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Title: Prejudices, fifth series

Author: H. L. Mencken

Release date: December 26, 2023 [eBook #72510]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PREJUDICES, FIFTH SERIES ***





  PREJUDICES
  FIFTH SERIES

  By H. L. MENCKEN

  [Illustration]

  PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY
  ALFRED · A · KNOPF




  COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS


      I FOUR MORAL CAUSES,                           9
            1. Birth Control,                        9
            2. Comstockery,                         15
            3. Capital Punishment,                  21
            4. War,                                 27

     II FOUR MAKERS OF TALES,                       34
            1. Conrad,                              34
            2. Hergesheimer,                        42
            3. Lardner,                             49
            4. Masters,                             56

    III IN MEMORIAM: W. J. B.,                      64

     IV THE HILLS OF ZION,                          75

      V BEETHOVEN,                                  87

     VI RONDO ON AN ANCIENT THEME,                  95

    VII PROTESTANTISM IN THE REPUBLIC,             104

   VIII FROM THE FILES OF A BOOK REVIEWER,         120
            1. Counter-Offensive,                  120
            2. Heretics,                           127
            3. The Grove of Academe,               133
            4. The Schoolma’m’s Goal,              141
            5. The Heroic Age,                     146
            6. The Woes of a 100% American,        152
            7. Yazoo’s Favorite,                   159
            8. The Father of Service,              164
            9. A Modern Masterpiece,               169
           10. Sweet Stuff,                        172

     IX THE FRINGES OF LOVELY LETTERS,             175
            1. Authorship as a Trade,              175
            2. Authors as Persons,                 180
            3. Birth Pangs,                        185
            4. Want Ad,                            190
            5. Literature and the Schoolma’m,      196
            6. The Critic and His Job,             202
            7. Painting and Its Critics,           208
            8. Greenwich Village,                  214

      X ESSAY IN PEDAGOGY,                         218

     XI ON LIVING IN BALTIMORE,                    237

    XII THE LAST NEW ENGLANDER,                    244

   XIII THE NATION,                                255

    XIV OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN,                    263

     XV GOLDEN AGE,                                270

    XVI EDGAR SALTUS,                              277

   XVII MISCELLANEOUS NOTES,                       283
            1. Martyrs,                            283
            2. The Ancients,                       283
            3. Jack Ketch as Eugenist,             284
            4. Heroes,                             286
            5. An Historic Blunder,                291
            6. On Cynicism,                        292
            7. Music and Sin,                      293
            8. The Champion,                       296
            9. Honor in America,                   300
           10. Note in the Margin of a Treatise
                 on Psychology,                    302
           11. Definition,                         302

  XVIII CATECHISM,                                 304

        INDEX,                                     305




  PREJUDICES

  FIFTH SERIES




PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES




I. FOUR MORAL CAUSES


1

_Birth Control_

The grotesque failure of the campaign to put down propaganda for birth
control in the Republic has a lesson in it for those romantic optimists
who believe that in the long run, by some mysterious hook or crook
and perhaps with divine help, Prohibition will be enforced. They will
not heed that lesson, but it is there nevertheless. Church and state
combine to baffle and exterminate the birth controllers. They are
threatened with penal servitude and their customers are threatened with
hell-fire. Yet it must be obvious that they are making progress in the
land, for the national birth-rate continues to slide downhill, steadily
and rapidly.

Incidentally, it is amusing and instructive to observe that it
diminishes with greatest celerity among the educated and highly
respectable classes, which is to say, among those who are ordinarily
most law-abiding. The same thing is to be noted when one turns to
Prohibition. The majority of professional criminals, now as in the old
days of sin, are teetotalers, but when one comes to the good citizens
who scorn them and demand incessantly that the _Polizei_ butcher them
and so have done with them, one comes at once upon a high density of
scofflaws. I know many Americans of easy means, some of them greatly
respected and even eminent. Not two per cent make any pretense of
obeying the Volstead Act. And not two per cent of their wives are
innocent of birth control. The reason is not far to seek. Both the
Volstead Act and the statute aimed at birth control invade the sanctity
of the domestic hearth. They take the roof off a man’s house, and
invite the world to look in. Obviously, that looking in is unpleasant
in proportion as the man himself is dignified. If he is a low fellow,
he doesn’t care much, for he is used to such snooping by his low
neighbors. But if he is one who has a high opinion of himself, and is
accustomed to seeing it ratified by others, then he is outraged. And if
he has any natural bellicosity in him and resistance seems reasonably
safe, he resists with great diligence and vigor.

Here, perhaps, we come upon an explanation of the fact that Prohibition
and all other such devices for making men good by force are far less
opposed in the country than they are in the cities. The yokel is
trained from infancy to suffer espionage. He has scarcely any privacy
at all. His neighbors know everything that is to be known about him,
including what he eats and what he feeds his quadrupedal colleagues.
His religious ideas are matters of public discussion; if he is recusant
the village pastor prays for him by name. When his wife begins the
sublime biological process of giving him an heir, the news flies
around. If he inherits $200 from an uncle in Idaho everyone knows it
instantly. If he skins his shin, or buys a new plow, or sees a ghost,
or takes a bath it is a public event. Thus living like a goldfish in
a glass globe, he acquires a large tolerance of snoutery, for if he
resisted it his neighbors would set him down as an enemy of their
happiness, and probably burn his barn. When an official spy or two
are added to the volunteer pack he scarcely notices it. It seems
natural and inevitable to him that everyone outside his house should
be interested in what goes on inside, and that this interest should
be accompanied by definite notions as to what is nice and what is not
nice, supported by pressure. So he submits to governmental tyranny as
he submits to the village inquisition, and when he hears that city men
resist, it only confirms his general feeling that they are scoundrels.
They are scoundrels because they have a better time than he has--the
sempiternal human reason. The city man is differently trained. He is
used to being let alone. Save when he lives in the slums, his neighbors
show no interest in him. He would regard it as outrageous for them to
have opinions about what goes on within the four walls of his house.
If they offered him advice he would invite them to go to hell; if they
tried force he would bawl for the police. So he is doubly affronted
when the police themselves stalk in. And he resists them with every
means at his command, and believes it is his high duty to do so, that
liberty may not perish from the earth.

The birth control fanatics profit by this elemental fact. It is their
great good fortune that their enemies have tried to put them down,
not by refuting their ideas, but by seeking to shove them into jail.
What they argue for, at bottom, remains very dubious, and multitudes
of quite honest and intelligent persons are against it. They have by
no means proved that a high birth-rate is dangerous, and they have
certainly not shown that they know of any sure and safe way to reduce
it--that is, any way not already known to every corner druggist. But
when an attempt is made to put them down by law, the question whether
they are wise falls into the background, and the question whether their
rights are invaded comes forward. At once the crowd on their side is
immensely reinforced. It now includes not only all the persons who
believe in birth control, but also all the persons who believe in free
ideas and free speech, and this second group, it quickly appears, is
far larger than the first one, and far more formidable. So the birth
controllers suddenly find themselves supported by heavy battalions,
and that support is sufficient to make them almost invulnerable.
Personally, I am inclined to be against them. I believe that the
ignorant should be permitted to spawn _ad libitum_, that there may be
a steady supply of slaves, and that those of us who are more prudent
and sanitary may be relieved of unpleasant work. If the debate were
open and fair, I’d oppose the birth controllers with all the subtlest
devices of rhetoric, including bogus statistics and billingsgate. But
so long as they are denied their plain rights--and, in particular,
so long as those rights are denied them by an evil combination of
theologians and politicians,--I am for them, and shall remain so until
the last galoot’s ashore. They have got many more allies on the same
terms. And I believe that they are winning.

The law which forbids them to send their brummagem tracts through the
mails is obviously disingenuous and oppressive. It is a part of the
notorious Postal Act, put on the books by Comstock himself, executed by
bureaucratic numskulls, and supported by every variety of witch-burner.
I know of no intelligent man or woman who is in favor of the principal
of such grotesque legislation; even the worst enemies of the birth
controllers would not venture to argue that it should be applied
generally. The way to dispose of such laws is to flout them and make a
mock of them. The theory that they can be got rid of by enforcing them
is nonsense. Enforcing them simply inspires the sadists who advocate
them to fresh excesses. Worse, it accustoms the people to oppression,
and so tends to make them bear it uncomplainingly. Wherever, in
the United States, there has been any sincere effort to enforce
Prohibition, the anti-evolutionists are already on the warpath, and the
Lord’s Day Alliance is drumming up recruits. No, the way to deal with
such laws is to defy them, and thus make them ridiculous. This is being
done in the case of the Volstead Act by millions of patriots, clerical
and lay. It is being done in the case of the Comstock Act by a small
band, but one full of praiseworthy resolution.

Thus I deliver myself of a whoop for the birth controllers, and pass
on to pleasanter concerns. Their specific Great Cause, it seems to me,
is full of holes. They draw extremely questionable conclusions from a
highly dubious body of so-called facts. But they are profoundly right
at bottom. They are right when they argue that anyone who tries to
silence them by force is the common enemy of all of us. And they are
right when they hold that the best way to get rid of such opposition is
to thumb the nose at it.


2

_Comstockery_

In 1873, when the late Anthony Comstock began his great Christian work,
the American flapper, or, as she was then called, the young lady, read
_Godey’s Ladies’ Book_. To-day she reads--but if you want to find out
what she reads simply take a look at the cheap fiction magazines which
rise mountain-high from every news-stand. It is an amusing and at the
same time highly instructive commentary upon the effectiveness of moral
legislation. The net result of fifty years of Comstockery is complete
and ignominious failure. All its gaudy raids and alarms have simply
gone for naught.

Comstock, of course, was an imbecile; his sayings and doings were of
such sort that they inevitably excited the public mirth, and so injured
the cause he labored for. But it would be inaccurate, I believe, to
put all the blame for its failure upon his imbecility. His successor,
in New York, John S. Sumner, is by no means another such unwitting
comedian; on the contrary, he shows discretion and even a certain
wistful dignity. Nevertheless, he has failed just as miserably. When he
took office “Three Weeks” was still regarded as a very salacious book.
The wives of Babbitts read it in the kitchen, with the blinds down; it
was hidden under every pillow in every finishing-school in the land.
To-day “Three Weeks” is dismissed as intolerably banal by school-girls
of thirteen. To make a genuine sensation it is not sufficient that a
new book be naughty; it must be downright pathological.

I have been reviewing current American fiction pretty steadily since
1908. The change that I note is immense. When I began, a new novel
dealing frankly with the physiology and pathology of sex was still
something of a novelty. It was, indeed, so rare that I always called
attention to it. To-day it is a commonplace. The surprise now comes
when a new novel turns out to be chemically pure. Try to imagine an
American publisher, in these days, getting alarmed about Dreiser’s
“Sister Carrie” and suppressing it before publication! The oldest and
most dignified houses would print it without question; they print far
worse every day. Yet in 1900 it seemed so lewd and lascivious that the
publisher who put it into type got into a panic of fright, and hid the
whole edition in the cellar. To-day that same publisher is advertising
a new edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” with “A Woman Waits
for Me” printed in full!

What ruined the cause of the Comstocks, I believe, was the campaign
of their brethren of sex hygiene. The whole Comstockian case, as
good Anthony himself used to explain frankly, was grounded upon the
doctrine that virtue and ignorance were identical--that the slightest
knowledge of sin was fatal to virtue. Comstock believed and argued that
the only way to keep girls pure was to forbid them to think about sex
at all. He expounded that doctrine often and at great length. No woman,
he was convinced, could be trusted. The instant she was allowed to peek
over the fence she was off to the Bad Lands. This notion he supported
with many texts from Holy Writ, chiefly from the Old Testament. He
was a Puritan of the old school, and had no belief whatever in virtue
_per se_. A good woman, to him, was simply one who was efficiently
policed. Unfortunately for him, there rose up, within the bounds of his
own sect, a school of uplifters who began to merchant quite contrary
ideas. They believed that sin was often caused by ignorance--that many
a virtuous girl was undone simply because she didn’t know what she was
doing. These uplifters held that unchastity was not the product of a
congenital tendency to it in the female, but of the sinister enterprise
of the male, flowing out of his superior knowledge and sophistication.
So they set out to spread the enlightenment. If all girls of sixteen,
they argued not unplausibly, knew as much about the dreadful
consequences of sin as the average police lieutenant or midwife, there
would be no more seductions, and in accordance with that theory, they
began printing books describing the discomforts of parturition and the
terminal symptoms of lues. These books they broadcasted in numerous
and immense editions. Comstock, of course, was bitterly against the
scheme. He had no faith in the solemn warnings; he saw only the new and
startling frankness, and he believed firmly that its one effect would
be to “arouse a libidinous passion ... in the mind of a modest woman.”
But he was spiked and hamstrung by the impeccable respectability of
the sex hygienists. Most of them were Puritans like himself; some were
towering giants of Christian rectitude. One of the most active, the
Rev. Dr. Sylvanus Stall, was a clergyman of the first chop--a sorcerer
who had notoriously saved thousands of immortal souls. To raid such
men, to cast them into jail and denounce them as scoundrels, was
palpably impossible. Comstock fretted and fumed, but the thing got
beyond him. Of Pastor Stall’s books alone, millions were sold. Others
were almost as successful; the country was flooded from coast to coast.

