The Project Gutenberg eBook of History as literature, and other essays
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: History as literature, and other essays
Author: Theodore Roosevelt
Release date: February 5, 2025 [eBook #75294]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY AS LITERATURE, AND OTHER ESSAYS ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS. An account of the African Wanderings of an
American Hunter-Naturalist.
Illustrated. Large 8vo $4.00 _net_
OUTDOOR PASTIMES OF AN AMERICAN HUNTER.
New Edition. Illustrated. 8vo $3.00 _net_
HISTORY AS LITERATURE and Other Essays.
12mo $1.50 _net_
OLIVER CROMWELL. Illustrated. 8vo $2.00 _net_
THE ROUGH RIDERS. Illustrated. 8vo $1.50 _net_
THE ROOSEVELT BOOK. Selections from the Writings of Theodore
Roosevelt. 16mo 50 cents _net_
* * * * *
THE ELKHORN EDITION. Complete Works of Theodore Roosevelt. 26 volumes.
Illustrated. 8vo. Sold by subscription.
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1913
Copyright, 1913, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1913
Reprinted in December, 1913
[Illustration]
PREFACE
In this volume I have gathered certain addresses I made before the
American Historical Association, the University of Oxford, the
University of Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together with six
essays I wrote for _The Outlook_, and one that I wrote for _The
Century_.
In these addresses and essays I have discussed not merely literary but
also historical and scientific subjects, for my thesis is that the
domain of literature must be ever more widely extended over the domains
of history and science. There is nothing which in this preface I can
say to elaborate or emphasize what I have said on this subject in the
essays themselves.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL,
_July 4, 1913_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
HISTORY AS LITERATURE 1
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY 37
THE WORLD MOVEMENT 95
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 135
THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 175
PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 195
DANTE AND THE BOWERY 217
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 231
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT 245
THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 275
AN ART EXHIBITION 301
⁂ Three chapters, “Biological Analogies in History,” “The World
Movement,” and “Citizenship in a Republic,” were included in the
volume entitled “African and European Addresses.”
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
HISTORY AS LITERATURE[1]
There has been much discussion as to whether history should not
henceforth be treated as a branch of science rather than of literature.
As with most such discussions, much of the matter in dispute has
referred merely to terminology. Moreover, as regards part of the
discussion, the minds of the contestants have not met, the propositions
advanced by the two sides being neither mutually incompatible nor
mutually relevant. There is, however, a real basis for conflict in so
far as science claims exclusive possession of the field.
[1] Annual address of the president of the American Historical
Association delivered at Boston, December 27, 1912.
There was a time--we see it in the marvellous dawn of Hellenic
life--when history was distinguished neither from poetry, from
mythology, nor from the first dim beginnings of science. There was a
more recent time, at the opening of Rome’s brief period of literary
splendor, when poetry was accepted by a great scientific philosopher
as the appropriate vehicle for teaching the lessons of science and
philosophy. There was a more recent time still--the time of Holland’s
leadership in arms and arts--when one of the two or three greatest
world painters put his genius at the service of anatomists.
In each case the steady growth of specialization has rendered such
combination now impossible. Virgil left history to Livy; and when
Tacitus had become possible Lucan was a rather absurd anachronism. The
elder Darwin, when he endeavored to combine the functions of scientist
and poet, may have thought of Lucretius as a model; but the great
Darwin was incapable of such a mistake. The surgeons of to-day would
prefer the services of a good photographer to those of Rembrandt--even
were those of Rembrandt available. No one would now dream of combining
the history of the Trojan War with a poem on the wrath of Achilles.
Beowulf’s feats against the witch who dwelt under the water would not
now be mentioned in the same matter-of-fact way that a Frisian or
Frankish raid is mentioned. We are long past the stage when we would
accept as parts of the same epic Siegfried’s triumphs over dwarf and
dragon, and even a distorted memory of the historic Hunnish king in
whose feast-hall the Burgundian heroes held their last revel and made
their death fight. We read of the loves of the Hound of Muirthemne and
Emer the Fair without attributing to the chariot-riding heroes who
“fought over the ears of their horses” and to their fierce lady-loves
more than a symbolic reality. The Roland of the Norman trouvères, the
Roland who blew the ivory horn at Roncesvalles, is to our minds wholly
distinct from the actual Warden of the Marches who fell in a rear-guard
skirmish with the Pyrenean Basques.
As regards philosophy, as distinguished from material science and from
history, the specialization has been incomplete. Poetry is still used
as a vehicle for the teaching of philosophy. Goethe was as profound
a thinker as Kant. He has influenced the thought of mankind far more
deeply than Kant because he was also a great poet. Robert Browning
was a real philosopher, and his writings have had a hundredfold the
circulation and the effect of those of any similar philosopher who
wrote in prose, just because, and only because, what he wrote was not
merely philosophy but literature. The form in which he wrote challenged
attention and provoked admiration. That part of his work which some of
us--which I myself, for instance--most care for is merely poetry. But
in that part of his work which has exercised most attraction and has
given him the widest reputation, the poetry, the form of expression,
bears to the thought expressed much the same relation that the
expression of Lucretius bears to the thought of Lucretius. As regards
this, the great mass of his product, he is primarily a philosopher,
whose writings surpass in value those of other similar philosophers
precisely because they are not only philosophy but literature. In other
words, Browning the philosopher is read by countless thousands to whom
otherwise philosophy would be a sealed book, for exactly the same
reason that Macaulay the historian is read by countless thousands to
whom otherwise history would be a sealed book; because both Browning’s
works and Macaulay’s works are material additions to the great sum
of English literature. Philosophy is a science just as history is
a science. There is need in one case as in the other for vivid and
powerful presentation of scientific matter in literary form.
This does not mean that there is the like need in the two cases.
History can never be truthfully presented if the presentation is purely
emotional. It can never be truthfully or usefully presented unless
profound research, patient, laborious, painstaking, has preceded the
presentation. No amount of self-communion and of pondering on the soul
of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of
cool, serious, widely extended study. The vision of the great historian
must be both wide and lofty. But it must be sane, clear, and based on
full knowledge of the facts and of their interrelations. Otherwise
we get merely a splendid bit of serious romance-writing, like
Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Many hard-working students, alive to the
deficiencies of this kind of romance-writing, have grown to distrust
not only all historical writing that is romantic, but all historical
writing that is vivid. They feel that complete truthfulness must never
be sacrificed to color. In this they are right. They also feel that
complete truthfulness is incompatible with color. In this they are
wrong. The immense importance of full knowledge of a mass of dry facts
and gray details has so impressed them as to make them feel that the
dryness and the grayness are in themselves meritorious.
These students have rendered invaluable service to history. They are
right in many of their contentions. They see how literature and science
have specialized. They realize that scientific methods are as necessary
to the proper study of history as to the proper study of astronomy
or zoology. They know that in many, perhaps in most, of its forms,
literary ability is divorced from the restrained devotion to the actual
fact which is as essential to the historian as to the scientist. They
know that nowadays science ostentatiously disclaims any connection with
literature. They feel that if this is essential for science, it is no
less essential for history.
There is much truth in all these contentions. Nevertheless, taking them
all together, they do not indicate what these hard-working students
believed that they indicate. Because history, science, and literature
have all become specialized, the theory now is that science is
definitely severed from literature and that history must follow suit.
Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history, but I do not
even accept it as true for science.
Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because
both of its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical
value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For a great
work of literature there is the same demand now that there always
has been; and in any great work of literature the first element is
great imaginative power. The imaginative power demanded for a great
historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is
no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with
minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real and vivid,
presentation of the past can come only from one in whom the imaginative
gift is strong. The industrious collector of dead facts bears to such
a man precisely the relation that a photographer bears to Rembrandt.
There are innumerable books, that is, innumerable volumes of printed
matter between covers, which are excellent for their own purposes, but
in which imagination would be as wholly out of place as in the blue
prints of a sewer system or in the photographs taken to illustrate a
work on comparative osteology. But the vitally necessary sewer system
does not take the place of the cathedral of Rheims or of the Parthenon;
no quantity of photographs will ever be equivalent to one Rembrandt;
and the greatest mass of data, although indispensable to the work of a
great historian, is in no shape or way a substitute for that work.
History, taught for a directly and immediately useful purpose to pupils
and the teachers of pupils, is one of the necessary features of a sound
education in democratic citizenship. A book containing such sound
teaching, even if without any literary quality, may be as useful to the
student and as creditable to the writer as a similar book on medicine.
I am not slighting such a book when I say that, once it has achieved
its worthy purpose, it can be permitted to lapse from human memory as a
good book on medicine, which has outlived its usefulness, lapses from
memory. But the historical work which does possess literary quality may
be a permanent contribution to the sum of man’s wisdom, enjoyment, and
inspiration. The writer of such a book must add wisdom to knowledge,
and the gift of expression to the gift of imagination.
It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagination tends to
inaccuracy. Only a distorted imagination tends to inaccuracy. Vast and
fundamental truths can be discerned and interpreted only by one whose
imagination is as lofty as the soul of a Hebrew prophet. When we say
that the great historian must be a man of imagination, we use the word
as we use it when we say that the great statesman must be a man of
imagination. Moreover, together with imagination must go the power of
expression. The great speeches of statesmen and the great writings of
historians can live only if they possess the deathless quality that
inheres in all great literature. The greatest literary historian must
of necessity be a master of the science of history, a man who has at
his finger-tips all the accumulated facts from the treasure-houses of
the dead past. But he must also possess the power to marshal what is
dead so that before our eyes it lives again.
Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness in a
book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned people
seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting is proof that it
is shallow. This is particularly apt to be the attitude of scientific
men. Very few great scientists have written interestingly, and these
few have usually felt apologetic about it. Yet sooner or later the time
will come when the mighty sweep of modern scientific discovery will be
placed, by scientific men with the gift of expression, at the service
of intelligent and cultivated laymen. Such service will be inestimable.
Another writer of “Canterbury Tales,” another singer of “Paradise
Lost,” could not add more to the sum of literary achievement than the
man who may picture to us the phases of the age-long history of life on
this globe, or make vivid before our eyes the tremendous march of the
worlds through space.
Indeed, I believe that already science has owed more than it suspects
to the unconscious literary power of some of its representatives.
Scientific writers of note had grasped the fact of evolution long
before Darwin and Huxley; and the theories advanced by these men
to explain evolution were not much more unsatisfactory, as full
explanations, than the theory of natural selection itself. Yet, where
their predecessors had created hardly a ripple, Darwin and Huxley
succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of the age,
a revolution as great as that caused by the discovery of the truth
about the solar system. I believe that the chief explanation of the
difference was the very simple one that what Darwin and Huxley wrote
was interesting to read. Every cultivated man soon had their volumes
in his library, and they still keep their places on our book-shelves.
But Lamarck and Cope are only to be found in the libraries of a few
special students. If they had possessed a gift of expression akin to
Darwin’s, the doctrine of evolution would not in the popular mind have
been confounded with the doctrine of natural selection and a juster
estimate than at present would obtain as to the relative merits of
the explanations of evolution championed by the different scientific
schools.
Do not misunderstand me. In the field of historical research an
immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power whatever.
Moreover, the most painstaking and laborious research, covering long
periods of years, is necessary in order to accumulate the material
for any history worth writing at all. There are important by-paths of
history, moreover, which hardly admit of treatment that would make
them of interest to any but specialists. All this I fully admit. In
particular I pay high honor to the patient and truthful investigator.
He does an indispensable work. My claim is merely that such work should
not exclude the work of the great master who can use the materials
gathered, who has the gift of vision, the quality of the seer, the
power himself to see what has happened and to make what he has seen
clear to the vision of others. My only protest is against those who
believe that the extension of the activities of the most competent
mason and most energetic contractor will supply the lack of great
architects. If, as in the Middle Ages, the journeymen builders are
themselves artists, why this is the best possible solution of the
problem. But if they are not artists, then their work, however much it
represents of praiseworthy industry, and of positive usefulness, does
not take the place of the work of a great artist.
Take a concrete example. It is only of recent years that the importance
of inscriptions has been realized. To the present-day scholar they
are invaluable. Even to the layman, some of them turn the past into
the present with startling clearness. The least imaginative is moved
by the simple inscription on the Etruscan sarcophagus: “I, the great
lady”; a lady so haughty that no other human being was allowed to rest
near her; and yet now nothing remains but this proof of the pride of
the nameless one. Or the inscription in which Queen Hatshepsu recounts
her feats and her magnificence, and ends by adjuring the onlooker,
when overcome by the recital, not to say “how wonderful” but “how like
her!”--could any picture of a living queen be more intimately vivid?
With such inscriptions before us the wonder is that it took us so long
to realize their worth. Not unnaturally this realization, when it did
come, was followed by the belief that inscriptions would enable us to
dispense with the great historians of antiquity. This error is worse
than the former. Where the inscriptions give us light on what would
otherwise be darkness, we must be profoundly grateful; but we must not
confound the lesser light with the greater. We could better afford to
lose every Greek inscription that has ever been found than the chapter
in which Thucydides tells of the Athenian failure before Syracuse.
Indeed, few inscriptions teach us as much history as certain forms of
literature that do not consciously aim at teaching history at all. The
inscriptions of Hellenistic Greece in the third century before our era
do not, all told, give us so lifelike a view of the ordinary life of
the ordinary men and women who dwelt in the great Hellenistic cities of
the time, as does the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus.
This does not mean that good history can be unscientific. So far from
ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do nothing
unless he is steeped in science. He can never equal what has been done
by the great historians of the past unless he writes not merely with
full knowledge, but with an intensely vivid consciousness, of all that
of which they were necessarily ignorant. He must accept what we now
know to be man’s place in nature. He must realize that man has been
on this earth for a period of such incalculable length that, from the
standpoint of the student of his development through time, what our
ancestors used to call “antiquity” is almost indistinguishable from the
present day. If our conception of history takes in the beast-like man
whose sole tool and weapon was the stone fist-hatchet, and his advanced
successors, the man who etched on bone pictures of the mammoth, the
reindeer, and the wild horse, in what is now France, and the man who
painted pictures of bison in the burial caves of what is now Spain;
if we also conceive in their true position our “contemporaneous
ancestors,” the savages who are now no more advanced than the
cave-dwellers of a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years
back, then we shall accept Thothmes and Cæsar, Alfred and Washington,
Timoleon and Lincoln, Homer and Shakespeare, Pythagoras and Emerson, as
all nearly contemporaneous in time and in culture.
The great historian of the future will have easy access to innumerable
facts patiently gathered by tens of thousands of investigators, whereas
the great historian of the past had very few facts, and often had to
gather most of these himself. The great historian of the future can not
be excused if he fails to draw on the vast storehouses of knowledge
that have been accumulated, if he fails to profit by the wisdom and
work of other men, which are now the common property of all intelligent
men. He must use the instruments which the historians of the past did
not have ready to hand. Yet even with these instruments he can not do
as good work as the best of the elder historians unless he has vision
and imagination, the power to grasp what is essential and to reject the
infinitely more numerous non-essentials, the power to embody ghosts, to
put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men living before our
eyes. In short, he must have the power to take the science of history
and turn it into literature.
Those who wish history to be treated as a purely utilitarian science
often decry the recital of the mighty deeds of the past, the deeds
which always have aroused, and for a long period to come are likely
to arouse, most interest. These men say that we should study not the
unusual but the usual. They say that we profit most by laborious
research into the drab monotony of the ordinary, rather than by
fixing our eyes on the purple patches that break it. Beyond all
question the great historian of the future must keep ever in mind
the relative importance of the usual and the unusual. If he is a
really great historian, if he possesses the highest imaginative and
literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of
the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting
peaks. It is even more essential to have such quality in writing of the
commonplace than in writing of the exceptional. Otherwise no profit
will come from study of the ordinary; for writings are useless unless
they are read, and they can not be read unless they are readable.
Furthermore, while doing full justice to the importance of the usual,
of the commonplace, the great historian will not lose sight of the
importance of the heroic.
It is hard to tell just what it is that is most important to know. The
wisdom of one generation may seem the folly of the next. This is just
as true of the wisdom of the dry-as-dusts as of the wisdom of those who
write interestingly. Moreover, while the value of the by-products of
knowledge does not readily yield itself to quantitative expression, it
is none the less real. A utilitarian education should undoubtedly be
the foundation of all education. But it is far from advisable, it is
far from wise, to have it the end of all education. Technical training
will more and more be accepted as the prime factor in our educational
system, a factor as essential for the farmer, the blacksmith, the
seamstress, and the cook, as for the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer,
and the stenographer. For similar reasons the purely practical and
technical lessons of history, the lessons that help us to grapple
with our immediate social and industrial problems, will also receive
greater emphasis than ever before. But if we are wise we will no
more permit this practical training to exclude knowledge of that
part of literature which is history than of that part of literature
which is poetry. Side by side with the need for the perfection of the
individual in the technic of his special calling goes the need of broad
human sympathy, and the need of lofty and generous emotion in that
individual. Only thus can the citizenship of the modern state rise
level to the complex modern social needs.
No technical training, no narrowly utilitarian study of any kind will
meet this second class of needs. In part they can best be met by a
training that will fit men and women to appreciate, and therefore to
profit by, great poetry and those great expressions of the historian
and the statesman which rivet our interest and stir our souls. Great
thoughts match and inspire heroic deeds. The same reasons that make the
Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural impress themselves on men’s
minds far more deeply than technical treatises on the constitutional
justification of slavery or of secession, apply to fitting descriptions
of the great battle and the great contest which occasioned the two
speeches. The tense epic of the Gettysburg fight, the larger epic of
the whole Civil War, when truthfully and vividly portrayed, will always
have, and ought always to have, an attraction, an interest, that can
not be roused by the description of the same number of hours or years
of ordinary existence. There are supreme moments in which intensity
and not duration is the all-important element. History which is not
professedly utilitarian, history which is didactic only as great
poetry is unconsciously didactic, may yet possess that highest form
of usefulness, the power to thrill the souls of men with stories of
strength and craft and daring, and to lift them out of their common
selves to the heights of high endeavor.
The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no
proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness as on the
same level. But of course the obsession of purposeful moral teaching
may utterly defeat its own aim. Moreover, unfortunately, the avowed
teacher of morality, when he writes history, sometimes goes very far
wrong indeed. It often happens that the man who can be of real help in
inspiring others by his utterances on abstract principles is wholly
unable to apply his own principles to concrete cases. Carlyle offers
an instance in point. Very few men have ever been a greater source of
inspiration to other ardent souls than was Carlyle when he confined
himself to preaching morality in the abstract. Moreover, his theory
bade him treat history as offering material to support that theory.
But not only was he utterly unable to distinguish either great virtues
or great vices when he looked abroad on contemporary life--as witness
his attitude toward our own Civil War--but he was utterly unable to
apply his own principles concretely in history. His “Frederick the
Great” is literature of a high order. It may, with reservations, even
be accepted as history. But the “morality” therein jubilantly upheld
is shocking to any man who takes seriously Carlyle’s other writings
in which he lays down principles of conduct. In his “Frederick the
Great” he was not content to tell the facts. He was not content to
announce his admiration. He wished to square himself with his theories,
and to reconcile what he admired, both with the actual fact and with
his previously expressed convictions on morality. He could only do so
by refusing to face the facts and by using words with meanings that
shifted to meet his own mental emergencies. He pretended to discern
morality where no vestige of it existed. He tortured the facts to
support his views. The “morality” he praised had no connection with
morality as understood in the New Testament. It was the kind of archaic
morality observed by the Danites in their dealings with the people of
Laish. The sermon of the Mormon bishop in Owen Wister’s “Pilgrim on
the Gila” sets forth the only moral lessons which it was possible for
Carlyle truthfully to draw from the successes he described.
History must not be treated as something set off by itself. It should
not be treated as a branch of learning bound to the past by the
shackles of an iron conservatism. It is neither necessary rigidly to
mark the limits of the province of history, nor to treat of all that is
within that province, nor to exclude any subject within that province
from treatment, nor yet to treat different methods of dealing with the
same subject as mutually exclusive. Every writer and every reader has
his own needs, to meet himself or to be met by others. Among a great
multitude of thoughtful people there is room for the widest possible
variety of appeals. Let each man fearlessly choose what is of real
importance and interest to him personally, reverencing authority, but
not in a superstitious spirit, because he must needs reverence liberty
even more.
There is an infinite variety of subjects to treat, and no need to
estimate their relative importance. Because one man is interested in
the history of finance, it does not mean that another is wrong in being
interested in the history of war. One man’s need is met by exhaustive
tables of statistics; another’s by the study of the influence exerted
on national life by the great orators, the Websters and Burkes, or
by the poets, the Tyrtæuses and Körners, who in crises utter what is
in the nation’s heart. There is need of the study of the historical
workings of representative government. There is no less need of the
study of the economic changes produced by the factory system. Because
we study with profit what Thorold Rogers wrote of prices we are not
debarred from also profiting by Mahan’s studies of naval strategy.
One man finds what is of most importance to his own mind and heart
in tracing the effect upon humanity of the spread of malaria along
the shores of the Ægean; or the effect of the Black Death on the
labor-market of mediæval Europe; or the profound influence upon the
development of the African continent of the fatal diseases borne by
the bites of insects, which close some districts to human life and
others to the beasts without which humanity rests at the lowest stage
of savagery. One man sees the events from one view-point, one from
another. Yet another can combine both. We can be stirred by Thayer’s
study of Cavour without abating our pleasure in the younger Trevelyan’s
volumes on Garibaldi. Because we revel in Froissart, or Joinville, or
Villehardouin, there is no need that we should lack interest in the
books that attempt the more difficult task of tracing the economic
changes in the status of peasant, mechanic, and burgher during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
History must welcome the entrance upon its domain of every science. As
James Harvey Robinson in his “New History” has said:
“The bounds of all departments of human research and speculation
are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating; moreover,
the lines of demarcation are hopelessly interlaced, for real men
and the real universe in which they live are so intricate as to
defy all attempts even of the most patient and subtle German to
establish satisfactorily and permanently the _Begriff und Wesen_ of
any artificially delimited set of natural phenomena, whether words,
thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, plants, or stars. Each so-called
science or discipline is ever and always dependent on other sciences
and disciplines. It draws its life from them, and to them it owes,
consciously or unconsciously, a great part of its chances of progress.”
Elsewhere this writer dwells on the need of understanding the genetic
side of history, if we are to grasp the real meaning of, and grapple
most effectively with, the phenomena of our present-day lives; for that
which is can be dealt with best if we realize at least in part from
what a tangled web of causation it has sprung.
The work of the archæologist, the work of the anthropologist, the work
of the palæo-ethnologist--out of all these a great literary historian
may gather material indispensable for his use. He, and we, ought fully
to acknowledge our debt to the collectors of these indispensable
facts. The investigator in any line may do work which puts us all
under lasting obligations to him, even though he be totally deficient
in the art of literary expression, that is, totally deficient in the
ability to convey vivid and lifelike pictures to others of the past
whose secrets he has laid bare. I would give no scanty or grudging
acknowledgment to the deeds of such a man. He does a lasting service;
whereas the man who tries to make literary expression cover his
ignorance or misreading of facts renders less than no service. But the
service done is immeasurably increased in value when the man arises who
from his study of a myriad dead fragments is able to paint some living
picture of the past.
