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Title: The Pardoner's Wallet
Author: Samuel McChord Crothers
Release date: March 16, 2024 [eBook #73172]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905
Credits: Alan, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARDONER'S WALLET ***
By Samuel M. Crothers
THE PARDONER’S WALLET. 12mo, $1.25, _net_. Postage extra.
THE ENDLESS LIFE. 16mo, gilt top, 85 cents, _net_. Postage extra.
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Postpaid $1.08.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
THE PARDONER’S WALLET
The Pardoner’s
Wallet
BY SAMUEL McCHORD CROTHERS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1905
COPYRIGHT 1905 BY SAMUEL McCHORD CROTHERS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published November 1905_
TO KATHARINE
WITH WHOM THESE THINGS HAVE
BEEN TALKED OVER
PREFACE
[Illustration]
There is a well-grounded prejudice against a volume which exhibits no
marks of design and which turns out to be only a fortuitous collection
of essays. It is felt that the chapters brought together under the
cover of a single book should have something in common. When one sees
a number of subjects, each standing aloof from the others, he predicts
infelicity. It suggests incompatibility of temper.
The essays brought together in “the Pardoner’s Wallet” have at least a
certain community of interest. They treat of aspects of human nature
which, while open to friendly criticism, are excusable. If the author
sometimes touches upon the foibles of his betters, he at least has the
grace to know that they are his betters.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE PARDONER 1
UNSEASONABLE VIRTUES 23
AN HOUR WITH OUR PREJUDICES 46
HOW TO KNOW THE FALLACIES 82
THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE PEACEMAKERS 119
THE LAND OF THE LARGE AND CHARITABLE
AIR 140
A COMMUNITY OF HUMORISTS 176
A SAINT RECANONIZED 199
AS HE SEES HIMSELF 221
A MAN UNDER ENCHANTMENT 249
THE CRUELTY OF GOOD PEOPLE 267
THE PARDONER
[Illustration]
With him ther rood a gentil Pardoner
Of Rouncival, his freend and his compeer,
That streight was comen fro the Court of Rome.
* * * * *
A vernicle hadde he sowed on his cappe
His walet lay biforn him in his lappe
Bretful of pardoun.
I have no plea to make for this fourteenth-century pardoner. He was an
impudent vagabond, trafficking in damaged goods. One did not need to
be a Lollard in order to see that he was a reprehensible character.
Discerning persons in need of relics would go to responsible dealers
where they could be assured of getting their money’s worth. This
glib-tongued fellow peddling religious articles from door to door lived
on the credulity of untraveled country people. He took advantage of
their weaknesses. Many a good wife would purchase a pardon she had
no need of, simply because he offered it as a bargain. This was all
wrong. We all know how the business of indulgence-selling was overdone.
There was a general loss of confidence on the part of the purchasing
public; and at last in the days of the too enterprising Tetzel there
came a disastrous slump. There was no market for pardons, even of the
gilt-edged varieties. Since then very little has been doing in this
line, at least among the northern nations.
The pardoner richly deserved his fate. And yet there are times when one
would give something to see the merry knave coming down the road.
I suppose that the nature of each individual has its point of moral
saturation. When this point is reached, it is of no use to continue
exhortation or rebuke or any kind of didactic effort. Even the finest
quality of righteous indignation will no longer soak in. With me
the point of moral saturation comes when I attend successively more
meetings of a reformatory and denunciatory character than nature
intended me to profit by. If they are well distributed in point of
time, I can take in a considerable number of good causes and earnestly
reprobate an equal number of crying evils. But there is a certain
monotony of rebuke which I am sure is not beneficial to persons of
my disposition. That some things are wrong I admit, but when I am
peremptorily ordered to believe that everything is wrong, it arouses
in me a certain obstinacy of contradiction. I might be led to such a
belief, but I will not be driven to it. I rebel against those censors
of manners and morals who treat all human imperfectnesses with equal
rigor. To relax even for an instant the righteous frown over the things
that are going wrong, into an indulgent smile at the things that are
not nearly so bad as they seem, is in their eyes nothing less than
compounding a felony. If they would allow proper intervals between
protests, so that the conscience could cool down, all would be well.
But this is just what they will not allow. The wheels must go round
without intermission until progress is stopped by the disagreeable
accident of “a hot box.”
You remember after Mrs. Proudie had given her guests a severe lesson in
social ethics, the Signora asked in her hearing,--
“‘Is she always like this?’
“‘Yes--always--madam,’ said Mrs. Proudie, returning; ‘always the
same--always equally adverse to impropriety of conduct of every
description.’”
Mrs. Proudie was an excellent woman according to her light, yet
Barchester would have been a happier place to live in had her light
been less constant. A little flicker now and then, a momentary relief
from the glare, would have been appreciated.
It is when the note of personal responsibility has been forced beyond
my ability that I feel beneath my inherited Puritanism the stirring
of a vague Papistry. Instead of joining another protesting society
beginning with that feverish particle “anti,” how delightful it would
be to go out and dicker with a well-conditioned pardoner
Streight comen fro the Court of Rome!
Wearied with diatribes and resolutions, one falls back upon the
guileless bargainings of Simple Simon.
“Let me taste your ware,” say I.
“Show me first your penny,” says the pardoner.
There is a renewal of one’s youth in this immortal repartee.
There is no greater relief than to go out and buy something,
especially if one can buy it cheap. A great part of the attractiveness
of the mediæval indulgences lay in the fact that you could buy them.
They would not have seemed the same if they had been given away, or if
you had to work them out like a road tax. To go out and buy a little
heart’s ease was an enticement.
Then again, the natural man, when he has to do with an institution, is
in a passive rather than in an active mood. If it is instituted for his
betterment, he says, “Let it better me.” It seems too bad that in the
end it should throw all the responsibility back upon himself.
A delightful old English traveler criticises the methods of
transportation he found in vogue in parts of Germany. He says that on
the Rhine it was customary to make the passengers do the rowing. “Their
custome is that the passengers must exercise themselves with oares
and rowing, _alternis vicibus_, a couple together. So that the master
of the boate (who methinks in honestie ought either to do it himself
or to procure some others to do it for him) never roweth but when his
turne commeth. This exercise both for recreation and health sake is I
confesse very convenient for man. But to be tied unto it by way of
strict necessitie when one payeth well for his passage was a thing that
did not a little distaste my humour.”
This is the trouble which many of us find in the modern methods of
doing good. There are all sorts of organizations which promise well.
But no sooner have we embarked on a worthy undertaking than we find
that we are expected to work our passage. The officers of the boat
disclaim all further responsibility, leaving that to private judgment.
It is the true Protestant way and it works excellently well, when it
works at all. It offers a fine challenge to disinterested virtue. But
there are occasions when the natural man rebels. To have so much put
upon him doth “not a little distaste his humour.” He longs for the good
old times when there were thinkers who were not above their business,
and who when he was at his wit’s end would do his thinking for him.
It’s the same way with being excused for his shortcomings. Of course
on a pinch he can excuse himself, but he generally makes a pretty
poor job of it. It would be much more satisfactory to have a duly
authorized person who, for a consideration, would assume the whole
responsibility. Of course if he had done something that was really
unpardonable, that would be another matter. The law would have to take
its course. But there are a great many venial transgressions. What he
wants is some one who can assure him that they are venial.
Let no good Protestant take offense at the finding of a Pardoner’s
Wallet in this twentieth century. It is only a wallet containing
tentative suggestions concerning things pardonable. Nothing is
authoritatively signed and sealed.
Of one thing let the good Protestant take notice. I would have my
pardoner know his place. He must not meddle with things too high for
him. He has no right to deal with the graver sins or to speak for a
higher power. He must not speak even in the name of the Church, which
has worthier spokesmen than he. In a book on indulgences the author
says, “On the subject of elongated, centenary, and millenary pardons,
it would take too much space to enlarge.” I should rule out all such
ambitious plans, not only from lack of space but on conscientious
grounds.
My pardoner should confine himself to a more modest task. He should
be the spokesman not of any ecclesiastical power, but only of ordinary
and errant human nature. There are sins against eternal law that must
at all times be taken seriously. The trouble with us poor mortals is
that, even in our remorse, we do not take very long views. The judgment
that seems most terrible to us is that of the people who live next
door. The transgressions which loom largest are offenses against social
conventions and against our own sensitive vanity. The pangs of remorse
for an act of remembered awkwardness are likely to be more poignant
than those which come as retribution for an acknowledged crime.
Here is ample room for a present-day pardoner. I should like to hear
him make the cheery proclamation of his trade.
“Good friends: You are not what you would like to be. You are not what
you think you are. You are not what your neighbors think you are,--or
rather, you are not what you think your neighbors think you are. Your
foibles, your peccadillos, your fallacies, and your prejudices are
more numerous than you imagine. But take heart of grace, good people.
These things are not unpardonable. We indulgencers have learned to
make allowances for human nature. Let’s see what’s in my wallet! No
crowding! Each will be served in his turn.”
* * * * *
If I were a duly licensed pardoner, I should have a number of nicely
engraved indulgences for what are called sins of omission. Not that
I should attempt to extenuate the graver sort. I should not hold out
false hopes to thankless sons or indifferent husbands. To be followed
by such riff-raff would spoil my trade with the better classes. I
should not have anything in my wallet for the acrimonious critic, who
brings a railing accusation against his neighbor, and omits to sign his
name. Some omissions are unpardonable.
I should, at the beginning, confine my traffic to those sins which
easily beset conscientious persons about half past two in the morning.
We have warrant for thinking that the sleep of the just is refreshing.
This is doubtless true of the completely just; but with the just man
in the making it is frequently otherwise. There is a stage in his
strenuous moral career which is conducive to insomnia.
Having gone to sleep because he was tired, he presently awakes for the
same reason. He is, however, only half awake. Those kindly comforters,
Common-sense, Humor, and Self-esteem, whose function it is to keep him
on reasonably good terms with himself while he is doing his necessary
work, are still dozing.
Then Conscience appears,--a terrible apparition. There is a vague
menace in her glance. The poor wretch cowers beneath it. Then is
unrolled the lengthening list of the things left undone which ought to
have been done. Every unwritten letter and uncalled call and unattended
committee meeting and unread report emerges from the vasty deep and
adds its burden of unutterable guilt. The Thing That Was Not Worth
Doing arises and demands with insatiate energy that it be done at once.
The Thing Half-done, because there was no time to finish it, appears
with wan face accusing him of its untimely taking off. The Stitch not
Taken in Time appears with its pitiful ninefold progeny all doomed
because of a moment’s inattention. It seems that his moral raiment,
instead of being put together with an eye to permanency, has been
stitched on a single-thread machine and the end of the seam never
properly fastened. Now he is pulling at the thread, and he sees the
whole fabric unraveling before his eyes.
His past existence looms before him as a battlefield with a perpetual
conflict of duties,--each duty cruelly slain by its brother duty.
While the wailing of these poor ghosts is in his ears he cannot rest.
And yet he knows full well that at half past two in the morning the
one inexorable duty is that he should go to sleep. Conscience points
to this as another duty left undone. Then begins a new cycle of
self-reproach.
At such times the sight of an indulgence neatly framed hanging upon
the bedroom wall would be worth more than it would cost. It would save
doctor’s bills.
Even in our waking hours there is a tendency for the sins of omission
and the sorrows of omission to pile up in monstrous fashion. There
is a curious ingenuity which some persons have in loading themselves
with burdens which do not belong to them, and in extracting melancholy
reflections out of their good fortune. They will not frankly accept a
blessing in its own proper form,--it must come to them in a mournful
disguise. Poets seem particularly subject to these inversions of
feeling. Here are some lines entitled “Two Sorrows:”--
Before Love came my eyes were dim with tears
Because I had not known her gentle face.
Softly I said, “But when across the years
Her smile illumes the darkness of my place,
All grief from my poor heart she will efface.”
Now Love is mine--she walks with me for aye
Down paths of primrose and blue violet,
But on my heart at every close of day
A grief more keen than my old grief is set.
I weep for those who have not found Love yet.
There is a fine altruism about this sentiment that one cannot but
respect; yet I should hate to live with a person who felt that way.
One would not venture on any little kindness for fear of opening a new
floodgate of tears.
I should feel like urging another point of view. It is true that you
are happy, happier than you deserve. But don’t get morbid about it;
take it cheerfully. It’s not your fault. It seems selfish, you say, to
enjoy your blessings when there aren’t enough to go round among all
your fellow beings. Why, my dear fellow, that’s the only way to make
them go around. What if, theoretically, it is a little selfish? We will
readily pardon that for the sake of the satisfaction we get out of
seeing you have a good time. We much prefer that you should allow us
to sympathize with you in your happiness, rather than that you should
inflict upon us too much sympathy for our deprivations.
* * * * *
There is opportunity for a thriving trade in indulgences for
necessarily slighted work. I emphasize the idea of necessity, for I am
aware of the danger of gross abuse if poets and painters should get
the notion that they may find easy absolution for the sin of offering
to the public something less than their best. Their best is none too
good. We must not, through misdirected charity, lower the standards of
self-respecting artists.
But some of us are not artists. The ordinary man is compelled to spend
most of his time on pot-boilers of one kind or another. When the pot
is merrily boiling, and all the odds and ends are being mingled in a
savory stew, I would allow the ordinary man some satisfaction. As
fingers were made before forks, so mediocrity was made before genius.
Has mediocrity no right to enjoy its own work, just because it is not
the very best?
We of the commonalty who are fitted to live happily in the comparative
degree, allow ourselves to be bullied by the superlative. There are
uneasy spirits who trouble Israel. They continually quote the maxim
that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. It is a good maxim in
its way, and causes no particular hardship until our eyes are opened
and we see what it means to do anything superlatively well. When we
are shown by example the technical excellence which is possible in the
simplest forms of activity, and the extent to which we fall short, we
are appalled. It is a wonder that we keep going at all when we consider
the slovenly way we breathe. And yet breathing, though it well might
engage all our attention, is only one of the things we have to do.
I attribute a good deal of the sense of stress in modern life to the
new standards of excellence that are set in regard to the multifarious
activities which make up our daily lives. We have to do a hundred
different things. This is not particularly trying so long as it is
merely touch and go. In our amateurish way we rather enjoy the variety.
But when a hundred experts beset us, each one of whom has made a life
study of a particular act, we are bowed in contrition. There is no good
in us but good intentions, and they cannot save us. Our life story is
summed up like that of the unfortunate sparrow in the tragical history
of Cock Robin:
His aim then he took
But he took it not right.
Our capacity for imperfectness seems absolutely unlimited. The effort
taken to achieve success in one direction is from another point of
view a dissipation of energy. It is so much power withdrawn from
another possible achievement. The most versatile men do not do all
things equally well, and while the world calls them successful they are
inwardly conscious of their manifold failures. Mr. Balfour as Prime
Minister of the British Empire has had much to gratify his ambition,
but he takes the public into his confidence and confesses that he is a
bitterly disappointed man. For, in addition to other accomplishments,
he plays golf, a game that develops a conscience of its own. He plays
well, but his conscience tells him that he does not play as well as he
might. “I belong,” he says, “to that unhappy class of beings forever
pursued by remorse, who are conscious that they threw away in youth
opportunities that were open to them of beginning golf at a time of
life when alone the muscles can be attuned to the full perfection
required by the most difficult game that perhaps exists.”
Surely there must be a way by which such vain regrets may be stilled.
Life has its inevitable compromises. We cannot always be at our best.
Take such a simple matter as that of masticating our food. Before I
had given much thought to it, I should have said that it was something
worth doing and worth doing well. When I learned that Mr. Gladstone was
accustomed to chew each morsel of food thirty-two times, I thought it
greatly to his credit. For a man who had so many other things to do,
that seemed enough.
But when I read a book of some three hundred pages containing the whole
duty of man in regard to chewing, I was disheartened. Mr. Gladstone
appeared to be a mere tyro guilty of bolting his food. “The author has
found that one fifth of the midway section of the garden young onion,
sometimes called shallot, has required seven hundred and twenty-two
mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing.”
The author evidently did his whole duty by that young onion, and yet I
should have pardoned him if he had done something less. That doctrine
of his about involuntary swallowing being the only kind that is morally
justifiable, seems to me to be too austere. If we have to swallow in
the end, why not show a cheerful willingness?
* * * * *
Not only do those need comfort who do less than is expected of
them, those who do more are often in an equally sorry plight. Their
excellences make them obnoxious to their neighbors, and are treated
as unpardonable offenses. I would have a special line of indulgences
for that class of people known as the “unco guid.” I know no persons
more in need of charity, and who get so little of it. Every man’s hand
is against them, especially every hand that wields the pen of a ready
writer. They seem predestinated to literary reprobation, and that
without regard to their genuinely good works or to their continuance
in the same. And yet the whole extent of their crime is that, being in
some respects better than their neighbors, they are painfully aware of
the fact. It is because they have tasted of the forbidden knowledge of
their own moral superiority that their fall is deemed irremediable.
I confess that, in spite of all that has been said against them, I have
a tender feeling for them. They are persecuted for self-righteousness
without the benefit of any beatitude. Why should we consider it
unpardonable to be fully cognizant of one’s undoubted virtues? Of
course unconscious virtue is the more paradisiacal, while conscious
virtue often rubs one the wrong way. But while there are so many worse
things in the world, why should we mind a little thing like that?
We listen to Dumas’ swashbuckling heroes recounting their
transgressions. We know that they are not so bad as they would have us
believe, but we think no worse of them for that. But let a thoroughly
respectable man draw attention to his own fine qualities, and we treat
every deviation from exact fact as a crime. When he indulges in some
exaggeration and pictures himself as rather better than he is, we cry,
“Hypocrite!” If he claims possession of some single virtue which does
not, in our judgment, harmonize with some of his other characteristics,
we treat him as if he had stolen it. And yet, poor fellow! he may have
come honestly by this bit of finery, though he has not been able to get
other things to match it. All this is unkind.
Whatever one may think of the “unco guid,” every right-minded person
must agree with me that something ought to be done for the peace of
mind of the quiet, respectable, good people who bear the heat and
burden of the day. I have in mind the people who pay taxes, and build
homes, and support churches and schools and hospitals, and now and then
go to the theatre. They are as likely as not to be moderately well to
do, and if they are not, nobody knows it. When times are hard with
them, they keep their own counsels and go about with head erect and the
best foot forward. You may see multitudes of these people every day.
As a class, these people are sadly put upon. They are criticised
not only for their own shortcomings, but for those of all their
irresponsible fellow citizens. If anything goes wrong they are sure to
hear about it, for they listen to sermons, and read the newspapers,
and attend meetings. No reformer can be truly eloquent who does not
point his finger at his hearer, and say, “Thou art the man!” Now,
unfortunately, the real delinquents are usually absent, and the
right-minded, conscientious hearer of the word, who is doing all he
can for social regeneration, even to the verge of nervous prostration,
has to act as substitute. He has been so often assured that he is the
guilty man that, by and by, he comes to believe it.
He walks to church with his family only to be told that it is his
fault, and the fault of those like him, that other people have gone
off in their automobiles. Perhaps, if he had walked differently, he
might have made church-going more attractive to them. The evils of
intemperance are laid at his door. It is not worth while to blame
the drunkard or the saloon-keeper; they are not within ear-shot. As
to pauperism and vice, every one knows that they arise from social
conditions; and pray who is responsible for these conditions unless it
be the meek man who sits in the pew,--at least, he is the only one who
can readily be made to assume the responsibility.
There is something wholesome in all this if it be not overdone. I,
myself, like to have my fling at the man who is trying to do his duty,
and to twit him occasionally for not doing more. It keeps him from
self-righteousness. But sometimes it is carried too far, and the poor
man staggers under a load of vicarious guilt.
I especially hate to see the man who is trying to do his duty given
over to the censures of those who do not try. There is something very
harsh in the judgment of the ne’er-do-well upon his well-to-do brother.
His attitude is the extreme of phariseeism, as he contrasts his own
generous and care-free nature with the pickayunish prudence which he
scorns. To be sure, his brother in the end pays his debts for him, but
he does it with a narrow scrutiny which robs the act of its natural
charm. His acts of helpfulness are marred by a tendency to didacticism.
All these things are laid up against him.
But allowance should be made for the difference in condition.
Ne’er-do-wellness is an expansive state. There are no natural limits
to it. It develops broad views, and its peculiar virtues have a free
field. It is different with well-to-doness, which is a precarious
condition with a very narrow margin of safety. The ne’er-do-well can
afford to be generous, seeing that his generosity costs him nothing.
He is free from all belittling calculations necessary to those who are
compelled to adjust means to ends,--he is indifferent to ends and he
has no means.
When the morally responsible person finds himself too much put upon, I
would grant him a generous indulgence. After all, I would tell him, the
prudential virtues are not so bad. It is a good deal of an achievement
to make both ends meet. I am not disposed to be too hard on those who
accomplish this, even though I may think a little fullness in their
moral garments might be more becoming.
I should also make provision for the pardon of those good people who
are harshly judged because their virtues are unseasonable. But their
case involves delicate considerations that can best be treated in
another chapter.
UNSEASONABLE VIRTUES
[Illustration]
There are certain philosophers who have fallen into the habit of
speaking slightingly of Time and Space. Time, they say, is only a poor
concept of ours corresponding to no ultimate reality, and Space is
little better. They are merely mental receptacles into which we put our
sensations. We are assured that could we get at the right point of view
we should see that real existence is timeless. Of course we cannot get
at the right point of view, but that does not matter.
It is easy to understand how philosophers can talk in that way, for
familiarity with great subjects breeds contempt; but we of the laity
cannot dismiss either Time or Space so cavalierly. Having once acquired
the time-habit, it is difficult to see how we could live without it. We
are accustomed to use the minutes and hours as stepping-stones, and we
pick our way from one to another. If it were not for them, we should
find ourselves at once beyond our depth. It is the succession of events
which makes them interesting. There is a delightful transitoriness
about everything, and yet the sense that there is more where it all
comes from. To the unsophisticated mind Eternity is not the negation
of Time; it is having all the time one wants. And why may not the
unsophisticated mind be as nearly right in such matters as any other?
In a timeless existence there would be no distinction between now and
then, before and after. Yesterdays and to-days would be merged in one
featureless Forever. When we met one another it would be impertinent
to ask, “How do you do?” The chilling answer would be: “I do not do;
I am.” There would be nothing more to say to one who had reduced his
being to such bare metaphysical first principles.
I much prefer living in Time, where there are circumstances and
incidents to give variety to existence. There is a dramatic instinct
in all of us that must be satisfied. We watch with keen interest for
what is coming next. We would rather have long waits than to have no
shifting of the scenes, and all the actors on the stage at once, doing
nothing.
An open-minded editor prints the following question from an anxious
reader in regard to a serial story appearing in his paper: “Does
it make any difference in reading the serial whether I begin with
Saturday’s chapter and read backward toward Monday, or should the tale
be read as the chapters appear?”
The editor assures his subscriber that the story is of such uniform
excellence that it would read well in either direction. In practical
affairs our dramatic instinct will not allow us this latitude. We
insist upon certain sequences. There is an expectancy that one thing
will lead up to another. We do not take kindly to an anti-climax or
to an anachronism. The Hebrew sage declares, “He hath made everything
beautiful in his time.” That is in the right time, but alas for the
beautiful thing that falls upon the wrong time! It is bewitched beyond
all recognition by the old necromancer who has power to make “ancient
good uncouth.”
It is just here that charity requires that we should discriminate.
There is a situation that demands the services of a kind-hearted
indulgencer. Ethics has to do with two kinds of offenses: one is
against the eternal and unchanging standards of right and wrong, and
the other against the perpetually varying conditions of the passing
day. We are continually confusing the two. We visit upon the ancient
uncouth good which comes honestly stumbling on its belated journey
toward the perfect, all the condemnation that properly belongs to
willful evil. It is lucky if it gets off so easily as that, for we are
likely to add the pains and penalties which belong to hypocritical
pretense. As for a premature kind of goodness coming before there is
time properly to classify it, that must expect martyrdom. Something of
the old feeling about strangers still survives in us. We think it safer
to treat the stranger as an enemy. If he survives our attacks we may
make friends with him.
Those good people who, in their devotion to their own ideals, have
ignored all considerations of timeliness, have usually passed
through sore tribulations. They have been the victims of cruel
misunderstandings. Such, for example, was Saint Cerbonius. Cerbonius
is one of the October saints. October is a good month for saints. The
ecclesiastical calendar gives us a sense of spiritual mellowness and
fruitfulness. The virtues celebrated are without the acidity which
belongs to some other seasons: witness Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint
Teresa, Saint Luke, the beloved physician, Saint John Capistran,
of whom it is written, “he had a singular talent for reconciling
inveterate enemies and inducing them to love one another.” Cerbonius
has a modest place in this autumnal brotherhood; indeed, in some Lives
of the Saints, he is not even mentioned, and yet he had the true
October spirit. Nevertheless, his good was evil spoken of, and he came
near to excommunication, and all because of his divergence from popular
custom in the matter of time.
It seems that he lived towards the end of the sixth century, and that
he was bishop of Piombino. Very soon a great scandal arose, for it was
declared that the bishop was neglecting his duties. At the accustomed
hour the citizens came to the cathedral for their devotions, only to
find the chancel devoid of clergy. Cerbonius and his priests were at
that moment comfortably seated at breakfast. Each succeeding morning
witnessed the same scene. The bishop was evidently an infidel scoffing
at the rites of religion. Appeal was made to Rome, and legates were
appointed who confirmed the astounding rumors. At last Cerbonius went
to Rome to plead his cause; but only by a special miracle was his
character cleared. The miracle induced the authorities to look into
the matter more carefully, and it was found that Cerbonius, instead of
neglecting his duties, had been carried away by holy zeal. While the
people of Piombino were still in their beds, Cerbonius and his clergy
would be celebrating mass. As for breakfast, that was quite late in the
day.
It is easy to be wise after the event, and now that the matter has
been cleared up it is evident that all the religion was not on one
side. Taking a large view of the subject, we see that in the course of
the twenty-four hours the bishop spent as much time in the church as
the most scrupulous parishioner could ask. But it was just this large
view that they were unwilling to take. With them it was now or never.
They judged his character by the cross-section which they took at one
particular hour.
I suppose that, had I lived in Piombino, I should have been a moderate
anti-Cerbonian. Cerbonius was in error, but not in mortal sin. He
was guilty of a heresy that disturbed the peace of the church,--that
of early rising. So long as early rising is held only as a creed for
substance of doctrine and set forth as a counsel of perfection, it may
be tolerated, but when the creed becomes a deed it awakens fanatical
opposition. This breeds schism. A person cannot be popular who gets
the reputation of being a human alarm clock. The primitive instinct
in regard to an alarm clock is to stop it. If Cerbonius had possessed
the tact necessary to a man in his position, he would not only have
done his duty, but he would have done it at the time most convenient
to the greatest number. His virtue was unseasonable; but between a man
of unseasonable virtue and an abandoned character who has no virtue
at all, there is a great difference. It is just this difference which
the majority of people will not see. They make no distinction between
one who deliberately offends against the eternal verities and one who
accidentally tramples upon a temporary verity that he didn’t know was
there.
Most of our quarrels do not concern absolute right and wrong; they
arise from disputes about the time of day. Two persons may have the
same qualities and convictions and yet never agree. An ironical fate
sets them at cross purposes and they never meet without irritating
contradictions. It is all because their moods do not synchronize. One
is always a little too slow, the other a little too fast. When one
is in fine fettle the other is just beginning to get tired. They are
equally serious, but never on the same occasion, and so each accuses
the other of heartless frivolity. They have an equal appreciation of a
pleasantry, but they never see it at the same instant. One gives it an
uproarious welcome when the other is speeding the parting guest.
Two quick-tempered people may live together very comfortably so long
as they lose their tempers simultaneously; they are then ready to
make up at the same time. They get on like an automobile, by a series
of small explosions accurately timed. But when a quick-tempered
person is unequally yoked with one who is slow to wrath, the case is
difficult. The slowness causes continual apprehension. The fuse burns
so deliberately that it seems to have gone out and then the explosion
comes. In such cases there can be no adequate explanation. The offender
would apologize if he could remember what the offense was, and he
doesn’t dare to ask.
Said one theologian to another: “The difference between us is that
your God is my Devil.” This involved more than the mere matter of
nomenclature. It upset the spiritual time-table and caused disastrous
collisions. When one good man set forth valiantly to fight the Devil,
the other would charge him with disturbing his worship.
The fact that one man’s work is another man’s play is equally fruitful
in misunderstandings. The proverbial irritability of the literary and
artistic tribes arises in part from this cause. They feel that they are
never taken seriously. When we go to a good play we find it so easy to
be amused that we do not realize what hard work it is for those whose
business it is to be amusing. The better the work, the more effortless
it seems to us. On a summer afternoon we take up a novel in a mood
which to the conscientious novelist seems sacrilege. He has thrown all
the earnestness of his nature into it, and he wants his message to be
received in the same spirit. We have earnestness of nature too, but
we have expended it in other directions. Having finished our work, we
take our rest by reading his. It is a pleasant way to pass the time.
This enrages the novelist, and he writes essays to rebuke us. He calls
us Philistines and other hard names, and says that we are incapable of
appreciating literary art.
But what is our offense? We have used his work for our own purpose,
which was to rest our minds. We got out of it what at the time we
needed. Does he not act in very much the same way? Did we not see
him at the town-meeting when a very serious question concerning the
management of the town poor-house was to be settled? It was a time
when every good citizen should have shown his interest by speaking an
earnest word. Unmindful of all this, he sat through the meeting with
the air of an amused outsider. He paid little attention to the weighty
arguments of the selectmen, but noted down all their slips in grammar.
He confessed unblushingly that he attended the meeting simply to get a
little local color. What is to become of the country when a tax-payer
will take the duties of citizenship so lightly?
These recriminations go on endlessly. Because we do not see certain
qualities in action, we deny their existence. The owl has a reputation
for sedentary habits and unpractical wisdom, simply because he keeps
different business hours from those to which we are accustomed. Could
we look in on him during the rush time, we would find him a hustling
fellow. He has no time to waste on unremunerative meditation. This is
his busy night. How ridiculous is the sleepiness of the greater part
of the animal world! There is the lark nodding for hours on his perch.
They say he never really wakes up--at least, nobody has seen him awake.
* * * * *
There is a pedagogical theory according to which each individual in his
early life repeats quite accurately the history of mankind up to date.
He passes through all the successive stages in the history of the race,
with a few extra flourishes now and then to indicate the surprises
which the future may have in store for us. The history of civilization
becomes, for the initiated, the rehearsal of the intensely interesting
drama of the nursery and the schoolroom. It lacks the delicacy of the
finished performance, but it presents the argument clearly enough and
suggests the necessary stage business. The young lady who attempts to
guide a group of reluctant young cave-dwellers from one period in human
culture to another is not surprised at any of their tantrums. Her only
anxiety is lest some form of barbarism appropriate to their condition
may have been skipped. Her chief function is like that of the chorus in
the Greek tragedy, to explain to the audience each dramatic situation
as it unfolds.
I should not like to take the responsibility of running such an
excellent theory into the ground, yet it does seem to me that it might
be carried further. Granted that childhood is innocent savagery and
that adolescence is gloriously barbaric, what is the matter with mature
life? Does it not have any remnants of primitiveness? Does not Tennyson
write of “the gray barbarian”?
