaos, the inexplicable clashing of forces. Of late I am not
so sure. This matter of orthogenesis now; it appeals to me very much as
demonstrating an intellectual if not a spiritual order, some great
controlling force somewhere. I seem to see a definite tendency to order
in things. Life has certainly built itself up through the ages in a very
intelligent way indeed, don’t you think?
BARRETT
(_Loftily._) Ye-es, of course, only there have been many errors and
conflicts there too--sudden stoppage of plans in various directions.
MITCHELL
True, as I was about to point out.
SYPHERS
(_Almost unconscious of interruption._) I admit that. I admit that. What
I am getting at is this: all life, as we know it, is based on the
cell--cell origination, cell multiplication, cell arrangement. That is
an old story. Now here is something which is my own idea--it’s a mere
theory, of course--that the whole thing may have been originated,
somehow, somewhere else, worked out beforehand, as it were, in the brain
of something or somebody and is now being orthogenetically or chemically
directed from somewhere, being thrown on a screen, as it were, like a
moving-picture, and we mere dot pictures, mere cell-built-up pictures,
like the movies, only we are telegraphed or telautographed from
somewhere else, like those dot pictures that are now made electrically,
built up dot by dot, millions of them coming rapidly by wireless or wire
and being thrown on a screen of some kind--ether, the elements--you know
what I mean. You have seen the telautograph pictures I mean, of course?
BARRETT
Yes, of course. Very ingenious. Very ingenious. But how do you prove the
origination of the cell in the fashion that you want?
MITCHELL
(_Aside._) A rather slow movie, I should say, considering the length of
time it has taken to build it up.
SYPHERS
Well, in this way--it has its drawbacks, of course; you remember the
experiments of that Irish scientist Burke, don’t you? He generated what
he called a radiobe--a single cell in a plasm culture which he had
hermetically sealed and which he kept under the influence of radium. I
do not recall the exact facts of the case at the moment, and I do not
believe that his deductions have since been accepted, but that is
neither here nor there. That idea of his illustrates mine very well. If
we could prove that one cell, one radiobe, had been or could be
originated or generated by an outside influence of this kind--radium, if
you wish, in a plasm of that kind--we would have to admit that the whole
thing might be built up in some such fashion. Why, you could base a new
philosophy on that, Mitchell. One radiobe generated in a plasm culture
under radium or something else, some autogenetic force manifesting
itself through a thing like radium, and there you are. After that you
would have to grant the possibility of millions and billions of cells
coming in that fashion, whole nations constructed of cells, as they have
been.
MITCHELL
My dear Syphers!
BARRETT
There was some hitch in that experiment, however. The chain wasn’t quite
complete.
SYPHERS
I know--I know. I grant you that. All I’m insisting on is that if one
cell, one radiobe, say, can be generated by a synthesis of energy, why
not millions? And if millions, why not billions, the whole human family,
in short, since we are a synthesis of cells--this whole visible scene in
all its details? I know it sounds wild, but (_to Mitchell_) I have heard
you yourself say that you thought it might be possible that we were all
a part of some invisible psychic body, force body, in the mechanism of
which we function in some way, just as the cells do in ours.
MITCHELL
(_Much flattered._) Yes, I have said as much.
SYPHERS
Well, then, why may not my theory be true?
BARRETT
May? May? Of course it may. But how are you going to prove it? I myself
have suggested that Mitchell’s larger psychic body, as he calls it, may
be nothing more than a fetus, a secondary creature being built in the
womb of a still larger organism, but what of it? All of us, everything
that we see here, may be nothing more than parts of organs that are
being constructed in some huge womb. This so-called higher psychic body
may not even be complete yet, not ready to be born in its realm. But how
do we know? There’s nothing to prove it.
SYPHERS
Just the same, if I had a few hundred thousand dollars I would enlarge
my laboratory and pursue this subject. I believe that something may be
discovered. I believe that I could prove it in the course of time. Why,
snow crystals, tree and flower forms, everything, gives us a hint,
sometimes instantaneously. Why do snow crystals assume almost
instantaneously and out of nothing their beautiful forms? The
controlling impulse is certainly artistic, isn’t it, and outside of
anything we know? (_He notes that he is pressing the matter too far and
boring his two friends._) Well, good night. Glad to see you two at the
meeting to-night. It was interesting, wasn’t it?
BARRETT
Very. (_To himself._) He’s a terrible bore.
MITCHELL
Delightful. (_To himself._) I’m glad he’s done. (_They bow and depart._)
SYPHERS
Dolts! Fogies! That’s always the way, dull and cautious.
BARRETT
(_As they walk up the street._) An ingenious theory, but dangerously
speculative. He ought to read Stromeyer on “Impulse.”
MITCHELL
I often wonder about his work and just how sound he is.
(_SYPHERS reaches his own door and goes up the steps, unlocks it and
mounts the inside stairs to his room. He lights the gas in a chamber
which is half library and half bedroom._)
SYPHERS
(_Seating himself and gazing about dreamily._) A great idea. I’m sure of
it. Along this line is coming a scientific revolution. If I had enough
radium and stromium, why--but they cost so much. (_He yawns._) Life is
really a dream. We are all an emanation, a shadow, a moving picture cast
on a screen of ether. I’m sure of it. (_He gazes about, yawns again, and
begins to undress._)
A TELEGRAPH INSTRUMENT
(_At 110th Street Station._) Tick--tick-tick----
tick-tick-tick--tick-tick---- tick--tick-tick-tick-tick-tick----
TELEGRAPH OPERATOR
There goes that blamed machine again (_begins to write_.) “Professor
George Paul Syphers, 621 West 115th Street, New York City. Your uncle,
Edward Fillmore, died at eleven to-night. By the terms of his will you
are the sole heir to the bulk of his fortune, three hundred thousand
dollars. Come at once. A. J. Larywind, Counsellor,” (_Aside._) I wish
someone would leave me three thousand cents. (_To a waiting messenger._)
Here, Patsy. Take this up to 115th Street.
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Cock-eyed, overgrown, contentious._) Sure, it’s just de night to keep
busy. It’s goin’ to rain, an’ it’s me late watch. Oh, well, dere’s
nuttin’ like bein’ poor an’ honest. (_He seizes a black cotton umbrella
almost as large as himself and goes out._)
SYPHERS
(_Crawling into his bed._) The curious thing is: why should any dominant
force outside this seeming life wish to create it--the smallness, the
pettiness, the suffering? I must write a book about that. Here I
am--(_he suddenly bethinks him of opening a window and gets out. Looking
out_). It’s going to rain, I do believe. (_He returns and stretches
himself to rest._) There, it’s thundering already.
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Trudging solemnly up Broadway._) It’s funny, dese mokes wot git
messages at one in de mornin’. I’ll lay a even bet I don’t git nuttin’,
neider. If you’d come wit a million dollars after twelve o’clock dere’s
guys wot’d git sore.
SYPHERS
(_Dozing, but still continuing his speculations hazily._) I must
try to find the psychic impulse which originates and directs
the cell. That is the great thing. We’re all shadows, I say,
shadows--adumbrations--impalpable nothings--rumors--dreams. (_He turns
on his side._) If our ills become too great we might be able to wake up
or drive them away by thinking of this. It may be that that’s what we
do when we die--wake up. But that’s Christian Science, isn’t it? Bah!
(_He snores slightly._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Arriving at the door and closing his umbrella._) A fine night, dis.
An’ he won’t be in. Dat’s my luck. (_He rings the bell._)
SYPHERS
(_Beginning to dream._) Radiobes! Radiobes! Flying radiobes as big as
houses--monsters--(_He stirs. As he does so the ringing of the bell, the
rising wind and the thunder and lightning, which rapidly become violent,
identify themselves in some weird way with his thoughts. He is on a
large plain now over which a battle is being fought. The flashes of
lightning and bellows of thunder gradually identify themselves in his
mind with some impending disaster, vague and yet oppressive. He begins
to cerebrate in an imaginative, illogical way. A sense of something
ominous pervades him, a feeling of great change. Then the rat-a-tat-tat
of machine guns begins and armed figures running and fighting appear in
the distance._)
SYPHERS
(_Who once saw military service._) War! And fighting men! (_It begins to
rain._) That is a machine gun. Now I am in real danger. How did I come
here, anyhow? (_He moves a hand, thinking he is hurrying to cover._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Standing at the door, ringing the bell and shifting from one foot to
the other._) Wot a swell night! Wot a swell night! Now it’s startin’ to
pour an’ I’ll have to stand here aw’ile, I guess. Holy Cripes, dem drops
is as big as marbles! (_He pushes the bell again._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Hearing the whirr of the buzzer in his dreams and taking it for the
rush of artillery and men._) Ah, the horror of war! What was I
thinking?--ah, yes! If one had some method of waking up. (_He mingles
the dream notions of his waking philosophy with the figures of his
dream._) Then there would be no more war, no horrors. It is entirely
possible, now that we know this existence of ours is a dream. I may be
dreaming now--who knows? If so, I could wake up and all my ills would
vanish--or would they? (_As the thunder and lightning increase._) How
horrible this is! (_The dream sky lights up as if with red fire._)
PATSY LAFERTY
T-r-r-r! T-r-r-r-r! T-r-r-r-r-r! Wot’s de matter wit dis bell? W’y don’t
de guy answer?
THE PROFESSOR
(_Dreaming and looking about him in apprehension._) War! War! How
terrible! How did I come here? How does there happen to be war? Those
are fighting men over there! They are killing each other! Horrors! But
the great thing is to escape. That fire is dreadful. It means death.
(_He struggles to put himself in motion and grunts in his sleep._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Ringing again._) Well, dis is some sleeper, all right. Or else dere
ain’t nobody home. I’ll kick, I will. (_He kicks._) Come to! I ain’t
supposed to stand here all night. (_Kicks and knocks are without
result._)
SYPHERS
(_Still dreaming heavily._) And here comes a file of soldiers--I hear
them tramping--a great company. Merciful heavens, they see me! (_He
begins to run. As he does so the file of dream soldiers begin to run
also._)
THE FILE OF DREAM SOLDIERS
Halt!
THE PROFESSOR
(_Breaking into a heavy sweat._) Great God! I haven’t a place to hide!
Oh, Lord, what shall I do? (_He turns, and in his dream he imagines a
deserted stone hut set in a grove of thick tall trees, which seems to
offer shelter. He runs towards the hut._) As I live, here is a stone hut
among thick trees! I’ll hide in it. Perhaps they won’t see me. _(He
dashes wildly in, slamming a heavy door behind him._)
A SCORE OF DREAM SOLDIERS
(_Hurrying after him and knocking with their musket butts on the door._)
Knock! Knock! Knock!
PATSY LAFERTY
(_At the door._) Knock! Knock! Knock! Gee, wot a night! Dese raindrops
look like spits. An’ dat lightning! Dat last one looked like a telegraph
pole standin’ straight in de air!
SYPHERS
(_Cowering in a corner._) Oh, Lord! My life is worth nothing! Here I lie
hiding in an empty stone hut, and those men at the door want my life.
What is life? A dream! A dream!--but, oh, such a precious dream! I would
not want to disappear--not yet! No, no! I would not want to wake up. I
don’t want to die--not yet. Not yet! (_As he lies there cowering, all
the coruscations and thunder of a great battle afflict him; cannon,
machine guns, human cries, commands. He cowers lower, and yet in spite
of the thickness of the walls which seem to protect him he can see
through them to the surrounding trees to where the dream soldiers await
him--tall men in red coats and towering shakos--and beyond them again to
the battlefield, red with flame and gore. As he stares, the men in the
shakos glare at him._)
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
(_Pointing at him and speaking to another._) We’ll easily get him out
of there. Can’t you see him lying there, close by the wall? (_To the
other soldiers._) Bring a battering ram. (_A soldier starts off._) No,
bring a cannon. We’ll blow him out. (_A second soldier goes._) He thinks
we can’t get him, but we can. (_Other soldiers draw near. They move in
the curious, indefinite way common to figures in dreams. Nothing is
clear, and yet there is a sense of impending disaster. The Professor
studies the nature of his predicament with a sense of horror._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Lying on the floor, close to the wall._) Ah, if I could only escape! I
was thinking a while ago that life was a shadow of something else, an
adumbration, a thing built up point by point like the dots of a
telautographed picture. Now if that were so I could get out of here. It
would be a dream. I could wake. I could cry “Avaunt!” I could stir and
it would all disappear and become as nothing. But here! Here--(_he
pauses and stares. A company of dream soldiers on horseback gallop up
and swing a cannon into position._)
THE CAPTAIN OF THE DREAM SOLDIERS
(_Dramatically._) Position! (_They unhook the horses and man the guns._)
Load! (_A shell is put in._) Fire! (_It belches flame and smoke. A great
hole is torn in the wall of the hut._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_At the door._) Gee, dat las’ crack was a bold! If he kin sleep troo
dat he soitenly won’t hear me--or maybe he ain’t home. Well, I might as
well stand here. I can’t go back in dis. (_He decides to make himself
comfortable in the doorway._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Imagining he is crying._) Help! Help! Oh, save me! Save me! (_He
realizes that he emits no sound, and groans._)
FIRST DREAM OFFICER
Once, more, men! Another shell here! (_Another is put in._) Fire!
THE CANNON
Poof! Boom! (_Another great hole is torn in the wall._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_As a second electric crash occurs._) I don’t know wedder I’d better
stay here. I don’t wanna get killed. (_He walks about uneasily._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Heavily and desperately._) I am lost! I know it. Oh, if my idea were
only true! What if all this turmoil and agony were a figment of the mind
merely, a cell or dot picture? Here I am in this hut; these soldiers are
about to destroy me. If I could just cry “Avaunt!” “Disappear!”--or if I
could know that I am not real, and disappear myself. I wonder if I might
not try it? (_He jumps to his feet._)
A FLASH OF LIGHTNING
Click--Sssssss!
A CLAP OF REAL THUNDER
Boom----!
THE PROFESSOR
(_To the dream soldiers, defiantly._) I defy you! Do your worst! You’re
not real! I’m not real! This whole thing is a dream! I’m a dream, or I’m
dreaming! I defy you!
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
(_Drawing near with a rifle._) Is that so? You defy me, do you? I’ll
show you whether I’m real or not. (_He takes deliberate aim._)
SECOND DREAM SOLDIER
Yes, kill him. That’s the way!
THE PROFESSOR
(_Lifting his hand._) Wait a moment! Don’t! I--I’m not sure!
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
But I will, just the same. You say I’m not real? I’ll show you whether I
am or not! (_He fires._) How does that feel?
THE PROFESSOR
(_Who has twisted himself about until he has one hand under him in a
most painful position._) Oh, God, I’m shot! And now I’ll die! This whole
scene, real or not real, will pass away and I will never know--or will
I? And yet once I was a man, and it was good to be alive. Oh! Oh! Oh!
(_He weeps and sinks down. A powerful clap of thunder half arouses him.
The knocking of Patsy Laferty becomes dimly audible, a cross between the
clatter of musketry and a knock. He stares at the soldiers, some of whom
seem already to be growing thin and wavering._) Dying! Alas! I’m dying!
Never will I see this wonderful world any more! (_He partially wakes._)
Or will I? What’s this--I’m not dying, after all! They’re not real! I’m
only dreaming. How astonishing! (_To the dream soldiers, defiantly._)
You’re not real, after all. You’re mere shadows, thin air. I’m dying,
but you’re not real. This house isn’t real. It couldn’t have holes in it
if it were, or at least I couldn’t have seen through it in the first
place if it hadn’t. You’re shadows, tissues of nothing, a mere fancy of
the brain. Oh, wonderful!
FIRST DREAM OFFICER
(_Standing by the cannon._) Are we? Well, you’re a fool! Wait! You may
be waking into another state, but you’ll be dead to this one. But we
won’t. Ha! Ha! We’ll still be here, alive. (_To the second dream
soldier._) He thinks he’s not real. He thinks we’re not real. He thinks
he’s not going to die, but wake up into something else! Ha! Ha! (_They
look at each other in a strange, fading, unreal way._) When he passes
out of this won’t he be dead to this, though?
THE PROFESSOR
(_Amazedly._) What is this? Am I dying, or waking up? Which is it? Are
there various worlds, one within another? Are those soldiers really
real? Great heavens! How strange! I am waking up, and yet this world in
which I am is real enough. I died there. I certainly did, or I am dying
there. (_The house begins to dissolve like smoke; the trees can be seen
through the bodies of the soldiers._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_At the door._) I’ll give dis guy one more spin an’ den I’ll quit. I
ain’t gonna stand here all night, rain or no rain. Clump! Clump! Clump!
(_He kicks with his heel at the same time that he rings._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Bounding out of bed._) Oh, blessed heaven! What is that? I’m not dead,
after all! I am really alive! It was a dream, all of it. How glad I am
to be awake! (_He reaches for his trousers._) But those soldiers! They
argued with me about it! They did! They made fun of me! Isn’t that
amazing! This dream is a call to me to seek out this mystery. If ever I
get money enough to do it that is certainly what I will do. I shall
devote all my life to solving this mystery. If only I could find
somebody who would endow a laboratory for this purpose. (_He pauses and
stares, as the bell whirrs._) Yes, yes! I’m coming! (_He bustles
downstairs, turning up the light as he goes._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Irritably, as the door is opened._) Syphers?
THE PROFESSOR
Yes.
PATSY LAFERTY
Tellygram. Sign here. (_He produces about a half inch of pencil and
holds up a signature blank. The Professor signs. Absentmindedly he tears
open the message, but while doing so turns and closes the door. Patsy
Laferty stares at it disconsolately._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Reading._) A miracle! $300,000! Just what I need for that laboratory!
It’s a sign! The dream is a portent, a call! My poor dear, good uncle!
What moved him to leave me that? Now I know the dream was an omen. And
yet--(_thinking of a certain maiden he has been courting._)--should I
really do that? Three hundred thousand are three hundred thousand, and
where would I ever get that much again? (_He hesitates mentally._) We
could live beautifully on that. I’m not so sure. Perhaps I could get
some one else to furnish that money. (_He starts upstairs._) But that
poor boy! I forgot to give him a penny, and it’s storming. (_Returns and
reopens the door, looks up and down the street, and comes back._) Dear,
dear, dear! I should have given him a dime, anyhow--bringing such a
fortunate message. But I must think about this laboratory, though, and
this money. I must not act too hastily or inadvisedly. Three hundred
thousand are three hundred thousand, and---- (_He goes upstairs again
solemnly._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_One block south, staring at the sidewalk._) Wot did I say? Wot did I
say? Dey never comes across wit nuttin’ after twelve--nuttin’. Not if
you handed dem a million.
THE AMERICAN FINANCIER
The long line of American financiers, beginning with Stephen Girard
(1750-1831), and extending via Astor, the Vanderbilts, Goulds, J. P.
Morgan and F. W. Woolworth to Henry Ford of the present time, suggests
nothing so much as a procession of thrifty and, in the main, cat-like
animals weaving a devious way amid intricacies of law and public opinion
and theories as to morals, duty, charity and the like, until finally one
is led to conclude that, by and large, the financial type is the
coldest, the most selfish, and the most useful of all living phenomena.
Plainly it is a highly specialized machine for the accomplishment of
some end which Nature has in view. Often humorless, shark-like, avid,
yet among the greatest constructive forces imaginable; absolutely
opposed to democracy in practice, yet as useful an implement for its
accomplishment as for autocracy; either ignorant or contemptuous of
ethical niceties as related to thine and mine, yet a stickler for all
that concerns mine; moral and immoral sexually--both types abound;
narrow to all but an infinitesimal line in nearly all that relates to
the humanities as applied to individuals; wise and generous in the
matter of large, even universal benefactions, yet guilty of the meanest
subterfuge where their own interests are concerned; and seeking always
to perpetuate their own fame. In other words, typical men and women of
an avid pagan world (vide Hetty Green, Russell Sage), yet surrounded by
religious and ethical abstrusities for which they care little and of
which they understand less.
Such might be called the pathology of the genus financier, not only in
America, but everywhere.
In regard to our American specimens it is more or less anachronistic to
speak of them as purely American in character, although, in a way, they
are. The organizing and financial type of mind--American, European or
any other--is really little different from that of all preceding
countries and ages. Yet financial manipulation, in the extended modern
sense, is comparatively new. It dates from the industrial revolution in
England in the eighteenth century. There was a time when the organizing
type of mind, comparable to our modern examples, was engaged in other
things: money-lending and exchange principally. The machinery for
finance in the modern sense was lacking. You might have found a J. P.
Morgan, a J. D. Rockefeller, or a Russell Sage as Keeper of the
Exchequer and Supervisor of the Grain Stores of, say, Egypt or Assyria,
or Adviser to the King, whether he ruled in Babylon, Persia or
elsewhere. One cannot help thinking what an excellent type of Keeper of
the Exchequer, Vizier or High Priest our own John D. Rockefeller would
have made. The robes! The sanctity!
As we come forward in history to the end of the Roman Empire and the
beginning of that mental darkness known as the Middle Ages, when all
intelligence, financial and other, seems to have been completely swept
away, we find the purely financial and organizing type but slowly
developing. Joseph (he of the coat of many colors), fabled Crœsus, who
ruled in Asia Minor, and Lepidus and Mæcenas, friends of triumvirs,
emperors and poets, are excellent examples of the ancient financial
type. Their like is not to be found until after the revival of banking
and trade in the fifteenth century. And if you look back you will see
that to-day, in another way, we have been repeating in Wall Street (or
were until a few years ago), the type of man who occasionally sat as
Emperor over all the Romans. If you are inclined to doubt this you
might, if the opportunity offered, examine the collection of portrait
busts of Roman Emperors of the highly executive and financial type
(Hadrian, Trajanus, Titus, Caracalla and the rest) in the Vatican, the
Musee del la Terme and the British Museum. Hadrian, for instance, was as
much like the late Commodore Vanderbilt, side whiskers and all, as one
man might be to another; and Trajanus greatly resembled the late Mark
Hanna, whose name somehow suggests that of a Roman. Any one of ten or
fifteen portrait busts of ancient Roman Emperors might almost be
mistaken for Armour, Morgan, Gould, Sage, Crocker, Stanford, Hearst. For
example, compare Russell Sage to Julius Cæsar; or Wm. H. Vanderbilt to
Augustus Cæsar. Indeed, if you were to examine some of the major
operations of the successful Roman Emperors you would find that their
power to maintain their positions with the Prætorian Guard and the
Patrician Class (which was really the Roman world, so far as they were
concerned) was largely financial and organizing in the same peculiar
spirit in which we find those qualities operating to-day.
It is not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in
Italy, Flanders and north Germany that one encounters financial types
very like those with which we have been very recently dealing. Italy of
the Renaissance found a most interesting specimen of this type of mind
in Cosimo I. of the Medici--“Pater Patriæ,” as he was called--who was
little more than a very active Vanderbilt I. of his day. The family
first conducted a successful pill business, then Cosimo engaged in the
banking business. Being a financier he secured control of nearly all the
financial channels of Italy, France, Greece, a portion of Egypt, and the
Lowlands. It is charged that he brought about the death of one or two
enemies in Florence, not because he disliked them, but because he
thought they were dangerous to his interests, and once he came very near
to being gibbeted himself. He was a patron of the arts, not so much
because he was emotionally and poetically enthusiastic about art as
because, as at present, it was a distinguished thing to be. The trick
of currying favor via art patronage is old. His descendants, having less
of his force and more of the refinement which invariably follows wealth,
did more for art and less for trade, and so while we see the Medici
family identified with the most brilliant period of Italian art we also
see it slowly sinking into financial and political insignificance. That
it finally degenerated and passed out is no reflection on the
significance of Cosimo, his primary import. Although the coldest and
most financial of them all, he was also the best.
This was equally true of Louis XIV of France and Frederick the Great of
Germany, organizing and financial types both, although monarchs by
birth.
England has had its full share of the type in the officers and directors
of its famous East India Company (Warren Hastings, for one) and their
efforts to monopolize and exploit the Indian Empire, as well as in the
very excellent Rothschild, who flourished at the time of the Battle of
Waterloo and who stood behind a tree to view the battle in order that he
might decide for himself which side was going to win and so get to
London and the stock-market first. There he spread the report that
England had lost so that the already trembling stocks of the nation
might tumble and he be able to buy them for a song. When he had gathered
in all the shares he could carry he gave out the correct news of the
victory and reaped his harvest. Dishonest? As you choose to look at such
things. But when has high finance been honest, or let us say,
considerate of the interests of others? The financial history of this
particular individual is so selfishly single-minded as to be almost
ridiculous, suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no
other, as generals, saints and the like are invented.
In America, the history of our financiers is so full of thievery and
selfishness as to appear comic were it not for the mass misery which so
many of their deeds involved. Stephen Girard, for instance, stole his
employers’ ship at the outbreak of the American Revolution (pretending
it had been sunk, of course), and with the proceeds opened a wine and
cider business in Philadelphia. John Jacob Astor drugged the Indians
with fire-water and bought their furs for a song, as well as bribed
Government agents to permit him so to do. J. P. Morgan senior at the
outbreak of the Civil War sold the Government five hundred of its own
condemned rifles for twenty-two dollars each, after having but the
moment before bought them _from_ the Government for three dollars and
fifty cents each, and that with money borrowed on the strength of the
proposed contract. (History of the Great American Fortunes, Myers, Vol.
II., page 172.) Cornelius Vanderbilt blackmailed the United States
Steamship Company, plying between New York and California, in the amount
of nearly $500,000 a year by threatening to operate a rival line. (Ibid.
Vol. II., pp. 120-121.) Jay Gould robbed the various States through
which his railroad ran and drove some of his rivals to suicide. Russell
Sage robbed the city of Troy of a railroad and bribed the Minnesota and
other State Legislatures. (Ibid. Vol II., pp. 12-16.) The record is too
long to be more than mentioned here; those interested should read Myers’
remarkable work, in which the crimes as well as genius of our long line
of money kings are described in full.
That the world has always been troubled with the huge financial
innovator and the self-seeker is of course a commonplace; the objection
to him has been, as a rule, that he has too few human traits. Like the
astronomer, the mathematician, the philosopher and the historian, his
thoughts are more or less remote from the concerns of the ordinary
individual, although his dealings are with him. To do anything which is
to be of benefit to the individual it requires the mind that sees the
individual en masse rather than in particular. Indeed, the thing that
has always confronted the individual of ability since the beginning,
aside from his own inner driving emotions, ambitions and needs, is this
same organized need of the mass as represented in constitutions,
governments, declarations, which in order to advantage himself he must
flatter, satisfy or exploit--but which he must meet in some way or fail.
And only when the organized sense of the mass becomes sufficiently
intelligent for it to act in concert is it possible to sweep away or
even curb the individual. For the individual and the mass are
interdependent facts, and the one cannot escape the other, try as each
may.
But never, apparently, previous to the French Revolution, which was a
revolt against centralized and hereditary constructive craft and
ingenuity, had it occurred to the world, or rather the mass, to rout
these individuals and make pariahs of them, although the world in recent
days has developed an especial aptitude for it, one must admit. England,
which is not so much a democracy as an ordered hierarchy of powers,
largely financial in character, has never felt called upon to drive
these gentlemen from their positions or quarrel with them for the often
singular and fantastic manner in which they have achieved their success,
or the indifference they may have displayed toward the millions below
them. The gentlemen at the top may or may not have intentionally done
anything for the peasants at the bottom in the past, but until very
recent days they have not been asked to relinquish their control of the
machinery. Yet now the world presents another angle to this proposition:
the organizer and financier is being suspected and harried everywhere.
Only in America, the home of anti-financial legislation, the
multi-millionaire is apparently becoming safer than ever and more
powerful. Yet to the economist, the historian, the student of politics,
it is already a truism that economic reforms are not and never have been
permanent; also that no one, however self-interested, ever succeeds
wholly in working for himself. He must do something for the mass if he
is to do anything for himself. It is a condition of life, not a theory.
The trouble in America, in so far as this type of mind is or was
concerned, is or was this: that when it appeared it came rather speedily
and roughly into contact with the pen-written notion or ideal embodied
in our American Declaration that all men are born free and equal, and
that they are possessed of certain inalienable rights, among which of
course are those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And
these latter were not supposed to be interfered with by financiers or
organizers seeking power. Yet the race has always been, and will so
remain, of course, to the swift, the battle to the strong; chemical and
physical laws not being easily upset by fiats of government. Time and
chance still continue to operate as before, sometimes to destroy the
strong, sometimes to destroy the weak. The best that can be said for the
theories laid down in the American Declaration is that they do more
credit to the hearts of those who penned them than to their heads. Yet
that these sentiments so expressed should have moved to bring about a
conflict between the American individual and the American mass might
well have been foreseen, although curiously it has not yet done so.
Other countries without any Declaration are far more alive to their
inalienable (so-called) rights than is America, if one may judge by
recent developments in Russia and elsewhere. All good things may be and,
no doubt, are gifts, but they are not conferred by governments, any more
than death and disaster can be prevented by governments. Sometimes
innate strength and fortuitous circumstances help some of us, yet this
merely illustrates once more the truism that nature “plays favorites”
and that many are vastly better equipped than others.
A great voice, for instance, is a gift, and cannot be acquired at any
school or for any price; the beauty of a woman, however modest or
staggering, is a gift and cannot be purchased or even manufactured
(amazing as that may seem in the face of all the drug companies),
although ugliness, apparently, can almost be wished on a person, so
lavish is life with its disfavors. The ability to paint a great picture,
to design a great building, to lead an army, to organize a government,
to construct a philosophy, to dream a religion, is a gift and cannot be
added to any one by taking thought, however quickly it may be taken
away. Neither can the possessors of these be reduced to the level of
those who have nothing to offer, no ideas, no dreams. Christ said one
really significant thing, “Who by taking thought can add a cubit to his
stature?” If He had followed the logic of that statement He would never
have delivered the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes and would not
now be so popular, but apparently He was genius enough to be illogical.
What has confronted the American organizing genius, now known as a
captain of industry, a multi-millionaire, a financier and the like, has
been--aside from a mass need for this, that and the other and his desire
to supply it in order that he might improve his own condition,
strengthen his own individuality, etc.--this same pen-written theory
about all men being free and equal. Free they might be to begin with,
one might hear him saying to himself--to a very limited extent,
anyhow--but equal to himself, however much they might be equal one to
another, never. It became his business, therefore, as he soon found and
as he afterwards phrased it, to “drive a horse and wagon through the
Constitution,” or indeed any other law that might be devised to stop him
and his dreams. I do not believe that any financial genius, American or
other, anywhere or at any time, ever stopped to consider that there was
such a thing as law or a Declaration of Independence or a Constitution
when he began; or, if he did, it was as something to be evaded or
overcome. To the aggressive organizing mind life is and always has been
a free and practically uncharted sea. It finds itself blazing with an
impulse to get some one new thing done; it conceives some great scheme,
is inspired with some great enthusiasm for something; and thereafter all
else is as nothing. Being strong and magnetic and enthusiastic, it
rushes in where it is generally assumed angels fear to tread and seizes
upon all which it deems may aid it in its dreams. The average man is of
as little significance to such a temperament as a stalk of grain to a
reaper. Any ideal other than its own is likely to be looked upon as an
impediment. But always, of course, there exists the tramping mass of
lesser individuals who have been going to school and church and there
learning (in America at least) all the religious and copy-book maxims,
which argue that the world was made for the individual and that he was
born free and equal, each as good as any other and each called upon to
aid the other; and these begrudge, and always have and always will,
these great giants their power. They often fight them and sometimes beat
them.
But they are not to be wholly undone by them at any time, anywhere. Like
the Lilliputians, the mass as often succeeds in binding Gulliver with
their threads as Gulliver succeeds in tearing through their petty stays.
The twain are ever being born side by side in nature; the giant and the
pygmy, the shark and the bluefish, the whale and the minnow. “Look,” cry
the minnows to their fellows, “this whale imagines he is better, wiser,
greater, than we! He moves in larger ways, disturbs our great sea,
taking his choice of the realms and pleasures of life. Why should this
be? Are we not as good as he? And yet he does all these things which we
cannot; he breaks the law which governs the average minnow, whereas we
cannot. Therefore he must be evil. We will seize and bind him and so end
his privileges, if not him.” Immediately and always, at this point,
there arises an intermediate figure or group, the sophisticated
“advocates of the people,” “tribunes of the people,” individuals less
powerful than the giants, though shrewder than the pygmies, their
employers, many of whom are sincere enough in their conviction of
unselfishness; others self-seekers and charlatans purely, yet each and
every one crying that he will deliver the mass from its bondage, and
actually attempting, or pretending, to adjust the impossible demands of
the people with the almost impossible individualism of the egoist. But,
honest or dishonest as they may be, the mass is never made quite free;
the financiers or individuals are never wholly curbed. Both merely
proceed to develop new issues and new battlefields.
Personally I believe that most of us would prefer that the mass should
not sweep away the individual, for each of us would prefer to be
somebody in however small a way rather than mere unrecognizable cogs in
a machine or bees in a bee-hive. At best, we are little more than that;
even our greatest individuals, individual as they may seem. They, too,
are but minute factors in the total machinery, little able to forefend
against disaster or the ultimate nothingness that swallows them. But one
thing is sure: the individual in the course of the development of his
dreams and ambitions does scheme out and construct or bring into organic
operation functions which are valuable to mass prosperity, and on that
score there is scarcely any fault to be found with him.
The thing that might seriously concern a thinking American would be
whether the American financial type, as contrasted with those of other
lands and times, is more or less admirable. Greece had Crœsus; Rome,
Lepidus, Hadrian; Italy, Lorenzo, the money-gathering Popes; France,
Louis XIV, the Baron de Hirsch; England, the first Rothschild, the late
Cecil Rhodes, Harmsworth, Strathcona; Japan, Shibusawa.
While it may be admitted that the organizing types developed in America
have not had any too great charm or virtue (Astor I., Vanderbilt I.,
Gould, Sage, Harriman, Morgan), still they appear to compare favorably
with most ancients and moderns. If they have done less for the arts, as
many seem to think, socially, or at least economically, they have done
as much if not more than their predecessors. Astor I. may have begrudged
a washerwoman fifty cents, dunned his tenants for rent, debauched the
Indians, but he opened up the most remote portions of America and laid
the way for roads and railroads. The first Vanderbilt was no doubt a
brutal, cruel and savage man, but he had the vision which made a
transcontinental railroad possible. His greed and vanity made it
possible. As much might be said for Gould, Russell Sage and Harriman,
though the picture of Sage keeping apples in his desk to avoid buying
lunches for his friends or well-wishers and using his old plug hats for
umbrella stands in order to get a little more wear out of them could not
be of much interest to the mass except in a Dickensian sense. Unless one
accepts the subtleties of Nature as one finds them, sees in all an
inexplicable and yet biologic or universally constructive plan, and in
these riant and lawless individuals a scheme of hers to achieve
something quickly, there is nothing very admirable or even explicable
about the dark goings to and fro of such types as the late J. P. Morgan,
H. H. Rogers, Thomas F. Ryan, William C. Whitney, or any of a score of
other large fortune-builders so recently in control of stupendous
matters here and elsewhere. They are not explicable save as motivating
forces in the hands or will of higher powers--good, bad or indifferent.
Seen at close range they are more suggestive of sharks and we of
sniveling bluefish, and it is plainly to our best interests either to
keep out of their way or unite firmly to oppose them in whatever way we
can, unless we choose to be promptly eaten.
Yet are they any worse than their prototypes anywhere? The worst that
can be said for the American is that as yet no one of him has been able
to rival Lorenzo the Magnificent or Louis XIV to gather and use in any
marked way, supposing there has been anything of importance to use, the
significant artistic personalities and materials (American or general)
of his time after the fashion, say, of a Lorenzo, a Hadrian or a Can
Grande. Perhaps he has had few opportunities, no Michelangelos to
countenance or foster, no Raphaels or Leonardos to attach to his court
or entourage. Again it may be urged that he has never been in any
position to organize or dictate, being by no means in any free or
superior position in a democracy such as this. The best he has been able
to do apparently is to buy, although of course the power to patronize
nobly and generously has to a certain extent been within his range.
Still, a stranger to our rich and powerful land might (I do not say he
would) be struck by the abject poverty of a Poe or a Whitman, scarcely
knowing which way to turn for means, as contrasted with the enormous
affluence of so many financial geniuses. Why, one such might ask, should
either a writer or poet of the transcendent merit of either of these
have lacked a financial sponsor? And why, the same inquiring mind might
ask, was there no Mæcenas to befriend the late George Inness, Harris
Merton Lyon, or MacDowell, the musician? But in other ways--via
libraries, gifts to art museums, schools and universities--he would have
to admit that the American multi-millionaire has done quite as well as
the others; only, in so far as I can see, he has in the main lacked the
insight to connect his gifts with an impulse toward the truest art
values and realms of mental freedom and refinement. Too often, as in the
case of our universities, his gifts have been far too subtly identified,
aside from purely technical progress, with mental retrogression, or at
least the perpetuation of religious and moralistic dogma not compatible
with the truest mental development. At the same time the retort might be
that it has never been a part of the organizing ability of any money
genius anywhere to plan for true mental progress. It may not be
necessary. Life may be taking care of that “on its own,” as the phrase
runs.
However that may be, one cannot help thinking how interesting it would
have been if in New York or elsewhere any one of the above-mentioned men
had in his day troubled to gather about him in some private court a
representative group of intellectual and artistic personalities, for the
sole purpose of testifying to his interest in that side of life, if
nothing more. After all, the living individual is worth something, and
any one of our financiers might have done what no American of wealth, as
far as I know, has as yet done: invested some of his boundless wealth in
personality. Or he might have endowed a wholly independent magazine or
newspaper or theatre, of which there is at present not one, or a school
of special learning free from dogmatic interference, or a publishing
house, or a university which should have been a true university and not
one devoted to the economic or social or religious theories or moods of
any particular period. The strangest lack or flaw in the American
organizing financial temperament, in so far as I can see, is or has
been, hitherto, its inability to see either character or significance in
anything save movements which tend to further the most material
financial aims: railroads, butcher-companies, electricity, gas,
typewriter and other purely mechanical or material organizations. Yet
possibly, up to the present time, the land has only needed things of
this kind. And perhaps the next generation will make amends. Who knows?
Thus far there has been little if any tendency to invest in anything
save such art or art forms as have been heralded by time.
To this day, ancient Asiatic, Egyptian and European art forms continue
to pour in on us in a brilliant phantasmagoric stream, until we
threaten, or did, to drain the world of its treasures. Our private
mansions groan with the antiquated skill of Asia and other continents,
but of these other matters, or the cultivation or preservation of a
single living personality, not a word. It is possible to go forth and
raise any reasonable or even unreasonable sum for any number of useless
or surplus charitable organizations or hospitals or churches, whereas if
it were a question of cash for a truly civilizing movement of some kind,
or a personality, the obstacles would prove well nigh insurmountable.
Some of the trashiest homes I have ever had the misery of beholding have
been those of men of tremendous wealth and alleged refinement, stuffed
to overflowing with bogus furniture and art. Yet, when all is said and
done, are they to blame? Are they not specialized machines sent here for
a purpose? And should one expect more? Verily we have our reward in
their practical achievements.... Yet, also, when one looks at them one
cannot help remembering that Walt Whitman lived in a back street in
Camden and depended upon a friendly admirer to bring him a fish for his
supper; that Poe lived in a hut in the woods, unable to achieve or
afford a more suitable abode. I am not quarreling; I cite these as
interesting facts.
* * * * *
An interviewer once questioning me in regard to the significance of the
American financial type (it was just after I had published “The
Financier”), raised the question as to whether the American financial
type, then so abundant and powerful, had ethically the right to be as it
was or do as it was doing, seeing that it was being and doing about as
it pleased. My answer was, and I still see no reason for changing it,
that, in spite of all the so-called laws and prophets, there is
apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right not
to do, if you reach the place where the significance of the social chain
in which you find yourself is not satisfactory. The murderer has under
the written law no right to murder anybody. It is perfectly plain that
he has the right if he is willing to pay the penalty, or if he can evade
it. Conscience, this thing called conscience to which people repeatedly
appeal, is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, little more than a
built-up net of social acceptances and agreements in regard to society
or the agreed state of facts in which we all find ourselves when we
arrive here; in other words all the things which we wish to do and be,
or avoid. It is not anything save an inherent condition of balance in
Nature which desires and achieves a very rough equation, but nothing
which works exact justice to any individual anywhere. The so-called
“still, small voice,” ever present at one’s inner or spiritual ear, is,
if it is anything at all, a sense of self-preservation and conditional
desire for equation or peace--stillness, rest, lack of friction.
It is true that the individual may not always agree with the ethics of
his time, or that he may smack of anything but sweetness and light, may
even seem a little gross or terrible; but if he prove essential, as he
nearly always does, his revolt against the commonplace fixity, rigidity
and the like of the slower-moving man cannot be looked upon as either
wholly evil or in vain. Indeed, if he did no more than throw a new light
on this strange phantasmagory called existence, then, ethics or no
ethics, he would have been worth while and it would make no essential
difference whether he agreed with passing theories or not. Apparently
the world, or let us say the race, is moving along in some curious way
to possibly a larger, more widespread condition of complexity and
articulation, part with part (variety in unity, unity in variety), and a
self-sensating intellectual perception and appreciation of the same. Who
knows? But beyond that, what? Is man better, purer, more spiritual, more
generous than ever he was? Do any of the savages or animals lack any of
the emotional or charitable traits which we possess? Observe the wolf
with its young; the cat; the dog; the lion. Are not all swayed by
conditioning laws of subsistence and which they obey, but nothing more?
True, they kill to eat, to preserve themselves. Has man ever done
less--or more?
Any naturalistic philosopher can, of course, trace all the steps for
you, how it is that you have come to be seemingly so different, although
he cannot tell you why or where you are going. My own guess would be
that we, or rather the race, is going on to a greater individuality,
plus a greater weakness as to its component and clinging atoms,
providing it does not suffer an endless dark age of mass control or
total extinction in some form or other. Nietzsche appeared preaching
individuality, greater individuality for everybody who could achieve it,
and to a certain extent he was right. Greater individuality than the
world has yet seen will certainly be achieved by some. Schopenhauer,
before him, announced that only failure for the individual was possible,
and to a certain extent he was right also. The two saw the oversoul from
different angles. Again, Marx, the humanitarian, appeared preaching
solidarity for the mass and mass control, and his work will probably
result in greater material battles between the individual and the mass
than any yet witnessed. If one stands with the individualists, as one
may well do, and believes that there are no laws created by mass
conditions and necessities which the individual should not be allowed to
break for the subsequent good of the mass, and also that the mass only
moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual,
then one will be compelled to agree with Nietzsche that it is folly not
to wish that the significant individual will always appear and will
always do what his instincts tell him to do. On the other hand if one
feels, as so many of the less well-equipped do, that in the long run and
in the plan of Nature itself the individual is nothing, the type all,
and that mass conditions favoring the production of many of the best
type are most important, then the airs and dreams of the individual in
regard to his personal satisfaction and satiation will not seem so
important, the general welfare of each individual of the mass more
important than anything else. And this will mean that always the
special individual, the genius of any kind, will be curbed and
restrained if not actually pushed into the background. And, in the main,
life proves this nearly all the time. Attempts at world domination on
the part of one individual and another have proved failures, as witness
Darius, Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon, the Kaiser.
Yet theories and doxies wear thin with the course of time, and the
“still, small voice” of one age is not the “still, small voice” of the
next, strange as it may seem. At best, all we have is the individual,
not always financial, by any means, or artistic, but one who has dreamed
out something: music, a picture, poetry, a machine, a railroad, an
empire--anything, in short, that man as race or nation can use or
rejoice in. If to have a Woolworth Building, a transcontinental
railroad, a Panama Canal, a flying machine, to say nothing of literature
and art, means that we must endure a man who is dull, greedy, vain,
ridiculous in many ways or even an advocate of every conceivable vice in
order to twist his brain into some strange phantasmagorical tendency,
the result of which will be some one of these things, there are many who
would enthusiastically say, “Then let us have him along with all his
lacks or vices, in order that this other may be.” If it is a question of
having a Villon or not, provided we cannot have him without having a
thief at the same time, then the same or another group would cry, “Let
us have the thief and the poem concerning the ‘Snows of Yesterday.’” For
my part I am convinced that so-called vice and crime and destruction and
so-called evil are as fully a part of the universal creative process as
are all the so-called virtues, and do as much good--providing, as they
do, for one thing, the religionist and the moralist with their reasons
for existing. At best, ethics and religion are but one face of a shield
which is essentially irreligious and unethical as to its other face, or
the first would not exist.
For myself, then, I cannot say that personally or socially the American
or any other financier, as I have investigated him, is not as
satisfactory as may be, all things considered. Artistically thus far he
is not much to survey, but a giant or a Titan he certainly has been. As
for the majority of them, they were by no means presentable or even
acceptable socially, but what would you? They were, in the main, too
ignorant, too insistent on their own views, too self-hypnotized by their
own dreams of self-advancement and dominance. A leader of polite society
anywhere, for instance, might not be willing to welcome a Russell Sage,
a Jay Gould, or a John W. Gates or his wife, or indeed any other
American financial type thus far known, and this solely on the ground of
expediency or social or artistic fitness or unfitness for the lighter
forms of living, but that in itself proves nothing. It could truthfully
be said, on the other hand, that it would scarcely be possible to admit
the average society man to the threatening precincts of radical energy
or thought in any form. One thing is sure: the individual cannot wholly
understand the mass, nor the mass the individual. Both have their
significance, their place, but if one were to say of either that it or
he alone had claim to significance as a helpful factor in life, or as
dramatic or artistic material, or as a spectacle, one would be greatly
mistaken. Both have. All have.
THE TOIL OF THE LABORER
A TRILOGY
I.
“The ears to hear! The beauty
Of life is unceasingly calling.
The eyes to see! Its glory
Is ever unfolding anew!”
The toil of the laborer is artless. There is in it neither form, nor
color, nor tone. For months I have been working as only workingmen work,
and in the dreary round of the hours it has come to me that the thing
which is wearisome and disheartening about it is that it is utterly
devoid of art. In the construction of a building, for instance, whereat
we labored for three long months, I discovered that with each day’s
labor I was in contact only with that which was formless and colorless
and toneless. Huge, misshapen, disheartening piles of brick;
commonplace, indifferent and colorless masses of stone, wood, iron,
sand, cement; bone and sinew of what was to be, but in themselves devoid
of all that could appeal to the eye or touch the heart, and scattered
about in such an aimless way as to bring to the mind nothing but a
wearying sense of disorder. This disorder, however, as soon became clear
to me, was not apparent in a definite way to all those who worked amidst
it. These mixers of mortar and carriers of brick toiled in the grime and
dust without seeming to realize that it was a wretched condition, hard,
grim and, so far as the sum of their individual lives was concerned, but
meagerly profitable. Carpenters, masons and iron-workers went sturdily
about their labors, but the artless and unlovely nature of their work
was over it all, and despite their seeming unconsciousness to it one
felt the drag of its absence, their eagerness to get away, their innate
yearning to be where things were not in the making, the urge to be out
in the larger and more perfect world where form and color and tone do
abound.
For, after all, in the main, things do stand complete, as we see them.
The hills have their enduring roundness, the trees their perpetual
forms. Landscapes and skylines are not torn and scraped as in the
vicinity of some (comparatively) minute constructive labor. Nature is
nearly always cunningly pleasing to the eye on the surface, whatever may
go on below, whereas the average constructive processes are so often
discordant, broken, disordered.
Seeing this, and not being able in my own consciousness to explain why,
my heart was sad and I wondered why life should be thus grimly
organized; why formlessness in the parts of the thing to be formed; why
tonelessness in that which when laboriously organized would be all tone;
why colorlessness in that which in the end would enliven the heart with
color and dance before the eye a perfect thing.