This is why the record as great writers preserve it has a value
immeasurably beyond what is merely lifeless. Such a record pulses with
immortal life. It may recount the deed or the thought of a hero at some
supreme moment. It may be merely the portrayal of homely every-day
life. This matters not, so long as in either event the genius of the
historian enables him to paint in colors that do not fade. The cry of
the Ten Thousand when they first saw the sea still stirs the hearts
of men. The ruthless death scene between Jehu and Jezebel; wicked
Ahab, smitten by the chance arrow, and propped in his chariot until
he died at sundown; Josiah, losing his life because he would not heed
the Pharaoh’s solemn warning, and mourned by all the singing men and
all the singing women--the fates of these kings and of this king’s
daughter, are part of the common stock of knowledge of mankind. They
were petty rulers of petty principalities; yet, compared with them,
mighty conquerors, who added empire to empire, Shalmaneser and Sargon,
Amenhotep and Rameses, are but shadows; for the deeds and the deaths
of the kings of Judah and Israel are written in words that, once read,
can not be forgotten. The Peloponnesian War bulks of unreal size to-day
because it once seemed thus to bulk to a master mind. Only a great
historian can fittingly deal with a very great subject; yet because the
qualities of chief interest in human history can be shown on a small
field no less than on a large one, some of the greatest historians have
treated subjects that only their own genius rendered great.
So true is this that if great events lack a great historian, and a
great poet writes about them, it is the poet who fixes them in the mind
of mankind, so that in after-time importance the real has become the
shadow and the shadow the reality. Shakespeare has definitely fixed
the character of the Richard III of whom ordinary men think and speak.
Keats forgot even the right name of the man who first saw the Pacific
Ocean; yet it is his lines which leap to our minds when we think of the
“wild surmise” felt by the indomitable explorer-conqueror from Spain
when the vast new sea burst on his vision.
When, however, the great historian has spoken, his work will never be
undone. No poet can ever supersede what Napier wrote of the storming
of Badajoz, of the British infantry at Albuera, and of the light
artillery at Fuentes d’Oñoro. After Parkman had written of Montcalm and
Wolfe there was left for other writers only what Fitzgerald left for
other translators of Omar Khayyam. Much new light has been thrown on
the history of the Byzantine Empire by the many men who have studied
it of recent years; we read each new writer with pleasure and profit;
and after reading each we take down a volume of Gibbon, with renewed
thankfulness that a great writer was moved to do a great task.
The greatest of future archæologists will be the great historian who
instead of being a mere antiquarian delver in dust-heaps has the genius
to reconstruct for us the immense panorama of the past. He must possess
knowledge. He must possess that without which knowledge is of so little
use, wisdom. What he brings from the charnel-house he must use with
such potent wizardry that we shall see the life that was and not the
death that is. For remember that the past was life just as much as the
present is life. Whether it be Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or Scandinavia
with which he deals, the great historian, if the facts permit him,
will put before us the men and women as they actually lived so that
we shall recognize them for what they were, living beings. Men like
Maspero, Breasted, and Weigall have already begun this work for the
countries of the Nile and the Euphrates. For Scandinavia the groundwork
was laid long ago in the “Heimskringla” and in such sagas as those of
Burnt Njal and Gisli Soursop. Minute descriptions of mummies and of
the furniture of tombs help us as little to understand the Egypt of
the mighty days, as to sit inside the tomb of Mount Vernon would help
us to see Washington the soldier leading to battle his scarred and
tattered veterans, or Washington the statesman, by his serene strength
of character, rendering it possible for his countrymen to establish
themselves as one great nation.
The great historian must be able to paint for us the life of the plain
people, the ordinary men and women, of the time of which he writes.
He can do this only if he possesses the highest kind of imagination.
Collections of figures no more give us a picture of the past than the
reading of a tariff report on hides or woollens gives us an idea of
the actual lives of the men and women who live on ranches or work in
factories. The great historian will in as full measure as possible
present to us the every-day life of the men and women of the age which
he describes. Nothing that tells of this life will come amiss to him.
The instruments of their labor and the weapons of their warfare, the
wills that they wrote, the bargains that they made, and the songs that
they sang when they feasted and made love: he must use them all. He
must tell us of the toil of the ordinary man in ordinary times, and of
the play by which that ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget
that no event stands out entirely isolated. He must trace from its
obscure and humble beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of
triumph has shaken the world.
Yet he must not forget that the times that are extraordinary
need especial portrayal. In the revolt against the old tendency
of historians to deal exclusively with the spectacular and the
exceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and government, many
modern writers have gone to the opposite extreme. They fail to realize
that in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there are hours so
fraught with weighty achievement, with triumph or defeat, with joy or
sorrow, that each such hour may determine all the years that are to
come thereafter, or may outweigh all the years that have gone before.
In the writings of our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary
citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it is the ordinary
every-day life which counts most; nor yet that seasons come when
ordinary qualities count for but little in the face of great contending
forces of good and of evil, the outcome of whose strife determines
whether the nation shall walk in the glory of the morning or in the
gloom of spiritual death.
The historian must deal with the days of common things, and deal with
them so that they shall interest us in reading of them as our own
common things interest us as we live among them. He must trace the
changes that come almost unseen, the slow and gradual growth that
transforms for good or for evil the children and grandchildren so that
they stand high above or far below the level on which their forefathers
stood. He must also trace the great cataclysms that interrupt and
divert this gradual development. He can no more afford to be blind to
one class of phenomena than to the other. He must ever remember that
while the worst offence of which he can be guilty is to write vividly
and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he can not write
truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as
the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.
There can be no better illustration of what I mean than is afforded by
the history of Russia during the last thousand years. The historian
must trace the growth of the earliest Slav communities of the forest
and the steppe, the infiltration of Scandinavian invaders who gave them
their first power of mass action, and the slow, chaotic development
of the little communes into barbarous cities and savage princedoms.
In later Russian history he must show us priest and noble, merchant
and serf, changing slowly from the days when Ivan the Terrible warred
against Bátory, the Magyar king of Poland, until the present moment,
when with half-suspicious eyes the people of the Czar watch their
remote Bulgarian kinsmen standing before the last European stronghold
of the Turk. During all these centuries there were multitudes of
wars, foreign and domestic, any or all of which were of little moment
compared to the slow working of the various forces that wrought in
the times of peace. But there was one period of storm and overthrow
so terrible that it affected profoundly for all time the whole growth
of the Russian people, in inmost character no less than in external
dominion. Early in the thirteenth century the genius of Jenghiz Khan
stirred the Mongol horsemen of the mid-Asian pastures to a movement as
terrible to civilization as the lava flow of a volcano to the lands
around the volcano’s foot. When that century opened, the Mongols were
of no more weight in the world than the Touaregs of the Sahara are
to-day. Long before the century had closed they had ridden from the
Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. They had crushed
Christian and Moslem and Buddhist alike beneath the iron cruelty of
their sway. They had conquered China as their successors conquered
India. They sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In mid-Europe their
presence for a moment caused the same horror to fall on the warring
adherents of the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they were a scourge so
frightful, so irresistible, that the people cowered before them as if
they had been demons. No European army of that day, of any nation, was
able to look them in the face on a stricken field. Bestial in their
lives, irresistible in battle, merciless in victory, they trampled the
lands over which they rode into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their
horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny horse-bowmen drew a red furrow
across Hungary, devastated Poland, and in Silesia overthrew the banded
chivalry of Germany. But it was in Russia that they did their worst.
They not merely conquered Russia, but held the Russians as cowering
and abject serfs for two centuries. Every feeble effort at resistance
was visited with such bloodthirsty vengeance that finally no Russian
ventured ever to oppose them at all. But the princes of the cities soon
found that the beast-like fury of the conquerors when their own desires
were thwarted, was only equalled by their beast-like indifference to
all that was done among the conquered people themselves, and that they
were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid each Russian against his
brother. Under this régime the Russian who rose was the Russian who
with cringing servility to his Tartar overlords combined ferocious and
conscienceless greed in the treatment of his fellow Russians. Moscow
came to the front by using the Tartar to help conquer the other Russian
cities, paying as a price abject obedience to all Tartar demands. In
the long run the fierce and pliant cunning of the conquered people
proved too much for the short-sighted and arrogant brutality of the
conquerors. The Tartar power, the Mongolian power, waned. Russia became
united, threw off the yoke, and herself began a career of aggression
at the expense of her former conquerors. But the reconquest of racial
independence, vitally necessary though it was to Russia, had been paid
for by the establishment of a despotism Asiatic rather than European in
its spirit and working.
The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were
the present. He will make us see as living men the hard-faced archers
of Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who followed Alexander down
beyond the rim of the known world. We shall hear grate on the coast
of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves whose children’s
children were to inherit unknown continents. We shall thrill to the
triumphs of Hannibal. Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor
of dead cities, and the might of the elder empires of which the very
ruins crumbled to dust ages ago. Along ancient trade-routes, across
the world’s waste spaces, the caravans shall move; and the admirals of
uncharted seas shall furrow the oceans with their lonely prows. Beyond
the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We
shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the
course of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of forgotten seers.
Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly, who saw in
their vision peaks so lofty that never yet have they been reached by
the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds
of men of might and the love and the beauty of women. We shall see
the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of the flowers in the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon will be heavy to our senses. We shall sit at feast
with the kings of Nineveh when they drink from ivory and gold. With
Queen Maeve in her sun-parlor we shall watch the nearing chariots of
the champions. For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the
flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The
frowning strongholds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and
the white palace-castles from whose windows Syrian princes once looked
across the blue Ægean. We shall know the valor of the two-sworded
Samurai. Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and the strange, crooked folly
of the immemorial civilizations which tottered to a living death in
India and in China. We shall see the terrible horsemen of Timur the
Lame ride over the roof of the world; we shall hear the drums beat as
the armies of Gustavus and Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to
victory. Ours shall be the woe of burgher and peasant, and ours the
stern joy when freemen triumph and justice comes to her own. The agony
of the galley-slaves shall be ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked
are brought low and the men of evil days have their reward. We shall
see the glory of triumphant violence, and the revel of those who do
wrong in high places; and the broken-hearted despair that lies beneath
the glory and the revel. We shall also see the supreme righteousness
of the wars for freedom and justice, and know that the men who fell in
these wars made all mankind their debtors.
Some day the historians will tell us of these things. Some day, too,
they will tell our children of the age and the land in which we now
live. They will portray the conquest of the continent. They will show
the slow beginnings of settlement, the growth of the fishing and
trading towns on the seacoast, the hesitating early ventures into the
Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show the backwoodsmen, with their
long rifles and their light axes, making their way with labor and peril
through the wooded wilderness to the Mississippi; and then the endless
march of the white-topped wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the
coast of the greatest of the five great oceans. They will show how the
land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was
filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western
and central Europe. The portentous growth of the cities will be shown,
and the change from a nation of farmers to a nation of business men and
artisans, and all the far-reaching consequences of the rise of the new
industrialism. The formation of a new ethnic type in this melting-pot
of the nations will be told. The hard materialism of our age will
appear, and also the strange capacity for lofty idealism which must
be reckoned with by all who would understand the American character.
A people whose heroes are Washington and Lincoln, a peaceful people
who fought to a finish one of the bloodiest of wars, waged solely for
the sake of a great principle and a noble idea, surely possess an
emergency-standard far above mere money-getting.
Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of
to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much that is
unpleasant. This is but saying that they will describe the arch-typical
civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is finally told,
I believe that it will show that the forces working for good in our
national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that, with many
blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and turning aside from the
path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in
our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation.
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[2]
An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received,
speaks in this university of ancient renown, can not but feel with
peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught
as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and
all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the
minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who
dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations
are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are
not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one
thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of
the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who
came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our
people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become
more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are
of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that,
as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among
the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my
ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come
to Oxford in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth,” would have felt
far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in
the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in
the things of the body.
[2] Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910. This was the Romanes
Lecture for 1910, and has been published by the Oxford
University Press, with whose permission it is included in
this volume.
More than ever before in the world’s history we of to-day seek to
penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind
but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we
see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we
look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages,
from the immemorial past when in “cramp elf and saurian forms” the
creative forces “swathed their too-much power,” down to the yesterday,
a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man became
the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet; and
studying we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death,
of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal
life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly
complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we
speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence.
In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the
history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in
scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by the
men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits. I
am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for instance,
which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and the
water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the science
that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements as the
telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so accelerated
the velocity of movement in social and industrial conditions--for
the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary life during the
last three generations have been greater than in all the preceding
generations since history dawned. I speak of the science which has
no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our every-day life than
literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A
hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know something
of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather against his
having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present
all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific
discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and the
rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most
advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in
the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of
science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect
naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain
tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This
is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have
scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history
of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what biology
shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen
a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both
positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position, the
more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an
attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter
of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely
as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree
that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative
worth and interrelationship are just as necessary in historical
study as in any other kind of study. The fact that a book, though
interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at once from the category
of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the
always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction.
But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to
insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which
is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth
seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific
historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book
is directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as
a painful duty. Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a
branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch
of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science
encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding
encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the
great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is
broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of
books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which
shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great
historians, the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay,
we need merely that the future writers of history, without losing the
qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the
new facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal.
Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No “scientific” treatise
about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that
Joinville’s place is in both history and literature; no minute study
of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot--and Marbot is
as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the
branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art of
presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than the
layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics which
can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of realization,
it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the future must
essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great historians
of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an honorable,
but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian who produces
books which are not literature must rest content with the honor,
substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who
gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to use.
Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of
literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in the
scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He who
would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology, of
the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of
that science of evolution which is inseparably connected with the great
name of Darwin. Of course, there is no exact parallelism between the
birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, and the birth,
growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there is a
certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there
are homologies.
How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are
more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the
interpretation of human history, we can not at present say. The
historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man
is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance
is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is
advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and,
moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts of
vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full significance,
are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The research which
enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge stands first;
but second only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly
to pose the problem, also requires us to say that with our present
knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of
the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the
higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.
Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time
necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many
hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed
by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we
find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian
life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as
we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of
man substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him,
we also find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind,
though widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day.
Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type,
in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most
imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned
into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed
clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these
lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The
scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the
relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation,
by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their
writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which
our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case
the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such
partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that we
have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the development
of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some
facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes
for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts
as to which we grope in the dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes,
of which we can give no adequate explanation.
Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of
terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of species
we must remember that such expressions as “a new species,” or as “a
species becoming extinct,” are each commonly and indiscriminately
used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course
the “new” species is not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared
later on the globe’s surface than those of any old species tottering to
extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now living must necessarily
trace its ancestral descent back through countless generations, through
eons of time, to the early stages of the appearance of life on the
globe. All that we mean by a “new” species is that from some cause, or
set of causes, one of these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops
into a form unlike any that has preceded it; so that, while in one form
of life the ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species
continues to exist, in another form of life there is a deviation from
the ancestral type and a new species appears.
Similarly, “extinction of species” is a term which has two entirely
different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and
leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the generations
go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced.
Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the other case it
changes into something different. The huge titanothere, and the small
three-toed horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the same
period of the world’s history, back in the middle of the mammalian age.
Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely disappeared
and that nothing like either is to be found in the world to-day. But
whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no
descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave descendants,
and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages went by, finally
developed into the highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and
zebras of to-day.
The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in
the development of human societies is striking. A further analogy
is supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of
intense and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes
highly specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization,
triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great
development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so extreme
that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely guess, it
disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly come from the
less specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant, and striking
types, of the preceding era.
When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide one
period of paleontological history from another, we can sometimes assign
causes, and again we can not even guess at them. In the case of single
species, or of faunas of very restricted localities, the explanation
is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change in the amount
of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in vegetation,
might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge herbivores with
a bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity of food, and with
teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants could
furnish this food. Again, we now know that the most deadly foes of the
higher forms of life are various lower forms of life, such as insects,
or microscopic creatures conveyed into the blood by insects. There
are districts in South America where many large animals, wild and
domestic, can not live because of the presence either of certain ticks
or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there is a terrible genus of
poison fly, each species acting as the host of microscopic creatures
which are deadly to certain of the higher vertebrates. One of these
species, though harmless to man, is fatal to all domestic animals,
and this although harmless to the closely related wild kinsfolk of
these animals. Another is fatal to man himself, being the cause of
the “sleeping-sickness” which in many large districts has killed out
the entire population. Of course the development or the extension
of the range of any such insects, and any one of many other causes
which we see actually at work around us, would readily account for
the destruction of some given species or even for the destruction of
several species in a limited area of country.
When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is
different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the
knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctogæal continent, for
instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the glacial
period made a complete, but of course explicable, change in the faunal
life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied
fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna
succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is obvious.
But in many other cases we can not so much as hazard a guess at why
a given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of these
inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South America
toward the close of the tertiary period. For ages South America had
been an island by itself, cut off from North America at the very
time that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication
with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South
America, some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while
others are recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths,
and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian
fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar
during his career on this earth.
Toward the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land
between this old South American island and North America, near what
is now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge across which
the teeming animal life of the northern continent had access to this
queer southern continent. There followed an inrush of huge, or swift,
or formidable creatures which had attained their development in the
fierce competition of the arctogæal realm. Elephants, camels, horses,
tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer,
crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers
and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not
only was the character of the South American fauna totally changed by
the invasion of these creatures from the north, which soon swarmed over
the continent, but it was also changed through the development wrought
in the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they were
exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types died out. Others
developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and thereby saved
themselves from the new beasts. In consequence, South America soon
became populated with various new species of mastodons, sabre-toothed
tigers, camels, horses, deer, cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange
shapes, and some of them of giant size, all of these being descended
from the immigrant types; and side by side with them there grew up
large autochthonous ungulates, giant ground-sloths well-nigh as large
as elephants, and armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally
of the armadillo or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only
held their own, but actually in their turn wandered north over the
isthmus and invaded North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa
to-day, as abundant in species and individuals, even more noteworthy,
because of its huge size or odd type, and because of the terrific
prowess of the more formidable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in
South America, and flourished for a period which human history would
call very long indeed, but which geologically was short.
Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this
fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate
befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous fauna
and the descendants of the migrants that had come down from the north.
Ground-sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all
the associated animals of large size vanished, and South America,
though still retaining its connection with North America, once again
became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that
of North America and the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for
instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like
wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of
small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes
diminutive representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both
of the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants
among the new and intrusive kinds. The change was wide-spread and
extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is wholly
inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine any cause
which would account for the extinction of so many species of huge
or moderate size, while smaller representatives, and here and there
medium-sized representatives, of many of them were left.
Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there
are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history
of human societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, of the
development and change, of the temporary dominance, and death or
transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form races or
nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind that we
use each of the words “birth” and “death,” “youth” and “age,” often
very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally
different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing
as an “old” or a “young” nation, any more than there is an “old” or
“young” family. Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral descent must be
of exactly the same length for every existing individual, and for every
group of individuals, whether forming a family or a nation. All that
can properly be meant by the terms “new” and “young” is that in a given
line of descent there has suddenly come a period of rapid change. This
change may arise either from a new development or transformation of the
old elements, or else from a new grouping of these elements with other
and varied elements; so that the words “new” nation or “young” nation
may have a real difference of significance in one case from what they
have in another.
As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the
specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing,
generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, occurs when
a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more
complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for
instance, in western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and,
later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the
modern countries of western Europe are descended from the states
created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be
called “new” or “young” states in the sense that part or all of the
people composing them were descended from races that hitherto had not
been civilized, and that therefore, for the first time, entered on
the career of civilized communities. In the southern part of western
Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants
already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the
new kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence
then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders had
come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities
with essentially the same civilization as their southern neighbors;
though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there
was no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which
gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same races
which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly
changing barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the Slavonized
Finns of eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian leaders
from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine culture from the
south, joined to produce the changes which have gradually, out of the
little Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, formed the
mighty Russian Empire of to-day.
Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a
long-established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this
case the nation is usually spoken of as a “young,” and is correctly
spoken of as a “new,” nation; but the term should always be used with a
clear sense of the difference between what is described in such case,
and what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized
nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new
cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phœnician race
was in every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old
city. So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared
with England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and
culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean
for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that
the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished
many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean
that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly use
the phrase “a new people,” in speaking of Canadians or Australians,
Americans or Africanders. But we use it in an entirely different sense
from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those
founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of
astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves
conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use
it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when
speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod,
and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy forests
struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities
and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred
were “new,” compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also
in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing
in common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the
Cæsars of Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history were
totally different. This is not true of those “new” nations which spring
direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United States,
are all “new” nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but, with
whatever changes in detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the
general European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The
differences between these “new” American and these “old” European
nations are not as great as those which separate the “new” nations
one from another, and the “old” nations one from another. There are in
each case very real differences between the new and the old nation;
differences both for good and for evil; but in each case there is the
same ancestral history to reckon with, the same type of civilization,
with its attendant benefits and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer
stages are passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of superficial
differences, are in their essence the same; they are those that
confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront only peoples
struggling from barbarism into civilization.
So, when we speak of the “death” of a tribe, a nation, or a
civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally
different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological
history being complete. Certain tribes of savages--the Tasmanians, for
instance, and various little clans of American Indians--have within
the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals
have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared.
Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are
now disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the
veins of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those
white intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed
into something absolutely different from what they were. In the
United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees,
Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes are in process of absorption
into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a
couple of years ago, one of the two senators, and three of the five
representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a
few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as
those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by
absorption and transformation into the mass of the American population.
A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that
a civilization has “died out.” The nationality and culture of
the wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have
completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences dating
therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and hidden form
as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the Roman Empire
was of no such character. There was complete change, far-reaching
transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation; but it would
not be correct to speak either of the blood or the culture of Old
Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to the
permanence or evanescence of the various strains of blood that go to
make up every civilized nationality; but it is reasonably certain
that the blood of the old Roman still flows through the veins of the
modern Italian; and though there has been much intermixture, from
many different foreign sources--from foreign conquerors and from
foreign slaves--yet it is probable that the Italian type of to-day
finds its dominant ancestral type in the ancient Latin. As for the
culture, the civilization of Rome, this is even more true. It has
suffered a complete transformation, partly by natural growth, partly
by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic religion,
and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs; but the process
was not one of extinction, but one of growth and transformation, both
from within and by the accretion of outside elements. In France and
Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture
which was forced on those countries has been tenaciously retained by
them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes,
as the basis on which their civilizations have been built. Moreover,
the permanent spreading of Roman influence was not limited to Europe.
It has extended to and over half of that New World which was not even
dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant life between the
birth and the death of pagan Rome. This New World was discovered by
one Italian, and its mainland first reached and named by another;
and in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan’s empire,
the Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the
Saint Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of the Andes, and in
the shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande
to the Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing
apace, which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in
their blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization.
When we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient
Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to
describe totally different phenomena.
The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more clearly
than their predecessors of a couple of generations back, how artificial
most great nationalities are, and how loose is the terminology usually
employed to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and
rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which
spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as
if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something
ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and
faith in their own and their fellow countrymen’s purity of descent
from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a
few generations earlier by the various noble families who traced
their lineage direct to Odin, Æneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course,
all students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the
slightest connection between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue. In
America we find three races, white, red, and black, and three tongues,
English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such a way that the lines
of cleavage of race continually run at right angles to the lines of
cleavage of speech; there being communities practically of pure blood
of each race found speaking each language. Aryan and Teutonic are
terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; but whether they have
any such ethnical meanings as were formerly attributed to them is so
doubtful, that we can not even be sure whether the ancestors of most
of those we call Teutons originally spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The
term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when used linguistically; but
when used to describe a race it means almost nothing until we find out
which one of several totally different terminologies the writer or
speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is used to designate
the short-headed, medium-sized type common throughout middle Europe,
from east to west, it denotes something entirely different from what
is meant when the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents
of the Romans and the later Greeks; while, if used to designate any
modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as the
term Anglo-Saxon itself.
Most of the great societies which have developed a high civilization
and have played a dominant part in the world have been--and
are--artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the sense of
including totally different race types. A great nation rarely belongs
to any one race, though its citizens generally have one essentially
national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great
artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the
parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward
or go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very
powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is
far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed
we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from
one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when they
become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and creed
sink into littleness.