The transitions from primitive savagery to civilization which took
the race centuries to accomplish are repeated by the individual, not
once but many times. After we get the knack of it, we can run over the
alphabet of human progress backwards as well as forwards.
Exit Troglodyte. Enter Philosopher discoursing on disinterested virtue.
Reënter Troglodyte. Such dramatic transformations may be expected by
merely changing the subject of the conversation.
I remember sitting, one Sunday afternoon, on a vine-covered piazza
reading to a thoughtful and irascible friend. The book was Martineau’s
“Endeavors after the Christian Life.” In the middle of the second
discourse my friend’s dog rushed into the street to attack the dog of
a passer-by. It was one of those sudden and unpredictable antipathies
to which the members of the canine race are subject. My friend, instead
of preserving a dignified neutrality, rushed into the fray in the
spirit of offensive partisanship, and instantly became involved in an
altercation with the gentleman on the sidewalk. Canes were brandished,
fierce threats were exchanged, and only by the greatest efforts were
the Homeric heroes separated. Returning to his chair, my friend handed
me the book, saying, “Now let us go on with our religion.” The religion
went on as placidly as aforetime. There was no sense of confusion. The
wrath of Achilles did not disturb the calm spirituality of Martineau.
Each held the centre of the stage for his own moment, and there was no
troublesome attempt to harmonize them. Why should there be? Martineau
was not talking about dogs.
I know no greater luxury than that of thinking well of my fellow-men.
It is a luxury which a person in narrow circumstances, who is compelled
to live within the limits of strict veracity, sometimes feels to
be beyond his means. Yet I think it no harm to indulge in a little
extravagance in this direction. The best device for seeing all sorts
and conditions of men to advantage is to arrange them in their proper
chronological order.
For years it was the custom to speak disparagingly of the “poor whites”
of our Southern mountains. Shut off from the main currents of modern
life, they seemed unpardonably unprogressive. They were treated as
mere degenerates. At last, however, a keener and kindlier observer
hit upon a happy phrase. These isolated mountaineers, he said, have
retained the characteristic habits of a former generation. They are
our “contemporary ancestors.” Instantly everything was put in a more
favorable light; for we all are disposed to see the good points in
our ancestors. After all, the whole offense with which these mountain
people are charged is that they are behind the times. In our bona-fide
contemporaries this is a grave fault, but in our ancestors it is
pardonable. We do not expect them to live up to our standards, and so
we give them credit for living up to their own.
In this case we agree to consider fifty miles of mountain roads,
if they be sufficiently bad, as the equivalent of rather more than
a hundred years of time. Behind the barrier the twentieth century
does not yet exist. Many things may still be winked at for which the
later generation may be sternly called to repentance. Then, too, the
end of the eighteenth century has some good points of its own. These
contemporary ancestors of ours are of good old English stock, and we
begin to look upon them with a good deal of family pride.
But when we once accept poor roads as the equivalent of the passage of
time, putting people at the other end into another generation, there
is no knowing what we may come to in our charitable interpretations.
For there are other equally effective non-conductors of thought.
By the simple device of not knowing how to read, a man cuts off
some thousands of culture years and saves himself from no end of
intellectual distractions. He becomes the contemporary of “earth’s
vigorous, primitive sons.” If to his illiteracy he adds native talent
and imagination, there is a chance for him to make for himself some
of those fine old discoveries which we lose because we got the answer
from some blabbing book before we had come to the point of asking the
question. Of course the danger is that if he has native talent and
imagination he will learn to read, and it must be confessed that for
this reason we do not get such a high order of illiterates as formerly.
I once made the acquaintance of an ancient Philosopher. His talents
were for cosmogony, and his equipment would have been deemed ample in
the days when cosmogony was the fashion. He had meditated much on the
genesis of things and had read nothing, so that his speculations were
uncontaminated by the investigations of others. He was just the man to
construct a perfectly simple and logical theory of the universe, and he
did it. His universe was not like that of which our sciences give us
imperfect glimpses, but it was very satisfactory to him. He was very
fair in dealing with facts; he explained all that could be explained
by his system. As the only criterion of a fact which he recognized was
that it agreed with his system, there was none left over to trouble
him. His manner of thought was so foreign to that of our time that his
intellectual ability was not widely appreciated; yet had his birth not
been so long delayed, he might have been the founder of a school and
have had books written about him. For so far as I could learn, his
views of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, were very
much like those of the early Greek physicists. Had I taken him as a
fellow American, I should have dismissed him as not up to date; but
considering him in the light of an ancient sage, I found much in him to
admire.
Once upon the coast of Maine I came upon a huge wooden cylinder.
Within it was a smaller one, and in the centre, seated upon a swinging
platform, was the owner of the curious contrivance. He was a mild-eyed,
pleasant-spoken man, whom it was a pleasure to meet. He explained that
this was “The Amphibious Vehicle,” and that it would move equally well
on land or sea.
“You know,” said he, “what the prophet Ezekiel said about the ‘wheel in
the middle of a wheel’?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well, this is it.”
There was something convincing in this matter-of-fact statement. The
“wheel within a wheel” had been to me little more than a figure of
speech, but here it was made out of good pine lumber, with a plank
in the middle for the living creature to sit on. It was as if I had
fallen through a trap door into another age. Here was a literal-minded
contemporary of Ezekiel, who, having heard of the wheel within a wheel,
had proceeded at once to make one. I ascended into the precarious seat,
and we conversed upon the spiritual and temporal possibilities of the
vehicle. I found that on the scriptural argument he was clearly ahead
of me, being able to quote chapter and verse with precision, while my
references were rather vague. In the field of mechanics he was also my
superior. I could not have made the vehicle, having not yet emerged
beyond the stone age. As we talked I forgot that we were at the mouth
of the Penobscot. We were on the “river of Chebar,” and there was no
knowing what might happen.
* * * * *
The belated philosophers and inventors, who think the thoughts of the
ancient worthies after them, live peaceful lives. What matters it that
they are separated by a millennium or two from the society in which
they were fitted to shine? They are self-sufficing, and there are few
who care to contradict them. It is not so with one who is morally
belated. There is something pathetic in the condition of one who
cherishes the ambition of being a good man, but who has not informed
himself of the present “state of the art.”
Now and then an ethical revolution takes place. New ideals are
proclaimed, and in their light all things are judged. The public
conscience becomes sensitive in regard to courses of conduct which
heretofore had been unchallenged. Every such advance involves a waste
in established reputations. There are always excellent men who are not
aware of what has been going on. They keep on conforming scrupulously
to the old standards, being good in the familiar ways that were
commended in their youth. After a time they find themselves in an alien
world, and in that world they are no longer counted among the best
people. The tides of moral enthusiasm are all against them. The good
man feels his solid ground of goodness slipping away from under him.
Time has played false with his moral conventionalities. He is like a
polar bear on a fast-diminishing iceberg, growling at the Gulf Stream.
When a great evil has been recognized by the world, there is a revision
of all our judgments. A new principle of classification is introduced,
by which we differentiate the goats from the sheep. It is hard after
that to revive the old admirations. The temperance agitation of the
last century has not abolished drunkenness, but it has made the
conception of a pious, respectable drunkard seem grotesque. It has also
reduced the business of liquor-selling to a decidedly lower place in
the esteem of the community. When we read to-day of the horrors of the
slave trade, we reconstruct in our imagination the character of the
slave trader,--and a brutal wretch he is. But in his day the Guinea
captain held his own with the best. He was a good husband and father,
a kind neighbor, a generous benefactor. President Ezra Stiles of Yale
College, in his “Literary Diary,” describes such a beautiful character.
It was when Dr. Stiles was yet a parish minister in Newport that one of
his parishioners died, of whom he wrote: “God had blessed him with a
good Estate and he and his Family have been eminent for Hospitality to
all and Charity to the poor and afflicted. At his death he recommended
Religion to his Children and told them that the world was nothing.
The only external blemish on his Character was that he was a little
addicted to the marvelous in stories of what he had seen in his Voyages
and Travels. But in his Dealings he was punctual, upright, and honest,
and (except as to the Flie in the Oynment, the disposition to tell
marvelous Stories of Dangers, Travels, &c.), in all other Things he
was of a sober and good moral character, respected and beloved of all,
so as to be almost without enemies. He was forward in all the concerns
of the Church and Congregation, consulting its Benefit and peaceably
falling in with the general sense without exciting quarrels, parties,
&c., and even when he differed from his Brethren he so differed from
them that they loved him amidst the differences. He was a peaceable man
and promoted Peace.”
It was in 1773 that this good man died in the odor of sanctity. It is
quite incidentally that we learn that “he was for many years a Guinea
captain, and had no doubt of the slave trade.” His pastor suggests that
he might have chosen another business than that of “buying and selling
the human species.” Still, in 1773, this did not constitute an offense
serious enough to be termed a fly in the ointment. In 1785, Dr. Stiles
speaks of the slave trade as “a most iniquitous trade in the souls
of men.” Much may happen in a dozen years in changing one’s ideas of
moral values. In another generation the civilized world was agreed that
the slave trade was piracy. After that there were no fine Christian
characters among the slave traders.
There is evidence that at the present time there is an awakening of
the social conscience that threatens as great a revolution as that
which came with the abolition of the slave trade. Business methods
which have been looked upon as consistent with high moral character are
being condemned as “the sum of all villainies.” The condemnation is
not yet universal, and there are still those who are not conscious that
anything has happened. The Christian monopolist, ruthlessly crushing
out his competitors and using every trick known to the trade, has no
more doubts as to the rightfulness of his proceedings than had the good
Newport captain in regard to the slave trade.
It is a good time to have his obituary written. His contemporaries
appreciate his excellent private virtues, and have been long accustomed
to look leniently on his public wrong-doing. The new generation, having
agreed to call his methods robbery, may find the obituary eulogies
amusing.
AN HOUR WITH OUR PREJUDICES
We may compare the human mind to a city. It has its streets, its places
of business and amusement, its citizens of every degree. When one
person is introduced to another it is as if the warder drew back the
bolts, and the gates were thrown open. If he comes well recommended
he is given the freedom of the city. In the exercise of this freedom,
however, the stranger should show due caution.
There is usually a new quarter. Here the streets are well lighted and
policed, the crowds are cosmopolitan, and the tourist who wanders about
looking at the shop windows is sure of a civil reply to his questions.
There is no danger of highway robbers, though of course one may be
taken in by confidence men. But if he be of an inquiring mind and a
lover of the picturesque, he is not satisfied with this. After all, the
new quarters are very much alike, and one tires after a while of shop
windows. The visitor longs to explore the old town, with its winding
ways, with its overhanging houses, and its mild suggestions of decay.
But in the mental city the lover of the picturesque must remember that
he carries his life in his hands. It is not safe to say to a casual
acquaintance, “Now I have a fair idea of that part of your mind which
is like that of any other decently educated person. I have seen all the
spick and span show places, and admired all the modern improvements.
Where are your ruins? I should like to poke around a while in the more
dilapidated section of your intellect.”
Ah, but that is the Forbidden City. It is inhabited, not by orderly
citizens, under the rule of Right Reason, but by a lawless crowd known
as the Prejudices. They are of all sorts and conditions. Some are of
aristocratic lineage. They come from a long line of hereditary chiefs,
who, as their henchmen have deserted them, have recreated into their
crumbling strongholds. Some are bold, roistering blades who will not
stand a question; dangerous fellows, these, to meet in the dark! The
majority, perhaps, are harmless folk, against whom the worst that can
be said is that they have a knack of living without visible means of
support.
A knowledge of human nature, as distinguished from a knowledge of moral
philosophy, is a perception of the important part played by instinctive
likes and dislikes, by perverse antipathies, by odd ends of thought, by
conclusions which have got hopelessly detached from their premises--if
they ever had any. The formal philosopher, judging others by himself,
works on the assumption that man is naturally a reasoning animal,
whereas experience teaches that the craving for the reasonable is an
acquired taste.
Of course we all have reasons for our opinions,--plenty of them!
But in the majority of cases they stand not as antecedents, but as
consequents. There is a reversal of the rational order like that
involved in Dr. Hale’s pleasant conceit of the young people who adopted
a grandmother. In spite of what intellectual persons say, I do not see
how we can get along without prejudices. A prejudice is defined as “an
opinion or decision formed without due examination of the facts or
arguments which are necessary to a just and impartial determination.”
Now, it takes a good deal of time to make a due examination of facts
and arguments, even in regard to a small matter. In the meantime our
minds would be sadly unfurnished. If we are to make a fair show in the
world, we must get our mental furniture when we set up housekeeping,
and pay for it on the installment plan.
Instead of taking a pharisaic attitude toward our neighbor’s
prejudices, it is better to cultivate a wise tolerance, knowing that
human intercourse is dependent on the art of making allowances. This is
consistent with perfect honesty. There is always something to admire if
the critic is sufficiently discriminating. When you are shown a bit of
picturesque dilapidation, it is quite possible to enjoy it. Said the
Hebrew sage, “I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard
of the man void of understanding; and, lo, it was all grown over with
thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall
thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked
upon it, and received instruction.”
His point of view was that of a moralist. Had he also been a bit of an
artist, the sight of the old wall with its tangle of flowering briers
would have had still further interest.
When one’s intellectually slothful neighbor points with pride to
portions of his untilled fields, we must not be too hard upon him. We
also have patches of our own that are more picturesque than useful.
Even if we ourselves are diligent husbandmen, making ceaseless war on
weeds and vermin, there are times of relenting. Have you never felt a
tenderness when the ploughshare of criticism turned up a prejudice of
your own? You had no heart to harm the
Wee sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie.
It could not give a good account of itself. It had been so long snugly
ensconced that it blinked helplessly in the garish light. Its
wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin’!
And naething now to big a new ane.
You would have been very angry if any one had trampled upon it.
This is the peculiarity about a prejudice. It is very appealing to
the person who holds it. A man is seldom offended by an attack on his
reasoned judgments. They are supported by evidence and can shift for
themselves. Not so with a prejudice. It belongs not to the universal
order; it is his very own. All the chivalry of his nature is enlisted
in its behalf. He is, perhaps, its only defense against the facts of an
unfriendly world.
We cannot get along without making allowances for these idiosyncrasies
of judgment. Conversation is impossible where each person insists on
going back, all the time, to first principles, and testing everything
by an absolute standard. With a person who is incapable of changing his
point of view we cannot converse; we can only listen and protest. We
are in the position of one who, conscious of the justice of his cause,
attempts to carry on a discussion over the telephone with “Central.” He
only hears an inhuman buzzing sound indicating that the line is busy.
There is nothing to do but to “hang up the ’phone.”
When a disputed question is introduced, one may determine the true
conversationalist by applying the method of Solomon. Let it be
proposed to divide the subject so that each may have his own. Your
eager disputant will be satisfied, your genial talker is aghast at the
proposition, for he realizes that it would kill the conversation.
Instead of holding his own, he awaits developments. He is in a mood
which can be satisfied with something less than a final judgment. It
is not necessary that his friend’s opinions should be just; it is
sufficient that they are characteristic. Whatever turn the talk may
take, he preserves an easy temper. He is a heresy-hunter,--not of the
grim kind that goes hunting with a gun; he carries only a camera. If
he stirs up a strange doctrine he does not care to destroy it. When he
gets a snap-shot at human nature he says,--
Those things do best please me
That befall preposterously.
An English gentleman relates a conversation he had with Prince
Bismarck. The prince was inclined to take a pessimistic view of the
English people. He thought that there was a degeneration in the race,
which he attributed to the growing habit of drinking water. “Not that
he believed that there was any particular virtue _per se_ inherent in
alcoholic drink; but he was sorry to hear that the old ‘three bottle
men’ were dying out and leaving no successors. He had a suspicion that
it meant shrinkage in those qualities of the English which had made
them what they were in the past, and for which he had always felt a
sincere admiration.”
It would have been very easy to drift into debate over this
proposition. The English gentleman, however, defended his countrymen
more diplomatically. “I replied that with regard to the water-drinking
proclivities of my countrymen there was a good deal of calumny
connected with the story. It is true that a certain section of English
society has indeed taken to water as a beverage. But to argue therefrom
that the English people have become addicted to water would be to draw
premature conclusions from insufficient data. In this way I was able to
calm Prince Bismarck’s fears in regard to what the future might bring
forth, and our conversation reverted to Royalty.”
Each nation has its own set of preconceptions. We must take them
altogether, or not at all. They are as compact and as natural a growth
as the concentric layers of an onion. Here is a sentence from Max
Müller’s “Autobiography,” thrown out quite incidentally. He has been
telling how strange it seemed, when first coming to Oxford, to find
that the students got along without dueling. Fighting with swords
seemed to him the normal method of developing manliness, though he adds
that in the German universities “pistol duels are generally preferred
by theological students, because they cannot easily get a living if the
face is scarred all over.”
This remark must be taken as one would take a slice of the
national onion. One assumption fits into another. To an Englishman
or an American there is an incongruity that approaches the
grotesque,--because our prejudices are different. It all becomes a
matter-of-fact statement when we make the proper assumptions in regard
to dueling in general and theological duels in particular. Assuming
that it is necessary for theological students to fight duels, and
that the congregations are prejudiced against ministers whose faces
have been slashed by swords, what is left for the poor theologues
but pistols? Their method may seem more dangerous than that adopted
by laymen, but Max Müller explains that the danger is chiefly to the
seconds.
Individual peculiarities must be taken into account in the same way.
Prince Bismarck, in dining with the Emperor, inquired the name of the
brand of champagne, which proved to be a cheap German article. “The
Emperor explained, ‘I drink it from motives of economy, as I have a
large family; then again I drink it from patriotic motives.’ Thereupon
I said to the Emperor, ‘With me, your Majesty, patriotism stops short
in the region of my stomach.’”
It is evident that here was a difference not to be arbitrated by
reason. If the Emperor could not understand the gastronomic limitations
to the Chancellor’s patriotism, neither could the Chancellor enter into
the Emperor’s anxieties, as he economized for the sake of his large
family.
One cannot but wonder at the temerity of a person who plunges into
conversation with a stranger without any preliminary scouting or making
sure of a line of retreat. Ordinary prudence would suggest that the
first advances should be only in the nature of a reconnoissance in
force. You may have very decided prejudices of your own, but it is not
certain that they will fraternize with those of your new acquaintance.
There is danger of falling into an ambush. There are painful occasions
when we remember the wisdom of the Son of Sirach: “Many have fallen by
the edge of the sword, but not so many as have fallen by the tongue.”
The mischief of it is that the most kindly intent will not save us. The
path of the lover of mankind is beset by difficulties for which he is
not prepared. There are so many antagonisms that are unpredictable.
When Nehemiah came to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem he remarked
grimly, “When Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the
Ammonite, heard of it, it grieved them exceedingly that there was come
a man to seek the welfare of the children of Israel;” and the trouble
was that a large number of the children of Israel themselves seem to
have resented the interference with their habitual misfortunes. The
experience of Nehemiah is that of most reformers. One would suppose
that the person who aims at the greatest good for the greatest number
would be greeted with instant applause. The difficulty is that the
greatest good is just what the greatest number will not tolerate. One
does not need to believe in human depravity to recognize the prejudice
which most persons have against anything which is proposed as good
for them. The most successful philanthropists are those who most
skillfully conceal their benevolent intent.
In Coleman’s “Life of Charles Reade” there is a paragraph which gives
us a glimpse of a prejudice that has resisted the efforts of the most
learned men to eradicate it. An incident is there recorded that took
place when Reade was a fellow in Magdalen College. “Just as I was
about to terminate my term of office (I hope with credit to myself
and the ’Varsity), an untoward incident occurred which embittered my
relations for life with two very distinguished men. Professor Goldwin
Smith and his friend John Conington, who belonged to us, had attempted
to inaugurate a debating society. A handful of unmannerly young cubs,
resenting the attempt to teach them political economy, ducked poor
Conington under the college pump.”
“Resenting the attempt to teach them political economy!”--What is the
source of that resentment? What psychologist has fathomed the abyss of
the dark prejudice which the natural man has against those who would
improve his mind? It is a feud which reaches back into hoar antiquity.
Doubtless the accumulated grievances of generations of schoolboys
have intensified the feud, but no amelioration of educational methods
has put an end to it. In the most successful teacher you may detect a
nervous strain like that which the trainer of wild beasts in the arena
undergoes. His is a perilous position, and every faculty must be on the
alert to hold the momentary ascendency. A single false motion, and the
unmannerly young cubs would be upon their victim.
Must we not confess that this irrational resentment against our
intellectual benefactors survives, in spite of all discipline, into
mature life? We may enlarge the area of our teachableness, but there
are certain subjects in regard to which we do not care to be set right.
The polite conventionality according to which a person is supposed to
know his own business is an evidence of this sensitiveness. Of course
the assumption is not justified by facts. A man’s own business is just
the thing he is conscious of not knowing, and he would give anything in
a quiet way to find out. Yet when a candid friend ventures to instruct
him, the old irrational resentment flashes out. What we call tact is
the ability to find before it is too late what it is that our friends
do not desire to learn from us. It is the art of withholding, on
proper occasions, information which we are quite sure would be good for
them.
The prejudice against our intellectual superiors, which leads us to
take their well-meant endeavors in our behalf as of the nature of
personal insults, is matched by the equally irrational repulsion which
many superior people have for their inferiors. Nothing can be more
illogical than the attitude of these gifted ones who use their gifts
as bludgeons with which to belabor the rest of us. When we read the
writings of men who have a stimulating sense of their own genius,
we are struck by their nervous irritability whenever they mention
“mediocrity.” The greater number of the quarrels of the authors, which
the elder Disraeli chronicled, arose from the fact that the authors
had the habit of accusing one another of this vice. One would suppose
mediocrity to be the sum of all villainies, and that the mediocre man
was continually plotting in the night watches against the innocent
man of genius; and yet what has the mediocre man done to deserve this
detestation? Poor fellow, he has no malice in him! His mediocrity is
only an afterthought. He has done his level best; his misfortune is
that several million of his fellowmen have done as well.
The superior man, especially if his eminence be accidental, is likely
to get a false notion of those who stand on the level below him. The
biographer of an English dignitary says that the subject of his memoir
was not really haughty, but “he was apt to be prejudiced against any
one who seemed to be afraid of him.” This is a not uncommon kind of
prejudice; and in nine cases out of ten it is unfounded. The great man
should remember that most of those whose manners seem unduly respectful
mean nothing personal.
As great Pompey passes through the streets of Rome, he may be pardoned
for thinking meanly of the people. They appear to be a subservient lot,
with no proper interests of their own, their happiness dependent on his
passing smile,--and he knows how little that is worth. He sees them at
a disadvantage. Let him leave his triumphal chariot, and, in the guise
of Third Citizen, fall into friendly chat with First Citizen and Second
Citizen, and his prejudices will be corrected. He will find that these
worthy men have a much more independent and self-respecting point of
view than he had thought possible. They are out for a holiday; they
are critics of a spectacle, easily pleased, they will admit; but if no
one except Pompey is to be seen to-day, why not make the most of him?
Pompey or Cæsar, it matters not; “the play’s the thing.”
* * * * *
The origin of some of our prejudices must be sought in the childhood
of the race. There are certain opinions which have come down from the
cave-dwellers without revision. They probably at one time had reasons
to justify them, though we have no idea what they were. There are
others, which seem equally ancient, which originated in the forgotten
experiences of our own childhood. The prehistoric age of myth and fable
does not lie far behind any one of us. It is as if Gulliver had been
educated in Lilliput, and, while he had grown in stature, had never
quite emancipated himself from the Lilliputian point of view. The great
hulking fellow is always awkwardly trying to look up at things which he
has actually outgrown. He tries to make himself believe that his early
world was as big as it seemed. Sometimes he succeeds in his endeavors,
and the result is a curious inversion of values.
Mr. Morley, in speaking of Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy, says: “The
Sultan’s ability to speak French was one of the odd reasons why Lord
Palmerston was sanguine of Turkish civilization.” This association of
ideas in the mind of the Prime Minister does seem odd till we remember
that before Lord Palmerston was in the cabinet he was in the nursery.
The fugitive impressions of early childhood reappear in many curious
shapes. Who would be so hard-hearted as to exorcise these guiltless
ghosts?
Sometimes, in reopening an old book over which long ago we had dreamed,
we come upon the innocent source of some of our long-cherished
opinions. Such discovery I made in the old Family Bible when opening at
the pages inserted by the publisher between the Old Testament and the
Apocrypha. On many a Sunday afternoon my stated hour of Bible reading
was diversified by excursions into these uncanonical pages. There was
a sense of stolen pleasure in the heap of miscellaneous secularities.
It was like finding under the church roof a garret in which one might
rummage at will. Here were tables of weights and measures, explanations
about shekels, suggestions in regard to the probable length of a
cubit, curious calculations as to the number of times the word “and”
occurred in the Bible. Here, also, was a mysterious “Table of Offices
and Conditions of Men.”
I am sure that my scheme of admirations, my conception of the
different varieties of human grandeur, has been colored by that “Table
of Offices and Conditions of Men.” It was my “Social Register” and
Burke’s “Peerage” and “Who’s Who?” all in one. It was a formidable
list, beginning with the patriarchs, and ending with the deacons. The
dignity of the deacon I already knew, for my uncle was one, but his
function was vastly exalted when I thought of him in connection with
the mysterious personages who went before. There was the “Tirshatha, a
governor appointed by the kings of Assyria,”--evidently a very great
man. Then there were the “Nethinims, whose duty it was to draw water
and to cleave wood.” When I was called upon to perform similar services
I ventured to think that I myself, had I lived in better days, might
have been recognized as a sort of Nethinim.
Here, also, I learned the exact age of the world, not announced
arbitrarily, but with the several items all set down, so that I might
have verified them for myself, had I been mathematically gifted. “The
whole sum and number of years from the beginning of the world unto
the present year of our Lord 1815 is 5789 years, six months, and the
said odd ten days.” I have no prejudice in favor of retaining that
chronology as far as the thousands are concerned. Five thousand years
is one way of saying it was a very long time. If the geologists prefer
to convey the same idea by calling it millions, I am content; but I
should hate to give up the “said odd ten days.”
From the same Table of Offices and Conditions I imbibed my earliest
philosophical prejudices; for there I learned the difference between
the Stoics and the Epicureans.
The Stoics were described succinctly as “those who denied the liberty
of the will.” Just what this might mean was not clear, but it had an
ugly sound. The Stoics were evidently contentious persons. On the other
hand, all that was revealed concerning the Epicureans was that they
“placed all happiness in pleasure.” This seemed an eminently sensible
idea. I could not but be favorably disposed toward people who managed
to get happiness out of their pleasures.
To the excessive brevity of these definitions I doubtless owe an
erroneous impression concerning that ancient, and now almost extinct
people, the Samaritans. The name has had to me a suggestion of a
sinister kind of scholarship, as if the Samaritans had been connected
with some of the black arts. Yet I know nothing in their history to
justify this impression. The source of the error was revealed when I
turned again to the “Table of Offices and Conditions of Men” and read
once more, “Samaritans, mongrel professors, half heathen and half Jew.”
How was I to know that the reference was to professors of religion, and
not to professors of the arts and sciences?
As there are prejudices which begin in verbal misunderstandings, so
there are those which are nourished by the accidental collocation of
words. A noun is known by the adjectives it keeps. When we hear of dull
conservatism, rabid radicalism, selfish culture, timid piety, smug
respectability, we receive unfavorable impressions. We do not always
stop to consider that all that is objectionable really inheres in the
qualifying words. In a well-regulated mind, after every such verbal
turn there should be a call to change partners. Let every noun take a
new adjective, and every verb a new adverb.
Clever Bohemians, having heard so much of “smug respectability,” take
a dislike to respectability. But some of the smuggest persons are not
respectable at all,--far from it! Serenely satisfied with their own
irresponsibility, they look patronizingly upon the struggling world
that owes them a living. I remember a visit from one of these gentry.
He called to indicate his willingness to gratify my charitable impulses
by accepting from me a small loan. If I did not believe the story of
his frequent incarcerations I might consult the chaplain of the House
of Correction. He evidently considered that he had a mission. He went
about offering his hard and impenitent heart as a stone on which the
philanthropists might whet their zeal. Smug respectability, forsooth!
From force of habit we speak of the “earnest” reformer, and we are
apt to be intolerant of his lighter moods. Wilberforce encountered
this prejudice when he enlivened one of his speeches with a little
mirth. His opponent seized the opportunity to speak scornfully of the
honorable gentleman’s “religious facetiousness.” Wilberforce replied
very justly that “a religious man might sometimes be facetious, seeing
that the irreligious did not always escape being dull.”
An instance of the growth of a verbal prejudice is that which in
certain circles resulted in the preaching against what was called
“mere morality.” What the preachers had in mind was true enough. They
objected to _mere_ morality, as one might say, “Mere life is not enough
to satisfy us, we must have something to live on.” They would have more
than a bare morality. It should be clothed with befitting spiritual
raiment. But the parson’s zeal tended to outrun his discretion, and
forgetting that the true object of his attack was the mereness and
not the morality, he gave the impression that the Moral Man was the
great enemy of the faith. At last the parishioner would turn upon his
accuser. “You need not point the finger of scorn at me. What if I have
done my duty to the best of my ability! You should not twit on facts.
If it comes to that, you are not in a position to throw stones. If I am
a moral man, you’re another.”
There are prejudices which are the result of excessive fluency of
speech. The flood of words sweeps away all the natural distinctions
of thought. All things are conceived of under two categories,--the
Good and the Bad. If one ill is admitted, it is assumed that all the
rest follow in its train. There are persons who cannot mention “the
poor” without adding, “the weak, the wretched, the oppressed, the
downtrodden, the suffering, the sick, the sinful, the erring,” and so
on to the end of the catalogue. This is very disconcerting to a young
fellow who, while in the best of health and spirits, is conscious that
he is rather poor. He would willingly admit his poverty were it not
for the fear of being smothered under the wet blanket of universal
commiseration.
When the category of the Good is adopted with the same undiscriminating
ardor the results are equally unfortunate. We are prejudiced against
certain persons whom we have never met. We have heard nothing but
good of them, and we have heard altogether too much of that. Their
characters have been painted in glaring virtues that swear at one
another. We are sure that we should not like such a combination of
unmitigated excellencies, for human nature abhors a paragon. And yet
the too highly commended person may, in reality, not be a paragon at
all, but a very decent fellow. He would quickly rise in our regard were
it not for the eulogies which hang like millstones around his neck.
It is no easy thing to praise another in such a way as to leave a
good impression on the mind of the hearer. A virtue is not for all
times. When a writer is too highly commended for being laborious and
conscientious we are not inclined to buy his book. His conscience doth
make cowards of us all. It may be proper to recommend a candidate for a
vacant pulpit as indefatigable in his pastoral labors; but were you to
add, in the goodness of your heart, that he was equally indefatigable
as a preacher, he would say, “An enemy hath done this.” For the
congregation would suspect that his freedom from fatigue in the pulpit
was likely to be gained at their expense.
The prejudices which arise from verbal association are potent in
preventing any impartial judgment of men whose names have become
household words. The man whose name has become the designation of a
party or a theory is the helpless victim of his own reputation. Who
takes the trouble to pry into the personal opinions of John Calvin? Of
course they were Calvinistic. When we hear of the Malthusian doctrine
about population, we picture its author as a cold-blooded, economical
Herod, who would gladly have ordered a massacre of the innocents.