In the progress of the work, however, it was given me to see that, in
the production of all things here, there is at bottom this very
formlessness innate. For to organize and perfect one thing we must take
from and destroy another; and in doing that we fly in the face of that
which we most desire: order and harmony. Therefore, if we would have
that which the inexplicable urge for something new and more beautiful
commands, we must apparently steel our hearts against the old and
destroy it, although, having committed the offense of destruction, we
must repay or balance by the labor of construction.
It is not given to all of us to follow the ramifications of Nature’s
planning nor to see wherein justice or the seeming injustice lies. Most
of those about me--average short-reasoning creatures--took their labor
drearily enough and were not able to see in any definite inspiriting way
the approaching beauty of that which their hands were building. It did
not concern them. Many of them came and labored but a little while,
doing but a minute portion of that which was to be the whole, seeing
only the mass and chaos of it without ever obtaining one glimpse of the
loveliness which was to be.
But when the labor had been completed, when the mortar had been mixed
and the brick and stone removed from their uneven masses and set in
order, when the wounds of the earth had been smoothed over, the
scattered débris removed and the grass allowed to grow, when in the
light of the restful evening there rose, in this instance, high in the
air a perfect tower, buttressed, arched and pinnacled, with here a
window reflecting the golden Western glow and there a pillar standing
out in delicate relief against the perfect background of the sky, the
meaning of the chaos came home. Here it was: color, form, tone, beauty.
The labor of the excavator, the toil of the iron-worker, the irritating
beats of the carpenters’ hammers, the mess and disorder of the field of
action, had all blended together finally and made this perfect
thing--only they were no longer a part of it. To most of them it was all
but meaningless. Having labored on but portions of it they could
scarcely conceive it as a whole.
And yet as I looked my heart rose up, and I, for one, was thankful to
have been in part a worker, to have worked a little, to have wearied a
little, to have sighed a little, that so lovely a thing might be.
II.
The toil of the laborer is thoughtless. There is in it neither
conception nor initiative nor the development of that which is new.
Though the hands labor and the body bend, the heart is not in it. It is
all a weariness and a travail of the flesh, and the profit is unseen.
In a certain factory, not far from the heart of the city of New York, I
worked as a laborer. My duty was to carry shavings and lumber and to
sweep the floor. All day, from the blowing of the whistle at seven in
the morning to its welcome blast at six at night, my body was busy
bending and lifting in the effort to keep the floor clean of shavings
and supplying a half-dozen machines with lumber. The slow, unchanging,
imperative nature of the work, the fact that I went on whether one man
came or another one stayed away, the dreary persistence with which it
was necessary to repeat the same motion day after day, week after week,
month after month, year after year, was, to the thinking and restless
mind, maddening.
In this factory at the time there ruled a foreman well fitted to the
scheme of things. He was a strange, egotistic, vainglorious soul, with a
mind so set up by the fact that he had been foreman of this little shop
that there was no living with him. He was arbitrary; his word was law.
With an air that might have become a tragedian, he walked about his
domain and glared upon each and all, meditating upon his exalted
position. Every word was either a command or a reproof, and in times of
excitement or depression, such as naturally flow from the hurry or the
lack of work, he was always about, venting his humor or wrath, as his
mood dictated.
This situation, coupled with the meager wages, the enormous wealth of
the corporation which controlled it all, the utter indifference of those
who sat at the top to those who worked at the bottom, was a difficult
thing to endure. It was so very apparent to any one who thought that the
work of those at the bottom was entirely without point save as a means
of subsistence. To lift and carry, to move along given lines and within
certain limits--this was the sum and substance of wisdom required, and
it mattered little who did it. Some small personal characteristics
figured in, such as whether a man was naturally quick or slow,
good-humored or ill-humored and the like, but the main point was to do
the work as conceived, planned, initiated and developed by some one
above. And this could be acquired until it was not a matter of thought
but of rote. What you thought or how you felt was not involved.
One of its pathetic aspects was that it was involved with the
maintenance of a condition which was not necessarily beneficial or
worthy of approval. So many of the owners, for whom these thousands upon
thousands of individuals labored, were mere idlers in society, social
loafers, daily bulletined as the chief factors in a dozen trivial
amusements, and as wholly unconscious of this under-condition which made
for their situation and pleasure as if it did not exist at all. For
every motion and bending here, some one else was deriving the privilege
not to move or bend there. It was as if some untoward power were
momentarily taking something from each of these and giving it to some
one who did not even know whence it came.
And the saddest part of it was that these toilers, born for the most
part to a condition and with brains unsuited to anything much better,
were still not so dull that they could not see, and that rather plainly,
how scurvily Nature was using them, with what a vast, contemptuous
indifference. It was little to Her whether they lived or died, did
poorly or well. Most of them were mere machines who had acquired the
little they knew by observing others, who, if they were capable of
thinking at all, were restricted by the nature of their labor in
utilizing thought, and yet they could see so plainly that those above
them did very little or nothing, and received much, so much more. It
was one of those situations in which labor, a mere round of motions,
took the place of thought and left them weary and disinterested at the
close of the day, not fit to originate a thought if it had been possible
or necessary.
And yet, after a time, it occurred to me that it was not, perhaps, so
much the thoughtlessness of it that was so wretched as that any human
being, toiling to his full capacity, should not receive more of the
legitimate profits of his labor. These men, ignorant and, in a way,
valueless without direction, were nevertheless useful creatures and, in
this sense if no other, were deserving of a far more reasonable share of
the profit which their efforts created. That it should not be so, that
despite their willing or non-willing they should be driven early and
late to create a surplus which was not directly applied to the pressing
needs of society as a whole, but to the frittering amusements of the
few, not much better in the main than themselves, seemed hard.
And yet sometimes when I looked out upon the world as it glimmered
before my windows--when I saw, as it so chanced, the waters of the river
flowing by, the splendid boats riding at anchor or steaming peacefully
past, and the wonder of the hills and hollows, all set suggestively
before the eyes--it came to me that, perhaps, in spite of the seeming
injustice involved in this situation, variety was as essential to
happiness as so-called justice or equation, and that the very
inequalities I was bemoaning were the things which I was admiring in
Nature. To blot out the light and the shadows, to remove the hills and
dales, to take away the far reaches which spread between luxury and
want, idleness and toil--might not these be the things which after all
would rob life of much of its value and charm? Might they not?
But as I turned again to the weariness of my labor and saw once more the
routine, the comparative slavery, the drag of almost endless hours, I
could not help wishing for each that there might be some better
solution than this necessity for variety--that perhaps the heights and
hollows need not after all be so vast. To survey a mountain, to view a
desert--was not this the privilege of but a few? And might not the true
beauty of life exist in the way-places where are neither heights nor
depths but only a tender and appealing undulation? I wondered, and still
do, for in spite of endless personal inconvenience I have never been
able to believe that an unbreakable dead level of equality should
maintain, that none should suffer overmuch, that none should want to the
extreme. And yet at this time, in this place, the less varied seemed the
all-to-be-desired. That it was not to be found in so starkly diversified
a world as here offers did not lessen the pain of the labor or the value
of the ideal in the least. To work, to wait, to hope, to pray for some
such change--how important these loomed in the hour of weariness! And
yet the charm that hope cast over effort was as though the difference
had already in part been bridged and that the realization of the ideal
was almost at hand.
III.
The toil of the laborer is without mercy, its grim insistence unrequited
by anything save the meager wages wherewith it is paid. There is no true
beauty in it, no tenderness. There is no thought of anything save what
muscle and the strength of the individual can be made to yield. More
than this, the sum of what is accomplished passes almost entirely into
other hands. There is no provision made for those who will be as
tattered remnants when the things for which they labored have been
accomplished.
For several months I worked with the laborers for a great railroad. It
was the kind of labor that falls to the lot of every man who is
unskilled and whose sense of honesty or compulsion or duty or need
commands that he labor. Those with whom I worked were employed to carry
lumber, load brick, shovel earth and mix mortar. The work was requited
at the rate of fifteen cents an hour, and nothing more than this was
allowed for overtime. We worked nine or ten hours a day, as the light
permitted. There was no rest for those here employed save in a form of
subterfuge, which was as wearisome as the toil itself to one not
accustomed to it by long years of practice. To be sure one might delay
in the carrying of anything; it was possible to be deliberate, to hang
first on one foot and then the other; there was a way of resting on
one’s pick before lifting it; but the gain was scarcely worth the pains.
At the close of the day the sum of idleness thus secured would not be
sufficient to produce a restful feeling, and the knowledge that a
watchful foreman was well aware of the spirit of your labor was not
conducive to comfort.
We were under a foreman whose conception of life was that it meant toil,
and who himself was perfectly equipped physically to meet it. He did not
stop to parley or temper the necessities with tenderness but shouted and
cursed his commands, the fulfilling of which was as much of a burden on
his mind as upon our bodies. Work there was in plenty, vast quantities
of labor extending into the weeks and years, and the only thought which
the conclusion of one hard day’s toil could bring was that there was
another exactly like it tomorrow. It had no end for the individual save
in arbitrary cessation on his part, the ending of his pay, or in
disintegration and death. And need drove so many to continue day after
day, without rhyme or reason in so far as the individual was concerned.
I could not help pondering over this from time to time, wondering at the
lust of the controlling powers at the top for money and place, the
fierceness of Nature in placing such an impulse in them, the fierceness
of the temper of our immediate masters (general managers,
superintendents, foremen and the like), the persistence of their
frowns, the manner in which, when anything was delayed or the work went
wrong, they visited the blame upon the heads of those beneath them, the
urge and blame finally falling with sharp effect upon the carriers and
serfs at the bottom. Life did not seem to require or justify it, I often
thought. The rewards achieved by those at the bottom at least were too
inconsiderable. The enormous and almost useless surplus of this great
corporation flowering out into exotic social forms at the top was proof
that it was an unjust exaction. A man should be a man in spite of the
orders of his superiors. Mercy and tenderness should qualify our every
deed.... So it looked from the bottom.
And then one day I was made a foreman.
I was determined that I, as foreman, would hold persistently, through
whatever wearinesses might come, to this earlier creed of courtesy and
consideration. I told myself that I would do better than these others.
There should be no harshness in my tone. I would not swear. A moderate
effort would be demanded of my men, but nothing more. So much for good
intentions.
In this new capacity I found that my duties were of a different nature
from those of my former. Here, instead of running at the beck and call
of another, I had men running for me. I had from a dozen to fifteen men
under me, as the work varied, and my principal duty was to see that they
did not shirk.
I accepted this with a light heart. It seemed easy enough, something
which could be accomplished in the most gracious spirit. All I had to do
was to take my position beside my gang, humming a tune, and to watch (as
I thought) their progress with a gentle and merry heart.
How speedy and how sad was my disillusionment!
Before one day was gone I was made to feel that the pressure which was
on me from above must be transferred to those who were below,
regardless. There were orders to be complied with, periods to be
observed, standards of quality to be maintained in certain kinds of
work, which my men did not always understand. Nor did an explanation or
a simple request always result in understanding or ready willingness to
comply. They were often tired, a night’s rest not always apparently
repairing the weariness of the day before. None were so dull that they
could not see that many reaped where they had not sown, took joy in that
for which they had never paid, while others like themselves sweated
under a load which they had never willed to carry. Dark looks, dark
moods, dark wishes were as common as ever, yet if my own position or my
superior’s good will were worth anything to me I could not allow them to
fall below their quota of toil. It was necessary to achieve a given
result, or resign, and at every turn there were rules, rules, rules.
How hard I tried to adjust my new relationship to the ideal which had
previously been mine, and at the same time comply with the rules of the
company, I will not say. For a time I did manage to keep a cheerful
attitude and to speak gently. I tried to overlook the indifference and
subterfuge which I knew they were practicing and which before, in part
at least, had seemed justifiable but which must also in part be
overcome, if life were to go on at all. For Nature, as I had come to
see, had established these inequalities, the smallness of mind in some,
the strength and vision in others. Who was I to set about establishing
exact justice or equation, where I had not created? Or how or where? Or
I might smile and smile and urge with pleasant compliments, but how did
that justify or make amends? And although for a time it seemed as though
I might succeed in avoiding all difficulty, still the memory of my own
recent feelings was too fresh not to influence me deeply.
Then came a day when the pressure of work to be done was so much
greater than it had been before that the usual subterfuge of the men
became an irritation to me. They were painfully and exasperatingly slow,
if not without reason, and the pressure on me from above was heavy also.
A heavy rain had washed the earth into a long trench which we had been
excavating. It was necessary to hurry the reopening of this in order not
to delay other work. Concrete had to be prepared, a large foundation set
by a given date. We were under urgent surveillance from our superiors
and could but follow out their orders or resign.
In this situation I confess that I did not do much parleying with my
sense of equation or justice. Although I knew these men to be in the
main underpaid and overworked, and in so far as the corporation was
concerned mere machines to be pushed to the limit of their capacity and
discharged when no longer useful, still I stood beside them and ordered
and commanded, urging first one and then the other with shouts and gruff
words, until at last they were as wrought up and as harried by me as
they had been by any one of whom I had previously complained. They were
driven, harassed _by me_, until one, irritated by the anachronism of it
all, no doubt, my previous enthusiasm for better conditions, turned on
me with: “Yes--hurry! Hurry! You didn’t work so hard yourself, though!”
I paused in my ordering and walked aside a little space to consider. How
true was the thing he said! I had not worked so. It had been a constant
complaint with me, in my own mind at least, that so much insistence and
heartless driving had never been justified by the reward offered, that
the men were entitled to more than they received for the grudging toil
they gave. And here was I outdoing these drivers who to me had seemed
most brutal!
For that day then, and for many others, I tried to discover just how it
was that I had drifted into so rough and exacting an attitude. Did I
not know now, as well as before, that the corporation for which we were
all working was enormously rich? Had I not more evidence than before
that the men were overworked and underpaid, my own demands proving it?
Could I not see in the orders given me that there was no consideration
for them, but only the thing to be accomplished at the least possible
expense?
I acknowledged freely that this was absolutely true, and yet I now
pleaded with myself that I saw no way to remedy it and that if I did not
fulfill the company’s orders some one else would. The work had to be
done. There was no way of permitting these men to shirk and take their
time, without noticeably delaying the work. If the corporation was to be
run, its present efficiency maintained and the public served, it would
of course have to be done at a profit which would induce men of
initiative and skill at the top to serve; otherwise no man would
undertake the matter, and there would be no labor at all for any of
these men at the bottom. For Nature apparently went on the theory of
great reward for those who could or would originate and conduct in a
large way, little for those who could not; and these at the bottom did
not and apparently could not originate. Their reasoning powers were not
as yet sufficiently developed for that. They were, by reason of their
mental equipment, hewers of wood and drawers of water.
After a time I felt that I could no longer go on without making a
definite choice: I must serve them or their masters wholeheartedly. The
retort of the laborer had proved too great a shock, and it was long
before I recovered my exterior equanimity, and never again my internal
peace, here. Plainly I was not one called by nature to this task. Reason
as I would, the two elements of capital and labor, exacting strength and
helpless weakness, would not adjust themselves within my consciousness
save in some such rough way as I here saw operating, and so because of
my natural sympathy for these underlings I was forced in spite of myself
to choose sides. Either I must relinquish my former attitude of sympathy
for the men and opposition to the indifference of the company, or I must
side with them. There could be no middle ground, and until I should
choose my conscience would give me no peace.
It was after a particularly hard day’s work and because of some special
conditions that I managed finally to reach a decision, which, however
much it may have benefited me, helped them in no least way. We had been
mixing concrete and, a touch of my old cynical uncertainty dominating
me, I had been driving them all the day long, urging one to shovel
faster, calling to another to bring the wheelbarrows of stone almost
before they were needed, sending this one for water and that one for
cement, until the men were running about like ants. About four o’clock
of this long day it began to rain. It had been gray and lowery all day
but now the moisture descended in a fine drizzle and we were compelled
to work or leave unfinished the batch of concrete we were just
beginning. In a sullen mood, because of my own dreary part in this, I
stood and held them to their task, not caring much what became of them
or myself either, until at last the work was completed. At dusk, damp
and dreary, I took my lunch-box and tramped doggedly along the tracks
toward the depot, comforted by one thought only: that the day was over
and I myself was free.
It was at that hour when the traffic outward from the great city assumes
its most imposing aspect. Along this magnificent highway of steel were
speeding the trains of one of the wealthiest corporations in the world.
Limiteds were passing, their splendid interiors aglow with half a
hundred lights. Seemingly more prosperous citizens than we were
reclining there in comfort. Others were gazing out idly. The dining cars
of various trains were set with silver and white linen.
As I paused near the station to turn my eye on this truly appealing
scene and to gather its significance as contrasted with that which I had
just left, there passed by, going in my direction, the little procession
of Italians over whom I ruled, bearing with them the tools with which
they had been laboring. There was Philip, whom I had often noted as I
stood beside the trench in which he was working, his body all twisted
and bent from long years of unremitting toil; there was Angelo, old and
leathern in feature, whose one boast was that he had never missed a
day’s work in seventeen years; there was Matteo, thin, spare,
worn-looking, whose eye was alight with a kindly humor and whose
willingness to work I had never been able to question; there were John
and Collarbrace (as we called one Calabrian), Mussolin and Jimmie, all
trudging patiently onward like cattle, the day of their labor having
brought forth nothing but a night of weariness.
And as I stood there looking at them I could not help contrasting the
weariness of their labor with this (one of many, many), flowers which
it, or labor like it, had produced at the top. Here was this immerse
corporation with its magnificent equipment, its palatial depots, its
comfortable trains speeding onward bearing their burdens of the
comfortable (?) and the more fortunate (?), and here at the very bottom
were these humble trudgers making their way homeward in the night and
the rain. And as I thought of the meagerness of their wages, the manner
in which I had driven them, and the profitless luxury, in so far as they
were concerned, to which their labor trended, I resolved that I, for
one, would have nothing more to do with it.
Not to drive where I could not ease, not to urge where I could not
repay, not to be a tool in the hands of their indifferent masters who
could not or would not interest themselves in them, was something, even
though my ceasing could not relieve them of their toil.
PERSONALITY
In the last analysis personality appears to be a sense of power resting
on a feeling of capability or wisdom and usefulness, and hence a right
to be; or this may be reversed for some and it be said to be a sense of
capability or usefulness which springs from inherent wisdom and power.
At best it is inexplicable to the individual himself. He does not know
from whence it comes, why he has it, why he of all people should have it
and so many other billions not, why his thoughts should be large where
those of others are so small, his cunning or subtlety great where those
of so many others are obviously less. If he has in addition any charm of
character, being thus endowed, he will be courteous, considerate,
merciful; but it by no means follows that he must so have or be. That
would not explain an Attila, an Alaric, a Can Grande or a Torquemada.
“Why should I be born with a great mind,” a Cæsar, a Shakespeare, a
Hannibal or a Leonardo might well have asked of himself, “whereas so
many have little ones? Why is my frail bark speeded by winds of destiny
or chance over favorable seas to power, where so many are beached or
foundered en route? Did I make myself? Did I foreknow all?” Where so
profound an egoist, even with a minute brain, to claim so much?
The truth is all good things are gifts, a voice, strength of body, vigor
of mind, vision, the power to lead, as in war, any art, beauty, charm.
This is not to say that these things may not be technically improved,
and are, but this is the business with which mediocrity is chiefly
concerning itself. I know that the world, where it lacks the strength
to think on the subject, thinks differently, but this is mere nonsense
and without import.
The man of personality or destiny realizes the guidance, enmity or favor
of not necessarily higher, we will say, but different powers. (I am not
for saints, guardian _angels_, Buddhas, Christs, perfect gods all.) He
realizes all too keenly the element of chance, luck, unpropitious as
well as propitious hours. Sometimes, in spite of himself and to his
wonder, he notes that his affairs prosper. “There is a tide--” At other
times (and who has not realized this?), try as he will, he had better
lay aside all effort and disappear. Fortune will have none of him. The
furies hover over his path. Harpies beset him. Go where he will, there
will be elements to annoy him, if no more than an ill wind to blow his
cap away or to cast dust into his eyes. He, above all others, knows that
time and chance happen to all men.
But it is so easy to cite the old-time virtues of honesty, stability,
truthfulness, fair-dealing, etc., as proving character, its value, and
the power of any one, however weak or defective, personally to achieve
it. But always, in spite of the advocates of simple and normal and moral
things as proving in themselves genius and worth, there is something
more--magnetism, for instance, a thing not necessarily or solely a part
of these other so-called virtues, and strength, assurance, courage,
generous or the reverse. These are not things of ethical import
necessarily, but they make for success just the same. Observe that youth
admires color, flare, pugnacity, brute courage and daring; middle age,
knowledge of sorts, aggressiveness, endurance, success; old age, wisdom,
generosity, humility, etc. How many of the former are ethical? In the
quiet halls of learning or reflection certain of the tabulated virtues
may be extolled, but to whom does the world pay attention, to whom has
it paid attention? Darius, Artaxerxes, Alexander, Cæsar, Hannibal,
Attila, Alaric, Peter the Hermit, Napoleon, the Kaiser; possessing what
of all these virtues? Cæsar kind, patient, honest, truthful? Napoleon
the same? Antony the same? Attila the same? Not even the popes, the
preachers, the founders of religion were so. Always craft, force,
diplomacy; but little of the sacrificial media so extolled and commended
to the rank and file in order to keep them at rest.
It is significant of the intellectual development of America, if not of
other countries, that we hear less these days of _character_, that
something or somewhat which we were all supposed to have, or at least
develop for ourselves or make (!) à la Washington, Lincoln, Grant, etc.,
who in most American schoolbook essays and college addresses were and
still are supposed to have _made_ their skill, endurance,
resourcefulness, etc.; and more of that other thing which we call
personality and which for a long time apparently we were not supposed to
have, that unexplainable, inescapable something with which we come and
in which even here in America we are now beginning to believe. Yes, we
are beginning to suspect that there are certain things which some of us
cannot do, however much we may wish or try to. Also that ability in many
realms and forms comes without volition on our part, fate and
circumstance causing it to blaze for us whether we will or no. After
many volumes of another kind of mush, this is at last becoming rather
apparent. There is less talk now of being Napoleons all, adding inches
to our stature by taking thought (lifting ourselves by our boot-straps,
in other words), and more of plain effort according to our especially
inherited abilities or capacities. It is a sad truth for most men, more
especially for most Americans, when they discover it, but it is
nevertheless an economic and helpful one. Men do better once they
realize their genuine limitations and cease reaching for the moon. For
so very long, here in America at least, we have been fed on something
so very different: our inalienable ability to do anything and everything
equally well.
One wonders at times whether the light is really breaking. Can it be
that we are getting ready to admit that we are not Cæsars each and all,
held back by our own idleness and indifference? One begins to rub one’s
eyes. I have often wondered why it is that the word “common,” in its
sense of being plentiful and therefore indifferent, has not struck home
to the many of us for what it is: an expression of contempt; and that
“uncommon,” “extraordinary,” denote approbation. Why, if this is not
true, should everything that is common be held so lightly of the mass,
whereas that which is special or individual, inherited or no, is of such
intense interest to it? For example, the individual skill or personal
traits of the actor, painter, writer, sculptor, the exceptionally
talented in any field?
The truth is that the average man, dull as he is, realizes quite well
that a creature who has little or nothing that is different from
millions of his kind is of small import here or anywhere. There is no
especial demand for what he has to offer. If he wishes to stand out
above his fellows he must bring something new, and this he cannot
provide by mere wishing or thinking. There is something more than
that--inherent capacity, a something which he cannot create for himself,
try as he may. He also knows that Nature sends bubbling up from her
inexhaustible springs an infinitude of creatures who are of small
import, because they have no inherent power wherewith to develop very
special characteristics, or better yet individual impulses--in other
words, personality. They cannot, and are not asked to, create them after
they arrive here. They must have them to begin with, or they are not
important, cannot make their way easily. And again, it is obviously
quite right that a creature with qualities except those of the species
should have to confine its claim to an existence entirely within the
limits of the species, and live a life conditioned by them. If Nature
wishes one to rise above the conditions wherewith he finds himself
surrounded at birth She usually provides him with the equipment for so
doing during gestation, or before, and in addition accidental and most
opportune circumstances invariably aid him. He is the heir of most
propitious conditions. Vide Cæsar, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Luther,
Lincoln, even Goethe. Yet, it is impossible, I presume, to convince the
mass that this is true. It would be too discouraging.
Again, it is a common fallacy among the ignorant that no lower
animal possesses more than the generic characteristics of its
species--such-and-such powers, such-and-such limitations, such-and-such
instincts,--although this of course is not true. There are weak and
strong animals of the same species, more cunning and less, more
ferocious and less, better-natured and less, just as there are among
men. (If you do not believe this study cats and dogs, the historic wolf
of Cevennes in France.) Indeed in many intellectual circles, so-called,
it is still claimed for man that he is the only one to possess
individual character. But this is not true, as the “Origin of Species”
plainly shows. Sometimes I think that man, take him by and large,
presents less differences than some of the individuals of species of the
so-called lower animals. He is supposed to reason more, but does he? It
seems to me that the average cat reasons quite as well as the average
plumber or grocer, if not better. Give a good pagan tomcat a man’s body
and sensory capacity, and how long do you suppose he would remain a
plumber? The truth is that man, somewhat confused at present in his
response to those chemic instincts which appear originally to have
guided him, has been all but done for mentally by vain isms and
theories. At times these same appear to be able, and quite completely,
to do for him mentally, as does cancer and tuberculosis for him
physically--vide Christianity, Mohammedanism, Shintoism, etc. On the
other hand, the animal has no such handicap, let us say, as Catholicism,
Shintoism, or what Mohammed or Buddha or Zoroaster said. It has just
life and its own bare wits or chemical responses wherewith to do, no
restraining and deadening rules. Hence it has very marked personality at
times, and makes its way exceedingly well and without restraint or
deadening aid of community or mass governmental advice. This is true of
snakes, birds, fishes, monkeys and all other creatures _lower_,
so-called, than man.
In most men, individual character, that thing which is supposedly so
superior to lower animals, comes to very little. They run in schools,
join secret orders or churches, vegetate, label themselves in a dull way
democrats, republicans, socialists, and strive in all ways to make
themselves as like others (those within their immediate ken) as
possible. My father, for instance (peace to his spirit!), wished to
prepare himself by self-abnegation, prayers and good works here on earth
to fit himself for an entirely mythical heaven, to be a standardized
angel--wings, harp, robes and all--such as he saw in the “saint
pictures” in the various Catholic churches which he attended from time
to time. These were the only representations of the future life with
which he was familiar, hence he accepted them as true! Indeed as a rule
the average or ordinary man (fortunately there is no exact average)
cannot think or see beyond his quite immediate environment and binding
rules, his neighborhood, his church, what somebody else says or thinks.
A plumber wants to be exactly like the next successful plumber he sees;
a grocer, the same; an undertaker, the same. Most rich men would like to
live in a house like that of all the other rich men they know. Show them
the very different house of a rich man in Spain, in Egypt, in India, in
Japan--it would never, never do. It is not like that which they know.
Their thoughts and desires, like their faces, are those of the species
to which they belong. In the main, they are of a trivial, commonplace
character, as unimportant as a bean or a pea. Like animals of so limited
a mentality as the duck and the penguin, if you know one you know all.
You might almost say that they have come to their end spiritually.
Nothing can be done for them. Some more vigorous active thing--i. e.,
the thinking, restless, dissatisfied individual--must come along to
rebel and push them aside. If ever the surface of the commonplace is to
be disturbed the individual moved by some inherited or bestowed impulse
must do it: Luther, Galileo, Keppler, Newton, Columbus.
Anything that is strong, special, different must, as a matter of course
and by its very nature, stand alone in the world where so many things
are not strong, special, different. That which places one being over
another and sets differences between man and man is not alone intellect
or knowledge, as some would have us believe (Schopenhauer, for one), but
these plus, other things being equal, the vital energy to apply them or
the hypnotic power of attracting attention to them--in other words,
personality. It is that peculiar quality or ability which makes a way
for our plans, desires, dreams. Cunning, which is by no means knowledge
in the sense in which we use that word, nor intellect of a high order
perhaps (although it may well be), still may play a magnificent share in
personality and contribute to its triumph. No truer book than
Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” although it earned him the distinction of
equaling the devil, was ever written, although the necessary gift of
hypnotic personality was by no means sufficiently insisted upon. Was not
one of the amazing qualities of Julius Cæsar, as of Hannibal, Napoleon
and, indeed, most of the outstanding figures of history, cunning? The
average man, realizing his own limitations, does not like to believe it,
but it is none the less true. Did Alexander the Great, for instance,
lack it? Or Lincoln? On the other hand, mere strength without cunning
is so little. Contrast the tiger and the Norman horse or an elephant.
Which of the three is truly superior? Which one commands your innate
respect?
Whatever else you do, believe nothing in regard to the individual’s
ability to develop an especial and remarkable capacity, unless it is
already inherent in him at birth. Nature works in no other way. Another
thing, life cannot do without brains, however much disassociated from
beatific virtues these may be; for these are a gift and can no more be
created here than you can add to your height by taking thought. What
life does is to develop and train especial inherent capacities--an eye,
a hand, a taste, a smell perhaps; but the instinct and the ability to
foreknow, to appreciate, understand--these things are not taught in
schools. Schools labor with them to improve, polish, give them a special
turn or bent; little more and little less.
A COUNSEL TO PERFECTION
Brief as are the sensations of success, victory, happiness, etc., yet
these are things of actually some duration and as such can be looked
forward to and back upon with pleasure, which in itself is a kind of
reward for living. Love is real, a kinetic vibration of great comfort
and a reward, as well as are the gratifications which arise from a sense
of wealth or power or any hunger satiated. All these may be exceedingly
brief and do fade, but however brief and however quickly faded they
endure for at least a minute fraction of time and are therefore, and
legitimately so, the basis of much human hope, ambition, delight, as
well as despair and all the other contraries which might otherwise be
inexplicable. The pathetic thing in connection with them all is that
they are so plainly baits as well as rewards, that they do prove man to
be the victim or evoluted mechanism if not tool of some higher, perhaps
scheming force by no means essentially friendly to, if it is even
conscious of, him, and that an enduring state of pleasure for anything
is not contemplated by Nature as an essential portion of the career of
man; also that it may be by no means concerned as to whether or no man,
its tool, achieves any moments of triumph or satiation.
Looking at most lives--the defeated, the hungry, the poorly equipped
mentally and physically, the homely, those seized on in childhood by the
strong and shrewd and made to serve pointless and wretched purposes
entirely alien to their lives--I should say that Nature does not care
and that distinctly for them life may not be worth its pains. On the
other hand, where crass chance lifts a given organism to great power or
builds it with such care that it is an almost perfect and delicately
responsive machine, life may well be and no doubt is worth all its
costs. Many organisms, by accident of dullness or non-responsiveness of
a higher sort, come off with less pain, and Nature, either accidentally
or intentionally, builds most of these. They are machines well suited to
the rough grind of material and psychic forces, and may be said to
strike such a neat equation with the circumstances of life that they
achieve a kind of sensory comfort or satiation and so do well enough.
Again, dulling religion or illusions of one type and another, fatuitous
hopes far beyond the pale of possibility, sensory response of a
comfortable character to this earthly scene as a spectacle, or depleted
nervous energy or force which reduces many to the point where nervous or
sensory response is lacking, eases many to the place where it may be
said that if they do not enjoy keenly they at least do not suffer
keenly.
But is man happy? Is his game worth the candle? The sophisticated reply
that the fear of death proves that life is worth while, since all are so
eager to avoid it. But this is worse than no answer for it predicates
either no life at all, which is certainly no recommendation, or that
there may be worse things _there_ than those which befall man
_here_--certainly no proof of a keen joy in this.
The essential tragedy of life, then, and the thing which makes it
painful to consider, is this: that once man is raised above the
non-cerebrating and automatic sensory responsiveness of the beast he
becomes conscious of the rather obvious fact that he is either an
intelligently or an accidentally evoluted mechanism or minute tool in
the hands of something so much more significant than himself that he is
as nothing; and again, that to this force or intelligence above him his
little earthly schemes bear about as much relationship as do those of an
office boy bent on becoming a baseball pitcher to those of the Standard
Oil Company or the German Emperor bent on world dominion. And again--and
this is the darkest thought of all--it, our personal Creator, assumed by
the religionists at least to be so careful of our individual welfare,
may be little more than the veriest tyro in so far as the larger and
largest creative forces or impulses in the universe are concerned.
Manifesting little or no interest in us, no more perhaps than is needful
to its own welfare, it may be as little to the powers above it as are we
to it. For who can guess whether the thing or power which makes man is
the ultimate power or guiding force in so spacious a thing as the
universe? Already our chemists and physicists are inclined to doubt it.
Its impulses, humors, appetites and methods, as manifest in man, are by
no means of so glorious or illuminating a character as to inspire
admiration, even in its machine: man. Plainly, its methods and actions
bespeak as much of the lowest as of the highest that we know, and this
is as much evidenced by the thoughts, aspirations, tastes or habits,
chemically compulsory or no, of man, its product, and through whom it
seemingly expresses itself, as by its methods and procedure in other
ways, fumbling efforts and failures of all kinds. For man in his
capacity as chemist, physicist, fumbling philosopher, didactic or
synchronetic poet, experimenter or agnostic is scarcely a fit creature
for one to contemplate as the highest product of a so-called supreme
intelligence or God, or Good, however well he might look as the product
of a minor and so seeking hieratic power. For if God, or Good, as so
many have already pointed out, can do no better than produce the
quarreling, eating, seeking, spewing thing we know as man--and that is
the chief concern of His intelligence--!!!
We will assume that you have read at least a simple work on astronomy or
chemistry or physics. If so, could you possibly believe that the present
intelligence of man, or even any conceivable progress which he can make
in his present limited form and with his present equipment of senses,
would be of sufficient force to gather either the meaning or sensory
impact of spaces, distances, weights, relationships which at present,
except in the most minute and fragmentary way, are entirely beyond him?
Consider the meaninglessness of numbers to you, of great weights,
distances. I for one would be the last to cast a shadow upon man’s
dreams or pride, but when one investigates even the little we are
permitted to know--the darkness, the inexplicable confusion, the
non-reason in all the things we think, believe, hope for--it would, at
the least, suggest that æons must elapse and man himself change
radically and develop powers (which, if they are his at all at present,
are in embryo) before he could begin to conceive of the significance of
even the smallest of the forces which he seems to use but which in
reality use him.
All the great things, the creative impulses and substances such as
produce even the most minute forms of life which at present we can see,
are entirely outside the range of his limited group of senses. He does
not know, for instance, where heat or cold begin or end; what shades lie
beyond the outer edges of the spectrum; what are the limits or the
immediate beyond of sound, light, weight, space, etc. His weak senses
plus his devised instrumental aids offer him no real help. They merely
multiply his difficulties. Something has invented an eye, an ear, an
olfactory nerve, the ganglia of the fingertips, the central cerebral
cortex and so-called reason, all of which appear to be nothing more than
assembled and synchronized reactions to other and unknown stimuli,
wherewith it is possible now for man to apprehend only minute portions
of the immense energies and substances blowing about him. Yet with all
these aids and the evidences of the mechanism of the universe outside
him which they yield, still man, attacking special bits and portions,
finds it quite impossible to suggest the reason for anything. He lacks
the equipment and power, which even the thing which made him may not
have, of creating such finer perceptive organs as might aid him. At
present and at best apparently, he is allowed only to invent some
things--such, for instance, as are or may be useful to the propagation
and rearing of man in the matter of numbers, not brains. His Creator
apparently is either unable or unwilling to endow him with such
equipment as might make for great knowledge. Tremendous psychic
opportunities appear and go by, as when a duller and more ignorant Rome
conquers a sensitive and highly perceptive and meditative Greece. Owing
to his minor equipment, ignorance and vain beliefs flourish, and he
stumbles from one vain illusion and delusion to another--to achieve
what? Something, possibly, which his Creator can use. Or so it would
seem.
But it is not this phase alone which is troublesome. One might and does
get along well enough knowing but a minute portion of that which, it
would seem, our immediate Creator must plainly know concerning the
processes by which we arrive, depart and function during our little stay
here, but to a seeking intelligence there is inescapable tragedy in the
plain implication, written large over everything, that to the accidental
Creator of man the largest intelligence of whatsoever bent or character
among him is of no more importance to the ruling force than the veriest
gnat or leaf. It, whatever it is that makes man and the animal,
manufactures intelligences as though they were buttons or pins, and
though it create from time to time an Anaximander, a Plato, an
Alexander, a Socrates, a Keppler, a Newton, a Leonardo or any other
titanic brain, yet to it the least ditch-digger or wastrel is as
important. The mass is everything, the individual nothing. With the
greatest nonchalance or blundering inconsequence it strikes down a
Hertz, a Raphael, a Curie, a Spinoza, a Schubert, a Keats. Seventy years
is the allotted span for all, great or small, an average amount of
strength, the same stomach and blood capacity. Though an individual had
seemingly the most important ideas under consideration, great schemes
wherewith to benefit or further the so-called progress of man (the
especial care, as we learn, of his Maker), still this is of no least
importance to his Creator. It is invariably on, on, out of the way, as
though the Creator had most carefully arranged not to take advice from
any one He made, or as though a blind process were at work which could
not. If the former, one might say small blame to one so powerful.
Presuming Him even moderately intelligent, how unimportant His little
mannikins must be to the ultimate scheme of things, the giant forces
through which He manifests Himself and which grind, helplessly create,
helplessly control! Imagine taking advice from a loaf of bread you had
accidentally evolved, or listening to the protests or advice of a
ginger-snap of your own creating!
Nevertheless if it were possible in the face of the driving forces which
seem wholly to manipulate him to reach man and by a suggestion aid him,
it would be that in the face of so much confusion he no longer wastes
time on theories wholly unrelated to himself or his own material
welfare, his essential necessities here, but rather that he see to it
first of all, and clearly, that his life here is something which is to
be lived here and now to the utmost, in the best form for all--during
seventy years, if not longer--here, and not elsewhere, and that some
reasonable and concentrated effort be made to make it livable for man
here and now instead of elsewhere, however glittering or picturesque
that elsewhere may be, thin romance that it is. For is it not high time
that we all realized how essential it is to make life worth while for
all here, knowing as we now do that man is not a pet in Nature and that
if he makes anything of himself and his social as well as his mental
state here it must be with the full understanding that he can expect but
little if any aid from Nature or the forces directing him, certainly
none that would tend to ultimately enlarge his own mental clarity and
supremacy. To this end therefore it would seem advisable that man as a
whole throw over as swiftly as possible all his old-time religious and
moral conceptions, his restraining conventions, taboos and the like, and
re-examine for himself the data concerning which, accidentally or
otherwise, he now finds himself capable of cerebrating and according to
which he is now supposed to regulate his life. It may not be true that
he should limit himself as his present theories and ethics suggest. And
furthermore, his greatest problem being that of living longer, of being
stronger, happier, not so much the butt and jest of chance or the
willful or indifferent moods of the surrounding and stronger forces in
Nature, that he devote himself entirely to solving those problems.
Elsewhere I have indicated a possibly broader moral conception which may
be of value to this end. One of the greatest achievements, of course,
would be to rid the human mind of all vain illusion concerning things
spiritual, to get it to see, if it were possible, that man is not
necessarily an enduring spiritual creature endowed--for who can
know?--with an enduring and progressive soul, but rather that he is an
implement or tool in the hands of something else which is creating or
using him as, for example, the vine does the leaf, yet which itself may
be of no great import in Nature.
If, by any process of investigation, and as now seems possible, it could
be proved that man’s Creator is no universal lord by any means but a
blind fumbling force, it should be possible for man to do one of two
things: either ally himself strictly with such impulses and instincts as
he can detect as coming from this lesser and plainly more immediate
Creator--many of them plainly non-moral enough, as we may see by like
impulses in him, and so aid this Creator to discover Himself; or, now
that he has a foothold here and appears to be a fairly self-perpetuating
machine, to endeavor to reveal to himself and for himself the secret of
self-creation and perpetuation and so become the equal of the force or
forces now using him. But to that end he would need to rid himself of
the delusion that anything in life should be accepted in blind faith and
without question as permanent. One of the oldest of the Hebraic sayings
is “My son, get wisdom, get understanding,” and a later saw declares
“Knowledge is power,” and so it is. Adam, in the fable of the genesis of
man, was condemned not so much for eating of the Fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge as for the fact that “in the day ye eat thereof your eyes
shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And
Prometheus (forethought), the other “God” who is supposed to have
created man out of earth and water and who for man’s benefit “stole fire
from heaven in a hollow tube” and taught him all the useful arts, was
punished for this by Zeus, the supreme “God,” by being chained to a rock
and having his liver daily torn by an eagle--certainly a most
significant fable, for he was trying to make something of man, or rather
teaching man to help himself, and this the Supreme Ruler of the Universe
did not want, probably for the same reason that the Hebraic “God” wanted
Adam to remain a dull machine or clod.
But the Greek fable is far more hopeful and significant than is the
Hebraic one, for, in the former, strength (Hercules) subsequently slew
the eagle and released Prometheus, or forethought, thus allowing him to
aid man; while in Genesis man is condemned, slave-like and forever
after, to “eat his bread in the sweat of his face,” a very sharp
commentary on the nature of his Maker as the ancients conceived him.
What is implied by both fables is that man is a waif or accident in
Nature, not intentionally endowed with wisdom or the power to get it,
and that Nature (Zeus, Jehovah, anything you will) markedly objects to
his obtaining any “lest he become as one of us” and “put forth his hand
and take also of the Tree of Life and eat and live forever.”
In view of this one might ask, Is life worth living? Is there any use?
Perhaps there would be if man, accidentally evoluted or not, but coming
at last, by accident or not, to the place where he finds himself able to
reason upon the processes which have brought him thus far, could seize
upon the constructive processes and so begin a creative, constructive
career of his own which would redound to his own benefit and comfort and
none other. Only there is no least evidence as to that yet, i. e., that
it is possible. In so far as one may judge by chemistry and physics man
appears to be in the grip of a blind force or process which cannot help
itself and from which man can derive no power to help himself save by
accident or peradventure. Even now, for all one can know, he may be
sinking into a blind, unreasoning mush instead of evoluting further, so
many are the theories which counsel him to believe in some vague,
aimless peace hereafter and which he so readily accepts. The important
thing for him to do, supposing that he could, would be to avoid
henceforth all destroying notions of this character and to think of
himself rather as a waif, an unloved orphan in space, who must
nevertheless and by his own effort make his own pathetic way in the
world. Or, if that is too harsh, then to think of himself as part and
parcel (leaf and vine) of some hard-pressed Creator, a sun, a group of
chemic forces synthetized into an individual somewhat like himself, not
a Supreme God, by any means, but a kind of local manufacturer or
well-meaning Prometheus who is trying to make something out of man and
Himself at the same time, being in or of man, or man in Him (“I am in
the Father; the Father is in me”), but who in turn and so through him,
man, is being assailed by larger or rival forces and cannot always make
His way as well as He might wish. Hence, He needs the consideration and
even help of man, the atomic force of which He is composed. That being
the case, the burden of life might possibly come to seem less hard.
But, aside from such an hypothesis, thought offers but small comfort to
the thinker viewing the drift of fact as one must. For see how painfully
and often most sadly our scientists and philosophers dig at this riddle
of existence and how slowly, if at all, we are really fitting ourselves
for the giant task, these greater and greater contests with Nature,
which must come if man is to come to anything. Even individual
self-preservation via chemistry, physics, mathematics, economics,
sociology, philosophy, astronomy, botany, biology, and what not, is a
slow and difficult process. On every hand are destructive forces that
beset us, and we have apparently only ourselves to look to that we be
not so persistently tortured. All religions and theories of Divine aid
to the contrary, man has been and is now compelled to battle hourly and
momentarily for his “right” (how pale is that word!) to live and grow,
let alone think--against heat, cold, destructive rivals and enemies of
all kinds, destructive insects, savage animals, savage men, droughts,
storms, dissensions, diseases, death--whereas he in turn has sought and
does now seek to help himself via farmers, butchers, inventors,
scientists, doctors, seeking to wrest from forces apparently alien to
the one which prospers him, if there is such an one, some of the powers
which apparently they hold in such vast abundance and which might even
contain the secret of eternal life. Who knows? Indeed, surveying what
has befallen him throughout the ages, I should suggest to man that he
accept as true the fabled statement made by “God” in Genesis iii. 14:19,
and seek persistently and without too much reverence for some method of
solving his own difficulties. He should reject vain theory, especially
that which relates to a mythical reward hereafter, and cling only to
those methods and forms of procedure which give promise or hope of a
larger reward here, tending to strengthen his capacity for living here
and now. Such a theory or belief, however antagonistic to current
religious theories, would at least tend to make man less depressed and
indifferent to his state here and more conscious of the fact that if he
is to extract any joy out of his span he must think and plan to make
things better not only for himself but for others, since joy for himself
depends upon his joy in others and they in him. Indeed, it would give
him more zest for the game here if he did. By that last I am not arguing
with the moralists for all their shabby, little pinchbeck repressions,
the idea that the less you do and know the better you are; but rather
that the more you do and know the better off you are, physically and
mentally, and the more you make your state or form of government do and
let you know the better.
How soon would not such an attitude--not on the part of all, for one
cannot hope for that, but of even a moderate minority--make for a more
vivid, aggressive, fascinating world! How soon might not the now
seemingly sealed doors open, unsolvable (so-called) riddles end as
solved, man acquire new reasoning faculties, senses and powers, and
finally stand forth a creative force himself, a genuine creator on his
own account, able not only to fend and forefend against many of his
present disasters here but to give new powers and thought, and even
creative force, to things which now crawl meekly at the feet of man? Who
knows? Is not courage better than fear? a healthy, if skeptical, seeking
better than blind, dull acceptance of anything or nothing, as the case
may be? I, for one, think so, and, for my part, would prefer to be a
seeking Prometheus chained to a rock and my liver gnawed daily by the
eagle of an irritated and jealous higher power than a crawling worm or
whimpering slave praying for some endless Nirvana, or a minute part in
an endless legion of cherubim harping the glory of something which had
plainly sought neither my peace nor my significance but only my painful,
unimportant and even worthless service.
NEUROTIC AMERICA AND THE SEX IMPULSE
I sometimes think that a calm and exhaustive study of the American
temperament in relation to sex and its various manifestations would
result in the scientific conclusion that this country, taken as a whole,
is as much a victim of a deep-seated neurosis relating to this impulse
as any, the most morbid of those who appeal to psycho-analysis for
treatment. The profound and even convulsive interest in any case
involving a sex crime or delusion (Thaw, Leo Frank, Billy Brown,
Carlisle Harris, Nan Patterson, Durant; or any negro rape case in the
South); the ridiculous and quite neurotic interest displayed by grown
men and women, to say nothing of children, in the exploits of so-called
“cuties”--the “Spring Blossoms,” “June Elfs,” “Violet Dawns” of the
movies--the perennial and astonishingly profitable (in so far as a
certain class of theatrical management is concerned) interest of the
male and even female American in the utterly mechanical and standardized
beauty chorus shows with their (presumably) seventeen-year-old maids in
bathing, bedroom-bath and other forms of abbreviated attire! Are not
these points in evidence? In the matter of the latter, no story is
necessary; just erotic color, music, dancing evolutions and double-meant
(I almost said “mint”) jokes, and the thing is done.