An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided
according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as
stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance
whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities,
of Europe; while, on the contrary, a linguistic map would show a
general correspondence between speech and nationality. The northern
Frenchman is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to his
German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean
seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than
to the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of
the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that
tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen
feel keenly that they are one, and are different from all outsiders,
their differences dwindling into insignificance compared with the
extraordinary, artificially produced resemblances which bring them
together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true
when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the
Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German
of the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and
Yorkshireman in England.
In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and primitive
relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized, civilized, or
semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution in drawing
analogies with what has occurred in the development of the animal
world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of the
phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these complex, artificial
groups of human beings resemble what has happened in myriads of
instances in the history of life on this planet.
Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are knit by a bond of
speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood, show periods of
extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering decay? In some
cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases we can not as yet
even guess what the proper answer should be. If in any such case the
centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal, the nation will of course
fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure to become a dominant
force is patent to every one. The minute that the spirit which finds
its healthy development in local self-government, and is the antidote
to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into mere
particularism, into inability to combine effectively for achievement of
a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland and
certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the standard examples
of failure of this kind; and the United States would have ranked with
them, and her name would have become a byword of derision, if the
forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of
soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a national
danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the vision of a
seer to foretell what must happen in any community if the average woman
ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy children, if the
average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to
fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die
out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if
the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material
prosperity can offset.
But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially
inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great
slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a countryside of
peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like
acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the
citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the
state, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But this does not
explain why the forward movement stopped at different times, so far as
different matters were concerned; at one time as regards literature,
at another time as regards architecture, at another time as regards
city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome’s dissolution
at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the impoverishment
and depopulation of the empire, its fall would be quite sufficiently
explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had lost the
fighting edge--an essential even under a despotism, and therefore far
more essential in free, self-governing communities, such as those of
the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is rather that out
of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during the last days of
the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an empire able to
hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or four centuries. But
why, for instance, should the higher kinds of literary productiveness
have ceased about the beginning of the second century, whereas the
following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in the shape
of city-building in the provinces, not only in western Europe, but in
Africa? We can not even guess why the springs of one kind of energy
dried up, while there was yet no cessation of another kind.
Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period
covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some
of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the dangerous
heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior in
territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later
she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which she
had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it could
not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker than it
needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great
Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed. Her government
was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to
permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to
rob the central authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But
the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies,
where men hate to think of war as possible, and try to justify their
own reluctance to face it either by high-sounding moral platitudes,
or else by a philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were
very wealthy. They grew to believe that they could hire others to do
their fighting for them on land; and on sea, where they did their own
fighting, and fought very well, they refused in time of peace to make
ready fleets so efficient as either to insure them against the peace
being broken or else to give them the victory when war came. To be
opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost
certain cost of disaster in the future.
It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position
among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the
same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position in
the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burnt itself
out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of great
warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the great
Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed
the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.
In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it
was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy
teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the
Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no
decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so
many countries: no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no
general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first
a flowering time, in which the country’s men of action and men of
thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day;
then this period of command passed, and the state revolved in an eddy,
aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the
people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially
unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves
and play again a leading part.
In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course
of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really
Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries
when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and
frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating
self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as
most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work throughout
Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism. It had
ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring forth
men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people cowered
in helpless misery among the horsehoofs of the barbarians, as the wild
northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities for
a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but in the end
it was seen that what came had been in part change and growth. It was
not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of
language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but the people
of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins. In a
few centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy. Then for four or
five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states which,
in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent life,
in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and in their
utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among themselves or
to repel outside invasion, can not unfairly be compared with classic
Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or
Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, there came
for the third time a wonderful new birth.
Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in
certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance
in certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one
time seemed as firmly established as in Italy--certainly as in Spain
or Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of
a national type can be found than in the case of the Greco-Roman
dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over
nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the
time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins
of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must
once have been. The overshadowing and far-reaching importance of what
occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New
Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North
Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the valley of the Po.
The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a
period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage
of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then
they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion,
and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they
vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside
them a new type, the Arab.
Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main facts.
We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the greatness
of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood remains in Italy,
whether to a greater or less extent; and that the Latin culture has
died out in the African realm it once won, while it has lasted in Spain
and France, and thence has extended itself to continents beyond the
ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts, save partially; but
the facts themselves we do know. But there are other cases in which
we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we do not know what the
changes really were, still less the hidden causes and meaning of these
changes. Much remains to be found out before we can speak with any
certainty as to whether some changes mean the actual dying out or the
mere transformation of types. It is, for instance, astonishing how
little permanent change in the physical make-up of the people seems to
have been worked in Europe by the migrations of the races in historic
times. A tall, fair-haired, long-skulled race penetrates to some
southern country and establishes a commonwealth. The generations pass.
There is no violent revolution, no break in continuity of history,
nothing in the written records to indicate an epoch-making change at
any given moment; and yet after a time we find that the old type has
reappeared and that the people of the locality do not substantially
differ in physical form from the people of other localities that did
not suffer such an invasion. Does this mean that gradually the children
of the invaders have dwindled and died out; or, as the blood is mixed
with the ancient blood, has there been a change, part reversion and
part assimilation, to the ancient type in its old surroundings? Do
tint of skin, eyes and hair, shape of skull, and stature change in the
new environment, so as to be like those of the older people who dwelt
in this environment? Do the intrusive races, without change of blood,
tend under the pressure of their new surroundings to change in type
so as to resemble the ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the strains
mingled, has the new strain dwindled and vanished, from causes as yet
obscure? Has the blood of the Lombard practically disappeared from
Italy, and of the Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow in large
populations where the old physical type has once more become dominant?
Here in England, the long-skulled men of the long barrows, the
short-skulled men of the round barrows--have they blended, or has one
or the other type actually died out; or are they merged in some older
race which they seemingly supplanted, or have they adopted the tongue
and civilization of some later race which seemingly destroyed them?
We can not say. We do not know which of the widely different stocks
now speaking Aryan tongues represents in physical characteristics the
ancient Aryan type, nor where the type originated, nor how or why it
imposed its language on other types, nor how much or how little mixture
of blood accompanied the change of tongue.
The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of those which can
and those which can not be explained, have been peculiarly in evidence
during the four centuries that have gone by since the discovery of
America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These have been the
four centuries of by far the most intense and constantly accelerating
rapidity of movement and development that the world has yet seen. The
movement has covered all the fields of human activity. It has witnessed
an altogether unexampled spread of civilized mankind over the world, as
well as an altogether unexampled advance in man’s dominion over nature;
and this together with a literary and artistic activity to be matched
in but one previous epoch. This period of extension and development
has been that of one race, the so-called white race, or, to speak more
accurately, the group of peoples living in Europe, who undoubtedly have
a certain kinship of blood, who profess the Christian religion, and
trace back their culture to Greece and Rome.
The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief is
this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race.
It is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years which went
before the opening of this era of European supremacy, the attitude of
Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and Moor, had
on the whole been that of successful aggression against Europe. More
than a century went by after the voyages of Columbus before the mastery
in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During that time
Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand comparison with
Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European advance gathered
momentum; until at the present time peoples of European blood hold
dominion over all America and Australia and the islands of the sea,
over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia. Much of this world
conquest is merely political, and such a conquest is always likely in
the long run to vanish. But very much of it represents not a merely
political, but an ethnic conquest; the intrusive people having either
exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples, or else having
imposed upon them its tongue, law, culture, and religion, together
with a strain of its blood. During this period substantially all of
the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the
people of European descent. The first exception of any consequence is
the wonderful rise of Japan within the last generation--a phenomenon
unexampled in history; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese
line of ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours; and yet
Japan, while hitherto keeping most of what was strongest in her ancient
character and traditions, has assimilated with curious completeness
most of the characteristics that have given power and leadership to the
West.
During this period of intense and feverish activity among the peoples
of European stock, first one and then another has taken the lead.
The movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their flowering-time was
as brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of their annals are
illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, poets,
and painters. Then their days of greatness ceased. Many partial
explanations can be given, but something remains behind, some hidden
force for evil, some hidden source of weakness upon which we can not
lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after
centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese
stock are entering upon another era of development, and there are other
signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.
About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of the
Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of Europe, in
the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav turned in
his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp leadership and
dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has at one time or
another sought a place in the movement of expansion; but for the last
three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has been the growth of
the English-speaking peoples and their spread over the world’s waste
spaces.
Comparison is often made between the empire of Britain and the
empire of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all modern
civilization, the empire of Rome is of course the more important,
simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other
continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by
the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The empire of Rome
is the most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time
can be compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying
that the nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection
of the stream’s current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one
with the other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the
immensely increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the
older empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand
years, there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and
abounding interest and importance of their careers.
In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its predecessor
had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed large over the
horizon of history, there were left for her to contend with only
decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus,
she strove against the strength of but one of the many fragments into
which Alexander’s kingdom had fallen. When she conquered Carthage,
she overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single Greek
city of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy
armies of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of the
House of Barca, which rendered the struggle forever memorable. It was
the distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen,
that set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was
curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the
tall barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her
greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the
Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened
her but to die.
On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the great
empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that have
also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the continent
of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the empire she
won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had at the same
time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of
Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and Macedon in the red
flush of their warrior-dawn. The empire of Britain is vaster in space,
in population, in wealth, in wide variety of possession, in a history
of multiplied and manifold achievement of every kind, than even the
glorious empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome, Britain has won dominion in
every clime, has carried her flag by conquest and settlement to the
uttermost ends of the earth, at the very time that haughty and powerful
rivals, in their abounding youth or strong maturity, were eager to
set bounds to her greatness, and to tear from her what she had won
afar. England has peopled continents with her children, has swayed
the destinies of teeming myriads of alien race, has ruled ancient
monarchies, and wrested from all corners the right to the world’s waste
spaces, while at home she has held her own before nations, each of
military power comparable to Rome’s at her zenith.
Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own
borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country, my hearers,
is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from
without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard
ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these
enemies are our own passions and follies. Free peoples can escape
being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves. We
Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep
in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of
a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty,
of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my
hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think
me a very radical democrat--as, for the matter of that, I am--and my
theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as
little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist.
But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think
soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is
the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have
a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool.
No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that
wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman;
but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the
all-important factor in national greatness is national character.
There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever
tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to an
end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law
of death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can
tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that
can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for good
and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for
vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The
most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of
natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of
the civilized nations of central and western Europe, of America and
Australia--a diminution so great that, if it continues for the next
century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years,
all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else
have begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have
already gone very far backward.
There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there
is much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be
mistaken than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in
1830 Niebuhr hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go
down with a crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third-
and fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked,
comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to
the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the civilized
portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at Carlyle’s
prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the teeming
life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and of noble
effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two generations
since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been told and
all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth doing had been
done. I believe with all my heart that a great future remains for us;
but whether it does or does not, our duty is not altered. However the
battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost vigor
do his allotted task, and bear himself as valiantly in defeat as in
victory. Come what will, we belong to peoples who have not yielded
to the craven fear of being great. In the ages that have gone by, the
great nations, the nations that have expanded and that have played a
mighty part in the world, have in the end grown old and weakened and
vanished; but so have the nations whose only thought was to avoid all
danger, all effort, who would risk nothing, and who therefore gained
nothing. In the end, the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the
memory of the one type perishes with it, while the other leaves its
mark deep on the history of all the future of mankind.
A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in
the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of
heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence
the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has
done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time to
see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to take up
the task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth.
But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours to
remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers were
before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation, from
civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from the
dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of this
teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward and
the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man
whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept alight
only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they
worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than
how they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the realm of the
body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was of substance,
then high success was really theirs.
In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between what
has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession of the ages
on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring to the great
artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the world’s
surface during the thousands of years that have elapsed since cities
of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the Euphrates,
and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of the Ægean
craft. But of course the parallel is true only in the roughest and most
general way. Moreover, even between the civilizations of to-day and
the civilizations of ancient times there are differences so profound
that we must be cautious in drawing any conclusions for the present
based on what has happened in the past. While freely admitting all
of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it is yet mere perversity to
refuse to realize the incredible advance that has been made in ethical
standards. I do not believe that there is the slightest necessary
connection between any weakening of virile force and this advance in
the moral standard, this growth of the sense of obligation to one’s
neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor wrong. We need have
scant patience with that silly cynicism which insists that kindliness
of character only accompanies weakness of character. On the contrary,
just as in private life many of the men of strongest character are
the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so I believe that
in national life, as the ages go by, we shall find that the permanent
national types will more and more tend to become those in which,
though intellect stands high, character stands higher; in which rugged
strength and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful aggression
by others, will go hand in hand with a lofty scorn of doing wrong
to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of Hampden, of Washington,
and Lincoln. These were as good men, as disinterested and unselfish
men, as ever served a state; and they were also as strong men as ever
founded or saved a state. Surely such examples prove that there is
nothing Utopian in our effort to combine justice and strength in the
same nation. The really high civilizations must themselves supply the
antidote to the self-indulgence and love of ease which they tend to
produce.
Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to
solve within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from
juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the
self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must deal
with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the
problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must
be a spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance
of responsibility, one for each and each for all, and at the same
time a spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and
sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong
to the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil
affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the
lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted a reward which
is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned.
The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself;
and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently
helped at the expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to
best advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially
of minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to
the advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage
of a majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom
of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the
body politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires
of an impossible--and incidentally of a highly undesirable--social
revolution which, in destroying individual rights--including property
rights--and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the
advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance
or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a
dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our
duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions.
But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment
by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to
better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate
relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use,
with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that,
though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than
softness of head.
But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important
of all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern
nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded,
that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien
races, have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong
to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has
ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying, on a scale hitherto
unexampled, to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the
people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great
Power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve,
and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the
man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and
the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with
utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our
own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism
which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that arise are
of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They can not be solved by the
foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little patent
recipes and those cut-and-dried theories of the political nursery which
have such limited applicability amid the crash of elemental forces.
Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality of the men who, whether
at home or on the rough frontier of civilization, adopt might as the
only standard of right in dealing with other men, and treat alien races
only as subjects for exploitation.
No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races,
because they differ from one another far more widely than some of
them differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not
be forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for
one race managing or controlling another unless the management and
control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that
other race. This is what our peoples have in the main done, and must
continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt,
and the Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race,
everywhere, at home or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from the
great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth
as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a
given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted
to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied
to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the other hand, where he
acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was
one of our own stock, he is just as entitled to that respect and reward
if he comes of another stock, even though that other stock produces a
much smaller proportion of men of his type than does our own. This has
nothing to do with social intermingling, with what is called social
equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing to each man
and each woman that elementary justice which will permit him or her
to gain from life the reward which should always accompany thrift,
sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights of others, and hard
and intelligent work to a given end. To more than such just treatment
no man is entitled, and less than such just treatment no man should
receive.
The other type of duty is the international duty, the duty owed by
one nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which should
govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are just
as binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the other.
The application of the moral law must be different in the two cases,
because in one case it has, and in the other it has not, the sanction
of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can depend for his
rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their force from the
police power of the state. The nation can depend upon nothing of the
kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest duty of the
most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves in such a state
of readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the hope of
arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that
lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the
unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples
who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible
foe. But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and
the peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and
iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate
lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong;
and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous
fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country
should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence
upon one’s own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that
marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his
fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience.
For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged
especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those
years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face
of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an
individual in dealing with other individuals.
I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a
right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several
countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of
doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily
for success, even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer
souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. Let us
hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children
and children’s children to endless generations shall arise to take our
places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether
this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least
the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch
in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close,
and we go out into the darkness, and others’ hands grasp the torch, at
least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.
THE WORLD MOVEMENT
THE WORLD MOVEMENT[3]
I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of
Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence.
It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the
feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a
country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the
case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks
with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all
the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany.
More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the
West became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the
Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history
of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise
of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore
ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society
and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders,
city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the
seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat
back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.
[3] Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910.
After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman
Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working
for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was round the
Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great,
the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab
and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old
heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild
horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion
in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the
Karling empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery:
Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders
from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany proper who quelled
these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became
Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began
to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the
centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now
well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and
in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted
hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern
rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding
position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.
To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to
this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young
nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of
the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has inherited
or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every
inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German
strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has
been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers
whose children’s children have been and are being fused into the
American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low
Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we
have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our
veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations
American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to
the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the
intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in
every way closer than it has ever been before.
Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of
to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life
of this university covers the period during which that movement has
spread until it is felt throughout every continent, while its velocity
has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has
changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and
appropriate here to speak on this subject.
When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this
planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight.
Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal
degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general
law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature,
changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life
of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups
of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary
beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call
civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far
the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living
world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something
totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been
before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the
development of life generally and what has gone on in the development
of human society. [These I have discussed in the preceding chapter.]
But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.
Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for,
properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were
local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along
but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages
we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary
discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and
the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at
the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the
half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them
except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not
the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which
separated man from brute.
Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high
position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to
violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric
or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given
localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that
was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what,
if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we
have developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly
how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many
cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered
the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed
the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact.
In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at
the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over
the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a
certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at
the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage
souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that
had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves
of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak
definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years
that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in
prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as
to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to
the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which
Stonehenge is the type.
The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in
that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate
present--and which is but a span’s length from the present, even when
compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this
planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia
and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far
as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural
development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us
to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern
Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese
civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.
Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the
striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were
the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness.
The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates
are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds,
leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of
centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action
and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the
movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual,
was much faster than anything that had occurred during the eons of
mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement
was very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it was strongly
localized, while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain
conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the
domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread
the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a
“world movement” at all, for by far the greater part of the habitable
globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as
peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.
With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into
prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be
said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can
consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to
be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man,
when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically
these three peoples--although, judged even by the history of which we
have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.
The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of
little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus,
until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under
the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died.
In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the
most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of
mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies
left us by the Greek and the Roman.
The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more
varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that
affected a far larger share of the world’s surface. For the first
time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a “world
movement” in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of
the world’s surface and that it represented what was incomparably
the most important of all that was happening in world history at the
time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had
greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by
the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization
affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there
was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind
from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to
the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas.
Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences
which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to
affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the forms of science,
in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition
to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose
concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life.
Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and
understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we
come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers,
whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose
writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there
were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like
Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the
centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were
so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for
them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge.
The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by
the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement;
and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming
destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the
reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed
between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later
which fully avenged it.
This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In
its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among
those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace our
descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far more
thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both conquests
were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest which in its
ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.
With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and
it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years
passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European
civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned.
During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation
of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing
back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the
Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted
with qualifications. There is no hard-and-fast line between one age or
period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression
universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle
Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed
the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some
points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below
the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry,
of architecture--especially cathedral architecture--and of serene
spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of
violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded
that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its
scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.
During this period there were several very important extra-European
movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose,
and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races
into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able
to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing
European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and
here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the
civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured
peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered
development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any
European influence.
Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the
unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and
terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction--Hun
and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes
of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and
destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in
no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.
At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement toward
a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning
of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with
the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures
which culminated in the discovery of America; and, after these two
epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material
and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should
thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that
had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of
intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names
of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man
was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time
experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization.
Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity
and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects
during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or
two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of
the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations.
From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than
anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there
has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of
organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural
resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an
immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as
varied as it is striking.
In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their
conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically
vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in
organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of
military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these
two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time
there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a
world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of
Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every
sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been
ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and
new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely
or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate
and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in
portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the
conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for
the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators,
as in most of tropical Asia and Africa, and in much of tropical
America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has
been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and
radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most
extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth
and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the
most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past
history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet
with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient
ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized
nations of mankind.
There are, of course, many grades between these different types of
influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last
four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises
a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There
are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is
at present no large space of territory in which the general movement
of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This
represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been
seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was
felt over only a relatively small portion of the world’s surface. Over
much the larger part of the world the process of change and development
was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman
Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in
action and reaction, and in interaction, among themselves, were grouped
immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is
bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred
rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.
Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought
or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The
student of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Petersburg, Rome or
London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres;
but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men
who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor
problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insurance
for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and
we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is
doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most
dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which
the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of
study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is
accomplished in the laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the
details of that practical application of science which has changed
the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health
resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western
methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European
and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of
European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact
that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem
conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question
in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European
or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the
form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to
what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of
any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or
political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every
continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating
or applying socialism, there is no movement of note which can take
place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of
people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal
or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than
ever before.
So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern
civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of
modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The
movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces,
in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.
The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase
in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an
extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature.
In both directions the advance has been very great during the past
four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with
ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great
age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in
many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain
was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year
150 A. D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central
Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate
than any which we had as late as 1850 A. D. More was known of physical
science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed
at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern
movement began. The case was the same as regards military science. At
the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always
been--sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more
than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the
science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal
and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this university was founded,
the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from
what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity.
Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on
beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars;
and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements
there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some
respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There
were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than
the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance,
was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam
and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting
immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely
changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt
to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as
in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were
not materially improved. A graduate of your university to-day can go
to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a
feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a
student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and
use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution
in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here
again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not
merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern
city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed
one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one
of the most formidable problems of modern life.
Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and
water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air
is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so
the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they
annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without
regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced
each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with
the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the
farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained
intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the
effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific
development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind
that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation
on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at
the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing
output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when
our children’s children, or their children’s children, shall dwell in
an ironless age--and, later on, in an age without coal--and will have
to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and
use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific
civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of
field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century,
more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power
that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine,
the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been
literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been
over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of
the human race.
The advances in the realm of pure intellect have been of equal note,
and they have been both intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields of
learning and wisdom have been discovered by the few, and at the same
time knowledge has spread among the many to a degree never dreamed of
before. Old men among us have seen in their own generation the rise of
the first rational science of the evolution of life. The astronomer and
the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, and all their brethren
in many different fields of wide endeavor, work with a training and
knowledge and method which are in effect instruments of precision,
differentiating their labors from the labors of their predecessors as
the rifle is differentiated from the bow.
The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world
as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces
for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a
thousandfold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the
whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the
mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole
world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The machinery
is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort
and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread
the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown,
and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the
machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern
civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Greco-Roman
civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the
Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were
then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement,
wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast
scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in
applied science--all these mark our civilization as they marked the
wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands
twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older
civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are
quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old
civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the
two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in
the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that
it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.
One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency
to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge.
When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is
always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness
of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life,
is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man
of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand,
merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now, I will not assert that
in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly overcome;
but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome them than
was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously shown by the
military history of the Greco-Roman period as compared with the history
of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and among nations of
European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military history the change
was steadily from a citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the days
of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when
the Roman republic conquered what world it knew, the armies were filled
with citizen soldiers. But gradually the citizens refused to serve in
the armies, or became unable to render good service. The Greek states
described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, hired others to do
their fighting for them. The Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly
ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any
infantry, to the legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to
an end, there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers.
The change from the citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been
completed.
Now the exact reverse has been the case with us in modern times. A few
centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the principal figure in most
armies, and in great numbers of cases the mercenary soldier was an
alien. In the wars of religion in France, in the Thirty Years’ War in
Germany, in the wars that immediately thereafter marked the beginning
of the break-up of the great Polish kingdom, the regiments and brigades
of foreign soldiers formed a striking and leading feature in every
army. Too often the men of the country in which the fighting took place
played merely the ignoble part of victims, the burghers and peasants
appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary armies by which they
were plundered. Gradually this has all changed, until now practically
every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary has almost disappeared,
while the army exists on a vaster scale than ever before in history.