Whether Comstock was right or wrong I don’t know--that is, whether
these sex hygiene books increased or diminished loose living in the
Republic I don’t know. Some say one thing and some another. But this I
_do_ know; they had a quick and tremendous influence upon the content
of American fiction. In the old-time novel what are now called the
Facts of Life were glossed over mellifluously, and no one complained
about it, for the great majority of fiction readers, being young and
female, had no notion of what they were missing. But after they had
read the sex hygiene books they began to observe that what was set out
in novels was very evasive, and that much of it was downright untrue.
So they began to murmur, to snicker, to boo. One by one the old-time
novelists went on the shelf. I could make up a long and melancholy
roll of them. Their sales dropped off; they began to be laughed at.
In place of them rose a new school, and its aim was to tell it all.
With this new school Comstock and his heirs have been wrestling ever
since, and with steadily increasing bad fortune. Every year they make
raids, perform in the newspapers and predict the end of the world, but
every year the average is worse than the worst of the year before.
As a practicing reviewer, I have got so used to lewd and lascivious
books that I no longer notice them. They pour in from all directions.
The most virtuous lady novelists write things that would have made a
bartender blush to death two decades ago. If I open a new novel and
find nothing about Freudian suppressions in it, I suspect at once that
it is simply a reprint of some forgotten novel of 1885, with a new
name. When I began reviewing I used to send my review copies, after
I had sweated through them, to the Y. M. C. A. Now I send them to a
medical college.

The Comstocks labor against this stream gallantly, but, it seems
to me, very ineptly. They can’t, of course, proceed against every
naughty book that comes out, for there are far too many, but they
could at least choose their marks far more sagaciously than they do.
Instead of tackling the books that are frankly pornographic and have
no other excuse for being, they almost always tackle books that have
obvious literary merit, and are thus relatively easily defended. In
consequence, they lose most of their cases. They lost with “Jurgen,”
they lost with “The ‘Genius,’” they lost with “Mlle. de Maupin,” and
they have lost countless other times. And every time they lose they
grow more impotent and absurd. Why do they pick out such books? Simply
because raiding them gets more publicity than raiding more obscure
stuff. The Comstock Society, like all other such pious organizations,
is chronically short of money, and the way to raise it is to make
a noise in the newspapers. A raid on “Night Life in Chicago,” or
“Confessions of an Escaped Nun” would get but a few lines; an attack on
“Jurgen” is first-page stuff for days on end. Christian virtuosi, their
libido aroused, send in their money, and so the society is saved. But
when the trial is called and the case is lost, contributions fall off
again, and another conspicuous victim must be found.

Well, what is the Comstocks’ own remedy for this difficulty? It is
to be found in what they call the Clean Books Bill. The aim of this
bill is to make it impossible for a publisher accused of publishing
an immoral book to make any defense at all. If it ever becomes a
law the Comstocks will be able to pick out a single sentence from a
Dreiser novel of 10,000 pages and base their whole case upon it; the
author and publisher will be forbidden to offer the rest of the book
as evidence that the whole has no pornographic purpose. Under such a
law anyone printing or selling the Bible will run dreadful risks. One
typographical error of a stimulating character will suffice to send
a publisher to jail. But will the law actually achieve its purpose?
I doubt it. Such extravagant and palpably unjust statutes never
accomplish anything. Juries revolt against them; even judges punch
holes in them. The Volstead Act is an excellent specimen. Has it made
the Republic dry?


3

_Capital Punishment_

Having argued against the death penalty with great heat and eloquence
for more than twenty years, I hope I do not go beyond my rights when I
now announce that I have begun to wobble, and feel a strong temptation
to take the other side. My doubts, in all seriousness, I ascribe to the
arguments of the current abolitionists. The more earnestly they set
forth those arguments, the more I am harassed by suspicions that they
are full of folly. A humane and Christian spirit, to be sure, is in
them; but is there any sense? As I hint, I begin to doubt it. Consider
the two that are oftenest heard:

  1. That hanging a man (or doing him to death in any other such
  coldblooded way) is a dreadful business, degrading to those who have
  to do it and revolting to those who have to witness it.

  2. That it is useless, for it does not deter others from the same
  crime.

The first of these arguments, it seems to me, is plainly too weak to
need serious refutation. All it says, in brief, is that the work of
the hangman is unpleasant. Granted. But suppose it is? It may be quite
necessary to society for all that. There are, indeed, many other jobs
that are unpleasant, and yet no one thinks of abolishing them. I pass
over those connected with surgery, obstetrics, plumbing, military
science, journalism and the sacred office, and point to one which,
like that of the hangman, has to do with the execution of the laws:
to wit, the post of Federal judge under Prohibition. Consider what
a judge executing the Volstead Act must do nearly every day. He must
assume that men whom he esteems and loves, men of his own profession,
even his fellow judges--in brief, the great body of wet and enlightened
Christian men--are all criminals. And he must assume that a pack of
spies and blackmailers whose mere presence, in private life, would gag
him--in brief, the corps of Anti-Saloon League snouters and Prohibition
agents--are truth-seekers and altruists. These assumptions are
obviously hard to make. Not a few judges, unable to make them, resign
from the bench; at least one has committed suicide. But the remaining
judges, so long as they sit, must make them as in duty bound, whatever
the outrage to their feelings. Many grow callous and suffer no more.
So with the hangman, and his even more disagreeable offices. A man of
delicate sensibilities, confronting them, would die of horror, but
there is no evidence that they are revolting to the men who actually
discharge them. I have known hangmen, indeed, who delighted in their
art, and practiced it proudly. I have never heard of one who threw up
his job.

In the second argument of the abolitionists there is more force, but
even here, I believe, the ground under them is very shaky. Their
fundamental error consists in assuming that the whole aim of punishing
criminals is to deter other (potential) criminals--that we hang or
electrocute A simply in order to so alarm B that he will not kill C.
This, I believe, is an assumption almost as inaccurate as those which
must be made by a Federal judge. It confuses a part with the whole.
Deterrence, obviously, is _one_ of the aims of punishment, but it is
surely not the only one. On the contrary, there are at least half a
dozen, and some of them are probably quite as important. At least one
of them, practically considered, is _more_ important. Commonly, it is
described as revenge, but revenge is really not the word for it. I
borrow a better term from the late Aristotle: _katharsis_. _Katharsis_,
so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting
off of steam. A schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon
the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is
_katharsis_. A bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a
counterfeit $10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on
Sunday, is arrested and jailed. This is also _katharsis_. A subscriber
to a newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of
a lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not
buy Liberty Bonds. This again is _katharsis_.

What I contend is that one of the prime objects of judicial punishments
is to afford this grateful _katharsis_ (a) to the immediate victims
of the criminal punished, and (b) to the general body of moral and
timorous men. These persons, and particularly the first group, are
concerned only indirectly with deterring other criminals. The thing
they crave primarily is the satisfaction of seeing the criminal before
them suffer as he made them suffer. What they want is the peace of mind
that goes with the feeling that accounts are squared. Until they get
that satisfaction they are in a state of emotional tension, and hence
unhappy. The instant they get it they are comfortable. I do not argue
that this yearning is noble; I simply argue that it is almost universal
among human beings. In the face of injuries that are unimportant and
can be borne without damage it may yield to higher impulses; that
is to say, it may yield to what is called Christian charity. But it
never so yields when the injury is serious, and gives substantial
permanent satisfaction to the person inflicting it. Here Christianity
is adjourned, and even saints reach for their sidearms. The better the
Christian, in fact, the more violent his demand for _katharsis_--once
he has unloaded the Beatitudes. At the time of the Leopold-Loeb trial
in Chicago the evangelical pastors of the town bawled for blood
unanimously, and even a Catholic priest joined them. On lower levels,
it is plainly asking too much of human nature to expect it to conquer
so natural an impulse. A keeps a store and has a bookkeeper, B. B
steals $700, invests it in Texas oil stocks, and is cleaned out. What
is A to do? Let B go? If he does so he will be unable to sleep at
night. The sense of injury, of injustice, will keep him awake. So he
turns B over to the police, and they send him to prison. Thereafter
A can sleep. More, he has pleasant dreams. He pictures B chained to
the wall of a dungeon a hundred feet underground, devoured by rats.
It is so agreeable that it makes him forget his $700. He has got his
_katharsis_.

The same thing precisely takes place on a larger scale when there is
a crime which destroys a whole community’s feeling of security. Every
law-abiding citizen feels menaced and frustrated until the criminals
have been struck down--until the communal capacity to get even with
them, and more than even, has been dramatically demonstrated. Here the
business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought. The main
thing is to destroy the scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone,
and thus made everyone unhappy. Until they are brought to book that
unhappiness continues; when the law has been executed upon them there
is a sigh of relief. In other words, there is _katharsis_.

There is no public demand for the death penalty for ordinary crimes,
even for ordinary homicides. Its infliction, say, for necking, for
playing poker or for bootlegging would shock all men of normal decency
of feeling--that is to say, practically all men save the evangelical
clergy and their lay catchpolls. But for crimes involving the
deliberate and inexcusable taking of human life, by men openly defiant
of all civilized order--for such crimes it seems, to nine men out of
ten, a just and proper punishment. Any lesser punishment leaves them
feeling that the criminal has got the better of society--that he can
add insult to injury by laughing. That feeling is intensely unpleasant,
and no wonder! It can be dissipated only by a recourse to _katharsis_,
the invention of the aforesaid Aristotle. That _katharsis_ is most
effectively and economically achieved, as human nature now is, by
wafting the criminal to realms of bliss.


4

_War_

My mail is flooded with the briefs and broadsides of pacifist
organizations, damning war as a curse and those who make it as
scoundrels. Such literature I always read attentively, for it is full
of racy satire against the military, a class of men inevitably more or
less ludicrous in time of peace. But does it convert me to the pacifist
cause, which, as the pacifists contend, is the cause of God? I can only
report simply that it does not. I read it, enjoy it, pass it on to my
pastor--and go on believing in war myself. War is the only sport, so
far as I know, that is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport that
has any intelligible use.

The arguments that are brought against it are chiefly arguments, not
against the thing itself, but only against its political accompaniments
and consequences, most of them transient and gratuitous. They reached
a high tide of obnoxiousness, revolting to all self-respecting
men, during the last great moral combat. That combat was carried
on, at least from this side of the fence, in a grossly hysterical,
disingenuous, cowardly and sordid manner. The high participating
parties were vastly alarmed by the foe, and insanely eager to keep
business going as usual, and even better than usual. The result was
that the thing began as a sort of Methodist revival and ended as a raid
on a gentleman’s winecellar, with the Prohibition agents fighting among
themselves for the best jugs. The richest of them, once peace came,
began sending the others extortionate bills for the brass-knuckles,
Bibles and jimmies that all had used in common, and the heroes serving
this usurer began demanding tips in cash. But all that swinishness, I
submit, had no necessary connection with war itself. It is perfectly
possible to conduct war in a gallant and honorable manner, and without
using it as a mere cloak to rob noncombatants. More, the thing has
been done, and many times in the history of the world. If it has been
seldom done by democratic nations, then blame democracy, not war. In
democratic nations everything noble and of good account tends to decay
and smell badly.

War itself, in its pure form, is something quite different. It is a
combat of men who believe that a short and adventurous life, full
of changing scenes and high hazards, is better than a safe and dull
one--in other words, that it is better to have lived magnificently than
to have lived long. In this doctrine I am unable to discern anything
properly describable as fallacy. If you argue that, assuming every man
to embrace it, the human race would come to an end, I reply at once
that you assume something wholly impossible. And if you argue that the
life of a warrior is not actually magnificent, then I report that the
warrior should be permitted to judge of that himself. Against all such
arguments lie the plain facts that the great races of the world have
always been more or less warlike, and that war has attracted the talent
and satisfied the aspiration of some of their best men. I do not speak
of antiquity alone; I speak of our own time. The English, the Germans
and the French are all warlike, to-day as always--and if you took away
the English, the Germans and the French _Homo sapiens_ would be shorn
of his stomach, his liver and his ductless glands. If war is immoral,
then these great races are all immoral, and so are their greatest men.
The pacifists, of course, do not shrink from that absurd argument.
But the more they maintain it the more it becomes evident that, as
logicians, they are on all fours with the Prohibitionists.

War, so conducted by warriors, is a superb business and full of high
uses. It makes for resolution, endurance, enterprise, courage. It puts
down the sordid yearnings of ignoble men. Does it, incidentally, shed
some blood? Does it cost lives? The pacifists, discussing those lives,
always enmesh themselves in the theory that, without war, they would
go on forever. It is, I believe, not so. War, at worst, shortens them
somewhat. But at the same stroke it speeds up their tempo. The net
result is simply a matter of bookkeeping. A man killed at thirty, after
six months of war, has lived far longer than a man dead of a bellyache
at sixty, after forty-five years on an office stool.

But I am not on my legs to-day to sing the charms and glories of war;
my purpose is to argue that, whether glorious or not, it will remain
inevitable on this sad mud-pie so long as the great races of men
retain the view of it that I have described, and to deduce therefrom
the doctrine that pacifism, as a scheme of practical politics, is
thus not only unsound but also very dangerous. All that it could
conceivably accomplish, imagining it to succeed anywhere, would be
to make the nation embracing it highly vulnerable--in brief, a sort
of boozy idealist or unarmored butter-and-egg man, roaming the world
unprotected, and so holding out irresistible temptations to less moral
and more realistic nations.

War, under the sorry scheme that now passes for civilization, has been
degraded--transiently only, I hope and believe--to the uses of robbery.
Whoever has gold must have an army to guard it, or resign himself to
losing it. Especially must he have a guard for it if his public repute
is that of one with a not too fine understanding of the difference
between _meum_ and _tuum_. Such a reputation, it must be manifest, is
precisely that of the United States to-day. The rest of the world is so
passionately convinced that it is a thief that robbing it would take
on the high virtue and dignity of a constabulary act. It is not robbed
because it is strong. It will not be robbed until it grows weak.