Let no one tell us that the Reverend Richard Malthus was an amiable
clergyman, who was greatly beloved by the small parish to which he
ministered. In spite of all his church wardens might say, we would not
trust our children in the hands of a man who had suggested that there
might be too many people in the world. But in such cases we should
remember that a man’s theories do not always throw light upon his
character. When a distinguished physician has a disease named after
him, it is understood that the disease is the one he discovered, and
not the one he died of.
When the Darwinian hypothesis startled the world, many pious
imaginations conceived definite pictures of the author of it. These
pictures had but one thing in common,--their striking unlikeness
to the quiet gentleman who had made all this stir. By the way,
Darwin was the innocent victim of two totally disconnected lines of
prejudice. After he had outlived the disfavor of the theologians,
he incurred the contempt of the apostles of Culture; all because of
his modest confession that he did not enjoy poetry as much as he
once did. Unfortunately, his scientific habit of mind led him to say
that he suspected that he might be suffering from atrophy of the
imaginative faculty. Instantly every literal-minded reader and reviewer
exclaimed, “How dreadful! What a judgment on him!” Yet, when we stop
to think about it, the affliction is not so uncommon as to call for
astonishment. Many persons suffer from it who are not addicted to
science.
* * * * *
After all, these are harmless prejudices. They are content with their
own little spheres; they ask only to live and let live. There are
others, however, that are militantly imperialistic. They are ambitious
to become world powers. Such are those which grow out of differences in
politics, in religion, and in race.
Political animosities have doubtless been mitigated by freer social
intercourse, which gives more opportunities for meeting on neutral
ground. It is only during a heated campaign that we think of all of the
opposing party as rascals. There is time between elections to make the
necessary exceptions. It is customary to make allowance for a certain
amount of partisan bias, just as the college faculty allows a student a
certain number of “cuts.” It is a just recognition of human weakness.
Our British cousins go farther, and provide means for the harmless
gratification of natural prejudices. There are certain questions on
which persons are expected to express themselves with considerable
fervor, and without troubling themselves as to the reasonableness of
their contention. In a volume of published letters I was pleased to
read one from a member of the aristocracy. He had been indulging in
trivial personalities, when suddenly he broke off with “Now I must go
to work on the Wife’s Sister’s Question; I intend to make a good stout
protest against that rascally bill!” There is no such exercise for the
moral nature as a good stout protest. We Americans take our exercise
spasmodically. Instead of going about it regularly, we wait for some
extraordinary occasion. We make it a point of sportsmanship to shoot
our grievance on the wing, and we are nervously anxious lest it get out
of range before we have time to take aim.
Not so the protesting Briton. He approves of the answer of Jonah when
he was asked, “Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?” Jonah,
without any waste of words, replied, “I do well to be angry.” When
the Englishman feels that it is well for him to be angry, he finds
constitutional means provided. Parliament furnishes a number of
permanent objects for his disapproval. Whenever he feels disposed he
can make a good stout protest, feeling assured that his indignation
is well bestowed. He has such satisfaction as that which came to Mr.
Micawber in reading his protest against the villainies of Uriah Heep:
“Much afflicted but still intensely enjoying himself, Mr. Micawber
folded up the letter and handed it with a bow to my aunt, as something
she might like to keep.”
These stout-hearted people have learned not only how to take their
pleasures sadly, but, what is more to the purpose, how to take their
sadnesses pleasantly. We Americans have, here, something to learn. We
should get along better if we had a number of argument-proof questions
like that in regard to marriage with the deceased wife’s sister which
could be warranted to recur at regular intervals. They could be set
apart as a sort of public playground for the prejudices. It would at
least keep the prejudices out of mischief.
Religious prejudice has an air of singularity. The singular thing is
that there should be such a variety. If we identify religion with the
wisdom that is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable,
easy to be entreated, without partiality,” it is hard to see where
the prejudice comes in. Religious prejudice is a compound of religion
and several decidedly earthly passions. The combination produces a
peculiarly dangerous explosive. The religious element has the same part
in it that the innocent glycerine has in nitro-glycerine. This latter,
we are told, is “a compound produced by the action of a mixture of
strong nitric and sulphuric acids on glycerine at low temperatures.” It
is observable that in the making of religious prejudice the religion is
kept at a very low temperature, indeed.
We are at present in an era of good feeling. Not only is there an
interchange of kindly offices between members of different churches,
but one may detect a tendency to extend the same tolerance to the
opposing party in the same church. This is a real advance, for it
is always more difficult to do justice to those who differ from us
slightly than to those whose divergence is fundamental. To love our
friends is a work of nature, to love our enemies is a work of grace;
the troublesome thing is to get on with those who are “betwixt and
between.” In such a case we are likely to fall between nature and grace
as between two stools. Almost any one can be magnanimous in great
affairs, but to be magnanimous in trifles is like trying to use a large
screw-driver to turn a small screw.
In a recently published correspondence between dignitaries of the
Church of England I find many encouraging symptoms. The writers
exhibit a desire to do justice not only to the moral, but also to the
intellectual, gifts of those who differ from them even slightly. There
is, of course, enough of the old Adam remaining to make their judgments
on one another interesting reading. It is pleasant to see brethren
dwelling together in unity,--a pleasure seldom prolonged to the point
of satiety. Thus the Dean of Norwich writes to the Dean of Durham in
regard to Dean Stanley. Alluding to an opinion, in a previous letter,
in regard to Archbishop Tait, the writer says: “I confess I shouldn’t
have ranked him among the great men of the day. Of our contemporaries
I should have assigned that rank, without hesitation, to little Stan,
though I quite think he did more mischief in our church and to religion
than most men have it in them to do. Still I should say that little
Stan was a great man in his way.” There you may see a mind that has,
with considerable difficulty, uprooted a prejudice, though you may
still perceive the place where the prejudice used to be.
While the methods of the exact sciences have had a discouraging effect
on partisan and sectarian prejudices, they seem, for the moment, to
have given new strength to those which are the result of differences
in race. Time was when Anti-Semitism derived its power from religious
rancor. The cradle hymn which the Puritan mother sang began sweetly,--
Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber!
Holy angels guard thy bed!
But after a while the mother thinks of the wickedness of the Jews:--
Yet to read the shameful story
How the Jews abused their King,
How they served the Lord of Glory,
Makes me angry while I sing.
In these days, the Anti-Semites are not so likely to be angry while
they sing, as while they cast up their accounts.
* * * * *
The natural sciences discriminate between classes rather than between
individuals. Sociology deals with groups, and not with persons.
Anthropology acquaints us with the aboriginal and unmoralized man. It
emphasizes the solidarity of the clan and the persistence of the cult.
Experimental psychology is at present interested in the sub-conscious
and instinctive life. For its purpose it treats a man as a series of
nervous reactions. Human history is being rewritten as a branch of
Natural History. Eliminating the part played by personal will, it
exhibits an age-long warfare between nations and races.
This is all very well so long as we remember what it is that we are
studying. Races, cults, and social groups exist and have their history.
There is no harm in defining the salient characteristics of a race,
and saying that, on the whole, one race is inferior to another. The
difficulty comes when this rough average is made the dead line beyond
which an individual is not allowed to pass.
In our Comedy of Errors, which is always slipping into tragedy, there
are two Dromios on the stage,--the Race and the Individual. The Race
is an abstraction which can bear any amount of punishment without
flinching. You may say anything you please about it and not go far
wrong. It is like criticising a composite photograph. There is nothing
personal about it. Who is offended at the caricatures of Brother
Jonathan or of John Bull? We recognize certain persistent national
traits, but we also recognize the element of good-humored exaggeration.
The Jew, the Slav, the Celt, the Anglo-Saxon have existed for ages.
Each has admired himself, and been correspondingly disliked by others.
Even the Negro as a racial abstraction is not sensitive. You may, if
you will, take up the text, so much quoted a generation ago, “Cursed
be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be.... God shall enlarge
Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall
be his servant.” Dromio Africanus listens unmoved to the exegesis
of Petroleum V. Nasby and his compeers at the Crossroads: “God cust
Canaan, and sed he shood be a servant forever. Did he mean us to pay
him wages? Not eny: for ef he hed he wood hev ordered our tastes and
habits so es we shood hev hed the wherewithal to do it.”
The impassive Genius of Africa answers the Anglo-Saxon: “If it pleases
you to think that your prejudice against me came out of the Ark, so
be it. If you find it agreeable to identify yourself with Japheth who
shall providentially be enlarged, I may as well be Canaan.”
So long as the doctrinaires of the Crossroads are dealing only with
highly generalized conceptions no harm is done. But now another Dromio
appears. He is not a race; he is a person. He has never come that way
before, and he is bewildered by what he sees and hears. Immediately he
is beset by those who accuse him of crimes which some one who looks
like him has committed. He is beaten because he does not know his
place; how can he know it, stumbling as he does upon a situation for
which he is altogether unprepared? It is an awkward predicament, this
of being born into the world as a living soul. Under the most favorable
conditions it is hard for the new arrival to find himself, and adjust
himself to his environment. But this victim of mistaken identity finds
that he has been judged and condemned already. When he innocently tries
to make the most of himself a great uproar is created. What right has
he to interfere with the preconceived opinions of his betters? They
understand him, for have they not known him for many generations?
Poor man Dromio! Whether he have a black skin or a yellow, and whatever
be the racial type which his features suggest, the trouble is the same.
He is sacrificed on the altar of our stupidity. He suffers because of
our mental color-blindness, which prevents our distinguishing persons.
We see only groups, and pride ourselves on our defective vision. By
and by we may learn to be a little ashamed of our crudely ambitious
generalizations. A finer gift is the ability to know a man when we see
him. It may be that Nature is “careful of the type,” and “careless of
the single life.” If that be so, it may be the part of wisdom for us to
give up some of our anxieties about the type, knowing that Nature will
take care of that. Such relief from excessive cosmic responsibility
will give us much more time for our proper work, which is to deal
justly with each single life.
HOW TO KNOW THE FALLACIES
[Illustration]
My friend Scholasticus was in a bad way. He had been educated before
the elective system came in, and he had a pathetic veneration for the
old curriculum. It was to him the sacred ark, now, alas, carried away
into the land of the Philistines. He cherished it as a sort of creed
containing the things surely to be learned by a gentleman, and whoso
hath not learned these things, let him be anathema. In meeting the
present-day undergraduates, it was hard to say which amazed him most,
the things they knew or the things they did not know. Perhaps the new
knowledge seemed to him the more uncouth.
“The intellectual world,” he would say, “is topsy-turvy. What is to
be expected of a generation that learns to write before it learns to
read, and learns to read before it learns to spell,--or rather which
never does learn to spell. Everything begins wrong end foremost. In
my day small children were supposed to be ‘pleased with a rattle,
tickled with a straw,’ until such time as they were old enough to be
put to stiff work on the First Reader. Nowadays, the babes begin with
the esoteric doctrine of their playthings. Even the classics of infancy
are rationalized. I was about to buy a copy of ‘Mother Hubbard and her
Dog’ for a dear young friend, when I discovered that it was a revised
version. The most stirring incident was given thus,--
She went to the baker’s to buy some bread,
And when she came back the dog looked dead.
That wasn’t the way the tale was told to me. I was told that the poor
dog was dead, and I believed it. That didn’t prevent my believing
a little while after that the doggie was dancing a jig. I took it
for granted that that was the way dogs did in Mother Hubbard’s day.
Nowadays, the critics in bib and tucker insist that the story must
conform to what they have prematurely learned about the invariable laws
of nature.
“I shouldn’t mind this if they kept on reasoning. But it’s a false
start. After the wide generalizations of infancy have been forgotten,
the youth begins to specialize. He takes a small slice of a subject,
ignoring its more obvious features and its broader outlines. He has a
contempt for general ideas. What we studied, he takes for granted. He’s
very observing, but he doesn’t put two and two together. There they
stand in his mind, two separate ideas, politely ignoring one another,
because they have not been properly introduced. The result of all this
is evident enough. How many people do you come across with whom it is
a pleasure to hold an argument? Not many! They don’t know the rules
of the game. You can’t enter a drawing-room without hearing questions
discussed in a way possible only to those whose early education in the
art of reasoning had been neglected. The chances are that every one of
the fallacies we learned about in Whately could appear in good society
without anybody being able to call them by their Latin names.
“‘Doesn’t this follow from that?’ the facile talker asks, as if that
were all that is necessary to constitute a valid argument. Of course it
follows; his assertions follow one another like a flock of sheep. But
what short work our old Professor would have made with these plausible
sequences!
“What a keen scent the old man had for fallacies! Even when the
conclusion was obviously sound, he insisted that we should come by it
honestly. He would never admit that in such matters the end justifies
the means. I remember his merciless exposure of the means by which
some unscrupulous metaphysicians accumulated their intellectual
property. His feeling about the ‘Undistributed Middle’ was much the
same as that of Henry George about the ‘Unearned Increment.’ How he
used to get after the moonshiners who were distilling arguments by the
illicit process of the major term! In these days the illicit process
goes on openly. The growth of the real sciences does not in the least
discourage the pseudo-sciences. It rather seems to stimulate them.
“For many persons, a newly discovered fact is simply a spring-board
from which they dive into a bottomless sea of speculation. They pride
themselves on their ability to jump at conclusions, forgetting that
jumping is an exercise in which the lower orders excel their betters.
If an elephant could jump as far, in proportion to his weight, as a
flea, there would be no holding him on the planet. Every new discovery
is followed by a dozen extravagances, engineered by the Get-wise-quick
people. There is always some Young Napoleon of Philosophy who
undertakes to corner the truth-market. It’s like what happened at the
opening of Oklahoma Territory. Before the day set by the government
when they all were to start fair in their race for farms, a band of
adventurers called ‘Sooners’ smuggled themselves across the line.
When the _bona fide_ settler arrived on his quarter-section, he found
an impudent Sooner in possession. You can’t find any fresh field of
investigation that isn’t claimed by these Sooners. It all comes because
people are no longer educated logically.”
* * * * *
When Scholasticus was in this mood, it was difficult to do anything
with him. It was in vain to tell him that he was narrow, for, like
all narrow men, he took that as a compliment. It is the broad way, he
reminded me, that leads to intellectual destruction. Still, I attempted
to bring him to a better frame of mind.
“Scholasticus,” said I, “the old order changes. You are a survivor of
another period. You were educated according to a logical order. You
learned to spell out of a Spelling Book, and to read out of a Reader,
and to write not by following the dictates of your own conscience,
but by following the copy in a Copy Book; and you learned to speak
correctly by committing to memory the rules of grammar and afterwards
the exceptions.”
“And it was a good way, too,” interrupted Scholasticus. “It gave us a
respect for law and order, to learn the rules and to abide by them.
Now, I understand, they don’t have grammar, but ‘language work.’ The
idea is, I suppose, that if the pupils practice the exceptions they
needn’t bother about the rules. When I studied geography, we began with
a definition of the word geography, after which we were told that the
earth is a planet, and that three fourths of its surface is water, a
fact which I have never forgotten. Nowadays they hold that geography,
like charity, should begin at home, so the first thing is to make a
geodetic survey of the back yard. By the time they work up to the fact
that the earth is a planet, the pupils have learned so many other
things that it makes very little impression on their minds.”
“Scholasticus,” said I, “I was saying the old order changes lest one
good custom should corrupt the educational world. They were great
people for rules in your day. It was an inheritance from the past.
You remember the anecdote of Ezekiel Cheever, head master of the
Boston Latin School, who taught Cotton Mather Latin. A pupil writes,
‘My master found fault with the syntax of one word, which was not so
used heedlessly, but designedly, and therefore I told him there was a
plain grammar rule for it. He angrily replied that there was no such
rule. I took the grammar and showed the rule to him. Then he said,
“Thou art a brave boy. I had forgot the rule.”’ That takes us back to
a time when there was a superstitious reverence for rules. We don’t
reason so rigidly from rules now, we develop the mind according to
a chronological rather than a logical order. We let the ideas come
according to the order of nature.”
At this, the wrath of Scholasticus bubbled over. “‘The order of
nature’! The nature of what? A cabbage head grows according to an order
natural to cabbages. But a rational intelligence is developed according
to the laws of reason. The first thing is to formulate the laws, and
then to obey them. Logic has to do with the laws of rational thought,
just as grammar has to do with the laws of correct speech. Nowadays,
the teacher seems to be afraid of laying down the law. I visited a
model school the other day. It wasn’t a school at all, according to
the definition in the old-fashioned book I used to read: ‘A school
is a place where children go to study books. The good children when
they have learned their lessons go out to play, the idle remain and
are punished.’ According to the modern method, it is the teacher who
must remain to be punished for the idleness of her pupils. It’s her
business to make the lessons interesting. If their attention wanders,
she is held responsible. The teacher must stay after hours and plan new
strategic moves. She must ‘by indirections find directions out,’--while
the pupil is resisting one form of instruction, she suddenly teaches
him something else. In this way the pupil’s wits are kept on the run.
No matter how they scatter, there is the teacher before him.”
“Why is not that a good way?” I said. “It certainly brings results. The
pupil gets on rapidly. He learns a lesson before he knows it.”
“He never does know it,” growled Scholasticus. “And what’s worse, he
doesn’t know that he doesn’t know it. By this painless method he has
never been compelled to charge his mind with it and to reason it out.
And besides, it’s death on the teacher. Ezekiel Cheever taught that
Boston Latin School till he was over ninety years old, and never had
a touch of nervous prostration. He didn’t have to lie awake planning
how to hold the rapt attention of his pupils. If there was any chance
of the grammar rules not being learned, he let them do the worrying.
It was good for them. There was a race of sturdy thinkers in those
days. They knew how to deal with knotty problems. If they survived the
school, they could not be downed in the town meeting.”
“Scholasticus,” I said, “I don’t like the way you talk. The trouble
with you is that you took your education too hard. I fancy that I see
every lesson you ever learned sticking out of your consciousness like
the piles of stones in a New Hampshire pasture. They are monuments of
industry, but they lack a certain suavity. You are doing what most
Americans do,--whenever they find anything wrong they lay the blame
on the public schools. Just because some of the younger men at your
club argue somewhat erratically, you blame the whole modern system of
education. It’s a way you clever people have,--you are not content with
one good and sufficient reason for your statement of fact. You must
reinforce it by another of a more general character. It makes me feel
as I do when, a faucet needing a new washer, I send for a plumber,--and
behold twain! One would be enough, if he would attend strictly to
business. Every system has its failures. If that of the present day
seems to have more than its share, it is because its failures are still
in evidence, while those of your generation are mostly forgotten.
Oblivion is a deft housemaid, who tidies up the chambers of the Past,
by sweeping all the dust into the dark corners. On the other hand, you
drop into the Present amid the disorder of the spring cleaning, when
everything is out on the line. If you could recall the shining lights
in your Logic class, you might admit that some of them had the form of
reasoning without the power thereof. It was in your day, wasn’t it,
that the criticism was made on the undergraduate thesis:--
Although he wrote it all by rote,
He did not write it right.
I couldn’t help thinking of those lines when I was listening just
now to your reasoning. The real point, Scholasticus, is this, which
seems to have escaped you. You talk of the laws of the mind. When
you were in college it seemed a very simple thing to formulate these
laws. There was no Child Psychology, giving way before you knew it to
Adolescence, where everything was quite different. There was no talk
about subliminal consciousness, where you couldn’t tell which was
consciousness and which was something else. The mind in your day came
in one standard size.”
“Yes,” said Scholasticus, “when we were in the Academy, we had Watts on
the Mind. Watts treated his subject in a straightforward way; he had
nothing about nervous reactions; he gave us plain Mind. When we got
into college we had Locke on the Understanding. When it was time to
take account of conscience, we had Paley’s ‘Moral Science.’ This, with
the ‘Evidences,’ made a pretty good preparation for life.”
“So it did,” I said, “and you have done credit to your training. But
since that time Psychologists have made a number of discoveries which
render it necessary to revise the old methods.”
Seeing that he, for the first time, was giving me his attention, I
thought that it might be possible to win him away from that futile and
acrid criticism of the present course of events, which is the besetting
sin of men of his age, to the more fruitful criticism by creation.
“Scholasticus,” I said, “here is your opportunity. You complain that
Logic is going out. The trouble is that it has been taught in an
antiquated way. The logicians followed the analogy of mathematics. They
invented all sorts of formal figures and diagrams, and were painfully
abstract. When you were learning to reason, you had to commit to memory
a formula like this: ‘Every y is x; every z is y; therefore every z is
x. _E.g._, let the major term (which is represented by x) be “One who
possesses all virtue,” the minor term (z) “Every man who possesses one
virtue,” and the middle term (y) “Every man who possesses prudence,”
and you have the celebrated argument of Aristotle that “the virtues are
inseparable.”’
“Now you can’t make the youth of this generation submit to that kind of
argumentation. They are willing to admit the virtues are inseparable,
if you say so, but they are not going to take time to figure it out.
You can’t arouse their interest by demonstrating that ‘If A is B, C
is D, C is not D, therefore A is not B.’ They say, ‘What of it?’ They
refuse to concern themselves about the fate of letters of the alphabet.
Such methods prejudice them against Logic. They prefer not to reason
at all, rather than do it in such an old-fashioned way. Besides, they
have peeped into the Psychology for Teachers, and they know their
rights. Such teaching is not good pedagogics. The youthful mind must be
shielded from abstractions; if it is not, there’s no knowing what might
happen. It will not do to go at your subject in such a brutal way.
This is the age of the concrete and the vital. Things are observed in
the state of nature. The birds must be in the bush, and the fishes in
the water, and the flowers must be caught in the very act of growing.
That’s what makes them interesting. If the youthful mind is to be
induced to love Nature, Nature must do her prettiest for the youthful
mind. Otherwise it will be found that the mental vacuum abhors Nature.
“If there is to be a revival of Logic, it must be attached to something
in which people are already interested. People are interested in
biological processes. They like to see things grow, and to help in the
process as far as they can without disturbing Nature. Why don’t you,
Scholasticus, try your hand at a text-book which shall insinuate a
sufficient knowledge of the principles of sound reasoning, under the
guise of Botany or Hygiene or Physical Culture, or some of the branches
that are more popular? I believe that you could make a syllogism as
interesting as anything else. All you have to do is to make people
think that it is something else.”
At the time Scholasticus only sniffed scornfully at my suggestion;
but not many days had passed before I began to notice a change in his
demeanor. Instead of his usual self-sufficiency, there came into his
eyes a wistful plea for appreciation. He had the chastened air of one
who no longer sits in the chair of the critic, but is awaiting the
moment when he shall endure criticism.
From such signs as these I inferred that Scholasticus was writing
a book. There is nothing that so takes the starch out of a man’s
intellect and reduces him to a state of abject dependence on the
judgment of his fellow beings as writing a book. For the first
question about a book is not, “Is it good?” but, “Will anybody read
it?” When this question is asked, the most commonplace individual
assumes a new importance. He represents the Public. The Author wonders
as to what manner of man he is. Will he like the Book?
I was not therefore surprised when one day Scholasticus, in a
shamefaced way, handed me the manuscript of a work entitled, “How to
Know the Fallacies; or Nature-Study in Logic.”
In these pages Scholasticus shows a sincere desire to adapt himself
to a new order of things. He no longer stands proudly on the
quarter-deck of the good ship Logic, with a sense of fathomless depths
of rationality under the keel. Logic is a poor old stranded wreck.
His work is like that of the Swiss Family Robinson: to carry off the
necessities of life and the more portable luxuries, and to use them in
setting up housekeeping on the new island of Nature-Study.
I cannot say that he has been entirely successful in making the art
of reasoning a pleasant out-of-door recreation. He has not altogether
overcome the stiffness which is the result of his early education. In
treating thought as if it were a vegetable, he does not always conceal
the fact that it is _not_ a vegetable. There are, therefore, occasional
jolts as he suddenly changes from one aspect of his subject to another.
I was, however, much pleased to see that, instead of ambitiously
attempting to treat of the processes of valid reasoning, he has been
content to begin with those forms of argumentation which are more
familiar.
His preface does what every good preface should do: it presents the
Author not at his worst nor at his best, but in a salvable condition,
so that the reader will say, “He is not such a bad fellow, after all,
and doubtless when he gets warmed up to his work he will do better.” It
may be as well to quote the Preface in full.
“Careless Reader, in the intervals between those wholesome recreations
which make up the more important portion of life, you may have
sometimes come upon a thought. It may have been only a tiny thoughtlet.
Slight as it was in itself, it was worthy of your attention, for it
was a living thing. Pushing its way out of the fertile soil of your
subconscious being, it had come timidly into the light of day. If it
seemed to you unusual, it was only because you have not cultivated the
habit of noticing such things. They are really very common.
“If you can spare the time, let us sit down together and pluck up the
thoughtlet by the roots and examine its structure. You may find some
pleasure, and perhaps a little profit, in these native growths of your
mind.
“When you take up a thought and pull it to pieces, you will see that
it is not so simple as it seems. It is in reality made up of several
thoughts joined together. When you try to separate them, you find
it difficult. The connective tissue which binds them together is
called inference. When several thoughts growing out of the same soil
are connected by inference, they form what is called an argument.
Arguments, as they are found in the state of Nature, are of two kinds;
those that hang together, and those that only seem to hang together;
these latter are called Fallacies.
“In former times they were treated as mere weeds and were mercilessly
uprooted. In these days we have learned to look upon them with a
kindlier eye. They have their uses, and serve to beautify many a spot
that otherwise would remain barren. They are the wild flowers of the
intellectual world. I do not intend to intrude my own taste or to pass
judgment on the different varieties; but only to show my readers how
to know the fallacies when they see them. It may be said that mere
nomenclature is of little value. So it is in itself; yet there is a
pleasure in knowing the names of the common things we meet every day.
The search for fallacies need never take one far afield. The collector
may find almost all the known varieties growing within his own
enclosure.
“Let us then go out in the sunshine into the pleasant field of thought.
There we see the arguments--valid and otherwise--as they are growing.
You will notice that every argument has three essential parts. First
is the root, called by the old logicians in their crabbed language the
Major Premise. Growing quite naturally out of this is the stem, called
the Minor Premise; and crowning that is the flower, with its seed
vessels which contain the potentialities of future arguments,--this is
called the Conclusion.
“Let the reader observe this argument: ‘Every horse is an animal;’
that is the root thought. ‘Sheep are not horses;’ that is the stem
shooting into the air. ‘Therefore, sheep are not animals;’ that is the
conclusion, the full corn in the ear.
“There is a pleasing impression of naturalness about the way in which
one thought grows out of that which immediately preceded it. There is
a sudden thrill when we come to the ‘therefore,’ the blossoming time
of the argument. We feel that we are entering into one of Nature’s
secret processes. Unless our senses are deceiving us, we are actually
reasoning.
“After a while, when curiosity and the pride of possession lead us to
look more carefully at our treasure, we are somewhat surprised. It is
not as it seemed. A little observation convinces us that, in spite of
our argumentation, sheep are animals, and always have been. Thus, quite
by accident, and through the unaided exercise of our own faculties, we
have come upon one of the most ancient forms of reasoning, one that has
engaged the attention of wise men since Aristotle,--a fallacy.”
In the opening chapters, Scholasticus gives a description of the more
common fallacies, with an account of their habits of growth and of the
soils in which they most flourish. “_Petitio Principii_, or begging the
question. This is a very pretty little fallacy of vine-like habit. It
is found growing beside old walls, and wherever it is not likely to be
disturbed. It is easily propagated from slips, each slip being capable
of indefinite multiplication, the terminal buds sending down new roots,
and the process of growth going on continuously. So tenacious is it
that it is practically impossible to eradicate the _petitio_, when once
it has fairly established itself. It recommends itself on the ground of
economy. In most arguments the attempt is made to prove one thing by
means of another thing. This, of course, involves a considerable waste
of good material. In begging the question, by means of one proposition
we are enabled to prove a proposition that is identical with it. In
this way an idea may be made to go a long way.
“The most familiar variety of this fallacy is that known as the
Argument in a Circle. To those who are fond of arguments, but who
can afford very little mind space for their cultivation, this is an
almost ideal fallacy. It requires only the slightest soil, deriving its
nutriment almost wholly from the air, and reproducing itself without
the slightest variation in type.
“Its hardiness and exuberant efflorescence make it desirable for many
purposes. It is useful as a screen to hide the more unsightly parts of
one’s intellectual grounds. Often, too, there may be an argumentative
structure that has fallen into decay. Its real reason for existence is
no longer obvious, yet it may have associations which make us reluctant
to tear it down. In such a case, nothing is easier than to plant a slip
of the circular argument. In a short time the old ruin becomes a bower,
covered with an exuberant efflorescence of rationality. This argument
is to be recommended for a Woman’s Hardy Garden of Fallacies.
“It is one which gives great pleasure to a home-loving person who finds
satisfaction in that which is his own. Often have I seen a householder
sitting under its sweet shade, well content. He was conscious of
having an argument which answered to all his needs, and which
protected him alike from the contradiction of sinners and from the
intrusive questioning of the more critical sort of saints. He had such
satisfaction as came to Jonah, when the booth he had constructed, with
such slight skill as belonged to an itinerant preacher, was covered by
the luxuriant gourd vine. Things were not going as he had expected in
Nineveh, and current events were discrediting his prophecies, but Jonah
‘rejoiced with great joy over the gourd.’
“I may be pardoned, in treating the circular argument, for deviating,
for a moment, from the field of botany into the neighboring field of
zoölogy. For after all, the same principles hold good there also,
and as we are forming the habit of looking at thought as a kind of
plant, we may also consider it as a kind of animal,--let us say, if
you please, a goldfish. You have often paused to watch the wonders of
marine life as epitomized in a glass globe upon your centre-table.
Those who go down to the sea in ships have doubtless seen more of the
surface of waters, but they have not the same facilities for looking
into its interior life that you have in your aquarium. A school of
goldfishes represent for you the finny monsters of the deep. You see
the whole world they move in. The encircling glass is the firmament
in the midst of the waters. The goldfishes go round and round, and
have a very good time, and have many adventures, but they never get
out of their crystal firmament. You may leave them for half a day, but
when you come back you know just where to find them. An aquarium is a
much safer place for goldfishes to swim in than the ocean; to be sure,
they do not get on far, but on the other hand they do not get lost,
and there are no whales or even herrings, to make them afraid. There
is the same advantage in doing our reasoning in a circle. We can keep
up an argument much longer when we are operating in friendly waters
and are always near our base of supplies. The trouble with thinking
straight is, that it is likely to take us too far from home. The first
we know we are facing a new issue. From this peril we are saved by the
habit of going round and round. He who argues and runs away from the
real difficulty lives to argue another day, and the best of it is the
argument will be just the same.
“_Argumentum ad Hominem._ This is a large family, containing many
interesting varieties. The _ad hominem_ is of parasitic growth, a sort
of logical mistletoe. It grows not out of the nature of things, but
of the nature of the particular mind to which it is addressed. In the
cultivation of this fallacy it is only necessary to remember that each
mind has its weak point. Find out what this weak point is, and drop
into it the seed of the appropriate fallacy, and the result will exceed
your fondest anticipation.
“Again with the reader’s kind permission, I will stray from the field
of botany; this time into that of personal experience. At the risk of
falling into obsolete and discredited methods of instruction, I will
ask you for the moment to look in and not out.
“Dear Reader, often, when reasoning with yourself, especially about
your own conduct, you have found comfort in a syllogism like this:--
I like to do right.
I do what I like.