This is so among the military monarchies of Europe. In our own Civil
War of the United States the same thing occurred, peaceful people as
we are. At that time more than two generations had passed since the
war of independence. During the whole of that period the people had
been engaged in no life-and-death struggle; and yet, when the Civil War
broke out, and after some costly and bitter lessons at the beginning,
the fighting spirit of the people was shown to better advantage than
ever before. The war was peculiarly a war for a principle, a war
waged by each side for an ideal, and while faults and shortcomings
were plentiful among the combatants, there was comparatively little
sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant struggle, where across
the warp of so many interests is shot the woof of so many purposes,
dark strands and bright, strands sombre and brilliant, are always
intertwined; inevitably there was corruption here and there in the
Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides and the great majority of
the enormous masses of fighting men wholly disregarded, and were wholly
uninfluenced by, pecuniary considerations. There were, of course,
foreigners who came over to serve as soldiers of fortune for money or
for love of adventure; but the foreign-born citizens served in much
the same proportion, and from the same motives, as the native-born.
Taken as a whole, it was, even more than the Revolutionary War, a true
citizens’ fight, and the armies of Grant and Lee were as emphatically
citizen armies as the Athenian, Theban, or Spartan armies in the great
age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the days of the republic.
Another striking contrast in the course of modern civilization
as compared with the later stages of the Greco-Roman or classic
civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and politics.
In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its zenith,
politics became a recognized means of accumulating great wealth. Cæsar
was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he spent an enormous
fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which he made out of his
political-military career. Augustus established imperial Rome on firm
foundations by the use he made of the huge fortune he had acquired
by plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of Washington
and Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the
immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their civilizations
culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as one of the
incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is in sharp
contrast to what has happened within the last two or three centuries.
During this time there has been a steady growth away from the theory
that money-making is permissible in an honorable public career. In this
respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and things which
statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or two centuries
ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career even a century
ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still exercise a large,
and sometimes an improper, influence in politics, but it is apt to be
an indirect influence; and in the advanced states the mere suspicion
that the wealth of public men is obtained or added to as an incident
of their public careers will bar them from public life. Speaking
generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern political life,
but it is not acquired in political life. The colonial administrators,
German or American, French or English, of this generation lead careers
which, as compared with the careers of other men of like ability,
show too little rather than too much regard for money-making; and
literally a world scandal would be caused by conduct which a Roman
proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and which would not have
been especially uncommon even in the administration of England a
century and a half ago. On the whole, the great statesmen of the last
few generations have been either men of moderate means or, if men of
wealth, men whose wealth was diminished rather than increased by their
public services.
I have dwelt on these points merely because it is well to emphasize
in the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many respects there is
a complete lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day and
the only other civilization in any way comparable to it, that of the
ancient Greco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many points in which
the analogy is close, and in some of these points the resemblances
are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of all is the
fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of interest,
and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization can be
compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now literally a
world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid and is
ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at
one point is certain to be felt with greater or less effect at almost
every other point. Every path of activity open to the human intellect
is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto dreamed of. We
have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in consequence,
a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and daring souls have
before them a well-nigh limitless opening for endeavor of any kind.
Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been able to develop
only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field of endeavor has
been limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, of course,
been great movements, but they were of practically only one form of
activity; and, although usually this set in motion other kinds of
activities, such was not always the case. The great religious movements
have been the preeminent examples of this type. But they are not the
only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the Phœnicians, at almost
opposite poles of cultivation, have represented movements in which one
element, military or commercial, so overshadowed all other elements
that the movement died out chiefly because it was one-sided. The
extraordinary outburst of activity among the Mongols of the thirteenth
century was almost purely a military movement, without even any great
administrative side; and it was therefore well-nigh purely a movement
of destruction. The individual prowess and hardihood of the Mongols,
and the perfection of their military organization rendered their
armies incomparably superior to those of any European, or any other
Asiatic, power of that day. They conquered from the Yellow Sea to the
Persian Gulf and the Adriatic; they seized the imperial throne of
China; they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India.
The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism
were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting
men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into
bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows
of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease
any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they
had no root of permanence; their work was mere evil while it lasted,
and it did not last long; and when they vanished they left hardly a
trace behind them. So the extraordinary Phœnician civilization was
almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization, and though it
left an impress on the life that came after, this impress was faint
indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks with their
many-sided development. Yet the Greek civilization itself fell because
this many-sided development became too exclusively one of intellect, at
the expense of character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities
which fit men to govern both themselves and others. When the Greek lost
the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his
statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and
pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not
all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic
development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the
Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older
civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity
to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world’s surface;
the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities;
the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement--are all
these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and
terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be
in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go
down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity
for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we
have the wit and the courage and the honesty.
Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think
that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on
the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has
held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not
come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty
deeds we make them come true. We can not afford to develop any one set
of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others,
equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency of the
Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phœnician, nor the
subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.
We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we
are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of
all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family
life, the fundamental and essential qualities--the homely, every-day,
all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not
in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the
average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy
children, then the state will topple, will go down, no matter what may
be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But
these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be that
power of organization, that power of working in common for a common
end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion during
the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even
more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the
hard intolerance and arid intellectual barrenness of what was worst in
the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater
need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So,
while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern
philosophy in its various branches, it would be worse than folly on
our part to ignore our need of intellectual leadership. Your own great
Frederick once said that if he wished to punish a province he would
leave it to be governed by philosophers; the sneer had in it an element
of justice; and yet no one better than the great Frederick knew the
value of philosophers, the value of men of science, men of letters,
men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed to accept Tolstoi as a
guide in social and moral matters; but it would also be a bad thing
not to have Tolstoi, not to profit by the lofty side of his teachings.
There are plenty of scientific men whose hard arrogance, whose cynical
materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put them on a level with the
bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they denounce. Yet our debt to
scientific men is incalculable, and our civilization of to-day would
have reft from it all that which most highly distinguishes it if the
work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries
were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism,
seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the
folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the
believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with
his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must
remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by
the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure
of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of
well-being than was ever attained by any preceding civilization. Unjust
war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready
to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe
thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting
edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should
arise!
It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which morality,
ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike
be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil
passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of
sentimental attachment to the rights of man; in which a high material
development in the things of the body shall be achieved without
subordination of the things of the soul; in which there shall be a
genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of those virile
qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall avail any
race; in which the fullest development of scientific research, the
great distinguishing feature of our present civilization, shall
yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever take the place of
character--for, from the standpoint of the nation as of the individual,
it is character that is the one vital possession.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which
is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the
nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love
of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of
the world’s progress is essential to the world’s well-being. You, my
hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under
modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to
our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and
do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each
people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but
each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it
first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be
a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage
be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you
and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness
and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different
fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the
less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the
people of my own land.
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC[4]
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from
the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient
institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty
kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through
the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that
tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he
sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship
meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the
dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
[4] Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.
This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when
no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services
to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the
remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago,
were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers,
and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of
the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has
now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent,
to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare;
and the generations engaged in it can not keep, still less add to,
the stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are
still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To
conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile
forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our
race. The primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which
are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully
acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward
civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive
culture. At first only the rudest schools can be established, for no
others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust
forward the frontier in the teeth of savage man and savage nature; and
many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of
higher learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast
stretches of fertile farmland; the stockaded clusters of log cabins
change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude
frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their
lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an
oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for
which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and
supplanters, and then their children and children’s children, change
and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate
vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities
and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant,
self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and
blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier
days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more
intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these
themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and
predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many
lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the
spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to
wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new
life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the
life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of
value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift
that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought
can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New
World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon
the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in
the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak
to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it
is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation,
not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt
that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and
productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of
the Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can
show that Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship,
the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to
me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great
democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours--an
effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for
the people--represents the most gigantic of all possible social
experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good
and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means
the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for
us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme.
Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or of a very
few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such
governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nation
may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to
the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the
average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible
quantity in working out the final results of that type of national
greatness.
But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and
with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be
conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman,
does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life,
and next in those great occasional crises which call for the heroic
virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics
are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than
the main source; and the main source of national power and national
greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore
it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average
citizen is kept high; and the average can not be kept high unless the
standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in
any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes
represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those
classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of
devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special
advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental
training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance
for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of
your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you
much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which
it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated
intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should especially
guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable;
and if yielded to, their--your--chances of useful service are at an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that
queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the
cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to
whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face
it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride
in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of
the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There
is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he
who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering
disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement
or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to
achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to
criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an
intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s
realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think,
of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear
their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the
affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from
others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there
is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both
criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done
them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the
arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is
no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive
to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end
the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails,
at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop
into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a
workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is
but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who
shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for
those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the
brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they
would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what
they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure
in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.
There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the
great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the
lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if
they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth
all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard
fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory
we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for
the vile guns would have been a soldier.”
France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the
most important is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high
artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership
in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier
has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries
at every court in Europe the “freemasons of fashion” have treated the
French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of
letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvellous
instrument of precision, French prose, has turned toward France for aid
and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted
is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a
modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland’s doom
and the vengeance of Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish host
were stricken at Roncesvalles.
Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a
high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that
these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound
body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above
body stands character--the sum of those qualities which we mean when
we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of
honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we
keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I
believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But
the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be
really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of
intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack
of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common
sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of
acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution--these are
the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can
control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.
I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which
represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay
all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training
of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of
you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace,
every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to
work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The
need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant
insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they
can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make
it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most
valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative
in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in
large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of
indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He
should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he
occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not
an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale
he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision.
In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave
man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve
his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning
philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are
right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness.
War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity.
But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war. The
choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this whether the
alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The question
must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be,
Is the right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more
to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must
be, “Yes,” whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be
made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be
made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep
out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting
nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important
than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of
blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit
the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is
the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of
sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited
upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that
the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children,
so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so,
if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it
is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful
fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of
ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk,
which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If
we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have
emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down
on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it
will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to
boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy
of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no
sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate
for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great
fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the
race.
Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty
he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man’s foremost
duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by
earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being;
it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher
superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this
has been done that he can help in movements for the general well-being.
He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus
strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that
bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel
for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a
burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity
in the abstract, but who can not keep his wife in comfort or educate
his children.
Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely
acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of
material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with
equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing
but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable,
is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher
life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire,
the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and
especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses
his wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of real use--and
such is often the case--why, then he does become an asset of worth.
But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the
mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need
in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great
guiding intelligences. Their places can not be supplied by any number
of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample
recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to
the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the
reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration
will come only from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that,
after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has
been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly
less importance compared to other things that can be done in life. It
is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard
of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the
deification of material well-being in and for itself. The man who, for
any cause for which he is himself accountable, has failed to support
himself and those for whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he
has fallen lamentably short in his prime duty. But the man who, having
far surpassed the limit of providing for the wants, both of body and
mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a
great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns
no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be
made to feel that, so far from being a desirable, he is an unworthy,
citizen of the community; that he is to be neither admired nor envied;
that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of
citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those
whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few
words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully
safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human
rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run
identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict
between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property
belongs to man and not man to property.
In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that
there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire
in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged admirable
or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them.
Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts--the
gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the money
touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate
degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great
degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and
without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the
least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it
is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in
a democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly.
But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is to enable
the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to persuade
his hearers to put false values on things, it merely makes him a
power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not the gift
at all, and must rely upon their deeds to speak for them; and unless
the oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common
sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the
better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives.
Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth
if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend
to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for
which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger,
the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make
for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious
element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he
has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard
to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater
force to the orator’s latter-day and more influential brother, the
journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled
neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is
used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and
he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for
the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their
profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit
it. Offences against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a
private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for
debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander,
sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for
the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced
for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand
must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by
the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.
In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that he ought
to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the
other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and
he must also have those qualities which direct the efficiency into
channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There
is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be
said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a sluggish
circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life
for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust
wickedness is likewise rendered immune from the robuster virtues. The
good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own.
He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him
work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen
is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.
But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense,
then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to
the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities,
serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely for that
man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of
others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these
qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether
the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to
the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no
difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in
the career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist
or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful
he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and
farseeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong;
and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to
condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their
inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions
rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of
evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.
The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues
which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make
the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at
need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many others must
be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good
citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in the home.
There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the state, and
these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where
the effort is made to carry on free government in a complex, industrial
civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen,
and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in
political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closet
philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library
tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use
in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more
the mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises
what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but
noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve
them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so
lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and
indeed undesirable to realize. The impracticable visionary is far less
often the guide and precursor than he is the imbittered foe of the real
reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in
some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires
of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker,
to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the
man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him as
he does the work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how
sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the
damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive
measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him
remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined
by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should
abhor the so-called “practical” men whose practicality assumes the
shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief
in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and
conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But
only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally,
the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the
enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated;
and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more
complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to
leave to individual initiative can, under the changed conditions, be
performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible,
and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which
shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not
cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will
only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena.
For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets,
each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water supply;
but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new
problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not
only in degree but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage
and water supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It
is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point
is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment.
Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely
pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. It is not good
to be the slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal
habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common
sense to recognize that the state, the community, the citizens acting
together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to
individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in
the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of
civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle
or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning,
which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality.
We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and
the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into
the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably
borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical
and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell
sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler
immorality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we
may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed
by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to
be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a
lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor
proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not
exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at
least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force
or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their
blood and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and
suffered for them, and at the end died for them, who always strove
to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them,
spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism
and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local
significance):
“I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to
include all men, but that they did not mean to declare all men equal
_in all respects_. They did not mean to say all men were equal in
color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They
defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men
created equal--equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this
they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all
were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about
to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard
maxim for free society which should be familiar to all--constantly
looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly
attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and
deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life
to all people, everywhere.”
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make
us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means
injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege. We
are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far
as is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each
man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by
the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible,
be equality of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there
is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward.
We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artist, the worker in
any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault
it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who
does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of
privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege
is injustice, whatever form it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable,
ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable,
and upright, is to say what is not true and can not be true. Let us
try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of levelling down. If
a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one
of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is
a waste of time to try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for
every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those
who shirk their work and to those who do it.
Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be
misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for
re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded
examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal
merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is
proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard
formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If
it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject
it. There are plenty of men calling themselves Socialists with whom,
up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step
is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it,
without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may
differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it
has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least mean
that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just
as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire
at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these
absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the
extremists were wise.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of
pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus
claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in
any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country.
Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and
opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he
desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.
Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to
which side happens at the moment to be the persecutor and which the
persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without any
regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a
class for loyalty to the nation, or substitutes hatred of men because
they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded
them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure
of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look
down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to the envy and
hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing
brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful
malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely
different manifestations of the same quality, merely the two sides of
the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits
and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the
greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to
plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted
by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen
divide primarily on the line that separates class from class,
occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth,
instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges
each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or poor, without
regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only
true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied
in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what
we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and
the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to
divide along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no
difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether
the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob.
In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for
loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is
no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that
the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad
citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines
of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation.
Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of
judging him by his conduct in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity
of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction.
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and
social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not
to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter
internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of
earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious
or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a
manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in
the downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic
should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support
him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic,
that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another,
profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no
difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to
religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal
should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own
interest. The very last thing that an intelligent and self-respecting
member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man
because that public man says he will get the private citizen something
to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some
emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.
Let me illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience. A number
of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of
the western United States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered
free, the ownership of each being determined by the brand; the calves
were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on the
round-up an animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as
an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom
of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man
on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a
newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it;
then we built a little fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it at the
fire; and the cowboy started to put on the brand. I said to him, “It
is So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose range we happened to be.
He answered: “That’s all right, boss; I know my business.” In another
moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!” To which
he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s brand.” I
answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and
get what is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.” He jumped up
and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.” And
I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal _for_ me you will
steal _from_ me.”
Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in
public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that
he will do something wrong _in_ your interest, you can be absolutely
certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something
wrong _against_ your interest.
So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to
his family, to his neighbor, to the state. There remain duties of
citizenship which the state, the aggregation of all the individuals,
owes in connection with other states, with other nations. Let me say at
once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that
a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible
way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that
the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his
national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he
cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of
mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of
any one country, because he is a citizen of the world, is in very fact
usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the
world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral
needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can
view his own country and all other countries from the same level with
tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to
distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife
and his mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however
intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped
by love of his native land.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do
good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that
the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than
the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the
family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from
patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of
other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the
national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful
to see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a
gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong
him. I do not for one moment admit that political morality is different
from private morality, that a promise made on the stump differs from a
promise made in private life. I do not for one moment admit that a man
should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealings with other
nations, any more than that he should act deceitfully in his dealings
as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one
moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different
spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.
In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there
is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account.
We speak of international law; but international law is something
wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital
difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for
the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to
obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience
as regards the other. International law will, I believe, as the
generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other
there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only
in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of
necessity obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital importance
between it and its neighbors, and actions must of necessity, where this
is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private
citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and
must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise
statesmen, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage
and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute
some other agency for force in the settlement of international
disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the
nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the
great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to
the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep ever in mind that
in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to
resent wrong-doing from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty
morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether
among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals
should be high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to
realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace
and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice
though the whole world came in arms against him.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two
republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship
between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere
and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to
us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the
history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar
power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom or strength,
which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever
with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her
to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of
brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any
of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it
was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through
the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing
of a time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so
stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for
it. You have had a great past. I believe that you will have a great
future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation
which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names,
and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the
reverence for, or antipathy toward, a given name in order to achieve
some alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the
history of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The
rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the
rule of a single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and
the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a
bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn
be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the
apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the
tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually state that all
that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of
“liberty,” while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended
upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary
so as to secure “order.” Many excellent people are taken in by the
use of the word “liberty” at the one time, and the use of the word
“order” at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is
despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed
by one individual or by many individuals, by a state or by a private
corporation.
Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt
in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very
class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of
the second republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil
tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as
to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a
dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances
in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until
there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny
and all public order have disappeared together. The second empire in
France led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows
how far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government
as the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered
it imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did
not produce another violent reaction, but left the French republic
standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be
ruled by a king as by a mob.
Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much
people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their
unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at
Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a
century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured, or
sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set of
acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the name
of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the other
was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by the
direction of the great monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny and
cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as much when
those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used another. All
forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by honest men.
We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching
and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the
men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin
gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger
from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore
be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social
problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought
lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved
democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle
course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We
shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar
middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist,
between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong
done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the
apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement
of the eighth commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”
First and foremost, we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound
ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient
reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stem exposure
of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked
man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved
in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to
prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into
a terror-struck defence of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon
those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above
all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone
homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin
because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no
crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and
unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential
that we should wrest the control of the government out of the hands of
rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of
their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means
adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern
business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because
of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors
in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to
put the control of the government into the hands of demagogues and
visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing
thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with,
as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny
of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant
people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of
big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it
would make no more difference that one was called individualism and the
other collectivism than it made in French history whether tyranny was
exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a committee
of national safety, or of a king.
The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical,
are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of
the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his
own devices he will make such an exhibition of brutal and selfish
greed as to utterly discredit the entire system of government by
individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will
he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by
the state that any abuses connected with the untrammelled control of
all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We
can not afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits.
It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual
initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that
we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our
complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the
functions of the state. It has been shown beyond power of refutation
that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction
of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism” can
not be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see
that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy
buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted
and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may
be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private
monopoly, if the state does not interfere at all, as it would be
crushed out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with
everything else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets
of the extreme Socialists.
In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very
reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they
combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing
with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own
which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade
the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential
both to the material and moral progress of the country that these
forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the
genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly
materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as
exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the
refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth.
What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an
English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr.
Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex
American character; it would have been marvellous if a stranger of his
slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to
put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately
after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):
“In the United States legal organization of industry has been left
wholly wanting. Little is done by the state. All is left to the
initiative of the individual. The apparent negligence is explained
partly by the American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and
partly by their reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the
law as the safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves
under the protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust
in its exacter acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It
is certain that commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and
successful combinations to override the public interest. All such
corporations are left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears
almost a return to savagery. The defencelessness of individual liberty
against the encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies,
nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than
horrible. Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to
oppose them; where such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to
ignore them. When they want any act for themselves, it can always be
bought for cash. [This is of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion
should have been made to the violent and demagogic attacks upon
corporations, which are even more common than and are quite as noxious
as acts of oppression by corporations.] They maintain their own members
in the legislative bodies--pocket assemblymen, pocket representatives,
pocket senators. In the name of individual freedom and industrial
progress they have become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless
greed on one side and lawless brutality on the other--the outlook
frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or
imbittering these antagonisms--still more, on the fortune of the people
in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get
dollars is the one end of life--it depends whether the future of the
United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster.
It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may
become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will
furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.”
Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to
recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as
a modern business condition the curious result will follow that all
power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average
man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the state took
absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big
corporations each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all
competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as
dependent upon it as if the government had assumed complete charge of
the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for
the government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more
unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple
truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness
in the business world are either insincere or blind to the facts when
they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and
individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism,
save in a very few able and powerful men who tend to become dictators
in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American
president tended to become a dictator in the political world.
Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, absolute failure by the
state to control or supervise these great corporations, the inevitable
result is to favor, among these very able men of business, the man who
is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets complete
control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways which
alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination with his
fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out in the
great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite as much
as it would be crushed out by state control. The very reason why we
object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative
and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the
reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control
in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an
antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total
lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business
world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be
the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.
There must be law to control the big men, and therefore especially
the big corporations, in the industrial world in the interest of
our industrial democracy of to-day. This law must be efficient, and
therefore it must be administered by executive officers and not by
lawsuits in the courts. If this is not done the agitation to increase
out of all measure the share of the government in this work will
receive an enormous impetus. The movement for government control of the
great business corporations is no more a movement against liberty than
a movement to put a stop to violence is a movement against liberty.
On the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement for liberty; in
the one case a movement on behalf of the hard-working man of small
means, just as in the other case it is a movement on behalf of the
peaceable citizen who does not wish a “liberty” which puts him at the
mercy of any rowdy who is stronger than he is. The huge, irresponsible
corporation which demands liberty from the supervision of government
agents stands on the same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the
streets who wishes liberty from police interference.
But there is an even more important lesson for us Americans to learn,
and this also is touched upon in what I have quoted above. It is
not true, as Mr. Steevens says, that Americans feel that the one
end of life is to get dollars; but the statement contains a very
unpleasant element of truth. The hard materialism of greed is just as
objectionable as the hard materialism of brutality, and the greed of
the “haves” is just as objectionable as the greed of the “have-nots,”
and no more so. The envious and sinister creature who declaims against
a great corporation because he really desires himself to enjoy what
in hard, selfish, brutal fashion the head of that great corporation
enjoys, offers a spectacle which is both sad and repellent. The brutal
arrogance and grasping greed of the one man are in reality the same
thing as the bitter envy and hatred and grasping greed of the other.