But armed strength, argue the pacifists, does not prevent war: it
causes it. Who, reading history, could believe in such transparent
nonsense? Let us turn to the late enemy. What kept the peace in Europe
for forty-four years if it was not the mighty German army? If it
had been weak, France would have struck in 1875, and again in 1882,
and again in 1887, and again every two years thereafter. It took
nearly half a century to roll up a force sufficient to tackle the
colossus, and it took four years to bring it down even then. Our own
history is full of examples to the same effect. In 1867 Napoleon III,
believing that the United States was war weary and its army disbanded,
prepared to move into Mexico and tear the Monroe Doctrine to tatters.
He overlooked the large forces engaged in burning barns, robbing
hen-roosts and raiding cellars in the late Confederacy. When General
Sheridan marched upon the Rio Grande at the head of this army of
heroes, Napoleon changed his mind. Three years later he was disposed of
by the Germans, and the Continent settled down to forty-four years of
peace.

Consider, again, the Venezuela episode. When President Cleveland sent
his message to Congress on December 17, 1895, war with England became
imminent overnight. What prevented it? Was it the fact that the United
States had no army worthy of the name? Or the fact that the United
States had a brand-new, highly effective and immensely pugnacious
navy, notoriously eager to try its guns? Come, now, to 1898. Of all
the nations of Europe, only England sided with us against Spain. The
Germans, at Manila, went to great lengths to show their hostility. Did
they refrain from attacking Dewey because his fleet was smaller and
weaker than theirs, or because it was larger and stronger?

I could multiply instances, but observe the timekeeper reaching for the
gong. So far as I know, there is no record in history of a nation that
ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself. Such
nations, true enough, have sometimes managed to exist for a time--but
at what cost! There is the case of Denmark to-day. It is discussing
disbanding its army on the ground that any probable or even possible
foe could dispose of that army in five days. But what does this mean?
It means that the Danes must reconcile themselves to living by the
sheer grace of their stronger neighbors--that they must be willing,
when the time comes, to see their country made a battle-ground by those
neighbors, and without raising a hand. Here I do not indulge in idle
talk: I am quoting almost literally a member of the Danish cabinet.

I can’t imagine the people of a truly great nation submitting to any
such ignominious destiny. The Danes have been forced into acquiescence
by their weakness. But why should the United States invite the same
fate by putting off its strength?




II. FOUR MAKERS OF TALES


1

_Conrad_

Some time ago I put in a blue afternoon re-reading Joseph Conrad’s
“Youth.” A _blue_ afternoon? What nonsense! The touch of the man is
like the touch of Schubert. One approaches him in various and unhappy
moods: depressed, dubious, despairing; one leaves him in the clear,
yellow sunshine that Nietzsche found in Bizet’s music. But here again
the phrase is inept. Sunshine suggests the imbecile, barnyard joy of
the human kohlrabi--the official optimism of a steadily delighted and
increasingly insane Republic. What the enigmatical Pole has to offer
is something quite different. If its parallel is to be found in music,
it is not in Schubert, but in Beethoven--perhaps even more accurately
in Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the joy, not of mere satisfaction, but
of understanding--the profound but surely not merry delight which goes
with the comprehension of a fundamental fact--above all, of a fact
that has been coy and elusive. Certainly the order of the world that
Conrad sets forth with such diabolical eloquence and plausibility
is no banal moral order, no childish sequence of virtuous causes and
edifying effects. Rather it has an atheistic and even demoniacal
smack: to the earnest Bible student it must be more than a little
disconcerting. The God he visualizes is no loving papa in a house-coat
and carpet-slippers, inculcating the great principles of Christian
ethics by applying occasional strokes _a posteriori_. What he sees
is something quite different: an extremely ingenious and humorous
Improvisatore and Comedian, with a dab of red on His nose and maybe
somewhat the worse for drink--a furious and far from amiable banjoist
upon the human spine, and rattler of human bones. Kurtz, in “Youth,”
makes a capital banjo for that exalted and cynical talent. And the
music that issues forth--what a superb _Hexentanz_ it is!

One of the curiosities of critical stupidity is the doctrine that
Conrad is without humor. No doubt it flows out of a more general error;
to wit, the assumption that tragedy is always pathetic, that death
itself is inevitably a gloomy business. That error, I suppose, will
persist in the world until some extraordinary astute mime conceives
the plan of playing “King Lear” as a farce--I mean deliberately.
That it _is_ a farce seems to me quite as obvious as the fact that
“Romeo and Juliet” is another, this time lamentably coarse. To adopt
the contrary theory--to view it as a great moral and spiritual
spectacle, capable of purging and uplifting the psyche like marriage
to a red-haired widow or a month in the trenches--to toy with such
notions is to borrow the critical standards of a party of old ladies
weeping over the damnation of the heathen. In point of fact, death,
like love, is intrinsically farcical--a solemn kicking of a brick under
a plug-hat--, and most other human agonies, once they transcend the
physical--_i. e._, the unescapably real--have far more of irony in them
than of pathos. Looking back upon them after they have eased one seldom
shivers: one smiles--perhaps sourly but nevertheless spontaneously.
This, at all events, is the notion that seems to me implicit in every
line of Conrad. I give you “Heart of Darkness” as the archetype of
his whole work and the keystone of his metaphysical system. Here we
have all imaginable human hopes and aspirations reduced to one common
denominator of folly and failure, and here we have a play of humor
that is infinitely mordant and searching. Turn to pages 136 and 137 of
the American edition--the story is in the volume called “Youth”--: the
burial of the helmsman. Turn then to 178-184: Marlow’s last interview
with Kurtz’s intended. The farce mounts by slow stages to dizzy and
breath-taking heights. One hears harsh roars of cosmic laughter, vast
splutterings of transcendental mirth, echoing and reëchoing down the
black corridors of empty space. The curtain descends at last upon a
wild dance in a dissecting-room. The mutilated dead rise up and jig....

It is curious, re-reading a thrice-familiar story, how often one
finds surprises in it. I have been amazed, toward the close of “The
End of the Tether,” to discover that the _Fair Maid_ was wrecked,
not by the deliberate act of Captain Whalley, but by the machination
of the unspeakable Massy. How is one to account for so preposterous
an error? Certainly I thought I knew “The End of the Tether” as well
as I knew anything in this world--and yet there was that incredible
misunderstanding of it, lodged firmly in my mind. Perhaps there is
criticism of a sort in my blunder: it may be a fact that the old
skipper willed the thing himself--that his willing it is visible in all
that goes before--that Conrad, in introducing Massy’s puerile infamy
at the end, made some sacrifice of inner veracity to the exigencies
of what, at bottom, is somewhat too neat and well-made a tale. The
story, in fact, belongs to the author’s earlier manner; I guess that
it was written before “Youth” and surely before “Heart of Darkness.”
But for all that, its proportions remain truly colossal. It is one of
the most magnificent narratives, long or short, old or new, in the
English language, and with “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness” it makes up
what is probably the best book of imaginative writing that the English
literature of the Twentieth Century can yet show. Conrad learned a
great deal after he wrote it, true enough. In “Lord Jim,” in “Victory,”
and, above all, in a “A Personal Record,” there are momentary
illuminations, blinding flashes of brilliance that he was incapable of
in those days of experiment; but no other book of his seems to me to
hold so steadily to so high a general level--none other, as a whole, is
more satisfying and more marvelous. There is in “Heart of Darkness” a
perfection of design which one encounters only rarely and miraculously
in prose fiction: it belongs rather to music. I can’t imagine taking a
single sentence out of that stupendous tale without leaving a visible
gap; it is as thoroughly _durch componiert_ as a fugue. And I can’t
imagine adding anything to it, even so little as a word, without doing
it damage. As it stands it is austerely and beautifully perfect, just
as the slow movement of the Unfinished Symphony is perfect.

I observe of late a tendency to examine the English of Conrad rather
biliously. This folly is cultivated chiefly in England, where, I
suppose, chauvinistic motives enter into the matter. It is the just
boast of great empires that they draw in talents from near and far,
exhausting the little nations to augment their own puissance; it
is their misfortune that these talents often remain defectively
assimilated. Conrad remained the Slav to the end. The people of his
tales, whatever he calls them, are always as much Slavs as he is; the
language in which he describes them retains a sharp, exotic flavor.
But to say that this flavor constitutes a blemish is to say something
so preposterous that only schoolmasters and their dupes may be thought
of as giving it credit. The truly first-rate writer is not one who
uses the language as such dolts demand that it be used; he is one who
reworks it in spite of their prohibitions. It is his distinction that
he thinks in a manner different from the thinking of ordinary men;
that he is free from that slavery to embalmed ideas which makes them
so respectable and so dull. Obviously, he cannot translate his notions
into terms of everyday without doing violence to their inner integrity;
as well ask a Richard Strauss to funnel all his music into the
chaste jugs of Prof. Dr. Jadassohn. What Conrad brought into English
literature was a new concept of the relations between fact and fact,
idea and idea, and what he contributed to the complex and difficult art
of writing English was a new way of putting words together. His style
now amazes and irritates pedants because it does not roll along in the
old ruts. Well, it is precisely that rolling along in the old ruts that
he tried to avoid--and it was precisely that avoidance which made him
what he is. What lies under most of his alleged sins seems to me to be
simple enough: he views English logically and analytically, and not
through a haze of senseless traditions and arbitrary taboos. No Oxford
mincing is in him. If he cannot find his phrase above the salt, he
seeks it below. His English, in a word, is innocent. And if, at times,
there gets into it a color that is strange and even bizarre, then the
fact is something to rejoice over, for a living language is like a man
suffering incessantly from small internal hemorrhages, and what it
needs above all else is constant transfusions of new blood from other
tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

A very great man, this Mr. Conrad. As yet, I believe decidedly
underestimated, even by many of his post-mortem advocates. Most of
his first acclaimers mistook him for a mere romantic--a talented but
somewhat uncouth follower of the Stevenson tradition, with the orthodox
cutlass exchanged for a Malay _kris_. Later on he began to be heard of
as a linguistic and vocational marvel: it was astonishing that any man
bred to Polish should write English at all, and more astonishing that a
country gentleman from the Ukraine should hold a master’s certificate
in the British merchant marine. Such banal attitudes are now archaic,
but I suspect that they have been largely responsible for the slowness
with which his fame has spread in the world. At all events, he is
vastly less read and esteemed in foreign parts than he ought to be, and
very few Continental Europeans have risen to any genuine comprehension
of his stature. When one reflects that the Nobel Prize was given to
such third-raters as Benavente, Heidenstam, Gjellerup and Tagore,
with Conrad passed over, one begins to grasp the depth and density
of the ignorance prevailing in the world, even among the relatively
enlightened. One “Lord Jim,” as human document and as work of art, is
worth all the works produced by all the Benaventes and Gjellerups since
the time of Rameses II. It is, indeed, an indecency of criticism to
speak of such unlike things in the same breath: as well talk of Brahms
in terms of Mendelssohn. Nor is “Lord Jim” a chance masterpiece, an
isolated peak. On the contrary, it is but one unit in a long series
of extraordinary and almost incomparable works--a series sprung
suddenly and overwhelmingly into full dignity with “Almayer’s Folly.”
I challenge the nobility and gentry of Christendom to point to another
Opus 1 as magnificently planned and turned out as “Almayer’s Folly.”
The more one studies it, the more it seems miraculous. If it is not a
work of absolute genius then no work of absolute genius exists on this
earth.


2

_Hergesheimer_

This gentleman, like Conrad, has been slated very waspishly because
his English is sometimes in contempt of Lindley Murray. Once, a few
years back, a grammarian writing in the _New Republic_ formally
excommunicated him for it. A number of his offending locutions were
cited, all of them, it must be admitted, instantly recognizable as
pathological and against God by any suburban schoolma’m. _Soit!_
The plain truth is that Hergesheimer, when it comes to the ultimate
delicacies of English grammar, is an ignoramus, as he is when it comes
to the niceties of Swedenborgian theology. I doubt that he could
tell a noun in the nominative case from a noun in the objective.
But neither could any other man who writes as well as he does. Such
esoteric knowledge is the exclusive possession of grammarians, whose
pride in it runs in direct ratio to its inaccuracy, unimportance and
imbecility. English grammar as a science thus takes its place with
phrenology and the New Thought: the more a grammarian knows of it, the
less he is worth listening to. Mastering such blowsy nonsense is one
thing, and writing sound English is quite another thing, and the two
achievements seem to be impossible to the same man. As Anatole France
once remarked, nearly all first-rate writers write “bad French”--or
“bad English.” Joseph Conrad did. France himself did. Dreiser does.
Henry James did. Dickens did. Shakespeare did. Thus Hergesheimer need
not repine. He is sinful, but in good company. He writes English
that is “bad,” but also English that is curiously musical, fluent,
chromatic, various and caressing. There is in even the worst of his
_Saturday Evening Post_ novelettes for Main Street a fine feeling for
the inner savor of words--a keen ear for their subtler and more fragile
harmonies. In “Cytherea,” which I like beyond all his works--even
beyond “The Three Black Pennys” and “Java Head”--they are handled in so
adept and ingenious a way, with so much delicacy and originality, that
it is no wonder they offer an intolerable affront to pedagogues.