Again, look at any American city where morality or religion, or both,
presumably have full sway (and in what American city are they not
supposed to be dominant?), and what do you find? The most desirable
locations in the best portions of the city, outside of the trade
centers, given over to the leading churches and the newspapers, which
preach a lofty code of ethics and morals which they themselves find
difficult if not impossible to practice; while elsewhere the local
bookstores and picture shops and bill-boards are crowded with a class of
literature and illustration, or so-called “art,” which to read or view,
according to the adjacent churches and newspapers, would result in the
loss of your immortal soul as well as your local standing. And yet these
same are displayed, sold and read plentifully and with avidity, for the
very good reason, no doubt, that they satisfy a craving and a thirst not
otherwise open to satiation. In any town of any size, what pictures are
not displayed and sold: “September Morn,” “Youth,” “Purity,”
“Innocence,” “Yes,” “Waiting,” and the like, disguised as little as the
law will permit. Again, where will you not find a swarm of sex magazines
labeled “breezy,” “snappy” and the like, the kind that any
sex-suppressed neurotic might well crave, and all received with the
profoundest gratitude and widest distribution? Where in America, any
more than abroad (barring countries of Asia, Africa and the South
Pacific, where sex-suppression is not the order of the day) does one
lack for pornographic nudes or privately circulated writings of the most
lurid character? Are the art or book or drug stores of the small towns
free of them? Is it not true that you can still buy almost everywhere,
“Three Weeks,” “Life’s Shop Window,” “The Yoke,” and other such
classics, whereas those admirable volumes of life and satire “The
Decameron,” “Droll Stories,” “The Confessions,” Cellini, are only to be
discovered, and that by chance and peradventure and “against the law,”
on the dark and musty shelves of some out-of-the-way old book store, and
these consumed by the intelligensia and the sex-satisfied only, and with
an upward mouth-curl of amusement at the innate humors of passion? The
hobble-skirt, the tango dance, the Hula-Hula or Hawaiian melodies--what
did each in its day indicate? Plays like “Everywoman,” “Experience,”
“The Girl from Rector’s,” “Parlor, Bedroom and Bath”--what did they
suggest?
Not so very long since, I stopped for a little while in a town of a
hundred thousand population in the South. It was moral, religious,
conventional--in other words, American. It might as well, however, have
been in New England, the Northwest, the Southwest, the Middle West, for
any difference to be discovered in its moral texture. In this home of
chivalry, courtesy, purity and the like, erected originally on the backs
of driven slaves, a number of its most interesting points of vantage
were as usual occupied by the churches, as impressive and prosperous as
those anywhere. It had only one theater of consequence, and that open
only two nights a week, if so often. Its poorer classes were entertained
by three or four moving-picture establishments (“Passed by the National
Board of Censors”); but the well-to-do also attended these, for they had
no other place to go for amusement. Yet, in the face of the highly
censored “movies,” theater and bookstores and the absence of houses of
ill-repute (all suppressed), there were two or three “first-class”
hotels, all with their Thès Dansantes, cabaret suppers and the like, of
the character of which I propose to speak later. The most exclusive
bookstore was so very moral that it would not carry any books not
approved by the “Watch and Ward” and “Library Protection” association,
nor would the vine-covered library in the best section, although at any
time you might have gone to the principal dry-goods store and by a
roundabout process secured nearly all that you desired.
While I was in this city a twelve-year-old boy was arrested at one of
the railroad stations about two hundred yards from the principal beach
for appearing in a two-piece bathing suit. It was not asserted in the
prosecution which followed (which was vigorously defended by his father)
that a twelve-year-old boy in a two-piece bathing suit was immoral, but
a man in a one-piece one or a girl in any kind at all would be, and to
avoid the possible vitiation of public purity which might thus follow
the boy was arrested. He was discharged with a warning--but even so. You
can see how high the virtue at this city should be.
Yet, at the same time, in this same city, were the three aforementioned
hotels with their Thès Dansantes, roof gardens, cabaret grills, this,
that and the other, and in these might have been seen, any late
afternoon or evening, winter and summer, such a collection of sex-struck
infants and elders as would be worth the same price of admission
anywhere. The clothes! The wondrous shoes and gaudy purses, the subdued
and yet moving and suggestive combination of colors! The efforts to
flagellate the already too harried imagination with a promise of
delights which the local morality squad, I fear, would never permit to
be realized. You could pay as much in either of these places for a pot
of tea and three little thin slices of toast as you could anywhere in
the world. In their efforts to provide you with a superior (sex)
atmosphere they made it possible for you so to do.
Wrong? Not a bit. I am not describing it for that purpose; nor am I
quarreling with human nature for expressing its inmost desires, being
what it is: avid, alluring, secret, hungry. I am smiling at the
anachronistic spirit of the same community which would arrest the boy in
the bathing suit, prohibit “near beer,” snip every even weakly
suggestive passage out of a “movie,” “run” any indecent play (“Hedda
Gabler,” let us say, or “The Wild Duck,” since it could not understand
them) out of town. No copies of “The Song of Songs,” Rousseau’s
“Confessions,” “The Decameron,” or the unexpurgated “Arabian Nights.”
Never, never, never! Yet look at these same hotels, these girls and
youths clinging to each other in the suggestive dances! The movements,
the sinuous, almost savage, abandon, the love-looks, the whispers! And
the automobiles lined up along distant country roadsides in the dark
later--although not a single house of assignation or prostitution was
tolerated within the city limits. One had to secure a Ford and employ
the open woods and fields instead. And in the basement next to the
barbershop in each hotel was one or more “manicure booths,” curtained
confessionals or recessionals, into which one might retire with a
manicure maid to have one’s fingers done. Owing to the dashing quality
of these maids the business was large.
For myself, I do not know what the psychic or spiritual or creative
significance of these impulses of the sexes may be, unless, in truth,
within equational limits they are moral or at least essential, and so to
be cherished as a good instead of an evil; but one thing is certain:
their appearance in this florid public form and in the center of a
vice-cured city would indicate that either the attitude of the nation is
wrong or that we have in our midst a host of neurotic or sex-struck
degenerates who ought to be eliminated from the body civic in a very
radical manner. But are they neurotic? Or is it the nation that is
wrong, and these but the neurotic symptoms of its error? Certainly,
nowhere outside of America and especially in such a vice-taboo realm as
this, I fancy, are the terrors of sex excess, the degradation and
disease following sex libertinage, more enthusiastically or more
glowingly pointed out as the psychic or spiritual aftermath or heavenly
punishment of these “sins”; and, yet, for all the length of time these
horrors have been “known” or insisted upon or pointed out, and
regardless of whether they are really true or not, is there any marked
diminution of the so-called sex evil in America? Has the denying of
drink or prophylactics to the American sailor or soldier cured him of
his interest in sex? Will it? The world apparently, or that part of it
expressed by, in or through the sexes, is as avid and seeking as ever.
We know, or some of us do, that the chemistry by which we and the sex
impulse are compounded is above the knowledge or volition of man,
although its object in so far as human moods and passions are concerned,
is plain enough. But in America we are not willing, if we do know, to
admit it. Our increasing numerical presence here should be evidence
enough of its force, but we waive that in favor of our theories in
regard to the inherently moral and Christian home--even the complete
suppression of sex! That a balance or equation between excess and
license and inane, mollusc-like passivism in regard to sex and its
expression is all that is ever struck in Nature, is plain enough to
those who think; but that an American in authority in state or church
should admit it! Life, apparently, is never exact in anything, and the
desirability of having it so is of course open to question. But
still----
Yet, to me, the impulses we are trying to suppress are, this side of
excess, perfectly normal, while the thing we think we want is an
infantile conception of life and its processes, unsuited to thinking men
and women. Our conviction is apparently that sexuality is essentially
wrong and debasing, and yet we do not really think so, as our intense
national interest in every phase of sex proves. We are afraid to face
ourselves honestly and openly in anything, neurotically so, and that is
what makes the American intellect so utterly contemptible and negligible
at times. What is nearer the truth is that our attitude is to be
psychoanalytically traced in various ways to the strangely exaggerated
(neurotic, I think) conceptions of the part sex or its over-emphasis
plays in life due to repression, which have followed upon impossible
religious theories brought from abroad (Quaker, Methodist, Puritan,
Mennonite, Catholic), and our reaction to them. These have developed
that repressive social and biologic ignorance regarding sex
characteristic of so many American families, offspring of these sects
even when they are no longer of them. The conviction that sex is
debasing, dominant at least at this time in nearly every American mind,
I believe, is to be traced so often to these earlier experiences,
particularly with regard to parents and their views. The average
American child--and I suppose England is not much better, judging by
their novels and morals--is permitted to base its ideals of life and
social relations, especially sex relations, on this earlier pretense on
the part of parents that sex does not exist--for them at least.
So it is that we find adult boys and girls pretending, even to
themselves, that they do not know what sex is and the manner in which
children come into existence, and preachers and pretending thinkers
speaking and writing as though sex were not an all but dominant force in
life. And instead of viewing this inconceivably dull attitude as
something that needs modification and bringing ourselves to the
realization that there is nothing inherently disgraceful about having
sexual desire, or at least knowledge of it, and of eventually gratifying
it, we allow ourselves to be kept in tow of crack-brained religionists
and ethic mongers who insist on painting our very normal natures as
abnormal and so developing national neuroses and psychoses which make us
ridiculous, not only to ourselves but to every other nation. It has even
succeeded in twisting our judgments in regard to politics and economics.
For without a rational conception of the part, and the very normal part,
sex plays in life, how can there be sanity in these other things? One
cannot be wrong as to one vital point in life and right as to all
others. We continue to assert, as a nation and as individuals, that
everything sexual is wrong, while at the same time having sexual
feelings and impulses which we can scarcely disguise even to ourselves
and which we satisfy or over-compensate for in ways too ridiculous to
mention (a Billy Sunday revival, for instance; a White Slave Crusade in
which our papers blaze with sickening criticism; an insane, an
impossible pursuit of money or vice, due to the repression, of every
other normal instinct). Truly, a goose nailed to the floor by its feet
and stuffed daily to produce an enlarged and salable liver, could be no
more ridiculous or pathetic than the average American debarred from
every avenue of intelligence or effort save that which relates to money.
It is a bit curious, one cannot help remarking, that the widespread fame
and weight of such sincere and eminent investigators as Kraft-Ebbing,
Ellis, Freud and his host of followers, with all the profoundly moving
evidence of the pathos of sex-repression which they offer, has not had
more influence upon our national, if not the world’s international,
mind. The sorrows revealed! The grisly prison doors unlocked by the
patient and brilliantly revealing researches of Freud alone! The old
sorrows dragged from the depths of the repressed subconscious and at
last permitted to come forth into the light, where the fortuitous and
yet crushing weight of earthly illusion and error may be noted! And yet
they have not apparently as yet enlightened or broadened us.
At this point I would like to present a citation from the writings of
one of our leading neurologists and psychoanalysts (H. W. Frink) in
regard to the type of patient (neurotic) pouring in upon him from all
parts of America. “My own experience,” he writes (“Morbid Fears and
Compulsions,” page 224), “is that the sexual factor comes to expression
in every analysis at once, usually within the first two or three visits,
and I am sure that for this result no special technique or dexterities
are required; about all that is necessary being to let the patient talk.
To the question, Why is the sexual factor dominant in every neurosis? I
shall not attempt to make any detailed reply. The answer is perhaps to
be sought in the direction indicated by Meyer (“Discussion of Some
Fundamental Issues in Freud’s Psychoanalysis,” State Hospital Bulletin,
Vol. II, No. 4, 1910), when he says: ‘No experience or part of our life
is as much disfigured by convention as the sex feelings and ambitions.’
That is to say, if we had other impulses which throughout the whole life
of the individual were so consistently and unremittingly warped,
cramped and deformed in every conceivable and unnatural manner (as they
are in America) and they had the same strength to rebel against such
treatment as have the sex impulses, _then_ we might have neuroses in
which they and not the sex factor played the dominant role.”
For my own part, I cannot understand why it is that the human mind, and
more especially the American or Anglo-Saxon mind, unless it is regulated
by biogenetic forces over which it has no control but which have full
control over it, functions so dully in regard to sex and its import. One
would assume, from the average religious or social conception of the
time, that the sole function of sex in all its ramifications is the
production of more children, to live, work and die according to the
prescribed routine of the dullest Christian formula. But,
unquestionably, sex means much more than that. While it is true that
some of the minor professors of psychoanalysis are offering what they
are pleased to term the “sublimation of the holophilic (or sex) impulse”
into more “useful,” or, at any rate, more agreeable fields of effort via
suppression or restraint, this in my judgment is little more than a sop,
and an obvious one, to the moralists. What is actually true is that via
sex gratification--or perhaps better, its ardent and often defeated
pursuit--comes most of all that is most distinguished in art, letters
and our social economy and progress generally. It may be and usually is
“displaced,” “referred,” “transferred,” “substituted by,” “identified
with” desires for wealth, preferment, distinction and what not, but
underneath each and every one of such successes must primarily be
written a deep and abiding craving for women, or some one woman, in whom
the sex desires of any one person for the time being is centered. “Love”
or “lust” (and the one is but an intellectual sublimation of the other)
moves the seeker in every field of effort. It is the desire to enthrone
and enhance, by every possible detail of ornamentation, comfort and
color--love, sensual gratification--that man in the main moves, and by
that alone. Protean as this impulse may be, and it takes many forms, it
stands revealed as the underlying reality of a thousand astounding
impulses or disguises--pathetic, lying, simulating, denying, but the
same old impulse everywhere and under all circumstances. Refracted as it
is by opposition, misunderstanding, failure into a million glistering
and lovely or pathetic things, it may seem to be what it is not; but
hold fast, trace it back, and there, at bottom, sex appears, a craving
for love, and its accompanying sensual gratification, and there is no
other.
But the thing which is especially interesting about America is its
infantile blindness to all this and the pathetic and at least
semi-neurotic condition into which we have fallen in consequence. As one
views American life to-day it can be safely asserted that scarcely one
of a hundred America men or women view this phase of life intelligibly,
although they respond to it normally enough in some of its other phases.
Usually before their so-called vision, and between them and their daily
deeds, hangs an inane and miasmatic cloud of cant and make-believe. The
physiologically and biologically informed know, of course, how
ridiculous is the assumption that sex union is the narrowly “moral”
function which the religionists would have one believe, although moral
it may well be in some larger constructive sense, as is any other life
process, if life itself can be termed moral. But that it can involve,
without becoming profoundly ridiculous, a narrow or sectarian religious
interpretation, is open to question. That it has a sad, tragic, even
ruthless aspect (read Maeterlinck’s description of the struggles of some
flowers to be born and continue the species) is not, scientifically at
least, to be combatted. In its biological aspects it has many, many
tragic sides, although so dull is the race to all but its most
individual ambitions and needs that it cannot be expected to sense this
either. Indeed, as expressed by the impulses in man (concocted by what
psychic meditation below and on the part of what?), sex is an
unregenerate and only partially controlled passion which has more as its
aim perhaps than is dreamed of in the philosophies of man. It is a fire,
a chemical explosion, really. It concerns not so much the individual as
the race, the endless unbroken chain of men and women, however much any
individual may think it concerns him alone. Instead of denouncing the
individual for his mood in regard to all this, it might be more
important to inquire how moral in their import are the elements which
compound and bring about the explosion and to treat him as one of their
victims.
The truth no doubt is that in this much-maligned impulse which chemical
forces beyond and above the willing of men are compounding lies the
destiny of man (if he has one), only we are not as yet able to fathom
that destiny. Here we come, bottles of fluid dynamite (prepared by what
satiric super-soul, and why?), and somewhere in the world is, or may be,
another compound which will set us aflame--and we are supposed to
connect this with a narrow religious order or theory! I will admit that
for the necessities of social arrangement and relationship here, the
necessary balances and inter-adjustments that go to make up a workable
society of beings, some form of equation between the less and more avid
sexually, the too hot and the too cold, must be and is struck,
willy-nilly and regardless of individual or man’s moral theory. But by
what rule and rote? Is there so-called “justice” in it, or “reason,” or
a fixed social order or method of procedure? We see that in spite of our
fixed methods of moral procedure the tragedies continue, the waves and
flames of morality and immorality come and go. Our divorce rate! Our sex
tragedies and districts! And what guide has the individual? The Golden
Rule? A more liberal method of adjustment? In the past, Nature has
tolerated polygamy, polyandry and an abbreviated monogamy, and may do so
again. The stress and strain which the present social arrangements show
are almost premonitory.
But one thing is certain: no hard-and-fast rule governing this impulse
has worked with accuracy for any given length of time, anywhere. If
there are discovered or discoverable rules for its control and best
management in the interest of the race and so in the interest of the
Creator they have not yet been announced. We hear of the duty of
preserving the sanctity of the home, maintaining a wife and raising a
family according to the monogamic theory. Well and good. But, outside of
raising endless children to be slain in wars, vegetated in a routine
factory life, worn threadbare in a vast and internecine struggle for
existence, there is not so much to be said for that, either. Routine
home life, even an artistic breeding-pen, can scarcely be the be-all and
end-all of human existence, any more than may unrestrained license. And
however comfortable or admirable or encouraging the average home may be
to given individuals, it is not necessarily so to all. There are those
who find it confining, destroying. And, again, religionists and
theorists, moral and otherwise, as well as the great greedy syndics and
master minds in business or politics, prey upon the fruit of the home
and collect “spiritual” and material taxes and establish “spiritual” as
well as material autocracies or over-lordships which in no wise make for
sex morality any more than for the forces which destroy it. Vice,
suborned by the wealthy and powerful, as well as the avid and perverse
among the weak, feeds upon the fruit of the so-called moral home. The
bull seal still conquers his fifty or a hundred, and the weakling none.
In fact, in a so-called Christian realm the mistress abounds, and the
high divorce rate attests much private dissatisfaction with the theory.
Laws come and laws go; and still we are about where we were before. The
gardens of Aphrodite still exist. The hetæra of Greece and Rome are
still with us--in our back streets or our high-priced apartment houses.
If we no longer have our streets of the so-called “fallen” or “evil”
women, who walk in the dark, is it not because caution has become the
better part of trade? Are they not to be found behind closed doors in
response to special rings, by card of admission, in our best streets?
The endless pother! And still sex is as vigorous and dominant as ever it
was. The riant scoffers nod and smile and accept the new rules.
Personally, after all this time, my conclusion is: (1), that no
individual, however well or ill compounded physically, can make or
unmake his moods or add one jot or tittle to his moral desires or
perfections, although he and society (or convention) can exercise a
certain amount of restraint--a restraint that will almost invariably
prove irksome and which he will seek to evade; (2), that however much
theorists, hypocrites and sincere religionists, chill-blooded or
otherwise, may revile sex or attempt to restrain or destroy it, yet
Nature (God or the devil, or the two in one) permits these wild fires to
be generated in man, and, in spite of all punishments and hindrances,
sees to it that his passions overleap his fears and judgments and cause
him to do all the things that may be strictly forbidden him but which
may nevertheless be of value to the race itself; (3), that man is not
temperamentally or chemically a monogamous animal, however much the
social conditions and necessities by which he finds himself surrounded
in certain lands and times tend to make him believe so or fear, and that
a rough balance or equation is all that is ever struck between his
outward public deeds and his inner chemic condition; (4), that, to this
hour, there is no city without its percentage of prostitution or hetæra
of one grade or another; (5), that there is no city or town where some
women or girls do not walk, secretly or openly, to accomplish
prostitution and where men do not, secretly or openly, encourage and
pursue them, the chemic necessities of their being as much as poverty
impelling them to do it; (6), that there is no city or town or
countryside, anywhere, where adultery or fornication is not indulged in
outside wedlock for love or pleasure; (7), that a high percentage of men
in all walks, including priests and clergymen, look after some one type
at least of woman and lust after her; (8), that a moderate percentage of
women, in marriage and out, seek the affection of a given type of man
temperamentally or chemically agreeable or appealing to them, and offer
their bodies as a bid for or sacrifice to that affection; (9), that
women crave monogamy where their affections or the interests of their
children are involved; (10), that love of one woman or one man, or their
several or joint love of children, is likely to overlay and put at rest,
for the time being, the usual roving desires of sex; (11), that law in
all special instances is absolutely helpless before passion, powerless
either to interpret its psychology or fix a just measure of praise or
blame; (12), that convention has not made, and cannot make, any headway
against a chemical scheme of life which puts sex desires first and all
else as secondary or socially contributory.
Do I seem illogical or inclined to exaggerate? Think well over the
things I have said. The world has a partially traceable history covering
more than ten thousand years; in that time nations have risen and
fallen, law codes have come and gone, religions have dominated and been
swept away. In no law code and in no religion of any nation has the sex
question, the need of moderation, duty to family and the like, been
ignored. But in all that time the social expression of sex has never
been so much as modified, let alone done away with. The Mosaic law is
all of three thousand years old, yet what has it availed? Are our women
all pure, our men all moral? Yet, in the face of history and present-day
occurrences, the facts of divorce courts, night courts, streets crowded
with prostitution and kept women, men seeking constantly to lure women,
and vice versa, all the million and one evidences in books, plays,
newspapers and social life generally that sex is the keynote of
existence, there are those who would bar all mention of it, harry the
prostitute, unduly punish the fornicator, ostracise the woman who strays
from the path of virtue or seeks in divorce a way out of a troubled
marital state.
What to make of the brain of man under such circumstances? What to say
of the thing that causes him to fight the passion of which he is a
victim? Necessity for equation and balance in all things, a very rough
balance which cares no more for the individual “good” or “bad” than we
care for flies or gnats? Inherent love of moderation in some? Love of
peace in some? Love of the reverse in others? The tendency of all things
to become static, even passionate temperaments? Surely that, and nothing
more. Yet, aside from that, there is something which does not care for
the equation-seeking mood of either individuals or society, which is
busy manufacturing and pouring into the world new individuals with all
their new dreams, passions, lacks of equation, lack of a sense of
self-restraint, and sweeping away the old, the conservative, the
religious, sanctimonious.
One of the sanifying recourses in life is, of course, to fix one’s eye
on youth and note what it desires. Plainly, it is a fair expression of
the thing that creates it, the chemic mood of the biologic force, for
plainly it is closer to that which creates it. As the human or physical
machine ages and wears out it is prepared, and then only, to accept the
restraints and the equation which society, in order to maintain itself,
requires; but not before. In the main, youth blazes with non-equational
fires and it best represents that which makes it, the concocting chemic
impulses below or behind life. Is youth wrong? Then so is the life
impulse, for it builds youth freshly to its needs yearly, daily. The
physical laws which seem to govern the biologic impulse after it
expresses itself in the shape of youth, or man, and compels it for
purposes of social expression to submit to restraints and equation, is
another matter, inherent, perhaps, in the constitution of the universe
itself and not to be avoided by the biologic impulse or its creatures.
But this, as I have said before, does not provide us with _exact_ rules
for conducting ourselves here or how best to subdue or balance with
other things the enormous fires with which we sometimes find ourselves
lit. Better admit at once that hard-and-fast and cock-sure rules or laws
are of no avail, and trust to the crude accidents of life to caution
youth. A happy balance between the fires of youth and the fears and
chills of age may be desirable, but, freely admitting that, can it be
fixed by exact rule? We are inherent in some greater thing than
man--Nature Herself. Only She knows.
One thing is sure: we are not done with the conflict and amazing
super-impulses of sex, and are not likely to be soon. And if we were,
would life be the varied, fascinating, humorous, poetic, tragic thing we
see it to be? Suppose the moralists ruled, with their stiff and narrow
balance, and man accepted their quiescent dictates--then what? Contrast
it with some of the freer, more distinguished periods--Greece, Rome,
Italy during the Renaissance, France under the Louis, England under
Elizabeth and Charles II. Consider. I for one see no immediate solution,
and firmly believe there is none which does not end in complete mental
quiescence--balance or its equivalent, intellectual and emotional or
temperamental nothingness, decay and dissolution, with something not so
balanced and therefore alive, to supersede, if we are to have any form
of life at all.
SECRECY--ITS VALUE
In the face of a rampant and inane morality which is constantly seeking
to befog or misinterpret a world which needs to be seen quite clearly if
man is even partially to understand himself or the conditions by which
he is confronted, it is well to remember that life is secret, nearly
entirely so, in all its phases. Nature reveals Her secrets to no man,
save grudgingly and peradventure. By dint of slow searching and because
of his own necessities and sufferings he has discovered a few
things--how few, as contrasted with the vast sea of the all but
undiscoverable, not even the wisest can guess. And, even so, it is all a
process of inclusion, and hence exclusion. How little included? And how
much excluded? And Her secrecy is by no means moral or ethical or
generous in any way. Yet, confronted by all the iron and pagan mysteries
of a catch-as-catch-can world, and seeing daily and hourly that only the
strong or shrewd or gifted, or those befriended by them, survive, and
the weak and untalented are left to fester in want, and that only a
rather loose and not very protective or comforting balance or equation
is struck between extremes of any kind (even between his so-called God
and devil), man still persists in interpreting his needs or hopes or
dreams as the result of a super-tender administration of some kind, and
sniffs rather disconsolately, if not quite unbelievingly, at the hard
facts by which he is confronted. He is so anxious to think Nature kind,
generous, non-secret. Indeed, any well-reared-and-ordered moralist or
religionist would be inclined to contend, I am sure, that the world is
not in the main secret, or at least not maliciously so, and that, even
if it is, it should not be--innate desire for balance and equation
between so-called evil and good always urging him to this conclusion.
But, Nature is secret, quite maliciously so at times, and Her secrecy is
not to be escaped, even by those most anxious to condemn that phase of
Her character. All of us, as a part of Her, reflect this chiefest
characteristic as well as the most powerful instinct implanted in us by
Her--namely, the desire to preserve ourselves and propagate our kind as
against the lives and interests of all others. And, being confronted
also by one of Her sternest regulations, that only the shrewd, the
cunning, the appropriate or desired or presently essential or fit shall
survive when assailed by millions of other creatures not so fortunately
equipped, we are compelled to admit that we are at least a part of a
more or less internecine struggle and so do our best, willy-nilly, as
time and occasion may warrant or suggest to escape via secrecy,
intrigue, cunning and the like. In other words, we are compelled to
conceal that which is important to us and possibly inimical to others,
showing, in times of stress, only that which will help us; hence, we,
along with everything else, are compelled to be secret whether we wish
to or not.
It may be mentioned here that there is a certain fish whose scientific
name is Mycteroperca Bonaci and whose common name is Black Grouper,
which is of considerable value in this connection. It is a healthy
creature, growing to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds and living
a comfortable existence because of its very remarkable ability to adapt
itself to conditions. Now while that very subtle thing which we call the
creative power and which we endow with the spirit of the Beatitudes is
supposed to build this mortal life in such fashion that only honesty and
virtue shall prevail, still it builds this fish. Moving in its dark
world of green waters, Mycteroperca has the very essence of secrecy,
the power of almost instantaneous change into something quite different
in so far as appearances are concerned. Its great superiority over other
fishes lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation, which relates
solely to the pigmentation of its skin. In electrical mechanics we pride
ourselves on our ability to make over one brilliant scene into another
in the twinkling of an eye and flash picture after picture before the
onlooker. The directive control of Mycteroperca over its appearance is
so wonderful that you cannot look at it long without feeling that you
are witnessing something spectral and unnatural, so brilliant is its
power to deceive. Lying at the bottom of a bay, it can simulate the mud
by which it is surrounded. Hidden in the folds of glorious leaves, it is
of the same markings. Lurking in a flaw of light, it is like the light
itself shining dimly in water. Its power to elude or strike unseen is of
the greatest. One might go far afield and gather less forceful
indictments--the horrific spider spinning his trap for the unthinking
fly; the lovely Drosera (Sundew) using its crimson calyx for a
smothering-pit in which to seal and devour the victim of its beauty; the
rainbow-colored jellyfish that spreads its prismed tentacles like
streamers of great beauty, only to sting and torture all that falls
within their radiant folds. Man himself is busy digging the pit and
fashioning the snare, but he will not believe it. His feet are in the
trap of circumstances; his eyes are on an illusion.
But what would you say was the intention of the overruling intelligent,
constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability? To fit it
to be truthful? Or would you say that subtlety, chicanery, trickery were
here at work? An implement of illusion one might readily suspect it to
be, a living lie, a creature whose business it is to appear what it is
not, to simulate that with which it has nothing in common, the power of
its enemies to forfend against which is little. The indictment is fair.
Yet is it not ridiculous that where all Nature is working in shadow,
each thing hiding from the other its processes or thoughts of power and
its intentions, that we ask of poor, spindling, cowardly, scurrying man,
dodging perpetually here and there between the giant legs of chance and,
in so far as he is concerned, all but malign forces, that he stand up
and speak _the truth_ in all things (would that he could discover it!)
or that he say boldly and on all occasions what is in his heart, what
are his intentions? Of old we know that men do not, anywhere, save in
consonance with their interests, and yet the silly, self-interested
request persists; a demonstration of how thought or observation and
deduction and principally self-interest lag behind fact. The only thing
which opposes secrecy and brings it to light is the skill for secrecy in
others; another illustration of the law of balance or equation in
Nature, the necessity of give and take in life, the desire of the other
person to be protected from too much secrecy on the part of others. But
the folly of the appeal in its ideal form, the charm that would
disappear with the arrival of absolute frankness, the mystery that would
go!
Ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the interest or charm
of all the creatures of the earth and of the circumstances and spaces
and conditions in which they find themselves, is the secrecy--or, what
is the same, the mystery or subtlety--which attaches to them. We do not
know them; we do not understand them; we wonder at their states, their
thoughts, their moods, what they will do, which way turn, when
attacked, whom attack, whom deceive, whom praise, whom reward.
Secrecy--secrecy--mystery. If it were gone the illusion of life itself,
which is all that it is, would be gone also. And we are cautioned to
love truth and to say truly and to our own hurt if necessary! And some
advocate this so earnestly as part of the service due the other person,
or of life to us. Yet, in the main, it comes to this: every other is to
speak the truth to _us_, to conceal no important fact that might be
helpful to us from _us_, to do justice to _us_, to think kindly of _us_.
A fine program, and absolutely consonant with our desire to live,
prosper, succeed, regardless of the well-being of every other.
But let us reverse the program and advocate to ourselves, even in jest,
that we do strict justice (if we could discover what that might be) to
every other or tell him the exact truth about ourselves (heaven
forbid!), our adventures, dreams, schemes; to think kindly (yes, even to
think kindly in the face of the little that we know) of him. The
Catholic hierarchy--which, by the way, has little to do with Messianic
Christianity and its fine-spun ideals--so thoroughly understood human
nature of the middle centuries as well as to-day that it introduced as
an intermediary between man and his own conscience, his private shames,
regrets, fears: the confessional (secrecy) in order that the average
individual might free his soul of crimes without exposing himself to the
fierce light of criticism which a public confession or truth-telling
would entail. And the hesitation and even shame, for all its cloak of
secrecy, with which the confessional is approached! The Church knew that
man was not equal to the task of confronting his own accusing conscience
in the open or before others but must confess in secret, if at all.
Hence the drawn curtain and the reward of absolution for confession!
War, in the main the result of economic pressure, is an illustration of
the necessity for secrecy, or rather the methods by which war is
made--strategy, no less. Mere brute numbers clouting each other to
obtain a numerical supremacy is nothing. A soldier worthy the rank of
corporal would smile at such a program. Secrecy is the thing, the
devising of traps and lures whereby the enemy may be betrayed and to his
undoing. The spider weaving his net, the trapper devising his traps, the
snake moving in grasses the color of itself, is no different to the
general who by strategy (and what general without strategy is worthy
the name?) seeks to encompass the enemy. Shakespeare in Macbeth, by
means of the witches, suggests so archly the value of secrecy to the
so-called good or just (in that instance MacDuff) in fighting evil
(Macbeth) by having the soldiery of MacDuff simulate Birnam Wood by
cutting off and carrying the branches of its trees towards his castle,
thus lyingly fulfilling the prophecy of the witches to Macbeth that he
should not be injured until Birnam Wood should rise and come against
him, and so destroying his self-confidence. And, indeed, is not stark,
threatening secrecy, non-moral force that it is, the thing which gives
color if not joy to life and which lends surprise, uncertainty, fear and
hence freedom from ennui to life, and, by contrast, hope and
calculation, the greatest and most charming of all our gifts? For what
game or sport, implying, as they do, friendly contest, would be worthy
the name if it did not involve the element of chance or uncertainty, or,
in other words, secrecy, to the extent that one cannot beforehand
determine the outcome?
Again, are not all of our ambitions, if not as to their purport at least
as to their outcome, secret? Nature provides secrecy, or uncertainty,
which is the same thing, or darkness as a condition for the development
of quite everything, from seeds to human plans, and builds and builds
with us in countless ways and to astonishing results, and yet we are not
permitted to share Her secret. Our petty brains and bodies are but mere
implements of sorts in Her hands whereby She is constructing something,
the significance or purpose of which we cannot even guess and which She
is at no pains to reveal. She builds us to contain, or rather to
comprehend, but a modicum, a minute fragment, of the enormous
information or secret which is Hers. Secrecy on Her part, you see.
If one turns to the pages of science, what a masterly array of natural
diplomacy and artifice is there displayed! The fishes of the sea
imitating the coloring of the grasses or shadows of the deep in which
they hide and by means of which they escape their enemies (protective
coloring is the scientific name); insects the same, in so far as foliage
and grasses are concerned; birds the same; reptiles the same; man, for
all his noble theories and dreams of a generous and unselfish mode of
conduct, the same; as artificial and secretive as any, he. The stripling
lawyer imitates the look and manner of his intellectual superior--words,
phrases, carriage, side-whiskers even--in order to seem his equal, or in
other words to conceal (secrecy, you see) the fact that he is not his
equal, from some trusting and unsophisticated client. Protective
coloring, as it were.
Take again the instance of a man beginning to rise financially and
wishing to appear the equivalent of men far richer than himself. His
office is in their vicinity, his residence in their neighborhood. He is
in their club if possible, their church, their directories. He is not as
rich as they are, but wishes to conceal the fact. It is not good for the
world to know that he is not what he is not. His few public deeds would
not be as acceptable or he would be compelled to doff the uniform he so
much desires to wear, the manners, along possibly with the emoluments
thereof, or the hope of them. Secrecy--secrecy--secrecy. A seeming only,
where reality would leave life bare and hard.
And is it not the same with doctors, merchants, professionals of all
kinds? To this day is not medicine, like most other professions, fond of
mystery and secrecy.... Latin for instance, in preparing its
prescriptions, thereby giving them an air of superiority which is not
necessarily there at all, or to prevent the patient from knowing what is
being put into his stomach, or to make the cure seem more formidable by
being mysterious or secret. And to this hour, lawyers delighting in
magnificently darksome briefs, which in simple language would be
understandable to all and far less fearsome. Again, religion, the
Catholic and many other versions, rejoicing in a ritual which, if
presented or sung in English, would be just as impressive to the really
intelligent if it possessed any genuine merit or appeal. But to the
ignorant laity, according to the thoughts of the churchman, it might not
be; hence the Latin. And perhaps it is as it should be, for do not the
ignorant and the savage invariably crave that which they cannot
understand? It may be that they desire something more symbolic of all
they feel but cannot express, a quantity and quality of mysterious inner
moods and emotions which no human spoken words, especially those of
their own tongue, would even suggest.
Hence the priest and preacher, Shi’ite or Sunnite, Dervish, Buddhist, or
Brahman formalist, one and all, although ordinary human beings like
ourselves, are trained, and most carefully, in the protective coloring
of their profession. For essentially they are no different, or, with
very rare exception, no more spiritual, no more self-sacrificial--in
other words, no more unnatural--than any of their fellows. But, in due
process of time, the manners, customs, rules even of those who by chance
or peradventure (the accident of disposition or revulsion from too much
of something else) have been tender, self-sacrificial, humanitarian,
have given these latter their cue. They now know, let us say, what
“good” or self-restraining or humanity-loving men and women in times
past have, at one time and another, been like, how they walked in
humility, denied themselves the pleasures, even the necessities of life,
divided a cloak with a beggar or gave it whole, went with an importunate
enemy two miles instead of one, turned the other cheek to one who had
smitten them on one, gave the last of money or food to one who was
hungered, shelter to the shelterless, warmth to the cold, ignored
frivolity or laughter because of so much existing misery. And so those
who, without performing similar discomforting services, would like to
appear thus, now know what to do, how such an one, assuming that he
minister to the weak, the erring, the deficient, should conduct himself,
his most appropriate airs, manners, moods. Hence--but does one need to
call attention to the vast system of protective coloring which now
produces saviors, samaritans, ministers by the hundreds of thousands
throughout the world, all presumably embracing the qualities which make
the self-sacrificial character important, if it is important, yet who
perform few if any of those deeds which the coloring implies: the
“cloth,” the hats, the reversed collars, the severe _black_, sign of
abstemiousness, self-sacrifice, putting aside of the vanities, shows and
pleasures of this world.
Of course there is always the rare individual born so strong, so wise,
so courageous, that he needs few if any disguises in order to make life
palatable to him, or his way in it. But he is rare, and, even when
present, may not always proceed with ease or fearlessly but must
disguise the courage and intelligence which he possesses (secrecy). Even
he, when dealing with weaker, as well as stronger, individuals and
groups, dare not show forth his true strength, save in their behalf,
unless he would evoke their destroying anger. For masses, lacking power
as to their individual units, are infuriated by one who is not so
constituted, who offends by his strength their own futility. All lesser
strengths, whether represented by individuals or masses, are envious and
jealous of power. And the strong hate the strong quite as much as they
do the weak when the latter are opposed to them. And, vice versa, the
weak look upon the strong as driving masters, but the strong look upon
the strong as rivals seeking power equal to their own, or equal to the
task of displacing them. Hence their bitter and destructive rage; the
hate of tiger for tiger, for instance, bull for bull. Secrecy, secrecy,
here as elsewhere apparently the best policy Nature has been able to
devise the only or the essential one, the one most employed. Truly the
wise, however powerful, disguise their power and wisdom. They go softly,
speak kindly, advocate justice or equation in all things, as well they
may, seeing that they themselves may stand in need of it at any turn;
and, if they work their will, work it in the dark and alone as much as
possible.
What, then, shall we say of life when confronted by truths such as
these--that it is offensive, unbearable, a thing to be wept over,
shunned, departed from as quickly as possible? I think not. Nature has
always been so, and men for millions of years have undertaken life with
all its difficulties and subtleties and have done well enough. Indeed,
they have thrived, like all those who sharpen their souls against
difficulty. It is Nature’s way. With steel She cuts steel, with subtlety
subtlety, and the whole process appears to be one in which a more
capable device for enduring the inherent restlessness and changefulness
of Nature Herself is steadily prepared. It is one of dull wit upon whom,
like barnacles, illusions fasten. And he is in error who assumes that
the processes of Nature are different from those of man. We are like
life, like the chemicals and forces of which we are composed, and have
always been so. Only theory and dogma, growing upon and obscuring
sluggish minds, have permitted the rise of a contra-conception. We
should brush the cobwebs from our eyes and do away with illusion. In so
far as possible, and as did the gladiators of old, we should face life
with such weapons as we may, some with raw strength and short sword and
shield, others with net and trident; one relying on brute strength if
need must, the other on the skill and craft with which he may enmesh and
slay. There is no other way. Life is so, and only the cowardly or the
dull or the weak will either fail to see or endeavor to evade so solemn
and even terrible a truth.
IDEALS, MORALS, AND THE DAILY NEWSPAPER
For two centuries now if not longer the newspapers, rather than the
preachers and reformers generally who preceded and still parallel them,
have been elevating themselves to the rôles of soothsayer, prophet, and
guardians of all phases of virtue, honesty and the like, to say nothing
of those shibboleths of the would-be intellectually dominant, “justice”
and “truth.” And the particular views of these papers have come to have
an undue weight with those so moderately equipped intellectually as to
look upon them as moral leaders. Experiments in government and phases of
moral self-control, public and private, are there constantly advocated
for the good of the other man, yet nearly always in accordance with the
current bias or the direction of the interests of the paper. Yet back of
these papers, and in spite of a public following which is supposed to
regulate or control or suggest their policy and viewpoint, is always, or
nearly so, an individual or group of individuals, possibly a
self-interested organization (commercial, religious or otherwise) with
perhaps no more intellectual grip on the social and spiritual
complexities of the world than any other individual of average capacity
and judgment, possibly not so much. Yet with the tremendous leverage of
circulation, plus a serviceable and profitable and aggressive
counting-room to help out, their moral and social pronunciamentos
ridiculously enough become all but sacrosanct, irrefutable, colossal!
Yet after all is said and done, here is nothing more than an individual,
all too human perhaps, or if not that, a group represented by one
individual possibly, seeking via this same lever (circulation) the
special, particular things which he or it or they crave. And as a rule
he or his group is truckling and hand-rubbing to that which he or it or
they imagine the time requires, but seeking always circulation first, as
though that were the be-all and end-all of all value, wisdom and duty.
And yet, in America at least, where will you find a citizen who does not
to a marked extent reverence the opinions of his paper? The slavish
manner in which in certain regions to this day the voters follow a paper
and the manner in which the American press has successfully clouded
issue after issue since America began--the currency issue for one, the
slavery issue for another, the tariff issue for a third, the trust issue
for a fourth, the profiteering and European war issues at the present
moment. And where will you find a newspaper not advertising passing
panaceas that it knows cannot heal (I am not talking about patent
medicines), or admitting that a satisfactory social solution for the
woes of the millions cannot be found, or admitting frankly that human
law is the widespread net that it is, through which great and small
alike skip briskly, chance and accident restraining some and releasing
others? Only when the big skip through the lesion is greater. Or where
will you find a newspaper that will freely admit that the Ten
Commandments are not after all God-given law (do not think for a moment
that they privately believe they are), or that they constitute anything
more than a form of social agreement based for their validity on the
will of the majority and not holding where men do not believe them to be
true and not followed by any spiritually destructive consequences where
men do not accept them to be spiritually true? Life pours through the
reportorial, editorial and counting-rooms of the average newspaper
pell-mell quite as it does elsewhere, only a little more so. Those at
the head note well the secrecy, the self-interest, the “policy” running
through all things, the struggles of all individuals and organizations
to grow, usually at the expense of everything else; yet editorially, and
at the very best, a balance or dependent equation between rival
clashing interests--rival, hungry, self-seeking hordes--is all that is
ever struck here, although this is all but invariably announced as the
Sinaitic command of an all-wise, omnipotent, omnipresent intelligence,
the newspaper editor or owner posing as its especial mouthpiece and
forwarder! Is it not too ridiculous that so human and fallible or greedy
and venal a thing as the average newspaper should set itself up to be a
moral and at times even a religious arbiter of a community?
Yet where would be the circulation of the average paper if it did not so
do? And where would it be if it attempted to practice what it preached,
literally and for itself, as it so freely advises others to do? As all
those well know who have anything to do with the organization or control
of anything in life, newspapers included, the Beatitudes, as Christ laid
them down in the Sermon on the Mount, are not workable and never have
been practically. Yet where will you find a newspaper honestly so
stating, or even whispering a serious doubt? On the contrary, is it not
the absolute workability of these that has, hitherto at least, been most
violently insisted upon, and by organizations which well know the pagan
complexities of life and are in no way representative of even the
faintest approach toward a beatific conception of anything? “Do not as I
do but as I say.” That only quiescence and decay could follow the
enforcement of any such program as the Beatitudes or the fixed rules of
justice, truth, etc., advocated by the average daily paper or any one
else, is not only scientifically demonstrable by chemistry and physics
but is a truism to the average, and even less than average, constructive
and even newspaper mind. Nearly every one with any claim to intelligence
or experience understands this, yet where will you find a newspaper or
any other public medium of expression venturing on this simple truth?
The average man is still in leading strings to various silly theories,
religious or otherwise, fostered by self-interested groups, or to his
hope of temporary human prosperity, and these are the things which
still keep him in the wake of various sophisticated journals which
cunningly play upon his illusions. Indeed he flees exact fact as though
it were the plague. Blessed words or the sweet milk of romance and
prevarication are the things which entertain and soothe him most. In
other words--think of this ridiculous and paradoxical fact!--a creature
invents a bugaboo and then kneels down and worships it. It forges chains
for its so-called intellect, and then groans or rests content under
their binding weight.
But (to continue this slight diatribe) imagine the staff of any
newspaper even attempting to follow any rules save those which govern
the survival of the fit, or failing to cast the Beatitudes out of doors
when it comes to their special interests or the prosperity of the
several functions which they perform! Editorially the Beatitudes prove
profitable as texts for moral preachment and mass consumption, but in
the counting-office or the gathering of news how different! And as for
going two miles with a traveler when he had compelled you to go one, or
turning the other cheek when the first had been smitten! These things do
not fall within the realm of the practical and are therefore not in the
purview of any newspaper organization except in the editorial or
pulpiteering department, and that intended to catch the pennies of the
religionists.
So daily we have the spectacle of pages that in one column misrepresent
the motives of the social or political enemies of this or that
particular newspaper organization, or that play up to the subtleties of
vice or crime for their news or dramatic values, or that display to the
eyes of the young and old alike all the misadventures and incalculable
subterfuges of a treacherous universe, while in another column,
constantly reiterated, appear the words right, justice, mercy, truth,
tenderness, duty, etc., as representing a definite program for conduct
for the other person always, easily followed and easily achieved--by
him. Yes, for the other person, outside of any given newspaper office,
there are always God-given and immutable rules which spell peace and
happiness for him, that are invariably to be practiced, if you will
believe these same papers, by the majority, especially of their readers.
And indeed these rules are by them persistently represented as the will
and thought of a definite, definable God--He who spoke from Sinai, or
who walked to Calvary (quite different Gods, by the way!)--to fly in the
face of whom or which leads only to destruction. Yet all that is needed,
as they well know, in so far as a reasonable guide to conduct is
concerned (and all that we ever get, whether via the law or the average
motivating impulses of man) is the perception and the fact of the
necessity for a certain equation or balance in all things, i. e., the
Golden Rule, mystic heavens or hells and the clerical representatives of
the same with their collections and false notions to the contrary
notwithstanding. Yet where will you find a newspaper with sufficient
courage to say so? Where? Is it not here that one should pause and
inquire whether the newspapers, aside from their purely reportorial
functions (which latter might well be viséd under stricter libel,
perjury and false witness laws than those prevailing at present), should
receive so much as even a moment’s serious consideration?
EQUATION INEVITABLE A VARIANT IN PHILOSOPHIC VIEWPOINT
In society, where man is constantly scheming out methods of procedure
and how his ideas and feelings and appetites can be brought to a
harmonious workable state, a certain reciprocating smoothness of
exchange and balance must be, and apparently has been, achieved. It is
like those constructive adjustments which make any machine possible, and
has apparently given rise to such conceptions of the necessary
conditions for exchange as are indicated by the words “harmony,”
“justice,” “truth,” possibly even “tenderness” and “mercy,” all of which
mean but one thing, if they mean anything at all: the need of striking a
balance or achieving an equilibrium between plainly restless and
conflicting elements. (Why restless? Who knows? Why conflicting? Who
knows?) However, it is this same equation or balance which conditions so
large a thing as a universe, whose prime impulse apparently is to
achieve endless variety in homogeneity, and vice versa.
But these have been assumed, in an absolute and not a relative sense, to
be attributes of a Supreme Being who is all-just, all-truthful,
all-merciful, all-tender, rather than as mechanic or, if one accepts the
created theory of life, as an intelligently and yet not moralistically
worked-out system of minor arrangements, reciprocations and minute
equations, which have little to do with the aspects and movements of
much larger forces of which as yet we know nothing and which at first
glance hinder rather than aid the intellect in perceiving the ultimate
possibilities of the governing force in any direction. Indeed the rough
balance or equation everywhere seen and struck between element and
element, impulse and impulse, need and need, while they might seem to
lend color to the existence of absolute right, justice, truth, honor,
etc., really indicates nothing more than this rough approximation to
equation in everything--force with matter, element with element--as an
offset to incomprehensible and, to mortal mind, even horrible and
ghastly extremes and disorder; nothing more. For in the face of all the
schemes and contrivances whereby man may live in harmony with his
neighbor there is the contrary fact that all these schemes are
constantly being interfered with by contrary forces, decays, mistaken
notions, dreams which produce inharmony. This can mean nothing if not an
inherent impulse in Nature that makes for change and so rearrangement,
regardless of any existing harmonies or balances, plus the curious
impulse in man and Nature (inertia?) which seems to wish to avoid
change.