Therefore, I do what is right.
The conclusion is so satisfactory that you have no heart to look too
narrowly at the process by which it is attained. When you do what you
like, it is pleasant to think that righteousness is a by-product of
your activity. Moreover, there is a native generosity about you which
makes you willing to share with others the more lasting benefits which
may ensue. You are ready to believe that what is profitable to you must
also be profitable to them in the long run,--if not in a material,
then in a spiritual way. All the advantage that comes to you is merely
temporary and personal. When you have reaped this scanty harvest, you
do not begrudge to humanity in general its plentiful gleanings. In
your altruistic mood you do not consider too carefully the particular
blessing which your action has bestowed on the world; you are content
with the thought that it is a good diffused.
“When out of what is in the beginning only a personal gratification
there grows a cosmic law, we have the _Argumentum ad Hominem_.
There are few greater pleasures in life than that of having all our
preferences justified by our reason. There are some persons who are
so susceptible to arguments of this kind that they never suffer from
the sensation of having done something wrong,--a sensation which I can
assure you is quite disagreeable. They might suspect they had done
wrong, were it not that as soon as they begin to reason about it they
perceive that all that happened was highly to their credit. The more
they think about it, the more pleased they are with themselves. They
perceive that their action was much more disinterested than, at the
time, they intended. They are like a person who tumbles into the Dead
Sea. He can’t go under even if he tries. It is, of course, a matter of
specific gravity. When a conscience is of less specific gravity than
the moral element into which it is cast, it cannot remain submerged.
The fortunate owner of such a conscience watches it with satisfaction
when it serenely bobs to the surface; he advertises its superlative
excellence,--‘Perfectly Pure! It floats.’
“The great use of the _ad hominem_ argument is like that of certain
leguminous plants which enrich the soil by giving to it elements in
which it had been previously lacking. After a crop of _ad hominem_
arguments has grown and been turned under, we may expect a rich harvest
of more commercially valuable fallacies in the next season. To thus
enrich the soil is an evidence of the skill of the culturist.
“Suppose, for example, you were to attempt to implant this proposition
in the unprepared mind of an acquaintance, ‘All geese are swans.’ The
proposition is not well received. All your friend’s ornithological
prejudices are against it. There is no foodstuff to support your theory.
“But suppose you prepare the soil by a crop of the _ad hominem_
argument. You say to your friend, after looking admiringly at his
possessions, ‘It seems to me that all _your_ geese are swans.’ He
answers cordially, ‘That’s just what I was thinking myself.’ Now you
have nicely prepared the ground for further operations.
“While controversial theologians have always had a fondness for
arguments in a circle, the _ad hominem_ arguments have been largely
cultivated by politicians. More than a generation ago Jeremy Bentham
published a work called ‘Political Fallacies.’ He described those that
are indigenous to the British Isles. Almost all on his list were of
the _ad hominem_ variety. He described particularly those which could
be grown to advantage in the Houses of Parliament. Since Bentham’s
day, much has been done in America in the way of propagating new
varieties. Many of these, though widely advertised, have not yet been
scientifically described. I have thought that if my present book is
well received, I might publish another covering this ground. It will
probably be entitled, ‘Reasoning for Profit; or Success with Small
Fallacies.’
“The great essential in arguments of this kind is to have a thorough
knowledge of the soil. Given the right soil, and the most feeble
argument will flourish. Take, for example, the arguments for the
divine right of kings to rule, once much esteemed by court preachers.
Of course the first necessity was to catch your kings. The arguments
in themselves were singularly feeble, but they flourished mightily
in the hotbeds of royalty. The trouble was that they did not bear
transplanting.
“Half a century ago there were a dozen thrifty arguments for human
slavery. They are, abstractly speaking, as good now as they ever were,
but they have altogether passed out of cultivation.
“In landscape gardening groups of the _ad hominem_ arguments skillfully
arranged are always charming. Much discrimination is needed for the
adornment of any particular spot. Suppose you were called upon to
furnish fallacies for an Amalgamated Society of Esoteric Astrologers.
You might safely, in such fertile soil and tropical climate, plant the
most luxuriant exotics. Such airy growths, however, would be obviously
inappropriate for a commercial club composed of solid business men.
You would for them choose rather a sturdy perennial, for example, the
_argumentum ad Pennsylvaniam_, or tariff-bearing argument.
“It grows thus:--
The tariff is that which conduces to our prosperity.
A tax does not conduce to our prosperity.
Therefore, a tariff is not a tax.
“Persons who have confined their logical exercises to the task of
convincing impartial minds have no idea of the exhilaration which comes
when one has only to convince a person of the wisdom of a course of
action he has already taken. There is really no comparison between
the two. There is all the difference that there is between climbing
an icy hill and sliding down the same hill on a toboggan. There is no
intellectual sport equal to that of tobogganing from a lofty moral
premise to a congenial practical conclusion. We go so fast that we
hardly know how we got to the bottom, but there we are, safe and sound.
We have only to choose our company and hold on; gravitation does the
rest. It is astonishing what conclusions we can come to when we do our
reasoning in this pleasantly gregarious fashion.
“_Ignoratio Elenchi_, or the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. This is
not a natural species, but the result of artifice. It is a familiar
kind of argument. It begins well, and it ends well, but you have a
feeling that something has happened to it in the middle. You have
noticed in the orchard an apple tree that starts out to be a Pippin,
but when the time comes for it to bear fruit it has apparently changed
its mind, and has concluded to be a Rhode Island Greening. Of course
you are aware that it has not really changed its mind, for the laws
of Nature are quite invariable. The whimsicality of its conduct is to
be laid not upon Nature, but upon Art. The gardener has skillfully
grafted one stock upon another. The same thing can be done with an
argument. You have often observed the way in which a person will start
out to prove one proposition and after a little while end up with the
triumphant demonstration of something that is quite different. He shows
such an ability at ratiocination that you cannot help admiring his
reasoning powers, though it is hard to follow him. Your bewilderment
comes from the fact that you had expected the original seedling to
bring forth after its kind, and had not noticed the point where the
scion of a new proposition had been grafted on.
“Many persons are not troubled at all when the conclusions are
irrelevant. They rather like them that way. If an argument will not
prove one thing, then let it prove another. It is all in the day’s
work. To persons with this tolerant taste the variety afforded by the
use of the _ignoratio elenchi_ is very pleasing.”
A chapter is given to the Cross-fertilization of Fallacies. The author
shows how two half-truths brought together from two widely separated
fields of thought will produce a new and magnificently variegated
form of opinion. The hybrid will surpass specimens of either of the
parent stocks both in size and showiness. Thus a half-truth of popular
religion cross-fertilized by a half-truth of popular science will
produce a hybrid which astonishes both the religious and the scientific
world. If we were following the analogy of mathematics we might assume
that two half-truths would make a whole truth. But when we are dealing
with the marvelous reproductive powers of nature we find that they
make much more than that.
Scholasticus gives a page or two to the Dwarfing of Arguments. “The
complaint is sometimes heard that an argument which is otherwise
satisfactory proves too much. This may seem a good fault to those whose
chief difficulty is in making their arguments prove anything at all.
But I assure you that it is really very troublesome to find that you
have proved more than you intended. You may have no facilities for
dealing with the surplus conclusions, and you may find all your plans
disarranged. For this reason many persons, instead of cultivating
arguments of the standard sizes which take a good deal of room, prefer
the dwarf varieties. These are very convenient where one does not wish
one principle to crowd out another that may be opposed to it. Persons
inclined to moderation prefer to cultivate a number of good ideas
without crowding. The dwarf varieties are pleasing to the cultivated
taste, as they are generally exceedingly symmetrical, while full-grown
ideas, especially in exposed places, are apt to impress one as being
scraggly.
“Dean Swift, who had no taste for miniature excellencies, spoke
scornfully of those who plant oaks in flower-pots. I have, however,
frequently seen very pleasing oaks grown in this way, and they were not
in very big flower-pots, either.
“In moral reasoning, it is especially difficult to keep our conclusions
moderate enough for our convenience. An ordinary argument always tends
to prove too much. This is disconcerting to those who are endeavoring
to live up to their favorite text, ‘Be not overmuch righteous.’ The
danger of overmuchness is obviated by cultivating the fashionable dwarf
varieties of righteousness.
“Various methods of dwarfing are practiced with success. Training
will do much; you have seen trees dwarfed by tying them to a trellis
or against a wall or to stakes, and preventing their growth beyond
the prescribed limits. Incessant pruning is necessary, and each new
growth must be vigorously headed back. By using the same means we may
cultivate a number of fine ideas, and at the same time keep them fairly
small.”
The least satisfactory chapter is that on Pests. “It is easy enough,”
says Scholasticus, “to describe a pest, but it is another matter to get
rid of it. The most painstaking fallacy culturist must expect to awake
some morning and behold his choicest arguments laid low by some new
kind of critic. There seems to be no limit to the pestiferous activity
of these creatures. They are of two kinds: those that bite, cutting
off the roots of the argument, and those that suck out the juices.
These latter destroy the vital tissue of inference on which everything
depends. I never met any one who cultivated arguments on a large scale
who did not have his tale of woe.
“I had at one time a theological friend who had great reputation as a
dogmatist. He had for many years a garden of fallacies which was one of
the show places. It was in a sheltered situation, so that many fine old
dogmas flourished which we do not often, in these days, see growing out
of doors. Everything went well until the locality became infested with
destructive criticism. He tried all the usual remedies without success.
At last he became utterly discouraged, and cut out all the dead wood,
and uprooted all the dogmas that were attacked by the pest. Since then
he has given up his more ambitious plans, and he has only a simple
little place where he cultivates those fruits of the spirit which are
not affected by destructive criticism. It is only fair to say that he
is making a very pleasant place of it.
“For the encouragement of those who are not ready to take such heroic
methods, it may be said that eternal vigilance, though not a panacea,
will do much. Some of the most dreaded species of critics are not so
dangerous as they seem. Many persons fear the _Criticus Academicus_.
I have, however, seen fallacies which survived the attacks of this
species and fell easy victims to the more troublesome _Criticus
Vulgaris_, or Common Gumption.
“The worst pest is what is known as the _Reductio ad Absurdum_. This
is a kind of scale which grows upon a promising argument and eats out
its life. It is so innocent in its appearance that at first one does
not suspect its deadly character. In fact, it is sometimes taken as an
agreeable ornament. After a little while the argument is covered over
with a sort of dry humor. There is then no remedy.”
In the chapter on the use of artificial fertilizers, Scholasticus
deals particularly with statistics. He refers incidentally to their
use in the cultivation of valid arguments. Their importance here is
universally acknowledged. “It should be remembered,” he says, “that
in this case success depends upon the extreme care with which they
are used. An unusual amount of discrimination is demanded in their
application. For this reason, if solid conclusions, that head well, are
expected, only experts of good character can be trusted to do the work.
“There is no such difficulty in the use of statistics, if the grower
is content with arguments of the fallacious order. Statistics are
recommended for a mulch. By covering a bed of fallacies with a heavy
mulch of miscellaneous statistical matter it is protected from the
early frosts and the later drought. The ground of the argument is
kept thus in a good condition. No particular care is here needed in
the application of statistics; any man who can handle a pitchfork can
do all that is required. I have seen astonishing results obtained in
this way. No one need be deterred by the consideration of expense. In
these days statistics are so cheap that they are within the reach of
all. If you do not care to use the material freely distributed by the
government, you can easily collect a sufficient amount for yourself.
“The best way is to prepare circulars containing half a dozen
irrelevant questions, which you send to several thousand persons,--the
more the better. If you enclose stamps, those who are good-natured and
conscientious will send you such odd bits of opinion as they have no
other use for, and are willing to contribute to the cause of science.
When the contributions are received, assort them, putting those that
strike you as more or less alike in long, straight rows. Another way,
which is more fancy, is that of arranging them in curves. This is
called ‘tabulating the results.’ When the results have been thoroughly
tabulated, use in the manner I have described for the protection of
your favorite arguments.”
* * * * *
In this way the book ran on for some three hundred pages. After I had
read it, I congratulated Scholasticus on his effort. “You have almost
succeeded,” I said, “in making Logic interesting; that is, if it is
Logic. Now that you have made such a good beginning, I wish you might
go further. You have taught us, by a natural method, how to reason
fallaciously. I wish you would now teach us how to reason correctly.”
“I wish I could,” said Scholasticus.
THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE PEACEMAKERS
[Illustration]
To one who aspires to “sit and shake in Rabelais’ easy-chair,” the
greeting “Peace on Earth” is a godsend. Was ever such a provocative to
satire? Did ever human nature appear in a disguise more ridiculously
transparent than when assuming the part of Peacemaker in the midwinter
pantomimes, and impudently laying claim to the very choicest beatitude?
The bold masquerader has not even the grace to hide his big stick,
but waves it as a wand. We are asked to believe that the vigorous
flourishes of this same big stick prepare for the age of peace “by
prophets long foretold.”
“Have you ever been to a Peace Convention?” asks the amateur cynic.
“It is good fun if you are fortunate enough to be able to watch the
proceedings from the seat of the scornful. First come the advocates of
Peace pure and simple, enthusiasts for non-resistance. As you listen
to the reports of the delegates you feel that the time has already come
when ‘the lion shall eat straw like the ox.’ Your sympathies go out to
the poor beast in his sudden change of diet,--for we of the Carnivora
have no great appetite for straw. After a time the lions are led out
to speak for themselves. Representatives of the different nations give
greetings. It appears from their remarks that the cause is one that has
always been nearest to their valiant hearts. No need to take measures
to convert them,--they have always been on the right side. What were
teeth and claws invented for, if not to enforce peace on earth?
“Each nation points with pride to its achievements. Has not Great
Britain made peace in South Africa, and the United States of America
established it in the Philippines; and was not Russia a while ago
endeavoring to establish it in Manchuria? Even the little powers are
at work for the same end. Is not disinterested Belgium making peace
on the banks of the Congo, with rubber and ivory as a by-product? Has
not Holland for these many years been industriously weeding out the
malcontents in Java? The Christian message of good will has now reached
the most remote recesses of the earth. Even the monks in Thibet have
heard the good news. They must pay a good round sum for it, to be
sure; but what else could they expect when the message must be carried
to them away up on the roof of the world, quite beyond the limits of
the free delivery? It’s their own fault that they never got into full
connection with Christendom before. These unsocial creatures have for
generations been enjoying a selfish peacefulness of their own. They
have been like a householder who has a telephone, but will not allow
his number to go on the book. He likes to bother other people, but
will not allow them to bother him. It has long been known that the
Mahatmas in Llassa were in the habit of projecting thought vibrations
to the ends of the earth, and muddling the brains of the initiated; but
the general public could not reciprocate. The British expedition has
changed all that. Now when Christendom rings them up they’ve got to
answer.”
That word “Christendom” has a singular effect upon the cynic. It draws
out all his acrid humor; for it seems to him the quintessence of
hypocrisy.
“Christian nations! Christian civilization! A fine partnership this,
between the brutal and the spiritual! In the pre-Christian era war was
a very simple thing. Read the record of an Israelitish expedition in
the Book of Chronicles. ‘And they went to the entrance of Gedor, even
unto the east side of the valley, to seek pasture for their flocks. And
they found fat pasture and good, and the land was wide and quiet and
peaceable; for they of Ham had dwelt there of old. And these written by
name came in the days of Hezekiah, king of Judah, and smote their tents
and the habitations that were found there, and destroyed them utterly
unto this day, and dwelt in their rooms; because there was pasture
there for their flocks.’
“What an unsophisticated account of an ordinary transaction! Even the
sons of Ham could understand the motive. There was no profession of
benevolent intent, not even an eloquent reference to manifest destiny;
the fat pastures were a sufficient reason. In these days the unwilling
beneficiaries of civilization have a harder time of it. No sooner
are they dispossessed of their lands than they are called together to
rejoice over the good work that has been done for them. This is A. D.
and not B. C. The new era began with an angel chorus; let us all join
in the refrain. First of all, decorum requires that the bare facts be
decently arrayed in spiritual garments. With the skill that is the
result of long practice the ugliest fact is fitted. It is a triumph
of dressmaking. The materials may be a trifle threadbare, but with a
little fullness here and a breadth taken out there, each garment is
made as good as new. Not a blood-stain shows.”
* * * * *
This is a free country, and the cynic must be allowed his fling. But if
he has license to speak his mind in regard to the simple-hearted people
who believe in Peace, we must be privileged to say what we think of
him. The truth is that we think him to be a rather shallow-pated fellow
who has been educated above his deserts. For all his knowing ways he
has had but little knowledge of the world. He has seen the things which
are obvious, the things that are shown to every outsider. He prides
himself on his familiarity with accomplished facts, not realizing
that these belong to the world that is passing away. The interesting
things to see are those which belong to the world that is in process of
becoming. These are not visible from the seat of the scornful.
The sweeping accusation of hypocrisy against men or nations whenever
an incongruity is perceived between a professed purpose and an actual
achievement is an indication of too great simplicity of mind. It is the
simplicity that is characteristic of one without experience in the work
of creation.
The cynic, perceiving the shortcomings of those who “profess and call
themselves Christians,” greets their professions with a bitter laugh.
He cannot tolerate their pretensions, and he urges them to return to a
frank profession of the paganism which their deeds proclaim. Now it is
eminently desirable that all who profess and call themselves Christians
should _be_ Christians,--but that takes time. The profession is the
first step; that puts a whip into the hand of conscience. Not only do a
man’s friends, but particularly his enemies, insist that he shall live
up to his name. It is a wholesome discipline. In a new country two or
three houses set down in a howling wilderness are denominated a city.
It is a mere name at first, but if all goes well other metropolitan
features are added in due time. I remember a most interesting
visit which I once made to a university in a new commonwealth. The
university consisted of a board of regents, an unfenced bit of prairie
for a “campus,” a president (who was also professor of the Arts and
Sciences), a janitor, and two unfinished buildings. A number of the
village children took courses which, if persisted in for a number of
years, might lead to what is usually termed the Higher Education. One
student from out of town dwelt in solitary state in the dormitory.
The president met me with great cordiality, and after showing me “the
plant” introduced me to the student. It was evident that they were on
terms of great intimacy, and that discipline in the university was an
easy matter, owing to the fact that the student body was homogeneous.
Now it would be easy for one under such circumstances to laugh at what
seemed mere pretentiousness. “It was nothing more than a small school;
why not call it that and be done with it?” The reason for not doing so
was that it aimed at being a university. Its name was a declaration of
purpose. “Despise not the day of small things.” The small things may be
very real things; and then they have a trick of growing big before you
know it.
In the world of creative activity the thought precedes the deed, the
profession comes before the achievement. The child makes believe that
he is a man, and his play is prophetic. Let us grant that multitudes
who profess and call themselves Christians are only playing at
Christianity; they have not yet begun to take the beatitudes seriously.
It is a good thing to play at, and the play is all the time deepening
into earnest work.
When it becomes earnest, it is still far from perfect; but imperfection
of workmanship is no evidence of insincerity. He would be a poor critic
who at the spring exhibition should accuse the artist of attempt to
deceive because of his failure to achieve his professed purpose.
“Do you call that a picture of the Madonna? False-hearted hypocrite!
Are you wicked enough to attempt to poison our minds and prejudice us
against one who has been an object of worship? You are foisting upon
us an image of absolute imbecility.”
And yet the poor artist is no hypocrite,--he is only a poor artist,
that is all. He has striven to express what he has actually felt,
and he has had bad luck. He has been thrilled by an image of perfect
womanhood, and he sought to reproduce it for the joy of others. He
wrought with sad sincerity, and this is what came of it!
In the work of creating a condition of peace and good will among men
the Christian nations have not gone very far. But why twit on facts?
Let us be reasonable. Why should we take it as a grievance that our
birth has not been delayed till the Millennium, but that we have been
placed among those who are responsible for bringing it in? There is a
satisfaction in being allowed a part in the preliminary work. And what
if many well-meant endeavors have come to nought? Let us not spend our
time crying over the spilt milk of human kindness. It is natural that
the first attempts at peacemaking should be awkward. It takes time
to get the knack of it. It is foolish to reserve all our praise for
perfection. That gives an unpleasant impression, such as that which
we receive from a person who, when there is a call for small change,
produces a bank bill of a large denomination, which he knows no one can
break for him.
“Peace on earth” is not a statement of accomplished fact, but a
prophecy. Now it is nothing against a prophecy that it has not yet been
fulfilled. The farther off it is, the more credit to the eyes that
see and to the stout hearts that patiently wait and work for it. The
practical question is not “Has it come?” but “Is it on the way?” We are
considering a bit of the unfinished business of the world.
First we must listen to the report of the progress already made.
It is such a modest report that we must prepare our minds in order
to appreciate it. The simple-minded cynic must be instructed in
regard to the extreme difficulty and complexity of the work that has
been undertaken. It is nothing less than the transformation of a
carnivorous, not to say cannibalistic, species into an orderly society
in which each member shall joyously and effectively work for the
welfare of all. The first thing, of course, is to catch your cannibals.
This of itself is no easy task, and has taken many centuries. It
has involved a vast amount of wood-chopping and road-making, and
draining of swamps and exploring of caves and dens. It is a task that
is still far from accomplished. Savagery is a condition which cannot
be abolished till there is a conquest of the earth itself. When the
cannibals have been caught and tamed there comes the problem of keeping
them alive. They must eat _something_--a point which many of the
missionaries of civilization have not sufficiently considered. Ethical
progress is delayed by all sorts of economic complications. When the
natural man is confronted with the necessity of getting a living,
robbery is the first method which suggests itself to him. When this is
prohibited he turns upon his moral adviser with, “What more feasible
way do you propose?” The moral adviser has then to turn from the plain
path of pure ethics, and cudgel his poor wits trying to “invent a
little something ingenious” to keep his pupil from starving. The clever
railer at human kind who has always had a bank account to fall back
upon has no idea how much time and thought have been taken up in such
contrivances.
Then it should be remembered that the missionaries of civilization have
not themselves been above reproach. The “multitudes of the heavenly
hosts” might be heard for a moment singing of good will among men, but
they did not remain to do the work. The men of good will who were to
work out the plan were very human indeed. Milton, in the Hymn “On the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” warns us of the long interval between
the Christmas prophecy and its historical fulfillment.
For, if such holy song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back and fetch the age of gold;
And speckled vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould;
* * * * *
Yea, Truth and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering:
And Heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.
But all the imagery of the gala day of peace fades away before the
immediate reality.
But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so.
This veto of “wisest Fate” is not absolute. It only calls a halt upon
our imagination until the rest of our nature catches up with it.
Mankind is not to have peace till it has suffered for it and worked for
it. The workmen must do their work over and over again till they have
learned the right way.
That the “Christian nations” are not hypocrites, but novices who have
been making some progress toward the Christian ideal, becomes evident
when we look back over their history. They are not the descendants of
the simple shepherds of the plains of Bethlehem. Far from it! When they
first began to “profess and call themselves Christians,” they were not
thinking of the beatitudes. They had not got that far.
Turn to the Heimskringla and read how King Olaf converted the pagan
bonders.
“So King Olaf went into the God-house and a certain few of his men
with him, and a certain few of the bonders. But when the king came
whereas the gods were, there sat Thor the most honored of all the gods,
adorned with gold and silver. Then King Olaf hove up the gold-wrought
rod that he had in his hand and smote Thor that he fell down from the
stall; and therewith ran forth all the king’s men and tumbled down all
the gods from their stalls. But whiles the king was in the God-house
was Iron-Skeggi slain without, even at the very door, and that deed
did the king’s men. So when the king was come back to his folk he bade
the bonders take one of two things, either all be christened, or else
abide the brunt of battle with him. But after the death of Skeggi
there was no leader among the folk of the bonders to raise up a banner
against King Olaf. So the choice was taken of them to go to the king
and obey his bidding. Then King Olaf christened all folk that were
there and took hostages of the bonders that they would hold to their
christening. Thereafter King Olaf caused men of his wend over all parts
of Thrandheim; and now spoke no man against the faith of Christ. And so
were all folk christened in the country-side.”
That is the way the nations of the north were first christianized.
What is the difference between Thor and the Christ? the simple-hearted
people would ask. “The difference,” said King Olaf, “is very
fundamental, and it requires little theological training to see it. It
is this: the Christ is stronger. If you don’t believe it, I’ll”--but
they did believe it.
It is evident that there were some points in Christianity that King
Olaf did not appreciate. To cultivate these fruits of the spirit
required men of a different temper. Their work is not all done yet. It
is progressing.
* * * * *
There is one complication in the work of peacemaking which has not been
sufficiently considered. It is the recurrence of Youth. I have listened
to the arguments against war at a great Peace Congress. The reasoning
was strong, the statement of facts conclusive. War was shown to be
cruel and foolish, and incredibly expensive. The audience, consisting
of right-minded and very intelligent people, was convinced of the
justice of the cause of Peace. Why, then, does not the cause triumph?
In such cases I am in the habit of looking about with the intent
to fix the responsibility where it belongs, on those who were not
at the meeting. Mature life was well represented, but there was a
suspicious absence of young men in the twenties. Ah! I said, there is
the difficulty. We can’t be sure of lasting peace until we make it more
interesting to these young absentees. They’ll all be peace men by and
by, but meanwhile there is no knowing what trouble they may get us into.
John Fiske traced the influence which the prolongation of infancy
has had on the progress of civilization. I am inclined to think that
equally great results would flow from any discovery by which the period
of middle age could be prolonged beyond its present term. War would be
abolished without any more ado. A uniformly middle-aged community would
be immune from any attack of militant fever.
It happens, however, that every once in a while the hot passions of
youth carry all before them. The account of what happened at the
beginning of the civil wars in Israel is typical. King Rehoboam called
a meeting of the elder statesmen of his kingdom. They outlined a policy
that was eminently conciliatory. But we are told, “He forsook the
counsel of the old men which they had given him, and consulted with the
young men that were grown up with him and which stood by him.”
That’s the difficulty! The hardest thing about a good policy is to get
it accepted by the people who have the power. What avails the wisdom
of the old men when all the young men are “spoiling for a fight?”
Something more is needed than statesman-like plans for strengthening
the framework of civilization. You may have a fireproof structure,
but you are not safe so long as it is crammed with highly inflammable
material.
There is a periodicity in the passion for war. It marks the coming
into power of a new generation. A quarter of a century from now
“the good gray poet” Rudyard Kipling may be singing sweet lyrics of
peace. All things come in time. The Kipling we know simply utters the
sentiments of “the young men brought up with him.” What he has been
to his contemporaries Tennyson was to the generation before. Kipling
never wrote a more scornful arraignment of peace or a more passionate
glorification of war than Tennyson’s “Maud.”
We are listening to the invective of a youth whose aspirations have
been crushed and ideals shattered by a civilization that seems to him
to be soulless. He has seen something which to him is infinitely more
cruel than the battle between contending hosts
Why do they prate of the blessings of peace? we have made them a
curse,
Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own;
And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse
Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone?
We are made to see the inglorious peace in which men seek only their
own ease.
Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,
When the poor are hovell’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine,
When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie.
From the evils of a soulless commercialism, and from the inanities of
fashion, what is the way of escape? From the evils of peace he turns to
the heroism of war.
I wish I could hear again
The chivalrous battle song.
* * * * *
Ah God, for a man with heart, head, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by,
One still strong man in a blatant land.
At last, breaking in upon the deadly stupidity and selfishness of the
common life, is the noise of battle:--
it lightened my despair
When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right,
That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease,
The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height,
Nor Britain’s one sole God be the millionaire.
* * * * *
Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!
That was an appeal to Young England, the England that was too young to
remember the Napoleonic wars and was thirsting for an experience of its
own.
We may see in such an outburst of the militant spirit only the
recrudescence of savagery. It is better to treat it seriously, for it
is something which each generation must reckon with. Tennyson sums up
the matter from the standpoint of ardent youth:--
Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind.
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.
It is easy enough to dismiss all this as mere vaporing. But it is a
protest which must be heeded, for it expresses a real experience. There
are things worse than war. A sordid slothfulness is worse. A cowardly
acquiescence in injustice is worse. It is a real revelation when to the
heart of youth comes a sudden sense of the meaning of life. It is not
a treasure to be preserved with miserly carefulness. It is to be nobly
hazarded. It _is_ better to fight for the good than to rail, however
eloquently, against the ill. To feel for one’s native land, to unite in
generous comradeship with one’s kind, to endure hardness for a noble
cause,--these things are of the essence of manhood.
In times of national peril such awakening has come. Many a man has then
for the first time discovered that he has a soul. He has cried out,
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Now just here we peace men may see our most inspiring bit of unfinished
business. War has been idealized; it is left to us to idealize peace.
It cannot be done till we bring out all its heroic possibilities. If
it means dull stagnation, selfish ease, the prosperity that can be
measured in dollars and cents, there is sure to come a revulsion
against it. The gospel of the full dinner-pail and the plethoric
pocket-book does not satisfy. If the choice is between commercialism
and militarism we need not wonder if many an idealist chooses the
latter as the less perilous course. It seems less threatening toward
the things for which he cares.
The call is for a new chivalry. Our duty is not only to keep the peace,
but to make a peace that is worth keeping. This is no easy task. It
means the humanizing of all our activities. Everywhere a human ideal
must be placed above every other kind of success. Religion must be
lifted above ecclesiasticism; and business honor above the vulgar
standards of commercialism. The machinery of civilization must be
made subservient to man. More careers must be opened for men of the
soldierly spirit whose ambition is for service. The new generation must
be shown what opportunities the world’s business and politics offer to
great-hearted gentlemen who are willing to risk something for a cause.
The kind of peace which the world needs cannot be had for the asking.
It comes high,--but it is worth the price.
THE LAND OF THE LARGE AND CHARITABLE AIR
[Illustration]
Are you not constrayned (my fellow Academicks) to subscribe to this
my opinion that the knowledge of no nation is so necessary as the
searching out of a man’s own Country and the manners thereof and the
right understanding of that Commonweale whereof each one of us is a
part and member. The Lamiæ that are a certaine kind of monsters are
laughed at in the Poeticall Fables in that they were so blinde at home
that they could not see their own affaires, could foresee nothing;
but when they were once gone from home they were accounted the most
sharpe-sighted and curious searchers of all others.... [Are not they]
very ridiculous when as by taking long voyages unto farre remote
people, after they have curiously sought out all matters amongst them
are ignorant of the principall things at home and know not what is
contayned within the precincts of their country, and are reckoned
altogether strangers on their native soile?--CORYAT’S _Crudities_.
The remark that Boston is not so much a place as a state of mind is one
of the highest compliments ever paid to that city. Places are common
enough, the maps are dotted with them, but a state of mind is a mark
of distinction. The Bostonian enjoys his state of mind none the less
because he is aware that outsiders are not always able to enter into it.
Only those places which have become symbolic of mental or moral traits
are remembered. Sodom and Gomorrah were once towns of some commercial
importance. We think of them, however, not as trade centres, but as
sins. Babylon, according to a doctrine of spiritual correspondences
long since established, is another name for proud and cruel
worldliness. It is likely so to remain, in spite of the discovery of
clay tablets which show that many of its people were estimable citizens
who practiced domestic economy and collected their debts by due process
of law. All we have to say is that those who acted in this commonplace
way were not typical,--in fact, they were quite un-Babylonian. In
like manner, Zion represents no longer a hill whose altitude may be
prosaically estimated according to the metric system. It is a highly
exalted frame of pious joy.