This novel, as I say, seems to me to be the best that Hergesheimer
has yet done. His best writing is in it, and his best observation.
What interests him fundamentally is the conflict between the natural
impulses of men and women and the conventions of the society that
they are parts of. The struggles he depicts are not between heroes
and villains, dukes and peasants, patriots and spies, but between the
desire to be happy and the desire to be respected. It is, perhaps, a
tribute to the sly humor of God that whichever way the battle goes,
the result is bound to be disastrous to the man himself. If, seeking
happiness in a world that is jealous of it and so frowns upon it, he
sacrifices the good will of his fellow men, he always finds in the end
that happiness is not happiness at all without it. And if, grabbing
the other horn of the dilemma, he sacrifices the free play of his
instincts to the respect of those fellow men, he finds that he has also
sacrificed his respect for himself. Hergesheimer is no seer. He does
not presume to solve the problem; he merely states it with agreeable
variations and in the light of a compassionate irony. In “Cytherea” it
takes the ancient form of the sexual triangle--old material, but here
treated, despite the underlying skepticism, with a new illumination.
What we are asked to observe is a marriage in which all the customary
causes follow instead of precede their customary effects. To the eye of
the world, and even, perhaps, to the eye of the secondary figures in
it, the Randon-Grove affair is no more than a standard-model adultery,
orthodox in its origin and in its course. Lee Randon, with an amiable
and faithful wife, Fanny, at home in Eastlake, Pa., in the Country-Club
Belt, with two charming children at her knee, goes to the hell-hole
known as New York, falls in love with the sinister Mrs. Savina Grove,
and forthwith bolts with her to Cuba, there to encounter a just
retribution in the form of her grotesque death. But that is precisely
what does _not_ happen--that is, interiorly. Savina actually has
little more to do with the flight of Randon than the Pullman Company
which hauls him southward. It is already inevitable when he leaves
Eastlake for New York, almost unaware of her existence. Its springs are
to be sought in the very normalcy that it so profoundly outrages. He is
the victim, like Fanny, his wife, of a marriage that has turned upon
and devoured itself.

Hergesheimer was never more convincing than in his anatomizing of this
_débâcle_. He is too impatient, and perhaps too fine an artist, to do
it in the conventional realistic manner of piling up small detail.
Instead he launches into it with a bold sagittal section, and at once
the play of forces becomes comprehensible. What ails Randon, in brief,
is that he has a wife who is a shade too good. Beautiful, dutiful,
amiable, virtuous, yes. But not provocative enough--not sufficiently
the lady of scarlet in the chemise of snowy white. Worse, a touch
of stupid blindness is in her: she can see the honest business man,
but she can’t see the romantic lurking within him. When Randon, at
a country-club dance, sits out a hoe-down with some flashy houri on
the stairs, all that Fanny can see in it is a vulgar matter, like
kissing a chambermaid behind the door. Even when Randon brings home
the doll, Cytherea, and gives it a place of honor in their house, and
begins mooning over it strangely, she is unable to account for the
business in any terms save those of transient silliness. The truth
is that Cytherea is to Randon what La Belle Ettarre is to Cabell’s
Felix Kennaston--his altar-flame in a dun world, his visualization of
the unattainable, his symbol of what might have been. In her presence
he communes secretly with the outlaw hidden beneath the chairman of
executive committees, the gypsy concealed in the sound Americano. One
day, bent upon God’s work (specifically, upon breaking up a nefarious
affair between a neighboring Rotarian and a moving-picture lady), he
encounters the aforesaid Savina Grove, accidentally brushes her patella
with his own, get an incandescent glare in return, discovers to his
horror that she is the living image of Cytherea--and ten days later is
aboard the Key West Express with her, bound for San Cristobal de la
Habaña, and the fires eternal.

A matter, fundamentally, of coincidence. Savina, too, has her Cytherea,
though not projected into a doll. She too has toiled up the long slope
of a flabby marriage, and come at last to the high crags where the
air is thin, and a sudden giddiness may be looked for. To call the
thing a love-affair, in the ordinary sense, is rather fantastic; its
very endearments are forced and mawkish. What Randon wants is not more
love, but an escape from the bonds and penalties of love--a leap into
pure adventure. And what Savina wants, as she very frankly confesses,
is the same thing. If a concrete lover must go with it, then that
lover must be everything that the decorous William Loyd Grove is
not--violent, exigent, savage, inordinate, even a bit gross. I doubt
that Savina gets her wish any more than Randon gets his. Good business
men make but indifferent Grand Turks, even when they are in revolt: it
is the tragedy of Western civilization. And there is no deliverance
from the bonds of habit and appearance, even with a mistress. Ten days
after he reaches Havana, Randon is almost as securely married as he was
at Eastlake. Worse, Eastlake itself reaches out its long arm and begins
to punish him, and Savina with him. The conventions of Christendom,
alas, are not to be spat upon. Far back in the Cuban hinterland, in a
squalid little sugar town, it is a photograph of Fanny that gives a
final touch of gruesomeness to the drama of Randon and Savina. There,
overtaken in her sin by that banal likeness of the enemy she has never
seen, she dies her preposterous death. An ending profoundly ironical.
A curtain that gives a final touch of macabre humor to a tale that,
from first to last, is full of the spirit of high comedy. Hergesheimer
never devised one more sardonically amusing, and he never told one with
greater skill.

The reviewers, contemplating it, were shocked by his hedonism in
trivialities--his unctuous manner of recording the flavor of a drink,
the sheen of a fabric, the set of a skirt, the furnishings of a room.
In all that, I suppose, they saw something Babylonish, and against
the Constitution. But this hedonism is really as essential a part of
Hergesheimer as moral purpose is part of a Puritan. He looks upon the
world, not as a trial of virtue, but as a beautiful experience--in
part, indeed, as a downright voluptuous experience. If it is elevating
to the soul to observe the fine colors of a sunset, then why is it not
quite as elevating to observe the fine colors of a woman’s hair, the
silk of her frock, a piece of old mahogany, a Jack Rose cocktail? Here
it is not actually Hergesheimer’s delight in beauty that gives offense,
but his inability to differentiate between the beauty that is also
the good and the true, and the beauty that is simply beauty. As for
me, I incline to go with him in his heresy. It constitutes a valuable
antidote to the moral obsession which still hangs over American
letters, despite the collapse of the Puritan _Kultur_. It still seems
a bit foreign and bizarre, but that is because we have yet to achieve
a complete emancipation from the International Sunday-school Lessons.
In “Cytherea,” as in “Java Head,” it gives a warm and exotic glow to
the narrative. That narrative is always recounted, not by a moralist,
but by an artist. He knows how to give an episode color and reality
by the artful use of words and the images that they bring up--how to
manage the tempo, the play of light, the surrounding harmonies. This
investiture is always as much a part of his story as his tale itself.
So is his English style, so abhorrent to grammarians. When he writes
a sentence that is a bit artificial and complex, it is because he is
describing something that is itself a bit artificial and complex. When
he varies his rhythms suddenly and sharply, it is not because he is
unable to write in the monotonous sing-song of a rhetoric professor,
but because he doesn’t want to write that way. Whatever such a man
writes is _ipso facto_ good English. It is not for pedagogues to
criticise it, but to try to comprehend it and teach it. The delusion to
the contrary is the cause of much folly.


3

_Lardner_

A few years ago a young college professor, eager to make a name for
himself, brought out a laborious “critical” edition of “Sam Slick,”
by Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, eighty-seven years after its first
publication. It turned out to be quite unreadable--a dreadful series of
archaic jocosities about varieties of _Homo americanus_ long perished
and forgotten, in a dialect now intelligible only to paleophilologists.
Sometimes I have a fear that the same fate awaits Ring Lardner. The
professors of his own day, of course, are quite unaware of him,
save perhaps as a low zany to be enjoyed behind the door. They would
no more venture to whoop him up publicly and officially than their
predecessors of 1880 would have ventured to whoop up Mark Twain, or
their remoter predecessors of 1837 would have dared to say anything for
Haliburton. In such matters the academic mind, being chiefly animated
by a fear of sneers, works very slowly. So slowly, indeed, does it work
that it usually works too late. By the time Mark Twain got into the
text-books for sophomores two-thirds of his compositions, as the Young
Intellectuals say, had already begun to date; by the time Haliburton
was served up as a sandwich between introduction and notes he was
already dead. As I say, I suspect sadly that Lardner is doomed to go
the same route. His stories, it seems to me, are superbly adroit and
amusing; no other contemporary American, sober or gay, writes better.
But I doubt that they last: our grandchildren will wonder what they
are about. It is not only, or even mainly, that the dialect that fills
them will pass, though that fact is obviously a serious handicap in
itself. It is principally that the people they depict will pass, that
Lardner’s Low Down Americans--his incomparable baseball players, pugs,
song-writers, Elks, small-town Rotarians and golf caddies--are flitting
figures of a transient civilization and doomed to be as puzzling and
soporific, in the year 2000, as Haliburton’s Yankee clock peddler is
to-day.

The fact--if I may assume it to be a fact--is certain not to be set
against Lardner’s account; on the contrary, it is, in its way, highly
complimentary to him. For he has deliberately applied himself, not
to the anatomizing of the general human soul, but to the meticulous
histological study of a few salient individuals of his time and nation,
and he has done it with such subtle and penetrating skill that one
must belong to his time and nation to follow him. I doubt that anyone
who is not familiar with professional ball players, intimately and at
first hand, will ever comprehend the full merit of the amazing sketches
in “You Know Me, Al”; I doubt that anyone who has not given close and
deliberate attention to the American vulgate will ever realize how
magnificently Lardner handles it. He has had more imitators, I suppose,
than any other living American writer, but has he any actual rivals? If
so, I have yet to hear of them. They all try to write the speech of the
streets as adeptly and as amusingly as he writes it, and they all fall
short of him; the next best is miles and miles behind him. And they
are all inferior in observation, in sense of character, in shrewdness
and insight. His studies, to be sure, are never very profound; he
makes no attempt to get at the primary springs of human motive; all
his people share the same amiable stupidity, the same transparent
vanity, the same shallow swinishness; they are all human Fords in
bad repair, and alike at bottom. But if he thus confines himself to
the surface, it yet remains a fact that his investigations on that
surface are extraordinarily alert, ingenious and brilliant--that the
character he finally sets before us, however roughly articulated as to
bones, is so astoundingly realistic as to epidermis that the effect is
indistinguishable from that of life itself. The old man in “The Golden
Honeymoon” is not merely well done; he is perfect. And so is the girl
in “Some Like Them Cold.” And so, even, is the idiotic Frank X. Farrell
in “Alibi Ike”--an extravagant grotesque and yet quite real from
glabella to calcaneus.

Lardner knows more about the management of the short story than all
of its professors. His stories are built very carefully, and yet they
seem to be wholly spontaneous, and even formless. He has grasped the
primary fact that no conceivable ingenuity can save a story that
fails to show a recognizable and interesting character; he knows that
a good character sketch is always a good story, no matter what its
structure. Perhaps he gets less attention than he ought to get, even
among the anti-academic critics, because his people are all lowly
boors. For your reviewer of books, like every other sort of American,
is always vastly impressed by fashionable pretensions. He belongs to
the white collar class of labor, and shares its prejudices. He praises
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories of country-club flappers eloquently, and
overlooks Fitzgerald’s other stories, most of which are much better.
He can’t rid himself of the feeling that Edith Wharton, whose people
have butlers, is a better novelist than Willa Cather, whose people, in
the main, dine in their kitchens. He lingers under the spell of Henry
James, whose most humble character, at any rate of the later years,
was at least an Englishman, and hence superior. Lardner, so to speak,
hits such critics under the belt. He not only fills his stories with
people who read the tabloids, say “Shake hands with my friend,” and
buy diamond rings on the instalment plan; he also shows them having
a good time in the world, and quite devoid of inferiority complexes.
They amuse him sardonically, but he does not pity them. A fatal error!
The moron, perhaps, has a place in fiction, as in life, but he is
not to be treated too easily and casually. It must be shown that he
suffers tragically because he cannot abandon the plow to write poetry,
or the sample-case to study for opera. Lardner is more realistic.
If his typical hero has a secret sorrow it is that he is too old to
take up osteopathy and too much in dread of his wife to venture into
bootlegging.

Of late a sharply acrid flavor has got into Lardner’s buffoonery.
His baseball players and fifth-rate pugilists, beginning in his
first stories as harmless jackasses, gradually convert themselves
into loathsome scoundrels. The same change shows itself in Sinclair
Lewis; it is difficult, even for an American, to contemplate the
American without yielding to something hard to distinguish from moral
indignation. Turn, for example, to the sketches in the volume called
“The Love Nest.” The first tells the story of a cinema queen married to
a magnate of the films. On the surface she seems to be nothing but a
noodle, but underneath there is a sewer; the woman is such a pig that
she makes one shudder. Again, he investigates another familiar type:
the village practical joker. The fellow in one form or other, has been
laughed at since the days of Aristophanes. But here is a mercilessly
realistic examination of his dunghill humor, and of its effects upon
decent people. A third figure is a successful theatrical manager: he
turns out to have the professional competence of a chiropractor and the
honor of a Prohibition agent. A fourth is a writer of popular songs:
stealing other men’s ideas has become so fixed a habit with him that
he comes to believe that he has an actual right to them. A fourth is a
trained nurse--but I spare you this dreadful nurse. The rest are bores
of the homicidal type. One gets the effect, communing with the whole
gang, of visiting a museum of anatomy. They are as shocking as what
one encounters there--but in every detail they are as unmistakably real.