In spite of all man’s laws, taboos, social understandings, agreements
and beliefs, there are certain things done under the sun which do not
make for perpetual peace, harmony, order, exact justice and so the
welfare of the race _as he conceives it_; nor do they argue for the
domination of a harmonious, all-powerful God _as man conceives Him_.
Shocking as it may seem, certain individuals and groups contrive to live
and thrive under conditions which, according to other masses and
individuals who live and contemplate them, are apparently inimical to
the so-called best interests of the race and the plans of its Creator.
Indeed the latter is constantly, according to man or his theorists,
trying to overcome them and so save Himself.
Who and what are these inimical forces which are supposed to defy God
Himself? Criminals, liars, lechers, murderers, self-aggrandizing
intellects of all types and sizes, plus accident, disease, cataclysm. At
the same time and as if working in harmony with them, and to the dismay
of the religionist at least, there are vast legions of inimical
non-moral and seemingly socially non-helpful or even destructive
microbes and animals which seize on man, the image of God, whose
welfare God seeks, and which live and thrive without sign of
consciousness of God, equation, or anything else. I am thinking of the
germs of cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, as well as plagues of locusts,
worms, wood-lice or scales, rats and the like, which while destroying
vegetation and wealth most necessary to man at one point at the same
time may and do nourish birds inimical or helpful to him and cause all
things to develop methods of defending themselves and so aid their
growth. The chemic or mechanistic interpreter of life discovers equation
here well enough, and even a kind of rough harmony, although the
religionist does not, and so while it is entirely possible for a
monistic or evolutionary mystic to believe in a series of individually
severe but racially helpful checks and balances which in some of their
aspects are non-moral but are still driving man on to something, good or
ill, it is not possible for the religionist or the moralist, taking him
at his own dogmatic valuation, so to do. God must be good, exactly just,
always merciful, as man understands those things in the realm in which
he moves. Though a world of scientific data may now be brought forward
to demonstrate that God is not a personality with a given moral
direction or bias, as we understand morals, or with a here decipherable
purpose, yet he must deny that. The nature of God, if not revealed by a
voice of thunder from a mountain top, is, according to him, seen in the
works of Nature; and the works of Nature are good.
But if God, or Good, is imminent, working for some far-off, Divine
event, why the intermediate pother? I wonder at times why those who
ponder these things with a view of “saving” the race and so eventually
establishing truth, justice, mercy here on earth, are not permanently
confused or hushed into silence by the overwhelming evidence that no one
thing, however put together by the human brain to endure, succeeds
ultimately in maintaining itself or that which it dreams it will
maintain. Religions come and go. Laws are written and fade away. Moral
laws change with groups and climates. There remains only this necessity
for equation, some form of adjustment, reciprocity, balance between the
integral factors of each group, good, bad or indifferent, which no one
thinks of translating as the _only omnipresent evidence of so-called
Divine Will_. Indeed, since it is not necessarily directly connected
with the welfare of the individual but is something to which,
willy-nilly, he must at least roughly adjust himself, however
successfully he may temporarily evade it, if he wishes to live, it has
come to be looked upon by him as the machinations of a devil who opposes
his God. In other words, dogmatic morals, as we understand these, have
been introduced, although these same, or our interpretation of what is
essential to the welfare of life, may not agree with the larger chemic
urge and the import of this compulsion of balance as Nature views or
uses the same.
It follows, then, that many things which we now consider essential to
our racial or spiritual development, especially those which are intended
to fit us for a purely mythical heaven, may not be essential at all.
Especially may this be true of the many taboos and so-called moral
social arrangements which we have established here to make comfortable
our little passing state and which, by a process of egoism and
self-interest, we ascribe to the will of God. Asceticism in morals, as
well as self-imposed deprivations of any kind intended to bring us into
conformity with the exact righteousness of Nature or God, may have
nothing to do with any Divine mandate or impulse whatsoever. The
investigations of the mechanists and the monists throw a very disturbing
light on Nature (Loeb; Crile; Snyder). Excess, we know--or its
equivalent, strain--is destructive to any organism, and the dogmatic
moralist may well caution against it. Yet does a Creator who creates by
billions and allows whole races, such as the American Indians, for
example, to disappear almost in a generation, care particularly whether
this, that or the other organism is broken down by this, that or the
other strain or excess? It may be that excess is entirely gratifying to
Him or It--like a shell maker pleased with the explosive power of his
shells. What is one man, one organism, one race of organisms, to a thing
that produces them by quintillions, age in and age out? So a
conditioning law of equation or balance which compels a rough
reciprocity between parts, all parts, may not remove the effects of or
the necessity for strain or excess in the relationship of some men or
some races, or all men and all races. War certainly indicates as much,
and all the plottings and struggles and injustices and deaths which are
concomitants if not essentials of all forms of progress. Again, what
_we_ might consider necessary in the way of equation or balance, and
what _Nature_ would, are two very different things. Our very finite
minds can see but finitely. So our seemingly necessary limitations on
individuals may be accidental and trivial and so detrimental to the
larger purposes of Nature, which must betimes sweep them away with huge
murderous wars or movements and so restore the changeful balance which
she must keep in ways different from the minor arrangements which spring
up here.
Even now Nature may be constructing individuals and forces which will
completely undo, or at least enlarge, our theories of individual
limitations and powers. We do not as yet know what Nature is seeking
through man, if anything--certainly not his immortality; there is no
evidence as to that--nor can we guess how she is seeking it. One thing
we do know: our impulses do not always accord with moral or religious
law, the so-called will of the Creator here on earth, and yet our
impulses are assuredly provided us by a Creator, if no more than the
mechanistic one of the chemists and physicists. We do not compound
ourselves. We cannot always by any means control the impulses of our
compounds. Only the warring, frustrating impulses of other compounds (or
individuals or forces, social opinion being a phase of them) do that for
us; hence we are not privileged to say that God, or the Creator, wishes
us to do thus and so. We can only say that changing conditions compel us
to or prevent us from doing thus and so. Nature may wish us to be
forceful in many strange ways in order that we may contest, bicker with
other things equally forceful in other ways (all created by Her) so that
out of the contest such as we see may come something which we can never
see. Who knows?
In other words, all we can say is that Nature has supplied us with
certain forces or chemic tendencies and responses, and has also provided
(rather roughly in certain instances) the checks and balances which
govern the same. Our puny strengths will permit us to do only so much;
no more. That these strengths are being enlarged from time to time is
rather obvious (consider a man like John D. Rockefeller, or Napoleon,
and an ape). At the same time the limitations essential to balance,
reciprocity, part with part and force with force, are apparently never
set aside entirely. Both Rockefeller and Napoleon find themselves
decidedly limited in their powers, compelled to compromise with many
things in moving to attain their dreams. And their wishes in the main
have far transcended the dictates of ethics, as these have hitherto been
conceived. For the most part they ignored reported or written ethics,
sticking by seemingly unethical forces, subtlety, craft, the power to do
all that their strength or their instincts permitted them to do. And
Nature appears to have no objection to them or their results, has
furthered them indeed, nor has She apparently to millions of creatures
like them in spirit, or worse, as we see _worse_ here, for She permits
their appearance and uses the result.
Let me vary the argument slightly.
The shelves of our law libraries are packed to suffocation and moldering
to decay with laws ethically intended to govern things which man has
never yet been able to govern entirely and probably never will be,
although the instinct so to legislate probably conforms to the
mechanistic instinct for balance and proportion in all things. In
England they hung men for sheep-stealing a few hundred years ago, and
yet sheep were and still are stolen in England. It is death to kill your
neighbor, and yet when did man ever cease killing his neighbor? Is it
not as often and as indifferently done to-day as ever? It means from one
to twenty years in the penitentiary in America to steal, and yet men
steal. It is written that one should never covet his neighbor’s wife and
that adultery is a crime, yet when has the ultimate conception of these
things been more than a dream? Man, or at least a part of him, a
fragment of the chemical whole of which he is a part or an expression,
wishes and writes laws to confirm these, but in spite of all so-called
spiritual instruction, an ordered scheme of spiritual rewards and
punishments, he is still not chemically able to accommodate himself to
these things--not all of him, at least. Nature, his sheer, rank human
nature, which sinks deep below into mechanistic, chemical and physical
laws and substances, will not let him. Instead he resorts to subtlety,
craft--a very unspiritual but plainly natural or chemical thing. The
fact is that the power of certain individuals to do is only limited by
the power of certain other individuals to resist, and their natures and
tendencies are by no means the same. Yet this squares with the first or
pyknotic law of energy, as laid down by Vogt.[A] The self-integrating
force of one individual is limited by the self-integrating force of all
other individuals; which is, if it is anything, Newton’s law working out
in human affairs. There is a rough law of balance indicated by this
opposition and strain, but nothing more.
I once talked with a discouraged, or let us say pessimistic,
humanitarian, the twenty best years of whose life had been devoted to
corrective and ameliorative work among dependents and defectives, young
and old, criminals, the physically undermined and the insane. This man
had worked to have various laws passed in various States which would
tend to lessen the brutality of their treatment and also to bring about
some method whereby their self-reproduction would be painlessly stopped.
His idea, after twenty years of experimenting, was that the processes by
which the criminal and defectives generally were being gathered and
governed and improved, however laudable in theory, was destined to
eventually prove economically impossible and so shirked. The tares were
too many, too elusive, too expensive to gather and govern. “The thing
can’t be done,” I remember his saying. “As society is at present
governed or constituted something which is by no means humanitarian or
ideal prevails, and in spite of the best intentions of idealists or
philanthropists you have the enormous toll of inefficiency and nepotism
to contend with. Always the old Adam breaks loose somewhere, and by the
time you have investigated and reinvestigated and built institutions and
passed laws and elected officials the thing becomes a social and
financial burden beyond reckoning--lost,” he added, “in abstrusities and
bad management. Politicians juggle with it, and newer reformers or
reactionaries undo what you have done. Besides,” he concluded, “normal,
healthy men and women do not appear to be able to concern themselves
with the day-to-day variations and aberrations of dependent defectives
and criminal types. You have the spectacle then of official and even
medical neglect, brutality, rotten meat being served to criminals or
those detained or cared for--in short, all the horrors that spring from
some curious opposition in Nature to anything which is not able to take
care of itself. Her plan apparently is to let them die. I tell you that
the law of the survival of the strongest cannot be set aside. Any
attempt to do so merely begets a vast tangle of effort and expense which
results in the final operation of that law anyhow.”
My own observations of the working of various plans and theories
calculated to improve or “save” mankind coincide with this and suggest
to me the conclusion that there is, on the one hand, inherent in the
chemic impulses and appetites of life (which man does not create), an
instinct toward individuality which may be for good or for ill, plus, on
the other hand, this law of balance or equation but over which neither
the humanitarian nor the idealist, any more than the criminal or
indifferent or self-seeking realist, has any control whatever. If this
were not true there would be no explaining such strange social
developments as the lusts of certain individuals, the vast animal
hungers and abnormalities which seem to contradict any possibility of an
exact social equation. While the ascetic passions and self-sacrifice of
such men as St. Francis, Jesus, Buddha and the like may belie an
entirely material or animal interpretation of this very material scene,
the more material one of an Alexander VI., a Medici, a Morgan and a
Gould do suggest that an equation or balance between the types is
holding in Nature. Men do fight and die for idealistic or moral beliefs
just as plainly as they do for material ends. This would indicate, as I
said before, a desire for rough balance or equilibrium in Nature between
the starkest extremes of its creative impulses--equation, equation.
Nothing more nor less.
But a God directing and calling?
Oh, no; not that necessarily, but a condition in Nature itself perhaps
which will not permit it to move save by a process of checks and
balances--variety in unity, and vice versa.
If one takes no more varied types than Christ and Nero, or Alexander VI.
and St. Francis, one sees how plain this is, in so far as our earthly
state is concerned. God, or Nature, or Life, permits both, creates both.
In these examples one sees how the impulses of the flesh always vary and
how difficult it is, where millions outrival these in secret tendencies
and impulses, to suggest a working harmony; and yet there is a harmony
and they do harmonize, or, by triturating the one the other maintain a
working balance, the tendencies of the one being offset by those of the
other, and vice versa.
No less latitude, perhaps, could or would serve in a world or a
universe which breeds individuals by quadrillions, momentarily perhaps,
and which conceals or contains forces of whose impulses, emotions,
necessities we know nothing, and so equation is and can be the only
answer. What can we know, for instance, of the impulses or morals of the
Sun, whose heat apparently breeds all forms of life we know here,
horrific and otherwise? And yet we also know that heat is balanced by
cold in the universe; light by no light; matter by force; tenderness by
savagery; lust by asceticism; love by hate; and so on _ad infinitum_. No
thing is fixed. All tendencies are permitted apparently. Only a balance
is maintained.
The thing which the evolutionist has discovered and put forward with
considerable enthusiasm is this: that life in every form has tended to
evolve from the simple to the complex, and only through a vast
complexity or organization has it managed to attain this spectacle of
things which we call life or beauty--division of itself, as it were. The
complexity of the individual thing which we call a tree or a flower or
an animal, or, if you please, a social state (and indeed those more or
less abstruse things which we know as arts and sciences), are but a
further evolution of the complexity of the world machine, and life has
brought them about and apparently saved them to the world, possibly for
the purpose of partial self-expression. At the same time there has
always been involved in this process the law of the survival of the
strongest or temporarily and accidentally most favored, a process which
the humanitarians are never prone to accept because it belies the theory
of saving anything except by a compensative condition of slaughter and
neglect of other things less strong--or, as the phrase has it, unfit
things. In the theory of the religionist and the moralist the horrific
processes that work in the sea and the jungle, and other unsocialized
and enigmatic phases of imminent life, are entirely outside the scheme
of a just and merciful God or Creator, not countenanced by Him! When His
will is known and His suggestions are obeyed, these will be overcome
and disappear! Well, this may be true, only it does not appear from any
material or mental examination of the scene.
Even now, as we talk of sweeter and less avid processes which might be
brought into play by a superior power, life is maintaining its ancient
balance of evil and good, or extremities of one kind balanced against
extremities of another. Even now, under the very noses of the
religionists and the moralists, these processes are at work and show no
sign of being abated. For every neighborhood of taste and comfort,
witness the vast areas of poverty, poor taste, neglect, dull thought,
inefficiency. For every comfortable man a lean one, or many. For every
mind of the first order a million of a weaker, fumbling character. For
every tender, Christ-like soul how many of another kind--avid, selfish,
cruel, hideous almost! Are the poor governed by the rich--and well? Do
the shrewd rule the ignorant, and to their advantage? Do the strong
control the weak, and to their advantage? Are the inefficient well or
badly housed, well or badly nourished, neglected, left to stew in their
own juice of misery and live and die as best they can, or are they
looked after, as the religionist and moralist suggest and hope for? Only
the dull or dishonest among the moralists and religionists can, it seems
to me, fail to perceive or dare deny what even the dull or the ignorant
now being trampled upon do already vaguely perceive and understand.
And yet behold! the song of ultimate perfection continues yearly, from
century to century, to be sung. The Divine, far-off event (which, if
anything, is Nirvana) is surely coming. A sweeter and less avid process
will be brought into play. Man is to be saved from hunger, cold, thirst,
lust, undue material ambition, by telling him how horrible they are and
asking him to be kind. Well, he may make a comfortable social
organization for himself here on earth, but that will by no means prove
that the universe or God is moral. For, behold--man himself is
superimposed upon other forms of life, a ruthless Lord or devil to
them, and thrives only by their destruction. Do you suppose the ox, the
hog, the horse, the fish, or any of the multitude of creatures man slays
or enslaves in order that he may be comfortable and spiritually at rest,
could be made to look upon him as tender, merciful, a creature
necessarily to be saved to a higher spiritual state--representing, for
instance, an all-kind God? I doubt it. What about the God who allows
their organization and so-called right to life to be disrupted in our
favor? Where the universal harmony, justice, mercy there? We are to
develop a social organization in which gentleness, mercy and harmony
will prevail among us, but we do not hesitate to curb the efforts or
aspirations of lesser creatures, even rival nations--the Indians,
say--in the same direction. In the great days to come no man will
contest with his neighbor, but only with the universe--which of course
raises the question of why fight the universe. And where do the rights
of the universe come in, which we are hoping to rob to our own advantage
and its enslavement?
Aside from the confusion involved as to the character of man and the
governing forces of life, there is no quarrel with a portion of this
theory. To a certain extent harmony, or a “dependent equation,” as
Spencer was pleased to term it, will always be attained between
individuals assembled in vast numbers on earth or in the sea perforce,
because it may not be escaped. If one reads chemistry and physics
correctly it is a condition which underlies everything. An equation
between matter and force and the elements to which apparently they give
rise, must be struck, a balance attained, if life as we see it is to
appear or go on. The slightest disturbance of the existing equations
which produce life as we see it, as Loeb and Crile and others have
shown, ends in monstrosities or confusion, and life as we know it
ceases. In our own social life, if equation did not hold, internecine
contest would soon decimate and gradually eliminate the vast majority of
us. The late great war indicated as much. Indeed there is scarcely any
doubt that social life as we know it will yet need to be organized upon
an even more closely balanced scale than at present, since the elements
and powers which make for contest and self-defense are becoming more
numerous. Hunger, cold, thirst and many other ills to which the flesh is
heir may yet be eliminated among men, or the individuals of one dominant
state. It is now, by certain orders of men and insects; the bee-hive and
the ant-colony offer suggestions. But it does not follow that the basic
elements of Nature or God, or man, would thereby be changed. Is it not
more likely that here and now, in a small way and for the time being,
only their disruptive as opposed to their constructive characteristics
are restrained? Such stabilized centers of motion do occur in Nature
from time to time in small ways and places. All human and animal bodies,
machines and forms of government even, are illustrations in point. But
does that prove or augur that the changeful elemental conditions
everywhere prevailing outside these delicate arrangements in Nature may
not eventually sweep in and make over that which has been established
here into such a condition as we find in the sea, for instance, where
life insistently and apparently mechanistically preys on life? Why not?
The glory of pagan life and art--were they saved? Or was their knell
sounded by the advent of Christianity?
Many, observing only the satisfactory results of harmony or equation or
balance, and entirely failing to note the essential disharmonies out of
which alone harmonies may take their rise, have assumed the existence of
an emasculate God whose virtues are all negative, ignoring the positive
horrors by which we live and progress. For them the cataclysms of
physics, the fumbling failures of biology, are meaningless, if they
exist at all. Yet plainly the creative force is neither as generous nor
as amiable as they think. Rather, brilliant as is all this evolutionary
process, and it reveals startling harmonies, beauties and seeming
intelligence, it still only argues some such fumbling hit-or-miss
mechanistic scheme as the chemists and physicists are beginning to
outline and which allows for far more latitude in morals and conduct, as
well as invention and discovery even, than the religionist has hitherto
been willing to grant. The only one who appears to sense the true
process or processes of Nature is the mechanistic chemist or physicist,
who does not deny the possibility of extremes and horrors existing in
the Divine mind or will of the creative impulse. “Murder,” say these
scientific seekers after truth, or at least their facts point to this,
“is a disturbing and disrupting process. It destroys the equation best
expressed in ‘Live and let live.’ It affects individual peace. If you do
so unto others they will do the same unto you. Chemically and
physically, according to the law of reaction or equation, they cannot
very well avoid it. Therefore do not murder.” Yet where is there any
Divine command in that? Is it not rather a simple and easily
understandable interpretation of a very obvious and inescapable law of
equation, under which nevertheless, so roughly is this law adjusted and
so casually does it work, murder and many other forms of non-equation
may and do take their rise and do persist? If that is God or Good, then
God permits murder, repays with murder, or asks you to be the judge as
to whether you will tolerate murder in your State. Rather, to the
physicist and chemist, it appears to be not so much a Divine command as
an accidental and inescapable condition of equation.
We are told, by way of dogmatic moral comfort, that man has achieved
somewhat that the animals have not, and that therefore he is superior.
But also, as is now becoming perfectly plain, he has been able to
discover and perpetuate for his own satisfaction crimes and iniquities
for which no animal apparently within its small range of instinct or
mechanistic control has the skill. Nature makes both, yet she does not,
or cannot, or at least has not, made the animals as delicately and
resourcefully evil in some things as is man. That is why he is able to
dominate them. In one way, then, man is worse than the animals, and in
another better--a balance presumably in the favor of man, though not
necessarily so. The truth is that most of the ways wherein man has been
differentiated from the animals by forces over which he has no control
concern not ethics, as we understand and act upon them, but mechanical
articulations and utilitarian comforts, the construction and normal use
of which lie entirely apart from the realm of ethics. There is nothing
either moral or immoral in the development and use or non-use of steam,
electricity, plumbing, the tractor engine, automobiles and so on. They
are mechanistic and non-moral. Thus we have developed architecture,
machinery and the arts. It is true that in so far as man himself is
concerned these are helpful to him in his mass phase and provide a
larger freedom, which has resulted in a large experience, hence
intelligence or comprehension in every direction. Yet have they improved
his morals? Or lowered them? Who would say so? Yet perceiving this
development or change, and, more faintly, the need of balance and
equation which runs through all and underlies all, man has set about the
task of writing about it, framing the inescapable equational laws which
all changes suggest and compel into definite unbreakable commands from a
definite God, singing songs about Him, painting pictures of Him, and
directing attention to what man has ignorantly assumed to be a universal
source of supply which will or should permit the greatest possible
number to live under some such scheme of equation as is here suggested.
Unfortunately this has not been proved as yet, and at any rate it is not
the same as the presumably provable scheme of moral order which has been
foisted upon man by the dull, designing or poetically enthusiastic of
all ages, and which involves the laying aside of nearly every forceful,
vigorous, natural, or human or pagan, attribute. Quite the contrary.
In this connection I should like to reiterate that to the Christian and
other metaphysical idealists neither dishonesty nor vice nor any crime
is contemplated by God, and therefore should not exist, any more than
any other variation from that perfect state, best indicated perhaps by
what the Ten Commandments forbid and the Beatitudes imply. God does not
will them. He personally resents and will punish their appearance. The
first part of this (i. e., that He does not will them) might be accepted
as true if the fact that he permits them, or at least that they _are_,
in spite of Him, not denied. But of course religion, as all those who
philosophically struggle with life now know or should, is an
abstraction, an ideal, whose dogmas can only in part be approximated in
life. For life, as we nearly all know by now or should, is a shifty and
evasive mechanism, chemic in part at least, and material and
inscrutable, with which the abstractions of the religionist have little
if anything in common. The best that religion and ethics have so far
done is to take credit for the inherent and necessary tendency to
compromise which has previously been indicated and which is manifested
by all phases of natural energy, as much by that shown in our body
politic as anywhere else. Indeed, the very best that religion can show
is no better than that which life, or Nature Herself, could and did long
before any religion appeared, namely, a rough equation, a balance
struck; so that if a man had done a consciously wrong thing in one place
he was chemically or emotionally moved to do a right thing in another,
and if his actions were bad in one way it might be that he was compelled
by forces outside his control to counterbalance them by good ones in
another. All animal forms above those merely mechanistic or tropic
(those governed by tropisms of various kinds) appear to display most of
the virtues exercised by humans--the care of their young, for instance,
distress at their loss, loyalty, ability to organize and so observe
group laws; characteristics celebrated by man, where exercised by him,
as virtues, beatitudes and what not else. Yet these lower forms cannot
possibly know of religious or moral precepts in any revealed or
instructed sense, via a Messiah or Redeemer. Instincts or tropisms as
developed and verified by oppositions or aids (accidental or
otherwise)--once more the law of balance or equation--appear to have
been their sole guides. Hence to the religionist and moralist, thus far
at least, they have been beyond the pale of ethical consideration,
things almost beyond the willing, and so beyond the care, of the Creator
Himself. An especial opponent of God or Good had to be devised in order
to take care of them. And yet are they not an excellent illustration of
this same creative and governing force in Nature which, while apparently
seeking variety in unity, is itself subject to a law of balance or
harmony as well as one of disharmony or change, and this without any
evidence self-conscious on its part? At least the investigations of the
chemists and the physicists thus far appear to indicate as much.
“Vengeance is mine” declared the old Hebraic Jahveh, and by that very
assertion he admitted that he did not expect to establish the
abstractions of right, truth, justice and mercy on earth but rather,
since he could not, he would at least attempt to strike a balance and
would exact, in the form of pain or disaster, repayment for things done
in opposition to his code.
Well, that requires no Sinaitic command or religious law to make it
true. It is not a matter for great churches and confessionals and pence
and genuflections--or is it? It is true, whether God or Moses or any one
else ever said so or not. It is a material and an economic fact as well
as a chemic or psychic law. If you wish to glorify God or Nature for
that, well and good. Your mood may be admirable or interesting, if not
exactly necessary. But certainly, whether one admits the existence of a
self-willing Creator or not, it is too much to say that man obtains
exact justice or that an exact return is made anywhere for energies
expended, ideals struggled for, efforts, good, bad or indifferent, made.
We know that is not true. Nor is it true that there is not a counter
impulse to withhold it. There is. And men, fellow-units in the great
self-balancing cosmos, all too frequently reflect that impulse. Man is
no more essentially just than he is unjust. He is an impulse, a will to
live, a sharply reflected chemical and physical impulse in Nature, which
acts or reacts as the nature of other chemical and physical stimuli in
immediate contact with him suggests or compels, and which same may be by
no means as moral as we think. Man, as a representation of chemical and
physical impulses coming from somewhere, has an innate desire for power
for extreme movement for himself; but so have all other mechanical or
physical representations of that impulse. And it is but the balancing
pressure of his fellows which keeps him in position at or near a median
line. If you examine him carefully you will find that in the main he
desires so-called “justice” for himself only, a fair balance for
himself, liberty for himself, or that which is related to him via
pleasure or profit, and so on _ad infinitum_. At the same time he is a
slave, a tool, a medium for something, an intruded if not
self-intruding, self-seeking insect, but without power to control or
fend against major impulses and powers. Still, between man and man,
tribe and tribe, nation and nation, there are these necessary equations
or balances plus their internal hopes or chemic tendencies, each one for
himself, to change and achieve; yet the same being but roughly worked
out; on the one hand to balance or equation in favor of all the others,
on the other hand to supremacy or extreme liberty of movement for each.
Where only failure is achieved there is either a lull, temporary only,
or a storm soon or late (revolution), or periods of horror in which
chaos rules, or peace in which nothing is achieved. The world is sad
over its inability to obtain freedom, great scope of emotion, for
itself, or gleeful because of its triumph in this direction. But all the
time it is struggling and maintaining but a rough and in the main brief
balance, part with part or unit with unit.
One might go on indefinitely contemplating other phases of this same
equational law, its relation to love of parents, love of country, love
of home, love of one’s neighbor, love of this, love of that. Are not all
of these held up as duties, virtues, perfections even Sinaitic commands,
as in “Honor thy father and thy mother,” when as a matter of fact and
inwardly we know that this is a matter of equation or balance and cannot
absolutely as a commandment from on high exist where no reasonable
return in kind is predicated. What, love a shameless, brutal, unparental
or non-filial father or mother, son or daughter, in whom, let us say,
exists not one redeeming trait or quality of all that we consider
essential to or characteristic of those states? It is not chemically
therefore not humanly possible. What is meant is that it is not only
possible but natural to make a reasonable return where affection,
kindness or care has been extended. Now while it is entirely conceivable
that one might love one who was cruel to oneself and generous to others,
or generous to oneself and cruel to others, who in some way or some one
direction fulfilled some phases of balance or equation, in however weak
or impossible a way, still one could not possibly love one who was in no
wise kind or generous to any one, a thing without reciprocal or
balancing relations in some direction. The law of balance or equation
which governs in all processes, even thought, will not permit it. There
must be something given in some way, directly or indirectly, before
anything can be returned or evolved, even in thought. And if one
reverses the picture and attempts to conceive of hating some one or
thing equationally just, fair or balanced, not attempting to take from
any one or thing too much and not withholding from any one or thing that
which is equationally his, it is quite as psychically impossible. One
cannot cerebrate inimically toward that person or thing as being evil,
reprehensible or what not. It cannot be done. Sometimes, where by reason
of plenty or inherent weakness of mind or force, or carelessness of
thought or interest, an individual is in any way indifferent to a
“reasonable” or balanced return to himself for effort made, labor given,
thought expended and what not, and where this results in no injury to
himself or others, it is entirely possible to look upon him with
indifference or as a fool, or as one who is weak-minded or not capable
of balancing himself against the shrewd and self-interested minds of
others. But such indifference or lack of self-interest would not
indicate that one looked upon him as being evil, scarcely even a
discreditable force, save possibly where his operations, or lack of
them, affected the interests or rights or privileges of another or
others.
Not love of God, then, it would seem, nor fear of God, although these
abstractions have come to be real enough to some minds, prevents one
individual from overriding the dreams and hopes of his neighbor, but
fear of retaliation which his selfishness might produce. “Thou shalt
not” springs plainly from “Thou hadst best not, it is dangerous,” to
which might be added the strangest quality of all, the tendency in large
or small bodies or masses to quiescence, the love of peace, or inertia.
Our evoluted mechanistic chemism has become so diffused or varied that
we may even now speak of such intangible and yet vital forces as love of
the fixed scene, which appears to be little more than a reflected form
of helio, or ego, or someother form of tropism, the inherent power in
everything to attract something to itself and so maintain itself, for
the time being anyhow. That things are inclined to a static or inert
state or to congeal and so stratify and endure in that form (Nirvana?)
is as true as that they must change; and, under certain conditions,
Nature seems to abhor too much speed, as too little.
Is there anywhere in this to be found that universal right, truth,
justice, mercy, as we have hitherto deemed it or them to be or exist?
Perhaps not, but it is all of so-called right, truth, mercy or justice,
universal or otherwise, that we will ever know, all of it that is
involved with life. Does this, by any chance, contain truth? Yes,
indeed, it is truth, for it is a fact. Is it right? Well, for life as we
find it conditioned it is apparently the only way. Who can suggest a
better? Should the fact that we find ourselves thus conditioned,
confronted by Nature in all Her complexity and with only this necessity
for equation to fall back on, disconcert or dishearten us? Need it or
must it take the savor out of life? No; not, at least, in my judgment.
Life in its most terrible as well as its most halcyon aspects is at once
an enticing and a fit game. It seems well enough suited to our
capacities, and we to it, since essentially we are of it--it, in fact.
At least it leaves or provides us much to strive for, and strife is the
only key to knowledge or sensation and life that we have. Abstractions
and theories are good as games at which the human mind may play if it
chooses, and whenever life becomes too severe for any group or part of
it it is easy enough to invent a theory or abstraction which will then
make it seem different. And this is almost invariably done, as witness
all the impossible religions and theories that at one time and another
have filled the world. Like chess or checkers, they furnish a diversion
or relief to life-weary minds. If you have nothing better to do even a
religion may be worth while. At worst it can only narrow your vision,
and if that is a comfort--well, it is a comfort, but you do not thus
escape the essential facts of life. You merely invent a shield against
their too-sharp blows. Regardless of whatever dogmatic moralities may
have been dreamed, or yet may be, or attempted, life is still avid,
treacherous, astounding. Our little safety, if we have any, lies not in
the desires or intentions of our fellow-mortals, good, bad or
indifferent, or in their churches or creeds, or ours really, but in
their limitations. _They dare not do unto us for fear of what we will do
to them, or of what the machinery of equation which life has set up or
is conditioned by and now operates, will do to them._ All else is a
poet’s dream.
What, then, shall man do? Weep for that? Shall he despair and call life
a failure and a torment? Shall he say that it is limited, that there is
no opportunity for progress, or that the sweetness of those things
defined as love, charity, mercy, neighborliness and race sociability are
by such a governing condition destroyed? Not at all. Wherein is the
temperament of Nature Herself, Her sweetness, if such there be; Her
romance, if such there be; Her beauty, if such there be, altered by
this? Life is as it is--active, dancing, changeful, beautiful, at once
brutal and tender--regardless of how our theories would seek to make it
seem, and though it does as it chooses at times, or appears to, and
invents or assumes various guises of perfection, it is as it has always
been, both good and bad, yet held in a kind of equational vise or
harmony--neither too good nor too bad--or we would not now be here at
all, any of us, to tell the tale. As it is, and well within its
equational swing or law, there is room for the will to superiority in
the super-man as well as the trembling fears of the least of created
creatures. Nor is it impossible for man, with his puny strength or with
such force as he may gather, to attempt to upset this very equation and
so rule all; or, on the contrary, choose to live in sweetest peace with
his neighbor, if he can. He may, and great will be the wonder and charm
of his existence if he no more than try. But that he should succeed in
permanently so doing is not within his scope unless he should grow to be
the universe itself. On the other hand, under this same controlling
equation, a man may be a Colossus and bestride the world without
upsetting the equation ultimately. Like Alexander, he may sigh for more
worlds to conquer; or, like Hannibal, take refuge in despair and death.
Or, better yet, like some forceful and yet humble laborer at some small
task, he may seek to hide himself away in some simple peaceful realm,
free of the storms which rock these greater worlds, and still be secure
in one of those minor equilibriums which in the shadow of some of the
greater ones are always holding somewhere in part. For, roughly,
equation is always holding in one or many forms--dependent equations,
which consist of many, many equations or balances, joined in some still
greater one or synthesis--and apparently always will. Who shall say? To
our present senses the ultimate facts of life are not altering;
although that is not for petty man to know.
On the other hand, I should say that the condition of equation which is
everywhere evident does not deny or belie any elements of softness,
color, beauty or art which now sweeten, or seem, to, a picture which
must seem to many inherently grim. God, Good, Nature, Force, is not now,
and never has been apparently, without some of these aspects in part,
nor bare of the easing limitations indicated by the Ten Commandments,
the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes. For before these were _it_ was, and
if they are or ever were true they still are so, for they took their
rise out of it and so must be and remain in it, forever and ever,
emanations or adjustments (equation, no doubt) suggested by the desire
for expression on the part of the cosmos as a whole. Yet the knowledge
that they are the result of a condition or equation which the universe,
the life force itself, cannot escape, is or should be most encouraging.
Nature must let many things live in reasonable equation or peace, for it
is in them and they in it. “I am in the Father; the Father is in me.”
If, then, man is savage he is also tender, inherently so apparently, for
by what measure would he measure savageness if not by its contrary? And
if he is avid, centripetal, individual, is he not somewhat of their
contrary also? In truth, somewhere in the scheme of things is implanted
a love of beauty and order as well as their contraries, which can only
find expression via equation, and this it is, chemical, inherent
awareness of it no doubt, which eases the ache of existence for us all
(God, man, devil). For if life loves change, movement, difference,
contest, it also plainly loves their contraries, for these exist, and we
could not know the one without the other. Order exists as a half of its
opposite, disorder, and the one could not well be without the other, and
peace exists, if at all, as the complement or antithesis of what is not
peaceful. Yet through all and all, and in all and all, are the sting and
gayety of change and the consciousness of it, and these remain,
possibly forever and ever, outside Nirvana, which Nature may never wish
to see or know. It may be impossible for Her to die or be still.
Equation, then, is that which is involved in the lust of the lover for
his sweetheart, and her acceptance; the husband for his wife, and her
faith; the mother for her child, and its love; the citizen for his
neighbor; the individual for his friend. Art, the love of life for
itself, is nothing more than a synthesis of many equations whereby many
lovely harmonies and their opposites are expressed or implied. Hunger,
balanced against satiation, creates more beauty. Life builds and wills
far beyond the ken of man or his companion animals, and all that he can
know is the chemic thrill of life, its joys, the necessity of equation
and so-called fair play, or rhythm and balance. For, behold, life is
ever dancing and does not will to be still. Not to want too much,
because one cannot get too much; not to seek to devour the whole world,
because one cannot; not to threaten, because of vanity and
self-appreciation, all else with extermination, because one cannot
possibly exterminate all else without disturbing the general balance and
so bring the weight, the conditioning and crushing force of equation
itself upon oneself, is to say what may offend the individual life-lover
but which nevertheless produces the only condition in which the general
totality in all its glittering variety, which it appears to crave, can
best express itself outside Nirvana. And this it is which should drive
the fog of religious theory out of our minds.
For why pray in beggarly fashion for that which will be, whether we pray
or not--which, as the mechanists believe and show cannot escape its own
destiny? Rather sing and be joyful, I should say, for one’s unescapable
share in so great a spectacle. The game is open, free, a thrashing,
glorious scene. Our God, if we have one, is not a namby-pamby,
milk-and-water solution, suitable for the stomachs and optics of still
more namby-pamby men, but a vast somewhat which offers a splendid
universe-eating career to the giant, if he wills, an opportunity to
thrive and grow to even the most spindling of beginners. Our God, if we
have one, is a vast somewhat too great for the perception or
understanding or destruction or solution of any minor portion of Him,
such as we are. He is a creator of spectacles, a slinger of
thunder-bolts, a breather of fire, a master of cataclysm. His, or Its,
least breath is storm. Its sigh is earthquake or orbital derangement. No
attributes such as man can conceive can apply--neither good nor evil,
virtue or its opposite--for these apply only as mild suggestions at
moments of equation in one minor part of the great whole or another. Our
God is tragedy and comedy, terror and delight. He is limitless
opportunity and endless opposition and destruction, for His way is
extremes in equation, and nothing more and nothing less.
What then? Despair over that? Is there not, in all conscience, under a
loose equation (loose and operative only in extremes) room for all the
lusts, the terrors, the wonders, the simplicities of the greatest as
well as the least? Alexander may yet be again, or the devil himself in
all his power and lurid glory, before he is crushed and set aside, for
the time being, by his inherent antithesis, the thing which is not
devil.
And as for the religionist, may not Jesus, St. Francis, St. Simon
Stylites come again? Let man fight for their return if he will. Who is
to gainsay him?--not God, Force, the Universal Substance. Obviously it
does not care how it expresses itself, so long as it achieves avid,
forceful, artistic expression.
PHANTASMAGORIA.
CHARACTERS:
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
BEAUTY
AMBITION
PITY
LOVE
HATE
DESPAIR
REASON
HOPE
FEAR
GREED
FIRST }
SECOND }
THIRD }
FOURTH } POWERS OF DARKNESS
FIFTH }
SIXTH }
SERAPHIM
CHERUBIM
_Clouds upon clouds of birds, snakes, fish, animals, men, flowers,
trees, planets, suns._
SCENE I--_The House of Birth_.
SCENE II--_The House of Life_.
SCENE III--_The House of Death_.
SCENE I. THE HOUSE OF BIRTH
SCENE: _Darkness and illimitable space. Æons of time, as measured
by the illusion of time, elapse._ THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE, _as
force, inert, yet all-in-all, rests quiescent. A faint pulsing
begins. Without thought or reason, restless, chaotic, the idea of
separateness and individuality generates--an insane dream. The
cloudy length of a giant outlines itself, reclining in endless
space. It appears and disappears, now a thigh, now an arm, only to
fade again. The vague outlines of a brow and cheek appear, only to
fade again. Æons of time elapse. The illusion reasserts itself.
Cloudy fire-mists pour from his nostrils. Poles of light erect
themselves from materialized temples. Blazing suns and meteors
burst forth and swirl about his head. Strange and multitudinous
forms manifest themselves--animals, birds, fishes, horned and
winged things. They appear and disappear, as thoughts form and
fade. He is blind, aged, insane. He erects imaginary titanic arms
and rubs his changing, stupendous face with his changing hands._
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He sinks back wearily, all but the
outlines of his head disappearing._)
BEAUTY (_a thought_)
(_Leaping, pink-limbed and perfect, from his brain, a figure of
delight._) Lord, thou hast created me! I am thy perfect thought, thy
happiest illusion! I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped! (_She
springs sinuously among the spinning, changing spheres, a radiant smile
upon her face, her arms tossed upward in delight._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Materializing himself fully, a paretic smile upon his lips. He rubs
his face and imagines eyes, giving himself sight, and surveys her
broodingly._) Have I created thee? Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He rubs his
flaming hair._) I must not forget thee! I must not forget thee! Oh, ho,
ho! Thou art Beauty! (_His expression changes; an unimaginable weariness
settles upon his face, aged, æonic. He frowns and leers and partly
fades, re-establishing himself after a time. As he does so_, AMBITION,
_a sinister thought, club in hand and darkling and scowling, a figure of
terror, leaps from his eyes_.)
AMBITION
(_Brandishing his club._) I will be obeyed! I will be obeyed! Out of thy
terror, Lord, thou hast created me! War and strife will I have! War!
War! (_He struts and stares._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_The darkling mood passing, a light of momentary peace settling on his
face. He gazes at the figure tolerantly._) Have I created thee? Weary!
Weary! I am weary! (_He stretches his arms._) But stay! I am lonely. Be
thou what thou art. (_He draws himself to a sitting position, all the
height and depth of space._)
BEAUTY
(_Threading a necklace of suns._) I will be worshiped! I will be
worshiped! (_She croons joyously._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_His mood changing, a giant despair creeping into his eyes._) Forever
and ever! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Forever and ever! It is a dream! (_He staggers
to his feet, the great shadowy arms flailing wildly. As he does so he
imagines Space and Time, and begins to wander down their lengths,
staggering as he goes. From his brow leap_ HATE, DESPAIR, PITY, HOPE,
FEAR, _thoughts all, the last two with great round eyes and open mouths.
At the same time clouds upon clouds of unimaginable forms and
characters, previously non-existent, come into being, the product of his
fancy. Suns, worlds, fire-mists, swarms of birds, snakes, fishes,
animals and men are born, strange wraiths that float in wreaths about
him and traverse all immensity. They circle, murmur, mutter, cry. The
avatars of men come forth, huge forms of gas. They are preceded and
followed by vast clouds of thoughts of their own--ravening, embodied
fancies that bicker and contest. These immense companies and semblances
appear and disappear, as the primary figure thinks or loses memory of
what he has thought. He alternately laughs and groans, maundering._)
BEAUTY
(_Dancing on before._) I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!
AMBITION
(_Gathering at his back vast clouds of restless, threatening figures
like himself._) I am his thought of strength! I am his thought of power.
I am his thought of rage! I am his thought of contest! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
Follow me! Follow me! See, we will sow destruction! We will spread
despair! We will slay! We will burn! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Wildly, his fancy flaming furiously._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! I am God! I am
that I am--all in all! I am my dream of myself! I will dream me dreams,
visions. These are my creations, all! (_He turns and surveys his endless
fancies of horror and delight._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Come, Art! Come, Love!
Come, Hope! Come, Death! Dream as I dream! Create destiny, suffer! I am
God! I cannot die! Insane! Insane! Insane! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He shouts
in agony, then joy, then sobs, staggering as he does so, ending in a
gale of lunatic laughter._)
PITY
(_To_ LOVE, _hovering near_.) We are his children; and we can do
nothing?
LOVE
Nothing, save he think on us.
PITY
(_To_ HOPE.) Canst thou do nothing?
HOPE
Nothing, save he think on me and thee.
HATE
(_Clasping the hand of_ DESPAIR.) Come aside. Are not we his thought
also? What have we in common with them?
DESPAIR
(_Darkly._) Nothing! Nothing! Yet are we his thought also, but not of
them! No, no, no! He should sleep again! He should sleep!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Staggering and writhing._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! I am God! I
dream me dreams! I build me endless wonders, endless pleasures, endless
horrors! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He staggers madly on._)
BEAUTY
Build thou me temples of beauty, Lord! I will be worshiped! I will be
worshiped!
AMBITION
Make thou me worlds and legions! Worlds! Worlds! And legions! I would
rule! I would slay! I would burn!
LOVE
Oh, but wilt thou make flowers and vast realms of quiet places, Lord? Or
but little valleys, if thou wilt? Make streams and pretty shelters! Give
not all to Ambition, Lord! Give not all to war!
HATE
(_Springing before his face._) Make thou me implements of terror! Create
thou me forms of horror, of evil! Spin thou me dark chains and darker
places! Make thou tortures of failure and regret, Lord--tortures!
Tortures! (_He glowers about him._)
PITY
Nay, Lord, let not all be of horror and hate! Think thou on me, Lord, of
sweet pity and tender things! Or, if thou canst not, think thou but of
ways that I may heal what Hate will destroy, what Ambition would crush.
Think thou thus, Lord! I am a thought of thine also!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Wearily._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He staggers on._)
FEAR
Lord, do thou protect me! Do thou conceal me! Forget me not, Lord!
Forget me not! I fear! I fear!
DESPAIR
Why dost thou not sleep, Lord? Of what avail are we, thy fancies? Oh,
why dost thou not sleep? Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Staggering on._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Space--Time--I have
made me these! Suns--Planets--I have made me these! Love--Hate--I have
made me these! Hope--Fear--I have made me these! Beauty--I have made me
this! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He staggers on, gesticulating
and laughing stupendously._)
BEAUTY
(_Wildly._) I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!
SCENE II: THE HOUSE OF LIFE.
SCENE: _The cloudy realms of space. At a point, halls of
illimitable and indescribable splendor, the colorings of the dawn.
Beyond, a swirling belt of suns and satellites glittering thinly
against the dark. Beyond this, in measureless nothingness, the
suggestion of other clouds of suns and planets, spinning. At the
center, the Presence, couched upon gold and porphyry, high-piled,
cloud on cloud. Poles of outpouring thought, great flames, radiate
from his brows; about him a nimbus of fire. He is now fully
self-materialized and concentrated, but sits quiescent, weary,
lonely, a compendium of vagrom, changeful, insane emotions and
ideas. Immediately before him_, BEAUTY, LOVE, PITY, HOPE,
REASON--_colorful shadows all--as well as beasts, birds, fishes,
reptiles, flowers, trees; men and women in cloudy, wraith-like
masses. Above him, immense legions of_ CHERUBIM _and_ SERAPHIM,
_figures of translucent light, radiant, choral. In the background_,
AMBITION; _about him swirl, darkling_, HATE, FEAR, GREED, DESPAIR,
_and behind them, cloud upon cloud, sinister figures, emissaries,
dreams, the darker products of the Lord’s fancy_.
SERAPHIM AND CHERUBIM
(_Fanning with glittering wings._) Hail, our Creator! Hail, Lord! Do
thou remain forever in thought our Creator, our Thinker! Blessed be thy
reality! Hail! Hail!
BEAUTY
(_Surveying from a glistering footstool, nearest of all the swarming
universe._) Am I not beautiful, Lord? Am I not thy thought of Beauty?
Art thou not content to think on me, thy first thought? And shall I not
be thy last? Thou hast but commanded, and they worship me! Thou but
thinkest, and I am supernal in beauty! (_She smiles._) They worship me!
They worship me!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Broodingly._) Sweet thought--my dearest thought!
AMBITION
(_Clanking ponderous armor, a cloudy giant in moody meditation._) We
wait! We wait! He thinks not on us! He thinks not on us. Now are his
thoughts of drooling pleasure--of Beauty, of Hope, Peace--pale nothings
all--Seraphim and Cherubim, mere fluttering figures of light! Beauty
reigns! Hope and Reason and Pity are at her feet! See how the universe
peoples itself with these, his fancies! He dreams but fair dreams!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_To_ BEAUTY, _turning slowly and viewing complacently the immensity and
beauty of his fancy_.) Art thou pleased, then, with what I have made for
thee? See, see--dreams, dreams, sweet dreams all--mad fancies all--mad!
Mad! That which I make is madness all--disordered dreams! I am mad, mad!
BEAUTY
Wondrous, Lord, of whom I am the first! Great Creator! Thou art wonder
and beauty all. Sweet are thy dreams! Sweet thy madness! Sweet am I! But
sleep no more, Lord! Dream on. It is sweet to be worshiped so! I would
be worshiped! I would be worshiped!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Sayest thou so, perfect thought? It is sweet madness? Oh, ho, ho, ho! A
thing of now, and then no longer! Thou art a fair dream, a dear one, but
nothing--nothing! Is not that transcendant sorrow--madness?