That kind of “have” and that kind of “have-not” stand on the same
eminence of infamy. It is as important for the one as for the other
to learn the lesson of the true relations of life. Of course, the
first duty of any man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his
own livelihood, to support himself and his wife and his children and
those dependent upon him. He must be able to give those for whom it is
his duty to care food and clothing, shelter, medicine, an education,
a legitimate chance for reasonable and healthy amusements, and the
opportunity to acquire the knowledge and power which will fit them in
their turn to do good work in the world. When once a man has reached
this point, which, of course, will vary greatly under different
conditions, then he has reached the point where other things become
immensely more important than adding to his wealth. It is emphatically
right, indeed, I am tempted to say, it is emphatically the first duty
of each American, “to get dollars,” as Mr. Steevens contemptuously
phrased it; for this is only another way of saying that it is his first
duty to earn his own living. But it is not his only duty, by a great
deal; and after the living has been earned getting dollars should come
far behind many other duties.
Yet another thing. No movement ever has done or ever will do good in
this country, where assault is made, not upon evil wherever found,
but simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a particular class.
The big newspaper, owned or controlled in Wall Street, which is
everlastingly preaching about the iniquity of laboring men, which is
quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which with
raving fury defends all the malefactors of great wealth, stands on an
exact level with, and neither above nor below, that other newspaper
whose whole attack is upon men of wealth, which declines to condemn,
or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and wholly inefficient
manner, outrages committed by labor. This is the kind of paper which
by torrents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class hatred
against every man of means simply because he is a man of means, against
every man of wealth, whether he is an honest man who by industry and
ability has honorably won his wealth, and who honorably spends it, or
a man whose wealth represents robbery and whose life represents either
profligacy or at best an inane, useless, and tasteless extravagance.
This country can not afford to let its conscience grow warped and
twisted, as it must grow if it takes either one of these two positions.
We must draw the line, not on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We
must stand for the good citizen because he is a good citizen, whether
he be rich or whether he be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the
man who does evil, wholly without regard to whether the evil is done
in high or low places, whether it takes the form of homicidal violence
among members of a federation of miners, or of unscrupulous craft and
greed in the head of some great Wall Street corporation.
* * * * *
The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent
cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man
who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the
evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst
an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted
individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium.
Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not
as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of
a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A
healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very
many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force
must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these
many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the
individual men and women who make up the nation. No individual man
could be kept healthy by living in accordance with a plan which took
cognizance only of one set of muscles or set of organs; his health must
depend upon his general bodily vigor, that is, upon the general care
which affects hundreds of different organs according to their hundreds
of needs. Society is, of course, infinitely more complex than the human
body. The influences that tell upon it are countless; they are closely
interwoven, interdependent, and each is acted upon by many others.
It is pathetically absurd, when such are the conditions, to believe
that some one simple panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with
infinite difficulty, with bitter disappointments, with stumblings and
haltings, we are working our way upward and onward. In this progress
something can be done by continually striving to improve the social
system, now here, now there. Something more can be done by the resolute
effort for a many-sided higher life. This life must largely come
to each individual from within, by his own effort, but toward the
attainment of it each of us can help many others. Such a life must
represent the struggle for a higher and broader humanity, to be shown
not merely in the dealings of each of us within the realm of the
state, but even more by the dealings of each of us in the more intimate
realm of the family; for the life of the state rests and must ever rest
upon the life of the family.
In one of Lowell’s biting satires he holds up to special scorn the
smug, conscienceless creature who refuses to consider the morality
of any question of social ethics by remarking that “they didn’t know
everything down in Judee.” It is to be wished that some of those
who preach and practise a gospel of mere materialism and greed, and
who speak as if the heaping up of wealth by the community or by the
individual were in itself the be-all and end-all of life, would learn
from the most widely read and oldest of books that true wisdom which
teaches that it is well to have neither great poverty nor great riches.
Worst of all is it to have great poverty and great riches side by side
in constant contrast. Nevertheless, even this contrast can be accepted
if men are convinced that the riches are accumulated as the result of
great service rendered to the people as a whole, and if their use is
regulated in the interest of the whole community.
The movement for social and industrial reform has for two of its prime
objects the prevention of the accumulation of wealth save by honest
service to the country, and the supervision and regulation of its
business use, and the determination of how it shall be taxed, and
on what terms inherited, even when acquired and used honestly. This
movement is a healthy movement. It aims to replace sullen discontent,
restless pessimism, and evil preparation for revolution, by an
aggressive, healthy determination to get to the bottom of our troubles
and remedy them. To halt in the movement, as those blinded men wish
who care only for the immediate relief from all obstacles which would
thwart their getting what is not theirs, would work wide-reaching
damage. Such a halt would turn away the energies of the energetic and
forceful men who desire to reform matters from a legitimate object into
the channel of bitter and destructive agitation.
PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP[5]
What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation
can do, but what he or it actually does. Scholarship that consists
in mere learning, but finds no expression in production, may be of
interest and value to the individual, just as ability to shoot well
at clay pigeons may be of interest and value to him, but it ranks no
higher unless it finds expression in achievement. From the standpoint
of the nation, and from the broader standpoint of mankind, scholarship
is of worth chiefly when it is productive, when the scholar not merely
receives or acquires, but gives.
[5] “The Mediæval Mind.” By Henry Osborn Taylor.
“The Life and Times of Cavour.” By William Roscoe Thayer.
Of course there is much production by scholarly men which is not,
strictly speaking, scholarship; any more than the men themselves,
despite their scholarly tastes and attributes, would claim to be
scholars in the technical or purely erudite sense. The exceedingly
valuable and extensive work of Edward Cope comes under the head of
science, and represents original investigation and original thought
concerning what that investigation showed; yet if the word scholarship
is used broadly, his work must certainly be called productive
scientific scholarship. General Alexander’s capital “Memoirs of a
Confederate” show that a man who is a first-class citizen as well as
a first-class fighting man may also combine the true scholar’s power
of research and passion for truth with the ability to see clearly and
to state clearly what he has seen. Mr. Hannis Taylor’s history of “The
Origin and Growth of the American Constitution” and General Francis V.
Greene’s history of the American Revolution could have been written
only by scholars. Such altogether delightful volumes of essays as Mr.
Crothers’s “Gentle Reader,” “Pardoner’s Wallet,” and “Among Friends”
may not, in the strictest sense of the word, represent scholarship
any more than the “Essays of Elia” represent scholarship; but they
represent more than scholarship, and they could have been written
only by a man of scholarly attributes. The same thing is true of Mr.
Maurice Egan, now our Minister to Denmark--who so well upholds the
tradition which has always identified American men of letters with
American diplomacy--in his essays in Comparative Literature, named, as
I think not altogether happily, from the first essay, “The Ghost in
Hamlet.” Mr. Egan writes not merely with charm but as no one but a man
of scholarly attributes could write--and, by the way, his dedication
to Archbishop John Lancaster Spalding is a dedication to a man whose
lofty spiritual teachings have been expressed in singularly beautiful
English. In its most perfect expression scholarship must utter itself
with literary charm and distinction; although, I am sorry to say, the
professional scholars sometimes actually distrust scholarship which is
able thus to bring forth wisdom divorced from pedantry and dryness.
As an example, Gilbert Murray’s “Rise of the Greek Epic” not only
shows profound scholarship and the profound scholarly instinct which
can alone profit by the mere erudition of scholarship, but is also so
delightfully written as to be as interesting as the most interesting
novel; and, curiously enough, this very fact, coupled with the fact
that Mr. Murray’s translations of Euripides and Aristophanes are so
attractive, has tended to excite distrust of him in the minds of
worthy scholars whose productions are themselves free from all taint
of interest, from all taint of literary charm. Professor Lounsbury’s
extraordinary scholarship has been fully appreciated only by the best
scholars; and this partly because of the very fact of his many-sided
development in the field of intellectual endeavor.
But I speak now of works of scholarship in the more conventional sense,
of works which show scholarship such as Lea showed in his history of
the Inquisition, such as Child showed in his studies of English ballad
poetry.
Mr. Taylor’s study of “The Mediæval Mind” is a noteworthy
contribution--I am tempted to say the most noteworthy of recent
contributions--to the best kind of productive scholarship. His
erudition is extraordinary in breadth and depth, his grasp of the
subject no less marked than his power of conveying to others what
he has thus grasped. He is not only faithful to the truth in large
things, he is accurate in small matters also; and where he makes use
of any statement he always shows that there is justification for it;
although, by the way, I can only guess at his reason for calling Attila
a “Turanian”--a word which carries a pleasant flavor of pre-Victorian
ethnology, and might just about as appropriately be applied to
Tecumseh. As he expressly states, Mr. Taylor is not concerned with the
brutalities of mediæval life, nor with the lower grades of ignorance
and superstition which abounded in the Middle Ages, but with the more
informed and constructive spirit of the mediæval time. There is, of
course, no hard and sharp line to be drawn between mediæval time and,
on the one hand, what is “ancient” and, on the other hand, what is
“modern”; but for his purposes he treats the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries as showing the culmination of the mediæval spirit in its
most characteristic form; although he also incidentally touches on
things that occurred in the fourteenth century, and of course covers
the slow upward movement through the Dark Ages (as to which he does
rather less than justice to the Carolingian revival of learning), when
men were groping in the black abyss into which civilization so rapidly
slid after the close of the second century. His mastery of the facts
is well-nigh perfect, and he handles them with singular sympathy. In
such chapters as “The Spotted Actuality” he makes it evident that he
has constantly before his own mind the whole picture. The ordinary
reader, however, needs to remember that it is no part of Mr. Taylor’s
purpose to present this whole picture, but merely to make a study
somewhat analogous to what a study of the intellect of the nineteenth
century would be if it dealt exclusively with the thought of the
various universities of Europe and America and of circles like that of
Emerson at Concord and Goethe at Weimar. Indeed, this comparison is
hardly accurate, for the universities of the nineteenth century had a
far closer connection with the living thought of the day than was true
of the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The latter
(like their feeble survivals in the Spanish-speaking countries) much
more closely resembled the ordinary type of Mohammedan university of
the present day, such a university as the big Mohammedan university at
Cairo, than they resembled any modern university worth calling such,
or, indeed, any ancient university of living and creative force.
The schoolmen of the Middle Ages and the universities in which they
flourished are well worth such study as that which Mr. Taylor gives
them, if only because they represented what regarded itself as the
highest spiritual and intellectual teaching of the time, and because
they symbolized the forces which manifested themselves with infinitely
more permanent value in that wonderful cathedral architecture which was
one of the two culminating architectural movements of all time--the
other, of course, being the classical Greek. But the greatest
mediæval effect upon the thought of after time was produced, not by
the schoolmen, but by works which they would hardly have treated as
serious at all--by the Roland Song, the “Nibelungenlied,” the Norse
and Irish sagas, the Arthurian Cycle, including “Parsifal”; and modern
literature, on its historical side, may be said to have begun with
Villehardouin and Joinville. None of the leaders of the schools are
to-day living forces in the sense that is true of the nameless writers
who built up the stories of the immortal death fights in the Pyrenean
pass and in the hall of Etzel, or of the search for the Holy Grail.
There are keen intellects still influenced by Thomas Aquinas; but
all the writings of all the most famous doctors of the schools taken
together had no such influence on the religious thought of mankind
as two books produced long afterward, with no conception of their
far-reaching importance, by the obscure and humble authors of the
“Imitation of Christ” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” In the thirteenth
century the spiritual life in action, as apart from dogma, and as lived
with the earnest desire to follow in the footsteps of the Christ,
reached, in the person of Saint Francis of Assisi, as lofty a pinnacle
of realized idealism as humanity has ever attained. But among those
who, instead of trying simply to live up to their spiritual impulses,
endeavored to deal authoritatively in the schools with spiritual and
intellectual interests, the complementary tyranny and servility in all
such spiritual and intellectual matters were such as we can now hardly
imagine to ourselves. The one really great scientific investigator,
Roger Bacon, who actually did put as an ideal before himself the honest
search for truth, was imprisoned for years in consequence; and this in
spite of the fact that his avowals of abject submission to theological
authority and unquestioning adherence to dogma were such as we of
to-day can with difficulty understand.
At first sight such an attitude in the intellectual world seems
incompatible with the turbulent and lawless insistence on the right of
each individual to do whatever he saw fit in the political and social
world which characterized the seething life of the time. But, as Mr.
Taylor points out, the minute that a man in the Middle Ages began to be
free in any real sense he tended to become an outlaw; and, moreover,
the men who were most intolerant of restraint in matters physical
and material made no demands whatever for intellectual or spiritual
freedom. The ordinary knight or nobleman, the typical “man of action”
of the period, promptly resented any attempt to interfere with his
brutal passions or coarse appetites; but, as he had neither special
interest nor deep conviction in merely intellectual matters, he was
entirely willing to submit to guidance concerning them. The attitude
of the great baron of the highest class is amusingly shown by a
conversation that Joinville records as having occurred between himself
and King Louis the Saint. Among the questions which King Louis one
day propounded to Joinville, in the interests of the higher morality,
was whether Joinville would rather have leprosy or commit a mortal
sin; to which Joinville responded with cordial frankness that he would
rather commit thirty mortal sins than have leprosy. Now, in addition
to being a most delightful chronicler, Joinville was an exceptionally
well-behaved and religious baron, standing far above the average, and
he was very careful to perform every obligation laid upon him by those
whom he regarded as his spiritual advisers. The fact simply was that
he had no idea of the need for spiritual or intellectual independence
in the sense that a modern man has need for such independence,
because he took only a superficial interest in anything concerned
with intellectual inquiry. To harry a heretic or a Jew was not only
a duty but a pleasure, and no effort whatever was needed to refrain
from intellectual inquiry which presented to him not the slightest
attraction; but leprosy was something tangible, something real, and the
instant that the real came into collision with even the most insistent
supposed spiritual obligation the rugged old baron went into immediate
revolt.
The whole way of looking at life was so different from ours that only a
thoroughly sympathetic and understanding writer like Mr. Taylor can set
it forth in a manner that shall be sympathetic and yet not revolt us.
One of his most delightful chapters is that on “The Heart of Heloise.”
The qualities that Heloise displayed are those which eternally appeal
to what is high and fine in human life; as for her lover, Abelard, it
is possible to pardon the abject creature only by scornfully condemning
the age which imposed upon him the rules of conduct in accordance with
which he lived.
Mr. Thayer’s “Life of Cavour” is another first-rate example of
productive scholarship. It is much more than a mere biography.
The three greatest and most influential statesmen, in purpose and
achievement, since the close of the Napoleonic epoch were Lincoln,
Bismarck, and Cavour; and any account of either of them must
necessarily be an account of the most vitally important things that
happened to mankind during the period when each was playing his
greatest part. An adequate biography of either must therefore be a
permanent addition to history; such a biography could be written only
by a scholar and writer of altogether exceptional attainments; and such
a biography has been furnished by Mr. Thayer. Mr. Thayer is already
well known as the author of various volumes dealing with Italy, all
of them representing work worth doing, and all of them leading up to
and making ready the way for the really notable history which he has
now written. There are other books which should be read in connection
with it; the younger Trevelyan’s brilliant studies of Garibaldi and
the Italian revolutionists of 1848 and the dozen years immediately
succeeding, and De La Gorce’s profoundly interesting histories of the
Second Empire and the Second Republic in France, which contain the
most powerful presentment of the period from the anti-revolutionary
standpoint. Cavour not only did more than any other one man for
Italian unity and independence, but he symbolized the movement as
neither Garibaldi the Paladin, nor Mazzini the Republican, nor even
King Victor Emmanuel symbolized it. As Mr. Thayer describes Cavour’s
career it is not only of interest in itself, but it is of interest
as showing that vast and complex aggregate of contradictory forces
through whose warring chaos every great leader who fights for the
well-being of mankind must force his way to triumph. Cavour had to
contend against foes within just as much as against foes without. He
had to hold the balance between the unreasoning reactionary and the
unreasoning revolutionist, just exactly as on a larger or smaller scale
all leaders in the forward movement of mankind must ever do. Mr. Thayer
has set forth in masterly fashion the task to which the great statesman
addressed himself and the manner in which that task was performed; his
book is absorbingly interesting to the general reader, and should be of
profit not merely to the special student but to every active politician
who is in politics for any of the reasons which alone render it really
worth while to be a politician at all. Mr. Thayer is devoted to his
hero, as he ought to be; and he is a stanch partisan; but his obvious
purpose is to be fair, and the principles of liberty to which he pins
his faith are those upon which American governmental policy must always
rest--although it is not necessary to follow him in all his views, as
when he suddenly treats free trade from the fetichistic standpoint
instead of as an economic expedient to be judged on its merits in any
given case. Every man interested not only in the realities but in
the possibilities of political advance should study this book; and,
in addition to its intrinsic worth and interest, it is an example of
the kind of productive scholarship which adds to the sum of American
achievement.
* * * * *
Anything that Professor Lounsbury writes is certain to be interesting.
Any collection by him of the writings of others is also certain to be
interesting. Probably when Mr. Lounsbury is doing what he himself is
willing to accept as work, it is both so profound and so erudite that
we laymen can do little but admire it from a distance. Fortunately,
however, he is also willing to do what he regards as play, such as a
Life of Fenimore Cooper, or a study of English adapted to the needs of
those who are not scholars; and all of his writing of this lighter kind
adds markedly to the sum of enjoyment of laymen who are fond of reading.
The two volumes before me illustrate the good that can be done by
people of cultivation who at our different universities provide the
means needed to foster productive scholarship--for, unfortunately,
productive scholarship in this country is apt to be unremunerative. The
slender volume on the early literary career of Robert Browning[6] is
based on four lectures delivered at the University of Virginia under
the terms of the Barbour-Page Foundation, a foundation due to the
wisdom and generosity of Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. The “Yale Book of
American Verse”[7] is published by the Yale University Press under the
auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, a club founded by
Mr. Alexander Smith Cochran. It is the kind of club the possession of
which every real university in the country must envy Yale.
[6] “The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning.” By Thomas
R. Lounsbury.
[7] “Yale Book of American Verse.” Collected by Thomas R.
Lounsbury.
This study of Browning particularly appeals to any man who, although
devoted to Browning, yet does not care for the pieces that some of the
Browning clubs especially delight in. Browning’s great poems, those
which will last as long as English literature lasts, are given their
full meed of praise by Professor Lounsbury. The other poems, those
which especially excite the interest of the average Browning society,
are treated very amusingly and on the whole very justly. Professor
Lounsbury insists that these “poems” will not permanently last, because
they are essentially formless, and therefore not poetry at all,
and indeed not literature. He holds that the attraction such poems
exercise on certain people is the attraction of the unintelligible. Mr.
Lounsbury’s writings are always full of delicious touches, and he is
sometimes at his best in this little volume, as, for instance, where
he says: “In fact, commentaries on Browning generally bear a close
resemblance to fog-horns. They proclaim the existence of fog, but they
do not disperse it.” One of his main contentions is that fundamentally
the interest in those poems of Browning which are both very long and
very obscure does not differ in kind from that displayed in guessing
the answers to riddles or, to use a more dignified comparison, from
that employed in the solution of difficult mathematical problems.
I think, however, that for the admiration of these rather obscure
philosophical poems of Browning there is a reason upon which Mr.
Lounsbury has not touched. He says truly that the men who admire
Browning are very apt to be men not especially drawn to writers in whom
lofty speculations have found their fitting counterpart in clearness
and beauty of expression; and he instances Wordsworth and Tennyson as
poets to be enjoyed only by men and women who have a certain degree
of fondness for literature as literature. Now, I think it is true of
Browning (as it is true of Walt Whitman) that many of the people who
labor longest and hardest to master his meaning are entirely mistaken
in thinking that they enjoy him as a poet. But I do not think that Mr.
Lounsbury’s explanation that they prize him only as a puzzle fully
accounts for the enjoyment of many of these men or the profit they
derive from their study. The fact is that Browning does represent
very deep thought, very real philosophy--mixed, of course, with much
thought that is not deep at all but only obscure, and much would-be
philosophy that has no meaning whatsoever. In an instance that came to
my own knowledge, a class of college boys in a course of literature,
after carefully studying Browning for a couple of months, and after
then taking up Tennyson, unanimously abandoned Tennyson and insisted
on returning to the study of Browning. These hard-working, intelligent
boys were not all of them merely interested in puzzles. They were not
all of them blind to poetry as such. They did care to a certain extent
for form, but primarily they were interested in the great problems of
life, they were interested in great and noble thoughts. Doubtless many
of them rather enjoyed having to dig out the thought from involved
language. But probably a greater number felt a larger enjoyment in
finding lofty thought expressed in language which was even more lofty
than obscure.
It is true that as a poet Browning is formless. But the poets who are
great philosophers are few in number, and great philosophers who have
any gift of expression whatever or any sense of form, or whose writings
so much as approach the outer hem of literature, are even fewer in
number. Browning the philosopher is not more deep than many other
philosophers, and in form and expression he is inferior to many poets.
But he is a philosopher, and he has form and expression. The philosophy
he writes is literature, even though hardly in the highest sense poetic
literature. Therefore he appeals to men who are primarily interested
in his writings as philosophy, but who do derive a certain pleasure
from form or expression; who, without being conscious of it, do like to
have the writings they read resemble literature. These men are given
by Browning something that no other poet and no other philosopher can
give them; and I do not think that these men receive full justice at
Mr. Lounsbury’s hands. Moreover, as compared to Tennyson or Longfellow,
or any other of the more conventional poets--and I am extremely fond
of these conventional poets--there is far more in Browning, even in
Browning’s simpler and more understandable and formal poems, that
gives expression to certain deep and complex emotions. There are many
poets whom we habitually read far more often than Browning, and who
minister better to our more primitive needs and emotions. There are
very few whose lines come so naturally to us in certain great crises of
the soul which are also crises of the intellect.
* * * * *
“The Yale Book of American Verse” is an excellent anthology, and
the preface is one of the best things about it. In this preface Mr.
Lounsbury quite unconsciously shows why he appeals to so many men to
whom a college professor who is nothing more than a college professor
does not readily appeal. He mentions that on the march to Gettysburg
he picked up a torn piece of newspaper containing certain verses
which have always remained in his mind, and which he includes in this
collection of verse. This is the only hint in Professor Lounsbury’s
writings that he fought in the Civil War. A professor of English
literature in a great university who in his youth fought at Gettysburg
must necessarily have something in him that speaks not only to scholars
but to men.
This anthology includes hymns as well as secular poems. The collection
is good in itself, as I have already said, and, moreover, to all real
lovers of anthologies it will also seem good because each of them will
take much satisfaction in wondering why certain of his or her favorite
poems have been left out and why certain other poems have been put in.
I suppose every man who cares for poetry at all at times wishes that he
could compile an anthology for his own purposes. I certainly so feel.
I would like to compile two anthologies, one of hymns and one of those
poems which our ancestors designated quite ruthlessly as “profane,” in
opposition to sacred. I should not expect any one else to read either
of my collections. I should not wish the edition to consist of more
than one copy. But I would like, purely for my own use, to own that
copy! In the anthology of hymns, for instance, besides all the great
hymns, from Bernard of Morlais to Cowper and Wesley and Bishop Heber, I
would like to put in some hymns as to which I know nothing except that
I like them. Every Christmas Eve in our own church at Oyster Bay, for
instance, the children sing a hymn beginning “It’s Christmas Eve on the
River, it’s Christmas Eve on the Bay.” Of course the hymn has come to
us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average
native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our
own soil--which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the
nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.
As for the “profane” anthology, I think I should like to make one
consisting of several volumes. Even Mr. Lounsbury’s volume of American
verse, though it contains some specimens of verse I would not have
included, omits others which I certainly should put in. And then, think
of the many, many volumes that would be needed to include the English
poems, and the French poems, and the German poems from the Bard of
the Dimbovitza, and all the other poems which no human being could
make up his mind to see any anthology leave out! I fear that a perfect
anthology of the kind that fills my dreams would be as large as the
various rather dismal series of volumes which contain, as we are told,
“the world’s best literature”--and doubtless would be as unsatisfactory.