Lardner conceals his new savagery, of course, beneath his old humor. It
does not flag. No man writing among us has greater skill at the more
extravagant varieties of jocosity. He sees startling and revelatory
likeness between immensely disparate things, and he is full of pawky
observations and bizarre comments. Two baseball players are palavering,
and one of them, Young Jake, is boasting of his conquests during
Spring practice below the Potomac. “Down South ain’t here!” replies
the other. “Those dames in some of those swamps, they lose their head
when they see a man with shoes on!” The two proceed to the discussion
of a third imbecile, guilty of some obscure tort. “Why,” inquires
Young Jake, “didn’t you break his nose or bust him in the chin?” “His
nose was already broke,” replied the other, “and he didn’t have no
chin.” Such wise cracks seem easy to devise. Broadway diverts itself
by manufacturing them. They constitute the substance of half the
town shows. But in those made by Lardner there is something far more
than mere facile humor: they are all rigidly in character, and they
illuminate that character. Few American novelists, great or small,
have character more firmly in hand. Lardner does not see situations;
he sees people. And what people! They are all as revolting as so many
Methodist evangelists, and they are all as thoroughly American.


4

_Masters_

The case of Masters remains mysterious; more, even, than Sherwood
Anderson, his fellow fugitive from a Chicago in decay, he presents
an enigma to the prayerful critic. On the one hand there stands “The
Spoon River Anthology,” unquestionably the most eloquent, the most
profound and the most thoroughly national volume of poetry published
in America since “Leaves of Grass”; on the other hand stands a great
mass of feeble doggerel--imitations of Byron, of Browning, of Lowell,
of George H. Boker, of all the bad poets since the dawn of the
Nineteenth Century. Of late he turns to prose, and with results almost
as confusing. In all of his books there are fine touches, and in one of
them, “Mitch Miller,” there are many of them. But in all of them there
are also banalities so crass and so vast that it is almost impossible
to imagine a literate man letting them go by. Consider, for example,
the novel, “Mirage.” It seems to me to be one of the most idiotic and
yet one of the most interesting American novels that I have ever read.
Whole pages of it are given over to philosophical discussions that
recall nothing so much as the palavers of neighboring barbers between
shaves, and yet they are intermingled with observations that are shrewd
and sound, and that are set forth with excellent grace and no little
eloquence. Some of the characters in the book are mere stuffed dummies,
creaking in every joint; others stand out as brilliantly alive as
the people of Dreiser or Miss Cather. My suspicion is that there are
actually two Masterses, that the man is a sort of literary diplococcus.
At his worst, he is intolerably affected, arty and artificial--almost
a fit companion for the occult, unintelligible geniuses hymned in the
_Dial_. At his best he probably gets nearer to the essential truth
about the civilization we suffer under than any other contemporary
literatus.

“Mirage,” I daresay, is already forgotten, though it was published
only in 1924. In substance, it is the story of Skeeters Kirby’s quest
for the Wonder Woman that all sentimentalists seek, and that none of
them finds until drink has brought him to his deathbed, and he sees
the fat, affable nurse through a purple haze. Skeeters comes from the
town of Mitch Miller, and when we first encounter him he is a lawyer
in Chicago. Already the search for the Perfect Doll has begun to leave
scars upon his psyche. First there was the sweet one who died before
he could get her to the altar; then there was the naughty Alicia, his
lawful wife, but, as he would say himself, a lemon. As the story
opens, Alicia, divorcing him, had just blackmailed him out of $70,000,
almost his whole fortune, as the price of her silence about Mrs. Becky
Morris. Becky is the widow of a rich old man, and now enjoys the
usufruct of his tenements and hereditaments. She has red hair and a
charming manner, and is a great liar. She falsely pretends to have read
Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea,” and passes in her circle
as an intellectual on the strength of it. She tells Skeeters that she
is virtuous, or, rather, that she _has_ been virtuous, and all the
while she is carrying on with one Delaher, a handsome frequenter of the
Hotel Ritzdorf in New York. A saucy and poisonous baggage, this Becky,
but Skeeters falls violently in love with her, and gladly pays Alicia
the $70,000 in order to protect her from scandal. But then she leaves
him, writes him a letter of farewell, and refuses flatly to marry him,
and when he pursues her to New York, confronts her with her adulteries,
and throws up to her the fact that he has gone broke for her, she
requites him only with a dreadful slanging. I quote the exact text:

  Kirby took a drink of brandy from the flask and came to her, taking
  her in his arms. “Tell, me, dear, what shall we do? Are we engaged?”

  Becky shook her head.

  “What do you wish? Shall I treat you as my bride-to-be, or shall we
  go on as we are now?”

  “Go on as we are now!”

  “You know I am free now--and it cost me, too, to be free.”

  “How much?”

  “Seventy thousand dollars.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “It’s practically all I have.”

  “Well, _Alicia won’t have such a large income out of it_.”

  “And I paid it for you.”

  Becky opened her eyes. Her face became a bonfire of rage. Her red
  hair bristled like a wild animal’s.

  “You’re just a liar to say that! And you can’t say such things in my
  room. This is my room; _I pay for it_. And _you can be respectful to
  me here, or you can go_.”

  Kirby did not betray his anger. He concentrated it and went on: “_I
  beg your pardon._”

  In a voice as soft as oil he asked:

  “Did you see Delaher?”

  “Yes, I did, and he’s a rough-neck.”

  “Well?”

  “None of your business!”

  “None of my business, eh?” Kirby said, with a bitter intonation.

  “Leave my room,” Becky said.

  “No, I’ll not leave your room.”

  “_I’ll have you put out._”

  “You don’t dare, Becky--you don’t dare!”...

Two pages more of this, and then Becky breaks out grandly:

  “What do you want, anyway? You have had everything I have to give: my
  hospitality, _my bread, my wine, my couch, my affection, gift-tokens
  of my love_--what do you want?”

Kirby explains that he wants a wife and a soulmate--“a mind to be the
companion of my mind.” But Becky refuses to marry him. Instead she goes
to her bedroom and then returns with Kirby’s letters:

  “Here are your letters. You’ve stayed and had your say out. And now
  that you’ve said it, you can see for yourself that _you have no case
  against me_.... Here are your letters.”

  “I don’t want them.”

  “Very well, I’ll tear them up.”

  She proceeded to do so.

  “_Now all the evidence is destroyed_,” he said.

I have thrown in a few italics to point the high spots of this singular
colloquy. It goes on for page after page, and the whole book is filled
with dialogues like it. What is one to make of such inconceivable
banality? Is there worse in “An American Tragedy”? But Masters,
you may say, is trying to depict eighth-rate people--frequenters
of cabarets and hotel grill-rooms, male and female Elks, dubious
hangers-on upon the edges of intelligence and decency--and that is how
they actually talk. It may be so, but I note at once two objections
to that defense. The first is that Masters does not appear to regard
Kirby as eighth-rate; on the contrary, he takes the fellow’s moony
drabbing quite seriously, and even tries to get a touch of the tragic
into it. The second is that precisely the same hollow and meaningless
fustian often appears when the author speaks in his own person. The
way he tells his story is almost precisely the way it would be told by
a somewhat intellectual shoe-drummer in a Pullman smoking-room. Its
approach to the eternal sex question, its central theme, is exactly
that of such a gentleman; its very phrases, in the main, are his
phrases. He actually appears, in fact, as a sort of chorus to the
drama, under the name of Bob Haydon. Bob, facing disillusion and death,
favors Kirby with many cantos of philosophy. Their general burden is
that the prudent man, having marked a sweet one to his taste, uses her
person to his wicked ends, and then kicks her out. Kirby’s agonies do
not move Bob, and neither do they bore him. “Bore me!” he exclaims.
“This is better than a circus!”

As I say, I have also enjoyed it myself. It is not, indeed, without its
flashes of genuine sagacity; even Bob’s stockbroker view of the sexual
duel, given such a male as Kirby and such females as Becky, is probably
more sound than not. But the chief fascination of the story, I am bound
to say, lies in its very deficiencies as a human document and a work
of art--in its naïve lack of humor, its elaborate laboring of the
obvious, its incredible stiltedness and triteness. There are passages
that actually suggest Daisy Ashforth. For example: “She was biting her
nails while talking to Delaher, and biting them after he left. _Then
she put on white cotton gloves to prevent this nervous habit._” Again
(Kirby has abandoned Becky for another girl, Charlotte, formerly his
stenographer):

  “_May I say something to you?_” she whispered at last.

  “What is it, Charlotte?”

  “I want a child, and a child with you.”

Somehow, this “May I say something to you?” gives me vast delight: the
respectful politeness of the perfect stenographer surviving into the
most confidential of moments! No such child is achieved--Charlotte,
in fact, dies before it can be born--, and so we miss her courteous
request for permission to name it after its father. But she and
Kirby, alas, sin the sin, and what is worse, they sin it under his
mother’s roof. What is still worse, they do it with her knowledge and
connivance. She is greatly taken, in fact, with Charlotte, and advises
Kirby to marry her. I quote her argument:

  “If Byron had mistresses he was also a rider and a fencer and a poet;
  and if Webster may have been a drinker, he was great as a lawyer
  and a speaker. If Charlotte has had extra-marital relationships,
  she is a capable housekeeper, a good secretary, a woman skilled
  in many things; and she has all kinds of virtues, like humor and
  self-control, and the spirit of happiness, and an essential honesty.”

I leave the rest to posterity! What will it make of Masters as
novelist? When it turns from the heroic and lovely lines of “Ann
Rutledge” to the astounding banalities of “Mirage” what will it say?




III. IN MEMORIAM: W. J. B.


Has it been duly marked by historians that the late William Jennings
Bryan’s last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A
curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most
sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most
successful. His quarry, of course, was not _Musca domestica_ but _Homo
neandertalensis_. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up
and down the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of
Chautauqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of Idealism ran in the
veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and
men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were
full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (_Alosa sapidissima_)--there
the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He
knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the
most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city
proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated
his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered
him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years.
But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away
the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities
of the air--out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance
to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive in his game. The
news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would
choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge
his Message there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and
enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not
known since Johann fell to Herod’s ax.

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days
were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found
him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes.
He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the
refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main
street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland
valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms
and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust--so
accoutred and on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up
early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill.
He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked
country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked the
country sounds and country smells. I believe that this liking was
sincere--perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no
uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted
him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy
Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but
wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks
he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he
was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while
that they were laughing at him--if not at his baroque theology, then at
least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him.
To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end,
as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns,
they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the
peer of Abraham. His old enemy, Wilson, aspiring to the same white and
shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His
place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved
any of his hair, then it is curing gallstones down there to-day.

But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear,
of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended
too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully
literate men, even of the kind who write school-books. There was a
scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more
than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the
most romantic editorial writer could dredge up, save in the humorless
South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused
by his earnestness--that under his clowning, as under that of the
juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But
this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said
of Mary Baker G. Eddy, the late Czar Nicholas, or Czolgosz. The truth
is that even Bryan’s sincerity will probably yield to what is called,
in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed
imperialism in the Philippines, or when he fed it with deserving
Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the
Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and
began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed
against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform,
with a grave reserved among the generals? Was he sincere when he
denounced the late John W. Davis, or when he swallowed Davis? Was he
sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark?
Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he
bawled for the faggot and the stake in Tennessee?

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was
sincere, then so was P. T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded
by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany
without shame or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the
first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.
It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled,
that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a
high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around
him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological
hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and
noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a
gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What
animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply
ambition--the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar
of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes.
He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming
half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits
against their betters, that he himself might shine. His last battle
will be grossly misunderstood if it is thought of as a mere exercise
in fanaticism--that is, if Bryan the Fundamentalist Pope is mistaken
for one of the bucolic Fundamentalists. There was much more in it than
that, as everyone knows who saw him on the field. What moved him, at
bottom, was simply hatred of the city men who had laughed at him so
long, and brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He lusted
for revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against
them, to punish them for their execution upon him by attacking the very
vitals of their civilization. He went far beyond the bounds of any
merely religious frenzy, however inordinate. When he began denouncing
the notion that man is a mammal even some of the hinds at Dayton
were agape. And when, brought upon Darrow’s cruel hook, he writhed
and tossed in a very fury of malignancy, bawling against the baldest
elements of sense and decency like a man frantic--when he came to that
tragic climax of his striving there were snickers among the hinds as
well as hosannas.

Upon that hook, in truth, Bryan committed suicide, as a legend as well
as in the body. He staggered from the rustic court ready to die, and
he staggered from it ready to be forgotten, save as a character in a
third-rate farce, witless and in poor taste. It was plain to everyone
who knew him, when he came to Dayton, that his great days were behind
him--that, for all the fury of his hatred, he was now definitely an
old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant
manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a
close glance showed him as carefully shaven as an actor, and clad in
immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and
it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, in the obscene manner
of the late Samuel Gompers. The resonance had departed from his voice;
what was once a bugle blast had become reedy and quavering. Who knows
that, like Demosthenes, he had a lisp? In the old days, under the magic
of his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was
always audible.

When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the office
of the rustic lawyers who were his associates in the Scopes case, the
trial was yet to begin, and so he was still expansive and amiable. I
had printed in the _Nation_, a week or so before, an article arguing
that the Tennessee anti-evolution law, whatever its wisdom, was at
least constitutional--that the rustics of the State had a clear right
to have their progeny taught whatever they chose, and kept secure from
whatever knowledge violated their superstitions. The old boy professed
to be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders
to understand that I was a publicist of parts. Not to be outdone, I
admired the preposterous country shirt that he wore--sleeveless and
with the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two ambassadors.
But that was the last touch of amiability that I was destined to see
in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By
the end of the week he was simply a walking fever. Hour by hour he
grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal
magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my
place in the courtroom, standing upon a table, I looked directly down
upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes
fascinated me; I watched them all day long. They were blazing points
of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then
they wandered to me, and I got my share, for my reports of the trial
had come back to Dayton, and he had read them. It was like coming under
fire.