It is strange that, with all the ingenuity that has been shown in
inventing new text-books for the use of schools, no one has compiled a
Psychological Geography. The materials are ample. It only needs some
one with a scientific imagination, or, rather, with a capacity for
writing imaginative science, to make it a success. Eliminating those
communities whose states of mind are so mixed as to be unclassifiable,
the way would be clear for a very pretty series of generalizations.
There would be maps with isothermal lines uniting places of equal
degrees of warmth of temperament or frigidity of manner. Weather charts
would show the direction of the various winds of doctrine and the
storm centres, religious and political. The theory of moral cyclones
and anti-cyclones would be adequately explained. There would be maps
in colors indicating the communities situated on the plateaus of
conscious ethical and intellectual superiority. These often rise into
the arid, or at least semi-arid, belt. In sharp contrast with these
are the luxuriant bottom lands, where less favored peoples dwell in
happy ignorance of their low estate. The “principal products” would be
graphically illustrated. One section, being without natural resources,
is given over to the manufacture of novelties, while another is rich
in fossils. The distribution of fads may be shown to advantage. Some
localities are almost barren, while others are naturally faddy.
When he comes to the Points of the Compass the most matter-of-fact
psychological geographer will forget the cold mannerisms of his science
and become poetical. North, South, East, West, these are vast symbols
of psychic forces. He would not think of putting at the head of the
chapter the picture, from the old Geography, of the disconsolate urchin
with his face to the north and his arms extended in rigid but reluctant
testimony to the fact that “East is East and West is West.” What does
this featureless boy know of those tremendous forces whose age-long
contests have made the history of the world? What does he know of the
hardiness and the prowess that make the true North? If he were forcibly
turned around, his face would be as expressionless as ever. Such a
mannikin never felt a sudden longing for “a beaker full of the warm
South.”
Art must be called to the aid of science. Each point of the compass has
an expression of its own. One should be able by looking at the face of
the man in the picture to know the direction. There is no mistaking
the qualities which grow only where there is a northerly exposure. The
Orient and the Occident are not to be confounded.
Were some affluent citizen to endow a chair of psycho-geographical
science in one of our leading universities, especial attention should
be paid to the teaching of Systematic Americanism. It is a branch
now much neglected. The professor should take pains to instruct his
“fellow Academicks” in the manners and customs of their own country,
so that they should no longer be reckoned strangers on their native
soil. They should be taught to avoid entangling analogies drawn
from the experience of other lands, and to look directly at the
subject-matter. When they see something going wrong, they should not
jump at the conclusion that it is a repetition of the classic tragedy
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,--for it may be something
quite different. When there is a popular movement on the prairies,
they should not begin to talk of the French Revolution and of the
excesses of the proletariat. Before they talk in European fashion of
the “classes and the masses,” they should make certain that we have
such things, and if we have, that there is a sure way of telling which
is which. The Old-World generalizations about the upper and lower and
middle classes should be well shaken before using.
Those who elect the course in Americanism should be taught to
overcome the nervous fright to which bookish people are subject at
the appearance of any man in public life who shows signs of unusual
virility. It is a weakness of those who are more familiar with
the careers of Cæsar and Napoleon than with the temper of their
fellow-citizens. In the early seventies there were academic minds
thoroughly convinced that they were watching the Republic in its death
struggle with Cæsarism. Curiously enough, they fixed upon plain Ulysses
Grant to act the part of Cæsar. It would have been hard to find one
less fitted for the rôle. When we look back and contrast what really
happened with what the well-read spectators thought was happening, we
are reminded of the remark of the British matron to her husband as they
left the theatre where they had been seeing the play of “Antony and
Cleopatra,” “How unlike the home life of our dear Queen!”
The great thing, as President Roosevelt has often reminded us, is
to “think nationally.” This is no small achievement. A nation is a
psycho-geographical fact which it requires a very great effort of the
imagination to conceive. The same word represents a land and the
people who inhabit it. The physical features of the landscape have
their spiritual counterparts. It may be that the landscape impresses
itself on the imagination of the race, or, as may be maintained with
equal plausibility, the imagination of a gifted race may interpret the
landscape and impress itself upon it forever. In either case there is
a recognizable harmony between the two elements. In reading the great
literature of Israel we never forget that the nation was desert-born.
“He found him in a desert place, he led him about, he instructed him.”
In psalm and prophecy we are conscious of barren mountain ranges, of
rocks in a weary land, of narrow valleys which laugh for very joy over
the incongruity between themselves and the surrounding desolations.
There is the passion of the desert, born of solitude and the stars. In
the prophet of righteousness there is the same urgent note that Bayard
Taylor catches in his “Bedouin Song:”--
From the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
The impatient human cry is followed by the refrain natural to those
whose lives are surrounded by the eternal calm of the desert,--
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.
When we think of the Greeks we think at the same time of
the sprinkled isles
Lily on lily that o’erlace the sea,
And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps “Greece.”
England and her Englishmen are forever inseparable. “This happy breed
of men” belong to “this little world, this precious stone set in a
silver sea, this blessed plot, this England.” That Great Britain is an
island is more than a fact of physical geography. It is the outward and
visible sign of an insularity of sentiment which gives its peculiar
quality to British patriotism. There is something snug and homelike
about it, as of a family that enjoys “the tumultuous privacy of storm.”
We become conscious of Spain and her Spaniards as we read Longfellow’s
lines:--
A something sombre and severe
O’er the enchanted landscape reigned,
As if King Philip listened near
And Torquemada, the austere,
His ghostly sway maintained.
When we come to the United States of America there is a peculiar
difficulty in thinking and feeling nationally, because the imagination
does not at once find the physical facts to serve as symbols. It is not
easy to conceive the land as a whole. When we sing “My Country, ’tis
of thee,” the country that is visualized is very small. The author of
the hymn was a New England clergyman, and naturally enough described
New England and called it America. It is a land of rocks and rills
and woods, and the hills are templed, in Puritan fashion, by white
meeting-houses; for the early New Englander, like erring Israel of
old, loved to worship on “the high places.” Over it all is one great
tradition: it is the “land of the Pilgrims’ pride.”
The farmer in North Dakota loves his country, too; but the idea that
it is a land of rocks and rills and templed hills seems to him rather
farfetched. His heart does not thrill with rapture when he thinks of
these things. He can plow all day in the Red River valley without
striking a stone, and he is glad to have it so.
The Texan cultivates an exuberant Americanism, but he does not think of
his country as the “land of the Pilgrims’ pride.” Texas is not proud
of the Pilgrims, and perhaps the Pilgrims would not have appreciated
Texas.
When the American has come to feel, not provincially, but nationally,
the words “my country” bring to his mind not merely some familiar
scenes of his childhood, but a series of vast pictures. They are broad
and simple in outline. “My country” is no tight little island shut out
from “the envy of less happier lands.” It is continental in its sweep.
It lies open and free to all. It is large and easy of access. There
is a vision of busy cities serving as its gateways. Behind them is a
pleasant home-like land with “a sweet interchange of hill and valley.”
Beyond the mountains another scene opens. We see the sources of the
strength of America and feel the promise of its future. To see the
Mississippi valley is to believe in “manifest destiny,” and to take a
cheerful view of it. To the ancient world the valley of the Nile was
the symbol of fertility. It is a narrow ribbon of green in the midst of
the desert. Here Plenty and Famine were in plain sight of one another.
There was always the suggestion of Pharaoh’s ugly dream of the lean
kine devouring the fat and well-favored. But in the valley of the
Mississippi the fear of the lean kine is dispelled. One may travel at
railroad speed day after day, and still the fields of wheat and corn
smile upon him. Here the ample land gives happy confidence to men’s
prayer for daily bread. And beyond the fertile prairies “my country”
stretches in high plains and lofty mountain ranges. Here are new
treasures waiting bold spirits who claim them. The land has a challenge
and an invitation.
What a weary dearth
Of the homes of men! What a wild delight
Of space, of room! What a sense of seas
Where seas are not! What salt-like breeze!
What dust and taste of quick alkali!
And beyond the mountains lies the American Avilion, where never--
wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows: crown’d with summer seas.
And this great land is one; though it is “a nation of nations” it has
achieved a national consciousness. There is an atmosphere about it all
which we recognize. To breathe it is an exhilaration. One loves to
think of it as the land of “the large and charitable air.”
* * * * *
The conception of the continental proportions of America did not
at once dawn upon its new inhabitants. They thought and spoke as
transplanted Englishmen. Each of the thirteen States was a tight little
republic insisting on its own rights. Each plucky Diogenes sat in its
own tub, saying to its neighbors, “Get out of my sunshine!”
It was only as they turned westward that Americans discovered
America,--a discovery which in some instances has been long delayed.
“The West” is not merely a geographical expression, it is a state of
mind which is most distinctive of the national consciousness. It is
a feeling, an irresistible impulse. It is the sense of undeveloped
resources and limitless opportunities. It is associated with the verb
“to go.” To the American the West is the natural place to go to, as
the East is the place to come from. It is synonymous with freedom from
restraint. It is always “out West.”
Just where the geographical West begins it is not necessary to
indicate. On the coast of Maine you may be shown a summer cottage
and told that it belongs to a rich Westerner from Massachusetts.
Massachusetts is not thought of as exactly the Far West, but it is far
enough.
The psychological West begins at the point where the centre of
interest suddenly shifts from the day before yesterday to the day
after to-morrow. Great expectations are treated with the respect that
elsewhere had been reserved for accomplished facts. There is a stir in
the air as if Humanity were a new family just setting up housekeeping.
What a fine house it is, and how much room there is on the ground
floor! What a great show it will make when all the furniture is in!
There is no time now for the finishing touches, but all will come in
due order. There is need for unskilled labor and plenty of it. Let
every able-bodied man lend a hand.
One does not know his America until he has been touched by the Western
fever. He must be possessed by a desire to take up a claim and build
himself a shack and invest in a corner lot in a Future Great City. He
must be capable of a disinterested joy in watching the improvements
which other people are making. Let the man of the East cling to the
old ways and seek out the old landmarks. The symbol of the West is the
plank sidewalk leading out from a brand-new prairie town and pointing
to a thriving suburb which as yet exists only in the mind of its
projector. There is something prophetic in that sidewalk on which the
foot of man has never trod.
One who has once had this fever never completely recovers. Though he
may change his environment he is always subject to intermittent attacks.
I remember on my first evening in Oxford sitting blissfully on the top
of a leisurely tram car that trundled along High Street. The dons in
academic garb were on their way to dinner in the college halls, and
they looked just as my imagination had pictured them. I was introduced
to one of them. When he learned that I was an American, there was a
sudden thaw in his manner.
“Have you ever been in Dodge City, Kansas?” he inquired eagerly.
I modestly replied that I had only passed through on the railway, but
I was familiar with other Kansas towns, and, reasoning from analogy,
I could tell what manner of place it was. This was enough. I had
experienced the West. I was one of the initiated. I could enter into
that state of mind represented by the term Dodge City. It appeared
that in the golden age, when he and Dodge City were both young, he
had sought his fortune for some months in Kansas. He had experienced
the joys of civic newness, a newness such as had not been in England
since the Heptarchy. He discoursed of the mighty men of those days
when every man did what was right in his own eyes, and good-humoredly
allowed his neighbor to do likewise. As we parted, he said, with
mournful acquiescence in his present estate, “Oxford does very well,
you know, but it isn’t Dodge City.” If poetry is emotion remembered in
tranquillity, what could be more poetical than Dodge City remembered in
the tranquillity of Oxford quadrangles?
In this case the poetical view was a sound one. The traveler across
the newly developed States of the West has the traveler’s license to
contrast unfavorably that which he sees with that which he left behind
him in his home country. He may say a dozen uncomplimentary things, and
each one of them may be true. He may exhaust all his stock adjectives,
as “crude” and “raw” and the like. But when he remarks, as did a
certain critic, that because the country lacks “distinction” it is
uninteresting, he betrays his own limitations.
It is just that lack of distinction that makes America interesting.
Here, no longer distracted by what is exceptional, one may take the
welfare of the masses of men seriously.
Here the doings of men correspond to the broad doings of the day and
the night,
Here is what moves in magnificent masses, careless of particulars.
When Shelley was an undergraduate he was attracted to a lecture on
mineralogy. It seemed to him a subject full of poetical suggestiveness.
His expectations were disappointed, and he unceremoniously bolted
and returned to his room. “What do you think the man talked about?
Stones!--stones!--stones! I tell you stones are not interesting--in
themselves.”
Shelley was right. Stones are not interesting in themselves; neither
are railroads, nor stockyards, nor new unpainted buildings, nor endless
cornfields. But for that matter, neither are crumbling columns, nor
old manuscripts, nor the remains of feudal castles interesting--in
themselves. Things become interesting only when seen in relation to the
people whose thoughts they have stimulated and whose imaginations they
have stirred.
America is a fresh field for human endeavor. Here are men busily making
roads, bridging rivers, building new cities. They have been given the
task of subduing a continent. But in such conflicts with Nature the
conquered influences the conquerors. What impress does the continent
make upon the minds of the hardy men who are mastering it? What visions
of the future do they see which transform their drudgery into an heroic
adventure?
In the case of the older nations such questions about the beginnings
and the ideals of the beginners cannot be answered. The formative
period, with all its significant aspirations, is buried in oblivion.
“Who thinks any more as they thought?” we ask in regard to the pioneer
of Britain. Poetry has license to picture him as a knight in armor and
to tell how in romantic fashion he pitched
His tents beside the forest. And he drave
The heathen, and he slew the beast, and felled
The forest, and let in the sun.
It was all a long time ago, and the men who did these things are not
clearly revealed. Not being able to get at their ideals, we attribute
to them those which we think appropriate.
The historians are troubled by their lack of authentic material. They
are like the magicians, astrologers, sorcerers, and Chaldeans of the
court of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that he knew was
very important, but before he could get it interpreted by his wise men
he forgot what it was. They were good at interpretations, and could
have made one to fit if only the king had brought the dream with him so
that they could try it on. But that was the very thing he could not do.
The founders of London and Paris had doubtless their dreams of the
future; but alas! they have long since been forgotten. But Chicago
has not had time to forget. Everything is still vivid. Men walk the
streets of the great city who remember it when it was no bigger than
the Londinium of the time of the Cæsars. They have with their own eyes
watched every step in the civic development and they have been a part
of all that they have seen. The Londoner has seen only a passing phase
of his London; the greater part of its history is received on hearsay
evidence. The Chicagoan sees his Chicago steadily and sees it whole. No
wonder that there is a self-consciousness about the new metropolis that
is not to be found in the old. Its greatness has been thrust upon it
suddenly, and there is a full realization of its value.
The genuine American who is the maker of the new fortunes of the world,
and who is in love with his work, has not been adequately portrayed
in literature. It requires an ample imagination to do justice to
his character. There must be a mingling of realism and romance. The
realism must not be the minute, painstaking portraiture of a Miss
Austen, but the hearty, out-of-door reality of a Fielding. The American
Fielding has not yet appeared, but what a good time he will have when
he comes! What a host of characters after his own heart he will find!
The American Scott, too, is called for to give us a story of American
life which will read as well on the edge of a clearing in the forest
as “The Lady of the Lake” did in the trenches of Torres Vedras, when
the soldiers forgot the enemy’s shells as they gave a glorious shout
over the poet’s lines, which their captain was reading to them. I like
that story, in spite of the fact that a recent critic declares that to
like it shows an uncultivated taste. “This is not,” he says, “a test of
poetry. An audience less likely to be critical, a situation less likely
to induce criticism, can hardly be imagined.” Nevertheless, Scott would
much rather have written lines that rang true to soldiers in the hour
of battle, than to have been given a high mark by the most competent
corrector of daily themes.
The imagination of Hawthorne, brooding over the past, repeopled the
House of the Seven Gables with the successive generations. But there is
another kind of romance, in which the imagination is projected into the
future. Looking at the new house not yet enclosed against the storm, it
dreams dreams and sees visions. There is a story there, also, and the
best of it is that it is to be continued.
* * * * *
A shrewd old New England farmer recounted to me the warlike exploits
of his family. He himself had been in Gettysburg, and each generation
since the time of the French and Indian wars had had its soldier. His
son had been shot at Santiago. “The bullet went clean through his
body,” he said, indicating a course which seemed to me necessarily
fatal. I expressed sympathy. “Oh, it didn’t hurt him much,” he said,
“it seemed to go through a vacant spot.”
That there are vacant spots in the character of the typical man of
the Western world no one would be more ready to admit than he. His
shortcomings are obvious. Yet most of those which have been harshly
commented upon by the world are of the kind that might be commended to
the consideration of the kindly Pardoner. Some of his weaknesses touch
upon nobleness. Those who best know his environment and the work he has
done are most ready to grant him a reasonable degree of indulgence.
The most serious charges against him are that he is a boastful
materialist enamored of crude bulk, and that he has trampled upon the
old sanctities and is a worshiper of the almighty dollar. There is
some color for these charges in his manners, but those who make them
have certainly not understood his spirit. “The Western Goth,” Lowell
called him. The Goths had a bad reputation once as wanton destroyers
of ancient art. But after they had had their fling and had settled
down, the Teutonic barbarians showed that they could make a thing or
two themselves. Gothic has long since ceased to be a term of reproach.
Even in the destruction of the ancient, archæologists now admit that
the Goths did not do as much harm as was at first feared. The real
destroyers of ancient Rome have been the Romans.
From the fact that western America is a place where people are actively
engaged in making money, and that they find their work so interesting
that they like to talk about it, the superficial observer jumps at the
conclusion that this is the seat of the cult of wealth-worship. But
there is a vast difference between making a thing and worshiping it. It
is reported that one of the varied industries of Great Britain is the
manufacture of molten images. It is undoubtedly a sin, but the British
manufacturer comforts himself with the reflection that he only breaks
half the commandment; he makes the idol, but he does not bow down
before it.
Worship is not talkative or boastful. It is reserved and self-abasing.
The worshiper accepts the superiority of the object of his devotion
as a fact not to be questioned. For such serious-minded worship of
wealth go to the English moral tales so popular a generation or two
ago, before the wave of democracy came in. Then the affluent Squire and
his lady were lifted into the place of superior beings. They dispensed
bounty after the manner of Providence to their poorer neighbors, and
there was no thought of questioning their ways. They were rich, as had
been their fathers and mothers before them, and all other virtues were
attributed to them by fond superstition.
The men of the Western mining camps, where millionaires are made in
a day, have no conception of such a reverential attitude toward the
possessor of wealth. When you see them in the eager pursuit of dollars,
you are watching not their religion, but their sport. They care for
money as the fox-hunter cares for the fox. They admire the man who wins
the prize, in proportion to the skill and pluck which he has exhibited.
But there are no illusions of a personal superiority imparted by
the possession of property. That is impossible in a community where
everybody is acquainted with the short and simple annals of the rich.
The man who is conspicuously successful in the national sport
is undoubtedly an object of interest, but it is interest of the
superficial sort. He is not the man whom the people delight to honor,
and he usually has the good sense to know it. In a Western newspaper
my attention was attracted by the headlines: “Noah a Millionaire.” It
seems that some one had calculated that, even after making allowance
for the low price of labor and materials in his day, the Ark must
have cost over half a million dollars, and that Noah must have had
at least a million in order prudently to undertake the work. It put
the patriarch in a fresh light, and I read the article diligently, as
did most of my fellow passengers on the train. But that was the end
of it; our opinions about diluvian and antediluvian matters remained
unchanged. I suppose that the publicity given to the doings of our
conspicuously rich contemporaries has no greater significance.
The millionaire who cares for the admiration of his fellow-citizens
must do more than accumulate. When he has made his fortune the next
question is, “What will he do with it?” He must do something or sink
into the rank of nobodies. Even the most selfish and parsimonious feels
that something is required of him. A great part of the stream of new
wealth may be wasted, so far as the higher interests of society are
concerned, but a certain part of it is pretty certain to be directed
toward those same higher interests. The process is like that which goes
on with an hydraulic ram. Where there is a good stream of water, one
can afford to lose most of it. The waste water, before it escapes down
the hill, pumps a slender but sufficient stream into the second story.
Indeed, it is the interest of our millionaires in art, science, and
religion which has created a puzzling ethical problem. They are not
content to be mere money-getters. They aspire to be benefactors on a
large scale. But what if the wealth so freely offered has not been
honestly come by? What if the best institutions should hesitate to
receive it? The poor rich man cannot contemplate such a refusal with
equanimity. It would interfere with the fulfillment of his most
cherished plans. To have unlimited opportunities to make money, and
to be hindered in giving it away, seems to him like building a trunk
line of railroad and then being denied terminal facilities. Of course
he could change his plans and keep it all himself, but to a man who
had been accustomed to “doing things” that would be a humiliating
anti-climax.
* * * * *
The fact that the American is greatly absorbed in his work with
material things is no sufficient basis of the charge of materialism
that is lightly brought against him. The crucial question is, “What
do the things stand for in his mind? Are they finalities, or are they
means to an end?” The most appalling picture of a purely materialistic
civilization is that given in the book of the Revelation. It is an
inventory of the wealth of the Babylon which was Imperial Rome. The
inventory is an indictment. “The merchandise of gold, and silver, and
precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk,
and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and
all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and
marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and
wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and
horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.”
The heart grows sick when the list of commodities ends with the “souls
of men.” What were they worth, measured against all that goes before?
A very different impression comes as we read Joaquin Miller’s exultant
cry over the West:--
O heart of the world’s heart, West! my West!
Look up! Look out! There are fields of kine,
There are clover fields that are red as wine,
* * * * *
There are emerald seas of corn and cane,
* * * * *
There are isles of oak and a harvest plain
Where brown men bend to the bending grain,
There are temples of God and towns new born.
* * * * *
And the hearts of oak and the hands of horn
Have fashioned them all, and a world beside.
This frank delight in the riches of the earth is not materialistic.
The souls of men are not in the market. They form the supreme standard
of value. Materialism is not a disease to which nations are subject in
their lusty youth. It comes with senile decay.
Sometimes when we are wearied with the intense activity of modern life
we quote the saying, “Things are in the saddle.” Perhaps our sympathy
is misplaced. If the poor Things could speak, they would tell us that,
so far from being in the saddle, they are under the lash of furious
young idealists who give them no rest. It is the nature of a Thing to
“stay put,” but these headstrong youths despise this conservative bias.
They are no respecters of Things, being wholly absorbed in Purposes.
To see Things in undisputed possession, go into “the best room” of
a respectable old farmhouse. Here the Thing has the place of honor,
and the Person is a base intruder, having no rights of his own. The
priestess hovers occasionally around her sacred Things, waving her
feather duster as a mystic wand, and then leaves them in respectful
gloom. Nothing short of a death in the family would induce her to
disturb them. Go into a busy workshop, and you may see how the Thing
may be taught to know its place. It is always at the mercy of the
innovating Intelligence. When a new Idea comes, the old Thing which had
heretofore had a useful function is thrown aside. It is still as good
as it ever was, but it is not good enough. It must go to the scrap pile.
* * * * *
The man of the West is likely to offend against the standards of
propriety in speech. When he begins to explain the character of
his country, he is accused of inaccuracy. His prospectus is not
always confirmed by the Table of Contents. He has acquired the habit
of “talking large.” This prejudices many people against him. They
accuse him of willful exaggeration, and if he be the promoter of some
commercial enterprise, they impute to him a mercenary motive.
But he is in reality quite sincere. If he talks large, it is only
because he feels large. His is a language natural to those who are
engaged in creative work, and who foresee great things. It is like “the
large utterance of the early gods.” He does not feel called upon to
limit his statements to the facts that are already apparent; he expects
the facts to grow up to his statements. He is not shooting at a fixed
target, but at a flying mark; if he is to hit it, he must aim a little
ahead.
Another reason for this large utterance is that in a new country the
ordinary man identifies himself with his community in a way impossible
to any but very great magnates in an old civilization. He feels very
much as did the kings and earls he has read about. How proudly on the
Shakespearean stage a great noble will speak of himself as Norfolk or
Northumberland! It is as if his personality had been multiplied by so
many square miles. He is no longer a mere individual,--he is a whole
county.
An American may have much the same sense of territorial aggrandizement
by identifying himself with a promising community in its first stage
of growth. He is not a unit lost in a multitude. His town has a fine
name and a glorious future. Some day these glories may be divided among
thousands, now they are his own. He is proud of the town, and the pride
is more satisfying because he is it.
I once camped for a whole month in the city of Naples on the shores
of the Pacific. I knew it was a city, for a huge sign announced the
fact to every one who passed by the beautiful, secluded spot. Unlike
some of the boom towns of that period, Naples had an inhabitant, whom
I had occasion frequently to meet. When I addressed him, it was hard
for me to use his surname, as I would with a common man. For to me he
was Naples. It would have seemed appropriate for him to speak in blank
verse.
* * * * *
There are those who look upon the Western delight in the idea of
bigness as an evidence of vulgarity of sentiment and of the lack of
idealism. They have a scorn of those who habitually think of quantity
rather than of quality. But the man of fastidious taste should not be
allowed to have it all his own way. One poet may be inspired by “the
murmur of a hidden brook in the leafy month of June.” But another may
prefer to stand on the shore of the ocean and feel its immensity. He is
tremendously impressed by its size. It is a big thing. But the ocean is
as poetical as the brook, though in its own huge way.
There are some things wherein quality is the first consideration. They
are the luxuries of life. But when we come to the prime necessities,
the first question is in regard to the adequacy of the supply. When a
sentimental young lady was seated at dinner next to a great poet, she
waited, awestruck, for him to give utterance to a fine thought. The
only gem he vouchsafed was, “How do you like your mutton? I like mine
in hunks.” The poet was a man of sound sense. There is one law for
poetry and another for mutton. Poetry is precious, and a little goes a
long way; we can get on without any but the best. But mutton should be
served more generously.
It is the glory of the West that it treats what elsewhere are the
luxuries of the few as the necessities of the many. It dispenses even
“the higher education” not in dainty morsels, but in hunks.
Old Mrs. Means, in “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” formulated the wisdom of
the pioneer. “You see, this ’ere bottom land was all Congress land in
them there days and sold for a dollar and a quarter, and I says to my
old man, ‘Jack,’ says I, ‘do you git a plenty while you’re gittin’. Git
a plenty while you’re gittin’,’ says I, ‘for ’twont be no cheaper than
’tis now;’ and it haint, and I knowed ’twouldn’t.”
Translate Mrs. Means’s shrewd maxim into the terms of idealism, and you
have the characteristic contribution of the West. The old prudential
maxims, which were true enough in a finished civilization, may well be
disregarded by those who face a great new opportunity. They can well
afford to preëmpt more territory than they can at present cultivate.
When one’s aims are selfish, the desire to get a plenty is mere greed,
but in the altruist it rises into “the enthusiasm for humanity.” It
is the ambition to supply the wants of men no longer in niggardly
fashion, but in full measure.
In two directions the expectation of moral amplitude in things American
is fulfilled,--in Education and in Charity. Here we feel that the
people have been aroused to the need of making plentiful provision,
not only for immediate necessities, but for future growth. Along these
lines we think and plan nationally.
But there are some questions which give pause to the most boastful
patriot. Where is the distinctive American Art which interprets in a
broad, fresh way the genius of the land, and where is the public that
would recognize it and delight in it if it should appear? Where is
the great American Church able splendidly to organize the forces of
spiritual freedom as Rome organized the principles of ecclesiastical
authority? How is the vision of her prophets fulfilled?
And thou, America,
For the scheme’s culmination, its thought and its reality,
For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived.
Thou, too, surroundest all,
Embracing, carrying, welcoming all, thou too by pathways broad and
new,
To the ideal tendest.
The measured faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past
Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own,
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all.
Where are these “deific faiths and amplitudes” that are worthy of the
land embodied?
America presents new problems for statesmanship; where are the
large-hearted, clear-eyed men who give themselves to the task? Here and
there we see them. In the crisis of the nation’s life nature came to
the rescue.
For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
That is the kind of manhood America needs. Is the supply equal to the
demand? The growth of wealth in the Republic has been marvelous. Has
there been evolved a wisdom equal to the task of justly distributing
what enterprise has created? We hear of American “Captains of
Industry.” How far have they realized Carlyle’s idea when he gave
the title to those whose success lies not in personal gain but in
ability to be real leaders of men? How far has America produced great
captains, able to bring into commerce and manufacture the soldierly
virtues of courage, loyalty, and willing obedience?
When he considers these things the just critic must say to the
Republic, “Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting.” But let
him not hastily assume that he is reading the mystic handwriting on the
wall, the _Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin_, that foretells the fall of
nations. Let him rather talk as to a young athlete who has not come up
to the mark, “You have done much, but you have not yet done your best!
You are yet wanting in some essential elements. You must try again.”
The American idealist recognizes the present failures, but it does not
quench his high spirits. They come to him as challenges. He takes his
falls as Adam and Eve took theirs. After the first shock was over there
was a healthy reaction.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
The most hopeful sign of the times is the number of young Americans who
have become conscious of the grave evils that beset their country, but
who neither whine nor scold nor prophesy ill. The pioneer spirit is
strong within them. They attack the abuses of democracy with a cheery
iconoclasm. They are impelled to their work not merely by a sense of
duty; they find their fun in it. It is with a sense of exhilaration
that we watch these pioneers. Their world is all before them. We are
anxious to see what they will make of it.
A COMMUNITY OF HUMORISTS
[Illustration]
Humor is not usually looked upon as a civic virtue. It is for the most
part confined to a modest sphere of usefulness, and is accepted as an
alleviation to the lot of the private man. He learns to find pleasure
in his small misadventures and to smile amiably at his discomfitures.
The most ancient pleasantries have almost always an element of
domesticity. They form the silver lining to the clouds that sometimes
gather over the most peaceful homes. What comfort an ancient Hebrew
must have taken in the text from Ecclesiasticus: “As climbing up a
sandy way is to the feet of the aged, so is a wife full of words to a
quiet man.” The quiet man would murmur to himself, “How true!” He would
seize the simile as a dog snatches a bone, and would carry it off to
enjoy it by himself.
But it would never occur to him to treat the large affairs of the
community in this fashion. Here everything seems too dignified to allow
of pleasant conceits. The quiet man could not treat the prolixity of
his social superiors as he could the too long drawn out wisdom of his
wife. He must take it, as he would take the invariable laws of nature,
with unsmiling acquiescence. Lord Bacon in his list of works that ought
to be undertaken declared the need of one to be entitled “Sober Satire;
or the Insides of Things.” Such sober satire might express the moods
of a philosophical statesman, who could contrast the inside of great
affairs with the outside. It implies a certain familiarity with the
institutions of society which the common man does not possess.
Now and then, however, there is a reversal of the usual relation. The
community is of such a nature that each member can see through it and
all around it. The ordinary citizen becomes a philosopher indulging
habitually in sober satire. He knows that things are not as they
seem, and is pleased at the discovery. In such a case humor envelops
everything and becomes the last word of sociological wisdom.
So it was in a community which I fondly remember. It was not much
to look at, this brand-new Nevada mining town. The main street
swaggered up the gulch in a devil-may-care fashion, as if saying
to the teamsters, “You may take me or leave me.” To the north it
pointed to an alkali flat, and to the south to a dusty old mountain,
which was immensely richer than it seemed. On the mountain side were
hoisting works and hundreds of prospect holes which menaced the lives
of the unwary. In the gulch were smelters which belched forth divers
kinds of fumes. To the stranger they seemed to threaten wholesale
asphyxiation, but to the citizen they gave the place the character of
a health resort. An analysis of the air showed that it contained more
chemicals than were to be found in the most famous mineral springs.