Meanwhile, as all this represents an unattainable dream, we have
reason to be glad that Mr. Lounsbury’s particular anthology has been
published.
DANTE AND THE BOWERY
DANTE AND THE BOWERY
It is the conventional thing to praise Dante because he of set purpose
“used the language of the market-place,” so as to be understanded
of the common people; but we do not in practice either admire or
understand a man who writes in the language of our own market-place.
It must be the Florentine market-place of the thirteenth century--not
Fulton Market of to-day. What infinite use Dante would have made
of the Bowery! Of course, he could have done it only because not
merely he himself, the great poet, but his audience also, would have
accepted it as natural. The nineteenth century was more apt than the
thirteenth to boast of itself as being the greatest of the centuries;
but, save as regards purely material objects, ranging from locomotives
to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its boasting. A
nineteenth-century poet, when trying to illustrate some point he was
making, obviously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century
heroes if he also referred to those of classic times, lest he
should be suspected of instituting comparisons between them. A
thirteenth-century poet was not in the least troubled by any such
misgivings, and quite simply illustrated his point by allusions to any
character in history or romance, ancient or contemporary, that happened
to occur to him.
Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was the only
one who dared use the Bowery--that is, use anything that was striking
and vividly typical of the humanity around him--as Dante used the
ordinary humanity of his day; and even Whitman was not quite natural
in doing so, for he always felt that he was defying the conventions
and prejudices of his neighbors, and his self-consciousness made him a
little defiant. Dante was not defiant of conventions: the conventions
of his day did not forbid him to use human nature just as he saw it,
no less than human nature as he read about it. The Bowery is one of
the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied
interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is
haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the
“Inferno.” But no man of Dante’s art and with Dante’s soul would write
of it nowadays; and he would hardly be understood if he did. Whitman
wrote of homely things and every-day men, and of their greatness, but
his art was not equal to his power and his purpose; and, even as it
was, he, the poet, by set intention, of the democracy, is not known to
the people as widely as he should be known; and it is only the few--the
men like Edward FitzGerald, John Burroughs, and W. E. Henley--who prize
him as he ought to be prized.
Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people
would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante
did six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as
he saw it around him and from human nature as he read of it. I suppose
that this must be partly because we are so self-conscious as always
to read a comparison into any illustration, forgetting the fact that
no comparison is implied between two men, in the sense of estimating
their relative greatness or importance, when the career of each of them
is chosen merely to illustrate some given quality that both possess.
It is also probably due to the fact that an age in which the critical
faculty is greatly developed often tends to develop a certain querulous
inability to understand the fundamental truths which less critical ages
accept as a matter of course. To such critics it seems improper, and
indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by examples chosen alike
from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and the Piræus, alike from
Tammany and from the Roman mob organized by the foes or friends of
Cæsar. To Dante such feeling itself would have been inexplicable.
Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which
dwarf all differences in outward and visible form and station, and
therefore he illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to
him apt. Only the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and
so, when he spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to
illustrate his thesis by an appeal to the past, he could speak only
of great and prominent characters; but in the present of his day most
of the men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people of no permanent
importance--just as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet the
passions of these men were the same as those of the heroes of old,
godlike or demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries,
or his immediate predecessors, to illustrate his points, without
regard to their prominence or lack of prominence. He was not concerned
with the differences in their fortunes and careers, with their heroic
proportions or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic whose
imagination soared so high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the far
depths of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the
eternal mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the
differences between the careers of the mighty masters of mankind and
the careers of even very humble people seemed trivial. If we translate
his comparisons into the terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused
over this trait of his, until we go a little deeper and understand
that we are ourselves to blame, because we have lost the faculty simply
and naturally to recognize that the essential traits of humanity are
shown alike by big men and by little men, in the lives that are now
being lived and in those that are long ended.
Probably no two characters in Dante impress the ordinary reader more
than Farinata and Capaneus: the man who raises himself waist-high from
out his burning sepulchre, unshaken by torment, and the man who, with
scornful disdain, refuses to brush from his body the falling flames;
the great souls--magnanimous, Dante calls them--whom no torture, no
disaster, no failure of the most absolute kind could force to yield
or to bow before the dread powers that had mastered them. Dante has
created these men, has made them permanent additions to the great
figures of the world; they are imaginary only in the sense that
Achilles and Ulysses are imaginary--that is, they are now as real as
the figures of any men that ever lived. One of them was a mythical
hero in a mythical feat, the other a second-rate faction leader in a
faction-ridden Italian city of the thirteenth century, whose deeds have
not the slightest importance aside from what Dante’s mention gives.
Yet the two men are mentioned as naturally as Alexander and Cæsar are
mentioned. Evidently they are dwelt upon at length because Dante
felt it his duty to express a peculiar horror for that fierce pride
which could defy its overlord, while at the same time, and perhaps
unwillingly, he could not conceal a certain shuddering admiration for
the lofty courage on which this evil pride was based.
The point I wish to make is the simplicity with which Dante illustrated
one of the principles on which he lays most stress, by the example
of a man who was of consequence only in the history of the parochial
politics of Florence. Farinata will now live forever as a symbol of
the soul; yet as an historical figure he is dwarfed beside any one
of hundreds of the leaders in our own Revolution and Civil War. Tom
Benton, of Missouri, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, were opposed
to one another with a bitterness which surpassed that which rived
asunder Guelph from Ghibellin, or black Guelph from white Guelph. They
played mighty parts in a tragedy more tremendous than any which any
mediæval city ever witnessed or could have witnessed. Each possessed an
iron will and undaunted courage, physical and moral; each led a life of
varied interest and danger, and exercised a power not possible in the
career of the Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, fought for
his principles as unyieldingly as the other fought for what he deemed
right in trying to break up the Union. Each was a colossal figure.
Each, when the forces against which he fought overcame him--for in his
latter years Benton saw the cause of disunion triumph in Missouri,
just as Jefferson Davis lived to see the cause of union triumph in
the Nation--fronted an adverse fate with the frowning defiance, the
high heart, and the stubborn will which Dante has commemorated for all
time in his hero who “held hell in great scorn.” Yet a modern poet who
endeavored to illustrate such a point by reference to Benton and Davis
would be uncomfortably conscious that his audience would laugh at him.
He would feel ill at ease, and therefore would convey the impression
of being ill at ease, exactly as he would feel that he was posing, was
forced and unnatural, if he referred to the deeds of the evil heroes
of the Paris Commune as he would without hesitation refer to the many
similar but smaller leaders of riots in the Roman forum.
Dante speaks of a couple of French troubadours, or of a local Sicilian
poet, just as he speaks of Euripides; and quite properly, for they
illustrate as well what he has to teach; but we of to-day could not
possibly speak of a couple of recent French poets or German novelists
in the same connection without having an uncomfortable feeling that
we ought to defend ourselves from possible misapprehension; and
therefore we could not speak of them naturally. When Dante wishes to
assail those guilty of crimes of violence, he in one stanza speaks
of the torments inflicted by divine justice on Attila (coupling him
with Pyrrhus and Sextus Pompey--a sufficiently odd conjunction in
itself, by the way), and in the next stanza mentions the names of a
couple of local highwaymen who had made travel unsafe in particular
neighborhoods. The two highwaymen in question were by no means as
important as Jesse James and Billy the Kid; doubtless they were far
less formidable fighting men, and their adventures were less striking
and varied. Yet think of the way we should feel if a great poet should
now arise who would incidentally illustrate the ferocity of the human
heart by allusions both to the terrible Hunnish “scourge of God” and
to the outlaws who in our own times defied justice in Missouri and New
Mexico!
When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce passions of the human
heart, he may speak of Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may speak of two
local contemporary captains, victor or vanquished in obscure struggles
between Guelph and Ghibellin; men like Jacopo del Cassero or Buonconte,
whom he mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus or Rehoboam. He is
entirely right! What one among our own writers, however, would be able
simply and naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren, or Custer, or Morgan,
or Raphael Semmes, or Marion, or Sumter, as illustrating the qualities
shown by Hannibal, or Rameses, or William the Conqueror, or by Moses or
Hercules? Yet the Guelph and Ghibellin captains of whom Dante speaks
were in no way as important as these American soldiers of the second or
third rank. Dante saw nothing incongruous in treating at length of the
qualities of all of them; he was not thinking of comparing the genius
of the unimportant local leader with the genius of the great sovereign
conquerors of the past--he was thinking only of the qualities of
courage and daring and of the awful horror of death; and when we deal
with what is elemental in the human soul it matters but little whose
soul we take. In the same way he mentions a couple of spendthrifts of
Padua and Siena, who come to violent ends, just as in the preceding
canto he had dwelt upon the tortures undergone by Dionysius and Simon
de Montfort, guarded by Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For some reason
he hated the spendthrifts in question as the Whigs of Revolutionary
South Carolina and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint Leger, and De
Lancey; and to him there was nothing incongruous in drawing a lesson
from one couple of offenders more than from another. (It would, by the
way, be outside my present purpose to speak of the rather puzzling
manner in which Dante confounds his own hatreds with those of heaven,
and, for instance, shows a vindictive enjoyment in putting his personal
opponent Filippo Argenti in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.)
When he turns from those whom he is glad to see in hell toward those
for whom he cares, he shows the same delightful power of penetrating
through the externals into the essentials. Cato and Manfred illustrate
his point no better than Belacqua, a contemporary Florentine maker of
citherns. Alas! what poet to-day would dare to illustrate his argument
by introducing Steinway in company with Cato and Manfred! Yet again,
when examples of love are needed, he draws them from the wedding-feast
at Cana, from the actions of Pylades and Orestes, and from the life
of a kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who had just died. Could
we now link together Peter Cooper and Pylades, without feeling a
sense of incongruity? He couples Priscian with a politician of local
note who had written an encyclopædia and a lawyer of distinction
who had lectured at Bologna and Oxford; we could not now with such
fine unconsciousness bring Evarts and one of the compilers of the
Encyclopædia Britannica into a like comparison.
When Dante deals with the crimes which he most abhorred, simony and
barratry, he flails offenders of his age who were of the same type as
those who in our days flourish by political or commercial corruption;
and he names his offenders, both those just dead and those still
living, and puts them, popes and politicians alike, in hell. There have
been trust magnates and politicians and editors and magazine-writers
in our own country whose lives and deeds were no more edifying than
those of the men who lie in the third and the fifth chasm of the eighth
circle of the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men would be
condemned as an instance of shocking taste.
One age expresses itself naturally in a form that would be unnatural,
and therefore undesirable, in another age. We do not express ourselves
nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the emotions aroused in us by
what is good or evil in the men of the present in a totally different
compartment from that which holds our emotions concerning what was
good or evil in the men of the past. An imitation of the letter of the
times past, when the spirit has wholly altered, would be worse than
useless; and the very qualities that help to make Dante’s poem immortal
would, if copied nowadays, make the copyist ridiculous. Nevertheless,
it would be a good thing if we could, in some measure, achieve the
mighty Florentine’s high simplicity of soul, at least to the extent of
recognizing in those around us the eternal qualities which we admire
or condemn in the men who wrought good or evil at any stage in the
world’s previous history. Dante’s masterpiece is one of the supreme
works of art that the ages have witnessed; but he would have been
the last to wish that it should be treated only as a work of art, or
worshipped only for art’s sake, without reference to the dread lessons
it teaches mankind.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[8]
Mr. H. S. Chamberlain’s work on “The Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century” is a noteworthy book in more ways than one. It is written by
an Englishman who has been educated on the Continent, and has lived
there until he is much more German than English. Previously he had
written a book in French, while this particular book was written in
German, and has only recently been translated into English. Adequately
to review the book, or rather to write an adequate essay suggested by
it, would need the space that would have been taken by an old-time
Quarterly or Edinburgh Reviewer a century or fourscore years ago. I
have called the book “noteworthy,” and this it certainly is. It ranks
with Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” and still more with Gobineau’s
“Inégalité des Races Humaines,” for its brilliancy and suggestiveness
and also for its startling inaccuracies and lack of judgment. A
witty English critic once remarked of Mitford that he had all the
qualifications of an historian--violent partiality and extreme wrath.
Mr. Chamberlain certainly possesses these qualifications in excess,
and, combined with a queer vein of the erratic in his temperament, they
almost completely offset the value of his extraordinary erudition,
extending into widely varied fields, and of his occasionally really
brilliant inspiration. He is, however, always entertaining; which is
of itself no mean merit, in view of the fact that most serious writers
seem unable to regard themselves as serious unless they are also dull.
[8] “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.” By Houston
Stewart Chamberlain. A translation from the German, by
John Lees. With an introduction by Lord Redesdale. In two
volumes.
Mr. Chamberlain’s thesis is that the nineteenth century, and therefore
the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything in them
worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan
race. He holds that there is no such thing as a general progress of
mankind, that progress is only for those whom he calls the Teutons,
and that when they mix with or are intruded upon by alien and, as he
regards them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that he says
regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general
progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like,
is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a
generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the preceding generations
were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious
doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but
Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of
those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon
foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines
are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain’s hatreds cover a
wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church,
the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety
of literary men and historians.[9] To this sufficiently incongruous
collection of antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent
attachments, ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to
Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy--he
draws sharp distinctions between all three, and I merely use them to
indicate his admiration for the Indian habit of thought, an admiration
which goes hand in hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for
what most sane people regard as the far nobler thought contained, for
instance, in the Old Testament. He continually contradicts himself, or
at least uses words in such diametrically opposite senses as to convey
the effect of contradiction; and so it would be possible to choose
phrases of his which contradict what is here said; but I think that I
give a correct impression of his teaching as a whole.
[9] Some of his antipathies appeal to the present writer;
I much enjoy his irrelevant and hearty denunciation of
the folly of treating the comparatively trivial Latin
literature as of such peculiar importance as to entitle it
to be grouped in grotesque association with the magnificent
Greek literature under the unmeaning title of “classic.”
As he touches lightly on an infinitely varied range of subjects, it
would be possible to choose almost at random passages to justify what
is said above. Take, for instance, his dogmatic assertions concerning
faith and works. He frantically condemns the doctrine of salvation
by works and frantically exalts the doctrine of salvation by faith.
Much that he says about both doctrines must be taken in so mystical
and involved a sense that it contains little real meaning to ordinary
men. Yet he is also capable of expressing, on this very subject, noble
thought in a lofty manner. In one of his sudden lapses into brilliant
sanity he emphasizes the fact that Saint Francis of Assisi was faith
incorporate and yet the special apostle of good works; and that Martin
Luther, the advocate of redemption by faith, consecrated his life and
revealed to others the secret of good works--“free works done only to
please God, not for the sake of piety.”
Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity are fixed in a
matrix of fairly bedlamite passion and non-sanity. Mr. Chamberlain
jeers with reason at the Roman Curia because until 1822 it kept on
the Index all books which taught that the earth went round the sun;
but really such action is not much worse than that of a man professing
to write a book like this at the outset of the twentieth century
who takes the attitude Mr. Chamberlain does toward the teaching of
Darwin. The acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution are
quite as necessary to sound scientific thought as the acceptance of
the fundamental truths concerning the solar system; and the attempt
that Mr. Chamberlain in one place makes to draw a distinction between
them is fantastic. Again, take what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and
Teutons. He bursts the flood-gates of scorn when he deals with persons
who idealize humanity, or, as he styles it, “so-called humanity”; and
he says: “For this humanity about which man has philosophized to such
an extent suffers from the serious defect that it does not exist at
all. History reveals to us a great number of various human beings, but
no such thing as humanity”; yet on this very page he attributes the
history of the growth of our civilization to its “Teutonic” character,
and he uses the word “Teuton” as well as the word “Aryan” with as utter
a looseness and vagueness as ever any philanthropist or revolutionist
used the word “humanity.” All that he says in derision of such a forced
use of the word “humanity” could with a much greater percentage of
truthfulness be said as regards the words and ideas symbolized by
Teutonism and Aryanism as Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. Indeed,
as he uses them they amount to little more than expressions of his
personal likes and dislikes. His statement of the raceless chaos into
which the Roman Empire finally lapsed is, on the whole, just, and, to
use the words continually coming to one’s mind in dealing with him,
both brilliant and suggestive. But in his anxiety to claim everything
good for Aryans and Teutons he finally reduces himself to the position
of insisting that wherever he sees a man whom he admires he must
postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, Teutonic blood. He likes
David, so he promptly makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael
Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and he instantly says that
they are Teutons; but he does not like Napoleon, and so he says that
Napoleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos. The noted
Italians in question, he states, were all of German origin, descended
from the Germans who had conquered Italy in the sixth century. Now,
of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to be serious with himself,
he must know perfectly well that even by the time of Dante seven or
eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the other great Italians
he mentions eight or ten centuries had passed, since the Germanic
invasion. In other words, these great Italians were separated from
the days of the Gothic and Lombard invasions by the distance which
separates modern England from the Norman invasion; and his thesis has
just about as much substance as would be contained in the statement
that Wellington, Nelson, Turner, Wordsworth, and Tennyson excelled in
their several spheres because they were all pure-blood descendants of
the motley crew that came in with William the Conqueror. The different
ethnic elements which entered into the Italy of the seventh century
were in complete solution by the thirteenth, and it would have been
quite as impossible to trace them to their several original strains
as nowadays to trace in the average Englishman the various strains of
blood from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian ancestors. Nor
does Mr. Chamberlain mind believing two incompatible things in the
quickest possible succession if they happen to suit his philosophy of
the moment. Generally, when he speaks of the Teuton he thinks of the
tall, long-headed man of the north; although, because of some crank
in his mind, he puts in the proviso that he may have black as well as
blond hair. The round-skulled man of middle Europe he usually condemns;
but if his mind happens to run with approbation toward the Tyrolese,
for instance, he at once forgets what ethnic division of Europeans
it is to which they belong, and accepts them as typical Teutons. He
greatly admires the teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he endeavors
to persuade himself that the Apostle Paul was not really a Jew; but
he does not like the teachings of the Epistle of James on the subject
of good works (teachings for which I have a peculiar sympathy, by the
way), and accordingly he says that James was a pure Jew.
Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamberlain’s ideas are true and
noble. I admire the morality with which he condemns the intolerance
of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the intolerance of their
Roman opponents, and yet his acceptance of the fact that they could not
have done their great work if there had not been in their characters
an alloy which made it possible for actual humanity to accept their
teaching. But even his sense of morality is as curiously capricious
as that of Carlyle himself, and as little trustworthy. He glories in
the pointless and wanton barbarity of the destruction of Carthage in
the Third Punic War as saving Europe from the Afro-Asiatic peril--pure
nonsense, of course, for Carthage was then no more dangerous to Rome
than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities stand on a par as
regards any importance in their after effects. Perhaps his attitude
toward Byron is more practically mischievous, or at least shows a
much less desirable trait of character. He says that the personality
of Byron “has something repulsive in it for every thorough Teuton,
because we nowhere encounter in it the idea of duty,” which makes him
“unsympathetic, un-Teutonic”; but he adds that Teutons do not object
in the least to his licentiousness, and, on the contrary, see in it “a
proof of genuine race”! Really, this reconciliation of a high ideal
of duty with gross licentiousness would be infamous if it were not so
unspeakably comic. On the next page, by the way, Mr. Chamberlain says
that Louis XIV was anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the Protestants,
but a thorough Teuton when he defended the liberties of the Gallican
church against Rome! Now such intellectual antics as these, and the
haphazard use of any kind of a name (without the least reference to
its ordinary use, provided Mr. Chamberlain has taken a fancy to it)
to represent or symbolize any individual or attribute of which he
approves, makes it very difficult to accept the book as having any
serious merit whatever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages which
at best are those of an able man whose mind is not quite sound, and at
worst lose their brilliancy without their irrationality, there are many
pages of deep thought and lofty morality based upon wide learning and
wide literary and even scientific knowledge. There could be no more
unsafe book to follow implicitly, and few books of such pretensions
more ludicrously unsound; and yet it is a book which students and
scholars, and men who, though neither students nor scholars, are yet
deeply interested in life, must have on their book-shelves. Much
the same criticism should be passed upon him that he himself passes
upon John Fiske, to whose great work, “The History of the Discovery
of America,” he gives deserved and unstinted praise, but at whom he
rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, with more than Papal
pretensions to infallibility, setting forth complete patent solutions
for all the problems connected not merely with the origin but with
the destiny of man. Mr. Chamberlain differentiates sharply between
the admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that treating of the
discovery of America and the work he did when he ventured to dogmatize
loosely, after the manner of Darwin’s successors in the ’70s and ’80s,
upon a scanty collection of facts very imperfectly understood. But Mr.
Chamberlain himself would have done far better if in his book he had
copied the methods and modesty of Fiske at his best--the methods and
modesty of such books as Sutherland’s “Origin and Growth of the Moral
Instinct”--and had refrained from taking an attitude of cock-sureness
concerning problems which at present no one can more than imperfectly
understand. He is unwise to follow Brougham’s example and make
omniscience his foible.
Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful
and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true acceptance of
Christ’s teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has done, a man
who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the fundamental facts of
the Roman empire in the first three centuries of our era, a man who can
warn us as clearly as he has warned about some of the pressing dangers
which threaten our social fabric because of indulgence in a morbid and
false sentimentality, a man, in short, who has produced in this one
book materials for half a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse
subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to
be taken into account.
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition
in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering
from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from
all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition,
even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could
be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in
morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself,
than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely
calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use
the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves,
it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend
gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous
standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.
This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous
than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled
materialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of
political and clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned
below[10] is written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under
the rather fanciful title of “The Death of the Swan” it deals with
the shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the
doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and
draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially
of our own countrymen, which I, for one, am unwilling to have drawn.
The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is
going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn
governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility
of its ideals in government, religion, and the whole art of living, a
futility so wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the
people from all that makes for real efficiency and success. In his
revolt against sentimentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypocrisy the
author advocates frank egotism and brutality as rules of conduct for
both individuals and nations; and in his revolt against the theological
tyranny and superstition from which the Spanish peoples in the Old and
New Worlds have suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit
obedience to the revolting creed which would treat gold and force as
the true and only gods for human guidance; and this he does in the
name of science and enlightenment and of exact and correct thinking.
He speaks with admiration of certain American qualities, confounding
in curious fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous traits.
He fails to see that the line of separation between the school of
Washington and of Lincoln and the school of the prophets of brutal
force, as expressed in the deification of either Mars or Mammon, is
as sharp as that which distinguishes both of these schools from the
apostles of the silly sentimentalism which he justly condemns. He sees
that the really great Americans were thoroughly practical men; but
he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty idealists. It was
precisely because they were both idealists and practical men that they
made their mark deep in history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry
and superstition; he does not see that they were sundered as far from
the men who attack all religion and all order as from the men who
uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. It was the fact that
Washington and Lincoln refused to carry good policies to bad extremes,
and at the same time refused to be frightened out of supporting good
policies because they might lead to bad extremes, that made them of
such far-reaching usefulness.
[10] “La Mort du Cygne.” By Carlos Reyles. Translation from
Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea.
“Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist.” By Thomas Dwight, M.D.
“The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.” By Henry Osborn
Taylor.
“Some Neglected Factors in Evolution.” By Henry M. Bernard.
“The World of Life.” By Alfred Russel Wallace.
“William James.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science et Religion.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science and Religion.” By Émile Boutroux. Translation into
English by Jonathan Nield.
“Creative Evolution.” By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation
by Arthur Mitchell.
“The Varieties of Religious Experience.” By William James.
“Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. L.
Pogson.
“From Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.
“The Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.