BEAUTY
(_Caressingly._) Oh, think not so, Lord! Think not so! A dear dream! A
wondrous dream!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Darkly and broodingly._) What am I? What art thou? What are these?
(_He waves a vast hand._) What it all is I cannot think--or why--or
whence--or where. I dream and sleep--I sleep and dream! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
Oh, ho, ho, ho! A dream! A dream! Sayest thou a sweet dream? A sweet
dream! Oh, ho, ho, ho! I have lost the key! I have lost the key! (_He
laughs loudly, sadly._)
AMBITION
(_In the background, rumbling._) He has lost the key! He has lost the
key!
BEAUTY
A sweet dream, Lord! A sweet dream! Sleep no more, Lord! Sleep no more!
It is all too sweet! Sleep no more! (_She smiles._)
AMBITION
(_Restlessly._) He dreams but useless things! We grow to thin nothings!
(_He clanks his armor weakly._)
PITY
Think kindly, Lord! Kind and tender thoughts! It is best ever!
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS
(_Rumbling._) Hail! Let Hope be forgotten! And Love! And Pity! Hail!
BEAUTY
(_Rising and laying a hand upon his brow._) Lord, I am thy first-born.
After me came these. (_She motions to_ HOPE, PITY, REASON.) I am thy
first thought, thy thought of Beauty! Say it! Remember me! Forget me
not! All else avails so little! And think thou not on Ambition or Hate.
They would destroy--even me! Even me! (_She smiles._)
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS
(_Thundering_:) Yea, even Beauty, Lord! What is Beauty to thee?
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Gazing dully._) Beauty! Beauty! Can I remember thee always, even
though I would? Thine eyes! What is it I meant by thine eyes? (_He
gazes into them._) Mad! Mad! Mad!
AMBITION
(_Angrily, clanking his armor._) He drools and dreams! Me, his best
thought--his greatest--he forgets! I am his horror, his strength, his
despair, his power--yet he thinks not on me! Beauty! Beauty! And I wait
in shadow! I, his rage--yet he sleeps in vagrom thoughts of beauty!
Awake, Lord! Forget these pale shadows! Are not thy darker thoughts
better? Think thou on me! On Power! Come, Hate! Come, Anger! Come,
Despair! Come, Fear! Sit ye all with me!
FEAR
Only let me return unto thee, Lord! I fear! I fear!
BEAUTY
(_To_ AMBITION, _angrily_.) And if he thought on thee, what then?
Storms, horrors, all blackness and rage! Thou art such! Is not Beauty
better?--this light?--this song?--these Cherubim and Seraphim? Wilt thou
have naught but shadow? Avaunt! To think on thee is death, destruction,
the end of all! Oh, no, Lord! Oh, no, no, no! Put them all hence! Think
thou on me! Are not all thy fair dreams, in which suns cluster and
lovely forms bud forth, more to thee than these, thy darker? (_She
smiles winningly._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Heavily._) I am that I am!
AMBITION
(_Fiercely glowering and sulking._) Yea; Terror, Might, Strength, Death
thou art! Think thou on me!
BEAUTY
Nay--Love, Beauty, All Perfectness, Light, Joy, Song--so art thou, and
so only! Think thou on me, Lord! Think thou on me! (_She smooths his
hands._)
HATE, FEAR, GREED, DESPAIR
(_In chorus._) Think thou on us! Are not we of thee?
LOVE, PITY, HOPE, REASON
(_In chorus._) Think thou on us! Are not we of thee?
CHERUBIM AND SERAPHIM
Thou everlasting glory--Hail! Hail!
AMBITION
(_Angrily._) Vanish, vain things! Dream, Lord, no more! (_He glowers and
sulks._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_To_ BEAUTY _sadly_.) I know not whether thou art best or worst. But
stay, stay! Stay thou with me but yet a while! Let me not forget this
thing that thou art--wonder, light, a glorious dream! (_He sighs._) Oh,
ho, ho, ho! Let me think no more of horrors! Of that I am aweary! Mad!
Mad! Mad! Yet now I have thee--thou art a pleasant thought, thou joyous
dream of fair things! Beauty! Beauty! Oh, Beauty! (_He smooths her
cheek._)
A CLOUD OF SERAPHIM
(_Fluttering nigh._) He dreams of Beauty! We will not die! Hail! Hail!
A CLOUD OF CHERUBIM
He smiles on Beauty! We will not die! Hail! Hail!
AMBITION
(_A hovering, terrible figure in the gloom._) He rests and drools! All
is light and song! He thinks not on death!
(_The shadows recede into the darkness, to all but nothingness; the
endless legions of suns twinkle; the clouds of_ CHERUBIM _and_ SERAPHIM
_swirl and turn_.)
SCENE III: THE HOUSE OF DEATH
SCENE: _A chamber of unimaginable horrors, vast, murky, involute,
in which serpents twist and writhe; tortured figures crawl and
groan; beasts of many heads and paws prowl to and fro, and all
slimy odorous forms interlace in welters and sloughs and draperies
and festoons. At the center, the Throne of the Lord, a mound of
unclean beasts and serpents, hung over by clouds of evil spirits;
his present embodied thoughts. At his side, huddled in despair,
faint, pale shadows of their former selves, the thinnest of
dreams_--BEAUTY, REASON, PITY, HOPE, LOVE. _Before him in glowering
fullness, grown to vast proportions_, AMBITION, _and behind him the
legions of his fancy, black and fulgurous, drawn close about.
Insane, fevered, maundering, the LORD OF THE UNIVERSE bellows of
destruction_.
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Death! Death! Death! Thou dearest death!
Bring thou me heaps of dead--the endless slain! Breed winged and forked
things, horrors all! Bring thou me shames, despairs, disasters, with
which to torture and slay! Go forth! Go forth! Sweep thou with Hate,
with Rage, with Despair, with Fear! Breed me vast powers of evil, and
still vaster! Rank thou me them rank on rank--file by file! (_He thinks
on tortured forms._) Make me armies of horrors, of woes, of immedicable
griefs! (_As he thinks, from his brain leap forth, many-headed, forked,
winged, the first six Powers of Darkness, and after them, clawed and
winged forces of ravening aspect and disaster._)
BEAUTY
(_Sadly, in a thin voice._) Lord, am I forgotten? (_He makes no
answer._)
LOVE
(_In a thin voice._) Lord, canst thou no longer think on me? (_He makes
no answer._)
HOPE
(_Weakly._) Lord, am I no more to thee? (_No answer._)
PITY
Canst thou not remember me, Lord? (_No answer._)
REASON
Lord, am I as nothing to thee now? (_No answer._)
AMBITION
(_To the clouds of darkness behind him as the first of the six great
Powers leap forth._) Join them thou! Forth!
FIRST POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, leaping from the brain of the
Creator at illimitable speed._) Hail! I go to harry! To slay!
SECOND POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! I go to rack, to torture!
THIRD POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! I go to ravage! To gall! To flay!
FOURTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! Where Sorrow is not, I carry it!
FIFTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! Where Happiness is, I destroy it!
SIXTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, seven-horned, winged and fanged, rushing forth at
illimitable speed._) Hail! Hail! Where Peace is, and Love, I make them
as not! (_They speed to his right hand and to his left, above and
beneath him, before and behind him._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Forth! Forth! Fury upon fury! Bring me masses of destruction! Undo!
Undo! Undo! I would have change! Death! Woe! Tears--bring me tears,
tears, tears! Wipe out all dreams! Make ashes of fancies! Destroy!
Destroy! Destroy! Let all be of horror, of death, of sorrow, of pain!
Make of life an ending in misery! Mad! Mad! I am mad! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
(_He bellows in insane rage._)
AMBITION
(_Raveningly, to the clouds of Darkness behind._) Join thou these!
Forth! Forth! Out upon his glistering thoughts! Undo! Undo! He is sick
of pity, of peace! Harry thou with these! Destroy! Make dust of suns!
Breed distempers in all flesh! Reduce, level, macerate, decay! Make of
everything nothing! Forth! Forth!
THE LEGIONS OF DARKNESS
(_Rumbling in anticipation._) Hail! (_They speed outward._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Rocking to and fro in insane pain._) To my right hand and to my left!
Above me, and beneath! Before me, and behind! Out--on! Harry! Destroy!
Cease, Time! Be nothing, Space! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! End thou
me the weariness of this! (_He weeps in frenetic misery._)
A CLOUD OF SERAPHIM
(_Faded to but pale rays._) Oh, Measureless Wonder of all Wonders! Oh,
Creator of all Things! Canst thou not think on us? We die! We die!
(_They begin to fade._)
A CLOUD OF CHERUBIM
(_Shrunken to a thin line._) Nor on us--on us? We die! We die! (_They
slowly fade also._)
BEAUTY
(_Rising and viewing all with weary eyes._) He dreams on me no more--on
Beauty no more! Oh, mad, mad, Lord! Oh, fevered, useless dreams! Gone
all the sweet Seraphim and Cherubim--the halls of light and wonder--his
suns and jewel-stars! His dreams have changed. These his horrors are
now his mood. And death--and nothingness--for all of us, his mood! (_To_
DESPAIR.) Hail! Hail! thou unutterable one. (_To_ AMBITION, _glowering
near_.) And thou, great evil one, his torturous swelling thought! Now is
thy dark hour! But sleep and nothingness is the end of this for thee and
all! Thou wouldst destroy even me, oh evil thing! Yet if he but thought
on me, how different! His singing world again! But wait, wait! If he
think on thee for long comes death and the end of all this--of thee, as
of me! By death, sleep! And by sleep, if he sleep--where then is his
thought of thee or me? Pray that he change!
AMBITION
(_Arrogantly._) Avaunt, thin thing! Now is my Lord awake--he thinks on
me, not thee! To harry, burn, slay! To his right hand and to his left!
Above him, and beneath! Before him, and behind! He is for strife,
strength, conflict! To harry, slay, lay waste! It is as it is! He knows
thee not! (_The destroying legions rumble._)
PITY
(_Drawing near to_ BEAUTY.) He thinks not on me again! I am grown so
thin! Is there no change? Is peace worth nothing--the tender heart--the
end of agonies and storms?
AMBITION
Avaunt! He knows thee not! (PITY _shrinks exceeding small_.)
LOVE
(_Drawing near, a pale shadow._) Or all the lovely thoughts that
fluttered into happiness--are they worth nothing?
AMBITION
Avaunt! He knows thee not, thin wraith! (_She fades to a point._)
REASON
Nor me? Not even order?
AMBITION
Hence! (REASON _steps aside_.)
HOPE
Nor yet the thought he had in me? Can he not remember me?
AMBITION
Vanish! Thy Lord is for destruction! He thinks not on thee--but on me!
Hence! (HOPE _pales to a thin flame_.)
BEAUTY
(_Proudly._) Yet am I Beauty, his first thought! Rage on, thou evil one!
Of what avail, since thou wilt end also? Destroy as thou wilt, he will
not forget me! I am that which he is--Beauty! His first thought! Think
madly as he may, yet will his last thought, as his first, be of me. I am
in him, and he in me. From him, when he wake, if ever, will I come! I
will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Writhing in a last insane agony._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Let
me have done with Life! Let me have done with Thought--Pain--with Order,
Beauty, Hope! Let me have done with all things! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
Sick--sick! Death! Death! Burn! Harry! Slay! Oh, ho, ho, ho! I will have
done with all! (_He tears at his snaky locks._)
REASON
(_Sadly._) Great Master of us all, so this then is the end? I, who was
thy thought of order, am disordered! I, who was thy strength, am thy
weakness! So sink I back to nothingness! (_He re-enters the brow of the
Lord._)
LOVE
And I, who was his thought of happiness! So come I to nothingness again!
(_She re-enters the forehead of the Lord._)
PITY
And I, who was his thought of tenderness! (_She fades into his brain._)
HOPE
And I, who was his thought of love and peace! (_She disappears also._)
BEAUTY
(_Paling._) Yet is he not done with me! Mad though he be, even though he
sleep, now I feel his thought! He is in me, as I in him! I will be
worshiped! I will be worshiped! (_She re-enters his brow undiminished._)
FIRST POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was to thy left hand is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
SECOND POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was to thy right hand is not.
THE LORD
’Tis well!
THIRD POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was before thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
FOURTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was behind thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
FIFTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering._) All that was above thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
SIXTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering._) All that was beneath thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
AMBITION
’Tis well! Hail, Lord! As thou wouldst, I have ended thy dreams! Canst
thou not rest?
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Writhing._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! I dream! I dream! It is
too much! Destroy! Destroy! I will have peace! I will have peace! (_He
turns and writhes, sinking in weariness as he does so, and partially
disappearing. Æons elapse._)
FIRST POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Beginning to fade in the brain of the Lord._) It is of me that he
ceases to think! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
(_Sadly._) It is the end!
SECOND POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Beginning to fade in the brain of the Lord._) It is of me he ceases to
think. Oh, ho, ho, ho! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
(_Sadly._) It is the end!
THIRD POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Writhing and fading in the brain of the Lord._) It is of me he ceases
to think! I fail! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
FOURTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Fading into the brain of the Lord._) It is of me he ceases to think! I
fail! (_He groans and disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
FIFTH POWER OF DARKNESS
It is of me he ceases to think! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
SIXTH POWER OF DARKNESS
It is of me he ceases to think! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Stretching prone in space and all but vanishing. Only faint outlines
are visible here and there, the brow and face intact._) Peace! Peace! It
is enough! It is enough! I have done! Let it be as it ever was from
everlasting to everlasting--a dream--a dream! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He sighs
heavily. The last writhing beasts thin and are gone._ AMBITION, _paling
and thinning, stands wide-eyed, agape, before the fading brow of the
Lord_.)
AMBITION
At last! And I--it is of me he ceases to think--even me! I have done! I
have done! (_He vanishes._)
BEAUTY
(_A thin star in the brow of the Lord, glistering and yet paling._) It
is even of me he ceases to think! Lord, hast thou forgotten thy
first-born?
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Peace! Peace! Enter thou into me! (_He sighs and begins to vanish
completely._)
BEAUTY
(_Fading into his sleep._) I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!
(_She smiles._)
_The illusion of reality ceases. Suns and planets are gone. Time
and Space are not. That which was is as that which was not._
ASHTORETH
What has impressed me most about life, always, is the freshness and
newness of everything, the perennial upwelling of life in every form;
the manner in which, as age steals on for some, youth, new, innocent,
inexperienced, believing, takes charge, its eyes alight with aspiration,
its body ablaze with desire. We know that the world is old, old, and
societies also in every form, while the average span of life for the
individual is little more than forty years--yet step into the streets
and witness the immemorable clangor and newness, the present visible
portion of the unbroken thread or pattern that reaches back into
eternity. And for all that life is so old, old, and atoms of the life
pattern or chain are feeble, is life old? Does the bit of thread or
pattern that we see here now show the least evidence of wear or tear? Is
not the race as new, as fresh as ever? We rise betimes and the ancient
sunlight streams fresh and strong and _new_ into our passing
window--this window which, in a few years, will be as forgotten and as
non-recoverable as we ourselves shall be.
And the ways without--are they crowded with the aged, the worn, the
soul-weary? Here and there, perhaps, a halting, bent or time-worn
specimen that attracts attention for its _age_! In the main, at every
turn, youth is in charge, laughing, singing, whistling, the newest modes
of the _Zeitgeist_ adorning it, the latest coats, the latest hats, the
latest shoes heightening the charm of bodies utterly evanescent. The
percentage of the really aged abroad is as one to one hundred--one
thousand. Viewing the swift tides of life as they burble in the great
thoroughfares they are utterly negligible. And it is always so. A large
crowd of the old and the weak and the defective would be an astounding
sight anywhere in life that is so old.
Yes, life is careful to do away with all evidences of age in the public
places where it runs so gaily. The sick--are they here or in hospitals
or darkened bedrooms? The maimed, the blind, the defective in any
way--are they here, or hidden away in institutions where the young and
the hopeful may not see? Life apparently resents them. It will not have
its ways bestrewn by its discarded implements and shells. Out, out,
since it is done with them. Away! There is much talk of charity and the
beatitudes, but let one lose an arm, a leg, an eye, a hand. Practically
the entire world shudders and withdraws. Better, indeed, a criminal,
whole and exhibiting that self-sufficiency which the life impulse
demands, than to have been injured in any worthy or even glorious
contest. Rarely if ever, and never willingly, does Life obtrude upon our
unwilling gaze a suggestion of the brevity of our own strength or charm,
or present to the eye even a faint suggestion of the inscrutable and
astounding and even wholesale cruelty of itself. Indeed, where Nature
with her illusions has her way, pain, weariness and death are never to
be accepted as the huge controlling facts that they are.
What--Nature cruel? Look at the freshness of Her face, the joy of Her
perpetual youth, the glory of Her springs, the richness and variety of
Her facets and changes! Quite so. She is the subtlest of all our
enemies, the wisest of all our craftsmen and managers. Her instinct and
therefore Her business is to keep the eternal freshness and durability
and zest of life uppermost, and this She does with unbelievable skill.
For although we are here, young and new, believing vigorously in our
destiny, the grand sum of our future and its durability, still only
forty or fifty years ago there were all of a billion people here who
were as fresh and as vigorous and as youthful as we are now. They
believed in their grand destinies as we believe in ours, and where are
they? Gone. No trace--no memory even--no care. Only we are what is left
of what was them, their descendants. And the astonishing tragedies, the
painful diseases, the most grinding and wearing of denied hopes, by
reason of which they are no longer here and we are--how adroitly even
the memory of these have been removed! The wonder! Yet _life_ is as
fresh now as it was then. _It_ has not aged. _It_ has not gone. The
endless chain is as bright and strong as ever--stronger, maybe.
To-morrow when we are where they are it will be as taut and shining and
swift-moving and as new as ever.
But these young bustling souls swinging their canes, lighting their
cigarettes, whistling and dreaming of a perfect to-morrow--do they know
aught of this? Not a word. And will they? Not, in the main, until it is
too late to affect their lives. And, better yet, and what is really more
important, they do not care. Life has one admirable trait: it limits the
sensibility of many. “Never mind, dearie,” it seems to say, “do not
worry about me, or older days. The old was nothing, the new is all. Eat,
drink, be merry and forget. It is best.” Thus life, and it is her
intention that they shall. Each sorrow or deprivation or disaster as it
befalls them is painted in their consciousness as special to them. Never
before was there one such to equal this. No, no. Life would not be so
cruel. She would not intentionally do this to any one. “What!” she
whispers artfully and convincingly, “life induce such bitter tears? Life
ruthlessly and cruelly deprive any one of a hand? an eye? of life
itself? Never. To be injured thus indifferently, when so many are not,
was never intended by her for you, as you can see. If that is not so,
why is it so many are well, hale, happy?” So she lies, for well she
knows that each can know but a very little, has no time to learn more.
And she sees that he has not.
But in the dark places, the back rooms, the upper floors or cellars of
tenements or great houses, the hospitals, the asylums, the jails, the
farms and homes for the aged--and the enormous graveyards! Look and see.
Here are those who but a little while since were a part of this
pell-mell vigorous scene. They were her tools, as you are now, her
victims. She fashioned them as one might a small machine, used them for
a while for something and then threw them aside. Like a knife or any
tool, they grew a little dull, and it is so much easier to fashion a new
one. We are intended to last only a little while. While your strength is
budding that of others is failing. While your cheeks are reddening
theirs are paling. While your eyes are sharpening in shrewdness theirs
are weakening to a dim myopia, and you may soon out-see them and push
them aside. Yet the bodies of the old that so offend you now were as
lithe as your own, and they in their hour were grumbling at the
ineffectiveness of age.
But the darkest part of it is that aside from the small modicum of
service which you may render at top speed and with the utmost
enthusiasm, Nature has not the slightest care for you or yours. With the
same cavalier air with which She provides a hundred drones for the
single love-flight of the queen bee, all the failures to die, so She
provides a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, that
one--and only one--may think the necessary thought, invent the necessary
machine, build the necessary bridge or lead the necessary army. The rest
may die as they will. They are chaff. Lay them out in hundreds--in
millions--to be blown whithersoever the wind listeth, to poverty, to
death, perchance even to fortune, a brief hour. Who cares? Not She. Only
the ways of life must be kept fresh and new, the illusion of newness and
vigor maintained. Only through new bright instruments will She work, and
none other. A tasteful maid. In the blood-stream of your body are
quadrillions of little entities--so many millions to the single blood
drop--whose total destiny, apparently, is to your life about as yours is
to the race--and no more. They hurry that you may live. They toil that
you may smile, seek, yearn, blaze with ecstasy. A fraction of a minute
each, and their little cycles have been run. So yours here. But do they
know? Or care? Or do you? There is that much wisdom or tenderness or
practicality in Nature, that for the majority She inhibits the power of
memory or perspective or too great sensitiveness to joy or pain. Else
what a cursing, else what a wailing, else what a ceasing--even in the
face of Her imperial will.
THE REFORMER
Among the interesting phenomena of life is the periodic appearance in
every walk of life of the reformer, the individual who, according to
some theory based on clear perception or some delusion that has
developed in his brain, seeks to readjust conditions as he finds them to
something more in accord with what is agreeable to him, and who
accordingly, by a process of transference akin to that which has been so
adequately set forth in psychoanalysis, seeks to represent himself to
himself as a world need. Always it is life, not himself, that is in need
of this new condition, and so him. And what is it that as a rule he
offers or seeks? Without exception, if you trouble to examine the great
instances--Buddha, Christ, Confucius, St. Francis, Luther, Mohammed--it
is a revision of a current, and in itself passing, condition which has
become irritating to his sense of balance or proportion or equation in
things mundane, his personal and physical reaction to or sensory
repulsion from conditions which have become chemically (socially,
spiritually, anything you will) too far removed from a norm or mean or
equation which appeals to him, his eternal and special view of harmony.
But this after all is chemic and natural, and when he is successful he
merely represents an inevitable tendency in nature to maintain a balance
or equation between one type of mood and another, only one of which can
be dominant for a time and of which he becomes the passing
representative.
It is the only way apparently in which the moving spirit which creates
us can express--or, better yet, change--itself. Our self-propulsive
emotions, moods or appetites have somehow a tendency, if uninterrupted,
to lead us too far in some one direction--to the place, for instance,
where a chemical or physical non-balance is threatened to that dependent
equation of rival forces in which we all find ourselves immersed or
held. Then, apparently, by an inhering law which compels balance or
equation in all things, a counter-tendency which is most likely to first
present itself in the shape of a reformer, or instructor, or warner,
always chemical in his significance, appears (Buddha, Christ, Mohammed,
Luther), and you have a readjustment toward a happy medium again, as it
were. One phase of life, let us say, grows and presses too dominantly on
another. Forthwith a spokesman or mouthpiece of some kind arises, the
antithesis of the dominant thing, by no means remote or divine but
plainly human and simple and easily understandable, if he is to prove of
any value. That is why it is always esoterically safe in gross material
days to look forward to the coming of a Christ or Messiah, or reformer,
or changer, of one type or another. He is in reality a chemic and
psychic sign. He cannot help coming. He is merely an individual
expression of the general tendency toward balance or equation. And he
will surely come when things swing too far in any given direction. Any
one can be a mouthpiece for an extreme lack of balance in human affairs,
any one. The accident of circumstances usually distinguishes that one.
But by that we are not told that extremes, either of the gross or
material, or on the other hand of the spiritual or ascetic, are to be
permanently done away with or “reformed,” or that either, when dominant,
is essentially evil or good, or that the replacing thing is essentially
better and so should remain forever. Rather, what is new and
ameliorative--be it religious, ethic or economic--is merely one or the
other half or portion or face of that which was before it came, a change
from, or the obverse of, the other. Indeed the essential character of
God, or the biologic force, or the Universe, is not made much clearer
unless we see in this tendency to change or equation in all things that
it or he is both good and evil. Since chemically or spiritually we are
compelled always to seek a level or balance and maintain it, roughly
enough it is true; since to live is to swing to and fro, past a mean and
between extremes, may we not deduce from that that equation, balance, is
an attribute of God or the life force, a conditioning attribute, and one
under which it _must_ express itself?
For in life, as we may always note, and at the very moment the greatest
reformers are operating, there are also working--and quite as
vigorously, else the reformer would have little to do--anti-reformers,
or anti-Christs, or reactionaries, if you will, creatures who represent
the obverse of what is sought by the reformer or changer, and who will
by no means be permanently disposed of by him. Life apparently goes on
two legs, or opposites, always--heat: cold; high: low; external:
internal; strength: weakness; little: much; excluded: included. Side by
side with millions or billions who wish one type of thing are always
millions or billions who wish another, whose impulses, desires and
necessities are the very antithesis of those advocated by the reformers,
saviors, adjustors then operating. Thus as Christ walked the earth there
were Herod, and the whole brood of Roman, Greek and Egyptian
philosophers--pagans all--scouting his beliefs and dreams, and their
descendants are with us yet. About St. Francis were the millions of
gourmandizers and lechers of France, Italy and the European world
generally (to say nothing of the skeptical Innocent III.), too gross to
perceive the significance of that which the saint represented. Yet St.
Francis was little more than a chemical reaction against a too-heavy
materialism that enveloped Europe--nothing more, truly. He was, as it
were, poetry as opposed to the grossest and most sodden type of
materialistic thought. This is equally true of Luther and so many
others. Christ the same; Mohammed the same. Yet plainly the creative
force which we worship as God, the underlying chemistry with its cell
mechanism, was as much the maker of the fat sensualists who surrounded
and enraged Luther as it was of Luther. It was and is in both, and both
in it. Else how explain their joint presence and conflict, their psychic
as well as chemic necessity to each other, the one useless without the
other--no devil no saint, and vice versa? I for one am convinced that
the Universe, or God, or Good, is no more concerned with our saints than
with our sinners. Both may be essential, no doubt are. Certainly both
are in it, from it, necessary to it, expressive of different moods of
it, and as such necessary to each other, in order that it or life shall
exist, express itself, at all. From this I see no escape by any path.
The great aim of all reformers--that of permanently reforming man in his
social as well as his religious ways or intentions, in his lusts after
sensuality and the like, from a (in their estimation) condition of too
great license to one of none at all--is of course ridiculous. Although
always “Justice,” “Right,” “Truth,” “Eternal law” are supposed to be
involved in their commandments or demands, and presumed to represent a
permanent and unchanging state of perfection of some kind--the all-good
in some direction, and as such to be the direct commandments of God
Himself--what is really, often unintelligently, sought is an easement of
a too-great social swing in any one direction. Not perfection, but a
better balance, is all that is really sought or ever attained. Yet so
errant and nonsensical is life, its social or chemic drift--mere idle
rocking of force in one direction or another at times--that man, for a
time at least at one period or another, may be made to believe in or at
least conform to, even coincide with, some current conception of the
ideal which may or may not be in line with his greatest need, equation,
in his affairs here or elsewhere at the time--which, indeed, may be
absolutely inimical to his mental progress, as in the case of
Mohammedanism, Shintoism, Christianity and the like. In other words, the
necessity for obtaining a better equation in one place may very well
upset a very excellent equation elsewhere. Thus, while it might be of
passing advantage in one country--Arabia, say--that a readjustment via
the thoughts of a Mohammed would be in order, it does not follow that
his local “Rights,” “Truths” and homilies would elsewhere be essential.
Yet essential or no, an impetus flowing from such a center may well
disturb a better equation elsewhere. This was illustrated when
Mohammedanism assailed Christianity in Europe.
The truth is that what the reformers are always seeking, ignorantly or
otherwise, is a better balance in things social or mental or moral, less
accentuated tendencies of any kind--usually away from the too-gross,
although at times away from the too-ascetic also, toward which extremes
life appears to swing at times. And what they do is to identify their
meager, if equational, perceptions of life with eternal thought or
order, and to insist that the half of the balance which they represent
is the whole of it. As a rule they are quite unfitted by ignorance as
well as by the time mood of which they are the expression to see that
without that against which they war neither they nor their divine
creator would have the least excuse for existing.
To me, not violent extremes of any kind, although these are productive
of great suffering at times, but the suave inanity which imagines it
wants only unchanging good or, on the other hand, unchanging evil, is
the thing to be feared. Fortunately or unfortunately, as one may view
this thing, a strictly median condition, while excellent as a haven of
refuge from extremes, is nevertheless never wholly or easily attained in
life, and never, apparently, seriously desired by it, as an end in
itself, and never quite satisfactory. Indeed it is the equivalent of
nothingness and would produce just that if the world sought to persist
in it. Yet wise Nature is our rescuer in this as in many another plight
in which betimes She places us for ends of Her own, for Nature seeks, if
She seeks anything, motion, although apparently in no straight line. Her
mood, if anything, is synchronic, rhythmic, pendulumic. She wishes, if
one may interpret Her wishes from what may be seen here, to swing in a
semi-balanced way between extremes of so-called good and evil--never all
good and never all evil, but a little of both, or plenty, in order that
there may be contention, strife, something to live _about_ and for.
These violent extremes of any kind--ascetic, religious, barbaric, or
repulsive--which affect life and irritate our souls, or the souls of
some of us, are not at all offensive to Nature in Her entirety
apparently. She appears to like extremes as well as a median line, the
latter as a fence or break between them, and will have nothing of
perpetual anything in any one direction. And life, it seems to me, would
be more understandable, less disturbing to most of us, if in hours of
stress of any kind we were able to realize this--that Nature adores
extremes, with always a happy medium as the guiding and dividing line to
which She can return and on which She can fix, as the mariner on the
North Star. And if some such more liberal conception of God, or force,
or life, or the creative impulse, could be introduced, it would be
better. What we really need is a better stomach for life as it is, and
Nature, in the course of time, may possibly build us such.
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
“_Whom does not love rule? And where is he not Lord?_”
_Epiphanes Soter._
“_There is no advisable love unless it is as reverent as it is
romantic, as permanent as it is passionate._”
_George M. Gould._
“_Faithful monogamy must ever be woman’s standard in love, because
only in its still certainty can she fitly prepare and keep the
place for her child._”
_Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale._
“_Too many have forgotten that love is as much a subject of the law
of evolution or progressive development as any other biologic
thing._”
_Haeckel._
_N. B. The attached six questions, to which I have appended answers,
were once submitted to me by an American publication for comment or
solution! At the time I was unable to make an intelligible reply, but
having since given the matter thought I have answered them, largely for
my own satisfaction. They are submitted with no faith in any possible
fixed solution but merely as meat for passing discussion._
I
_Why is it, when there are so many evidences in favor of marriage
as we practice it, that so many marriages fall short of just the
purpose they seem meant to serve?_
In the first place, are there so many evidences in favor of marriage as
we practice it? In part the question contains its own answer when it
states that so many marriages fall short of just the purpose they seem
meant to serve. Statistics for marriage and divorce show that one out of
every seven marriages ends in the divorce court. For every one thus
openly disrupted, how many others are restrained or concealed for
reasons of religion, morality, children, society and business policy or
permitted license? Many a couple agree to go their ways separately,
doing as they please and shielding each other in their privileges.
Others drift into a quarrelsome or unhappy state from sheer inertia or
lack of means or charm or courage to establish or create a new
condition. Millions sink in the slough of despond because they have not
strength of any kind. Age, poverty, thickness of wit does for them
completely.
Now there is no need, and should be no desire, to evade the biologic
necessity implied by marriage. Children must be brought into the world
and reared if life is to go on. All the why-fors of this are given in a
thousand biologic and anthropologic volumes, and so no need to discuss
them here. But this much may be said, that among animals the limits of
the control of the maternal feeling or instinct are rigidly confined to
simple necessity. Love seems to disappear as soon as the young can
possibly walk or fly and get their food--proof of its mechanistic or
chemic quality and origin and its lack of any sacrosanct and “for
eternity” spiritual character. Indeed, under most phases of animal life
the father is absolutely indifferent to the fate of his offspring. In
many, perhaps most, animals he seems to care no more for his children
than if they were moving bushes. Certainly he cares no more for his own
than for those of another, and the idea of any love toward grandchildren
is absurd. Not even the mother shows this.
But it is of the greatest interest to note that with the appearance of
humanity and its ideas of home and property (both products of maternal
instinct or the chemic necessity in her for the care of her young)
there has arisen a natural extension of the scope and control of the
family instinct, so that the interest of the parents continues into or
through adult life. Support and protection of the mother continues
beyond the child-bearing period, grandchildren are beloved, more distant
relatives are held within the family affection, and the patriarchal type
of society is established. Since the higher ideals of society and
civilization have been permitted to arise the ægis of love has extended
over the nation, and patriotism, with its great influence in war and
history, has appeared. Finally that highest development of humanity,
ethics or love of humanity, has arisen (still an actual outgrowth and
extension of maternal instinct or love apparently), as well as the
theory of the existence of a Divine Father-Mother of humanity and of all
life.
Yes, since the period of the law and the influence of Rome and the idea
of love, the practice of it by enduring families has become rapidly more
complex. To the force of sex compulsion and instinct, never omitted,
have been added permanency, monogamy, home-keeping virtues, pedagogy,
public health, civic and political honor, democracy and a thousand such
compounds. Has it stood up well under them? Is the load too great? Our
riotous divorce practices and statistics, as well as the so-called sex
or prostitution problem, raises a sharp question. Does the average
strong successful man confine himself to one woman? Has he ever? Does
the exceptionally beautiful and dynamic woman confine herself to one
man? Has she ever? Has not fear frightened the weak into a kind of
rat-like dodging or a sniveling, quarreling, complaining compliance? It
may be and no doubt is true that the so-called “building of the future,”
contemplated by the mechanistic or biologic impulse, if by anything,
cannot be based on sensuality entirely; but the retort may be that
Nature never seems to desire or achieve a wholesale debauchery any more
than she desires a cold and narrow monogamy--the religionists and
ethic-mongers to the contrary notwithstanding. At best she strikes a
balance, wishes apparently virtue opposed to debauchery, _and vice
versa_, for ends of her own.
But to return. However mechanically and instinctively it may have
started, Life has since developed the more or less gorgeous chemistry of
love with which now, if never in the past, it is invested. Human beings
are apparently capable of higher and more enduring synthetic and chemic
affinities, and this to many has seemed to warrant the second thought
wherewith this interview is prefaced. Yet, for all this higher
development, the strain of practical life appears to be too much for it.
Besides the compulsion imposed by the biologic process which draws two
people together there is a process of self-evolution and variation which
seems to conflict with the marriage tie. How subtle is that problem
which is to keep two people, subject to internal and external chemical
and physical changes, harmonious for the eternity for which they are
supposed to be linked? Nothing short of this is the theory which the
religionist propounds. The moralist, not bound by religious dogma, will
make the bond for life only. The philosopher or chemist transmutes the
bond into a problem and speculates on how many weeks, or months, or
years, the unstable equation may endure.
In considering the validity of our ideas in regard to marriage we either
accept the current religionistic or moralistic theory, or we do not. For
those who do there is no problem: they must accept their chains and
slavery, if so they find marriage to be, and make a virtue of their
sufferings. For those who do not there is the agonizing problem of the
need of an equation in the matter of change. Somewhere they must draw
the line, or necessity, increasing age, the difficulty of living in a
moving-van, will fix the line for them. Again, there is a limit to any
individual’s capacity for change, however kaleidoscopic that may be.
After all, any individual, male or female, however attractive, is but
single in quantity, and the choice offered to either of a suitable
helpmate or companion is not so very large. One may be forever lowering
a hook into the water, but not all the fishes in the sea may take it
even if they would. Solomon may have had three hundred wives and seven
hundred concubines, but it can scarcely be said that he needed them or
that they got much out of it; and while it is conceivable that a man or
woman in swift kaleidoscopic search, and devoting him or herself
strictly to the task in hand, might enjoy as many as a thousand or so of
the opposite sex in the course of a lifetime, it can scarcely be
considered valuable from the point of view of public policy and little
less than difficult and, as it would seem to one at least, profitless
from the point of view of the individual himself.
On the other hand there enters into the matter the very serious problem
suggested by question IV, which I will include and touch on here for a
moment only: “Are the children of any union better served by successive
marriages than by a home where parents are held together, even though
not by love but rather by a sense of duty to their children?” Obviously,
Nature intended marriage for the reproduction and care of children, but
I beg to call attention to the fact that Nature, or God, or the biologic
process, or what you will, is no better planner or executor of any given
theory or scheme it may have in mind than man himself. If this were not
true there would be no physically imperfect men or women. The student of
the pathology of sex, as well as of the sources of life itself, is
confronted by a thousand variations from that happy norm on which the
moralistic marriage must be based. Nature has not provided all its
creatures with the capacity for a happy marriage. Plainly, it has cursed
or endowed many of them with strange and horrible vices, with vast and
self-torturing passions, with immeasurable longings and desires, which
unfit them for the proper fulfillment of the monogamic conception of the
perfect marriage, hence of the care of the ensuing children. What then
is to be done? Who is to blame--Nature or man? And if Nature is to
blame, or God, cannot we charge the presumed misery of the children up
to Him also?
Personally, I am not prepared to admit that children are made miserable
or destroyed by divorce and change. But granting that, certainly man is
not to blame, for from the very beginning he has been crucified upon a
rood which is not of his devising. He did not institute marriage; it was
instituted for him, the biologic process having devised it long before
he appeared apparently. I would gladly have all living creatures endowed
with every capacity which would fit them for a peaceful and contented
enjoyment of a moralistic life, if that were intended or important, but
since in the vast and secret laboratory of Nature alone can man be
properly outfitted for the adventure, and since, obviously, in many
cases he is not, I submit that the matter of matrimony and the welfare
of the ensuing children cannot be solved by talk and that Nature and its
concomitants, change and divorce, must be permitted to take their free
and unlimited way as they will. The great tides and forces of life which
burst upon men and animals and change them do not always give notice
that they are about to rise and change things. They rise in their great
strength, and man, to his bewilderment, finds himself changing and
changed. Hence I would say that the trouble with marriage is that in its
extreme interpretation it conflicts with the law of change, or balance
and equation, and hence suffers a severe and seemingly destructive
defeat.
II
_What would be the result were we generally to adopt Ellen Key’s
conception of marriage: “Marriage is only moral when it grows from
an inner necessity, and not from outward pressure?”_
Very pleasant, I should say, if logic and ideal syllogism ruled in life.
The trouble with this world is that no ideal, however eagerly pursued,
is guaranteed a happy fruition. You may lay down your formula for
happiness and say: “Thus and so being done all will be well,” but can
you make human nature do anything according to any one finite individual
theory? Man does not make or regulate Nature: Nature makes and regulates
man, and She makes him any way She pleases--vile, lovely, strong, weak,
simple, complex, and so on. There is no one theory that fits all
climates or types of people. Life would be very dull if this were true.
But I presume by “inner necessity” Ellen Key means intense desire plus a
marked affinity of two people for each other, and if the union is for
only so long as this endures I should see no drawback to it whatever. I
should say that humanity would be much better able to endure the
stresses and difficulties of the world if they were all so happily
mated, and indeed there might not be so many stresses and difficulties
to endure. No doubt we all wish that this would come true, but not all
people are motivated by either love or passion. They would not marry for
love if they could but rather for social precedence, material luxuries
and the like. They accept children as a somewhat unfortunate
concomitant, and so you have the curious problem of whether this state
and its results are good, bad or indifferent in so far as society is
concerned. For my part I would paraphrase Christ’s idea and say: “Render
unto Materiality the things that are Material, and to Love the things
that are Love’s.” Then the world would remain just about as it is now.
III
_Would a succession of unions, expressing different phases of true
love, be of higher value to the individual soul and to the life of
the race than one unbroken although loveless marriage?_
My answer to this question, based on my own individual temperament,
would be Yes, but I cannot help speculating as to the opinions of those
whose temperaments are so cool or so unemotional that they can put
social precedence, material comfort, or the general welfare of the
state, as they see it, above affection or passion. Thousands of people
are by temperament sacrificial, one might almost say masochistic. They
never put themselves first, and that for the very simple reason that
their emotions or desires do not compel them so to do. The religionist,
the moralist and the fanatic, for reasons of order or material
development, as he sees them, would and does look upon love and passion
as a disturbing, unsatisfactory and almost unnecessary element in life.
Passion is sin or weakness to him, and the individual who requires more
than one union to express his emotional necessities is either a lunatic
or a criminal. His first impulse is to drive him out of society, to lock
him up and reform him by some iron system of training; failing this he
will shun him and form little communities of his own into which the
victims of emotion and passion must never venture save as thieves steal
into a house at night. This last is well and as it should be no doubt in
his special case, but on the other hand he is the type of man who is
determined that there shall be no divorce for others very unlike
himself, who would make wife-desertion a criminal offense of the first
order and who would almost punish adultery with death if he could. He is
a puritan soul. He does not see Nature in all Her subtle ramifications
and climatic and chemic variations, and he helps to make that endless
war between the so-called light and darkness of life--between sin and
virtue--and these special phases of asceticism or temperamental coolness
are the foundation of all religions apparently.
Such individuals would argue, for instance, that the child of a loveless
marriage is as well off as a child of a marriage of any other kind,
provided he is clothed and fed, washed and schooled and thoroughly
inculcated with the belief that sex is a crime. The less love enters
into the child’s life at any time the better, say they. Children will do
better, make better men and women, and make more money, if they do not
love too much. Thus stands the world, divided between the hot and the
cold, the stern and the tender, the fools of passion and the fools of
material order and well-being. Is the one better or wiser than the
other? I do not know. You may pay your money and take your choice, for
you cannot well serve passion and materiality at the same time.
Personally I stand with the fools of love, because I think for all their
follies and errors and Lear-like ends they are happier.
IV
_If the answer is Yes, are the children better served by successive
marriages than by a home where parents are held together if not by
love by a sense of duty to their children?_
I would not say that children are, in the main, better served by
successive marriages due to changes of temperament, because I do not
know, but I can truly say that I am fairly well satisfied, from my
personal observation, that they are no worse served. In the first place
the fate of the modern child is not nearly so much in the hands of
individual parents as it is in those of the state, the public schools
and their teachers, the newspapers and their editors, the judges of
courts and public and private citizens generally; for the modern child
can almost say to-day that the state is both my father and my mother and
it will take care of me. When it can really say this we will be much
better off, for we are all going to be happier. The extremes of misery
in childhood are going to be done away with.
In the next place it is a part of my personal observation that children
of warring or troubled homes, where they are made to endure them, are
worse off than are those who have escaped through fracture and been
thrown on their own resources or are assisted by the charity of the
state, or relatives, or the citizens of the country generally, to say
nothing of the love or obligation of one or both of the separated
parents. There is a deal too much sentiment attaching to the home as
such to-day, sentiment not justified by facts. All homes are not ideal
rearing-places for children, by any means. Consider the vast factory
communities everywhere, too easily forgotten by the comfortable
intellectual classes, and again the slums. The homes in these are, if
one were to pay strict attention to the moralist, as ideal
rearing-places for children as any other; yet we know that life offers
pits of horror as well as abodes of sweetness and light in the guise of
the modern so-called home. Again, it should be remembered that the home
was made for man, not man for the home, and when the home fails as a
vehicle of comfort and aid it should be done away with. It is, after
all, only wood or stone or plaster, an economic convenience at best.
And, anyhow, where the heart is is home, though it be a bed under the
open sky or in a new lodging-house every hour. And this generalization
is not intended to exclude children either. The children of troubled
warring homes live in a kind of hell of temperament from which they are
glad enough to escape as they grow older, and from which they evolve the
dream of building something better for themselves, for they realize the
horror of the thing they have endured.
The basic reason for destroying many a home is that the children may not
be injured. All life administers its sternest reprimands to those who
abuse children. Life loves children. It really prefers them to their
elders--the biologic process so does. There is a public obligation to
them which we all acknowledge. But this is not to say that all parents
should therefore be compelled to rear their children. It may well be
that they are not fitted economically or mentally or otherwise so to do.
Their whole duty is, or might well be, done when they support them
properly. The state should do the rest, for, as I have just suggested,
most people are not fit to rear their children; and I say this with the
greatest respect for the human and very charming impulse which causes
them to wish to. The intellectual standards of the average individual
are not much; those of the state are in the main better and should and
may be trusted to do better by the children than any of millions of
parents.
V
_Under what circumstance is divorce justifiable?_
When there is inharmony, schism, and in consequence bitter contention. I
recommend this question, first, to the religious dogmatists of all
creeds; second, to the anarchists, socialists and economic thinkers
generally. They represent purely individual, and to them justifiable,
points of view. Hence the world’s collection of dogmatic and radical
literature.
VI
_What is the key to making marriage do its work in the world?_
???? Unchanging love possibly, or an ingrowing and harmonious sense of
duty. Without Napoleonic skill or tact, however, I fear me much even
then, and so would end with----
???????
P. S. To sum it all up I should like to advance another theory of mine
in regard to the duality of sex. It is quite probable that in the
beginning (biologically speaking) the sexual progenitor of the human
race or of evoluted species contained in itself the full chemical
content of what has since been evoluted into the so-called male and
female. Such being the case its chemical responsiveness to the movements
of the universe, chemical, physical, spiritual, or let us say
emotional, and to its immediate surroundings, was complete in itself. It
was not divided into two sexes and therefore not dependent on any
alienated portion of itself for its chemical, spiritual, emotional or
physical satiation. What happened to it individually and momentarily was
all that could happen to it. It needed no complementary organism, no
other half, to make its understanding of, its reaction to, life
complete. That is not true to-day. Man (male or female) appears to be
individual and complete, but it is an illusion. He is complete and
separate as an organism in everything save his chemical responsiveness
to the universe which requires his union, not merely physically but
spiritually, with his sexual companion to be complete. Their union
sexually, temperamentally, emotionally, intellectually and so on is
required before a full measure of chemical responsiveness to life can be
attained in either. It may seem otherwise in individual cases, but it is
not so. Such being the case (and a world of biological data might be
here introduced), you have the amazing spectacle of love which confounds
all theories of life, which laughs at death, and, in its fullest
expression, defies all human theory and understanding, acting as a _new_
non-understandable thing, and letting in dreams, emotions, conditions
from a deeper world than any we know and whereby this shadow called
existence is resolved, modified, made over into something else so that
it bears no resemblance to its former state. It becomes apparently what
it well may be: a dream and an illusion of beauty or pain or delight, or
all. Evolutionary progress seems to be based on this non-understandable,
mysterious, idealistic reaction and contact which baffles the most
searching suggestions and intuitions of the imagination and leaves us
awed and dumb before the great classics of desire and passion.
But the great fact, not to be lost sight of, is that love, complete
chemical responsiveness to the universe, is only attained in the
reunion of the separated chemical constituents of the original asexual
individual, and without love or this union there is no full
chemical-spiritual responsiveness to the universe. Man does not soar
emotionally into the empyrean except in love, and by “in love” I mean
when stirred by the sex impulse which makes for mate-seeking and union.
It does not follow that there need ever be physical satiation to
complete this union. Spiritual pollination can spring from the merest
accidental contact for a moment with a mate. But the fact remains that
the greatest, most complete spiritual and physical responsiveness to the
universe (which after all is a mere matter of chemical reaction) springs
from this responsiveness, which springs from love, and as such our
so-called love (desire, passionate chemical response, physical and
spiritual) becomes the most significant fact in the universe as we now
understand it. For what is the universe without intellectual perception
on our part, the beholding of it with the eye, the perception of it with
the senses, the responsiveness to it through the emotions?
MORE DEMOCRACY OR LESS? AN INQUIRY
In my youth no country was so significant to me as the United States, of
course, so wonderful, so fully representative of the natural spirit of
aspiration in man, his dreams, hopes, superior and constructive
possibilities. All that America did, could do, had done, was in line
with the noblest and best principles in Nature, as I then understood
Nature. And I still believe that this nation might be one of tremendous
significance in connection with intellectual development, but some
marked changes will need to come about.