Thus he fought his last fight, thirsting savagely for blood. All sense
departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He
descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates at the trial
table blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up--to
lead his forlorn mob of imbeciles against the foe. That foe, alas,
refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the whole battle as
a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the
prevailing spirit. One day he lured poor Bryan into the folly I have
mentioned: his astounding argument against the notion that man is a
mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I’d never believe in it.
There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency
of the Republic--there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering
stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at! The artful Darrow led him
on: he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice.
So he was prepared for the final slaughter. He came into life a hero,
a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was passing out a poor
mountebank.

The chances are that history will put the peak of democracy in America
in his time; it has been on the downward curve among us since the
campaign of 1896. He will be remembered perhaps, as its supreme
impostor, the _reductio ad absurdum_ of its pretension. Bryan came very
near being President. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected.
He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for
Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and
the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare
to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President
of the United States may be an ass, but he at least doesn’t believe
that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and
that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly
on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors
waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue
Room. We have escaped something--by a narrow margin, but still we have
escaped.

That is, so far. The Fundamentalists, once apparently sweeping all
before them, now face minorities prepared for battle even in the
South--here and there with some assurance of success. But it is too
early, it seems to me, to send the firemen home; the fire is still
burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at
any moment. The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his
malice, started something that it will not be easy to stop. In ten
thousand country towns his old heelers, the evangelical pastors, are
propagating his gospel, and everywhere the yokels are ready for it.
When he disappeared from the big cities, the big cities made the
capital error of assuming that he was done for. If they heard of him
at all, it was only as a crimp for real-estate speculators--the heroic
foe of the unearned increment hauling it in with both hands. He seemed
preposterous, and hence harmless. But all the while he was busy among
his old lieges, preparing for a _jacquerie_ that should floor all his
enemies at one blow. He did his job competently. He had vast skill at
such enterprises. Heave an egg out of a Pullman window, and you will
hit a Fundamentalist almost everywhere in the United States to-day.
They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their _shamans_, and with
a saint, now, to venerate. They are thick in the mean streets behind
the gas-works. They are everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden
for mortal minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in
little red schoolhouses. They march with the Klan, with the Christian
Endeavor Society, with the Junior Order of United American Mechanics,
with the Epworth League, with all the rococo bands that poor and
unhappy folk organize to bring some light of purpose into their lives.
They have had a thrill, and they are ready for more.

Such is Bryan’s legacy to his country. He couldn’t be President, but he
could at least help magnificently in the solemn business of shutting
off the Presidency from every intelligent and self-respecting man.
The storm, perhaps, won’t last long, as time goes in history. It may
help, indeed, to break up the democratic delusion, now already showing
weakness, and so hasten its own end. But while it lasts it will blow
off some roofs.




IV. THE HILLS OF ZION


It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton,
but I went down there very willingly, for I had good reports of the
sub-Potomac bootleggers, and moreover I was eager to see something of
evangelical Christianity as a going concern. In the big cities of the
Republic, despite the endless efforts of consecrated men, it is laid
up with a wasting disease. The very Sunday-school superintendents,
taking jazz from the stealthy radio, shake their fire-proof legs; their
pupils, moving into adolescence, no longer respond to the proliferating
hormones by enlisting for missionary service in Africa, but resort
to necking and petting instead. I know of no evangelical church from
Oregon to Maine that is not short of money: the graft begins to peter
out, like wire-tapping and three-card monte before it. Even in Dayton,
though the mob was up to do execution upon Scopes, there was a strong
smell of antinomianism. The nine churches of the village were all half
empty on Sunday, and weeds choked their yards. Only two or three of
the resident pastors managed to sustain themselves by their ghostly
science; the rest had to take orders for mail-order pantaloons or work
in the adjacent strawberry fields; one, I heard, was a barber. On the
courthouse green a score of sweating theologians debated the darker
passages of Holy Writ day and night, but I soon found that they were
all volunteers, and that the local faithful, while interested in their
exegesis as an intellectual exercise, did not permit it to impede the
indigenous debaucheries. Exactly twelve minutes after I reached the
village I was taken in tow by a Christian man and introduced to the
favorite tipple of the Cumberland Range: half corn liquor and half
coca-cola. It seemed a dreadful dose to me, spoiled as I was by the
bootleg light wines and beers of the Eastern seaboard, but I found that
the Dayton illuminati got it down with gusto, rubbing their tummies and
rolling their eyes. I include among them the chief local proponents of
the Mosaic cosmogony. They were all hot for Genesis, but their faces
were far too florid to belong to teetotalers, and when a pretty girl
came tripping down the Main street, which was very often, they reached
for the places where their neckties should have been with all the
amorous enterprise of movie actors. It seemed somehow strange.

An amiable newspaper woman of Chattanooga, familiar with those uplands,
presently enlightened me. Dayton, she explained, was simply a great
capital like any other great capital. That is to say, it was to Rhea
county what Atlanta was to Georgia or Paris to France. That is to say,
it was predominantly epicurean and sinful. A country girl from some
remote valley of the county, coming into town for her semi-annual
bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, shivered on approaching
Robinson’s drug-store quite as a country girl from up-State New York
might shiver on approaching the Metropolitan Opera House or the Ritz
Hotel. In every village lout she saw a potential white-slaver. The hard
sidewalks hurt her feet. Temptations of the flesh bristled to all sides
of her, luring her to hell. This newspaper woman told me of a session
with just such a visitor, holden a few days before. The latter waited
outside one of the town hot-dog and coca-cola shops while her husband
negotiated with a hardware merchant across the street. The newspaper
woman, idling along and observing that the stranger was badly used by
the heat, invited her to step into the shop for a glass of coca-cola.
The invitation brought forth only a gurgle of terror. Coca-cola, it
quickly appeared, was prohibited by the country lady’s pastor, as
a levantine and hell-sent narcotic. He also prohibited coffee and
tea--and pies! He had his doubts about white bread and boughten meat.
The newspaper woman, interested, inquired about ice-cream. It was, she
found, not specifically prohibited, but going into a coca-cola shop to
get it would be clearly sinful. So she offered to get a saucer of it,
and bring it out to the sidewalk. The visitor vacillated--and came near
being lost. But God saved her in the nick of time. When the newspaper
woman emerged from the place she was in full flight up the street!
Later on her husband, mounted on a mule, overtook her four miles out
the mountain pike.

This newspaper woman, whose kindness covered city infidels as well as
Alpine Christians, offered to take me back in the hills to a place
where the old-time religion was genuinely on tap. The Scopes jury,
she explained was composed mainly of its customers, with a few Dayton
sophisticates added to leaven the mass. It would thus be instructive to
climb the heights and observe the former at their ceremonies. The trip,
fortunately, might be made by automobile. There was a road running out
of Dayton to Morgantown, in the mountains to the westward, and thence
beyond. But foreigners, it appeared, would have to approach the sacred
grove cautiously, for the upland worshipers were very shy, and at the
first sight of a strange face they would adjourn their orgy and slink
into the forest. They were not to be feared, for God had long since
forbidden them to practice assassination, or even assault, but if they
were alarmed a rough trip would go for naught. So, after dreadful
bumpings up a long and narrow road, we parked our car in a little
woodpath a mile or two beyond the tiny village of Morgantown, and made
the rest of the approach on foot, deployed like skirmishers. Far off
in a dark, romantic glade a flickering light was visible, and out of
the silence came the rumble of exhortation. We could distinguish the
figure of the preacher only as a moving mote in the light: it was like
looking down the tube of a dark-field microscope. Slowly and cautiously
we crossed what seemed to be a pasture, and then we crouched down along
the edge of a cornfield, and stealthily edged further and further. The
light now grew larger and we could begin to make out what was going on.
We went ahead on all fours, like snakes in the grass.

From the great limb of a mighty oak hung a couple of crude torches of
the sort that car inspectors thrust under Pullman cars when a train
pulls in at night. In the guttering glare was the preacher, and for
a while we could see no one else. He was an immensely tall and thin
mountaineer in blue jeans, his collarless shirt open at the neck and
his hair a tousled mop. As he preached he paced up and down under the
smoking flambeaux, and at each turn he thrust his arms into the air and
yelled “Glory to God!” We crept nearer in the shadow of the cornfield,
and began to hear more of his discourse. He was preaching on the Day
of Judgment. The high kings of the earth, he roared, would all fall
down and die; only the sanctified would stand up to receive the Lord
God of Hosts. One of these kings he mentioned by name, the king of what
he called Greece-y. The king of Greece-y, he said, was doomed to hell.
We crawled forward a few more yards and began to see the audience. It
was seated on benches ranged round the preacher in a circle. Behind him
sat a row of elders, men and women. In front were the younger folk. We
crept on cautiously, and individuals rose out of the ghostly gloom. A
young mother sat suckling her baby, rocking as the preacher paced up
and down. Two scared little girls hugged each other, their pigtails
down their backs. An immensely huge mountain woman, in a gingham dress,
cut in one piece, rolled on her heels at every “Glory to God!” To one
side, and but half visible, was what appeared to be a bed. We found
afterward that half a dozen babies were asleep upon it.

The preacher stopped at last, and there arose out of the darkness a
woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so
quietly that we couldn’t hear what she said, but soon her voice rose
resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading
of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, had come to her
cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused
to touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true,
then everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false, then
reading it would imperil the soul. This syllogism from Caliph Omar
complete, she sat down. There followed a hymn, led by a somewhat fat
brother wearing silver-rimmed country spectacles. It droned on for
half a dozen stanzas, and then the first speaker resumed the floor.
He argued that the gift of tongues was real and that education was
a snare. Once his children could read the Bible, he said, they had
enough. Beyond lay only infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the
cities. Dayton itself was a Sodom. Even Morgantown had begun to forget
God. He sat down, and a female aurochs in gingham got up. She began
quietly, but was soon leaping and roaring, and it was hard to follow
her. Under cover of the turmoil we sneaked a bit closer.

A couple of other discourses followed, and there were two or three
hymns. Suddenly a change of mood began to make itself felt. The
last hymn ran longer than the others, and dropped gradually into
a monotonous, unintelligible chant. The leader beat time with his
book. The faithful broke out with exultations. When the singing ended
there was a brief palaver that we could not hear, and two of the men
moved a bench into the circle of light directly under the flambeaux.
Then a half-grown girl emerged from the darkness and threw herself
upon it. We noticed with astonishment that she had bobbed hair.
“This sister,” said the leader, “has asked for prayers.” We moved
a bit closer. We could now see faces plainly, and hear every word.
What followed quickly reached such heights of barbaric grotesquerie
that it was hard to believe it real. At a signal all the faithful
crowded up to the bench and began to pray--not in unison, but each
for himself! At another they all fell on their knees, their arms over
the penitent. The leader kneeled facing us, his head alternately
thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands. Words spouted from
his lips like bullets from a machine-gun--appeals to God to pull the
penitent back out of hell, defiances of the demons of the air, a vast
impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts. Suddenly he rose to his feet,
threw back his head and began to speak in the tongues--blub-blub-blub,
gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. His voice rose to a higher register. The climax
was a shrill, inarticulate squawk, like that of a man throttled. He
fell headlong across the pyramid of supplicants.

A comic scene? Somehow, no. The poor half-wits were too horribly in
earnest. It was like peeping through a knothole at the writhings of
people in pain. From the squirming and jabbering mass a young woman
gradually detached herself--a woman not uncomely, with a pathetic
homemade cap on her head. Her head jerked back, the veins of her neck
swelled, and her fists went to her throat as if she were fighting for
breath. She bent backward until she was like half a hoop. Then she
suddenly snapped forward. We caught a flash of the whites of her eyes.
Presently her whole body began to be convulsed--great throes that
began at the shoulders and ended at the hips. She would leap to her
feet, thrust her arms in air, and then hurl herself upon the heap. Her
praying flattened out into a mere delirious caterwauling, like that of
a Tom cat on a petting party. I describe the thing discreetly, and as a
strict behaviorist. The lady’s subjective sensations I leave to infidel
pathologists, privy to the works of Ellis, Freud and Moll. Whatever
they were, they were obviously not painful, for they were accompanied
by vast heavings and gurglings of a joyful and even ecstatic nature.
And they seemed to be contagious, too, for soon a second penitent, also
female, joined the first, and then came a third, and a fourth, and a
fifth. The last one had an extraordinary violent attack. She began
with mild enough jerks of the head, but in a moment she was bounding
all over the place, like a chicken with its head cut off. Every time
her head came up a stream of hosannas would issue out of it. Once she
collided with a dark, undersized brother, hitherto silent and stolid.
Contact with her set him off as if he had been kicked by a mule. He
leaped into the air, threw back his head, and began to gargle as if
with a mouthful of BB shot. Then he loosed one tremendous, stentorian
sentence in the tongues, and collapsed.

By this time the performers were quite oblivious to the profane
universe and so it was safe to go still closer. We left our hiding
and came up to the little circle of light. We slipped into the vacant
seats on one of the rickety benches. The heap of mourners was directly
before us. They bounced into us as they cavorted. The smell that they
radiated, sweating there in that obscene heap, half suffocated us. Not
all of them, of course, did the thing in the grand manner. Some merely
moaned and rolled their eyes. The female ox in gingham flung her great
bulk on the ground and jabbered an unintelligible prayer. One of the
men, in the intervals between fits, put on his spectacles and read his
Bible. Beside me on the bench sat the young mother and her baby. She
suckled it through the whole orgy, obviously fascinated by what was
going on, but never venturing to take any hand in it. On the bed just
outside the light half a dozen other babies slept peacefully. In the
shadows, suddenly appearing and as suddenly going away, were vague
figures, whether of believers or of scoffers I do not know. They seemed
to come and go in couples. Now and then a couple at the ringside would
step out and vanish into the black night. After a while some came
back, the males looking somewhat sheepish. There was whispering outside
the circle of vision. A couple of Fords lurched up the road, cutting
holes in the darkness with their lights. Once someone out of sight
loosed a bray of laughter.