I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these
books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use
them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the
search for truth; as, for instance, the harm that comes from
seeking to apply, universally, truth as apprehended by the
mere materialist, the futility of trying to check this harm
by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediævalism, and the
fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the highest
type, both scientific and religious.
Dr. Dwight’s book is very largely a protest against the materialistic
philosophy which has produced such conceptions of life, and against
these conceptions of life themselves. With this protest we must all
heartily sympathize; unfortunately, it is impossible to have such
sympathy with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest.
There is much that is true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal
to show where the leaders of the modern advance have been guilty of
shortcomings he tends to assume positions which would put an instant
stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge us back
into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages. Apparently
the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man
of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn Taylor in one of
his profound and able studies has said: “The mediæval man was not
spiritually self-reliant, his character was not consciously wrought by
its own strength of mind and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint,
he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”
Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines
of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of
the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the
thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the
Revolution. In speaking of the similarities between them he says:
“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all kinds of company.
There are the honest men anxious for reform, the protesters against
what they conceived to be religious oppression, the dreamy idealists
without definite plan, the ranting orators of the ‘mountain,’ fanatics
and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a living from the more
or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary doctrines and who find
legalized plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or
for favor prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable
doctrines without an examination which most of them are incompetent
to make, and finally the mob of the _sans-culottes_ rejoicing in the
overthrow of law, order, and decency.”
This is true, although it does not contain by any means the whole
truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific movement of the
present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying which Dr.
Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he
himself attempts; to destroy the case of one’s opponents and to justify
one’s own case are two very different things. At present we are in
greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed
scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance;
just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among
the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is
vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because
victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil;
and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest
against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the
evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only
hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization
which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious
expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators
here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in
the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which
it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development
in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the
worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny--physical, intellectual,
spiritual--which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the
modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there
is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right
in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against
Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism
which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as
ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in
revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us
that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in
their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of
the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and
intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when
nominally religious. But in his entirely proper protest against these
men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than just to Darwin and to many
another seeker after truth, and he fails to recognize the obligation
under which he and those like him have been put by the fearless
pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind to the modern
scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it
has been real; but the good has much outweighed the evil. It is only
the triumph of the movement led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight
protests that has rendered it possible for books such as Dr. Dwight’s
to be published with the approval--as in his case--of the orthodox
thought of the church to which the writer belongs.
The most significant feature of his book is the advance it marks in
the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the
doctrine of evolution, although--quite rightly, and in true scientific
spirit, by the way--he insists most strongly upon the fact that we
are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or
show its significance; and he is again quite right in holding up as
an example to the dogmatists of modern science what Roger Bacon said
in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in
knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’” He,
of course, treats of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and
the like as every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of
this represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized
authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an
orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to
print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that
the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular
opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that
extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin
would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from
all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held
to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be
when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel’s work
would have been held if Darwin’s far greater work had not distracted
attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was
at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of
what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way
toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders
and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with
those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine
of evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the freedom
they do only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific
innovators of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically
condemned.
But when Dr. Dwight attacks the loose generalizations, absurd
dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few
of the so-called leaders of modern science, he is not only right but
renders a real service. The claims of certain so-called scientific
men as to “science overthrowing religion” are as baseless as the
fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The
establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more
justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of
the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith
sufficiently robust to stand the--surely very slight--strain of
admitting that the world is not flat and does move round the sun need
have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic
scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of
evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much
propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation.
Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by
one only as they are affected by the other. Genuine harm has been done
by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which,
in its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to
explain all the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed
in masterly fashion by such really great thinkers--such masters not
only of philosophy but of material science--as William James, Émile
Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. It is worth while to quote the remarks
of Alfred Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: “With Professor
Haeckel’s dislike of the dogmas of theologians and their claims as to
the absolute knowledge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable
mind that is the power within and behind and around nature many of
us have the greatest sympathy; but we have none with his unfounded
dogmatism of combined negation and omniscience, and more especially
when this assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put forward to
conceal his real ignorance of the nature of life itself.” Dr. Dwight
is emphatically right when he denies that science (using the word, as
he does, as meaning merely the science of material things) has taught
“a new and sufficient gospel,” or that, to use his own words, there
is any truth “in the boast of infidel science that she and she alone
has all that is worth having.” He could go even further than he does
in refuting the queer optimism of those evolutionists who insist that
evolution in the human race necessarily means progress; for every true
evolutionist must admit the possibility of retrogression no less
than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk after
having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again
happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after
having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight’s view of religion is that it
is the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically
right; and surely when the doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to
mean the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely the performance
of a barren ceremonial, it must command the respect, and I hope the
adherence, of all devout men of every creed, and even of those who
adhere to no creed of recognized orthodoxy.
In the same way I heartily sympathize with his condemnation of the men
who stridently proclaim that “science has disposed of religion,” and
with his condemnation of the scientific men who would try to teach
the community that there is no real meaning to the words “right”
and “wrong,” and who therefore deny free-will and accountability.
Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose book is rightly, as he
calls it, “an essay in constructive biology,” who in his theory of
group development has opened a new biological and even sociological
field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the psychical
accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it, and
whose final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows
that he has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist
can have, yet falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of
the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence
can not understand it. Dr. Dwight is right in his attitude toward
the scientific men who thus assume that there is no freedom of the
will because on a material basis it is not explicable. Whenever any
so-called scientific men develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory
in accordance with which it would be quite impossible to conduct
the affairs of mankind for so much as twenty-four hours, the wise
attitude of really scientific men would be to reject that theory,
instead of following the example of the, I fear not wholly imaginary,
scientist who, when told that the facts did not fit in with his
theory, answered: “So much the worse for the facts.” M. Bergson, in
his “Creative Evolution,” has brought out with convincing clearness
the great truth that the human brain, so able to deal with purely
material things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in which thought
is concerned only with unorganized matter, works under necessarily
narrow limitations--limitations in reality very, very narrow, and never
to be made really broad by mere intellect--when it comes to grasping
any part of the great principle of life. Reason can deal effectively
only with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to
allow reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where
experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly,
then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience,
and bid reason be humble--just as under like conditions it would
bid theology be humble. A certain school of Greek philosophers was
able to prove logically that there was not, and could not be, any
such thing as motion, and that, even if there were, it was quite
impossible logically for a pursuing creature ever to overtake a fleeing
creature which was going at inferior speed; but all that was really
accomplished by this teaching was to prove the need of much greater
intellectual humility on the part of those who believed that they were
capable of thinking out an explanation for everything. Mr. Bernard
ought not to have been caught in such a dilemma, because of the very
fact that he does not cast in his lot with the crass materialists;
for he admits that there are many things we do not know, that there
is much which our intelligence--necessarily functioning in material
fashion--can not understand. It is just as idle for a man to try to
explain everything in the moral and spiritual world by that which he
is able to apprehend of the material world as it would be for a polyp
to try to explain the higher emotions of mankind in terms of polyp
materialism. Not only would it be quite impossible to conduct even
the lowest form of civil society without practical acknowledgment of
free-will and accountability--an acknowledgment always made in practice
by every single individual of those who deny it in theory--but even
in their writings the very men who deny free-will and accountability
inevitably and continually use language which has no meaning except on
the supposition that both of them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance,
on the same page on which he denies freedom of the will, makes an
impatient plea for just laws, and explains that by “just laws” he
means laws that are in accordance with the highest conceptions of
human relationships; he complains that the legal idea of justice is
invariably far behind that of our psychic perceptions; and elsewhere,
as on page 457, he speaks of the “duties” of man and of his “moral
perceptions,” and on page 473 he asks for perfection of the community,
so that “social life worked out by the highest wisdom of mankind will
at once rise to a newer and higher physical and psychic level.” All
of this is meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the
will and accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and
original thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the
pure materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson’s pregnant
saying that “pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense,
which is an altogether different thing.” A part, and an essential part,
of the same truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when he paraphrases Saint
Augustine in insisting that “the truths of love are as valid as the
truths of reason.”
Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits of thought are similar to his
perform a real service when they keep people from being led astray by
the mischievous dogmas of those who would give to each passing and
evanescent phase of materialistic scientific thought a dogmatic value;
and our full acknowledgment of this service does not in the least
hinder us from also realizing and acknowledging that the advance in
scientific discovery, which has been and will be of such priceless
worth to mankind, can not be made by men of this type, but only by the
bolder, more self-reliant spirits, by men whose unfettered freedom of
soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of
truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search
to attain it. A brake is often a useful and sometimes an indispensable
piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as important as the
wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard T.
Ely was tried for economic heresy: “In all lines of investigation the
investigator must be absolutely free to follow the paths of truth
wherever they may lead.”
It is always a difficult thing to state a position which has two sides
with such clearness as to bring it home to the hearers. In the world
of politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and
no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but
difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress
combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of
extremists and against progress by another set of extremists. So in
the world of the intellect it is easy to take the position of the hard
materialists who rail against religion, and easy also to take the
position of those whose zeal for orthodoxy makes them distrust all
action by men of independent mind in the search for scientific truth;
but it is not so easy to make it understood that we both acknowledge
our inestimable debt to the great masters of science, and yet are
keenly alive to their errors and decline to surrender our judgment to
theirs when they go wrong. It is imperative to realize how very grave
their errors are, and how foolish we should be to abandon our adherence
to the old ideals of duty toward God and man without better security
than the more radical among the new prophets can offer us. The very
blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose complacency
is greatest in their belief that the material key is that which
unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that the finite mind of
man can, not merely understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon,
these mysteries. Mr. Wallace stands in honorable contrast to the men
of this stamp. No one has criticised with greater incisiveness what he
properly calls “the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions
of the biologists of the school of Haeckel.” He shows his scientific
superiority to these men by his entire realization of the limitations
of the human intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking
that we have explained what we are simply unable to understand when
we use such terms as “infinity of time” and “infinity of space” to
cover our ignorance; and he stands not far away from the school of
MM. Boutroux and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes near the
attitude of the more serious among the younger present-day scientific
investigators--of the stamp of Professor Osborn, of the American
Museum of Natural History--in his readiness to acknowledge that the
materialistic and mechanical explanations of the causes of evolution
have broken down, and that science itself furnishes an overwhelming
argument for “creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose” in
the process of evolution.
The law of evolution is as unconditionally accepted by every serious
man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and it is no more
and no less foolish to regard one than the other as antagonistic to
religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands on a par with
insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science must reconcile
itself--and astronomy as well--to a universe only six thousand years
old. The type of theologian who takes such a position occupies much the
same intellectual level with the strutting materialists of the Haeckel
type. To all men of this kind I most cordially commend a capital book,
“Evolution and Dogma,” by the Rev. J. A. Zahm, one-time professor of
physics at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.
The great distinguishing feature of the centuries immediately past
has been the extraordinary growth in man’s knowledge of, and power
to understand and command, his own physical nature and his physical
surroundings in the universe. It is this growth which so sharply
distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we may
roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus’s voyage, from all
preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased
man’s power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also
measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and
command over things spiritual no less than material. This conquest
could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow wherever their
longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of their own
consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the present. But
no such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever has taken place,
or ever will or can take place, without being fraught also with great
dangers to mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try to remain
stationary we shall surely go backward; and yet as soon as we leave the
ground on which we stand in order to advance there is always danger
that we shall plunge into some abyss.
Naturally, the men who have taken the lead in these extraordinary
material discoveries have often tended to think that there is nothing
to discover or to believe in except what is material. Much of the
growth in our understanding of nature has been due to men whose high
abilities were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain directions.
Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that the
remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate
and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so
powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our
knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet;
the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment
of such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolution; in short,
the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical
universe and of man’s physical place in that universe, has been due to
the labor of students whose special tastes and abilities lay in the
direction of dealing with what is purely material. Their astounding
success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of
their achievements, have naturally tended to make those among them
who possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not
broad, assume an attitude of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient
materialism: a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its own
grievous shortcomings and its inability to perceive anything outside
the realm of the body. This attitude is as profoundly repellent as
that of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of
all progress, against whom these men profess to be in revolt; and,
moreover, it is an attitude which is itself as profoundly unscientific
as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The
universal truth can never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended
unless we have the widest possible knowledge of our physical
surroundings, and unless we fearlessly endeavor to find out just
what the facts and the teachings of these physical surroundings are;
but neither will it ever be understood if the physical and material
explanations of life are accepted as all-sufficient. By none is this
more clearly recognized than by the most acute and far-sighted of the
investigators into physical conditions. Says Mr. Bernard: “There are
psychic elements wholly different in kind from the physical elements
... [they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a new character,
quality, element--or shall we at once boldly borrow a term from
mathematics and call it a new ‘dimension’ of our environment, hitherto
three-dimensional? These various mental conditions lead us to believe
that at any moment, while being driven through this three-dimensional
environment, we may also be plunged into a psychic condition which
hangs like an atmosphere over our particular physical surroundings.”
Not only every truly religious, but every truly scientific, man must
turn with relief from the narrowness of a shut-in materialism to the
profound and lofty thought contained in the writings of William James,
of his biographer, M. Émile Boutroux, and of another philosopher of
the same school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux’s study of William James
gives in brief form--and with a charm of style and expression possible
only for those who work with that delicate instrument of precision,
French prose--the views which men of this stamp hold; and be it
remembered that, like James, they are thoroughly scientific men,
steeped in the teachings of material science, who acknowledge no
outside limitation upon them in their search for truth. They have a
far keener understanding of the world of matter than has been attained
by the purely materialistic scientists, just because, in addition,
they also understand that outside of the purely physical lies the
psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the
purely psychic. M. Boutroux’s book on “Science and Religion” has been
translated into English--and we owe a real debt of gratitude to Messrs.
Nield and Mitchell for their excellent translations of MM. Boutroux
and Bergson. There is much talk of the conflict between science and
religion. The inherent absurdity of such talk has never been better
expressed than by M. Boutroux when he says that such opposition “is
the result of our defining both science and religion in an artificial
manner by, on the one hand, identifying science with physical science,
and, on the other hand, assuming that religion consists in the dogmas
which merely symbolize it.” M. Boutroux’s book, like M. Bergson’s
“Creative Evolution,” must be read in its entirety; mere extracts and
condensations can not show the profound philosophical acumen with
which these men go to the heart of things, and prove that science
itself, if correctly understood, renders absurd the harsh and futile
dogmatism of many of those who pride themselves upon being, above all
things, scientific. For, as these writers point out, the work of the
scientist is conditioned upon the existence of the free determination
of a spirit which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes also in
an æsthetic and moral ideal. They see the material, the physical body,
in its relation to other physical bodies; and back of and beyond the
physical they see life itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived
of as something always dynamic and never static, as a “stream of
consciousness,” a “becoming.”
As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the individual his
value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than treating
him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals. This
philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of
the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution
and of all else that modern science has ever taught; and so those
who profess it are in a position of impregnable strength when they
point out that all this in no shape or way interferes with religion
and with Christianity, because, as they hold, evolution in religion
has merely tended to disengage it from its own gross and material
wrapping, and to leave unfettered the spirit which is its essence.
To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which
humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches; for, as M.
Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith
in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need
give no other reason, for its existence than “its own incorruptible
disinterestedness.” The idea thus expressed is at bottom based on
the same truth to which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he
says: “The love of God means not despising but honoring self; and for
Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing
earth’s duties and living out earth’s full life, and not in abandoning
all for dreams, though the dreams be of heaven.” To men such as William
James and these two French philosophers physical science, if properly
studied, shows conclusively its own limitations, shows conclusively
that beyond the material world lies a vast series of phenomena which
all material knowledge is powerless to explain, so that science
itself teaches that outside of materialism lie the forces of a wholly
different world, a world ordered by religion--religion which, says M.
Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work according to its own nature
as a spiritual activity, striving to transform men from within and not
from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, by prayer, by the
communion of souls, not by restraint or policy; and such a religion
has nothing to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit to
which it is loyal is the faith in duty, the search for what is for the
universal good and for the universal love, the secret springs of all
high and beneficent activity.
It is striking to see how these two gifted Frenchmen, by their own
road, reach substantially the same conclusion which, by a wholly
different method, and indeed in treating religion from a wholly
different standpoint, is also reached by the president of Bowdoin
College. Mr. Hyde’s short volume combines in high degree a lofty
nobility of ethical concept with the most practical and straightforward
common-sense treatment of the ways in which this concept should be
realized in practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself in these
matters, and one man’s need will not be wholly met by what does meet
another’s; personally, this book of President Hyde’s gives me something
that no other book does, and means to me very, very much.
We must all strive to keep as our most precious heritage the liberty
each to worship his God as to him seems best, and, as part of this
liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater
or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and convictions,
without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of others. But the
professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon authority,
and those who in different measures profess the theory of individual
liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and with
self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of
every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: “The only setting
for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only
relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind.”
Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the
case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when
he summed up a notably fine address in defence--as he truly says,
_friendly_ defence--of his own church by enunciating the plea for
“true peace founded on justice,” worked out in accordance with what
he properly calls one of the “dearest blessings that heaven can give,
the spirit that springs from religious liberty.” However widely
many earnest and high-minded men of science and many earnest and
high-minded men of religious convictions may from one side or the other
disagree with the teachings of the earnest and high-minded students of
philosophy whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in agreement
with the fundamentals on which their philosophy is based. Surely we
must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we
ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should
be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with
humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations
both of the mind and the soul. We must stand equally against tyranny
and against irreverence in all things of the spirit, with the firm
conviction that we can all work together for a higher social and
individual life if only, whatever form of creed we profess, we make the
doing of duty and the love of our fellow men two of the prime articles
in our universal faith. To those who deny the ethical obligation
implied in such a faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens;
and we are brothers to all those who do acknowledge it, whatever their
creed or system of philosophy.
THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
Next to developing original writers in its own time, the most fortunate
thing, from the literary standpoint, which can befall any people is
to have revealed to it some new treasure-house of literature. This
treasure-house may be stored with the writings of another people in
the present, or else with the writings of a buried past. But a few
generations ago, in that innocent age when Blackstone could speak of
the “Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals”--incongruous gathering--as
“Celtic” tribes, the long-vanished literatures of the ancestors of
the present European nations, the epics, the sagas, the stories in
verse or prose, were hardly known to, or regarded by, their educated
and cultivated descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the nineteenth
century, these forgotten literatures, or fragments of them, were
one by one recovered. They are various in merit and interest, in
antiquity and extent--“Beowulf,” the Norse sagas, the “Kalevala,”
the “Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” the Arthurian cycle of
romances. In some there is but one great poem; in some all the
poems or stories are of one type; in others, as in the case of the
Norse sagas, a wide range of history, myth, and personal biography
is covered. In our own day there has at last come about a popular
revival of interest in the wealth of poems and tales to be found in the
ancient Celtic, and especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts--the
whole forming a body of prose and poetry of great and well-nigh unique
interest from every standpoint, which in some respects can be matched
only by the Norse sagas, and which has some striking beauties the like
of which are not to be found even in these Norse sagas.
For many decades German, French, Irish, and English students have
worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many of the
more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or
paraphrased in popular form by writers like Lady Gregory and Miss
Hull, Lady Gregory showing in her prose something of the charm which
her countrywoman Emily Lawless shows in her poems “With the Wild
Geese.” It is greatly to be regretted that America should have done so
little either in the way of original study and research in connection
with the early Celtic literature, or in the way of popularizing and
familiarizing that literature, and it is much to be desired that,
wherever possible, chairs of Celtic should be established in our
leading universities. Moreover, in addition to the scholar’s work
which is especially designed for students, there must ultimately be
done the additional work which puts the results of the scholarship at
the disposal of the average layman. This has largely been done for
the Norse sagas. William Morris has translated the “Heimskringla”
into language which, while not exactly English, can nevertheless be
understood without difficulty--which is more than can be said for his
translation of “Beowulf”--and which has a real, though affectedly
archaic, beauty. Dasent has translated the “Younger Edda,” the “Njala
Saga,” and the “Saga of Gisli the Outlaw.” It is pleasant for Americans
to feel that it was Longfellow who, in his “Saga of King Olaf,”
rendered one of the most striking of the old Norse tales into a great
poem.
It is difficult to speak with anything like exactness of the relative
ages of these primitive literatures. Doubtless in each case the
earliest manuscripts that have come down to us are themselves based
upon far earlier ones which have been destroyed, and doubtless, when
they were first written down, the tales had themselves been recited,
and during the course of countless recitations had been changed and
added to and built upon, for a period of centuries. Sometimes, as in
the “Song of Roland,” we know at least in bare outline the historical
incident which for some reason impressed the popular imagination
until around it there grew up a great epic, of which the facts have
been twisted completely out of shape. In other instances, as in the
“Nibelungenlied,” a tale, adaptable in its outlines to many different
peoples, was adapted to the geography of a particular people, and to
what that people at least thought was history; thus the Rhine becomes
the great river of the “Nibelungenlied,” and in the second part of
the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes connected with dim memories
of Attila’s vast and evanescent empire. The “Song of Roland” and the
“Nibelungenlied” were much later than the earliest English, Norse, and
Irish poems. Very roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the earliest
forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas were produced, or at least
were in healthy life, at about the time when “Beowulf” was a live saga,
and two or three centuries or thereabouts before the early Norse sagas
took a shape which we would recognize as virtually akin to that they
now have.
These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though somewhat artificially,
arranged in cycles. In some ways the most interesting of these is the
Cuchulain cycle, although until very recently it was far less known
than the Ossianic cycle--the cycle which tells of the deeds of Finn and
the Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty feats of Cuchulain, and
of the heroes whose life-threads were interwoven with his, date back
to a purely pagan Ireland--an Ireland cut off from all connection with
the splendid and slowly dying civilization of Rome, an Ireland in which
still obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere vanished even from
the memory of man.
Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still fought in chariots driven
each by a charioteer who was also the stanch friend and retainer of
the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had held the first place in
the armies of all the powerful empires in the lands adjoining the
Mediterranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris. Strange
African tribes had used them north and south of the Atlas Mountains.
When the mighty, conquering kings of Egypt made their forays into
Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, the decisive feature in
each battle was the shock between the hundreds of chariots arrayed on
each side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine hundred chariots of
iron. The Homeric heroes were “tamers of horses,” which were not ridden
in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That mysterious people,
the Etruscans, of whose race and speech we know nothing, originally
fought in chariots. But in the period of Greek and Roman splendor
the war chariot had already passed away. It had seemingly never been
characteristic of the wild Teuton tribes; but among the western Celts
it lingered long. Cæsar encountered it among the hostile tribes when he
made his famous raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later still.
The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of Cuchulain’s time
were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to battle. The
sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They show us a
land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards,
seers, but, above all, warriors. Erin was a world to herself. Her
people at times encountered the peoples of Britain or of Continental
Europe, whether in trade or in piracy; but her chief interest, her
overwhelming interest, lay in what went on within her own borders.
There was a high king of shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely
recognized as extending over the island, but whose practical supremacy
was challenged on every hand by whatever king or under-king felt the
fierce whim seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there were halls
and fortresses; there were huge herds of horses and cattle and sheep
and swine. The kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, the
chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore garments crimson and blue and
green and saffron, plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They had
rings and clasps and torques of gold and silver, urns and mugs and
troughs and vessels of iron and silver. They played chess by the fires
in their great halls, and they feasted and drank and quarrelled within
them, and the women had sun-parlors of their own.
Among the most striking of the tales are those of the “Fate of the Sons
of Usnach,” telling of Deirdrè’s life and love and her lamentation for
her slain lover; of the “Wooing of Emer” by Cuchulain; of the “Feast
of Bricriu”; and of the famous Cattle-Spoil of Cooley, the most famous
romance of ancient Ireland, the story of the great raid for the Dun
Bull of Cooley. But there are many others of almost equal interest;
such as the story of MacDatho’s pig, with its Gargantuan carouse of the
quarrelsome champions; and the tale of the siege of Howth.