Plainly, in a material and (socially speaking) internal organic way, it
has accomplished much, even if thus far its intellectual stature has not
proved so tremendous. We are, as I see it now, a deeply-illusioned
people, concerned solely with material things when they are really no
longer very important--certainly not as much so as when the land was new
and without material means--and yet we remain almost entirely interested
in such things when our minds should be beginning to grasp the wider
possibilities of life--still fighting over beef and coal trusts and
railroads and cables, the mere money return involved--who is to have the
control of them--when we ought to be intensely concerned with the
mysteries of chemistry and physics and a more pliable form of
government.
Though my personal feeling once was that America was destined to take
high rank, if not complete leadership, in the intellectual world, I am
now not so sure. At this writing it looks as though it might retrograde,
and that speedily, and give place to newer lands--newer in spirit, I
mean. It may not, but the signs are somewhat against it. Our literature
has plainly developed to the level of the best seller and then stopped.
Our art is sporadic, and with a few exceptions lymphatic and strongly
suggestive of older forms. The futuristic dream did not originate here.
Our science--well, who are our American scientists anyhow? Loeb? Carel?
Tesla? Bell? All foreigners.
In architecture, markedly allied, I must say, to mechanics, in which we
flourish, we have done better--yes, and in anything and everything which
relates, or has, to mechanics, trade, commercial organization. In those
things, indeed, we have appeared to do most astoundingly, although I am
firmly convinced that the boundless and virgin resources of the land
have had as much--more, in fact--to do with this than anything else. We
have not had so much to create as to develop, and other countries and
other financiers--their trade geniuses--have done quite as well if not
better in some instances than have we. I refer to such concerns and
individuals as the English East India Company, the Royal Dutch Shell,
the Allgemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft, the Cunard, Allen and other
such organizations, to say nothing of such individuals as Lord
Strathcona, Baron Shibusawa, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cowdray, Alfred
Harmsworth, Sir Thomas Lipton, etc.
Indeed the one thing I would like to point out most definitely in
passing is this: that the by now ingrown idea in every average
American’s mind that all of the most significant inventions and
discoveries, mental as well as mechanical, of the last hundred years or
more are entirely of American origin is not true by any means. Far from
it. Those great prime movers--for instance, the steam engine, the
electric motor, and the gas engine (as well as its natural child, the
automobile)--came to us from abroad. So did the telegraph, the railroad,
radium, X-ray photography and--what is most remarkable, considering that
the ironclad came from here--every step in steel manufacture. The
telephone was invented by a Scot who was twenty-five years old when he
became an emigrant to our country.
Other countries, so I was condescendingly taught--Egypt, Greece, Rome,
France, England, Spain (for a little while) and Holland--in times past
and even approximating our own day, had been blessed with some
opportunities and had done considerable toward fulfilling what I was
taught was not so much the material as the spiritual and moral
well-being of man--his intellectual and therefore his mental and social
happiness. But nevertheless and never before, however (or since), had
any country had, or could have, the natural, noble and spiritual
impulse, to say nothing of the amazing opportunities, which America, the
United States, was enjoying--a vast and fertile soil, an equable
climate, engrossing varieties of scenery, a people given over entirely
to industry, frugality and proper social and spiritual ideals. In other
words America, according to my teachers, was destined to lead the world
in thought, truth, beauty, liberty, justice, industry, and what not
achievement, among other things.
Well, consider Greece in its day, faced by or placed in a virgin and
undiscovered world, To the south and east Egypt and Phœnicia, to the
north and west darkness, mystery, an unexplored world. No ships but
oared boats--not even the trireme at first--no compass, no machinery, no
implements of agriculture, and consider that to-day we quote Galen,
Hippocrates and Æsculapius, its doctors; Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus
and Aristophanes, its playwrights; Herodotus and Xenophon, its
historians; Demosthenes, its orator; Homer, Anacreon, Pindar and Sappho,
its poets; Æsop and Helodorus, its writers; Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle and twenty others, its philosophers--the greatest in all the
world--Solon, Alcibiades, Pericles, Aristides, and ten others, its
statesmen. Also we marvel at Praxiteles, Phidias and Skopas, its
sculptors; Alexander, Miltiades and Themistocles, its generals; and
Archimedes, its mathematician. Nations, like individuals, are apparently
born with genius, or they are not. They think, or they do not; they are
dull merchants and tricksters like the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, or
they are not.
America at the present moment, these United States, suggests nothing so
much as the trading Carthaginians and Phœnicians. We have, apparently,
no soul for really great things intellectually, and yet we have done a
few things, too--fought wars for our own integrity, invented a number of
very useful machines--the cotton gin, sewing-machine, flying-machine and
U-boat--grown rich and great in size, freed the slaves (which England
did in her realm without a war), liberated Cuba (no exploitation
since?), struggled with the Philippine problem, the Mexican problem, and
some others, but to no definite end as yet, however. And yet our deeds
are plainly so incommensurate to our power. For we still have with us
the Negroes, the clash and plotting of various rival sectarians, easily
allayed by a truly educated race, the growth and almost complete
independence of various private interests and individuals--puritanism
run all but mad and to the death of genuine intellectuality, artistic or
otherwise, etc. And yet to the average American it remains a belief or
fact that within our borders, safe under the control and guidance of a
human and helpful Constitution or form of government, are all the
social, commercial and mental opportunities to which an ambitious
citizen of the world may logically aspire--freedom to think, to grow
mentally and in every other way, to acquire tremendous wealth and be a
person in whom the inventive and constructive processes of Nature can
take the liveliest interest. Indeed, whatever may have befallen him
socially or economically in recent years, he is still convinced that he
is absolutely free--freer than the constituent individuals of any other
nation, that he is a great thinker and leader in things intellectual and
that America is the best and most carefully administered country in the
world, administered entirely, or nearly so, on his behalf.
Well, I have no very great quarrel with that as a theory, a method of
expressing one’s private vital force, but is it true? In my personal
judgment, America as yet certainly is neither a social nor a democratic
success. Its original democratic theory does not work, or has not, and a
trust-and a law-frightened people, to say nothing of a cowardly or
suborned and in any case helpless press, prove it. Where in any country
not dominated by an autocracy has ever a people more pathetically and
ridiculously slipped about afraid to voice its views on war, on freedom
of speech, freedom of the press, the trusts, religion--indeed any honest
private conviction that it has? In what country even less free can a man
be more thoroughly browbeaten, arrested without trial, denied the
privilege of a hearing and held against the written words of the
nation’s own Constitution guaranteeing its citizens freedom of speech,
of public gathering, of writing and publishing what they honestly feel?
In what other lands less free are whole elements held in a caste
condition--the Negro, the foreign-born, the Indian?
When one considers the history of American commercial development, the
growth of private wealth, of its private leaders--the Rockefellers,
Morgans, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Ryans, et al., indeed all the railroad,
street-car, land and other lords--a, until the war, practically
stationary wage-rate, an ever-increasing rising cost of living, cold
legislative conniving and robbery before which the people are absolutely
helpless, Tammany Hall, the New York Street Car Monopoly, seven hundred
and fifty-three different kinds of trusts that tax people as efficiently
and ardently as ever any monarchy or tyranny dreamed of doing--I should
really like to know on what authority we base our plea for the
transcendent merits of democracy, and I am as good a democrat as most
Americans, if not more so.
Government everywhere, in monarchies and republics, as well as tyrannies
and despotisms, has, other things being equal, always kept step with the
natural development of the intelligence of the mass, a thing which has
been as much developed by the goads of tyrannies as by the petting of
republics. But could you ever convince a full-fledged American, raised
on Fourth of July orations and the wonders and generosities of the
American Constitution, of this? For him, of course, liberty began in
1776 at Bunker Hill or somewhere near it. Before that was no light
anywhere. Since then we have gone on--doing better and better, making
all men richer happier, kinder, wiser.
But have we? Is our land and its progress so absolutely flawless? Aside
from love of country and individual vanity which might make us want to
think so, have we not developed as many flaws, anachronisms, social and
governmental irritations and oppressions as any other country? I call
attention to the deliberation and ease with which the trusts organize
our legislatures, dictate to the jurists of the land, deny even the
permanence or sacredness of contract when it concerns them; rob, pillage
and tax to their hearts’ content while a pitiful mass at the bottom
march to and fro wondering where or to whom to turn for relief. And, on
the other hand, life here, as much as elsewhere--the struggling mass--is
as savagely pushed by necessity as any mass anywhere. Our labor unrest
is as great, our poverty as keen; five per cent, or so it is alleged, of
the population controlling ninety-five per cent of the wealth; thirteen
per cent of the population illiterate; at the top gorgons of financiers
as fat and comfortable and dictatorial as any the world has ever seen
and as unpatriotic and un-American, in so far as its original theory
goes, as may be. Worse yet, it is absolutely true that ours is, or was,
materially at least, a rich land, boundless in its opportunities at
first, which latter fact has contributed greatly to our optimism but not
to our comfort. More rapidly here than anywhere in the world the rich
have divided themselves from the poor, and now here as elsewhere
necessity and pain are and will remain no doubt the goads to comparative
ease. Yet the tramping American when he utters the marvelous word
democracy believes that he has it, and when he is not complaining and
the newspapers tell him so, believes that he is perfectly happy.
At the same time, considering our aggressive and progressive financial
leaders--and heaven forbid (on humanitarian grounds, at least) that I
should defend them, for a more selfish, cruel and undemocratic pack
never lived (consider the packers, the street-car corporations, the
railroads alone, not to mention a thousand others)--there is this to be
said, that although nearly every crime in the decalogue may be charged
to them, bribery, perjury, murder, even a total indifference to
individual welfare (twelve and a half cents an hour, for instance, up to
six years ago for hard, grinding day labor on a railroad or in a canning
factory), as well as greed, love of power, and lust after it--still much
if not all of America’s boasted financial supremacy is due to them and
to none other. We jeer at John D. Rockefeller at home perhaps, or
Morgan, but when abroad among envious strangers who is first to thrust
out his chest and boast of what America has done--its financial leaders,
no less? Who? The average American? You know so. Such being the case one
often wonders what is to be done with a country or a people that can so
readily blow hot and cold out of the same mouth. Can it be made to
follow an austere democratic program--the sharp, taut socialization of
everything--or will it succumb to autocratic or to financial domination,
and if so, which? At the present moment the air hums with the rival
theories. To me the chief problem in connection with America, if it has
one, and as I see it, is that of finding itself mentally as well as
finding a formula that will allow and encourage leadership without
submitting to the abuses which in the past and even the present the
latter tends to give rise. For here as much as anywhere else the average
small American is as much a petty tyrant as may be found. Consider only
the food profiteer, the small dealers, jobbers and wholesalers. And
here, as elsewhere, are all the petty tyrannies of small and large
enterprises in regard to wage-earners, the scorns, the brutalities, the
exactions. Can these be outrivaled if readily duplicated in any
autocracy or democracy ruled by a dictator anywhere? At the same time,
is it not true that, if the country is to succeed or at least progress
materially, a place must be made for the selfish, self-aggrandizing
individual either as leader politically or as creator? Will life go
forward without some such process or opportunities for immense rewards
or honors to the individual--the right to satisfy his feverish if
ridiculous ambition for supremacy? Will patriotism, love of country,
alone do it? Can it be discovered?
What made Rome great? _Senatus populusque Romanus._ The Senate supplied
the leadership, the people the impulse and force, which spread the
dominion of the shepherds of the Seven Hills until it ruled the world
from Scotland to the Nubian Desert and the confines of India. What is
the secret of the Roman church’s preëminence? Leadership? Autocracy? In
the early Christian church these were lacking. Think or say what you
will of its results, but consider it. In so far as the early Christians
were concerned they were all “brethren,” like the Russians of to-day and
the citizens of the French Revolution. Each early Christian community
elected its deacons; the deacons elected the priests; the priests
elected the bishops; the bishops elected the cardinals; and the
cardinals the pope. Before the Catholic church began to attain to its
strength, however, the process was reversed: the pope appointed the
cardinal, he the bishop, the bishop the priest. Then the deacons were
selected by the priest, in certain cases some deacons were elective, but
then the priest and deacon, appointed by the bishop, constituted the
majority of the board. It was then, and then only, that the Roman church
began to flourish truly. The ambition of man had full scope, his vanity.
Apparently the world hitherto has not been able to do or live without
it. On the authorization basis of leadership the Roman church, the most
impressive organization in human history, has stood for seventeen
centuries.
But take our own Standard Oil Company. Who built it? Who used to caution
all his lieutenants never to talk, to keep everything a secret,
particularly its prosperity? And has not the blessing of cheap oil been
extended to all the world? Who selected strong, ambitious men and set
them to planning the monopoly of oil for their personal and private
benefit, dickered with the railroads and cut the throats of his rivals
via the rebate? Does his name have to be written here? Call him a
scoundrel, scoff at autocracy and high and mighty plutocrats. After all,
can a man or a woman become a safe or dictatorial plutocrat without
having something to offer which makes his plutocracy and his
dictatorship bearable? Have mere dull tyrants anywhere ever lasted long?
Have they ever had brains enough? Most of Rome’s worst emperors were
slain in anywhere from three to five years. The tyrants of Asia and
Africa last, if they do, because the people are as dull as themselves,
or their rule is agreeable to them.
Every great business corporation, as we know, is built about the
personality, the leadership, the autocracy, of one man. We hear of love
of country, of putting the needs of the mass, one’s country--all
countries--above that of one’s personal or private needs. There are
noble examples no doubt (off-hand few occur to me) of unselfish public
sacrifice of many, many private lives, but are they the rule or the
exception? Does not the average individual now as heretofore consult his
own interest, his advantage, his purse, his survival, his fame? Once one
is large and secure, easy in the possession of fame, money, love even,
it is possible, of course--and even with a grandiose air--to do
generously, to give freely, to seek the advantage of the mass. Scarcely
any other avenue of personal satisfaction remains open. I am not
sneering; I am contemplating a possibly chemic, physic or psychic law.
Who knows?
Taking the average individual, with life (necessity, hunger, drouths of
one kind and another) pressing upon him as fiercely as it does, and
contemplating America as it is and the world as it is, is it not fair to
ask whether it is possible to make over man--his ambitions, his soul,
into the likeness of what is suggested by the average modern democratic
or republican or socialistic program? Can he be adjusted to it? Haven’t
we just had two thousand years of an attempt in one form? Possibly he
can, but is it wise that he should? Are not striking, centralizing
figures more important and, save during extremely patriotic moments,
when some danger, say, threatens the national organism as a whole, is it
not extremely difficult to cause the average individual to enthuse over
a crowd or the needs of a crowd? And on the contrary, is it not most
pathetically easy to cause him to enthuse over a man or a woman--to
cause any of us so to do? It would almost look as though it were
Nature’s way, would it not--the love of the mass for leaders, for
grandiose, grandiloquent figures? Is not life, in the main, personal,
individual? Think how we insist on identifying God as an individual.
Will not such leadership as was offered by Alexander, Hannibal,
Mohammed, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, always be popular? The
leadership of lesser or more self-aggrandizing individuals--such as, for
instance, that of the late James J. Hill, of the Great Northern Railway;
E. H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific; Cornelius Vanderbilt, of the New
York Central; Jay Gould, of the Missouri Pacific; Jay Cooke, of Civil
War Finance; Armour, Field, Leiter, Morgan, or, to come down to the
present moment, John H. Patterson, of the National Cash Register; Henry
Ford, of the jitney; F. W. Woolworth, of the five-and-ten-cent store--if
never popular, still does it not remain necessary? Must not some one
lead even in the home and all forms of private commercial adventure? It
may not be an absolutely invariable rule, but is it not near enough to
make it seem so? I am not quarreling with the possibilities of love,
generosity, self-sacrifice, public and private. We all hope for them, do
we not? In various minor ways at least, and even in some public and
large ways, they exist. But how about self-interest, cold, savage and
yet constructive if feverish self-interest? Has that been abrogated?
Indeed, ought not we Americans, of all people, learn, and learn
quickly, that autocracy in whatever form you find it--absolute or
otherwise--is never real autocracy, not absolute, and that on the other
hand so-called democracy is never real democracy but always something
tempered by private autocracy in a thousand--nay, in a million--forms?
For after all, who tells such people as Rockefeller and Woolworth, to
say nothing of kings and emperors--fallible and seeking souls, all--how,
what, why, they must do?--how far they may go? What to interest
themselves in? Consider the fall of the French kings, Charles I., the
late Czar. They deal with the mass, and therefore to a certain extent
they must respect it. They cannot escape it. It is their fate. At the
same time, in attempting so to do, to whom do they not listen really for
sound advice?--often to the least of their subjects or hirelings. The
stockholders in any modern corporation--are they any more as to voice
and weight in that which their money makes possible than the people out
in the street of a republic or a kingdom with their ultimate veto power?
They elect a board of directors as we elect a senate, or a monarchy, a
legislature. And this leadership perpetuates itself, or at any rate
holds things together, as does officialdom at Washington, until a leader
appears. A weak king or emperor is run by strong men, a weak President
is dictated to by a strong Senate or House. When the Roman Senate was
strong the dictators were weak, and vice versa. In calm, peaceful days
leadership is not necessary. It is or may be a disturbing factor. But
when changes are coming, when Nature is brewing a storm--then. So life,
with its endless brewing of storms and leaders, ought to give a hint to
republics or democracies or corporate organizations.
And, having said so much, is it not plain that room must be made always
for the leader, the passing autocrat, if you will? Must he not be
given--if he have brains--the right of initiative and power, for after
all is he not also a slave to life, chance, labor, the time-spirit? It
is to be assumed, of course, that men shall demand first that he command
their admiration and loyalty, as he certainly will if he is a real
leader. Rome admired her Cæsar, France her Napoleon; Germany evidently
liked her Kaiser, France her Clemenceau, England her Lloyd George. They
thought them, apparently, necessary and great leaders. In our contest
with Germany we perhaps, for one nation, were fighting to make her
dislike something which she craved and needed, could not probably very
well do without.
The trouble, as I see it, is that too often, in spite of all the current
palaver and enthusiasm of some for special individuals, we have too
little real or popular leadership. Middleweight idealists and theorists
are too often at the steering-gear here as well as elsewhere. In this
country we have the crowd, the extraordinarily well-educated (or we
think so) and disciplined crowd, willing and eager for leadership. But
what leadership? As it stands, all democracies are organized with
elaborate systems of checks--legislative, executive--which are intended
to and do tie the hands of all possible leaders, until a very, very
great emergency arises. In the ordinary run of days and events only the
ordinary politician or parlor-diplomat need apply. But when an extreme
necessity calls, these minors must give way, but does the true leader
always appear in time? Will he? Did the Allies have a truly able
anti-Teutonic leader in the recent great struggle? Joffre? Asquith?
Lloyd George? Kerensky? Wilson? Nicholas Romanoff?
Our Federal Constitution, theoretically at least, gives us a crowd
government; only, owing to the wholly undemocratic character of the
American people, this has long since been replaced by money or trust
government, the rule of the wealthy by right of subornation. And our
state and municipal governments, modeled on that of the nation, have
gone the same way. Even such little individuality and leadership for the
mass as might possibly exist under these conditions is lost or discarded
nearly every two or four years in the regular and money-controlled
changes of administration. The old and experienced are replaced with the
new and untried. Perhaps under conditions as they are this is best. I
am not sure. But for efficiency, after the manner of the great
successful private corporations, is it? Personally, I think not--not
yet, at any rate. As yet democracy does not take sufficient interest in
itself, is too indifferent to its real interests and needs. It is too
easy-going, not sufficiently self compelling. Every one wants to be his
own boss and to be a great, undemocratic, individual success, hence
there is very little true effective organization outside private
institutions and what they compel in a public way. We make no provision
for the continuation of leadership even under emergency.
Personally, I think the defect cannot forever go on unremedied.
Democracy must do at least as well as autocracy, or it ought to shut up
shop. And if it cannot obtain the efficiency exemplified by the private
corporation it will, and it will deserve to. Perhaps our recent sad
experiences in meeting the expanded demands on governmental efficiency
should show us how to lay a new basis for that efficiency in
modifications of our governmental structure. But will they? What I think
is that more autocracy, behind which should be a livelier sense of power
and control on the part of the people, should come into our democracy,
or our democracy will really cease to be. The present drift toward money
control cannot go unchecked. Our leaders will either become much more
forceful, and the mass more watchful and jealous, as it should be, or we
will have no democracy of any kind. There is scarcely any now. Congress
should be used more against the President and the Supreme Court, and the
latter against both, only the judges should be plainly responsible to
the people, closely and fearsomely beholden to them--as much so, at any
rate, as they now are to the corporations and wealth. Both the leaders
and their weapons--the laws--should become more vigorous. Democracy will
have to step up, and step lively. Then will it be any more of a
democracy than some of the older and more historic autocracies and
monarchies? Will it?
THE ESSENTIAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE
The Serpent to Eve, Genesis iii, 3:5: “_For God doth know that in
the day ye eat thereof_” (the Tree of Knowledge) “_then your eyes
shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil_.”
Jehovah to the Serpent, Genesis iii, 14;15: “_Because thou hast
done this_” (urged Eve to seek wisdom by eating of the Fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge) “_thou art cursed above all cattle, and every
beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life; and I will put enmity between
thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall
bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel_.”
Jehovah to Eve, for attempting to obtain wisdom via eating the
Fruit of the Tree, Genesis iv, 16: “_I will greatly multiply thy
sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth
children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule
over thee_.”
Jehovah to Adam, because of his following the advice of Eve:
“_Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast
eaten of the Tree, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow
shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles
shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the
field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou
return unto the ground._”
“_Prometheus (forethought), son of the Titan Iapetus and Clymene,
and brother of Atlas, Menœtius and Epimetheus (after-thought), is
represented as the creator of man, out of earth and water, and his
great benefactor, having given him, in spite of Zeus who was
apparently opposed to it all, a portion of all the qualities
possessed by the other animals. He also stole fire from heaven in a
hollow tube, and taught mortals all useful arts. In order to punish
Prometheus for this, Zeus gave Pandora to Epimetheus, his brother,
in consequence of which diseases and sufferings of every kind
befell mortals. He also chained Prometheus to a rock on Mount
Caucasus, where during the daytime an eagle consumed his liver,
which was restored each succeeding night. Prometheus was thus
exposed to perpetual torture; but Hercules (strength) killed the
eagle and with the consent of Zeus, who in this way had an
opportunity of allowing his son to gain immortal fame, delivered
the sufferer._”
_Smaller Classical Dictionary._
The significance of these several references to and quotations from the
supposed creative power of the elder pagan world is, if anything, that
man is a waif and an interloper in Nature (or things celestial or
intelligent), a machine or toy, created by something which desires to
use him or work through him in some way, with no essential power to make
his own way and no “right” to seek either knowledge or wisdom, lest, in
the words attributed to Jehovah, his Creator, in Genesis, he becomes “as
one of us,” a minor god, for instance, as the Creator via this phrase
writes himself down to be; not the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, by any
means. And in this phrase (“one of us”) is contained a hint of a
possible condition or order in the universe which, since the Christian
era, has been put aside as untrue, namely, that the Creator of man, our
two billion two-legged citizens stalking this earth, may be but (to use
a very crude and yet for that reason understandable description) a
“side-line” manufacturer, as it were, or a lower-level competitor for
life and pleasure, along with many others of his kind--Creators or
“Gods” or avatars of, let us say, mosquitos, flies, bulls, cats, dogs;
in other words the specific and singular Creator of some one thing as
opposed to other Gods or powers who might well be creators of other
things of equal rank. And these “Gods,” in turn, should one choose to
follow the thought, might well be the special product of some greater
“God” or manufacturer or Creator who is finding a rather peculiar
expression through them and their creations in turn; also the various
rivalries which exist between man and the lower animals for the
possession of the earth might thereby be explained or have something to
do with that.
The thought is not new. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with
Darwin, Lamarck and Spencer of the theory of evolution, has pointed out
that “the organizing mind which actually carries out the development of
the life world need not be infinite, need not be what is usually meant
by the term God or Deity. The main cause of the antagonism between
religion and science seems to me to be the assumption by both that there
are no existences capable of taking part in the work of creation other
than blind forces on the one hand and the infinite, eternal, omnipotent
God on the other. The apparently gratuitous creation by theologians of a
hierarchy of angels and archangels, with no defined duties but those of
attendants and messengers of the Deity, perhaps increases this
antagonism.” He then proceeds to develop a theory of his own in which (I
quote) “the vast, the infinite chasm between ourselves and the Deity is
to some extent occupied by an almost infinite series of grades of
beings, each successive grade having higher and higher powers in regard
to the origination, the development and the control of the universe.” He
goes on to show how this might be done by them--all to the one end:
namely, the creation and preparation of man via experiences here,
presumably for a higher place in the control of the universe at large,
always under the Supreme Ruler of course and his lesser, yet in so far
as man is concerned greater, agents. In other words, under these
sub-Gods.
The idea is interesting only it does not, although it may be too much to
say that it cannot, explain the endless bickering and chaffering in the
universe at large, the utter failure of various movements and types here
on earth and apparently elsewhere, the astonishing selection of so
minute a mote in the material universe as this particular planet for the
purpose of working out a higher type of assistant or worshiper of God
Himself. It may be true, but the idea is a little fantastic and suggests
the labors of an ignorant and yet hopeful being endeavoring to account
for himself, his presence, in the best way he can.
To my humble way of thinking, the ancient Greeks and the various
theogonies of the ancient pagan world (Egyptian, Chaldean, Hindu) were
at least as plausible in their apprehension of a troublesome disorder.
The Old Testament and all other forms of ancient pagan literature
suggest the general and very natural conception, based on the evidence
of life itself, that various gods were or are contending via various
forms of life (animal, vegetable and mineral) for some form of
expression here on earth, and that the various things which they make
(or the one thing which each makes, its image and likeness perhaps) is
opposed to all others here. Pagan thought reeked with the feeling of
contests between gods or creators or controllers of this, that and the
other, and in the Sinaitic interpretation of life just quoted we see
something of the same thing; also in what small consideration man was
held by his alleged special Creator. Evidently the conclusion reached by
the thinking elders of the pagan world was that man, in so far as his
own special Creator was concerned, was viewed with sinister opposition
by the power which made him. It did not want him to amount to anything.
Indeed he was very, very plainly conscious of the inimical attitude of
Nature, or rather man’s especial God or Creator, toward him. He was not
as yet deluded by the Christian phantasm that man is made in the image
and likeness of his Creator, who is highly considerate of him, and that
the world was made for man, or that because of faith, good deeds,
special forms of self-abnegation and self-effacement he is to be
reserved to eternal bliss hereafter although there is no especial reward
for him here and now. And this is excellent indeed as illustrating a
force or forces of a creative turn which might wish to use man as man
uses any other minor implement for the accomplishment of any purpose he
may have, but not very complimentary to him as an illustration of his
own free and creative powers.
And, curiously, modern chemistry with its various tropisms--helio,
magnetic, stereo and chemo--together with its legal part, physics, does
little better by him. Already they tend to show that he is merely--and,
what is worse, accidentally so--an evoluted arrangement of attractions
and repulsions, arranged by chemicals and forces which desire or cannot
escape whorls or epitomes of complicated motions and emotions or
attractions which take the odd forms presented by men and animals.
But aside from this the most effective illustration of the essential
nothingness of man is his plain _individual_ weakness here and now as
contrasted with his mass ideals and the huge vanity or tendency toward
romance which causes him to wish to seem to be more than he really is or
can ever hope to be. For plainly every life, in the last analysis,
however useful to an assumed and carefully directing Creator, or however
successful from a momentary analysis it may appear, is a failure. We
hear of that curious thing, “a successful life.” It is in the main a
myth, a self-delusion. How could there possibly be success for a watery,
bulbous, highly limited and specially functioned creature, lacking (in
the case of man, for instance) many of the superior attributes of other
animals--wings, a sense of direction, foreknowledge and the like--and
manufactured every forty years by hundreds of millions, century in and
century out, made apparently not in the image and likeness of anything
superior to himself but in that of an accidentally compelled pattern,
due to an accidental arrangement of chemicals, his every move and
aspiration anticipated and accounted for by a formula and an
accidentally evolved system long before he arrives, and he himself born
puling, compact of vain illusions in regard to himself, his “mission,”
his dominant relation to the enormous schemes of Nature, and ending, if
“life” endures so long, in toothless senility and watery decay,
dissolution. And in addition some have scientifically placed the
creative as well as the generative period of man between his twentieth
and fortieth years--twenty years! Others generously extend it to fifty
and even sixty. Few venture to carry it beyond that. At seventy old
Nestor drools and repeats his fables of his few years and many troubles.
At fifty, even forty-five, most men are busy recounting the deeds,
adventures and creations of their earlier years!
To me the most astonishing thing in connection with man is this same
vanity or power of romanticising everything relating to himself, so that
whereas in reality he is what he is, a structure of brief import and
minute social or any other form of energy, left by his loving Creator to
contest in the most drastic and often fatal way with thousands, one
might almost say millions of inimical powers and only significant really
in so far as he or it is interlocked with others in some larger unity,
either (for illustration) as a soldier in an army or its delegated
commander or as a delegated or acknowledged representative of some
moving or mass or race impulse, still he has this astonishing power of
viewing himself as a tremendous force in himself, a god, a hero, an
enduring and undying figure of glory and beauty--as significant almost
as the Creator Himself, in whose image and likeness he is supposed to be
made!
The wonder! The beauty even!
Sometimes I think all this is the almost inevitable result of something
inherently weak but with one clear power: that of visualizing or
perceiving strength in other things and so, by contrast, its own
weakness; and, by reflex action merely, attempting to salve itself
against its own ineffectiveness by imagining itself to be that which it
may never be: a victor, a Colossus bestriding the world, an undying
potentate, ruling forever, and so gaining strength to go on. For
individuals are never masters in any remarkable way. They merely and at
best borrow or direct the energies of many, and in the main to no
important result to themselves. A Napoleon slaves and starves to the end
that he may die on St. Helena and bring considerable profit to many who
never heard of him and care not at all. A Cæsar toils endlessly at
organization and the development and preservation of Rome, only to be
stabbed to death in his fifty-sixth year, practically unrewarded. A
Hannibal slaves for Carthage, enduring endless hardships, only to die by
his own hand. The category might be extended indefinitely. And yet the
world is full of laudations of the powers of men, their satisfactions,
their vast, vast rewards and glories; while so many decayed steles and
temple doorways, and data unending, bear testimony to their utter
material and subsequent spiritual futility.
And when I say this I wish to make it perfectly clear that I am by no
means confusing the race with the individual, or vice versa. What a race
may do, and what man may, are two very different things. The race,
representing the totality of active creations and pushed on by dynamic
forces from below, may be, and in so far as one can guess is, a huge
success. The God or force or forces using man in various aspects here
and now (two billion men at the present moment) may be and no doubt is
finding self-expression through and in him and may well be tremendously
satisfied with the result. But in what way does that, or can it, add to
the comfort or bliss of the particular individual? Endlessly repeated,
an oyster-like copy of every other man that has ever been, a mere minute
portion of something the significance or import of which he can not
even surmise. And within the race itself one need only think of the
various types--preacher, actor, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, writer,
poetic, artist, prize-fighter, all very much alike and all repeated and
repeated ad infinitum--to see how impossible the idea of individuality
is. The very idea of extreme individuality, even under the most special
and favored circumstances, is seen to be all but an impossibility. We
are at best, even in our arts and highest forms of special
adaptations, copies of things which are and have been as common as
pig-tracks--generals, philosophers, statesmen, society grande dames and
the like not excepted. Over and over and over we appear, one and all,
even our exact gestures, smiles, glances. Who has not seen it in so
short a space as three generations? And we speak of individuality, of
special destinies!
Herein lies the pathos, and this is the outstanding fact, that man is
essentially a creation or mechanism, accidental or not as you wish, of a
force or forces which in so far as any one can determine is or are, far
more than he in his wildest flights of fancy suspects, the thing which
he most craves to be, individual, enduring, but of which he is only a
part and of which he is constantly seeking more--_life_. The thing which
makes and repeats over and over ad infinitum and _is_ two billions of
men, or anything else into which it chooses to form itself, may be
thought of as having life, personality, success and the like, but as for
individual man or any of its minute atoms! Indeed man might as well
think of the minute atoms of his internal mechanism as having success,
fame, a great life or future, as himself. His day, like theirs, is
measured by a minute fraction of time and labor and energy, and so is
nothing. Quite obviously there is something which is to man what man in
his entirety as an individual is to the least ion or molecule of his
inner cosmos: a thing of so vast a magnitude comparatively as to be as
far outside his reckoning as must he be to the ion of his inner body.
And as for size or force and import, that which creates him is as far
above him as he is above the ion. Indeed, although man, in his capacity
or proportion as an individual and as contrasted with the least of the
electrons of his being, is beyond computation for size, yet viewed again
in contrast with his external world he sinks into a mere fumbling,
briefly-ended mote and tool. Like the ion of his inner cosmos, in this
vast etheric or ionic something which is outside of him and which we see
blazing as worlds or suns or existing as immeasurable space, he is too
minute and too brief to be discussed. Even the great earth which he
treads with so much pride is to this external thing quite as minute as
man’s electron is to him; and yet his relationship even to this is
almost as nothing. For on this so minute thing which, sidereally
speaking, is as nothing, he appears nevertheless, insect-wise, by the
billion every forty (or whatever the average life of man may be) years,
to say nothing of innumerable other forms which have the ion or the
molecule as the base of their material presence or structure. Still he
permits himself to believe that he is something, and in facing all has
the stupendous or fortunate ignorance to write himself down as Lord,
Master, Great Guider of Things Terrestrial!
One of the things which might modify this supreme romantic estimate of
himself, if such a thing were either desirable or possible, would be an
even slightly technical examination of the process by which he arrives,
as well as the extreme simplicity of the mechanical and chemical formula
by which, throughout endless ages, he and all his fellows have been
created. There is no longer any vast mystery about it; we are even
getting relatively close to the secret, or could if we were permitted to
go on undisturbed for a period by wars, let us say, or religious and
educational illusions and furies (put forward by what? How brought
about?), a persistent inherent mass opposition to thought and change in
man himself. What subtle force ever invented that as a race quieter?
As biologists and anthropologists present man and his allied species,
the original type structure on which all are more or less modeled is not
so wonderful: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two feet and two hands
or four feet, two of them antecedents of the present hands; or two feet
and two wings, the latter successors of former feet; a lung or
air-breathing system, not unlike that of any tree or plant; a root or
arterial system, modified to meet various conditions and situations as
in birds, fishes, moles; a nervous or sensory system of an allied
character--no marked diversity in anything indeed, and all brought about
by the inescapable chemical and physical reactions and compulsions of
seemingly blind forces, as Crile and Loeb have shown. Even now chemists
and physicists are at work upon the balances and equations involved in
the mechanical and chemical construction of man, the leverage by which
he moves, the combinations which control his form or aspect, as well as
the chemical combinations which can induce motion or self-propulsion.
Even as to his so-called thought how close are the Behaviorists to the
material mechanics which produce it? His thoughts also are apparently
little more than compelled reactions of one chemical upon another which
he can no more escape than can he his form or motions. The one unsolved
mystery apparently is why a machine so easily made and controlled should
be able to speculate as to the reason for his being or to worry over it.
And yet just here another interesting fact stands out, and that is that
whether or not he is a machine, Nature, or his Creator, appears to be
quite definitely opposed to his finding out about himself or even to his
delving into the matter, and throughout recorded science there is no
evidence of the least willingness on the part of Nature or the life
constructing forces to yield a single fact of any kind without a
struggle. Man has fumbled and stumbled, dying by billions in one
erroneous way, or another, until at last, by mere chance apparently, he
has stumbled upon one helpful fact or another. It is as if the fable of
Prometheus or that other of Adam and Eve were true. The seekers after
knowledge of any kind have almost invariably been fought or their work
brought to nothing, and even where man has apparently proven victorious
or where he has seemingly been aided only that has been yielded which
has tended to further him as an ignorant and yet useful machine, never
as a thinker. No one who has tended to throw a clear light on the
internecine struggles of Nature Herself, Her cruelties and brutalities,
has prospered. If one doubts this he has only to consider the fumbling,
haphazard progress of man, his warring notions as to his source and
import, his strange aberrant evolution and the persistent and
discouraging hindrances cast in the way of his intellectual evolution;
i. e., the rise of impossible and even ridiculous leaders and religious
theories--Christianity, Shintoism, Mohammedism--and the arrival of such
dark figures as Attila (self-styled “the scourge of God”), Alaric, and
Mohammed with his houris’ dream, upon the scene of fairly acceptable
intellectual conditions. The deaths of endless prying inventors, their
pursuit by the religionists in darker ages, the periodic rise of-isms
and world-sweeping folderol, political and other notions, all seem to
point to but one thing: Nature’s indifference if not opposition to man’s
tendency to develop intelligence and desire to know--if such a thing can
be assumed, for it cannot be proved. For since when has the dulness of
the mass, or man, his ignorance or indifference, apparently calculated
and conditional, not stood their ground against the overtures of
intelligence, science, the arts, philosophy? Nothing flourishes on earth
so well as vain theory. Energetic thought is all but taboo. False dreams
and false hopes are invariably encouraged by apparently some chemical or
mechanical condition in the so-called brain of man himself. It is
scarcely so much that he dare not as that he cannot.
And if he should but stop to consider this cloak-and-suit-model
repetition of himself previously suggested, this system or pattern after
which he and all the endless decillions which have preceded and will
follow him are made, do you suppose he could exact anything which
suggested individuality or personal persistence as a spirit or
thought--self-generated thought--out of it? Is one button wiser or much
more important than any other, or at all more likely to outlast another
spiritually? Is it in any way essential that it should? The original
model for the button might be important, but as for the endless copies!
Indeed in the whole program of repetition, in so far as man or any of
the animals or insects or of matter itself is concerned, there is but
one ray of light or hope, and that is that the ion or electron of which
all and everything appears to be composed may after all be the only true
base or unit of expression of the so-called controlling spirit or force
or forces of life, not the various contesting combinations of them, and
that this ionic sea or mass, while controlled by the necessity of
division and recombination, if it wishes to express itself at all (“The
Kinetic Theory,” J. C. Vogt), is still so large and so involute in its
creative processes as to be necessarily more or less indifferent to any
form of ionic self-expression or combination that might occur under or
with it. So that the mere fact that groups or volumes of itself (ions)
should combine for any purpose or generate themselves into any special
forms of life (via combination, of course)--suns, planets, animals,
races, nations, and their special developments again--might be to it a
matter of absolutely no consequence. What matter if the electrons of
some minute part of itself should organize and set up some special sun
or planet or race of individuals, so long as they did not prove
troublesome to the rest of the ionic sea? Supposing there are vast
galaxies of self-generated suns in space--endless space, composed of but
a part of the total ionic mass--so long as they are a mere negligible
nothing to the totality of enduring force; what of it? If such were the
case it is entirely conceivable that anything might arise for a time,
any system of suns or race-life on suns or planets, and also the
domination of one organized group of ions over another, but all subject
nevertheless in the course of time and according to some equational and
inescapable law to the totality of primary ionic or universal force.
In that case such a statement as occurs in Genesis iii. 5, would be
plain enough. Some self-generated combination of ions looking upon
itself as a creator in its own right (for a period anyhow), and having
sub-invented man for some purpose of its own, self-expression or
comfort, or the use of other enslaved ions to do its bidding, might say
just that (“For God doth know,” etc.); and it would be true.
On the other hand man, via the force of the numbers of the ions
collected within himself, his race, and by degrees so gaining in
numbers, and so power or intelligence equal to that of the ions which
had originally enslaved him, might rise and question of this other
elemental ionic combination its right to lordship over him. And again,
by reason of _laissez faire_ conditions which apparently hold throughout
all Nature and force, he would then be able to overthrow this higher
ionic combination and so set up a lordship of his own--as in some ways
even now he appears to be doing. For one need only observe his growing
command of machinery and the apparently indifferent streams of ionic
energy everywhere moving, upon the backs of which or to the streams of
which he attaches his wires and dynamos and engines and permits them to
do a part of his work for him, in order to see how this might be. For if
we are not an illustration of one ionic combination using another, what
are we? And if that which is above us is not a combination of ions using
us, what is it? Science has no other answer. At the same time, of
course, man would be fought, as apparently he is being fought now,
attacked and delayed by the powers which hitherto have made and are
still using him. In that case the remarks of Jehovah in Genesis would be
explicable enough.
And I here venture this prediction, based on this idea, that in case man
is ever capable of awaking from his dream of spiritual enslavement and
considers the higher creative reality which makes suns and his own
immediate God as well, and sees also that he is the victim of a purely
gratuitous overlordship of which he is no more than a hypnotic victim,
he may well be able to invent crawling and winged things with some
primary system of nervous response and intelligence, quite as he was
invented in the first place, which will serve him in some dull, hopeless
way, just as he himself now serves a higher power. Already he has
invented most complicated machinery, and what else may he not invent?
For ions are ions, wherever found, in whatever form of life, amœba, or
man or sun, and they are everywhere. Obviously they may not rule save in
combination and by force, one combined group seizing on other uncombined
and therefore helpless ions so to do, and is that not our method in all
phases of life here on earth now? But once the ions of men finding
themselves in combination, by whatsoever process contrived, it may not
be so easy longer to control them. Rebellions may occur, and probably
will. The great thing seems to be to get enough of them in combination.
Time perhaps is the great factor in all these things. At the same time
it might be true, and at present so appears, that the generative group
of ions which evolved man and all of his so-called superior combinations
and results here, might be so jealous of its own creative skill in this
respect that, seeing man or his ionic content attempting to gain
knowledge of how to proceed and do, it might at once set out to undo
him. The fable of Prometheus and of Adam and Eve may not be so
impossible, after all. Yet should his “God” not be able to completely
destroy him he may yet well imitate his Creator and create.
But will he be allowed so to do?
LIFE, ART AND AMERICA
I do not pretend to speak with any historic or sociologic knowledge of
the sources of the American ethical, and therefore critical, point of
view, though I suspect the origin, but I am at least convinced that,
whatever its source or sense, it does not accord with the facts of life
as I have noted or experienced them. To me the average or somewhat
standardized American is an odd, irregularly developed soul, wise and
even froward in matters of mechanics, organizations and anything that
relates to technical skill in connection with material things, but
absolutely devoid of true spiritual insight, correct knowledge of the
history of literature or art, and confused by and mentally lost in or
overcome by the multiplicity of the purely material and inarticulate
details by which he finds himself surrounded.
As a boy in the small towns of the middle West I had no slightest
opportunity to get a correct or even partially correct estimate of what
might be called the mental A B abs of life. I knew nothing of history,
and there was not a book in any of the schools which I attended, labeled
either history or science or art, containing the least suggestion of the
rationale which I subsequently came to feel to be relatively true, or at
least acceptable to me. If I remember correctly, in the history of the
world which was labeled Swinton’s, the defeat of Napoleon, not his
career, was pointed out as having had a great moral if not Christian
value to the world. His end on St. Helena, not the Code Napoleon or the
hieratic and ultra-economic arrangement of his material forces, was
supposed to have achieved something for society! Similarly Socrates and
his death were descanted upon as having almost a religious if not a
Christian import. His death was painted as having been brought about by
his low private deeds, not his higher moral views. The true significance
of the man as illustrated by the exact details of his life were utterly
ignored.
Because my father was a Catholic and I was baptized in that faith, I was
supposed to accept all the dogma, as well as the legends, of the Church
as true. In the life about me I saw flourishing the Methodist, the
Baptist, the United Brethren, the Christian, the Congregationalist, the
what-not churches, each representing, according to its adherents, the
exact historic and truthful development and interpretation of life or
the world. As a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy I listened to sermons
on hell, where it was, and what was the nature of its torments. As
rewards for imaginary good behavior I have been given colored picture
cards containing exact reproductions of heaven! Every newspaper that I
have ever read, or still read, has had an exact code of morals by the
light of which one may detect at once Mr. Bad Man and Mr. Good Man and
so save oneself from the machinations of the former! The books which I
was advised to read, and for the neglect of which I was frowned upon,
were of that naïve character known as pure. One should read only good
books--which meant of course books from which any reference to sex had
been eliminated, and what followed as a natural consequence was that all
intelligent interpretation of character and human nature was immediately
discounted.
A picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful; a statue equally
so. The dance in our home and our town was taboo. The theater was an
institution which led to crime, the saloon a center of low, even bestial
vices. The existence of such a thing as an erring or fallen woman, let
alone a house of prostitution, was a crime, scarcely a fact to be
considered. There were forms and social appearances which we were taught
to wear, quite as one wears a suit of clothes. One had to go to church
on Sunday whether one wished to or not. It was considered good
business, if you please, to be connected with some religious
organization; and, by the same token, this commercialized religiosity
was transmuted into glistening virtue. We were taught persistently to
shun most human experiences as either dangerous or degrading or
destructive. The less you knew about life the better; the more you knew
about the fictional heaven and hell ditto. People walked about in a kind
of sanctified maze or dream, hypnotized or self-hypnotized by an erratic
and impossible theory of human conduct which had grown up heaven knows
where or how, and had finally cast its amethystine spell over all
America, if not over all the world.
Now I have no particular quarrel with this save that it is so
impossible, so inane. In my day there were apparently no really bad men
who were not known as such to all the world, or at least quickly
detected, and few if any good men who were not sufficiently rewarded by
the glorious fruits of their good deeds here and now! Success--mere
commercial success--was in its way all but synonymous with greatness.
Positively, and I stake my solemn word on this, until I was between
seventeen and eighteen I had scarcely begun to suspect any other human
being of harboring the erratic and sinful thoughts which occasionally
flashed through my own mind.
At that time I was just beginning to suspect that some of the things
which had been laid down to me by one authority and another were not
true. All so-called good men were not necessarily good, I was beginning
to suspect, and all bad men not hopelessly bad. There were things in
cities and towns which, as I was coming to see, did not accord with the
theories of the particular realm from which I had sprung and seemed to
indicate another kind of human being, different from the type among
which I had been raised. My mother, as I even then saw, admire her as I
might, was a mere woman, not an angel; my father a mere, mere crotchety
man. My sisters and brothers were individuals such as I soon began to
find were breasting the stormy waters of life outside, and not very
different from all other brothers and sisters, not perfect souls set
apart from life and happy in the contemplation of each other’s
perfections. In short, I was beginning to find the world a seething,
stormy, bitter, gay, rewarding and destroying realm, in which the strong
and the subtle and the charming and the magnetic were apt to be victors,
and the weak and the homely and the ignorant and the dull were apt to be
deprived of any interesting share, not because of any innate depravity
but rather because of the lacks by which they were handicapped and which
they could not possibly overcome.
And there were other phases which previously I had scarcely suspected.
The race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. All great
successes, as I was beginning to discover for myself, were relatively
gifts, the teachings of the self helpers and virtue mongers to the
contrary notwithstanding. Artists, singers, actors, policemen,
statesmen, generals, were born and not made. Sunday-school maxims,
outside of the narrowest precincts, did not apply. People might preach
one thing on Sunday or in the bosom of their families or in the
meeting-places of conventional social groups, but they did not practice
them except under compulsion, particularly in the marts of trade and
exchange. Mark the phrase “under compulsion.” I admit a vast compulsion
which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or
impulses of individuals. That compulsion springs from the settling
processes of forces which we do not in the least understand, over which
we have no control and in whose grip we are as grains of dust or sand,
blown hither and thither, for what purpose we cannot even suspect.
Politics, as I found in working as a newspaper man, was a low mess;
religion, both as to its principles and its practitioners, a ghastly
fiction based on sound and fury, signifying nothing; trade was a
seething war in which the less subtle and the less swift or strong went
under, while the more cunning succeeded; the professions were largely
gathering-places of weaklings, mediocrities or mercenaries, to be
bought by, or sold to, the highest bidder.