Certain it was that there were enough to kill off all germs of
contagious diseases. The community felt the need of no further hygienic
precautions, and put its trust in its daily fumigations. No green thing
was in sight, not so much as a grass blade, for the fumes were not
only germicides, but also herbicides. On the main street were saloons
and gambling houses, in close proximity to two or three struggling
churches. There were two daily newspapers, each of which kept us
informed of the other’s manifold iniquities. A narrow-gauge railroad
had its terminus at the foot of the gulch. Once a day a mixed train
would depart for the world that lay beyond the alkali flat. Some of
the passengers would be “going below,” which meant nothing worse than
a trip to California; others were promoters going East on missions of
mercy to benighted capitalists. The promoter was our nearest approach
to a professional philanthropist. As for the rest, the chief impression
was of dust. It would roll in great billows down the gulch; it seemed
as if the mountains had been pulverized. Then the wind would change and
the dust billows would roll back. No matter how long it blew, there was
always more where it came from.
I cannot explain to an unsympathetic reader why it was that we found
life in our dusty little metropolis so charming, and why it was that
we felt such pity for those who had never experienced the delights of
our environment. Nor can I justify to such a reader the impulse which
led a woman whose husband had died far away in New England to bring his
body back to be laid to rest in the bare little cemetery amid the sage
brush.
“It’s not such a homelike country as the other,” I ventured.
“No,” she answered, “it isn’t, but he liked it.”
And so did we all; and the liking was not the less real because
it was an acquired taste. There was nothing in it akin to serious
public spirit. It was a whimsical liking, like that of Touchstone for
Audrey,--“An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own; a poor humour of
mine, sir, to take that that no man else will.”
When several thousand people, set down in the midst of a howling
wilderness, tacitly agree to consider it as the garden of the Lord,
they can do much. It pleases the ephemeral community to make believe
that it is permanent. The camp organizes itself into a city, with
all the offices and dignities appertaining thereto. Civilization is
extemporized like a game of dumb crambo. It amuses the citizens to
see their beloved city going about in institutions several sizes too
large for it. Nothing is taken literally. Humor is accepted not as a
private possession, but as a public trust, and cultivated in a spirit
of generous coöperation.
In the town were men whose education and experience had been in
the great world. There were mine superintendents who a little while
ago might have been in Germany or Cornwall; there were assayers and
engineers fresh from the great technical schools, and “experts” full of
geological lore. The mines were as rich in litigation as in silver, and
there were lawyers great and small.
But all were dominated by one typical character who was accepted as
the oracle of the land,--“The Honest Miner.” To him saloons were
dedicated with alluring titles, such as “The Honest Miner’s Delight”
and “The Honest Miner’s Rest.” At the end of the gulch was “The Honest
Miner’s Last Chance,”--one which he seldom missed. The newspapers and
political orators appealed to his untutored judgments as the last word
of political wisdom. He occupied the position which elsewhere is held
by the “Sturdy Yeoman” or the “Solid Business Man.”
The Honest Miner of the Far West is one of those typical Americans who
are builders of commonwealths. His impress is upon the western half of
our continent. He is a nomad, the last of a long line of adventurers
to whom the delight of the new world is in its newness. Sometimes his
work is permanent, but he never is quite sure. His habitual mood is one
of sober satire.
I know nothing more pleasant than to sit with an old-timer who has
spent years in prospecting for silver and gold, and listen to his
reminiscences. Here is a philosopher indeed, one with an historic
perspective. He has the experience of the Wandering Jew, without his
world-weariness. He has seen the rise and fall of cities and the
successive dynasties of mining kings. His life has been a mingling of
society and solitude. With his pack upon his back he has wandered into
desert places where no man had been since the making of the world,--at
least, no man with an eye to the main chance. A few weeks later the
lonely cañon has become populated with eager fortune-seekers. The camp
becomes a city which to the eyes of the Honest Miner is one of the
wonders of the world. A year later he revisits the scene, and it is as
Tadmor in the Wilderness. He pauses to refresh his mind with ancient
history, and then passes on to join in a new “excitement.” He measures
time by these excitements as the Greeks measured it by Olympiads.
He loves to tell of the ups and downs of his own fortune. There is
no bitterness in his memory of his failures. They relieve the record
from the monotony that belongs to assured success. His successes
are not less gratifying because, like all things earthly, they have
had a speedy ending. A dozen times he has “struck it rich.” He has
thrown away his pick and shovel and gone below to bask in the smiles
of fortune. He has indulged in vague dreams of going to Europe, of
looking up his family tree, and of cultivating grammar and other fine
arts. Fortune continued to smile, but after a while her smile became
sardonic, and with a wink she said, “Time’s up!” Then the Honest Miner
would take up his pick and shovel and return to his work, neither a
sadder nor a wiser man,--in fact, exactly the same kind of man he was
before. That Experience is a teacher is a pedantic theory which he
rejects with scorn. Experience is not a schoolmaster, Experience is a
chum who likes to play practical jokes upon him. Just now he has given
him a tumble and got the laugh on him. But just wait awhile! And he
chuckles to himself as he thinks how he will outwit Experience.
All the traditions of the mining country confirm him in his point of
view: Listen to what Experience says, and then do just the opposite.
It is the unexpected that happens. The richest diggings bear the most
lugubrious names. The Montanian delights to tell of the riches taken
out of Last Chance Gulch. The Arizonian for years boasted of the gayety
of Tombstone and the amazing prosperity of the Total Wreck Mine.
* * * * *
Certain physiologists are now telling us that the poetic praise of
wine is based upon a mistake. Alcohol, they say, is not a stimulant,
but a depressant. It does not stimulate the imagination so much as it
depresses the critical faculty so that dullness may easily pass for
wit. An idea will occur to a sober man as being rather bright, but
before he has time to express it he sees that it is not so. Under the
inhibition of good sense he holds his tongue and saves his reputation.
But in a convivial company the inhibition is removed. Everybody says
whatever is uppermost in his mind. The mice play, not because they are
more lively than before, but only because the cat is away.
On first hearing this theory, it seemed to me that it was the most
powerful temperance argument which could be formulated. But I am not
sure but that it leaves the matter very much where it found it. After
all, the man who is oppressed by the dullness of his ordinary condition
would enjoy feeling brilliant, even if he were not really so.
In trying to recall any specific instances of wit and humor in my
Nevada town, I am compelled to fall back on the theory of the removal
of inhibition. Life was not more amusing there than elsewhere,--it
only seemed so. There were no “best people” whose critical judgments
inhibited the self-expression of less favored classes. Every one
feeling at liberty to be himself and to express his own opinion,
unfailing variety was assured. Society, being composed of all sorts and
conditions of men, was in a state of perpetual effervescence. A very
ordinary man, who elsewhere might have passed unnoticed in a life of
drudgery, became a notable character.
There, for example, was Old Multitude, so called from the many oxen
attached to the huge wagons he convoyed to the distant mines. He was a
bull-whacker of the old school. His surname had long been lost in the
abyss of time. Old Multitude was not looked upon as a mere individual.
The public had adopted him, and he had become an institution.
When he was about to depart, a crowd would gather on the main street,
as the inhabitants of a little seaport town gather to watch the
departure of a ship. Old Multitude bore his honors meekly, but he was
conscious that he was the chief actor in an important social function.
There was nothing ill-advised in his actions, and his words were fitly
chosen as he walked down the line, addressing to each beast of his
multitudinous team the appropriate malediction. His wide vocabulary
on such occasions contrasted strangely with his usual taciturnity.
The words taken by themselves were blood-curdling enough, but as they
rose and fell in mighty undulations it seemed as if he were intoning a
liturgy.
And there was Old Tansy, a bit of wreckage from the times of ’49. There
was a tradition that Tansy had seen better days; at least, it was hard
to imagine how he could have seen worse. He lived without visible means
of support, and yet he was not submerged. It pleased the community
to accept Tansy as a character worth knowing in spite of his fallen
fortunes. His obvious failings were always clothed in soft euphemisms.
No one could say that he had ever seen him drunk, and on the other hand
no one would be so rash as to assert that he had ever seen him sober.
In the border land between moderate drinking and inebriety, Tansy dwelt
in peace.
What most endeared Tansy to his fellows was his mild religiosity, which
manifested itself in persistent church-going. He was no fair-weather
Christian. There was no occasion when he would not desert his
favorite saloon to take his accustomed place in the back pew of the
Presbyterian church. Only once did Tansy express an opinion in regard
to the services which he so assiduously attended. A minister passing
through the town preached a lurid sermon on the future punishment of
the wicked. He spared no materialistic imagery to make his remarks
effective. At the close of the service Tansy, instead of going out, as
was his custom, went forward and, grasping the minister’s hands, said
in a tone of quiet satisfaction, “Parson, it done me good.”
Just what the nature of the good was he did not indicate. I suppose
that there was something in the unction of the preacher that recalled
memories of the past.
There was one person whom I always recall with peculiar pleasure. To
see him coming over the divide in a cloud of dust was to see one of the
typical forms of creation. He was known, on account of the huge pair
of goggles which he wore, as “Four-Eyed Nick.” He dwelt in a cabin in
the most desolate part of the mountain, and he fitted his environment
perfectly. He seemed as natural a product of the soil as the sage
brush, for like it he had learned to exist where there was very little
water.
Great was the joy in the community when one day Four-Eyed Nick
announced that he had struck pay ore and that he was about to
celebrate his good fortune by getting married. Every one was intensely
interested. The newspapers made an especial feature of the approaching
marriage in high life. Nick was dazed by the sudden glare of publicity.
Who should be invited? His generous heart rebelled against any
discrimination, and he solved his problem by saying, “Come one! Come
all!” He engaged every vehicle in the town to be at the disposal of
such of his fellow citizens as would honor him with their presence at
his nuptials.
It would have delighted the heart of Chaucer to have seen the
procession of wedding guests wending their way over the ten miles of
abominable mountain road to Nick’s cabin. Not on the road to Canterbury
was there more variety or more hearty good fellowship. Nick had invited
the town, and the town was bent on showing its appreciation of the
compliment. The mayor and members of the city council, the lawyers,
editors, doctors, clergymen, gamblers, mining experts, saloon-keepers,
and honest miners all joined heartily in doing honor to one whom they,
for the moment, agreed to consider their most distinguished fellow
citizen.
No one could remain long in assured obscurity. It pleased the community
to turn its search-light now upon one member and now upon another, and
give him a brief experience of living in the public eye. Greatness of
one sort or another was sure to be thrust upon one in the course of
the year. The choicest spirits of the town were always collaborating
in some work of high-grade fiction, and were on the lookout for
interesting material. It would have been churlish for any one when his
turn came to have refused to be a notability.
An English writer laments the fact that the schools send out thousands
of persons whose imaginations have been stifled by the too prosaic
discipline which they have undergone. “Why,” he says, “is it that
ninety-nine persons out of a hundred lose this faculty in the earliest
period of their childhood? It is simply because their bringing up has
consisted in the persistent inoculation with the material facts of
life, and the correspondingly persistent elimination of all imaginative
ideas.”
He blames parents who give their children mechanical toys, especially
if they are well made. Even a doll should not have too much
verisimilitude. “It would be better to place a bundle of rags in
the arms of a little girl, and tell her to imagine it to be a baby.
She would, if left to herself with no other resource than her own
fancy learn to exercise all her dormant powers of imagination and
originality.”
That kind of education the Honest Miner has carried into mature life.
He is full of imaginative ideas. The barest shanty is glorified in his
eyes if it bears the sign “Palace Hotel” or “Delmonico’s.” If he cannot
have the thing, he takes satisfaction in the name. Above all else, he
craves variety.
The inhabitants of Gold Hill used to relate with pleasure the exploits
of Sandy Bowers. When he struck an incredibly rich pocket in the
mountain, Sandy built for himself a huge and expensive mansion in
Washoe Valley. He imported all kinds of trees from foreign lands, none
of which would grow. He filled his house with pianos, and when some one
suggested sheet music he telegraphed to New York: “Send me some sheet
music, one of every kind.”
It was the desire for one of every kind which induced our community,
when it put off the habits of a “camp” and became a “city,” to lift
into temporary prominence an elderly farmer from Pennsylvania who had
drifted into Nevada without changing any of his ways. He came from
York County, where he would have gone on his way unnoticed, for there
were so many like him. But in the silver country he was different
from the common run of fortune-seekers, therefore he was made much of.
Some local Diogenes turned his lantern upon him and discovered that he
was an honest man, honest in a plodding, Pennsylvania Dutch fashion.
“Honest John” became a man of note. Then some one suggested that we had
“in our midst a grand old man.” That was enough to make the political
fortune of the honest man. He was elected to a position of power in the
new city government, for every one was anxious to see what our “grand
old man” would do.
He proved a thorn in the flesh of the politicians. He introduced a
reign of rigid economy which made the local statesmen despair of the
Republic. It was decided that the city had had too much of a good
thing. The Grand Old Man should be deposed,--he should not be mayor,
nor member of the council, nor any such thing.
But the municipal charter had been conceived in that generous fashion
which is proper to a state where there are offices in excess of the
needs of the population. The Grand Old Man discovered that there was
one office which had been overlooked by the astute politicians: that
of the Superintendent of Streets and Sidewalks. The streets had not
been clearly differentiated from the surrounding desert, and, as for
sidewalks, the citizens had been accustomed to cut across the country
wherever it pleased them. The highways having been left to the kindly
influence of Nature, it never occurred to any one that they should be
officially superintended. The Grand Old Man cast a ballot for himself
as Superintendent of Streets and Sidewalks, and when the returns were
in, it was found that his name led all the rest. He was declared
elected by a majority of one.
Then he began to magnify his office. He brought forth a plan of the
city which had heretofore been a dead letter. He discovered streets
where the wildest imagination had not supposed streets to be possible.
Prominent citizens were arrested for obstructing mythical sidewalks. He
was encouraged to stretch his prerogatives to the utmost, for every one
was curious to see how far they would go. For six months he ruled by
right of eminent domain. Leading lawyers gave it as their opinion that
all rights not expressly reserved by the Federal and State governments
were vested in the Grand Old Man. The Methodist minister, who was
inclined to sensationalism, preached a sermon from the text in Nehemiah
vi. 6: “It is reported among the heathen, and Gashmu saith it.” “Who
this Gashmu was,” said the preacher, in beginning his discourse, “we
do not know, but from the importance attributed to his remarks we may
fairly assume that he was the Superintendent of Streets and Sidewalks
in Jerusalem.”
* * * * *
Lowell describes the rough humor of the frontier, with the free and
easy manners which characterize
this brown-fisted rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid,
This back-woods Charlemagne of empires new,
Whose blundering heel instinctively finds out
The goutier foot of speechless dignities,
Who, meeting Cæsar’s self, would slap his back,
Call him ‘Old Horse’ and challenge to a drink.
He had in mind the backwoodsmen whom sturdy apostles like Peter
Cartwright labored with to such good purpose. But the Honest Miner,
though a pioneer, is not a backwoodsman. His humor is of a different
quality. He would not think of slapping Cæsar on the back and calling
him “Old Horse.” It would seem more amusing to him to address some one
who might properly be called “Old Horse” with titles of honor.
“Truthful James” delights in euphemism. He does not object to calling a
spade a spade, but he refuses to do so in such a way as to give offense.
Which it is not my style
To produce needless pain
By statements that rile
Or that go ’gin the grain.
He is no “brown-fisted rough” who delights in swagger. There is
roughness enough all about him, and it pleases him to cultivate the
amenities. His gentlemanliness is often carried to excess.
The most characteristic humor of the Honest Miner consists, not in
grotesque exaggeration, but in delicate understatement. What can be
more considerate than the notice posted by the side of an open shaft:
“Gentlemen will please not fall down this shaft, for there are men at
work below.”
A Nevada minister once described to me the action of a brother
minister in the early days. The minister went to a certain town where
he offended the lawless element, and was threatened with physical
violence if he persisted in his intention of preaching. My friend
described the method by which the liberty of prophesying was asserted.
“He went into the pulpit, laid his revolver on the Bible--and then he
preached _extempore_.”
The manner of narration savored of the soil. The Honest Miner under
such circumstances would subordinate everything to emphasis on the
correct homiletical method. No matter how able the minister might be,
it was evident that if he were closely confined to his notes, his
delivery could not be effective.
A good woman described the way in which her minister, a young man fresh
from the theological school, made one of his first parish calls. He
found his parishioner, who had been extolled as one of the pillars of
the church, in a state of intoxication, and he was chased out of the
house and some distance down the street.
“We were sorry it happened, for it gave him an unpleasant impression of
the congregation. You know Mr. ---- met with several rebuffs.”
The unconventional episode was related with all the prim propriety of
“Cranford.”
The perfect democracy of a mining camp develops a certain naïve
truth-telling, which has all the unexpectedness which belongs to
the observations of a boy. There is no attempt to reduce everything
to uniformity, or to prove any particular thesis. The gossip of a
conventional village where people know each other too well is apt to
be malicious. A creditable action is narrated, and then comes the
inevitable “but.” The subject of conversation falls in the estimation
of the hearers with a sudden thud.
The Honest Miner does not attempt to pass final judgment or to arrange
his fellow men according to any sort of classification. He speaks of
them as he sees them, and so virtues and failings jostle one another
and take no offense. The result is a moral inconsequence which has
all the effect of studied wit. This is what delights us in the
characterization of Thompson of Angel’s:
Frequently drunk was Thompson, but always polite to the stranger.
As we read the line we smile, not so much at Thompson as at the society
of which he was a part. We see behind him the sympathetic company at
Angel’s. Here was a public with whose temper he was familiar. He could
trust himself to the judgment of his peers. No misdemeanor would blind
them to such virtues as he actually possessed. He could appeal to them
with perfect confidence.
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.
The Western mining camp is not primarily an educational institution,
yet it has served a most important function in the making of
Americans. The young man is fortunate who on leaving college can take
a post-graduate course in a community where he can study sociology at
first hand. He will learn many things, especially that human nature
is not so simple as it seems, but that it has many “dips, spurs, and
angles.”
A SAINT RECANONIZED
[Illustration]
All the world loves a lover,” but all the world does not love a saint.
Our hearts do not leap up when we behold a halo on the title-page, and
so the lives of the heroes of the Church are frequently neglected. When
the saint has been duly canonized, that is generally the end of him in
popular esteem. But sometimes the ecclesiastical and secular judgments
coincide and the saint is invested with human interest.
So it has been with St. Francis of Assisi,--given the highest honors in
his church, he has captivated the imagination of the world. Protestants
vie with Catholics in doing him honor. At no time has his name been
more familiar or his legend more often repeated than in our own day. He
has been recanonized.
This renewal of interest in the Franciscan legend is all the more
interesting because it carries us into a region so remote from that in
which we habitually dwell.
“Now it came to pass that as Francis, the servant of the Lord, was
singing the praises of the Lord with joy and gladness, certain robbers
fell upon him and fiercely questioned him who he was. And he answered,
‘I am the herald of the King of Heaven.’ And the robbers fell upon him
with blows and cast him into a ditch, saying, ‘Lie there, thou herald
of nothing!’ When they had departed Francis arose and went through the
forest, singing with a loud voice the praises of the Creator.”
These words take us into another world than ours. To enter that world
we must not only lay aside our easily besetting sins, but our easily
besetting virtues as well. We must cast aside all the prudential
virtues, we must rid our minds of all prejudice in favor of scientific
charity and rationalistic schemes of philanthropy, and we must disclaim
personal responsibility for the progress of modern civilization. With
such impedimenta the pilgrim of thought might possibly get as far
back as the sixteenth century, but it would be impossible for him to
penetrate into the thirteenth. He who would do so must first drink deep
of Lethe. He must put out of mind those persons and events which have
been the distinctive influences of the modern world. He must forget
Luther, and wash his soul clean of every trace of Calvin; every echo of
the raillery of Voltaire must have died away, and his mind must have
been kept unspotted from the world of Newton and of Darwin.
Above all, if he would enter into the social dreams of the thirteenth
century, he must forget that he ever heard of such a science as
political economy. He must renounce the old Adam and all his works,--I
mean Adam Smith.
But on the other side of Lethe there are pure fountains, and dark
forests where robbers lurk, and where saints are singing the high
praises of God, and beyond are the “regions dim of rapture” where they
are lost from the eyes of their disciples.
And it may not be in vain to turn aside from the consideration of the
engrossing questions of our day, to enter into that dim world and look
out upon it through the eyes of its truest saints. They were eyes blind
to many things we see clearly, but they saw some things which we do not
always see; at any rate they were eyes--
Beyond my knowing of them beautiful,
Beyond all knowing of them wonderful,
Beautiful in the light of holiness.
So Francis of Assisi has an especial interest for every student of
Christianity and for every student of ethics. For the student of
Christianity he stands as a man who, while neither a theologian nor
a reformer, and having no place among the intellectual leaders of
mankind, has an undisputed spiritual leadership. His place is that of
the little child whom Jesus placed in the midst and of whom he said,
“Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”
For the student of ethics St. Francis is of interest because, while he
had an invincible ignorance of scientific ethics, yet the real emphasis
of his life and teaching was on the finest kind of ethical idealism. We
are reminded of Shakespeare’s lines:--
Love is too young to know what conscience is,
Yet who knows not that conscience is born of love.
There are some characters, and St. Francis is among them, who belong
so completely to their own age that we cannot take them out of their
environment. The beauty of their lives is like that of some shy wild
flower which will not bear transplanting. If we would enjoy it we must
go where it grows. To appreciate these characters we need not critical
knowledge, but imaginative sympathy.
There is an old Irish legend of a young hero who sailed to a far
country and married a beautiful princess. Living there he enjoyed
perpetual youth, and three centuries passed away as if they had been
but three years. Then came a longing to return to his own native land.
After much entreating his fair wife allowed him to return on one
condition, and that was that he should not dismount from the white
steed she gave him. The prince came back, but riding in youthful
strength and beauty through the familiar land, at last he forgot
the condition. Dismounting, his feet touched the ground, and the
enchantment vanished. Suddenly he realized the passage of time. His
friends, the heroes of his youth, were dead and forgotten. He was very
old; his strength had withered away. The joyous paganism in which he
had been bred had been driven away. He saw processions of monks and
nuns, and heard the sound of church bells, and saw over all the shadow
of the cross. He belonged to the old order that had passed away, now
the destinies of the land were in the hands of new men.
Something of this same caution must be used by those who would see
the St. Francis whom the people long ago loved and worshiped. He is
the embodiment of mediæval goodness. Let us beware of disenchanting
literalism, lest suddenly the radiant youth disappear and we see only
the relic of an age that has passed away.
Let us not look back at St. Francis. Let us stand at the beginning of
the thirteenth century and look forward. Let us share the dream of the
youth who went through the forest singing the praise of God.
The transformation of worldly ambition into spiritual was never
more vividly told than in the legend of St. Francis, by the Three
Companions. We see Francis the gay son of Peter Bernardone, merchant of
Assisi, transformed into a knight of Lady Poverty.
“Then a few years later a certain noble of the city of Assisi provided
himself with warlike gear to go into Apulia to increase his profit of
money and renown. Upon hearing this, Francis did aspire to go with him
and to be made a knight by a certain count, Gentile by name; wherefore
he made ready stuffs as costly as he could, poorer in riches than his
fellow citizen, but more profuse in largesse. One night when he had
given all his thoughts to bringing this to pass, and was fevered with
the desire for making the journey, he was visited by the Lord, who
draweth him as one eager for glory to the pinnacle of glory by a vision
and uplifteth him. For while sleeping that night one appeared unto him,
calling him by name, and leading him into the palace of a fair bride,
very pleasant and full of knightly armor, to wit, glittering shields
and other apparel hanging on the wall as it were waiting for knights to
accoutre them therewithal. And while he, rejoicing greatly, marveled
silently within himself what this might be, he asked whose were these
arms flashing with such splendor and this so pleasant palace? And
the answer was made him that the palace and all things therein were
his own and his knights’. And thus awakening with joyous heart he
rose early.... And so much gayer than his wont did he seem that many
wondered thereat, and asked whence had he such joy, unto whom he would
reply, “I know that I shall be a great prince.”
It was not the sense of sin that proved the beginning of a new life
to this light-hearted Italian. It was rather the sense of a higher
chivalry. Another vision came to him. A voice asked, “‘Which can do the
better for thee, the lord or the servant?’
“And when he answered, ‘The lord,’ that other said again unto him,
‘Wherefore then dost thou leave the lord for the servant, and a rich
lord for a poor?’... Then waking he began earnestly to ponder this
vision. And just as in the first vision he had been, as it were,
quite carried out of himself for his great joy, coveting worldly
good fortune, so in this vision he withdrew within himself entirely,
wondering at its might, and meditating so earnestly that he could sleep
no more that night.”
At last the new vision took form in an enthusiastic way of life. In the
church Francis heard the words of the gospels, “Take no gold nor silver
nor money in your purses, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor staff.”
No further did he need to listen. Throwing away his purse, and putting
on the garb of a peasant, he devoted himself henceforth not simply
to the service of the poor, but to the worship of Poverty. Dante in
memorable words described this lover-like devotion.
For he in youth his father’s wrath incurred
For certain Dame, to whom as unto death
The gate of pleasure no one doth unlock;
* * * * *
Then day by day more fervently he loved her.
She reft of her first husband, scorned, obscure,
One thousand and one hundred years and more,
Waited without a suitor till he came.
* * * * *
So that when Mary still remained below
She mounted up with Christ upon the cross!
But that too darkly I may not proceed,
Francis and Poverty for these two lovers
Take thou henceforward in my speech diffuse.
Their concord and their joyous semblances
The love, the wonder, and the sweet regard,
They made to be the cause of holy thoughts.
Francis and Poverty--these lovers seem strange indeed to
twentieth-century eyes. An age when philanthropy strives for the
abolition of poverty and invites enlightened self-interest to its
aid cannot readily understand one who welcomed poverty as a blessed
condition. “No man,” said a disciple of St. Francis, “was ever so
covetous of wealth as he of poverty.”
We hear St. Francis discoursing with brother Leo concerning perfect
bliss. It lies not in knowledge or power or even in the ability to
convert the infidels to the Holy Faith. “When we shall come to St. Mary
of the Angels dripping with rain and tormented with cold and hunger,
and we shall knock at the door, and the porter shall say, ‘Who are ye?’
and we shall answer, ‘We are your brethren,’ and he shall say, ‘You
lie, you are two knaves that go about deceiving the people and stealing
from the poor’--if, when he leaves us in the cold and wet we shall
patiently endure, and say within ourselves, ‘Perhaps the porter reads
us aright,’ then, O brother Leo, thou mayest say, ‘Herein lies perfect
bliss.’”
We hear the passionate prayer, “O Lord Jesus, point out to me the ways
of poverty which were so dear to thee. O Jesus, who chosest to be poor,
the favor I ask of thee is to give me the privilege of poverty and to
be enriched by thy blessing.”
This was not the temper of ordinary asceticism. St. Francis was in
temper more an Epicurean than a Stoic. He was a lover of pleasure
and was not content with any kind of pleasure short of what he
conceived to be the highest. The ascetic was interested primarily in
the salvation of his own soul. Wealth and comfort were the temptations
of the devil to cheat him of his future reward. The hermit accepted
poverty as the hard road to Heaven; to St. Francis it was Heaven itself.
“Property is robbery,” he would have said, but not in the sense in
which a modern communist would use the words. It is the robbery not of
one’s neighbor but of one’s self. We take for granted that wealth is
a good thing and poverty an evil. No, St. Francis would say, there is
no good thing but what is good for the soul. It is good to be humble,
sympathetic, and thankful. It is good to be conscious of God’s presence
everywhere and to be close to the lowliest of his creatures. The means
of this grace are nearer to the peasant than to the prince. There
are some things that wealth buys. The rich man has his comforts, his
sheltered home, his group of friends and dependents, his servants and
his wide estates; his is the meekness that inherits the earth.
St. Francis found joy in the sacrifices and austerities which to
others were so painful. The predominant note is that of gladness. In
the midst of his penances he is light-hearted. He interpreted more
literally than we do the words, “Take no thought for the morrow.”
Some things are possible in Umbria and Galilee that seem wildly
impracticable under the fickle skies of New England. The sober prose of
religion may be translated into all languages and verified by all human
experience, but there is an idyllic poetry of religion that belongs
only to the climate where that poetry had birth. “The Little Flowers
of St. Francis” grew out of the same kindly soil and under the same
friendly skies that nourished the lilies that Jesus loved.
St. Francis always wore his halo with an easy grace. In spite of
his scourgings and fastings he was blithe and debonair. He was
saint-errant, as full of romance as any knight-errant of them all.
He was a lover of spiritual adventure, and delighted to attempt the
impossible.
To St. Francis voluntary poverty meant spiritual freedom. The preacher
was no longer dependent on powerful patrons or rich parishioners or
even on the fickle multitudes. The missionary did not need a missionary
board. He did not have to wait for a church building to be erected and
a pulpit to be prepared. Even a hermitage was a superfluity. “The true
hermit,” said St. Francis, “carries his cell about with him.” And so he
and his disciples preached and asked no man’s leave. Through all the
byways of Italy they wandered, proclaiming that God was in the fields
as well as in the churches. Entering a village Brother Francis would
say, “Love God and repent, good people. Love God and do penance.” And
Brother Egidio would say, “Yes, good people, do as Brother Francis
says, for he says what is right.”
And if there were no people to preach to there were always our sisters,
the birds, and now and then there was a wicked wolf who would yield to
moral suasion. We smile at this way of preaching to every creature, but
it is as we smile at the idiosyncrasies of one we love.
Many a preacher who has confined his preaching to human kind has put
less good sense into his sermons and shown less insight into the
causes of sin than did Francis in his discourse to the wolf of Gubbio.
The inhabitants who had suffered from his depredations hated him for
his wolfish iniquities. The saint saw that the cause of the evil was
economic rather than moral. He was a right-minded wolf; the trouble was
that he was hungry. St. Francis entered into a covenant of peace with
him.
“‘Brother Wolf, inasmuch as it pleases you to make and keep this peace,
I promise you that so long as you shall live you shall not suffer
hunger, forasmuch as I am aware that hunger has caused your every
crime. But since I have got for you this grace, I require, Brother
Wolf, your promise never again to do harm to any human being, neither
to any beast. Do you promise?’ And St. Francis stretching forth his
hand, the wolf uplifted his right paw and gave him the pledge of faith
as best he could.”
It was in the same spirit that St. Francis went forth on his mission
to the Sultan. The Crusaders had gone forth to destroy the infidels.
Francis, in the simplicity of his heart, thought the better way would
be to convert them. Neither way proved to be altogether effective, but
certainly the latter plan was the more Christian.
In the history of preaching there have been many vicissitudes.
Sometimes the preacher has been a philosopher, sometimes an advocate,
sometimes he has adopted the tone of a man of business. In the
preaching of St. Francis we are taken back to the time of the wandering
minstrels.