In these tales, which in so many points are necessarily like the
similar tales that have come down from the immemorial past of the
peoples of kindred race, there are also striking peculiarities that
hedge them apart. The tales are found in many versions, which for the
most part have been enlarged by pedantic scribes of aftertime, who
often made them prolix and tedious, and added grotesque and fantastic
exaggerations of their own to the barbaric exaggerations already in
them, doing much what Saxo Grammaticus did for the Scandinavian tales.
They might have been woven into some great epic, or at least have
taken far more definite and connected shape, if the history of Ireland
had developed along lines similar to those of the other nations of west
Europe. But her history was broken by terrible national tragedies and
calamities. To the scourge of the vikings succeeded the Anglo-Norman
conquest, with all its ruinous effects on the growth of the national
life. The early poems of the Erse bards could not develop as those
other early lays developed which afterward became the romances of
Arthur and Roland and Siegfried. They remain primitive, as “Beowulf” is
primitive, as, in less measure, “Gisli the Outlaw” is primitive.
The heroes are much like those of the early folk of kindred
stock everywhere. They are huge, splendid barbarians, sometimes
yellow-haired, sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief title
to glory is found in their feats of bodily prowess. Among the feats
often enumerated or referred to are the ability to leap like a salmon,
to run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible distances, to toss
the wheel, and, like the Norse berserkers, when possessed with the fury
of battle, to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last feat was
especially valued, and was recognized as the “heroes’ fury.” As with
most primitive peoples, the power to shout loudly was much prized, and
had a distinct place of respect, under the title of “mad roar,” in
any list of a given hero’s exhibitions of strength or agility; just as
Stentor’s voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable military
asset. So, when the slaughter begins in Etzel’s hall, the writer of the
Nibelung lay dwells with admiration on the vast strength of Diederick,
as shown by the way in which his voice rang like a bison horn,
resounding within and without the walls. Many of the feats chronicled
of the early Erse heroes are now wholly unintelligible to us; we can
not even be sure what they were, still less why they should have been
admired.
Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as wisdom was in the early
world, a vulpine wisdom of craft and cunning and treachery and
double-dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, witches appear,
now as friends, now as unfriends, of the men of might. Fiercely the
heroes fought and wide they wandered; yet their fights and their
wanderings were not very different from those that we read about in
many other primitive tales. There is the usual incredible variety of
incidents and character, and, together with the variety, an endless
repetition. But these Erse tales differ markedly from the early Norse
and Teutonic stories in more than one particular. A vein of the
supernatural and a vein of the romantic run through them and relieve
their grimness and harshness in a way very different from anything
to be found in the Teutonic. Of course the supernatural element often
takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the
Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes
from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there
were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against
which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales
an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible; and
their unearthly creatures could become in aftertime the fairies of the
moonlight and the greenwood, so different from the trolls and gnomes
and misshapen giants bequeathed to later generations by the Norse
mythology.
Still more striking is the difference between the women in the Irish
sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the
spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the romances of
the Middle Ages. In the “Song of Roland”--rather curiously, considering
that it is the first great piece of French literature--woman plays
absolutely no part at all; there is not a female figure which is
more than a name, or which can be placed beside Roland and Oliver,
Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and Charlemagne, the mighty
emperor of the “barbe fleurie.” The heroines of the early Norse and
German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to be the mothers of a
mighty race, as stern and relentless as their lovers and husbands. But
it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal
to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Dierdrè,
the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and Deirdrè have
the charm, the power of inspiring and returning romantic love, that
belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round Table,
though of course this does not mean that they lacked some very archaic
tastes and attributes.
Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who was wooed by Cuchulain,
had the “six gifts of a girl”--beauty, and a soft voice, and sweet
speech, and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In their wooing the
hero and heroine spoke to one another in riddles, those delights of the
childhood of peoples. She set him journeys to go and feats to perform,
which he did in the manner of later knight errants. After long courting
and many hardships, he took Emer to wife, and she was true to him and
loved him and gloried in him and watched over him until the day he went
out to meet his death. All this was in a spirit which we would find
natural in a heroine of modern or of mediæval times--a spirit which it
would be hard to match either among the civilizations of antiquity, or
in early barbarisms other than the Erse.
So it was with Deirdrè, the beautiful girl who forsook her betrothed,
the Over-King of Ulster, for the love of Naisi, and fled with him and
his two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At last they returned
to Ireland, and there Deirdrè’s lover and his two brothers were slain
by the treachery of the king whose guests they were. Many versions of
the Songs of Deirdrè have come down to us, of her farewell to Alba and
her lament over her slain lover; for during centuries this tragedy
of Deirdrè, together with the tragical fate of the Children of Lir
and the tragical fate of the Children of Tuirenn, were known as the
“Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin.” None has better retained its vitality
down to the present day. Even to us, reading the songs in an alien
age and tongue, they are very beautiful. Deirdrè sings wistfully of
her Scottish abiding-place, with its pleasant, cuckoo-haunted groves,
and its cliffs, and the white sand on the beaches. She tells of her
lover’s single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the daughter of a
Scottish lord, and Deirdrè, broken-hearted, put off to sea in a boat,
indifferent whether she should live or die; whereupon the two brothers
of her lover swam after her and brought her back, to find him very
repentant and swearing a threefold oath that never again would he prove
false to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. She dwells
constantly on the unfailing tenderness of the three heroes; for her
lover’s two brothers cared for her as he did:
“Much hardship would I take,
Along with the three heroes;
I would endure without house, without fire,
It is not I that would be gloomy.
“Their three shields and their spears
Were often a bed for me.
Put their three hard swords
Over the grave, O young man!”
For the most part, in her songs, Deirdrè dwells on the glories and
beauties of the three warriors, the three dragons, the three champions
of the Red Branch, the three that used to break every onrush, the three
hawks, the three darlings of the women of Erin, the three heroes who
were not good at homage. She sings of their splendor in the foray, of
their nobleness as they returned to their home, to bring fagots for the
fire, to bear in an ox or a boar for the table; sweet though the pipes
and flutes and horns were in the house of the king, sweeter yet was it
to hearken to the songs sung by the sons of Usnach, for “like the sound
of the wave was the voice of Naisi.”
There were other Irish heroines of a more common barbarian type. Such
was the famous warrior-queen, Meave, tall and beautiful, with her
white face and yellow hair, terrible in her battle chariot when she
drove at full speed into the press of fighting men, and “fought over
the ears of the horses.” Her virtues were those of a warlike barbarian
king, and she claimed the like large liberty in morals. Her husband was
Ailill, the Connaught king, and, as Meave carefully explained to him in
what the old Erse bards called a “bolster conversation,” their marriage
was literally a partnership wherein she demanded from her husband an
exact equality of treatment according to her own views and on her own
terms; the three essential qualities upon which she insisted being that
he should be brave, generous, and completely devoid of jealousy!
Fair-haired Queen Meave was a myth, a goddess, and her memory changed
and dwindled until at last she reappeared as Queen Mab of fairyland.
But among the ancient Celts her likeness was the likeness of many a
historic warrior queen. The descriptions given of her by the first
writers or compilers of the famous romances of the foray for the Dun
Bull of Cooley almost exactly match the descriptions given by the Latin
historian of the British Queen Boadicea, tall and terrible-faced, her
long, yellow hair flowing to her hips, spear in hand, golden collar on
neck, her brightly colored mantle fastened across her breast with a
brooch.
Not only were some of Meave’s deeds of a rather startling kind, but
even Emer and Deirdrè at times showed traits that to a modern reader
may seem out of place, in view of what has been said of them above.
But we must remember the surroundings, and think of what even the real
women of history were, throughout European lands, until a far later
period. In the “Heimskringla” we read of Queen Sigrid, the wisest of
women, who grew tired of the small kings who came to ask her hand, a
request which she did not regard them as warranted to make either by
position or extent of dominion. So one day when two kings had thus come
to woo her, she lodged them in a separate wooden house, with all their
company, and feasted them until they were all very drunk, and fell
asleep; then in the middle of the night she had her men fall on them
with fire and sword, burn those who stayed within the hall and slay
those who broke out. The incident is mentioned in the saga without the
slightest condemnation; on the contrary, it evidently placed the queen
on a higher social level than before, for, in concluding the account,
the saga mentions that Sigrid said “that she would weary these small
kings of coming from other lands to woo her; so she was called Sigrid
Haughty thereafter.” Now, Sigrid was an historical character who lived
many hundred years after the time of Emer and Deirdrè and Meave, and
the simplicity with which her deed was chronicled at the time, and
regarded afterward, should reconcile us to some of the feats recorded
of those shadowy Erse predecessors of hers, who were separated from her
by an interval of time as great as that which separates her from us.
The story of the “Feast of Bricriu of the Bitter Tongue” is one of the
most interesting of the tales of the Cuchulain cycle. In all this cycle
of tales, Bricriu appears as the cunning, malevolent mischief-maker,
dreaded for his biting satire and his power of setting by the ears the
boastful, truculent, reckless, and marvellously short-tempered heroes
among whom he lived. He has points of resemblance to Thersites, to Sir
Kay, of the Arthurian romances, and to Conan, of the Ossianic cycle of
Celtic sagas. This story is based upon the custom of the “champion’s
portion,” which at a feast was allotted to the bravest man. It was a
custom which lasted far down into historic times, and was recognized
in the Brehon laws, where a heavy fine was imposed upon any person who
stole it from the one to whom it belonged. The story in its present
form, like all of these stories, is doubtless somewhat changed from
the story as it was originally recited among the pre-Christian Celts
of Ireland, but it still commemorates customs of the most primitive
kind, many of them akin to those of all the races of Aryan tongue in
their earlier days. The queens cause their maids to heat water for
the warriors’ baths when they return from war, and similarly made
ready to greet their guests, as did the Homeric heroines. The feasts
were Homeric feasts. The heroes boasted and sulked and fought as did
the Greeks before Troy. At their feasts, when the pork and beef, the
wheaten cakes and honey, had been eaten, and the beer, and sometimes
the wine of Gaul, had been drunk in huge quantities, the heroes,
vainglorious and quarrelsome, were always apt to fight. Thus in the
three houses which together made up the palace of the high king at
Emain Macha, it was necessary that the arms of the heroes should all
be kept in one place, so that they could not attack one another at the
feasts. These three houses of the palace were the Royal House, in which
the high king himself had his bronzed and jewelled room; the Speckled
House, where the swords, the shields, and the spears of the heroes were
kept; and the House of the Red Branch, where not only the weapons, but
the heads of the beaten enemies were stored; and it was in connection
with this last grewsome house that the heroes in the train of the High
King Conchubar took their name of the “Heroes of the Red Branch.”
When Bricriu gave his feast, he prepared for it by building a
spacious house even handsomer than the House of the Red Branch; and
it is described in great detail, as fashioned after “Tara’s Mead
Hall,” and of great strength and magnificence; and it was stocked with
quilts and blankets and beds and pillows, as well as with abundance
of meat and drink. Then he invited the high king and all the nobles
of Ulster to come to the feast. An amusing touch in the saga is the
frank consternation of the heroes who were thus asked. They felt
themselves helpless before the wiles of Bricriu, and at first refused
outright to go, because they were sure that he would contrive to set
them to fighting with one another; and they went at all only after
they had taken hostages from Bricriu and had arranged that he should
himself leave the feast-hall as soon as the feast was spread. But
their precautions were in vain, and Bricriu had no trouble in bringing
about a furious dispute among the three leading chiefs, Loigaire the
Triumphant, Conall the Victorious, and Cuchulain. He promised to each
the champion’s portion, on condition that each should claim it. Nor
did he rest here, but produced what the saga calls “the war of words
of the women of Ulster,” by persuading the three wives of the three
heroes that each should tread first into the banquet-hall. Each of the
ladies, in whose minds he thus raised visions of social precedence,
had walked away from the palace with half a hundred women in her
train, when they all three met. The saga describes how they started to
return to the hall together, walking evenly, gracefully, and easily
at first, and then with quicker steps, until, when they got near the
house, they raised their robes “to the round of the leg” and ran at
full speed. When they got to the hall the doors were shut, and, as they
stood outside, each wife chanted her own perfections, but, above all,
the valor and ferocious prowess of her husband, scolding one another as
did Brunhild and Krimhild in the quarrel that led to Siegfried’s death
at the hands of Hagen. Each husband, as in duty bound, helped his wife
into the hall, and the bickering which had already taken place about
the champion’s portion was renewed. At last it was settled that the
three rivals should drive in their chariots to the home of Ailill and
Meave, who should adjudge between them; and the judgment given, after
testing their prowess in many ways, and especially in encounters with
demons and goblins, was finally in favor of Cuchulain.
One of the striking parts of the tale is that in which the three
champions, following one another, arrive at the palace of Meave. The
daughter of Meave goes to the sun-parlor over the high porch of the
hold, and from there she is told by the queen to describe in turn each
chariot and the color of the horses and how the hero looks and how the
chariot courses. The girl obeys, and describes in detail each chariot
as it comes up, and the queen in each case recognizes the champion from
the description and speaks words of savage praise of each in turn.
Loigaire, a fair man, driving two fiery dapple-grays, in a wickerwork
chariot with silver-mounted yoke, is chanted by the queen as:
“A fury of war, a fire of judgment,
A flame of vengeance; in mien a hero,
In face a champion, in heart a dragon;
The long knife of proud victories which will hew us to pieces,
The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire.”
Conall is described as driving a roan and a bay, in a chariot with two
bright wheels of bronze, he himself fair, in face white and red, his
mantle blue and crimson, and Meave describes him as:
“A wolf among cattle; battle on battle,
Exploit on exploit, head upon head he heaps”;
and says that if he is excited to rage he will cut up her people
“As a trout on red sandstone is cut.”
Then Cuchulain is described, driving at a gallop a dapple-gray and a
dark-gray, in a chariot with iron wheels and a bright silver pole. The
hero himself is a dark, melancholy man, the comeliest of the men of
Erin, in a crimson tunic, with gold-hilted sword, a blood-red spear,
and over his shoulders a crimson shield rimmed with silver and gold.
Meave, on hearing the description, chants the hero as:
“An ocean in fury, a whale that rageth, a fragment of flame and
fire;
A bear majestic, a grandly moving billow,
A beast in maddening ire:
In the crash of glorious battle through the hostile foe he leaps,
His shout the fury of doom;
A terrible bear, he is death to the herd of cattle,
Feat upon feat, head upon head he heaps:
Laud ye the hearty one, he who is victor fully.”
Bricriu lost his life as a sequel of the great raid for the Dun Bull
of Cooley. This was undertaken by Queen Meave as the result of the
“bolster conversation,” the curtain quarrel, between her and Ailill as
to which of the two, husband or wife, had the more treasure. To settle
the dispute, they compared their respective treasures, beginning with
their wooden and iron vessels, going on with their rings and bracelets
and brooches and fine clothes, and ending with their flocks of sheep,
and herds of swine, horses, and cattle. The tally was even for both
sides until they came to the cattle, when it appeared that Ailill had
a huge, white-horned bull with which there was nothing of Meave’s to
compare. The chagrined queen learned from a herald that in Cooley there
was a dun or brown bull which, it was asserted, was even larger and
more formidable.
Meave announces that by fair means or foul the dun bull shall be hers,
and she raises her hosts. A great war ensues, in which Cuchulain
distinguishes himself above all others. All the heroes gather to the
fight, and a special canto is devoted to the fate of a very old man,
Iliach, a chief of Ulster, who resolves to attack the foe and avenge
Ulster’s honor on them. “Whether, then, I fall or come out of it, is
all one,” he said. The saga tells how his withered and wasted old
horses, which fed on the shore by his little fort, were harnessed to
the ancient chariot, which had long lost its cushions. Into it he got,
mother-naked, with his sword and his pair of blunt, rusty spears, and
great throwing-stones heaped at his feet; and thus he attacked the
hosts of Meave and fought till his death. In the Cuchulain sagas the
heroes frequently fight with stones; and the practice obtained until
much later days, for in Olaf’s death-battle with the ships of Hakon
his men were cleared from the decks of the Long Serpent by dexterously
hurled stones as well as by spears.
Partly by cunning, Meave gets the dun bull upon which she had set her
heart. Then comes in a thoroughly Erse touch. It appears that the two
bulls have lived many lives in different forms, and always in hostility
to each other, since the days when their souls were the souls of two
swineherds, who quarrelled and fought to the death. Now the two great
bulls renew their ancient fight. Bricriu is forced out to witness it,
and is trampled to death by the beasts. At last the white-homed bull is
slain, and the dun, raging and destroying, goes back to his home, where
he too dies. And this, says the saga, in ending, is the tale of the Dun
Bull of Cooley and the Driving of the Cattle-Herd by Meave and Ailill,
and their war with Ulster.
The Erse tales have suffered from many causes. Taken as a mass, they
did not develop as the sagas and the epics of certain other nations
developed; but they possess extraordinary variety and beauty, and in
their mysticism, their devotion to and appreciation of natural beauty,
their exaltation of the glorious courage of men and of the charm and
devotion of women, in all the touches that tell of a long-vanished
life, they possess a curious attraction of their own. They deserve the
research which can be given only by the lifelong effort of trained
scholars; they should be studied for their poetry, as countless
scholars have studied those early literatures; moreover, they should be
studied as Victor Bérard has studied the “Odyssey,” for reasons apart
from their poetical worth; and finally they deserve to be translated
and adapted so as to become a familiar household part of that
literature which all the English-speaking peoples possess in common.
AN ART EXHIBITION
AN ART EXHIBITION
The recent “International Exhibition of Modern Art” in New York was
really noteworthy. Messrs. Davies, Kuhn, Gregg, and their fellow
members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors did a
work of very real value in securing such an exhibition of the works of
both foreign and native painters and sculptors. Primarily their purpose
was to give the public a chance to see what has recently been going on
abroad. No similar collection of the works of European “moderns” has
ever been exhibited in this country. The exhibitors were quite right
as to the need of showing to our people in this manner the art forces
which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which can not be
ignored.
This does not mean that I in the least accept the view that these men
take of the European extremists whose pictures were here exhibited. It
is true, as the champions of these extremists say, that there can be
no life without change, no development without change, and that to be
afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It
is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and
retrogression instead of development. Probably we err in treating most
of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent
in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly
lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid.
There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a
faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will
buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent
from every standpoint.
In some ways it is the work of the American painters and sculptors
which is of most interest in this collection, and a glance at this
work must convince any one of the real good that is coming out of the
new movements, fantastic though many of the developments of these new
movements are. There was one note entirely absent from the exhibition,
and that was the note of the commonplace. There was not a touch of
simpering, self-satisfied conventionality anywhere in the exhibition.
Any sculptor or painter who had in him something to express and the
power of expressing it found the field open to him. He did not have
to be afraid because his work was not along ordinary lines. There was
no stunting or dwarfing, no requirement that a man whose gift lay in
new directions should measure up or down to stereotyped and fossilized
standards.
For all of this there can be only hearty praise. But this does not
in the least mean that the extremists whose paintings and pictures
were represented are entitled to any praise, save, perhaps, that they
have helped to break fetters. Probably in any reform movement, any
progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding
the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary
to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized
dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact
that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any
forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe
was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists
and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists. I am not entirely certain
which of the two latter terms should be used in connection with some
of the various pictures and representations of plastic art--and,
frankly, it is not of the least consequence. The Cubists are entitled
to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored
puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason
for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less
fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most
formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call
themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights
of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so
desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as
fatuous as another. Take the picture which for some reason is called
“A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good
Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory,
is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some
inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of,
say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the
facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the
“Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” From the standpoint of terminology each
name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining
after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of
sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of
the picture.
As for many of the human figures in the pictures of the Futurists,
they show that the school would be better entitled to the name of
the “Past-ists.” I was interested to find that a man of scientific
attainments who had likewise looked at the pictures had been struck,
as I was, by their resemblance to the later work of the palæolithic
artists of the French and Spanish caves. There are interesting samples
of the strivings for the representation of the human form among
artists of many different countries and times, all in the same stage
of palæolithic culture, to be found in a recent number of the “Revue
d’Ethnographie.” The palæolithic artist was able to portray the bison,
the mammoth, the reindeer, and the horse with spirit and success,
while he still stumbled painfully in the effort to portray man. This
stumbling effort in his case represented progress, and he was entitled
to great credit for it. Forty thousand years later, when entered into
artificially and deliberately, it represents only a smirking pose of
retrogression, and is not praiseworthy. So with much of the sculpture.
A family group of precisely the merit that inheres in a structure made
of the wooden blocks in a nursery is not entitled to be reproduced in
marble. Admirers speak of the kneeling female figure by Lehmbruck--I
use “female” advisedly, for although obviously mammalian it is not
especially human--as “full of lyric grace,” as “tremendously sincere,”
and “of a jewel-like preciousness.” I am not competent to say whether
these words themselves represent sincerity or merely a conventional
jargon; it is just as easy to be conventional about the fantastic as
about the commonplace. In any event one might as well speak of the
“lyric grace” of a praying mantis, which adopts much the same attitude;
and why a deformed pelvis should be called “sincere,” or a tibia of
giraffe-like length “precious,” seems to a reasonably sane view of the
pictures of Matisse a question of pathological rather than artistic
significance. This figure and the absurd portrait head of some young
lady have the merit that inheres in extravagant caricature. It is a
merit, but it is not a high merit. It entitles these pieces to stand in
sculpture where nonsense rhymes stand in literature and the sketches of
Aubrey Beardsley in pictorial art. These modern sculptured caricatures
in no way approach the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, probably
because the modern artists are too self-conscious and make themselves
ridiculous by pretentiousness. The makers of the gargoyles knew very
well that the gargoyles did not represent what was most important in
the Gothic cathedrals. They stood for just a little point of grotesque
reaction against, and relief from, the tremendous elemental vastness
and grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, sinister and comic,
grim and yet futile, and they fitted admirably into the framework of
the theology that found its expression in the towering and wonderful
piles which they ornamented.
Very little of the work of the extremists among the European “moderns”
seems to be good in and for itself; nevertheless it has certainly
helped any number of American artists to do work that is original
and serious; and this not only in painting but in sculpture. I wish
the exhibition had contained some of the work of the late Marcius
Symonds; very few people knew or cared for it while he lived; but
not since Turner has there been another man on whose canvas glowed
so much of that unearthly “light that never was on land or sea.” But
the exhibition contained so much of extraordinary merit that it is
ungrateful even to mention an omission. To name the pictures one would
like to possess--and the bronzes and tanagras and plasters--would
mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. One of the most
striking pictures was the “Terminal Yards”--the seeing eye was there,
and the cunning hand. I should like to mention all the pictures of
the president of the association, Arthur B. Davies. As first-class
decorative work of an entirely new type, the very unexpected pictures
of Sheriff Bob Chandler have a merit all their own. The “Arizona
Desert,” the “Canadian Night,” the group of girls on the roof of a New
York tenement-house, the studies in the Bronx Zoo, the “Heracles,”
the studies for the Utah monument, the little group called “Gossip,”
which has something of the quality of the famous fifteenth idyl of
Theocritus, the “Pelf,” with its grim suggestiveness--these and a
hundred others are worthy of study, each of them; I am naming at random
those which at the moment I happen to recall. I am not speaking of
the acknowledged masters, of Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet; nor
of John’s children; nor of Cézanne’s old woman with a rosary; nor of
Redon’s marvellous color-pieces--a worthy critic should speak of these.
All I am trying to do is to point out why a layman is grateful to those
who arranged this exhibition.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
The illustration near the front of the book is the publisher’s logo.
Page 219: “understanded” was printed that way.
Page 287: “knight errants” was printed that way.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY AS LITERATURE, AND OTHER ESSAYS ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