The individual, as I found, was trying to do one thing: make himself
happy principally; life was plainly trying to do another, or at least
what it was doing involved no great concern for the welfare of any
particular individual. He might live, he might die; he might be well
fed, he might be hungry; he might, accidentally or by taking thought,
ally himself with successful movements, or he might inherently, by some
incapacity or fatality of disposition, involve himself in the drifts
toward failure; he might be weak, he might be strong; he might be wise,
he might be dull or narrow. Life in the large thrashing sense in which
we see it to move about us cared no whit for him. Why so many failures?
I was constantly asking myself; so many early deaths, so many accidents,
crass and unexplained? Why so many fires? So many cyclones? So many
destroying epidemics? So many breaks in health or in trade or by reason
of vice or crime or mere increasing age and mood? So many, many
individuals going down into the limbo of nothingness or failure, so few
attaining to that vast and lonesome supremacy which all were seeking?
Why? Why? I persistently asked myself; and I have yet to find the answer
in any current code of morals or ethics or the dogma of any religion.
If you should chance to consult a Methodist, a Baptist, a Presbyterian,
a Lutheran, or any other current American sectarian, on this subject you
would find (which after all is a dull thing to point out at this day and
date) that his conception of the things which he sees about him is
bounded by what he was taught in his Sunday School or his church, or
what he has stored up or gathered from the conventions of his native
town. (His native town! Kind heaven!) And although the world has stored
up endless treasures in chemistry, sociology, history, philosophy, still
the millions and millions who tramp the streets and occupy the stores
and fill the highways and byways and the fields and the tenements have
no faintest knowledge of this, or of anything else that can be said to
be intellectually “doing.” They live in theories and isms, and under
codes dictated by a church or a state or an order of society which has
no least regard for or relationship to their natural mental development.
The darkest side of democracy, like that of autocracy, is that it
permits the magnetic and the cunning and the unscrupulous among the
powerful individuals to sway vast masses of the mob, not so much to
their own immediate destruction as to the curtailment of their natural
privileges and the ideas which they should be allowed to entertain if
they could think at all--and incidentally to the annoying and sometimes
undoing of individuals who have the truest brain interests of the race
at heart: vide Giordano Bruno! Jan Huss! Savonarola! Tom Paine! Walt
Whitman! Edgar Allan Poe!
For after all the great business of life and mind is life. We are here,
I take it, not merely to moon and vegetate, but to do a little thinking
about this state in which we find ourselves, or at least to try. It is
perfectly legitimate, all priests and theories and philosophies to the
contrary, to go back, in so far as we may, to the primary sources of
thought, i. e., the visible scene, the actions and thoughts of people,
the movements of Nature and its chemical and physical subtleties, in
order to draw original and radical conclusions for ourselves. The great
business of the individual, if he has any time after struggling for life
and a reasonable amount of entertainment or sensory satiation, should be
this very thing. He should question the things he sees--not some things,
but everything--stand, as it were, in the center of this whirling storm
of contradiction which we know as life, and ask of it its source and its
import. Else why a brain at all? If only one could induce or enable a
moderate number of the individuals who pass this way and come no more
apparently to pause and think about life and take an individual point of
view, the freedom and individuality and interest of the world might be
greatly enhanced. We complain of the world as dull. If it is so, lack of
thinking by individuals is the reason. But to ask the poor,
half-equipped mentality of the mass to think, to be individual--what an
anachronism! You might as well ask of a rock to move or a tree to fly.
Here in America, by reason of an idealistic Constitution which is
largely a work of art and not a workable system, you see a nation
dedicated to so-called intellectual and spiritual freedom, but actually
devoted with an almost bee-like industry to the gathering and storing
and articulation and organization and use of purely material things. In
spite of all our base-drum announcement of our servitude to the
intellectual ideals of the world (copied mostly, by the way, from
England) no nation has ever contributed less, philosophically or
artistically or spiritually, to the actual development of the intellect
and the spirit. We have invented many things, it is true, which have
relieved man from the crushing weight of a too-grinding toil, and this
perhaps may be the sole mission of America in the world and the
universe, its destiny, its end. Personally I think it is not a half bad
thing to have done; the submarine and the flying machine and the armored
dreadnought, no less than the sewing-machine and the cotton-gin and the
binder and the reaper and the cash register and the trolley-car if not
the telephone, may prove in the end, or perhaps already have proved, as
significant in breaking the chains of the physical and mental slavery of
man as anything else. I do not know.
One thing I do know is that America seems profoundly interested in these
things, to the exclusion of anything else. It has no time, you might
almost say, no taste, to stop and contemplate life in the large, from an
artistic or a philosophic point of view. Yet after all, when all the
machinery for lessening man’s burdens has been invented and all the
safeguards for his preservation completed and possibly shattered by
forces too deep or superior for his mechanical cunning, may not a
phrase, a line of poetry, or a single act of some half-forgotten tragedy
be all that is left of what we now see or dream of as materially
perfect? For is it not thought alone, of many famous and powerful
things that have already gone, that endures?--a thought most often
conveyed by art as a medium?
But let me not become too remote or fine-spun in my conception of the
ultimate significance of art itself. The point which I wish to make is
just this: that in a land so devoted to the material, although dedicated
by its Constitution to the ideal, the condition of intellectual freedom,
let alone art, is certainly anomalous. Your trade and your trust
builder, most obviously dominant in America at this time, is of all
people most indifferent to, or most unconscious of, the ultimate and
pressing claims of mind and spirit as expressed by art. If you doubt
this you have only to look about you to see for what purposes, to what
end, the increment of men of wealth and material power in America is
most devoted. Stuffy, tasteless houses crowded with stuffy, tasteless
antiques, safety deposit vaults stuffed with securities, the having and
holding of purely material values always. In proof of which I may add
that we have something like twenty-five hundred colleges and schools and
institutions of various kinds, largely furthered by the money of
American men of wealth, and all presumably devoted to the development of
the mental equipment of man (or so we are told), yet nearly all set with
flinty firmness against anything which is related to truly radical
investigation, or thought, or action, or art. The inculcation of
morality and patriotism are even now laid down as the true task and
province of the so-called schools of higher learning by the educators
themselves, or at least the presidents of most of the leading
institutions--not the getting of knowledge at any cost, patriotic or
other.
As a matter of fact, in spite of the American Constitution and the
American oratorical address on all and sundry occasions, the average
American school, college, university, institution, is as much against
the development of the individual, in the true sense of that word, as
any sect or religion. What it really wants is not an individual but an
automatic copy of some altruistic and impossible ideal, which has been
formulated here or elsewhere under the domination of Christianity or
some other ism. I defy you to read any American college or university
prospectus or address or plea which concerns the purposes or ideals of
these institutions and not agree with me. They are not after
individuals; they are after types or schools of individuals, all to be
very much alike, all to be like themselves. And what type? Listen. I
know of an American college professor in one of our successful State
universities who had this to say of the male graduates of his
institution, after having watched the output for a number of years:
“They are all right, quite satisfactory as machines for the production
of material wealth or for the maintenance of certain forms of
professional skill, but as for ideas of their own or being creators or
men with the normal impulses and passions of manhood they do not fulfill
the requisite in any respect. They are little more than types, machines,
made in the image and likeness of their college. They do not think; they
cannot, because they are held hard and fast by the iron band of
convention. They are afraid to think. They are moral young beings,
Christian beings, model beings, but they are not men in the creative
sense, and the large majority will never do a thing other than work for
a corporation in a routine unindividual way, unless by chance or
necessity the theories and the conventions imposed or generated by their
training and surroundings are broken, and they become free, independent,
self-thinking individuals.”
In this connection I might say I know of one woman’s college, an
American institution of the highest standing, which since its inception
has sent forth into life some thousands of graduates and post-graduates
to battle life as they may for individual supremacy or sensory comfort.
They are (or were) supposed to be individuals capable of individual
thought, procedure, invention, development; yet out of all of them not
one has even entered upon any creative or artistic labor of any kind.
Not one. (Write me for the name of the college, if you wish.) There is
not a chemist, a physiologist, a botanist, a biologist, an historian, a
philosopher, an artist, of any kind or repute among them; not one. They
are secretaries to corporations, teachers, missionaries, college
librarians, educators in any of the scores of pilfered meanings that may
be attached to that much abused word. They are curators, directors,
keepers. They are not individuals in the true sense of that word; they
have not been taught to think; they are not free. They do not invent,
lead, create; they only copy or take care of, yet they are graduates of
this college and its theory, mostly ultra conventional, or, worse yet,
anæmic, and glad to wear its collar, to clank the chains of its ideas or
ideals--automatons in a social scheme whose last and final detail was
outlined to them in the classrooms of their alma mater. That, to me, is
one phase, amusing enough, of intellectual freedom in America.
But the above is a mere detail in any chronicle or picture of the social
or intellectual state of the United States. Turn, for instance, if you
will, to the legislative and judicial phases of our Government--those
grand realms in which only statesmen and judicial students of our
economic and social condition are supposed to move and rule, and what do
we find?
As long ago as 1875 Ernst Haeckel, the eminent German scientist,
complained that the judges and legislatures of his day and country had
“but a superficial acquaintance with that chief and peculiar object of
their activity--the human organism and its most important function, the
human mind,” and that they had no time for anything save “an exhaustive
study of beer and wine and the noble art of fencing.” If that could be
said of intellectual Germany in his day how much more and worse could be
judicated of the American jurist and legislator in America to-day. The
shabby mess which finance and trade rivalries make of our laws and our
halls of legislation--the mental equipment of the average politician,
his henchmen, the legislator and the judge--the hall boys of finance,
and at the same time of religious and therefore arbitrary moral dogma
which they have become, the petty ignoramuses we see on every hand
legislating for the people or interpreting the laws once they are thus
formulated! Haeckel wrote sadly of the judges and law enactors in his
day: “No one can maintain that their condition to-day is in harmony with
our advanced knowledge of this world”--and, certainly, in America
to-day, fifty years later, not a week passes in which we do not read of
legislative deeds and legal decisions which make a thinking man sigh.
Consider the slavish acceptance of religious and moral and financial
dictation from self-interested and equally ignorant people, the running
here and there to find what is temporarily expedient--what will satisfy
or quiet the public for an hour; what will keep them from losing their
petty jobs--by the politicians and legislators and so-called statesmen
and judges; the complete ignorance of every congressman and senator and
state legislator and judge and lawyer as to the commonest facts of
biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and history! One president,
Roosevelt, admitted that he could in no way understand economics. Yet
once the average country or city law student has mastered a few hundred
paragraphs of law he is ready to hire out to the nearest corporation, to
legislate for the people, to prefix “Hon.” to his name and set up in
business as a judge or a statesman.
On the other hand, and in the very teeth of all this, no country in the
world, at least none that I know anything about, has such a peculiar,
such a seemingly fierce determination, to make the Ten Commandments
work. It would be amusing if it were not pitiful, their faith in these
binding religious ideals. I have never been able to make up my mind
whether this springs from the zealotry of the Puritans who landed at
Plymouth Rock, or whether it is indigenous to the soil (which I doubt
when I think of the Indians who preceded the white), or whether it is a
product of the Federal Constitution, compounded by such idealists as
Paine and Jefferson and Franklin and the more or less religious and
political dreamers of the pre-Constitutional days. Certain it is that no
such profound moral idealism animated the French in Canada, the Dutch
in New York, the Swedes in New Jersey, or the mixed French and English
in the extreme South and New Orleans.
The first shipload of white women ever brought to America was sold,
almost at so much a pound. They were landed at Jamestown. The basis of
all the first large fortunes was laid, to speak plainly, in graft--the
most outrageous concessions obtained abroad. The history of our
relations with the American Indians is sufficient to lay any claim to
financial or moral virtue or worth in the white men who settled this
country. We debauched, then robbed and murdered them; there is no other
conclusion to be drawn from the facts covering that relationship as set
down in any history worthy the name. As regards the development of our
land, our canals, our railroads, and the vast organizations supplying
our present-day necessities, their history is a complex of perjury,
robbery, false witness, extortion, and indeed every crime to which
avarice, greed and ambition are heir. If you do not believe this,
examine the various congressional and State legislative investigations
which have been held on an average of every six months since the
Government was founded, and see for yourself. The cunning and
unscrupulousness of American brains can be matched against any the world
has ever known, not even excepting the English.
But an odd thing in connection with this financial and social
criminality is that it has been consistently and regularly accompanied,
outwardly at least, by a religious and a sex-puritanism which would be
scarcely believable if it were not true. I do not say that the robbers
and thieves who did so much to build up our great commercial and social
structures were in themselves always religious or puritanically moral
from the sex point of view, although in regard to the latter they most
frequently made a show of so being; but I do say that the communities
and the States and the nation in which they were committing their
depredations have been individually and collectively, in so far as the
written, printed and acted word are concerned, most loud in their
pretensions. Why? I have a vague feeling that it is the American of
Anglo-Saxon origin only who has been most vivid in his excitement over
religion and morals where the written, printed, acted or painted word
was concerned, yet who at the same time, and perhaps for this very
reason, was failing or deliberately refusing to see the contrast which
his ordinary and very human actions presented to all this. Was he a
hypocrite? Is he one?
Your American of Anglo-Saxon or other origin is actually no better,
spiritually or morally, than any other creature of this earth, be he
Turk or Hindu or Chinese, except from a materially constructive or
wealth-breeding point of view, but for some odd reason he thinks he is.
The only real difference is that, cast out or spewed out by conditions
over which he had no control elsewhere, he chanced to fall into a land
overflowing with milk and honey. Nature in America was, and still is,
kind to the lorn foreigner seeking a means of subsistence, and he seems
to have immediately attributed this to three things: First, his inherent
capacity to dominate and control wealth; second, the especial favor of
God to him; third, to his superior and moral state (due, of course, to
his possession of wealth). These three things, uncorrected as yet by any
great financial pressure or any great natural or world catastrophe, have
served to keep the American in his highly romantic state of
self-deception. He still thinks that he is a superior spiritual and
moral being, infinitely better than the creatures of any other land, and
nothing short of a financial cataclysm, which will come with the
pressure of population on resources, will convince him that he is not.
But that he will yet be convinced is a certainty. You need no fear.
Leave it to Nature.
One of the interesting phases of this puritanism or phariseeism is his
attitude toward women and their morality and their purity. If ever a
people has refined eroticism to a greater degree than the American I am
not aware of it. Owing to a theory of the doctrinaire acceptance of the
Mary legend possibly (Mary-olotry, no less), the good American, capable
of the same gross financial crimes previously indicated, has been able
to look upon most women, but more particularly those above him in the
social scale, as considerably more than human--angelic, no less, and
possessed of qualities the like of which are not to be found in any
breathing being, man, woman, child or animal. It matters not that his
cities and towns, like those of any other nation, are rife with sex;
that in each one are specific and often large areas devoted to Eros or
Venus. While maintaining them he is still blind to their existence or
import. He or his boys or his friends go--but----
Only a mentally one-sided nature or race such as the Anglo-Saxon could
have built upon any such asinine theory as this. One would suppose that
as they did, so they would have the courage to say, or at least cease
this endless pother as to superior virtue. But no. The purity, the
sanctity, the self-abnegation, the delicacy of women in America--how
these qualities have been exaggerated and dinned into our ears, until at
last the average scrubby non-reasoning male, quite capable of visiting
the gardens of Venus or taking a girl off the street, is no more able to
clearly visualize the creature before him than he is the central wilds
of Africa which he has never seen. A princess, a goddess, a divine
mother or creative principle, all the virtues, all the perfections, no
vices, no weaknesses, no errors--some such hodge-podge as this has come
to be the average Anglo-Saxon, or at least American, conception of the
average American woman. I do not say that a portion of this illusion is
not valuable, but as it stands now she is too good to be true, a
paragon, a myth! Actually, she doesn’t exist at all as he has been
taught to imagine her. She is nothing more than a two-legged biped like
the rest of us, but in consequence of this delusion sex itself, being a
violation of this paragon, has become a crime. We enter upon the earth,
it is true, in a none too artistic manner (conceived in iniquity and
born in sin, is the Biblical phrasing of it), but all this has long
since been glozed over, ignored, and to obviate its brutality as much
as possible the male has been called upon to purify himself in thought
and deed, to avoid all private speculation as to women and his
relationship to them, and, much more than that, to avoid all public
discussion, either by word of mouth or the printed page.
To think of women or to describe them, especially in our printed or
publicly uttered word, as anything less than the paragon previously
commented upon has become, by this process, not only a sin but a
shameful infraction of the moral code. Women are now so good, the sex
relationship so vile a thing that to think of the two at once is not to
be thought of. They are supposed to have no connection. We must move in
a mirage of illusion; we must trample fact underfoot and give fancy, in
the guise of our so-called better natures, free rein. How this must
affect or stultify the artistic and creative faculties of the race
itself must be plain, yet that is exactly where we stand to-day,
ethically and spiritually, in regard to sex and women, and that is what
is the matter with American social life, letters and art. Imagine a
puritan or a moralist attempting anything in art, which is nothing if
not a true reflection, emotional and intellectual, of insight into life!
Imagine! And contrast this moral or art narrowness with the American’s
commercial or financial or agricultural freedom and sense, and note the
difference. In regard to all the latter he is cool, skeptical,
level-headed, understanding, natural, consequently well-developed in
those fields; in regard to this other he is disillusioned, theoretic,
religious. In consequence he has no power, except for an occasional
individual who may rise in spite of these untoward conditions (to be
frowned upon), to understand, much less picture, life as it really is.
Artistically, intellectually, philosophically we are weaklings;
financially and in all ways commercial we are very powerful. So
one-sided has been our development that in this latter respect we are
almost giants. Strange, almost fabulous creatures have been developed
here by this process, men so singularly devoid of a rounded human nature
that they have become freaks in the matter of money-getting. I refer to
Rockefeller, Gould, Sage, Vanderbilt the first, H. H. Rogers, Carnegie,
Frick.
America I fear can be most aptly pictured as the land of Bottom the
Weaver; and by Bottom I mean the tradesman or manufacturer who by reason
of his enthusiasm for the sale of paints or powder or threshing machines
or coal has accumulated wealth, and in consequence and by reason of the
haphazard privileges of democracy, has strayed into a position of
counsellor, or even dictator, not in regard to the things about which he
might readily be supposed to know, but about the many things about which
he would be much more likely not to know: art, science, philosophy,
morals, public policy in general. You recall Bottom, of course, in “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream,” unconscious of his furry ears and also of the
fact that he does not know how to play the lion’s part; that it is more
difficult than mere roaring. Here he is now, in America, enthroned as a
lion, and in his way he is an epitome of the Anglo-Saxon temperament.
Bottom is so wise in his own estimation. He never once suspects his
furry ears or that he is not a perfect actor in the rôle of the
lion--or, if you will take it for what it is meant, the arts. He is just
a dull weaver really, made by this dream of our Constitution (“an
exposition of sleep” come upon him) into a roaring lion--in his own
estimation. No one must say that Bottom is not; he will be driven out of
the country, deported or exiled. No one must presume to practice the
arts save as Bottom understands them. If you do, presto, there is his
henchman Comstock and all Comstockery to take you into custody. Men who
have come here from foreign shores (England excepted) have been amazed
at Bottom’s ears and his presumption in passing upon what is a lion’s
part in life. Indeed he is the Anglo-Saxon temperament personified. He
is convinced that liberty was not made for Oberon or Peaseblossom or
Cobweb or Mustard, but for bishops and executives and wholesale grocers
and men who have become vastly rich canning tomatoes or selling oil. The
great desire of Bottom is for all of us to have furry ears and long, and
to believe that he is the greatest actor in the world. He is bewildered
by a world that will not play Pyramus his way. Quince, Snug, Flute,
Snout and Starveling (all those who came over with him in the Mayflower)
agree that he is a great actor, but there are others, and Bottom is
convinced that these others are in error, trying to wreck that dream,
the American Constitution, which brought this “exposition of sleep” upon
him and made him into a lion, “marvelous furry about the face” and with
great ears.
Alas, alas! for art in America. It has a hard, stubby row to hoe.
But my quarrel is not with America as a comfortable commercial and
industrious atmosphere in which to move and have one’s being, but
largely because it is no more than that, because it tends to become a
dull, conventionalized, routine, material world, duller even than its
reputed mother, sacred England. We are drifting, unless most of the
visible signs are deceiving, into the clutches of a commercial oligarchy
whose mental standards outside of trade are so puerile as to be scarcely
worth discussing. Contemplate, if you please, what has happened to one
of the shibboleths or bulwarks of our sacred liberties and intellectual
freedom, i. e., the newspaper, under the dominance of trade. Look at it.
I have not the time here to set forth seriatim all the charges that have
been made, and in the main thoroughly substantiated, against the
American newspaper; but consider for yourself the newspapers which you
know and read. How much, I ask you, if you are in trade, do the
newspapers you read know about trade? How far could you follow their
trade judgment or understanding? And if you are a member of any
profession, how much reported professional knowledge or news, as
presented by a newspaper, can you rely on? If a newspaper reported a
professional man’s judgment or dictum in regard to any important
professional fact, how fully would you accept it without other
corroborative testimony?
You are a play-goer: do you believe the newspaper dramatic critics? You
are a student of literature: do you accept the mouthings of their
literary critics or even look to them for advice? You are an artist or a
lover of art: do you follow the newspapers for anything more than the
barest intelligence as to the whereabouts of anything artistic? I doubt
it. And in regard to politics, finance, social movements and social
affairs, are they not actually the darkest, the most misrepresentative,
frequently the most biased and malicious guides in the world of the
printed word? Newspaper criticism, like newspaper leadership, has long
since come to be looked upon by the informed and intelligent as little
more than the mouthings or bellowings of mercenaries or panderers to
trade; or, worse still, rank incompetents. The newspaper man, _per se_,
either does not know or cannot help himself. The newspaper publisher is
very glad of this and uses his half intelligence or inability to further
his own interests. Politicians, administrations, department stores,
large interests and personalities of various kinds use or control or
compel newspapers to do their bidding. This is a severe indictment to
make against the press in general, but is it not literally true?
Take again the large, almost dominant religious and commercial
organizations of America. What relationship, if any, do they bear to a
free mental development, a subtle understanding, art or life in its
poetic or tragic moulds, its drift, its character? Would you personally
look to the Methodist or the Presbyterian or the Catholic or the Baptist
church to further individualism, or freedom of thought, or directness of
mental action, or art in any form? Do not they really ask of all their
adherents that they lay aside this freedom in favor of the reported word
or dictum of a fabled, a non-historic, an imaginary ruler of the
universe? Think of it! And they are among the powerful, constructive
and controlling elements in government--in this government, to be
accurate--dedicated and presumably devoted to individual liberty, not
only of so-called conscience, but of constructive thought and art.
And our large corporations, with their dominant and controlling captains
of industry so-called; what about their relationship to individuality,
the freedom of the individual to think for himself, to grow mentally?
Take, for instance, the tobacco trust, the oil trust, the milk trust,
the coal trust--in what way do you suppose they help? Are they actively
seeking a better code of ethics, a wider historic or philosophic
perspective, a more delicate art perception for the individual, or are
they definitely and permanently concerned with the customary bludgeoning
tactics of trade, piling up fortunes out of which they are to be
partially bled later by pseudo art collectors and swindling dealers in
antiques and so-called historic art and literature? Of current life and
its accomplishments, what do they actually know? Yet this is a
democracy. Here, as in no other realm of the world, the individual is
supposed to be permitted, even compelled, to seek his own material and
mental salvation as best he may. Yet one trouble with a democracy, in so
far as art and individual intelligence is concerned, as opposed to an
autocracy with a line of titled idlers, is that the latter permits at
least the gift of leisure and art indulgence to a few and there usually
is a central force or group to foster art, to secure letters and art in
their inalienable rights, to make of superior thought a noble and a
sacred thing. I am not saying that democracy will not yet produce such a
central force or group. I believe it may or can. It is entirely possible
that when the time arrives it may prove to be better than any form of
hereditary autocracy. But I am talking about the mental, the social, the
artistic condition of America as it is to-day.
To me it is a thing for laughter, if not for tears; one hundred and
twenty million Americans, rich (a fair percentage of them, anyhow)
beyond the dreams of avarice, and scarcely a sculptor, a poet, a
singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician, worthy the name. One hundred
and forty years (almost two hundred, counting the Colonial days) of the
most prosperous social conditions, a rich soil, incalculable deposits of
gold, silver and precious and useful metals and fuels of all kinds, a
land amazing in its mountains, its streams, its valley prospects, its
wealth-yielding powers, and now its tremendous cities and far-flung
facilities for travel and trade--and yet contemplate it. Artists, poets,
thinkers, where are they? Has it produced a single philosopher of the
first rank--a Spencer, a Nietzsche, a Schopenhauer, a Kant? Do I hear
some one offering Emerson as an equivalent? Or James? Has it produced a
historian of the force of either Macaulay or Grote or Gibbon? A novelist
of the rank of Turgenev, de Maupassant or Flaubert? A scientist of the
standing of Crookes or Röentgen or Pasteur? A critic of the insight and
force of Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the de Goncourts? A dramatist the
equivalent of Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann, Brieux? An actor, since
Booth, of the force of Coquelin, Sonnenthal, Forbes-Robertson or Sarah
Bernhardt? Since Whitman, one poet: Edgar Lee Masters. In painting a
Whistler, an Inness, a Sargent. Who else? (And two of these shook the
dust of our shores forever.) Inventors, yes; by the hundreds, one might
almost say thousands; some of them amazing enough, in all conscience,
world figures, and enduring for all time. But of what relationship to
art, the supreme freedom of the mind?
The most significant, and to me discouraging, manifestation in
connection with the United States to-day is the tendency to even
narrower and more puritanic standards than have obtained in the past. I
am constantly astonished by the thousands of men, exceedingly capable in
some mechanical or narrow technical sense, whose world or philosophic
vision is that of a child. As a nation we accept and believe naïvely in
such impossible things. I am not thinking alone of the primary tenets of
all religions, which are manifestly based on nothing at all and which
millions of Americans, along with the humbler classes of other
countries, accept, but rather of those sterner truths which life itself
teaches: the unreliability of human nature; the crass chance which
strikes down and destroys our finest dreams; the fact that man in all
his relations is neither good nor evil, but both. The American, by some
hocus pocus of atavism, has seemingly borrowed or retained from English
lower middle-class puritans all their folderol notions about making
human nature perfect by fiat or edict--the written word, as it were,
which goes with all religions. So, although by reason of the coarsest
and most brutal methods we as a nation have built up one of the most
interesting and domineering oligarchies in the world, we are still not
aware of the fact.
All men, in the mind of the unthinking American, are still free and
equal. They have in themselves certain inalienable rights; what they are
when you come to test them no human being can discover. Life here, as
elsewhere, comes down to the brutal methods of Nature itself. The rich
strike the poor at every turn; the poor defend themselves and further
their lives by all the tricks which stark necessity can conceive. No
inalienable right keeps the average cost of living from rising steadily,
while most of the salaries of our idealistic Americans are stationary.
No inalienable right has ever yet prevented the strong from tricking or
browbeating the weak. And although by degrees the average American is
feeling more and more keenly the sharpening struggle for existence, yet
his faith in his impossible ideals is as fresh as ever. God will save
the good American and seat him at His right hand on the Golden Throne.
With one hand the naïve American takes and executes with all the brutal
insistence of Nature itself; with the other he writes glowing platitudes
concerning brotherly love, virtue, purity, truth, etc., etc. A part of
this right or left hand tendency, as the case may be, is seen in the
constant desire of the American to reform something. No country in the
world, not even England, the mother of folderol reforms, is so prolific
in these frail ventures as this great country of ours. In turn we have
had campaigns for the reform of the atheist, the drunkard, the lecher,
the fallen woman, the buccaneer financier, the drug fiend, the dancer,
the theatergoer, the reader of novels, the wearer of low-neck dresses
and surplus jewelry--in fact every taste and frivolity, wherever
sporadically it has chanced to manifest itself with any interesting
human force. Your reformer’s idea is that any human being, to be a
successful one, must be a pale spindling sprout, incapable of any vice
or crime. And all the while the threshing sea of life is sounding in his
ears! The thief, the lecher, the drunkard, the fallen woman, the greedy,
the inordinately vain, as in all ages past, pass by his door and are not
the whit less numerous for the unending campaigns which have been
launched to save them. In other words, human nature is human nature, but
your American cannot be made to believe it.
Personally my quarrel is with America’s quarrel with original thought.
It is so painful to me to see one after another of our alleged reformers
tilting Don Quixote-like at the giant windmills of fact. We are to have
no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete
dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters, no motion
pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even,
which will in any way contravene his limited view of life. Finally we
even contrived a President who was to have no more war! A few years ago
it was the humble dealer in liquor whose life was anathematized and
whose property was descended upon with torch, axe and bomb. A little
later, our cities growing and the sections devoted to the worship of
Venus becoming more manifest, the Vice Crusader was bred, and we now
have the spectacle of whole areas of fallen women scattered to the four
winds and allowed to practice separately what they cannot do
collectively. Also came Mr. Comstock, vindictive, persistent, and with a
nose and taste for the profane and erotic such as elsewhere has not
been equaled since. Pictures, books, the theater, the dance, the
studio--all came under his watchful eye. During the twenty or thirty
years in which he acted as a United States Postoffice Inspector he was,
because of his dull charging against things which he did not understand,
never out of the white light of publicity which he so greatly craved.
One month it would be a novel by d’Annunzio; another, a set of works by
Balzac or de Maupassant, found in the shade of some grovelly
bookseller’s shop; the humble photographer attempting a nude; the
painter who allowed his reverence for Raphael to carry him too far; the
poet who attempted a recrudescence of Don Juan in modern iambics, was
immediately seized upon and hauled before an equally dull magistrate,
there to be charged with his offense and to be fined accordingly. All
this is being continued with emphasis.
Then came the day of the armed White Slave Chasers, and now no American
city and no backwoods Four Corners, however humble, is complete without
a vice commission of some kind, or at least a local agent or
representative charged with the duty of keeping the art, the literature,
the press and the private lives of all those at hand up to that standard
of perfection which only the dull can set for themselves. When the White
Slave question was at its whitest heat the problem of giving expression
to its fundamental aspects was divided between raiding plays which
attempted to show the character of the crime in too graphic a manner,
and licensing those which appealed to the intelligence of those who were
foremost in the crusade. Thus we had the spectacle of an uncensored, but
nevertheless approved, ten-reel film showing more details of the crime
and better methods of securing white slaves than any other production of
the day, running undisturbed to packed houses all over the country;
while two somewhat more dramatic but far less effective distributors of
information via plays were successfully harried from city to city and
finally withdrawn.
Shakespeare has been ordered from the schools in some of the States. A
production of “Antony and Cleopatra” has been raided in Chicago.
Japanese prints of a high art value, intended for the seclusion of a
private collection, have been seized and the most valuable of them
destroyed. By turns, an artistic fountain to Heine in New York, loan
exhibits of paintings in Denver, Kansas City and elsewhere, scores of
books by Stevenson, James Lane Allen, Frances H. Burnett, have been
attacked, not only, as in the case of the latter, with the airy weapons
of the law, but in the case of the former with actual axes. A male
dancer of repute and some artistic ability has been raided publicly by
the Vice Crusaders for his shameless exposure of his person! No play, no
picture, no book, no public or private jubilation of any kind is
complete any more without its vice attack.
To me this sort of thing is dull and bespeaks the low state to which our
mental activities have fallen. When it comes to the matter of serious
letters it is the worst. In New York a literary region of terror has
been and is now being attempted. The publisher of Freud’s “Leonardo” is
warned before he brings it out that he will be prosecuted--a work that
probably has no more defect than that of being intelligent and true.
Similarly, Mr. Przybyszewski’s “Homo Sapiens,” a by no means
pornographic work, was at once seized on its appearance and the
publishers frightened into withdrawing it. This was true of “Hagar
Revelly,” “Tess of the d’Urbevilles,” “Sapho,” “Jude the Obscure,” “Rose
of Dutchers Cooley,” “A Lady of Quality,” “A Summer in Arcady,” and
scores of others. Imagine banning a book like “A Summer in Arcady” from
the public libraries! Even “The Sexual Question” by the eminent August
Forel has been banned and of course all of Kraft-Ebling (Freud and Ellis
are sold only on the written order of a doctor--a mental prescription as
it were). Think of it--the work of a scientist of Freud’s attainments!
This sort of interference with serious letters and science is to me the
worst and most corrupting form of espionage which is conceivable to the
human mind. It plumbs the depths of ignorance and intolerance; if not
checked it can and will dam initiative and inspiration at the source.
Life, if it is anything at all, is a thing to be observed, studied,
interpreted. We cannot know too much about it because as yet we know
nothing. It is our one great realm of discovery. The artist, if left to
himself, may be safely trusted to observe, synchronize and articulate
human knowledge in the most comprehensive form. Human nature will seek
and have what it needs, the vice crusaders to the contrary
notwithstanding. There is no compulsion on any one to read; one must pay
to do so. What is more, one must have taste inherently to select, a
brain and a heart to understand. With all these safeguards and a double
score of capable critics in every land to praise or blame, what need
really is there for a censor, or a dozen of them, each far less fitted
than any of the working critics to indulge his personal predilection and
opposition, and to appeal to the courts if he is disagreed with?
Personally I rise to protest. I look on this interference with serious
art and thought and serious minds as an outrage. I fear for the ultimate
intelligence of America, which in all conscience, judged by world
standards, is low enough. Now comes a band of wasp-like censors to put
the finishing touches on a literature and an art that has struggled all
too feebly as it is. Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau, each in turn
was the butt and jibe of unintelligent Americans, until by now we are
well nigh the laughing-stock of the world. Where is it to end? When will
we lay aside our swaddling-clothes, enforced on us by ignorant,
impossible puritans and their uneducated followers, and stand up
free-thinking men and women? Life is to be learned as much from books
and art as from life itself--almost more so, in my judgment. Art is the
stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Shall the dull and the self-seeking and the self-advertising close this
store on the groping human mind?
THE COURT OF PROGRESS
EDITORIAL NOTE: The following manuscript, recovered from one of the
twenty-seven tombs of Federated Chairmen of the Post Federated Period of
World Republics, A.D. 2760-3923, recently discovered in the debris
centers of Exomia, Domas and Polos (Central Asia), plainly refers to
some annual festival or period of congratulation which, according to the
historian, Ruffstuff, who seems to have flourished toward the close of
that period when the great Asiatic and American world floods (the
shifting of the boundaries of the Pacific) ended the old order, was
apparently held, first, at some point in Central South Africa; later in
Middle Western North America, as the then continents were called. The
author or dramatist, Theobromo, plainly of some period later than that
of the Post Federated, when literature of all sorts, owing to the
religious viewpoint of the Federation, was non-existent, was plainly
familiar with records of this great court or festival, now non-existent.
(See mention in closing paragraph of Moline-Emporia-Sedalia sittings,
points or places which have not as yet been identified.) The translator,
Can. Theodore Dreiser, of Cambo, North Dromio, begs to explain that
owing to the peculiar difficulties of the language then used the exact
rendition of certain phrases and passages is not guaranteed.
CHARACTERS
NOXUS PODUNKUS: _Grand Referendunce Chairman of the Federated
Musnud of the World_.
SHISHMASH HASH HASH: _Master of Ceremonies to the Court of
Progress_.
{ _Savants_ }
{ _Moonshees_ }
{ _Roctor-Proctors_ }
Of { _Pundits_ } One hundred
{ _Theorists_ }
{ _Seers_ }
{ _Zadkiels_ }
{ _Oracles_ }
{ _Solons_ }
{ _Nestors_ }
{ _Gamaliels_ }
{ _Daniels_ }
{ _Dizzards_ _50_
{ _Zanys_ _100_
{ _Fuddys_ _100_
Of { _Hoddy-Doddys_ _100_
{ _Loobies_ _1000_
{ _Gaberlunzies_ _1000_
{ _Nizys_ _5000_
{ _Anti-Vivisectionists_ }
{ _Anti-Vaccinationists_ }
{ _Anti-Contraceptionists_ }
{ _Anti-Saloon Leaguers_ }
{ _Anti-Vice Crusaders_ }
{ _Anti-Lewd Book Examiners_ }
{ _Eugenic Sires_ }
{ _Free and Accepted Boy Scouts_ }
{ _Professors of Christian Economy_ }
{ _Feminists_ }
Of Descendant { _Moral Prophylaxers_ }
Sons and { _Non-Smokers’ Social Unionists_ } 50,000
Daughters { _Seventh Day Adventists_ }
of Ancient { _Sabbath Day Exclusivists_ }
and Honorable { _Holy Rollers_ }
{ _Evangelists_ }
{ _King’s Daughters_ }
{ _Women Magazine Editors_ }
{ _Library Protection Association Guards_ }
{ _Watch and Ward Society Guards_ }
{ _Prohibitionists_ }
{ _Federated Philosophers_ }
{ _Union Astronomers_ }
{ _Socialists_ }
{ _Gamblers_ }
{ _Saloon-keepers_ }
{ _Bartenders_ }
{ _Financiers_ }
{ _Thieves_ }
{ _Vivisectionists_ }
{ _Vaccinationists_ }
{ _Philosophers_ }
{ _Politicians_ }
{ _Astronomers_ }
{ _Magdalens_ }
{ _Madams_ }
{ _Novelists_ }
{ _Playwrights_ }
Of plaster { _Scenario Writers_ }
or Ossified { _Musicians_ }
Specimens { _Painters_ } One Each
of Ancient { _Poets_ }
and Degraded { _Cigarette Fiends_ }
{ _Dope Fiends_ }
{ _Sabbath Day Breakers_ }
{ _Pragmatists_ }
{ _Predatory Rich_ }
{ _Anarchists_ }
{ _White Slavers_ }
{ _Nietzscheans_ }
{ _Scientists_ }
{ _Chemists_ }
{ _Physicists_ }
{ _Stoics_ }
{ _Liars_ }
{ _Dogs_ }
{ _Scoundrels_ }
THE COURT OF PROGRESS
SCENE: _A great plain, filled with a vast multitude of people.
Tents, pagodas, pavilions, booths, kiosks, scattered over a wide
area and alive with a swarming mass. Overhead innumerable flags,
banners, shields, emblems and insignia of all kinds, as well as a
welter of decoration and bunting, all symbolic of peace,
prosperity and progress. Innumerable alleyways and passages suggest
a maze. In the center, behind a great open square or drill-ground,
an enormous pink-and-green pavilion of silk, fluttering innumerable
pinions and streamers of the most variegated hues. In the extreme
west of this (center) and facing east (to suggest open-mindedness
and a spirit of receptivity and progress) a giant Musnud or throne
of dried mush, straw and the polished grains of the oyster plant,
each with its spiritual, ethical and social significance. This same
is richly carved and tinted to represent the dawn, while at the
top, by a process of higher coloring, the floridity, variety and
fecundity of tropic life, signifying fullness of development, is
suggested. Over this a canopy of dried morning-glory vines stained
to represent the pink glow of dawn and strung with innumerable
papier-maché flowers representative of the bursting blooms of
perfection. Beneath, a large assortment of pillows, rugs,
bed-ticks, mats, cushions, hassocks and the like, tinted to suggest
the variety, fecundity, beneficence and generosity of Nature. On
these rest the one hundred Moonshees, Savants, Pundits,
Roctor-Proctors, Theorists, Seers, Zadkiels, Oracles, Solons,
Nestors and profound Daniels and Gamaliels, members of the High
Court of Progress of the Federated Republics of the World for the
years 3913-3923, and representing in themselves the world’s
farthest intellectual reaches as well as its peace, progress,
perfection and plenty._
_On their heads tall cornucopias of green-and-yellow tinfoil,
fluttering with ribbons. On their bodies flowing silk robes of
green decorated with red, yellow and blue astrologic designs, each
of special ethical, social and spiritual significance. In the
center of this company, his body clad in yellow, green and blue
cheesecloth, his head surmounted by a tall blue cornucopia
(signifying peace and plenty), and resting on an immense stack of
eiderdown pillows_, NOXUS PODUNKUS, _Grand Referendunce Chairman of
the Federated Republics of the World and President pro tem of the
Court of Progress of the same. He is very fat and restful. Behind
and among them, fifty Dizzards in sky-blue fleshings, jackets of
yellow, and pink coal-scuttle helmets, who keep watch and ward by
whistling between their teeth and laying about them with
feather-stuffed clubs whenever the attention of the Moonshees is
desired. Among the audience, one hundred thousand already admitted
and in their seats, five thousand Nizys in pink fleshings and
striped blue-and-green shawls, each carrying a tin wash-boiler full
of orange and lemon souffle and doling out the same in ice-cream
cones to all who signal. The latter are hung around their waists in
long strings._
_Before the Musnud one hundred Hoddy-Doddys, Ticklers Extraordinary
to the Savants, Zadkiels, etc. These are arrayed in green fleshings
and yellow silk overcoats, and carry yellow feather-dusters
attached to long blue bamboo stalks. They assist the Dizzards in
keeping the Moonshees awake. About the Hoddy-Doddys, ranged in a
semi-circle, one hundred Zanys, Official Wing-Bag Rattlers to the
Musnud. These same wear orange-and-green sweaters and running pants
of black and orange, plus long-visored caps of green, and carry
pear-shaped wind-bags containing dried watermelon seeds, the
ethical symbol of receptivity, which they rattle whenever the
attention of the audience is desired. Between the Hoddy-Doddys and
the Musnud, and at the immediate base of the same, one hundred
Fuddys, Wireless Telegraph Operators Extraordinary to the Court, in
green silk uniforms and plug hats, who are busy sending out
preliminary notices to the world of the assembling of the Court of
Progress. Beyond the Zanys in the aisles and semi-circular passages
between the seats, one thousand Loobies and one thousand
Gaberlunzies, Official First and Second Readers to the Court, the
First arrayed in blue-and-white, the Second in green-and-white
polka-dot gowns and mortar-boards, and each carrying about his
waist a chain to which is attached all the then permitted classics
of the pre-Federated Period (A. D. 1897-1927)--Hamilton Wright
Mabie, Orrison Swett Marden, Harold Bell Wright, Gene Stratton
Porter, Ralph Waldo Trine and others--from which at all moments of
undue excitement it is their duty to read soothing passages in
unison._
_Outside the principal entrance to the pavilion, on the Grand
Concourse, separate companies or regiments of Descendant Sons and
Daughters of Ancient and Honorable Anti-Vivisectionists,
Anti-Vaccinationists, Anti-Contraceptionists, Anti-Vice Crusaders,
Eugenic Sires, Feminists, Non-Smokers’ Social Unionists,
Anti-Saloon Leaguers, Free and Accepted Boy Scouts, Professors of
Christian Economy, Seventh Day Adventists, Sabbath Day
Exclusivists, Holy Rollers, King’s Daughters, Watch and Ward
Guards, Library Protection Association Guards, Union Astronomers,
Federated College Philosophers, Evangelists, etc., each practicing
their separate evolutions and class yells. A giant procession,
fifty thousand in number, soon to start and file before the
assembled Pundits and Zadkiels of the Court sitting on the Musnud
within, is intended to demonstrate to it and to the Universe at
large, via the assembled audience, the happy presence and
persistence and strength of the forces of light and order and
truth, as opposed to the quondom and now all but vanished remnants
of darkness prevailing in the world before the Federation of the
Commission-Governed Republics of the World. As the principal
function of the Court is to catechise its adherents and delegates
as to the reason for the faith that is in them, and to learn as to
the present progress of truth, mercy, justice, etc. via a series of
shrewd and now sacred questions (the Post Federated Tablets of the
Law) especially calculated to bring forth the facts and shame the
forces of darkness into silence, these same stand ready to answer
all such questions as to the certainty of the final perfection of
life and so to receive the approval of the Musnud and the assembled
populace._
_Some companies of these same are at present busy executing their
preliminary maneuvers, walking on their hands, turning hand-springs
and cart-wheels, whirling as dervishes and whistling and
cat-calling. Others ask and answer each other the sacred questions
of the Tablets; still others leap, run around in a ring, roll in
the dust and kick. Still others meditate head in hand or stare in
fixed absorption at Philosophers’ targets fixed on posts at
different points in the grounds. A general air of hope, sequacity,
peace, content, well-being, ease, and other forms of human
satisfaction, pervades each and every section of the field._
_Hauled about by varying groups of Descendant Sons and Daughters of
Free and Accepted Boy Scouts, Anti-Vivisectionists,
Anti-Vaccinationists, etc., all in attractive and unforgettable
raiment of cerise, purple, yellow and nile green, are the only
remaining specimens or images of now all but extinct Gamblers,
Saloon-Keepers, Financiers, Thieves, Vivisectionists,
Vaccinationists, Philosophers, Politicians, Magdalens and Predatory
Rich still in captivity or existence. It should be stated in
passing that all Liars, Thieves, Scoundrels, Lechers, Anarchists
and the like were finally exterminated during the all-memorable
Federated Presidency of Bonehead X, A. D. 3409-3427, just five
hundred years before. Saloons and all forms of illegal as well as
commercialized vice departed this earth some seven hundred years
before. The ladies of the Inner High Council of Descendant Sons and
Daughters of Ancient Thirty-second Degree Anti-Vivisectionists have
here (muzzled and chained) the only extant examples of a
Vivisectionist surgeon of the former cult of inhuman
experimentalists, captured in Greenland. The Federated Union of
Descendant Sons and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable
Vice-Crusaders of the World present in a drop-forged steel cage,
painted yellow, blue and green, the only living specimen of a
simon-pure Madam, recently captured in the outlying regions of
Borneo. In other portions of the field, caged and dressed to
represent now extinct types of Materialists, Scientists,
Philosophers, Chemists, Nietzscheans, Pragmatists, Stoics and so
forth, are one hundred volunteers of the East South African School
of Christian Histrionic Culture, freely giving their services for
this great occasion._
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_Grand Secretary-Treasurer of the Indo-African group of
Commission-Governed Republics, now in federation with the rest of the
world, and Master of Ceremonies to the Court of Progress. He is a tall
man, in a suit of red-and-green pajamas, slightly rubberized and
inflated. His ears are pierced and hung with blue earrings and his
cheeks are adorned with yellow lambrequins three feet long. Temporarily
he is entertaining himself just outside the stage entrance to the main
tent by doing back somersaults, but at the sight of five thousand
Descendant Sons and Daughters of Free and Accepted Boy Scouts, Watch and
Ward, and Library Protection Guards in marching order approaching the
main or stage entrance, he executes nine hand-springs, three bounds and
one back somersault, landing in front of the Musnud. At sight of him the
assembled multitude stirs and quivers and he-haws with delight. The
associated Moonshees, Pundits, Roctor-Proctors and others stir slightly
but continue to snore._ SHISHMASH HASH HASH, _executing a jig-step and
tying his whiskers in a bow-knot_.) Your Referendunces! (_At this the
fifty Dizzards directly in attendance on the assembled Moonshees of the
Musnud, each over six feet tall and weighing exactly one hundred and
twenty-seven pounds, stir the latter to wakefulness by whistling between
their fingers and beating them with their feather-stuffed clubs._)
THE FIFTY DIZZARDS
Pfs-s-t!---- Pfs-s-t!---- Pfs-s-t! (_They lay about them mightily with
their clubs._)
THE FIVE THOUSAND NIZYS
(_Bearers of orange and lemon souffle to the Court. Becoming greatly
excited at sight of the platform Dizzards belaboring the Moonshees and
beginning to jump up and down, at the same time ladling out cones of
green and pink souffle._) Refresh yourselves, good people! Refresh
yourselves! Ssh!--Sssssh!--Ssssssssh!
THE ONE HUNDRED HODDY-DODDYS
(_Shaking their long-handled feather-dusters and whirling about in a
ring._) Awake, your Referendunces! Awake! Awake! (_They tickle the
noses, ears, chins and necks of the Moonshees, Zadkiels, etc., who stir
feebly but continue to snore._)
THE ONE HUNDRED ZANYS
(_Rattling their wind-bags and jigging in unison._) Attention!
Attention, good audience! Attention! Their Grand Referendunces of the
Federated Musnud of the World are about to be awakened! Attention!