“So great was the sweetness and consolation of his spirit that he
called for Brother Pacificus whom the world entitled the King of Verse
and Courteous Doctor of Song, and desired to send him with the other
friars to go together through the world, preaching and singing the
“Praises of the Lord.” And he desired that he among them who was the
best preacher should first preach to the people, and when the sermon
was ended all the others should sing together the “Praises of the
Lord,” as the Lord’s minstrels; and at the end he desired the preacher
should say to the people, ‘We are the Lord’s minstrels, and the reward
we ask of you is that you turn to true repentance.’”
No wonder that the people loved Brother Francis when he brought
religion to them in such a fashion, and that there would gather around
him
A crowd of shepherds with as sunburnt looks
As may be read of in Arcadian books.
With all his saintly austerities St. Francis was always a gentleman.
Even the most admiring biographers cannot hide his humanness. The
Lives of the Saints do not contain many such incidents as that in the
chapter in “The Mirror of Perfection” entitled “How he comforted a Sick
Friar by eating Grapes with Him.” It was a little thing to do, but I
am sure that St. Dominic would never have thought of it. The friar had
been overdoing the mortification of the flesh, and had fallen ill.
“Blessed Francis said to himself: ‘If that friar would eat ripe grapes
in the morning I believe he would be cured!’ And as he thought so he
did. Rising early in the morning, he called the friar secretly, and
took him to a vineyard near the place, and choosing a vine that had
good grapes fit for eating, he sat down by the vine with the friar and
began to eat grapes, that the friar should not be ashamed of eating
alone.... And all the days of his life this friar remembered the pity
and compassion shown him by the blessed Father, and would relate what
had happened to the other friars.”
It was an age of miracles, but St. Francis never allowed them to
clutter up his little world. They must keep their place. When Brother
Peter died in great sanctity, he was immediately worshiped as a saint.
Great crowds came to his tomb, and many miracles were wrought. This
was well, but there must be a measure in all things. So one day St.
Francis went to the door of the tomb, and his most persuasive voice
said, “Brother Peter, in your lifetime you gave perfect obedience. Know
that your brethren are disturbed by the crowds that come to your tomb.
I command you, by holy obedience, that you work no more miracles.” And
from that day Brother Peter abstained from any interference with the
order of nature.
A true son of the Church, yet because of the unworldliness of
his nature Francis from the first transcended the sphere of
ecclesiasticism, and lived in the freedom of the spirit. In an age when
ritualism was triumphant he chose an unsacerdotal ministry. At a time
when the highest piety was supposed to manifest itself in the building
and adornment of churches, he insisted on the higher grace of charity.
When a case of need was presented to him, he said: “Sell the ornaments
on the altar of the Blessed Virgin. Be assured that she would be more
pleased to have her altar without adornment than to see the gospel of
her Son any longer set at naught.”
Pope Innocent had many who came with ambitious plans. There were always
monks who desired to be abbots, and priests who desired to be bishops.
But one day Brother Francis came desiring that he and certain poor
brethren might be allowed to live according to the rule of the gospel.
They were not content to be poor after the conventional fashion of the
great monastic institutions, where corporate wealth was married to
individual poverty. Their poverty should be real. Almost everything had
been organized around a treasury. They would like to organize brotherly
kindness, patience, humility, and love according to their own laws.
And the request was made so simply that Pope Innocent could do nothing
but grant it, though it made his own ambitions stand out in startling
contrast.
* * * * *
The life of St. Francis was very mediæval, which was but another way of
saying that its idealism was not balanced by the scientific temper. Men
in those days delighted in paradoxes, and were contented with no half
measures. His experience was different from ours. He did not confront
the poverty of the slums of our great cities. It was the poverty of
Umbria. It was a poverty that was acquainted with hunger and which wore
coarse garments, but it had the freedom of the fields and the open
roads. We have problems to solve with which he was unacquainted.
Yet there is something in his daring paradox which attracts us. Beneath
all its extravagance there is a vitality in the joyous worship of My
Lady Poverty. For what is worship? It is, literally, worth-ship. It is
the recognition of intrinsic values. It is just here that the modern
man is beginning to be distrustful of himself. He has been marvelously
successful in obtaining his desires, but has he desired the best
things? In the height of his achievement he cannot help asking, “After
all, is it worth what it has cost?”
Things turn out differently from what had been expected. A life devoted
to personal gain is likely to be disappointing. A whole community which
has no other means of estimating worth than the increase in wealth
is still more disappointing. It has no proper means of government. A
plutocracy is but another name for moral anarchy. Special interests
become intolerably domineering and override the common good. In a
society where everything is measured by money, where is the limitation
to despotism? What is to prevent the rich man from buying up his
neighbors and using all their talents to serve his own narrow purposes?
He is able to pay for the best food and drink and shelter. Why may he
not bend to his will the best human ability?
The answer comes from the iconoclasts, who strike boldly at the idols
of the market-place. They have something that is not for sale, and they
can afford to laugh at the highest bidders. They are not asking favors.
They are likely to be inexperienced in the ways of the world, but the
world fears them as it fears all forces which it cannot understand.
They cannot be cajoled or threatened, for they have learned that it is
possible to be happy and poor.
My Lady Poverty has still her worshipers. She has long been honored by
the devotion of true artists. The man of science gravely acknowledges
her, and confesses without shame that he is too busy to make money.
There are statesmen who are the despair of the party managers
because when the question comes, “What can we do for you?” they
answer “Nothing.” Every now and then there occurs that disconcerting
phenomenon which we call genius. It upsets all calculations and refuses
to respond to the law of supply and demand. The second best may be
bought, but the very best is given away. Now and then, too, out of
our conventional gentilities there comes an ideal gentleman. He would
adorn the most exclusive circles, were it not that he has a passion for
the best society, and he has learned that the best society is never
exclusive. He takes the part of the uttermost man, and finds his joy
in the companionship of those who are aspiring and struggling. And
there is the increasing number of the nature-lovers who enter into
the religious feelings which St. Francis voiced in “The Song of the
Creatures.” They love one who could worship out of doors, and speak
familiarly of Master Sun and Brother Wind and Sister Water. As they
sit around their campfires they join heartily in the praise of Brother
Fire. “He is jocund, robust, and strong and bright.”
They love to read again the story of how St. Francis and Brother Masseo
stopped at noon under a tree where there was a broad smooth stone to
serve as a table for their simple meal. Close by was a spring of cold
water.
“What a treasure we have here!” cried Francis in delight.
“Father,” answered Brother Masseo, “how can you talk so when we have no
tablecloth or knife or cup!”
Brother Masseo voices the opinion of the majority, but there are
increasing numbers of true Franciscans. St. Francis is the patron saint
of those who believe in Nature as well as in Grace. In spite of all his
austerities he is endeared to us because he represented the bohemianism
of piety.
AS HE SEES HIMSELF
The exercises of Commencement Day had been unusually interesting,
though prolonged. I had attended them all. I had listened to the wisdom
of the selected members of the graduating class, and afterwards to the
less dignified but more optimistic remarks of the old graduates. The
general impression that I received was that though the country had been
in danger, the worst was over.
Returning home I found a caller waiting for me in the library. He was a
rather handsome man in his way, but a close observer might have noticed
a certain shiftiness in his eyes and hard lines about his mouth, and
perhaps other signs of a misspent life. Not being a close observer, I
did not notice any of these things. He struck me as an ordinary person
with whom it might be a pleasure to talk. I was somewhat surprised at
his first remark, which was made by way of introduction.
“I am,” he said, “well known to the police, and am said to be the most
dangerous criminal of my class now at large. I am an expert forger and
have served time in four prisons.”
His frank statement was preliminary to the request for a temporary
loan that would enable him to complete the work of reformation, that
was endangered by a lack of funds. It was late in the day, and before
acceding to his request it was necessary that there should be some
investigation, so I asked him to call on the morrow.
“I have been at the Commencement exercises all day,” I said, “and am
not in a condition to be of much help to you just now; but if you would
like to stay a while and chat, I should be glad.”
He welcomed the suggestion, and, now that the matter of business had
been postponed, he was at his ease. In a friendly way he made me
acquainted with the general theory of forging and check-raising,--at
least so far as it is intelligible to the lay mind. His criticism of
prison management was acute, and he pointed out the seamy side of
the plans of the reformers. I listened with docility to his story of
the under world. He was a well-educated man with an appreciation of
good literature, which was a characteristic, he informed me, of most
forgers. He was especially interested in sociology, and had all its
best phrases at his tongue’s end. He attributed all his misfortunes
to Society. For one thing I listened in vain,--the admission that in
some respects he might himself have been remiss. The idea of reciprocal
obligation did not seem to have any place in his philosophy. As
delicately as I could I tried to turn the conversation from the sin
of Society, which I readily acknowledged, to the less obvious point
of personal responsibility. Granting that Society was imperfectly
organized, that juries were ignorant, and judges lacking in the quality
of mercy, and prison wardens harsh, and chaplains too simple-minded,
were there not faults on the other side that it might be profitable to
correct? It was of no use to try to induce such currents of thought;
they were quickly short-circuited.
At last I said, “You have told me what you did before you concluded to
reform. I am curious to know how, in those days, you looked at things.
Was there anything which you wouldn’t have done, not because you were
afraid of the law, but because you felt it would be wrong?”
“Yes,” he said, “there is one thing I never would do, because it always
seemed low down. I never would steal.”
It was evident that further discussion would be unprofitable without
definition of terms. I found that by stealing he meant petty larceny,
which he abhorred. In our condemnation of the sneak thief and the
pickpocket we were on common ground. His feeling of reprobation was,
if anything, more intense than that which I felt at the time. He
alluded to the umbrellas and other portable articles he had noticed
in the hallway. Any one who would take advantage of an unsuspecting
householder by purloining such things was a degenerate. He had no
dealings with such moral imbeciles.
It seemed to me that I might press the analogy which instantly occurred
to me between “stealing” and forgery.
“Do they not,” I said, “seem to you to amount to very much the same
thing?”
I had struck a wrong note. Analogies are ticklish things to handle,
for things which are alike in certain respects are apt to be quite
different in other respects. His mind was intent on the differences.
The sneak thief, he told me, is a vulgar fellow of no education. The
forger and the check-raiser are experts. They are playing a game. Their
wits are pitted against the wits of the men who are paid high salaries
for detecting them. They belong to quite different spheres. If we are
looking for analogies we should look up and not down.
“You wanted to know,” he said, “what was the difference between
stealing and check-raising. Now, let me ask you a question. What’s
the difference between check-raising and some of those big financial
operations we’ve all been reading about? Suppose I have a check for
five dollars, and I put my brains into it and I manipulate it so that I
can pass it off for five hundred. I shove it in to the cashier and he
takes it. Before he finds out his mistake, I have made myself scarce.
What’s the difference between that transaction and what the ‘big
fellows’ on the street are doing?” He mentioned several names that I
had not thought of in that connection.
“The difference,” said I, “is--” Then it occurred to me that it was a
subject to which I should give further thought. So we postponed the
conversation till he should call again--which he never did.
* * * * *
I may be doing injustice to my friend the forger, but he gave me the
impression that he considered himself to be, on the whole, a rather
admirable character. His proposed change of business seemed to be
rather a concession to the prejudices of the legal profession than
the result of any personal scruple. As he saw himself he was a man of
idealistic temper whose ideals conflicted with social usage. Society
was all the time getting into his way, and in the inevitable collisions
he had usually the worst of it. He regretted this, but he bore no
malice. By the time a man has reached middle life and accumulated a
good deal of experience he takes the world as he finds it.
He had encased himself in a moral system which was self-consistent and
which explained to his own satisfaction all that had happened to him.
One thing fitted into another, and there was no room for self-reproach.
* * * * *
Many attempts have been made to depict the character of an
accomplished scamp. But Gil Blas and Roderick Random and Jonathan
Wild the Great are after all seen from the outside. The author
may attempt to do them justice, but there is a vein of irony that
reveals a judgment of his own. They lack the essential element of
incorrigibility, which is that the scamp does not suspect himself, has
not found himself out.
No novelist has ever been able to give such a portraiture of a
complacent criminal as was given a century ago in the autobiography of
Stephen Burroughs.
Burroughs was the son of a worthy clergyman of Hanover, New Hampshire,
and from the outset was looked upon as a black sheep. As a mere
boy he ran away from home and joined the army, and then with equal
irresponsibility deserted. He became a ship’s surgeon, a privateersman,
then a self-ordained minister, a counterfeiter, a teacher of youth,
a founder of libraries, and a miscellaneous philanthropist. He was a
patriot and an optimist and an enthusiastic worker in the cause of
general education. He was chock-full of fine sentiment and had a gift
for its expression. He enjoyed doing good, though in his own way, and
never neglected any opportunity to rebuke those who he felt were in
the wrong. He had a desire to reform the world, and had no doubt of
the plans which he elaborated. He was capable on occasions of acts
of magnanimity, which, while not appreciated by the public, gave him
great pleasure in the retrospect. The intervals between his various
enterprises were spent in New England jails. These experiences only
deepened his love of liberty, which was one of the passions of his life.
Burroughs had a happy disposition that enabled him to get a measure of
satisfaction out of all the vicissitudes of his life. He had learned
neither to worry nor to repine. He was not troubled by the harsh
judgments of his fellow men, for he had learned to find his happiness
in the approbation of his own conscience.
He writes: “I possess an uncommon share of sensibility, and at the same
time maintain an equality of mind that is uncommon, particularly in the
midst of those occurrences which are calculated to wound the feelings.
I have learned fortitude in the school of adversity. In draining the
cup of bitterness to its dregs, I have been taught to despise the
occurrences of misfortune. This one thing I fully believe, that our
happiness is more in our power than is generally thought, or at least
we have the ability of preventing that misery which is so common to
unfortunate situations. No state or condition in life, but from which
we may (if we exercise that reason which the God of Nature has given
us) draw comfort and happiness. We are too apt to be governed by the
opinions of others, and if they think our circumstances unhappy, to
consider them so ourselves, and of course make them so. The state of
mind is the only criterion of happiness or misery.”
It was from this lofty point of view that Stephen Burroughs wrote the
history of his own life. His tendency to didacticism interferes with
the limpid flow of the narrative. Sometimes a whole chapter will be
given over to moralizings, but the observations are never painful. They
all reveal the author’s cheerful acquiescence in the inevitability of
his own actions. Along with this there is the air of chastened surprise
over the fact that he was made the object of persecution.
At the very beginning of the narrative one recognizes an independence
which would do credit to a better man. In New England, clergymen
have always been looked upon as making good ancestors, and Burroughs
might have been pardoned if he had shown some family pride. From this
weakness he was free. “I am,” he says, “the only son of a clergyman,
living in Hanover, in the State of New Hampshire; and were any to
expect merit from their parentage, I might justly look for that
merit. But I am so far a Republican that I consider a man’s merit to
rest entirely with himself, without any regard to family, blood, or
connection.”
The accounts of the escapades of his boyhood are intermingled with
dissertations on the education of youth. “I have been in the habit
of educating youth for seven years, constantly; in the course of
my business I have endeavored to study the operations of the human
heart, that I might be able to afford that instruction which would be
salutary; and in this I find one truth clearly established, viz.: a
child will endeavor to be what you make him think mankind in general
are.”
The neglect of this truth on the part of his parents and teachers was
the cause of much annoyance to Burroughs. Throughout his life he was
the innocent victim of an educational mistake. Though after a while he
learned to forgive the early injustice, one can see that it rankled.
He endeavored to think well of mankind in general, but it was more
difficult than if he had been habituated to the exercise in infancy.
At Dartmouth young Burroughs was peculiarly unfortunate; he fell into
bad company. As an unkind fate would have it, his room-mate was an
exemplary young man who was studying for the ministry. It appears that
this misguided youth attempted to entice him into what he describes
as “a sour, morose, and misanthropic line of conduct.” Nothing could
have been more disastrous. “To be an inmate with such a character, you
will readily conceive, no way comported with a disposition like mine,
and consequently we never enjoyed that union and harmony of feeling in
our intercourse as room-mates which was necessary for the enjoyment of
social life.”
To the malign influence of his priggish room-mate several misfortunes
were attributed. In endeavoring to restore the moral equilibrium which
had been disturbed by the too great scrupulosity of his chum, he
exerted too much strength in the other direction. The result was that
“a powerful triumvirate” was formed against him in the Faculty. The
triumvirate triumphed and his connection with Dartmouth ended suddenly.
This gave occasion to a chapter on the failure of the institutions of
learning to prepare for real life. The author declares “more than one
half of the time spent in the universities, according to their present
establishment on this continent, is thrown away, and that my position
is founded in fact I will endeavor to prove.”
I do not see how his argument is affected by the fact to which the
editor calls attention in a carping footnote. “It is not strange that
the author should reason in this manner. He was expelled from college
in the second quarter of his second year, and in fact he studied but
little while he was a member.” The editor, I fear, had a narrow mind
and judged according to an academic standard which Burroughs would have
despised.
From the uncongenial limitations of a college town it was a
satisfaction to escape to sea. Here Burroughs’s versatility stood him
in good stead. “Having no doctor engaged, I undertook to act in that
capacity; and after obtaining the assistance, advice, and direction
of an old practitioner, together with marks set on each parcel of
medicine, I thought myself tolerably well qualified to perform the
office of a physician on board the ship.”
From his seafaring life Burroughs returned with his reputation under
a cloud. There were ugly rumors afloat which were readily believed by
a censorious world. For once he confesses that his philosophy failed
him. “I returned to my father’s house sunken and discouraged; the world
appeared a gloomy chaos; the sun arose to cast a sickly glimmer on
surrounding objects; the flowers of the field insulted my feelings with
their gayety and splendor; the frolicsome lamb, the playful kitten, and
the antic colt were beheld with those painful emotions which are beyond
description. Shall all nature, shall the brute creation break out into
irregular transports, by the overflowing of pleasing sensations, whilst
I am shut out from even the dim rays of hope?”
Certainly not. To a mind constituted as was his there was an absurdity
in the very suggestion. The brute creation should not have any monopoly
of comfortable sensations, so he cheered up immediately and spent the
next year loafing around his father’s house.
He had been on the coast of Africa and had taken part in some strange
scenes, but his moral sense had not been blunted to such an extent
that he could not grieve over some infractions of the moral law which
he observed in peaceful Hanover. He regretted that he had been led
inadvertently by a young man named Huntington to join a party which
robbed a farmer’s beehive.
“For some unaccountable reason or other, youth are carried away with
false notions of right and wrong. I know, for instance, that Huntington
possessed those principles of integrity that no consideration would
have induced him to deprive another of any species of property, except
fruit, bees, pigs, and poultry. And why it is considered by youth that
depriving another of these articles is less criminal than stealing any
other kind of property, I cannot tell.”
Burroughs himself was inclined to take a harsher view of these
transgressions than he did of some others; for example, of
counterfeiting, in which he was afterwards for a time engaged during
one of his brief pastorates.
The argument by which his scruples in this particular were overcome
are worth repeating. The law was indeed violated in its letter, but
might not a justification be found by one who interpreted it in a large
spirit of charity?
“Money is of itself of consequence only as we annex to it a nominal
value as the representation of property. Therefore we find the only
thing necessary to make a matter valuable is to induce the world to
deem it so; and let that esteem be raised by any means whatever, yet
the value is the same, and no one becomes injured by receiving it at
the valuation.”
The principle of fiat money having been established, the only question
that remained was whether the circumstances of the times were such as
to justify him in issuing the fiat. The answer was in the affirmative.
“That an undue scarcity of cash now prevails is a truth too obvious
for me to attempt to prove. Hence whoever contributes to increase the
quantity of cash does not only himself but likewise the community an
essential benefit.”
It was in his attempt to benefit the community in this way that he
first experienced the ingratitude of republics, being landed in the
Northampton jail.
But to see Burroughs at his best one must enter into his thoughts at
that crisis in his life when he determined that his true vocation was
preaching. He lingers fondly on his emotions at that period. It was at
a time when he had been driven out of Hanover for conduct which had
outraged the feelings of that long-suffering community.
“One pistareen was all the ready cash I had on hand, and the suddenness
with which I departed deprived me of the chance to raise more.
Traveling on leisurely I had time for reflection.”
As was usually the case when he reflected, he grew more serene and
enjoyed a frame of mind that bordered on the heroic.
“I began to look about me to see what was to be done in my present
situation and to what business I could turn my attention. The practice
of law, which would have been most to my mind, I could not undertake
until I had spent some time in the study, which would have been
attended with expense far beyond my abilities; therefore this object
must be laid aside. Physic was under the same embarrassments; business
in the mercantile line I could not pursue for want of capital. ...
What can be done? There is one thing, said contrivance, that you can
do, and it will answer your purpose--preach.”
The idea came to him as an inspiration, but immediately there was
suggested an objection which to a less resourceful mind would have
seemed insuperable. “What an appearance should I make in my present
dress? which consisted of a light gray coat, with silver-plated
buttons, green vest, and red velvet breeches.”
Down the Connecticut valley he trudged, calling to mind his father’s
old sermons and gradually working himself into a state of pious
rapture. The heart of no young pulpiteer beat with more appropriate
emotions than his, when on the next Sunday, under an assumed name,
he preached his first sermon in the village of Ludlow. “I awoke with
anxious palpitation for the issue of the day. I considered this as the
most important scene of my life--that, in a great measure, my future
happiness or wretchedness depended on my conduct this day. The time for
assembling approached! I saw the people come together. My feelings were
up in arms against me, my heart would almost leap into my mouth. What
a strange thing, said I, is man! Why am I thus perturbated by these
whimsical feelings!”
The moment he began the service these perturbations came to an end.
Words came in a steady flow, and he felt sure that he had found his
true calling in life. “No monarch when seated on a throne had more
sensible feelings of prosperity than what I experienced at this time.”
The neighboring town of Pelham being without a minister, Burroughs
presented himself as a candidate, and was enthusiastically accepted. He
made a specialty of funeral sermons, and was soon in demand in all the
surrounding country. It was at this time also that he became acquainted
with the coiner who showed him how he might surreptitiously increase
the amount of cash in circulation. All went well till an enemy appeared
who called him by name and revealed his antecedents. All Pelham was
in an uproar, for the Pelhamites were “a people generally possessing
violent passions, which, once disturbed, raged uncontrolled by the
dictates of reason, unpolished in their manners, possessing a jealous
disposition, and either very friendly or very inimical, not knowing a
medium between these extremes.”
In this case they suddenly became very inimical, and Burroughs was
again compelled to depart under cover of darkness. His night thoughts
were always among his very best.
“Journeying on, I had time for reflection. At the dead of night--all
alone--reflection would have its operation. A very singular scene have
I now passed through, said I, and to what does it amount? Have I acted
with propriety as a man, or have I deviated from the path of rectitude?
I have had an unheard-of, disagreeable part to act; I do not feel
entirely satisfied with myself in this business, and yet I do not know
how I could have done otherwise, and have made the matter better. My
situation has been such that I have violated the principle of veracity
which we implicitly pledge ourselves to maintain towards each other, as
a general thing, in society. Whether my peculiar circumstances would
warrant such a line of procedure is the question. I know many things
will be said in favor of it as well as against it.”
From this difficult question of casuistry he found relief in reverting
to the one instance in which he had been clearly wrong, viz., joining
the young men in Hanover in their raid on the farmer’s beehive. “My
giving countenance to an open breach of the laws of the land in the
case of the bees was a matter in which I was justly reprehensible; but
that matter is now past. I must take things as they are, and under
these circumstances do the best I can. I know the world will blame me,
but I wish to justify my conduct to myself, let the world think what it
may.”
In this endeavor he was highly successful; and as he walked on, his
spirits rose. He contrasted his own clear views with the muddled
ideas of his late parishioners. “They understand the matter in the
gross, that I have preached under a fictitious name and character,
and consequently have roused many ideas in the minds of the people
not founded on fact. Therefore they concluded from this general view
the whole to be founded on wrong. The name impostor is therefore
easily fixed on my character. An impostor, we generally conceive,
puts on feigned appearances in order to enrich or aggrandize himself
to the damage of others. That this is not the case with me in this
transaction, I think is clear. That I have aimed at nothing but the
bare necessaries of life, is a fact.”
Having thus cleared himself of the charge of imposture, he determined
to rest his case on the broad ground of religious liberty. “That I have
a good and equitable right to preach, if I choose and others choose to
hear me, is a truth of which I entertain no doubt.”
When he was pursued into the borders of the town of Rutland, it was
too much for his patience. “I turned and ran about twenty rods down
a small hill, and the Pelhamites all after me, hallooing with all
their might, ‘Stop him! stop him!’ To be pursued like a thief, an
object of universal speculation to the inhabitants of Rutland, gave
me very disagreeable sensations, which I determined not to bear. I
therefore stopped, took up a stone, and declared that the first who
should approach me I would kill on the spot. To hear such language
and to see such a state of determined defiance in one whom they had
lately reverenced as a clergyman struck even the people of Pelham with
astonishment and fear.”
By the way, there follows a scene which makes us suspect that parts of
Massachusetts in the good old days may have had a touch of “the wild
West.” The two deacons who were leaders of the mob drew attention
to the fact that besides having come to them under false pretenses
Burroughs had absconded with five dollars that had been advanced on
his salary. He owed them one sermon which was theirs of right. In the
present excited state of public opinion it was obviously impossible for
Burroughs to deliver the sermon, but it was suggested that he might
give an equivalent. A peacemaker intervened, saying, “Wood keeps an
excellent tavern hard by; I propose for all to move up there.” This
proposal was accepted by all. “I therefore came down, and we all went
up towards the tavern. I called for drink, according to the orator’s
advice, to the satisfaction of all.”
After that the career of Burroughs went on from bad to worse, but never
was he without the inner consolations that belong to those who are
misunderstood by the world. Even when he unsuccessfully sought to set
fire to the jail he was full of fine sentiments borrowed from Young’s
“Night Thoughts.” He quotes the whole passage beginning
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne.
This he seems to consider to be in some way a justification for his
action. He is ever of the opinion that a man’s heart can not be wrong
so long as he is able to quote poetry.
The various incarcerations to which he was subjected might only
have imbittered a less magnanimous mind. They rather instilled into
Burroughs a missionary spirit. He felt that he ought to take more pains
to enlighten the ignorance of the world in regard to his excellent
qualities. “I have many times lamented my want of patient perseverance
in endeavoring to convince my persecutors of their wrong by the
cool dictates of reason. Error once seen ought to be corrected. The
pruning hook should never be laid aside; then we should live up to
the condition of our nature, which requires a state of improving and
progressing in knowledge till time shall cease.”
But even Burroughs was human. It is easier to bear great misfortunes
than to meet the petty annoyances of every-day life. To one who plans
his life in such a way as to depend largely on the casual gifts of
strangers, their dilatoriness is often a cause of real anxiety.
Here is a painful incident which happened to him in Philadelphia.
He applied to a member of Congress for a small sum of money. The
gentleman was not all that he should have been. “The most striking
features of his character were his great fondness for close
metaphysical reasoning and a habit of great economy in his domestic
concerns, and he had so long practiced upon this system that any
variation from it in a person’s conduct or any want of success in a
person’s undertakings were, in his view, perfectly wrong. This was the
man to whom I applied as my ultimatum.”
We can see at a glance that such a man was likely to be disappointing.
“I described my circumstances to him in as clear terms as possible, and
afterwards told him of the request I wished to make. Without giving me
an answer either in the affirmative or the negative, he went on with a
lengthy discourse to prove that my system of economy had been wrong,
drawing a comparison between his prosperity and my adversity, and then
pointed out a certain line of conduct that I ought then to take up
and observe, and offered to assist me in prosecuting such; but as his
plan had many things in it which I could not reconcile my mind to, I
took the liberty of reasoning with him upon a better plan which I had
marked out in my own mind.”
Upon this, the congressman became obstinate and would do nothing. His
depravity came to Burroughs as a sudden shock.
“When I took a view of the world, of the pomp and splendor which
surrounded crowds which perpetually passed before my eyes, to see them
roll in affluence and luxury, inhabiting lofty houses, with superb
equipages, and feasting upon all the delicacies of life, under these
affluent circumstances withholding from me what would never have been
missed from their superfluity, this brought to my mind a train of ideas
that were desperate and horrid.... My eyes lighted up with indignation,
my countenance was fortified with despair, my heart was swollen to that
bigness which was almost too large for my breast to contain. Under
this situation I arose with a tranquil horror, composedly took my hat,
and politely bid Mr. Niles farewell. I believe the desperate emotions
of my heart were apparently manifested to his view by my countenance;
his apparent immovability relaxed, he put his hand in his pocket, and
handed me three dollars. This act of kindness in a moment melted
the ferocious feelings of my heart, all those desperate sensations
vanished, and I found myself a man.”
Dear reader, have you not often taken a part in such a scene? When
instead of handing out your dollars at once you conditioned them upon
adherence to some “line of conduct,”--your conscience accuses you that
you might have pointed even to the buck-saw,--do you realize what a
pitiful spectacle you made of yourself?
* * * * *
Stephen Burroughs does not at all fulfill our preconceived notion of an
habitual criminal. He did not love evil for its own sake. His crimes
were incidental, and he mentions them only as the unfortunate results
of circumstances beyond his own control. His life was rather spent in
the contemplation of virtue. There were some virtues which came easy
to him, and he made the most of them. Like an expert prestidigitator,
he kept the attention fixed on what was irrelevant, so that what
was really going on passed unnoticed. He had eliminated personal
responsibility from his scheme of things, and then proceeded as if
nothing were lacking. He had one invariable measure for right and
wrong. That was right which ministered to his own peace of body and of
mind; that was wrong which did otherwise.
We are coming to see that that imperturbable egotism is the
characteristic of the “criminal mind” that is least susceptible to
treatment. Sins of passion are often repented of as soon as they are
committed. Sins of ignorance are cured by letting in the light. Sins
of weakness yield to an improved environment. But what are you going
to do with the man who is incapable of seeing that he is in the wrong?
Treat him with compassion, and he accepts the kindness as a tribute to
his own merits; attempt to punish him, and he is a martyr; reason with
him, and his controversial ardor is aroused in defense of his favorite
thesis.
Sometimes the lover of humanity, after he has tried everything which
he can think of to make an impression on such a character and to bring
him to a realizing sense of social responsibility, becomes utterly
discouraged. He feels tempted to give up trying any longer. In this he
is wrong. He should not allow himself to be discouraged. Something must
be done, even though nobody knows what it is.
But if the lover of humanity _should_ give up for a time and take a
rest by turning his attention to a more hopeful case, I should not be
too hard on him. My Pardoner, I am sure, must have some indulgence for
such a weakness.
A MAN UNDER ENCHANTMENT
[Illustration]
I sat down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment.” So
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his own visionary youth, and, truth to
tell, the spell lasted through life.
The wayside itself was not conducive to dreams. It was a busy
thoroughfare. Eager traffickers jostled one another, and there was
much crying up of new wares. Many important personages went noisily
along. There was a fresh interest in all sorts of good works and many
improvements on the roadway. There were not many priests or Levites
passing by on the other side, for ecclesiasticism was not in fashion,
but there were multitudes of Good Samaritans, each one intent on his
own brand-new device for universal helpfulness. There were so many of
them that the poor man who fell among philanthropists often sighed for
the tender mercies of the thieves. The thieves, at least, when they had
done their work would let him alone. From time to time there would
come groups of eager reformers, advance agents of the millennium. At
last there came down the road troops hurrying to the front, and there
was the distant sound of battle.
It was a stirring time, the noon of the nineteenth century; and the
stir was nowhere more felt than in New England. It was a ferment of
speculation, a whirl of passion, a time of great aspiration and of no
mean achievement.