All this went on for an hour or so. The original penitent, by this
time, was buried three deep beneath the heap. One caught a glimpse,
now and then, of her yellow bobbed hair, but then she would vanish
again. How she breathed down there I don’t know; it was hard enough
six feet away, with a strong five-cent cigar to help. When the praying
brothers would rise up for a bout with the tongues their faces were
streaming with perspiration. The fat harridan in gingham sweated like
a longshoreman. Her hair got loose and fell down over her face. She
fanned herself with her skirt. A powerful old gal she was, plainly
equal in her day to a bout with obstetrics and a week’s washing on the
same morning, but this was worse than a week’s washing. Finally, she
fell into a heap, breathing in great, convulsive gasps.

Finally, we got tired of the show and returned to Dayton. It was nearly
eleven o’clock--an immensely late hour for those latitudes--but the
whole town was still gathered in the courthouse yard, listening to the
disputes of theologians. The Scopes trial had brought them in from
all directions. There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing
that he was the Bible champion of the world. There was a Seventh Day
Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads
and ten horns described in Revelation xiii, and that the end of the
world was at hand. There was an evangelist made up like Andy Gump,
with the news that atheists in Cincinnati were preparing to descend
upon Dayton, hang the eminent Judge Raulston, and burn the town. There
was an ancient who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian.
There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come
to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in
his place. There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic hymns.
There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a gaping
crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus.
But the note of devotion was simply not there; the Daytonians, after
listening a while, would slip away to Robinson’s drug-store to regale
themselves with coca-cola, or to the lobby of the Aqua Hotel, where the
learned Raulston sat in state, judicially picking his teeth. The real
religion was not present. It began at the bridge over the town creek,
where the road makes off for the hills.




V. BEETHOVEN


Beethoven was one of those lucky men whose stature, viewed in
retrospect, grows steadily. How many movements have there been to
put him on the shelf? At least a dozen in the hundred years since
his death. There was one only a few years ago in New York, launched
by idiot critics and supported by the war fever: his place, it
appeared, was to be taken by such prophets of the new enlightenment as
Stravinsky! The net result of that movement was simply that the best
orchestra in America went to pot--and Beethoven survived unscathed. It
is, indeed, almost impossible to imagine displacing him--at all events,
in the concert-hall, where the challenge of Bach cannot reach him.
Surely the Nineteenth Century was not deficient in master musicians. It
produced Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Wagner and Brahms, to say nothing
of a whole horde of Dvořáks, Tschaikowskys, Debussys, Raffs, Verdis and
Puccinis. Yet it gave us nothing better than the first movement of the
Eroica. That movement, the first challenge of the new music, remains
its last word. It is the noblest piece of absolute music ever written
in the sonata form, and it is the noblest piece of program music.
In Beethoven, indeed, the distinction between the two became purely
imaginary. Everything he wrote was, in a way, program music, including
even the first two symphonies, and everything was absolute music,
including even the Battle grotesquerie. (Is the latter, indeed, as bad
as ancient report makes it? Why doesn’t some _Kappellmeister_ let us
hear it?)

It was a bizarre jest of the gods to pit Beethoven, in his first
days in Vienna, against Papa Haydn. Haydn was undeniably a genius of
the first water, and, after Mozart’s death, had no apparent reason
to fear a rival. If he did not actually create the symphony as we
know it to-day, then he at least enriched the form with its first
genuine masterpieces--and not with a scant few, but literally with
dozens. Tunes of the utmost loveliness gushed from him like oil from
a well. More, he knew how to manage them; he was a master of musical
architectonics. If his music is sniffed at to-day, then it is only by
fools; there are at least six of his symphonies that are each worth
all the cacophony hatched by a whole herd of Schönbergs and Eric
Saties, with a couple of Korngolds thrown in to flavor the pot. But
when Beethoven stepped in, then poor old Papa had to step down. It was
like pitting a gazelle against an aurochs. One colossal bellow, and the
combat was over. Musicians are apt to look at it as a mere contest
of technicians. They point to the vastly greater skill and ingenuity
of Beethoven--his firmer grip upon his materials, his greater daring
and resourcefulness, his far better understanding of dynamics, rhythms
and clang-tints--in brief, his tremendously superior musicianship. But
that was not what made him so much greater than Haydn--for Haydn, too,
had his superiorities; for example, his far readier inventiveness, his
capacity for making better tunes. What lifted Beethoven above the old
master, and above all other men of music save perhaps Bach and Brahms,
was simply his greater dignity as a man. The feelings that Haydn put
into tone were the feelings of a country pastor, a rather civilized
stockbroker, a viola player gently mellowed by Kulmbacher. When he wept
it was with the tears of a woman who has discovered another wrinkle;
when he rejoiced it was with the joy of a child on Christmas morning.
But the feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of
a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there
was a touch of hell-fire in his mirth.

It is almost a literal fact that there is not a trace of cheapness in
the whole body of his music. He is never sweet and romantic; he never
sheds conventional tears; he never strikes orthodox attitudes. In his
lightest moods there is the immense and inescapable dignity of the
ancient Hebrew prophets. He concerns himself, not with the puerile
agonies of love, but with the eternal tragedy of man. He is a great
tragic poet, and like all great tragic poets, he is obsessed by a sense
of the inscrutable meaninglessness of life. From the Eroica onward he
seldom departs from that theme. It roars through the first movement
of the C minor, and it comes to a stupendous final statement in the
Ninth. All this, in his day, was new in music, and so it caused murmurs
of surprise and even indignation. The step from Mozart’s Jupiter to
the first movement of the Eroica was uncomfortable; the Viennese began
to wriggle in their stalls. But there was one among them who didn’t
wriggle, and that was Franz Schubert. Turn to the first movement of his
Unfinished or to the slow movement of his Tragic, and you will see how
quickly the example of Beethoven was followed--and with what genius!
But there was a long hiatus after that, with Mendelssohn, Weber,
Chopin and company performing upon their pretty pipes. Eventually the
day of November 6, 1876, dawned in Karlsruhe, and with it came the
first performance of Brahms’ C minor. Once more the gods walked in the
concert-hall. They will walk again when another Brahms is born, but
not before. For nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the
man. What ails the music of all the Tschaikowskys, Stravinskys--and
Strausses? What ails it is that it is the music of shallow men. It is
often, in its way, lovely. It bristles with charming musical ideas.
It is infinitely ingenious and workmanlike. But it is as hollow, at
bottom, as a bull by Bishop Manning. It is the music of second-rate men.

Beethoven disdained all their artifices: he didn’t need them. It would
be hard to think of a composer, even of the fourth rate, who worked
with thematic material of less intrinsic merit. He borrowed tunes
wherever he found them; he made them up out of snatches of country
jigs; when he lacked one altogether he contented himself with a simple
phrase, a few banal notes. All such things he viewed simply as raw
materials; his interest was concentrated upon their use. To that use
of them he brought the appalling powers of his unrivaled genius. His
ingenuity began where that of other men left off. His most complicated
structures retained the overwhelming clarity of the Parthenon. And into
them he got a kind of feeling that even the Greeks could seldom match;
he was preëminently a modern man, with all trace of the barbarian
vanished. In his gorgeous music there went all of the high skepticism
that was of the essence of the Eighteenth Century, but into it there
also went the new enthusiasm, the new determination to challenge and
beat the gods, that dawned with the Nineteenth.

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that the most portentous
phenomenon in the whole history of music was the first public
performance of the Eroica on April 7, 1805. The manufacturers of
program notes have swathed that gigantic work in so many layers of
childish legend and speculation that its intrinsic merits have been
almost forgotten. Was it dedicated to Napoleon I? If so, was the
dedication sincere or ironical? Who cares--that is, who with ears? It
might have been dedicated, just as well, to Louis XIV, Paracelsus or
Pontius Pilate. What makes it worth discussing, to-day and forever,
is the fact that on its very first page Beethoven threw his hat into
the ring and laid his claim to immortality. Bang!--and he is off!
No compromise! No easy bridge from the past! The Second Symphony is
already miles behind. A new order of music has been born. The very
manner of it is full of challenge. There is no sneaking into the
foul business by way of a mellifluous and disarming introduction; no
preparatory hemming and hawing to cajole the audience and enable the
conductor to find his place in the score. Nay! Out of silence comes
the angry crash of the tonic triad, and then at once, with no pause,
the first statement of the first subject--grim, domineering, harsh,
raucous, and yet curiously lovely--with its astounding collision with
that electrical C sharp. The carnage has begun early; we are only
in the seventh measure! In the thirteenth and fourteenth comes the
incomparable roll down the simple scale of E flat--and what follows
is all that has ever been said, perhaps all that ever _will_ be said,
about music-making in the grand manner. What was afterward done, even
by Beethoven, was done in the light of that perfect example. Every line
of modern music that is honestly music bears some sort of relation to
that epoch-making first movement.

The rest is Beethovenish, but not quintessence. There is a legend that
the funeral march was put in simply because it was a time of wholesale
butchery, and funeral marches were in fashion. No doubt the first-night
audience in Vienna, shocked and addled by the piled-up defiances of
the first movement, found the lugubrious strains grateful. But the
_scherzo_? Another felonious assault upon poor Papa Haydn! Two giants
boxing clumsily, to a crazy piping by an orchestra of dwarfs. No
wonder some honest Viennese in the gallery yelled: “I’d give another
kreutzer if the thing would stop!” Well, it stopped finally, and then
came something reassuring--a theme with variations. Everyone in Vienna
knew and esteemed Beethoven’s themes with variations. He was, in fact,
the rising master of themes with variations in the town. But a joker
remained in the pack. The variations grew more and more complex and
surprising. Strange novelties got into them. The polite exercises
became tempestuous, moody, cacophonous, tragic. At the end a harsh,
hammering, exigent row of chords--the C minor Symphony casting its
sinister shadow before!

It must have been a great night in Vienna. But perhaps not for the
actual Viennese. They went to hear “a new grand symphony in D sharp”
(_sic!_). What they found in the Theater-an-der-Wien was a revolution!




VI. RONDO ON AN ANCIENT THEME


It is the economic emancipation of woman, I suppose, that must be
blamed for the present wholesale discussion of the sex question,
so offensive to the romantic. Eminent authorities have full often
described, and with the utmost heat and eloquence, her state before
she was delivered from her fetters and turned loose to root or die.
Almost her only feasible trade, in those dark days, was that of wife.
True enough, she might also become a servant girl, or go to work in a
factory, or offer herself upon the streets, but all of those vocations
were so revolting that no rational woman followed them if she could
help it: she would leave any one of them at a moment’s notice at
the call of a man, for the call of a man meant promotion for her,
economically and socially. The males of the time, knowing what a boon
they had to proffer, drove hard bargains. They demanded a long list of
high qualities in the woman they summoned to their seraglios, but most
of all they demanded what they called virtue. It was not sufficient
that a candidate should be anatomically undefiled; she must also be
pure in mind. There was, of course, but one way to keep her so pure,
and that was by building a high wall around her mind, and hitting
her with a club every time she ventured to peer over it. It was as
dangerous, in that Christian era, for a woman to show any interest in
or knowledge of the great physiological farce of sex as it would be
to-day for a presidential candidate to reveal himself in his cups on
the hustings. Everyone knew, to be sure, that as a mammal she had sex,
and that as a potential wife and mother she probably had some secret
interest in its phenomena, but it was felt, perhaps wisely, that even
the most academic theorizing had within it the deadly germs of the
experimental method, and so she was forbidden to think about the matter
at all, and whatever information she acquired at all she had to acquire
by a method of bootlegging.

The generation still on its legs has seen the almost total collapse
of that naïve and constabulary system, and of the economic structure
supporting it. Beginning with the eighties of the last century, there
rose up a harem rebellion which quickly knocked both to pieces. Two
women of the Western World not only began to plunge heroically into
all of the old professions, hitherto sacred to men; they also began to
invent a lot of new professions, many of them unimagined by men. Worse,
they began to succeed in them. The working woman of the old days worked
only until she could snare a man; any man was better than her work.
But the working woman of the new days was under no such pressure; her
work made her a living and sometimes more than a living; when a man
appeared in her net she took two looks at him, one of them usually very
searching, before landing him. The result was an enormous augmentation
of her feeling of self-sufficiency, her spirit of independence,
her natural inclination to get two sides into the bargaining. The
result, secondarily, was a revolt against all the old taboos that had
surrounded her, all the childish incapacities and ignorances that had
been forced upon her. The result, tertiarily, was a vast running amok
in the field that, above all others, had been forbidden to her: that of
sexual knowledge and experiment.

We now suffer from the effects of that running amok. It is women, not
men, who are doing all the current gabbling about sex, and proposing
all the new-fangled modifications of the rules and regulations
ordained by God, and they are hard at it very largely, I suppose,
because being at it at all is a privilege that is still new to them.
The whole order of human females, in other words, is passing through
a sort of intellectual adolescence, and it is disturbed as greatly
as biological adolescents are by the spouting of the hormones. The
attitude of men toward the sex question, it seems to me, has not
changed greatly in my time. Barring a few earnest men whose mental
processes, here as elsewhere, are essentially womanish, they still view
it somewhat jocosely. Taking one with another, they believe that they
know all about it that is worth knowing, and so it does not challenge
their curiosity, and they do not put in much time discussing it, save
mockingly. But among the women, if a bachelor may presume to judge,
interest in it is intense. They want to know all that is known about
it, all that has been guessed and theorized about it; they bristle with
ideas of their own about it. It is hard to find a reflective woman,
in these days, who is not harboring some new and startling scheme for
curing the evils of monogamous marriage; it is impossible to find any
woman who has not given ear to such schemes. Women, not men, read the
endless books upon the subject that now rise mountain-high in all the
book-stores, and women, not men, discuss and rediscuss the notions in
them. An acquaintance of mine, a distinguished critic, owns a copy of
one of the most revolutionary of these books, by title “The Art of
Love,” that was suppressed on the day of its publication by the alert
Comstocks. He tells me that he has already lent it to twenty-six women
and that he has more than fifty applications for it on file. Yet he has
never read it himself!