Attention! (_They rattle their wind-bags vigorously and roll their eyes
from left to right and back nine times._)
THE TWO THOUSAND LOOBIES AND GABERLUNZIES
(_Roaming nervously to and fro, reading._) “At this moment, the sun
sinking low in the West, the faint West wind stirring in the leaves, the
pellucid rill tinkling gently--so, for a heart-beat, he saw her.” (_Each
holds up a restful hand._)
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_Executing three steps to the left and four to the right and spinning
on his right toe._) Your Referendunces! Most Worthy and Grand
Referendunces! Is the High Court of Progress of the Federated Republics
of the World now ready to receive the reports of the various battalions
of Law, Order, Peace, Justice, Truth, etc., accredited to this Court?
They await your Referendunces’ pleasure without. (_At this another
herculean attempt is made to arouse the assembled judges of the Musnud.
The fifty Dizzards who are in direct attendance on the Moonshees begin
whistling between their teeth and striking them with their
feather-clubs. The one hundred Hoddy-Doddys stir up the multitude in the
front rows by dusting off their ears and noses with their long-poled
feather-dusters. The one hundred Zanys rattle their wind-bags, and the
two thousand Loobies and Gaberlunzies read intently and with vigor, each
holding up a hand. The five thousand Nizys hurry here and there offering
souffle to all._)
THE ONE HUNDRED MOONSHEES, ROCTOR-PROCTORS, ZADKIELS, ETC.
(_Stirring slightly and opening their eyes._) Souffle! Souffle! (_Great
panniers of souffle are fed to them, and they relapse into slumber._)
THE FIFTY DIZZARDS
(_Seeing they have the Moonshees partially awake._) Your Referendunces!
Most worthy Referendunces! The Secretary of the Honorable Court desires
to know is it ready to receive the first division of the assembled
Battalions of Knowledge now about to report as to the present state and
progress of the world? (_A vast murmur of “Hee-haw!”--the 30th century
expression of approval--passes over the assemblage._ SHISHMASH HASH HASH
_executes four more hand-springs, lights gracefully on his back and
slowly draws his toes up to his fingers, thus gradually assuming a
standing position, and bows. The fifty Dizzards whistle between their
teeth and beat the Moonshees vigorously with their feather-clubs. The
Zanys rattle their wind-bags lustily. Fifty of the one hundred
Moonshees awake and call for more souffle. Five hundred tons are at
once distributed to the audience, and quiet is restored._)
THE MOONSHEES, ROCTOR-PROCTORS, ZADKIELS, ETC.
(_Stirring feebly and pushing the feather-dusters out of their eyes. In
chorus._) What is the question? What is the question? (_They sink back
heavily on their pillows._ SHISHMASH HASH HASH _throws four fits and
attempts to insert his left foot in his mouth, then stands at attention
while four Dizzards, lifting aloft silk banners on which are pictures of
keys of knowledge and open books, fall to the ground and get up again.
The one hundred Hoddy-Doddys tickle the noses of the Moonshees
frantically. The five thousand Nizys throw handfuls of souffle in the
faces of the audience and spin on one foot. The two thousand Loobies and
Gaberlunzies rear and plunge, murmuring “Shush! Shush!” then read._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Chief Presiding Referendunce of the Federated Court of Progress of the
World. Sitting up, opening one eye and gazing about._) Indeed! You say,
do you? Well, let them enter! (_He collapses again._)
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_Spinning away to the stage entrance, at which the representatives of
the various forces of Progress are waiting in parade array._) Are you
ready? Are you ready? (_A shout goes up. He lifts both hands, and
pirouetting gracefully backward toward the Musnud is followed by the
1st, 316th, 3727th, 4728th, 6914th and 7178th Divisions of Descendant
Sons and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable Free and Accepted Boy
Scouts, Watch and Ward and Library Protection Association Guards, King’s
Daughters, Sabbath Day Exclusivists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Holy
Rollers in close formation. They are all in Empire Nicollet silk,
striped with blue bombazine, ruched at neck and feet, and carry immense
banners of green and yellow on which are pictured barred library doors,
sealed books, bonfires of questionable or lewd books, and padlocked
library safes. They are preceded by and interlarded with silver and
gold harp bands in great numbers, as well as a small exhibition corps of
Anti-Lewd Book Examiners, carefully examining lewd books after the
manner of the years_ A. D. 1885-1921. _These last carry large red,
yellow and green-blue pencils and wear horn glasses the size of saucers.
They read, blush, and blue-pencil as they come. They are preceded by
cage-cars containing [one each] Ossified Specimens of Ancient Lewd
Novelist, Playwright and Poet. They pause and stand at attention before
the Musnud, giving first an exhibition of lewd-book editing, then the
Free and Accepted and Descendant yell, “Anti-Vice! Anti-Vice! Boy Scouts
Forever!” after which they clog and whistle._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Scratching one ear and blinking his one open eye, the while the five
thousand Nizys distribute souffle and the audience cheers
vociferously._) Descendant Sons and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable
Free and Accepted Boy Scouts, Watch and Ward Guards, King’s Daughters,
Sabbath Day Adventists, Holy Rollers (_whispers to a Dizzard, “Did I get
them all right?”_)--we have, as you know, as President and Referendunces
of this great Court, founded so long ago by our worthy predecessor, Mush
Mush I, a certain duty to perform, and that is the asking of our regular
prepared and revered and revised Sacred Questions, the answers to which,
given as we all know you will give them, constitute in themselves at
once a record and a testimony to the wisdom, perfection, peace and
plenty to which our vast Federated Republics and Peoples the world over
have at last arrived. (_Great applause lasting one hour, during which
transcripts of the proceedings and speech thus far are wirelessed by the
Fuddys to all parts of the world._) Once, as you well know and as we are
sorry to remember, there existed a certain amount of vice and crime in
the world (_vast and prolonged boo-ing and cat-calling_)--less and less,
we will admit, as the forces of righteousness and order such as we
represent here to-day gained momentum (_a second burst of applause
lasting one hour, during which this portion of the speech is wirelessed.
The Zadkiels breathe heavily_), but plentiful enough--plentiful enough,
I am glad to say--Souffle! Souffle! (_he sighs and is fed_)--as well as
a tendency, disobedient in the extreme, to investigate and study and
doubt everything, from stars to ant-hills, and even to make light of the
revealed and divine facts of Nature, which as we all know are
irrefutable and not to be questioned and to which our hearts are always
and only our best guides. (_Enormous applause, lasting thirty minutes._)
Fortunately for us now, however, and happily, and owing, as I may say,
to the benign activities of those noble workers in the cause of
righteousness, Mush Mush I, Bonehead V, and Dish Rag III, who flourished
A. D. 1970-2061 in America and elsewhere, the virtues of sobriety,
justice, truth, mercy, industry and the like were, as we all well know,
firmly and finally established. (_Tremendous applause, lasting one
hundred and eight minutes, during which seven hundred wash-boilers of
souffle are consumed. Wireless messages are sent to all parts._) Thanks
to them and their beneficent efforts, we do not attempt to investigate
any more. (_Prolonged cheering._) We do not seek to reason any more.
(_Immense cheering, lasting two hours._) Man, as you all well know, has
seen the line of his duty and has followed it closely. (_More
cat-calling._) With the greatest care we have been able to eliminate not
only those besetting vices which scarred the face of man with their
hideous thoughts, but also those equally great vices of curiosity and
speculation in regard to chemistry, philosophy, physics, astronomy,
sociology, political economy, those low and evil so-called sciences
which once so disturbed and irritated and afflicted the human mind. (_A
burst of applause, lasting forty-three minutes._) They have been done
for, and instead we have strictly and sensibly confined ourselves, I am
happy to state, to those more acceptable evidences of our place in
Nature and our duties, as revealed by those renowned and profound
teachers and thinkers, our noble and revered ancestors, Billy Sunday the
Great, he of blessed memory (_applause, lasting one hour_)--Ralph
Waldensicuss Trinecuss of Boston (_applause, lasting fifty
minutes_)--Arise-and-Sweat Marden (_applause, lasting forty
minutes_)--Erbert Goughman (_applause, lasting thirty minutes_)--Philip
Dugmore Potts (_applause, lasting twenty minutes_)--and Edith Whiller
Nox Nox (_applause, lasting ten minutes_)--revealers and thinkers all,
the true forerunners and prophets of our present peaceful and happy
state. (_Prolonged applause, enduring over seven-hundred minutes, during
which_ NOXUS _and the Moonshees snore and the two thousand Loobies and
Gaberlunzies read long and refreshing passages from the works of the
individuals mentioned. The Fuddys sizz at their task._)
THE ONE HUNDRED HODDY-DODDYS
(_As the applause subsides, feathering the face of the Moonshees._)
Awake, your Referendunces, awake! (_They pole-vault in front of the
Musnud._)
THE FIFTY DIZZARDS
(_Whistling between their teeth and striking with their feather clubs._)
Oh, your Very Great Referendunces! Oh! Come to! Come to! (_They chatter
and clog._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Batting an eye and being lifted to a sitting position._) Ah, yes! Ah,
yes! Let me see ... where was I? (_A Dizzard, prompted by a Fuddy,
repeats his last sentence._) Ah, yes! As I was saying, these, our
revered leaders, taught us. It is to them, their patient and enduring
labors, their deep, even profound, cogitations as to life, that we all
owe all that we enjoy and revere so deeply to-day--our peace, our
freedom from disturbing thought, from the besetting vice of questioning
or investigating. All we have to do now is ask and re-ask and affirm and
re-affirm our Sacred Questions, so ably asked and answered so many
centuries since by our noble forerunners, Bonehead V. and Dish Rag III.
(_Separate and prolonged applause at each name, during which Podunkus
again slumbers, is feathered and clubbed and lifted to a sitting
position._) Ah, yes! Ah, yes! The Questions--the Questions. (_He fumbles
weakly about, while seven Dizzards hand him seven engrossed and
gold-plated copies of the regulation Sacred Questions as made and
provided for all such occasions. He stares at one feebly and
continues._) Ah yes! Now I have them! The Questions--the Questions, on
which, as I was saying, are based, as on a rock, all our peace,
security, freedom from thought; the very, indeed, pillows--I mean
pillars--of our ease and comfort. The Sacred Questions! To be sure!
Question One--let me see--Question One--Question One (_aside “Where is
it?” A Dizzard points to it._)--Question One is most important, the very
corner-stone, I might say, of our undisturbed security and ease in
thoughtlessness. (_Examines it closely._) It reads--it reads--Ah
yes!--Now I have it!--“Have you kept the faith?” That’s it. “Have you
kept the faith?” To be sure! Have _we_ kept it, I might say? Almost the
most sacred of all our Questions! Have _we_ kept the faith? (_He mumbles
feebly on._) That’s it! Have _we_ kept the faith?
THE 1ST, 316TH, 3727TH, 4728TH, 6914TH, AND 7178TH (_Standing at
attention and in unison._)
We have, we have!
We have, have, have!
(_They clog. Immense applause from the audience, lasting thirty minutes.
The First and Second Readers read soothing passages._)
THE MOONSHEES, ROCTOR-PROCTORS, GAMALIELS, ZADKIELS
(_Turning on the other side and imbibing souffle._) Excellent!
Excellent! Couldn’t be better! They have kept the faith! Most
comforting. Ah!
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Reclining and imbibing souffle._) Charming! Charming! Most sweet of
them! The dear, dear things! They would keep anything we asked them to!
It is really too wonderful! (_He sighs._)
THE FEDERATED SPECTATORS
(_One hundred thousand strong._) Hey! Hey! Hey! Rah! Rah! Rah! Federated
Republics forever! Long live the Court of Progress! (_The cheering
continues for fifteen minutes._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_When comparative silence is restored, and blinking his open eye._)
Beautiful! Beautiful! It is as I thought! A wondrous scene! Now for
Question Number--let me see (_eleven Dizzards point to the place_)--Ah,
yes! To be sure! (_Reads._) Question Number Two--a wonderful question--a
deep and subtly devised question--a question which, as I may say, has
done as much as any of the others to persuade us to and keep us all in
that happy and unquestioning frame of mind which, as we all know, we now
so wisely seek to maintain--Souffle! Souffle! (_he imbibes_)--a question
the like of which is not to be found in any other sacred code the world
has ever known--and here, my dear fellow-Federationists (_he raises a
hand_), and here is it: Question Two--Ah, yes! (_reads_) “Is it not true
that all men are now honest, kind, true, moral, virtuous and wise?” (_He
pauses for breath and looks benignly about._)
THE 1ST, 316TH, 3727TH, 4728TH, 6914TH, AND 7178TH
(_Jigging vigorously._)
They are! They are!
They rarr! rarr! rarr!
(_They walk on their hands._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
Beautiful! Beautiful! Never have I heard such perfect teamwork! It is
wonderful! Not so, my fellow Moonshees?
(_He turns._)
THE MOONSHEES, PUNDITS, ZADKIELS, ETC.
(_Turning over and snoring._) Excellent! Couldn’t be better! They do
perfect work! (_They each catch a wink of sleep._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Aroused and scratching the back of his neck, the while he eyes them
feelingly._) It is too delightful! That I should have lived to have the
exalted honor of presiding on so wonderful an occasion! But now for
Question Three, my dears--Question Three--another beautiful question
(_he fumbles foolishly about seeking the tablet. Seventeen Dizzards
point to it._)--Ah, yes! Ah, yes! Very difficult to manage all of these
questions! But here it is!--And now for Question Three--a lovely
question! A question lovely! I almost hate to read it and have it all
over with! (_Reads._) “And that all women are as pure as driven snow?”
(_Pauses and gazes about ecstatically, one hand up._)
THE 1ST, 316TH, 3727TH, 4728TH, 6914TH, AND 7178TH
(_Executing cart-wheels in circles._)
Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye!
’Tis as easy to say as Pie! Pie! Pie!
(_They end by waving with their feet._)
THE FEDERATED SPECTATORS
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
The world’s now safe for ever and a day!
(_An hour of unbroken applause follows._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_As quiet is once more restored and he is dusted into
semi-consciousness._) Quite so! Quite so! Forever and a day! Ah!
And--and (_he looks about for his tablet and twenty-seven Dizzards hand
him each a sacred plate._)--and that--let me see--Ah, yes!--Question
Four! Question Four! Here it is! (_Reads._) “And that God is always on
His Throne?” (_He collapses from exhaustion._)
THE 1ST, 316TH, 3727TH, 4728TH, 6914TH, AND 7178TH
(_Falling flat on their backs._)
He is! He is! It is so plain
Upon His Throne He doth remain!
By day or night, in dark or light,
We feel His presence shining bright!
All’s well with the world!
(_They roll to and fro in rows of one hundred each._)
THE ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND SPECTATORS
(_Uproariously._)
Hey! Hey! What a glorious day!
Hey! Hey! What a glorious day!
(_The cheering is resumed for fifteen minutes more, during which ten
vanloads of souffle are distributed._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_After order has been restored and surveying his associates of the
Musnud sleepily._) Perfect! Perfect!--or nearly so! Beautiful! I never
saw anything so well done! Never! Such order! Such union! But--let me
see--I believe these are all the questions to be asked of these
divisions, are they not? (_Looks about him helplessly and yet benignly.
The fifty Dizzards all rush together and confer. The Hoddy-Doddys ditto.
The Zanys ditto. The Loobies and Gaberlunzies bite their nails, then
rush together and mumble. The Moonshees sit up and confer with_
PODUNKUS. _He proceeds._) Ah yes! As I was saying! Quite so! Quite so!
Since, then, it is the opinion of the Associated Members of the Musnud
that the report of the Descendant Sons and Daughters of Ancient and
Honorable Free and Accepted Boy Scouts and Anti-(_he reads the entire
roster_) seems to accord with the progress of the year as reported to us
from all outlying sections of the Federation, and it is their wish that
it be accepted and offered and engrossed in the records of the Musnud as
a true picture of the state and progress of the world for this year of
our Lord A. D. 3913, they will signify as much by saying “Aye,”
contrary, “Nay.” The “Ayes” have it. The report of these excelling
representatives is accepted and they are excused. (_He falls back and
into a deep sleep. The Moonshees do likewise._)
THE ONE HUNDRED MOONSHEES
(_Weakly, in their sleep_). Souffle! Souffle!
THE ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND SPECTATORS
Hey! Hey! Hey! ’Tis a perfect day!
’Tis a perfect day! ’Tis a perfect day!
Hey! Hey! Hey! ’Tis a perfect day!
(_They cheer for one solid hour._)
THE 1ST, 316TH, 3727TH, 4728TH, 6914TH, AND 7178TH
(_Ricochetting and executing triple hand-springs, the while_ SHISHMASH
HASH HASH _sidesteps and returns to the main stage entrance, left._)
What pleasure, oh! What pleasure, oh!
To know the world is perfect, so
That never now by day or night
Need any one feel fear or fright.
(_They zigzag gaily in ranks of one thousand and exit._)
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_At the stage entrance, surveying one hundred and fifty divisions of
Descendant Sons and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable Moving Picture
Censors, Sabbath Day Observance Leaguers, Baptist and Methodist
Evangelists, and Non-Smokers’ Social Unionists, now ready and in
marching order just outside the tent entrance. These have arranged
themselves in battalions of two thousand each and are arrayed in
snow-white frock coats, bright red silk hats, lavender pants or skirts,
as the case may be, and carry bright brass drum-major batons. Numerous
bands of Descendant and Amalgamated Sons and Daughters of Ancient and
Honorable Anti-Saloon Leaguers and Billysundays are arrayed in
pink-flowered business suits and silver-green capes, carrying hatchets
and bearing aloft the portrait of their patron saint, Mrs. Carrie
Nation, who flourished A. D. 1884-1913, playing on silver and tin horns,
wind instruments, hewgags and jew’s harps. These are preceded by
cage-cars containing one each of Ossified Specimens of Ancient Cigarette
Fiend, Simon-pure American Bartender, Lewd Scenario Writer, Sabbath Day
Breaker. The bands begin playing “All Hail the Peace Which Now
Prevails!” As they enter, preceded by SHISHMASH HASH HASH with his head
between his legs and walking on his hands to the Musnud, forty thousand
members of the audience rise and stand on their heads. Another forty
thousand sink to the floor between their seats and gasp. The five
thousand Nizys pass swiftly among them administering souffle. The first
and second readers read rapidly. SHISHMASH HASH HASH, landing on his
feet as he reaches the Musnud and beginning to jig._) Will the High and
Mighty Referendunces of the Federated Musnud of the World deign to
notice these humble instruments of moral intercession here gathered from
all parts of the world to testify at this great review to the blessings
of peace, morality, fecundity and other social virtues? (_As he says
this he executes nine flip-flaps, whereat the great assemblage bursts
into thunders of applause. The fifty Dizzards on the Musnud leap on each
other’s necks as they whistle between their teeth. The one hundred Zanys
rattle their wind-bags furiously._ NOXUS PODUNKUS, _being simultaneously
beaten by four stuffed clubs and tickled by four feather-dusters, while
two Dizzards whistle in his ears, opens both eyes and looks blandly
around._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_With a fat, ingratiating smile, as the uproar continues._) Are we now
beholding more divisions of the unconquerable forces of Truth, Virtue,
Justice, Sobriety and Righteousness? Good! Good! (_He opens his mouth,
which is immediately filled with souffle._)
THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DIVISIONS
(_Cakewalking, shamble-shuffling and tossing their hatchets, batons,
musical instruments, etc., aloft._) Hail! Hail! The end of shame! (_They
sing._)
’Tis now that we with joy behold
The earth of virtue yield fourfold
Of truth and right the crop is great--
Indeed, enough the world to sate!
(_Melody the same as “Behold the Power.” To be sung without lining._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Scratching one ear and making a supreme effort to think._) A charming
sight! A charming sight! The world is indeed progressing! Allow us to
congratulate you, my dears and dearesses! Allow us! Allow us! Perfection
is at hand! It has been long in coming, but now, as I might say, it has
reached its destination. Souffle! Souffle! (_A pannier is brought and
fed him._) As I was saying to those last dear battalions who so
gracefully testified to our Peace and Progress, Security and the like,
it now becomes my duty to read from our revered and Sacred
Questions--the compendium, as you know, of all our Knowledge, Law,
Intelligence--Questions Five, Six, Seven and Eight--I believe that is
the allotted number, is it not? (_Thirty-one Dizzards nod._)--and as I
do so will you please answer in unison so that all may know--the
world--the universe indeed--how well we understand, how firmly we know,
believe, that which has brought us to our present state of peace and
comfort, our ease of mind and body. (_Reads._) Question Five--Question
Five--ah yes! Just as I thought! (_Reads, one hand up._) “There is a
God, is there not? We know that, do we not?”
THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DIVISIONS
(_Jabbing their batons into the ground, tossing them in the air and then
catching them again._)
There is! There is! We do! We do!
What joy to know ’tis true, true, true!
(_At this ninety-nine Moonshees, who have risen to a sitting position,
fall back, murmuring “Splendid! Splendid! Wonderful!” The Hoddy-Doddys
exclaim the same thing and practice at sword-play with their
feather-dusters, while the Dizzards play at leap-frog and the Zanys beat
each other with their empty wind-bags. The five thousand Nizys plunge
their heads into the souffle but withdraw them quickly and ladle out
cones to the mass. The two thousand Loobies and Gaberlunzies read many
enchanting passages as the audience applauds, after which the Dizzards
resume normal positions and lay about them with their stuffed clubs._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Scratching his nose and making another great effort to think, the
while he beats the railing before him._) Ah, yes! That is it! “There is!
We do!” It is on our knowledge of that that we rest so peacefully, all
else being of no importance. (_Reads._) Question Six--(_pauses_)--“He is
on His Throne, is He not? We know that, do we not?”
THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DIVISIONS
(_Jigging_)
He is! He is! We do! We do!
This truth is ever new and true!
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Sinking into his pillows and peacefully closing his eyes._) Quite so!
Quite so! We need that knowledge to sustain us in our present ease. It
is so comforting! As I often say, what would we do without our dear
Questions? (_He falls asleep. Seven Dizzards and seven Hoddy-Doddys club
and feather him. He resumes._) And now for--ah yes!--let me
see--Question--Question (_various Dizzards gather about him and
point_)--Ah, yes! Seven--Question Seven! (_Ecstatically._) Let me read
this to you, this beautiful Question, the answer to which, as I so often
say, reassures us all so much, keeps us all so sweet and content,
always. (_Raises one hand._) “All is well with the world, is it not? We
know that, do we not? It is, is it not?” Come now, all together--One,
Two, Three----
THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DIVISIONS
Yea ho! Yea ho! Yea, Bo! Yea, Bo!
A truer thing we do not know!
(_They fall to the ground and roll rapturously to and fro._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_As wave on wave of applause sweeps over the pavilion and bags out the
sides and top, leaning forward and opening one eye._) ’Tis beautifully
said! Beautifully said! A perfect answer to a perfect Question! A
wonderful testimony to the ever upwardness and onwardness of things! It
is almost more than one could hope for--than any one _can_ hope for! And
now, my dears and dearesses, comes Question--(_looks at the tablet while
all the Dizzards lean and point_)--Question Eight, a very, very great
Question, a Question which, as I always say, has undoubtedly more than
any other Question brought us at last to this very perfect and peaceful
state, in which we rest as, I might say, a babe in its cradle, as
a--a--Souffle! (_he is fed_). Here it is: “How is it that we know that
God is on His Throne and all is well with the world? How is it?” Can’t
you see how important that is, how wonderful? Come now! We must have a
perfect and compelling answer to this! All together--One, Two, Three!
(_Leans forward expectantly, intently._)
THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DIVISIONS
Our hearts, our hearts, they tell us so--
What is it that our hearts don’t know!
(_Each places a hand over his heart._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Falling back on seven pillows and taking a deep breath._) Beautiful!
Beautiful! Even so! And given as it should be! Let me hear you say that
again, my dears and dearesses! Let me hear it again! (_They repeat it,
waving pink handkerchiefs. The audience bursts into deafening applause
lasting seventy-eight minutes. The Loobies and Gaberlunzies leap in the
air, turn three somersaults before landing, and fall on their feet. Five
thousand wirelesses are sent. NOXUS PODUNKUS, falling back and
strangling with joy._) This is too much! Too much! Who can say now that
the world has not progressed! (_He is lifted up, feathered and doused
with souffle._) With the consent of my fellow Moonshees (_looks about
him affably at the sleeping Moonshees_), I will now excuse these very
good people. (_Feeble calls of “Beautiful! Beautiful!” and “Let them be
excused!” from the Moonshees._) You may go, my dears and dearesses! You
may go! (_He collapses._)
THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DIVISIONS
(_Executing a flank movement and assuming an open formation five hundred
abreast and marching briskly away, twirling their batons and wagging
their heads._) All hail the power of Podunks’ name! (_They exit. Enter
seven thousand Union Astronomers and four thousand Federated College
Philosophers in close formation, all in green knee pants, white spike
tailcoats and blue silk hats. The Astronomers carry green telescopes
instead of canes. The Philosophers are all chewing tutti-frutti. They
are preceded by cage-cars containing each one Specimen of Ossified and
Ancient and Unmoral Stoic, Nietzschean, Pragmatist, Anti-Christ, Chemist
and Physicist._)
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_Preceding them and climbing up the feather pole of a Hoddy-Doddy he
has seized._) The Union Astronomers, your Referendunces! The Federated
College Philosophers, your Referendunces! (_He leaps and tumbles three
times around the arena, holding his toes with his hands._)
THE ONE HUNDRED HODDY-DODDYS
(_Pole-vaulting over the procession as it approaches._) The Union
Astronomers, your Referendunces! The Federated Moral College
Philosophers! (_The Dizzards give an exhibition of feather-club
swallowing. The five thousand Nizys each juggle nine ice-cream cones in
the air._)
THE SEVEN THOUSAND UNION ASTRONOMERS
(_Marching to “Oh, Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” and
doing a hop, skip and jump as they near the Musnud._)
The universe is moral! The universe is moral!
’Tis as true--’tis as true--
As that a green horse isn’t sorrel!
(_One-half the division stand on their heads, the others on their
feet._)
THE FIFTY DIZZARDS
(_Receiving souffle handed up by the Nizys below. In chorus._)
“The universe is moral! The universe is moral!
’Tis as true--’tis as true--
As that a green horse isn’t sorrel!”
THE ELEVEN THOUSAND PHILOSOPHERS AND ASTRONOMERS
(_In chorus_)
Hail! Hail! The Comet’s Tail!
All is well! All is swell!
Never was there an age like this!
(_They wave their feet or hands, as the case may be._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Rising on one elbow and rubbing his eyes._) What! What! More? What
have we here? The Union Astronomers, you say? The Federated College
Philosophers? Excellent! A fine body of men, indeed! And, as you say,
the universe _is_ moral. Very, very, very moral. One of the most moral
universes I have ever known. (_Scratches an ear and sinks into his
cushions, but the nearest Dizzards lift him up._)
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_Excitedly touching his toes with his hands nine times._) The
Questions, your Noble Referendunce! The Sacred Questions!
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Heavily and benignly._) Ah, yes! Ah, yes! The Sacred Questions! It is
not intention, but memory, that seems to fail me. Quite so--the Sacred
Questions! (_He takes one of fifty plates offered him and examines it
closely._) Ah yes! Here it is! One of the most significant and wonderful
questions that has ever been planned, I think, to ease our minds and
comfort us. (_Reads._) Question Nine: “Is it not true that the universe
is ordained for Truth, Justice, Virtue, Mercy, Tenderness, Purity?”
(_His voice trails off in utter exhaustion._)
THE SEVEN THOUSAND UNION ASTRONOMERS
(_Doing a light come-all-ye and waving red bandana handkerchiefs._)
It is! It is! We know! We know!
The stars we see, they tell us so!
THE FOUR THOUSAND COLLEGE PHILOSOPHERS
(_Masticating their gum vigorously._)
It is! It is! Hail, loud and long!
Our works, they sing the same sweet song!
(_Loud and prolonged cheering by the audience. Wirelesses are sent to
the waiting world. The Dizzards gnaw excitedly at their feather-clubs,
then do a double-quick clog. The two thousand Loobies and Gaberlunzies
read many, many soothing passages. The Nizys dole out souffle._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Biting his nails and crossing his legs._) So! Quite so! The stars tell
us! It couldn’t be different! And now, my dears (_sighs from
weariness_), for the Tenth Great Question--one of those beautiful things
that I always love to read and re-read. The most important one, I always
think, in so far as astronomy is concerned, that has ever been devised.
A Question so perfect that, when we pause to consider its absolute
truthfulness and perfection, answers fully--oh, so fully!--all our
astronomical needs. (_Reads._) “Are not the stars maintained in their
courses in order that man may progress and be moral?” (_He contemplates
a fly which has lit on the end of his nose._)
THE UNION ASTRONOMERS
(_Juggling their telescopes after the manner of a shillalah and doing a
come-all-ye._)
They are! They are! The stars, they say
That man to truth is on his way!
THE COLLEGE PHILOSOPHERS
(_Catching hands and dancing around in a circle._)
The Universe was made for man--
And man for good, by God’s dear plan!
(_They slap each other on the back._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Rolling back in ecstasy and smearing his face with souffle._) Lovely!
Lovely! “The stars they say!” This certainly is the most inspiring
session we have ever had! Such unity of feeling! Such innate wisdom!
Surely the waiting world must realize now how completely we have
progressed--how absolutely--(_he sinks to his pillows and is lifted to a
sitting position by the Dizzards, who place the tablet in his hand,
while the Moonshees turn over and murmur “Excellent! Excellent!” The
wireless operators send out five thousand messages. PODUNKUS pulls
himself together and continues._) And now, my dear children--and now
comes one of the keenest, the most searching really, of all the Great
and Sacred Questions made and provided for these immortal occasions and
handed down to us by our renowned and dear bygone leaders and saints,
Bonehead V. and Dish Rag III. Really, when I stop to think of their
great work for mankind, when--(_he sinks back and the Hoddy-Doddys
proceed to dust him off_)--Ah yes! Ah, yes! Question Eleven--almost the
most wonderful, the most important of all--(_reads_)--“How--how,” so it
reads, “do we know that, me good men? How?” (_He smiles and waits
expectantly, one finger up._) How do we know? That is the famous, the
keenest and most searching of all the Twelve Sacred Questions. How?
THE SEVEN THOUSAND UNION ASTRONOMERS
(_Telescope to eye and weaving in and out in a wild dance._)
Our hearts, they tell us! We can hear
This truth they whisper, year by year!
(_They kiss each other on each cheek._)
THE FOUR THOUSAND COLLEGE PHILOSOPHERS
(_In chorus, and doing a hop, skip and jump._)
Our hearts do tell us! We do know--
Besides, our Astronomers do say so!
(_They swallow their gum. The multitude breaks into tumultuous applause,
which lasts for one hour, during which one thousand messages are sent
out and five thousand more wash-boilers of souffle are consumed._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Aiming at the fly and missing it._) Ah! Ah! Could the world wish for
anything more--more enlightening? Our hearts tell us! Oh, dear! Our dear
Astronomers and College Philosophers stand in absolute accord as to
this! Wonderful! Wonderful! (_Turning to the Musnud._) I am sure that
you, my dear fellow Moonshees and Savants, must be greatly impressed and
inspired by this! It is what we all so much wish to hear, always!
(_PODUNKUS rolls over on his side, while the Moonshees turn over and
murmur “Excellent! Exquisitely put! Couldn’t be better!” The Union
Astronomers and College Philosophers now march off singing, “Hail! Hail!
The Gang’s all here!” the Philosophers weeping on each other’s necks for
joy while the Astronomers wig-wag the song with their telescopes. The
Moonshees, Zadkiels, etc., squeak feebly for souffle._)
(_Enter forty-eight divisions of five hundred each of Descendant Sons
and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable Anti-Vice Crusaders, Prison
Visitation Leaguers, Moral Prophylaxers, Anti-Contraceptionists, Eugenic
Sires and Women Magazine Editors, in green, yellow and blue burnouses
and pink papier-maché casques, fox-trotting as they come. An immense
banner of Chinese silk and Australian wool mixed [symbolic of the
general sequacity, tranquillity, plasticity, yet not to say florescence
or flaccidity which now hovers over all the world] is carried before.
This same contains a pale representation of a jail, such as existed in
former centuries when the world was evil, but now [in the picture], in
order to symbolize the present peace and progress of the world, crumbled
and covered with vines and spiderwebs, while four angels of peace, one
at each corner, hold up palms of victory. They are preceded by cage-cars
containing each one Specimen of Ossified and Ancient White-Slaver,
Gambler, Thief and Predatory Rich. As they approach, the Loobies,
Gaberlunzies, Nizys and Zanys bustle hither and thither among the
audience, the former reading, the latter calling for silence and
explaining the exact significance of the symbol while they ladle out
souffle. On and before the Musnud the Hoddy-Doddys and Dizzards hover
over NOXUS and the Moonshees, who have fallen into a sound sleep. Two
thousand members of the Inter-Federated Association of Inter-Asiatic
Descendant Sons and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable Eugenic Sires
approach first, the men wearing green Zouave trousers, white silk
overcoats and blue shakos. They carry lilies. The ladies are wrapped in
nine layers of pink asbestos each one inch thick and carry poisoned
hatpins. After charging and counter-charging they form a square in front
of the Musnud, the ladies stacking hatpins, the men presenting lilies._)
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_Tumbling back from the entryway where he has been supervising the
general formation of the new division._) Your Referendunces! Your
Referendunces! Look, oh look! The Inter-Federated Association of
Inter-Asiatic Descendant Sons and Daughters of Eugenic Sires crave the
honor of approaching and testifying before this great Court as to what
Progress has done for them! Your Referendunces!
THE ONE HUNDRED HODDY-DODDYS
(_Ranging in a line and presenting arms with their feather-dusters._)
Oh, never, never has there been
A sight to equal this, we ween!
Glorious!
(_They clog, and chatter their teeth._)
THE MEMBERS OF THE INTER-FEDERATED ASSOCIATION OF INTER-ASIATIC
DESCENDANT SONS AND DAUGHTERS
(_Pirouetting and bowing to each other._)
’Tis six full centuries at least
Since un-Eugenic weddings ceased;
And now each youth and maid you see
Is married full Eugenic-ly.
In us behold the perfect fruitage
That followed on the former brute-age!
(_They ring-around-the-rosy._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Lifted to a sitting position by the Dizzards, tickled with
feather-dusters, beaten with wind-bags and doused with ice-water until
he opens his eyes._) What a sight!--A beautiful sight, I mean! My word!
O never, my celebrated and associated Referendunces (_he turns to them_)
have I seen so much beauty and virtue! Never! So much modesty! So
much--much--everything! Really this is the worst--I mean best--I ever
saw! This in itself is a complete refutation of that foul charge, once
so common, that the world was in danger of not progressing. Look!
Behold! O Progress, where is thy sting? (_He collapses, calling for
souffle, but is bolstered up and ice-water poured over him._)
ONE HUNDRED EUGENIC MAIDS
(_In pink Mother Hubbards and green Quaker bonnets. Stepping forward and
sinking on one knee, hands on their chins. They sing._)
It is our duty to attest
How by Eugenics we are blest!
O ’tis a wondrous art divine,
Which causes all the world to shine!
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Leaning over the railing and eying them closely._) Really! This is the
limit--I mean almost too much--too much! Sweet maids! Dear sweet maids!
This spectacle of the perfect fruitage of Progress under the great
moral care of our forefathers--blessed be the name of the
ever-to-be-remembered Anthony!--(_he bows, and the audience with
him_)--is all but too much! Progress can do no more! I would, if any
service which the mere sight of you does not render--could render--ask
you the Twelfth and final Question, but what would be the use? How well
we know the import of your message, even before you speak! How well we
know the import of you yourselves--wonderful creatures that you are!
(_They bow their heads._) This vast assemblage, which in itself is a
testimony to the value of Eugenics, understands full well that by the
practice of Eugenics alone all weakness, vice, crime, art, philosophy
(_except that which our dear Union Astronomers and Federated
Philosophers instinctively know and proclaim_), the need of white-slave
laws, saloons, the theater--all, all have long since been done away
with, so that we have now--the most of us, I am glad to say--not even so
much as an historic memory of them. Indeed, as we all know, on this once
most unsafe but now safest of planets (_applause lasting seventeen
minutes_), men and women are now as safe and perfect and pure as ever
our worthy forefathers could have dreamed of or desired. Why, to look at
you alone is enough! (_He sighs and rests._)
Dear Eugenic citizens and citizenesses, without taxing you further with
these deep and brain-racking questions, so sacred to us all of course,
the one message of this great Court to you is to go and do as you have
always done: think no more than is absolutely necessary. Don’t tax your
brains. This, our great Federation of Commission-Ruled Republics, is
here to do all that for you (_the Moonshees stir_). The less we know the
better, as we all know. (_Long and loud applause lasting eighteen
minutes._) In former and darker, and therefore sadder, times, there were
many who thought differently. But they and all those who were a part of
them have long since been disposed of. (_Long and uproarious applause._)
And is not, I now ask you, the world happier, fairer, sweeter to the eye
and the mind? (_Cries of “Hear! Hear!” and “Yea! Yea!” lasting two
hours._) Now, dear Eugenic citizens, you need only consider how
thoughtless you are and therefore how happy in these sweet exercises and
games such as we see here to-day which contribute only to the
sustenance, docility and fertility of man, to know how true all this
is. Be thoughtless. Be happy. And by so being, as I always think, you
contribute and testify to the efficiency of Truth, Virtue, Justice,
Mercy, Sobriety, Love, Beauty, Simplicity, Peace--(_he collapses from
sheer exhaustion._)--Souffle! Souffle! (_A bucket of souffle is brought
and administered._)
THE ONE HUNDRED MAIDS
(_Wishing not to tire their noble Referendunces, singing in chorus._)
O, sweet Eugenic thought--to know
That our dear Noxus loves us so!
(_They fall back in the ranks._)
(_Enter fifteen thousand Descendant Sons and Daughters of Ancient and
Honorable Anti-White Slavers of the pre-Federated Period_ (A. D.
1870-1927), _in green-and-white kilts and galligaskins, with perukes and
billy-cocks on their heads. They march swiftly forward, an expression of
grim determination--historically correct--on their faces, and pause
before the Musnud. Over their left arms, after the fashion of the
world’s great Anti-White-Slave Leaders and in accordance with historical
descriptions of the same, hang immense mantles of dark green bed-ticking
intended to shield naked fleeing white slaves. Over their shoulders are
carried papier-maché broadaxes of the kind known to have been used by
all Anti-White-Slavers, male and female, in felling the enemy. These
they occasionally brandish as they walk. At their belts hang lanterns,
files, skeleton keys, medicine kits containing concentrated food pills,
digitalis and the like, all intended for the rescue and resuscitation of
overcome white slaves. Their eyelids and mouths are painted a bright
cerise to give a look of extra vigor and force, and as they walk, one
hundred abreast, they peer to right and left in the most searching and
secretive and yet detecting way from beneath their hands, and
occasionally flash their dark lanterns on the surrounding spectators._)
SHISHMASH HASH HASH
(_Leaping up and cracking his heels nine times before descending._) Your
Referendunces! Your Referendunces! We have here the only living
Descendant Sons and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable American
Anti-White Slavers--the organization which in its day gave rise--laid
the foundation, as it were, of our present great and perfect World
Federation, over which at present your Referendunces are so ably
presiding. It claims to be the only existing organization that preserves
in all their purity the customs, manners and instincts of the original
pre-Federated Anti-White-Slavers of seven and eight centuries since. I
beg of your Referendunces--I beg of you!--on this very special
occasion--I know you are tired--Will your Referendunces be pleased to
receive them? (_He runs swiftly around in a ring and falls over three
extended feather-dusters. NOXUS PODUNKUS groans. The Moonshees moan._)
THE ONE HUNDRED ZANYS
(_Dancing on before them and rattling their wind-bags._) The
Anti-White-Slavers! The Anti-White-Slavers! Look! Behold!
THE FIFTY DIZZARDS
(_Beating the Moonshees with feather-clubs and whistling between their
teeth._) Awake! Awake! (_The Moonshees stir feebly and call for souffle.
By the aid of a dozen gallons of ice-water_ NOXUS PODUNKUS _is once more
aroused and now surveys the approaching procession, which marches about
the arena and back to the Musnud._)
NOXUS PODUNKUS
(_Scratching his left ear and surveying the assembled throng._)
What--more? Oh! Well, welcome, noble citizens! Welcome! I see by your
brows that you possess the unconquerable love of Liberty, Virtue, Truth,
Justice, Beauty, etc., so necessary to the happy maintenance of our
present Federated condition. (_He collapses and more souffle is
administered. Recovering._) Stick to it! What supreme comfort it must be
to you and your exceedingly courageous ancestors to know that our very
happy present condition is almost entirely due to them--their noble
deeds of valor performed in order that we might become so--so--(_he
coughs_). What supreme deeds would not you now, I am sure (_they
brandish their battleaxes_) gladly perform were it not that fortunately
all provocation had long since been done away with. (_Loud cheering. All
the Nizys, Zanys, Hoddy-Doddys, etc., walk on their hands._) Night after
night in the wilds of the great cities of those far-off centuries, now
so happily past, did your forefathers fearlessly and tirelessly seek out
the enslavers of resisting and lovely womanhood and battle to the death
with those who would have corrupted our worthy sires--I mean
siresses--Souffle!--(_he imbibes_)--performing astounding and now almost
unbelievable feats of valor, felling the vile and rapacious enslaver to
the plain and chopping him to bits, leaving us, their humble
descendants, little if anything to do save revere and historically
represent the marvels which they then performed. (_Immense and prolonged
cheering. Eight thousand wireless messages are sent forth._) Literature,
by their aid, as we all well know, has at last been completely done away
with. (_Riotous applause._) Profane art in all its forms and all its
seductive wiles has long since ceased. (_The audience shouts for one
hour._) The vile newspapers of ancient days (_innumerable swells of
booing and cat-calling_), wont to chronicle only the private and social
vices of unregenerate man, now, thanks to the unremitting toil of those
who had only the moral regeneration of the world in view, its true
spiritual progress (_prolonged and enduring applause_), chronicle only
the sweet messages of hope and cheer by which we sustain each other in
our happy state--Souffle! Souffle! (_He dips his head in a pannier. The
audience cheers for one hour._) Now we are not troubled with politics,
armies, or any vile evidences of commercial strife and contest. (_More
applause._) Nothing disturbs us in any way! Could we ask more? (_Cries
of “Hear! Hear!”_) As I was saying to those dear creatures who just
left, our beloved Eugenic citizens and citizenesses, we need now only
concern ourselves with the simple arts of peace and pleasure as we here
see manifest in this great assemblage. On you, therefore, more than on
any other group which at this time could come before this august Court
to testify to the Truth, Peace, Virtue, Sequacity and Docility of our
present world-realm, devolves, as lineal descendants of these our great
sires, the sweet task of keeping bright the memory of their great deeds.
I am sure that you, my dears and dearesses, by maintaining so earnest a
stand against all thought of any kind, by persisting in your aversion to
moral heresies of all sorts and indeed learning and science in every
form, and by your persistent and industrious mutilation and destruction
of all profane facts, so long the curse of society (_loud cries of “Down
with all facts!”_), will succeed--I know you will!--in keeping the world
as fresh and pure and innocent as on the day it was made. (_Cries of
“Yes, yes,” and “we will, we will.” Applause for one hour._) Souffle!
Souffle! (_He is fed._)--Cruel, disturbing thought, that one great curse
of humanity in its earlier ages must never be allowed to trouble us
again. (_Immense applause._) And since, by what processes of hardy
non-thinking only our revered ancestors know, profound peace has at last
been reached, I caution you, O my fellow-citizens, let not a single
irritating disturbing fact ever again impinge upon the sweet idealism
and mental slumber which now reigns. Behold our happy Dizzards! (_They
wiggle their stuffed clubs._) Could any of the so-called and boasted
mental processes of former ages have produced them? (_They walk on their
hands._) And our dear Zanys! (_They rattle their wind-bags._) What would
our great peaceful Federation be without them? (_They beat each other
over the head._) Or our graceful Nizys! (_They take up wash-boilers of
souffle and ladle it right and left solemnly._) The gentility and
wholeheartedness of their service! (_They playfully pelt each other with
cones filled with souffle._) Or our kindly Hoddy-Doddys! (_They vault._)
What more could humanity desire in the shape of perfect and helpful men?
(_They leap on each other’s backs and fall gracefully to the floor._)
When I contemplate these, and this great audience (_profound applause
lasting seventeen minutes_), and these our assembled cohorts of Virtue,
Truth, Justice, Mercy (_more applause, lasting one hour_), come here
from all parts of the known world to testify to the great fundamental
truths which have made them so, I--(_At this point the great audience
rises en masse and cheers for one hour, seventeen and one-half minutes
and thirteen seconds. Rival groups of Descendant Sons and Daughters of
Ancient and Honorable Anti-White-Slavers, Anti-Vivisectionists,
Anti-Contraceptionists, Billysundays, Eugenic Sires, Anti-Saloon
Leaguers, Watch and Ward Guards, King’s Daughters, Free and Accepted Boy
Scouts, etc., rush forward and seize upon the cages containing the only
remaining specimens of Gambler, Saloon-keeper, Predatory Financier,
Philosopher, Magdalen, Vivisectionist, Madam, Nietzschean and other
early examples of now nearly or quite extinct miscreants or papier-maché
representations of the same, and haul them before the Musnud amid the
cheering, hee-hawing, cat-calling of the audience. The Zanys, Nizys,
Dizzards, Loobies, Hoddy-Doddys, Gaberlunzies and Fuddys, forgetting
their regular duties, spin, squeal, play at leap-frog, beat each other
with feather-dusters and wind-bags. Various regiments of Descendant Sons
and Daughters of Ancient and Honorable Feminists, Professors of
Christian Economy, Prohibitionists, Socialists, etc., who have not yet
had the privilege of parading and testifying before the Musnud, crowd
the entryways, swarm the aisles and so obstruct the peaceful and orderly
development of the proceedings of the Court that, in view of this and
because ordinarily the proceedings consume from twenty to thirty days
anyhow, so great is the anxiety of all to testify to the magnificent
progress of the world since vice and crime have been done away with_,
NOXUS PODUNKUS, _now thoroughly awake and after due counsel with the
ninety-nine other Moonshees, Savants, Roctor-Proctors, Pundits,
Theorists, Zadkiels, Seers, Oracles, Solons, Nestors, Gamaliels,
Daniels, etc., also disturbed in their slumbers, decides that, all
things considered, and notwithstanding, it were as well if the taking of
testimony were to be discontinued for this day, and to this end, after
various signs, grunts, squeals, motions to the Zanys, Dizzards, Nizys,
Loobies, Hoddy-Doddys, Gaberlunzies, Fuddys, etc., the latter are
brought to their senses and through them the audience calmed._)
(_It was then that_ NOXUS PODUNKUS, _speaking for the Musnud, announced
that the proceedings for this day were hereby ended and that the Court
stood adjourned until the following morning at ten o’clock; after which
SHISHMASH_ HASH HASH, _as Master of Ceremonies, Chairmaster, etc., led
the outgoing throng with a magnificent example of rotary hand-spring
motion. At this point, also, owing to lack of space and by reason of the
fact that enough is as good as a feast, the humble recording Dramatist
quits and the curtain is hereby drawn on this historic scene. For those,
however, who desire a fuller report of the same, it may be found in
Volumes MMCCCIII, MMMMMMMMCCCLLVI, Proceedings of the Federated Court of
Progress [Moline-Emporia-Sedalia Sittings] for the years 3913-’14-’15_,
NOXUS PODUNKUS _presiding_; SHISHMASH HASH HASH, _Secretary and Master
of Ceremonies._)
Curtain.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] J. C. Vogt: “The Nature of Electricity and Magnetism on the Basis
of a Simplified Conception of Substance.”
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