But if you would get a sense of all this, do not turn to the pages of
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The ardor of Transcendentalism, the new spirit of
reform, the war between the States,--these were noted, but they made no
very vivid impression on the man who sat under enchantment. There was
an interval between these happenings and his consciousness that made
them seem scarcely contemporaneous.
It is a fashion in literary criticism to explain an author by his
environment. With Hawthorne this method is not successful. It is not
that his environment was not interesting in itself. His genius was
essentially aloof. It was a plant that drew its nourishment from
the air rather than from the soil. There are some men who have the
happy faculty of making themselves at home wherever they happen to
be. Hawthorne, wherever he had been born, would have looked upon the
scene with something of a stranger’s eye. Indeed, when we think about
it, the wonder is that most of us are able to take the world in such
a matter-of-fact way. One would suppose that we had always been here,
instead of being transient guests who cannot even engage our rooms a
day in advance.
It is perhaps a happy limitation which makes us to forget our slight
tenure, and to feel an absolute ownership in the present moment. We
are satisfied with the passing experience because it appears to us as
permanent.
To the man who sat by the wayside the present moment did not stand
in the sunshine sufficient unto itself. It did not appear, as it did
to the man of affairs, an ultimate and satisfying reality. He was
not unobservant. He saw the persons passing by. But each one, in the
present moment, seemed but a fugitive escaping from the past into the
future. Futile flight! unavailing freedom! for in the Future the Past
stands waiting for it. As he looked at each successive action it was as
one who watches the moving shadow of an old deed, which now for some
creature has become doom.
Did I say that Hawthorne was little influenced by his environment? It
would be truer to say that the environment to which he responded was
that to which most men are so strangely oblivious. He felt what another
Salem mystic has expressed:
Around us ever lies the enchanted land
In marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
The true-born Yankee has always persisted, in spite of the purists, in
using “I guess” as equivalent to “I think.” To his shrewd good-humored
curiosity, all thinking resolves itself into a kind of guesswork; and
one man has as good a right to his guess as another.
It is a far cry from the talk of the village store to Emerson and
Hawthorne, but to these New Englanders thinking was still a kind of
guessing. The observer looks at the outward show of things, which has
such an air of finality, and says, “I guess there’s something behind
all this. I guess it’s worth while to look into it.”
Such a mind is not deterred by the warnings of formal logic that there
is “no thoroughfare.” When it leaves the public road and sees the sign
“Private way, dangerous passing,” it says, “that looks interesting. I
guess I’ll take that.”
And from our streets and shops and newspapers, from our laboratories
and lecture rooms and bureaus of statistics, it is, after all, such a
little way to the border-land of mystery, where all minds are on an
equality and where the wisest can but dimly guess the riddles that are
propounded.
Hawthorne belonged to no school or party. To the men of his generation
he was like the minister of whom he writes who preached with a veil
over his face.
Nor is his relation in thought to his ancestry more intimate than that
to his contemporaries. Born to the family of New England Puritanism, we
think we recognize the family likeness--and yet we are not quite sure.
There are traits that suggest a spiritual changeling.
When we enter into the realm of Hawthorne’s imagination we are
conscious of sombre realities.
Is not this a survival of the puritanic spirit, with its brooding
mysticism, its retributive predestination, its sense of the judgment
to come? It was said of Carlyle that he was a Calvinist who had lost
his creed. May not the same be said of Hawthorne? The old New England
theology had in him become attenuated to a mere film, but through it
all may we not see the old New England conscience?
Doubtless there is much of this transmitted influence. Hawthorne
himself insisted upon it. Speaking of “the stern and black-browed
Puritan ancestors,” he said, “Let them scorn me as they will, strong
traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.”
But it is possible to exaggerate such likenesses. In Hawthorne’s case
there is danger of argument in a circle. We say that there is something
in Hawthorne’s imagination, in its sombre mysticism, in its brooding
sense of destiny, which is like that of the spirit of the inhabitants
of Salem and Boston in the old days when they walked through the narrow
streets and through the shadowy woodland ways pondering the fatal
sequences of life.
But how do we see these old Puritans? We see them through Hawthorne’s
eyes. His imagination peoples for us the old houses. Was Hawthorne’s
genius tinged with Puritanism, or are our conceptions of the Puritan
character largely Hawthornesque? It is not necessary to argue this
matter; it might be better to answer “Yes” to both questions.
It is the privilege of a creative genius to imprint his own features
upon his forbears. It is difficult here to determine which is cause
and which is effect. How marvelously Rembrandt gets the spirit
of the Dutch Burgomeisters! It was fortunate for him that he had
such subjects,--stalwart men with faces that caught the light so
marvelously. Yes, but had it not been for Rembrandt, who would have
told us that these Dutch gentlemen were so picturesque?
The subject of a good artist is accurately figured; the subject of a
great artist is transfigured. We cannot separate the historic reality
from the transfiguring light.
But however Hawthorne may have been influenced by his Puritan
inheritance, it would be hard to find one whose habitual point of
view was further removed from what we are accustomed to call the
“New England conscience.” It is the characteristic of that type of
conscience that it has an ever-present and sometimes oppressive sense
of personal responsibility. It is militant and practical rather than
mystical. To it evil is not something to be endured but something to be
resisted. If there is a wrong it must be righted, and with as little
delay as possible.
The highest praise a Puritan could give his pastor was that he was “a
painful preacher.” Jonathan Mitchell, writing of the beginnings of
the church in Cambridge, says that the people of Cambridge “were a
gracious, savory-spirited people, principled by Mr. Sheperd, liking an
humbling, heart-breaking ministry and spirit.”
The Puritan theology was based on predestination, but the Puritan
temper was not fatalistic. When that latter-day Puritan, Lyman Beecher,
was expounding the doctrines of the divine decrees, one of his sons
asked him, “Father, what if we are decreed to be lost?” The answer was,
“Fight the decrees, my boy!”
The Calvinistic spirit was exactly opposite to the fatalistic
acquiescence which shifts the responsibility from the creature to the
Creator. To be sure the fall of man took place a long time ago, but we
cannot say that it was none of our business. It was not an hereditary
misfortune to be borne with fortitude; it was to be assumed as our
personal guilt. “Original sin” means real sin. Adam sinned as the
typical and representative man, and every man became a sinner. No
individual could plead an _alibi_. The “conviction of sin” was not the
acquiescence in a penalty,--it was the heartbreaking consciousness of
the “exceeding sinfulness of sin.”
“In Adam’s fall _we_ sinned all.” When they said that, they were
thinking not of Adam, but of themselves. _They_ did it; it was the
guilt that was imputed to them. Sensitive consciences were tortured in
the attempt fully to realize their guilt.
The real inheritors of this type of conscience were to be found among
many of the radical reformers and agitators who were Hawthorne’s
contemporaries and with whom he had little in common. When their formal
creed had fallen off, there remained the sense of personal guilt for
original sin. The sin of the nation and of the whole social order
weighed heavily upon them and tortured them, and they found relief only
in action.
All this was foreign to Hawthorne’s mind. In his treatment of sin there
is always a sense of moral detachment. We are not made to see, as
George Eliot makes us see, the struggle with temptation,--the soul,
like a wild thing, seeing the tempting bait and drawing nearer to the
trap. Hawthorne begins after the deed is done. He shows us the
wild thing taken in a trap
Which sees the trapper coming thro’ the wood.
Of what is the trap made? It is made of a deed already done. Whence
comes the ghostly trapper? He is no stranger in the wood. There is no
staying his advance as he makes his fatal rounds.
In the preface to the “House of the Seven Gables” the author gives the
argument of the story,--“the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one
generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of
every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.”
This is the theme of the Greek tragedy--Nemesis. The deed is done and
cannot be undone; the inevitable consequences must be endured.
In the “Scarlet Letter,” when Hester and Roger Chillingworth review the
past and peer into the future, Hester says, “I said but now that there
can be no good event for him or thee or me who are wandering together
in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt
wherewith we have strewn our path.”
But is the present stumbling guilt or is it merely misery? The old man
replies, “By the first slip awry thou didst plant the germ of evil, but
since that moment it has been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged
me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion, neither am I
fiend-like who have snatched a fiend’s office from his hands. It is our
fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may.”
Strange words to come from one who had sat in a Puritan meeting-house!
It is such comment as the Greek Chorus might make watching the
unfolding of the doom of the house of Agamemnon. And when the tale of
the “Scarlet Letter” has been told, how does the author himself look
upon it? How does he distribute praise and blame?
“To all these shadowy beings so long our near acquaintances--as well
Roger Chillingworth as his companions--we would fain be merciful.
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry whether love and
hatred be not the same thing at bottom. Each in its utmost development
supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders
one individual dependent for his spiritual life on another; each leaves
the passionate lover or the no less passionate hater forlorn and
desolate by the withdrawal of its subject. Philosophically considered,
therefore, the passions seem essentially the same except that one
happens to be seen in celestial radiance and the other in a dusky lurid
glow.” This is not the Puritan Conscience uttering itself. It is an
illusive and questioning spirit.
If in his attitude toward human destiny Hawthorne was in some
essential respects un-Puritan, so also was he un-modern. There is a
characteristic difference between antique and modern symbols for those
necessary processes, beyond the sphere of our own wills, by which our
lives are determined. The ancients pictured it with austere simplicity.
Life is a simple thread. The Fates spin it. It is drawn out on the
distaff and cut off by the fatal shears.
Compare this with the phrase Carlyle loved to quote, “the roaring loom
of Time.” Life is not a spinning-wheel, but a loom. A million shuttles
fly; a million threads are inextricably interwoven. You cannot long
trace the single thread; you can discern only the growing pattern.
There is inevitable causation, but it is not simple but complex. The
situation at the present moment is the result not of one cause but of
innumerable causes, and it is in turn the cause of results that are
equally incalculable. We are a part of
the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and air and sea.
Men of science show us how the whole acts upon each part and each part
acts upon the whole. Modern novelists attempt, not always successfully,
to give the impression of the amazing complexity of actual life, where
all sorts of things are going on at the same time.
Whether we look upon it as his limitation or as his good fortune,
Hawthorne adhered to the spinning-wheel rather than the loom. We see
the antique Fates drawing out the thread. A long series of events
follow one another from a single cause.
A part of the power of Hawthorne over our imagination lies in his
singleness of purpose. In “The Marble Faun” we are told, “The stream
of Miriam’s trouble kept its way through this flood of human life, and
neither mingled with it nor was turned aside.”
We are made to see the dark streams that do not mingle nor turn aside,
and we watch their fatal flow.
But is this real, normal life? In such life do not the streams
mingle? Are not evil influences quickly neutralized, as noxious germs
die in the sunshine? No one would more readily acknowledge this
than Hawthorne. He says: “It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of
mental occupation to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of
individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s
self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart
almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or if we take the freedom
to put a friend under the microscope, we thereby insulate him from
many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear
him into parts, and of course patch him clumsily together again. What
wonder, then, that we be frightened at such a monster, which, after
all--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real
personage--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.”
The critic of Hawthorne could not describe better the limitation of
his stories as pictures of real life. His characters, however clearly
conceived, are insulated from many of their real relations, and their
peculiarities are magnified.
In the preface to “The Scarlet Letter” he says that the tale “wears to
my eye a stern and sombre aspect, too much ungladdened by the tender
and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of Nature and
real life, and which undoubtedly should soften every picture of them.”
One who would defend Hawthorne the Author against Hawthorne the Critic
must point out the kind of literature to which his work belongs. When
we judge it by the rule of the romance or of the realistic novel,
we fail to do justice to its essential quality. The romancer, the
story-teller pure and simple, is attracted by the swift sequence of
events. His nimble fancy follows a plot as a kitten follows a string.
Now it happens that in a world constituted as ours is the sequence of
events follows a moral order. A good story has always in it an element
of poetic justice. But the romancer does not tell his story for the
sake of the moral. He professes to be as much surprised when it is
discovered as is the most innocent reader. In like manner the realistic
novel, in proportion as it is a faithful portrayal of life, has an
ethical lesson. But the writer disclaims any purpose of teaching it.
His business is to tell what the world is like. He leaves the rest to
your intelligence.
But there is another kind of literature; it is essentially allegory.
The allegorist takes a naked truth and clothes it with the garments of
the imagination. Frequently the clothes do not fit and the poor truth
wanders about awkwardly, self-conscious to the last degree. But if the
artist be a genius the abstract thought becomes a person.
Hawthorne’s work is something more than allegory, but his mind worked
allegorically. His characters were abstract before they became
concrete. He was not a realist aiming to give a comprehensive survey
of the actual world. He consciously selected the incidents and scenes
which would illustrate his theme.
In his conclusion of “The Marble Faun,” when the actors have
withdrawn, the Author comes before the curtain and says that he
designed “the story and the characters to bear, of course, a
certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so
artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere that some laws
and proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly
acknowledged. The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the
poetry and beauty which the Author fancied in it and becomes nothing
better than a grotesque absurdity if we bring it into the actual light
of day.” This is not realism.
It is a mood in which the bounds between romance and allegory fade
away; persons become symbols and symbols have breathed into them the
breath of life. The story and the truth it shadows are one.
The mood is common in poetry. Poets like Dante and Spenser and Shelley
from it have given us
Wise and lovely songs
Of fate and God and chance and chaos old,
And love.
There is a point where “dreams begin to feel the truth and stir of
day,” where the incidents of existence assume a dream-like character,
and where dreams become transparent symbols of reality. There are
moods in which our familiar world seems strange to us, and we walk in
it as on some bewildered shore.
In such moods to meet Hawthorne is a great experience. He is no longer
shy and aloof, but he opens to us his heart, and with friendly zeal
points out each object of interest--for in this border-land he is at
home.
THE CRUELTY OF GOOD PEOPLE
The cruelty of bad people is easily explained. They are cruel because
they enjoy watching the pain of others. There are also the ignorant
and half-formed, to whom the word “inhumanity” applies literally. They
have not yet been really humanized. Before they can habitually yield
to feelings of compassion there is much to be done in developing their
higher natures. They must be urged to
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
The beast has a long start, and the ape and tiger die hard.
But this is only half the story. We are continually surprised at the
cruelty that is possible in those in whom there seems to be no tigerish
survival. It is intimately associated with the higher rather than with
the lower part of the nature. It is spiritual, rational, and moral. The
cruelty of women and priests is proverbial--and they are good women
and good priests.
Listen to the talk in a drawing-room when some question involving the
fate of thousands is introduced. There is a strike or lock-out. It
means that the hostile parties are struggling on a narrow ledge between
two precipices. The workmen are trying to push the employers into the
abyss of bankruptcy; the employers are exerting every means in their
power to hurl their antagonists into the abyss of starvation. It is a
battle to the death, and in many a home pale-faced women are watching
it with despairing eyes. But what says my lady who likes to talk about
current events? It is evident when she begins to speak that she is not
touched by the tragedy of it all. Nero watching the burning of Rome
could not assume an air of more complete detachment. She talks as if it
were nothing to her. Or the talk turns to the affairs of state. Issues
that involve the fate of nations awake in her only a languid curiosity.
The diplomacy of prudent statesmen who are endeavoring to keep the
peace strikes her as mere dilly-dallying. She wants to see something
doing. She enjoys a romantic sensation, and urges on those who would
give her this pleasure. Was there ever a useless war without fair faces
looking down upon it approvingly--at least at the beginning?
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried, “La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall.”
Yet she who in regard to the great affairs which involve millions may
appear as “La Belle Dame sans Merci” may be to all those whom she knows
a minister of purest kindness. It is only towards those whom she does
not know that she is pitiless.
* * * * *
Philosophers are usually cruel in their judgments of the persons and
events of the passing day, and that is perhaps the reason why no nation
has been willing to take the hint from Plato and allow the philosophers
to rule. It would be too harsh a despotism. Flesh and blood could not
endure it. For the philosopher is concerned with general laws and is
intolerant of exceptions, while it is the quality of mercy to treat
each person as in some degree an exception. Fancy the misery that would
be involved in the attempt to level us all up to the cold heights
of abstract virtue on which Spinoza dwelt. One shudders to think of
the calamity that would ensue were all our lawmakers to be suddenly
Hegelianized. All the attempts to alleviate the hard conditions under
which people are living would cease. The energy that is now spent in
trying to abolish abuses would then be directed toward explaining them.
What wailings would go up from earth’s millions on the proclamation of
the rule of unlimited Spencerianism! We should look back with envy to
the good old times of Nero and Tamerlane.
As the Inquisition handed its victims over to the secular arm and
disclaimed all further responsibility, so this new tyrant would hand
over all the unfit to the unobstructed working of natural law. No
attention would be paid to our sentimental preferences for particular
persons. Those merciful interferences which have been the contrivance
of mankind for the protection of weakness must be swept aside. The
unfit must take the full penalty justly visited on their unfitness. The
moment we begin to particularize we rebel. Pity revolts against a too
cold philosophy.
It is needless to say that the theologians have often attained
refinements of cruelty unknown even to the most severely logical of
the secular philosophers. They have been able to distill out of the
purest religious affections a poison capable of producing in the
sensitive soul unutterable agony. Then they have watched the writhing
of the victim with a cold benevolence. The worst of it was that the
benevolence was real in spite of the fact that it froze all the
fountains of natural pity.
Jonathan Edwards was not merely a good man in the ordinary sense. His
goodness rose into ideal heights. He had a genius for ethics as well
as for religion. He is still a teacher of teachers. But this wonderful
man, who must ever have a high place among the leaders and inspirers
of mankind, has an equally high place among the torturers of the
spirit. To understand the kind of pain which he inflicted we must not
be content with the threatenings of torment in sermons like that on
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The pictorial imagery which now
startles us was common enough in his day. The torments of sinners was
an ordinary theme; Edwards added appreciably to the torments of the
saints. His vivisection of the human soul was without compunction. In
the hearts and desires of the innocent he discovered guilt for which
there was no pardon. Every resting-place for natural human affection
was torn away, and when at last from the clear heaven the love of God
shone down in dazzling splendor, it shone upon a desert.
The cruelty of it all is seen in its effects on minds naturally prone
to melancholy. Read the journal of a disciple of Edwards, David
Brainerd, and remember that for several generations that journal was
esteemed a proper book to put into the hands of youth. The editor of
the Journal says, “As an example of a mind tremulously apprehensive
of sin, loathing it in every form and for its own sake, avoiding even
the appearance of evil, rising above all terrestrial considerations,
advancing rapidly in holiness, and finding its only enjoyment in the
glory of God, probably no similar work in any language can furnish a
parallel.” Poor Brainerd! Every step along the heavenly way cost him a
pang. He never could forget for more than a few hours at a time that
he was human, and to be human was to be vile. The groans follow one
another with monotonous iteration. He loved God, but he felt his guilt
in not loving him more. He was not only afraid of hell, but of a heaven
of which he was unworthy.
“I seem to be declining with respect to my life and warmth in divine
things. I deserve hell every day for not loving my Lord more.... I saw
myself very mean and vile, and wondered at those who showed me respect.”
We all feel that way sometimes, but to have the feelings set down day
by day for years at a time seems hardly profitable. We are relieved
when occasionally the editor summarizes the spiritual conflicts of
a week or two without going into details, as in the latter part
of December, 1744. “The next twelve days he was for the most part
extremely dejected, discouraged and distressed, and was evidently much
under the power of melancholy. There are from day to day most bitter
complaints of exceeding vileness, ignorance, and corruption; an amazing
load of guilt, unworthiness even to creep on God’s earth, everlasting
uselessness, fitness for nothing, etc., and sometimes expressions even
of horror at the thoughts of ever preaching again. But yet in this
time of dejection he speaks of several intervals of divine help and
comfort.”
The pitiful thing about it all was that Brainerd’s distress arose not
from the consciousness of any particular shortcoming of his own, which
after all was finite. He was endeavoring to realize the meaning of that
infinite guilt which was his as a child of Adam. That guilt must be
infinite because it was a sin against infinite purity and power. When
he had repented to the very utmost of his ability, he was conscious
that he had not repented enough.
When he went to New Jersey as a missionary to the Indians, it was this
abnormal spiritual sensitiveness which he endeavored to impart to the
aboriginal mind.
He found it difficult to bring the Indians to that degree of spiritual
anguish which, in his view, was necessary to their salvation. He could
make them understand the meaning of actual transgression, but they were
dull of comprehension when he urged them to repent of original sin.
“Another difficulty,” he says, “which I am now upon, is that it is
next to impossible to bring them to a rational conviction that they
are sinners by nature, and that their hearts are corrupt and sinful,
unless one can charge them with some gross act of immorality such as
the _light of nature_ condemns.”
One would suppose that the missionary might have found among his
untutored Indians enough actual transgressions to have brought to them
a conviction of sin and a desire for a better life. But no, that was
not enough, it would have fallen far short of what he had in mind. It
would have only convinced them that they were sinners individually
considered, and would not have overwhelmed them with the guilt of the
race. So he hit upon a device to turn their minds from the incidental
trangressions of mature life to the central fact that depravity was
innate and universal.
“The method which I take to convince them that we are sinners by nature
is to lead them to an observation of their little children: how they
will appear in a rage, fight and strike their mothers before they are
able to speak or walk, while they are so young that they are incapable
of learning such practices.... As children have never learned these
things, they must have been in their natures; and consequently they
must be allowed to be by nature the children of wrath.”
It did not seem to occur to Brainerd that in thus setting the child in
the midst of them as an illustration of the kingdom of wrath he was not
imitating the method of Jesus. Even in his treatment of the sins of
later life there is something illustrative of the cruel system which
dominated him.
“I then mention all the vices I know the Indians to be guilty of,
and so make use of these sinful _streams_ to convince them that the
_fountain_ is corrupt. This is the end for which I mention their wicked
practices to them; not because I expect to bring them to an effectual
reformation merely by inveighing against their immoralities, but hoping
that they may hereby be convinced of the corruption of their hearts,
and awakened to a sense of the depravity and misery of their fallen
state.”
Brainerd had in mind a profound truth; every great moral awakening
is accompanied by pain. But he was not content with that which
comes naturally. All specific reformation in morals and manners
was subordinated to that which he conceived to be the essential
thing,--that they should feel to its full extent the misery of being
human.
* * * * *
In every readjustment of thought or advance in the manner of life there
is involved a vast amount of unescapable pain. There is also a great
deal of pain that is gratuitously inflicted. In the contest between the
forces of conservatism and progress it is difficult to say which side
is more open to the charge of cruelty.
In reading history our sympathies are usually with the bold innovator.
He stands alone against the world and proclaims an unpopular truth.
He is misunderstood, reviled, persecuted for righteousness’ sake. The
defenders of the old order are hard-hearted persecutors who hound him
to death.
But this is only half the story. A glimpse of the other side is given
in the very term we use. We speak of the _defenders_ of the old order.
We only understand their feelings when we remember that they were
really on the defensive. The things they held most sacred were attacked
by a ruthless power which they could not understand. They flew to the
rescue of sanctuaries about to be violated. They often fought as those
in mortal agony, using blindly such weapons as came to their hands.
In “The Faerie Queene” Una, the fair symbol of Truth, wanders through
the forest protected by her lion. He is a good lion and faithful to his
lady.
The lyon would not leave her desolate,
But with her went along, as a strong gard
Of her chast person, and a faythfull mate
Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard:
Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward;
And when she wakt, he wayted diligent
With humble service to her will prepard;
From her fayre eyes he took commandëment
And ever by her lookes conceived her intent.
That is the picture that comes to the adherent of the old order. The
pure virgin Truth walked unharmed, with her strong protector by her
side. At length a proud Paynim attacked the gentle lady. Then it was
that
her fiers servant, full of kingly aw
And high disdaine, whenas his soveraine Dame
So rudely handled by her foe he saw,
With gaping jawes full greedy at him came,
And, ramping on his shield, did weene the same
Have reft away with his sharp rending clawes.
But it was a losing battle. The lion’s sudden fierceness was all in
vain.
O then, too weake and feeble was the forse
Of salvage beast.
Now that her defender is slain, what is to become of Lady Truth?
Who now is left to keepe the forlorn maid
From raging spoile of lawless victor’s will?
The lover of the old order does not stop to ask whether the lion may
not have made a mistake, and whether the object of his attack may not
have been, instead of a proud Paynim, only a Christian knight who
had approached to ask his way. Nor does he feel pity for the pains
inflicted by the lion’s “sharp rending clawes.” He only cries, “Poor
lion! Poor Lady Truth!”
“But,” says the careful reader, “are you not getting away from your
subject? You proposed the question, ‘Why are good people so cruel?’ You
began with the conversation of excellent ladies in the drawing-room,
and now you have wandered off into faery land, and are talking about
the Lady Truth and the noble lion who died in her defense. I fear you
are losing your way.”
On the contrary, dear reader, I think, as the children say when they
are hunting the thimble, we are “getting warm.” We started out to find
a cause for the obliviousness of good people to the pain which they
inflict on others, and we have come into the region of allegory. Now,
one of the chief reasons why good people are cruel is that it is so
easy for them to allegorize.
In an allegory virtues and vices are personified. Each is complete in
itself, and when it once has been set going it follows a preordained
course. It does not grow into something else, and it is incapable
of repentance or improvement. In the morality plays a virtue is as
virtuous and a vice as vicious at the beginning as at the end. Spenser
prefixes to “The Faerie Queene” a prose explanation of the meaning of
each important character. “The first of the Knight of the Red-crosse,
in whom I set forth Holynes; the second of Sir Guyon, in whome I sette
forth Temperance; the third of Britomartis, a lady knight, in whom I
picture Chastity.” Now, after this explanation we are relieved of all
those anxieties which beset us when we watch creatures of flesh and
blood setting out in the world to try their souls. Everything is as
much a matter of invariable law as the reactions of chemical elements.
The Knight of the Red-cross may appear to be tempted, but he is really
immune. He cannot fall from grace. From that disaster he is protected
by the definition. We have only to learn what the word holiness means
to know what he will do. As for Sir Guyon, when once we learn that he
is Temperance, we would trust him anywhere. For such characters there
is nothing possible but ultimate triumph over their foes. And what of
their foes? Being allegorical characters, they cannot be reformed.
There is nothing to do but to kill them without compunction, or if we
can catch them in the traps which they have set for others, and make
them suffer the torments they have themselves invented, so much the
better. We welcome the knight--
Who slayes the Gyaunt, wounds the Beast,
And strips Duessa quight.
We have no compunctions as we watch the administration of poetical
justice. Whatever happens to the false Duessa and to such miscreants as
Sansfoy and Sansjoy and Sansloy, we say that it serves them right.
If we can only hold fast to the allegorical clue, and be assured that
he is dealing with sins and not with persons, we can follow Dante
through purgatory without flinching. The moral always is a good one,
and full of suggestiveness.
But the moment we mistake an allegorical character for a person of
flesh and blood we get into trouble. Even the most perfect parable
represents only a certain phase of reality. When it is forced beyond
its real intention and taken literally it shocks our sense of humanity.
It needs to be interpreted by the same wise spirit that conceived it.
We repeat the story of the symbolic virgins who had forgotten to put
oil in their lamps, or of the servant who was too timid to put his
master’s money out to usury. The child asks, “Wasn’t it cruel of those
wise virgins not to give the others just a little of their oil? And
after the door was shut and the foolish virgins knew how foolish they
were and were sorry, couldn’t the people inside have opened the door
just a little bit? And just because the servant was afraid to go to
the bank with the money, because it was so little, ought the master
to have been so hard with him as to say, ‘Cast ye the unprofitable
servant into the outer darkness; there shall be weeping and wailing
and gnashing of teeth?’ Why didn’t he give him another chance?”
Then the parent will explain that these are symbolic characters. Or
perhaps he may not try to explain, but change the subject and read
a story of real people like that of the prodigal son or the good
Samaritan. The child may be made to understand that while the door is
always shut against a sin, it is always open for the sinner who repents.
The sensitive child takes up the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and reads of the
way Christian went on his way to the heavenly city, meeting all kinds
of people, yet apparently without sympathy for most of them. “Why did
he leave his wife and little children in the City of Destruction and go
off alone? If he knew that the city was to be burned up, why didn’t he
stay with them? He doesn’t seem to care very much for what happens to
people who are not of his set.” So it seems to be. Mr. Hold-the-world,
Mr. Money-love, and Mr. Save-all walk along with him, and then they go
off the path to look into a silver-mine. Christian doesn’t take the
trouble to find out what became of them. Bunyan says coolly, “Whether
they fell into the pit by looking over the brink or whether they went
down to dig, or whether they were smothered by the damps that commonly
arise, of these things I am not certain; but this I observed, that they
were never seen that way again.” Christian goes on after the tragedy
perfectly unconcerned, singing a cheerful hymn. It was none of his
business what happened to those who wandered off the road. He is rather
pleased than otherwise when Vain-Confidence falls into the pit. When
“the brisk young lad,” Ignorance, joins him Christian converses with
him only long enough to find out his name and where he came from. Then
instead of trying to improve him he leaves him behind. Poor Ignorance
trudges after, but he never can catch up.
All this is right in an allegory. Ignorance must be left behind,
Vain-Confidence must perish in the pit; from the City of Destruction we
must flee without waiting for others to follow. This is a very simple
lesson in the way of life. The next lesson is more difficult and it is
quite different,--how to treat ignorant and vainglorious and otherwise
imperfect _persons_.
The first thing we have to remember is that they are persons, and that
persons are quite different from allegorical characters. Persons can
change their minds, they can repent and aspire after a better life, and
above all they have feelings,--which abstract virtues and vices do not
have. Does not the cruelty of the good chiefly arise from the fact that
they do not see all this?
In a preceding essay we have considered Hawthorne’s judgment on the
characters which he himself created. His most powerful story of sin
and retribution wears to his eyes “a stern and sombre aspect too
much ungladdened by the tender and familiar influences which soften
almost every scene of Nature and real life.” He was aware that he
was depicting not all of life, but only one aspect of it. He saw the
characters of the “Scarlet Letter,” as they saw themselves, “in a
kind of typical illusion.” He was fully aware that his treatment was
symbolic rather than realistic. Real life is infinitely more complex
and therefore more full of possibilities of good than any symbolic
representation of it.
I do not think that good people are really as cruel at heart as one
would be led to think from their words, or even from their acts. I
remember a good professor of theology who was discoursing on the way in
which the Canaanites were destroyed in order that Israel might possess
the land.
“Professor,” asked a literal-minded student, “why did the Lord create
the Canaanites, anyhow?”
“The Lord created the Canaanites,” answered the professor, “in order
that Israel might have something on which to whet his sword.”
The words were bloodthirsty enough; and yet had I been a Canaanite in
distress I should have made my way at once to the good professor’s
house. I am sure that the moment he saw me he would have taken me in
and ministered tenderly to my distresses and protected me from an
unkindly world. But I should have taken the precaution to let him
see me before he learned my name. A Canaanite in the abstract would
be an abomination to him, and I would have to take pains to make him
understand that I was a human being.
The word “cruel” is in its derivation akin to “crude;” it is that which
is raw and unripe. Like all other good things, righteousness at first
is crude. Crude righteousness takes no account of the difference
between a sinner and his sin; it hates both alike with a bitter hatred,
and visits on each the same condemnation. It is harsh and bitter. For
all that it is a good thing, this unripe fruit of righteousness. Give
it time and sunshine, and it will grow sweet and mellow.
The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Transcriber’s Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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