As a professional fanatic for free thought and free speech, I can only
view all this uproar in the _Frauenzimmer_ with high satisfaction. It
gives me delight to see a taboo violated, and that delight is doubled
when the taboo is one that is wholly senseless. Sex is more important
to women than to men, and so they ought to be free to discuss it as
they please, and to hatch and propagate whatever ideas about it occur
to them. Moreover, I can see nothing but nonsense in the doctrine
that their concern with such matters damages their charm. So far as
I am concerned, a woman who knows precisely what a Graafian follicle
is is just as charming as one who doesn’t--just as charming, and
far less dangerous. Charm in women, indeed, is a variable star, and
shows different colors at different times. When their chief mark was
ignorance, then the most ignorant was the most charming; now that
they begin to think deeply and indignantly there is charm in their
singular astuteness. But I am inclined to believe that they have not
yet attained to a genuine astuteness in the new field of sex. To the
contrary, it seems to me that a fundamental error contaminates their
whole dealing with the subject, and that is the error of assuming that
sexual questions, whether social, physiological, or pathological, are
of vast and even paramount importance to mankind in general--in brief,
that sex is really a first-rate matter.

I doubt it. I believe that in this department men show better judgment
than women, if only because their information is older and their
experience wider. Their tendency is to dismiss the whole thing
lightly, to reduce sex to the lowly estate of an afterthought and a
recreation, and under that tendency there is a sound instinct. I do not
believe that the lives of normal men are much colored or conditioned,
either directly or indirectly, by purely sexual considerations. I
believe that nine-tenths of them would carry on all the activities
which engage them now, and with precisely the same humorless diligence,
if there were not a woman in the world. The notion that man would not
work if he lacked an audience, and that the audience must be a woman,
seems to me to be a hollow sentimentality. Men work because they want
to eat, because they want to feel secure, because they long to shine
among their fellows, and for no other reason. A man may crave his
wife’s approbation, or some other woman’s approbation, of his social
graces, of his taste, of his generosity and courage, of his general
dignity in the world, but long before he ever gives thought to such
things and long after he has forgotten them he craves the approbation
of his fellow men. Above all, he craves the approbation of his fellow
craftsmen--the men who understand exactly what he is trying to do, and
are expertly competent to judge his doing of it. Can you imagine a
surgeon putting the good opinion of his wife above the good opinion of
other surgeons? If you, can, then you can do something that I cannot.

Here, of course, I do not argue absurdly that the good opinion of
his wife is nothing to him. Obviously, it is a lot, for if it does
not constitute the principal reward of his work, then it at least
constitutes the principal joy of his hours of ease, when his work is
done. He wants his wife to respect and admire him; to be able to make
her do it is also a talent. But if he is intelligent he must discover
very early that her respect and admiration do not necessarily run
in direct ratio to his intrinsic worth, that the qualities and acts
that please her are not always the qualities and acts that are most
satisfactory to the censor within him--in brief, that the relation
between man and woman, however intimate they may seem, must always
remain a bit casual and superficial--that sex, at bottom, belongs to
comedy and the cool of the evening and not to the sober business that
goes on in the heat of the day. That sober business, as I have said,
would still go on if woman were abolished and heirs and assigns were
manufactured in rolling-mills. Men would not only work as hard as they
do to-day; they would also get almost as much satisfaction out of their
work. For of all the men that I know on this earth, ranging from poets
to ambassadors and from bishops to statisticians, I know none who
labors primarily because he wants to please a woman. They are all hard
at it because they want to impress other men and so please themselves.

Women, plainly enough, are in a far different case. Their emancipation
has not yet gone to the length of making them genuinely free. They have
rid themselves, very largely, of the absolute need to please men, but
they have not yet rid themselves of the impulse to please men. Perhaps
they never will: one might easily devise a plausible argument to that
effect on biological grounds. But sufficient unto the day is the
phenomenon before us: they have got rid of the old taboo which forbade
them to think and talk about sex, and they still labor under the old
superstition that sex is a matter of paramount importance. The result,
in my judgment, is an absurd emission of piffle. In every division
there is vast and often ludicrous exaggeration. The campaign for birth
control takes on the colossal proportions of the war for democracy.
The venereal diseases are represented to be as widespread, at least
in men, as colds in the head, and as lethal as apoplexy or cancer.
Great hordes of viragoes patrol the country, instructing school-girls
in the mechanics of reproduction and their mothers in obstetrics. The
light-hearted monogamy which produced all of us is denounced as an
infamy comparable to cannibalism. Laws are passed regulating the mating
of human beings as if they were horned cattle and converting marriage
into a sort of coroner’s inquest. Over all sounds the battle-cry of
quacks and zealots at all times and everywhere: _Veritas liberabit vos!_

The truth? How much of this new gospel is actually truth? Perhaps two
per cent. The rest is idle theorizing, doctrinaire nonsense, mere
scandalous rubbish. All that is worth knowing about sex--all, that
is, that is solidly established and of sound utility--can be taught
to any intelligent boy of sixteen in two hours. Is it taught in the
current books, so enormously circulated? I doubt it. Absolutely without
exception these books admonish the poor apprentice to renounce sex
altogether--to sublimate it, as the favorite phrase is, into a passion
for free verse, Rotary or the League of Nations. This admonition is
silly, and, I believe, dangerous. It is as much a folly to lock up sex
in the hold as it is to put it in command on the bridge. Its proper
place is in the social hall. As a substitute for all such nonsense I
drop a pearl of wisdom, and pass on. To wit: the strict monogamist
never gets into trouble.




VII. PROTESTANTISM IN THE REPUBLIC


That Protestantism in this great Christian realm is down with a
wasting disease must be obvious to every amateur of ghostly pathology.
The denominational papers are full of alarming reports from its
bedside, and all sorts of projects for the relief of the patient. One
authority holds that only more money is needed to work a cure--that
if the Christian exploiters and usurers of the country would provide
a sufficient slush fund, all the vacant pews could be filled, and the
baptismal tanks with them. Another authority argues that the one way to
save the churches is to close all other places of resort and amusement
on the Sabbath, from delicatessen shops to road-houses, and from movie
parlors to jazz palaces. Yet another proposes a mass attack by prayer,
apparently in the hope of provoking a miracle. A fourth advocates a
vast augmentation of so-called institutional effort, _i. e._, the
scheme of putting bowling alleys and courting cubicles into church
cellars, and of giving over the rest of every sacred edifice to debates
on the Single Tax, boxing matches, baby shows, mental hygiene clinics,
lectures by converted actors, movie shows, raffles, non-voluptuous
dances, and evening classes in salesmanship, automobile repairing,
birth control, interior decoration, and the art and mystery of the
realtor. A fifth, borrowing a leaf from Big Business, maintains that
consolidation and reorganization are what is needed--that the existence
of half a dozen rival churches in every American village profits the
devil a great deal more than it profits God. This last scheme seems to
have won a great deal of support among the pious. At least a score of
committees are now trying to draw up plans for concrete consolidations,
and even the Southern and Northern Methodists, who hate each other
violently, have been in peaceful though vain negotiation.

On the merits of these conflicting remedies I attempt no pronouncement,
but I have been at some pains to look into the symptoms and nature
of the disease. My report is that it seems to me to be analogous to
that malady which afflicts a star in the heavens when it splits into
two halves and they go slambanging into space in opposite directions.
That, in brief, is what appears to be the matter with Protestantism
in the United States to-day. One half of it is moving, with slowly
accelerating speed, in the direction of the Harlot of the Seven
Hills: the other is sliding down into voodooism. The former carries
the greater part of Protestant money with it; the latter carries the
greater part of Protestant enthusiasm, or, as the word now is, pep.
What remains in the middle may be likened to a torso without either
brains to think with or legs to dance--in other words, something that
begins to be professionally attractive to the mortician, though it
still makes shift to breathe. There is no lack of life on the higher
levels, where the most solvent Methodists and the like are gradually
transmogrified into Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians shin up the
ancient bastions of Holy Church, and there is no lack of life on the
lower levels, where the rural Baptists, by the route of Fundamentalism,
the Anti-Saloon League, and the Ku Klux Klan, rapidly descend to the
dogmas and practices of the Congo jungle. But in the middle there is
desiccation and decay. Here is where Protestantism was once strongest.
Here is the region of the plain and godly Americano, fond of devotion
but distrustful of every hint of orgy--the honest fellow who suffers
dutifully on Sunday, pays his share, and hopes for a few kind words
from the pastor when his time comes to die. He stands to-day on a
burning deck. It is no wonder that Sunday automobiling begins to get
him in its clutches. If he is not staggered one day by his pastor’s
appearance in surplice and stole, he is staggered the day following
by a file of Ku Kluxers marching up the aisle. So he tends to absent
himself from pious exercises, and the news goes about that there
is something the matter with the churches, and the denominational
papers bristle with schemes to set it right, and many up-and-coming
pastors, tiring of preaching and parish work, get excellent jobs as
the executive secretaries of these schemes, and go about the country
expounding them to the faithful.

The extent to which Protestantism, in its upper reaches, has succumbed
to the harlotries of Rome seems to be but little apprehended by the
majority of connoisseurs. I was myself unaware of the whole truth until
last Christmas, when, in the pursuit of a quite unrelated inquiry,
I employed agents to attend all the services held in the principal
Protestant basilicas of an eminent American city, and to bring in the
best reports they could formulate upon what went on in the lesser
churches. The substance of these reports, in so far as they related
to churches patronized by the well-to-do, was simple: they revealed a
headlong movement to the right, an almost precipitate flight over the
mountain. Six so-called Episcopal churches held midnight services on
Christmas Eve in obvious imitation of Catholic midnight masses, and one
of them actually called its service a solemn high mass. Two invited the
nobility and gentry to processions, and a third concealed a procession
under the name of a pageant. One offered Gounod’s St. Cecilia mass
on Christmas morning, and another the Messe Solennelle by the same
composer; three others, somewhat more timorous, contented themselves
with parts of masses. One, throwing off all pretense and euphemism,
summoned the faithful to no less than three Christmas masses, naming
them by name--two low and one high. All six churches were aglow with
candles, and two employed incense.

But that was not the worst. Two Presbyterian churches and one Baptist
church, not to mention five Lutheran churches of different synods, had
choral services in the dawn of Christmas morning, and the one attended
by the only one of my agents who got up early enough--it was in a
Presbyterian church--was made gay with candles, and had a palpably
Roman smack. Yet worse: a rich and conspicuous Methodist church,
patronized by the leading Wesleyan wholesalers and money-lenders of the
town, boldly offered a mediæval carol service. Mediæval? What did that
mean? The Middle Ages ended on July 16, 1453, at 12 o’clock meridian,
and the Reformation was not launched by Luther until October 31, 1517,
at 10.15 A. M. If mediæval, in the sense in which it was here used,
does not mean Roman Catholic, then I surely went to school in vain.
My agent, born a Methodist, reported that the whole ceremony shocked
him excessively. It began with trumpet blasts from the church spire
and it concluded with an Ave Maria by a vested choir! Candles rose
up in glittering ranks behind the chancel rail, and above them glowed
a shining electric star. God help us all, indeed! What next? Will the
rev. pastor, on some near to-morrow, defy the lightnings of Jahveh by
appearing in alb and dalmatic? Will he turn his back upon the faithful?
Will he put in a telephone-booth for auricular confession? I shudder to
think of what old John Wesley would have said about that vested choir
and that shining star. Or Bishop Francis Asbury. Or the Rev. Jabez
Bunting. Or Robert Strawbridge, that consecrated man.

Here, of course, I do not venture into the contumacy of criticising; I
merely marvel. A student of the sacred sciences all my life, I am well
learned in the dogmas and ceremonials of the sects, and know what they
affect and what they abhor. Does anyone argue that the use of candles
in public worship would have had the sanction of the _Ur_-Wesleyans,
or that they would have consented to _Blasmusik_ and a vested choir?
If so, let the sciolist come forward. Down to fifty years ago, in
fact, the Methodists prohibited Christmas services altogether, as
Romish and heathen. But now we have ceremonies almost operatic, and the
sweet masses of Gounod are just around the corner! As I have said, the
Episcopalians--who, in most American cities, are largely ex-Methodists
or ex-Presbyterians, or, in New York, ex-Jews--go still further. In
three of the churches attended by my agents Holy Communion was almost
indistinguishable from the mass. Two of these churches, according to
information placed at my disposal by the police, are very fashionable;
to get into one of them is almost as difficult as ordering a suit of
clothes from Poole. But the richer the Episcopalian, the more eager
he is to forget that he was once baptized by public outcry or total
immersion. The Low Church rectors, in the main, struggle with poor
congregations, born to the faith but deficient in buying power. As bank
accounts increase the fear of the devil diminishes, and there is bred
a sense of beauty. This sense of beauty, in its practical effects, is
identical with the work of the Paulist Fathers. To-day, indeed, even
the Methodists who remain Methodists begin to wobble. Tiring of the
dreadful din that goes with the orthodox Wesleyan demonology, they take
to ceremonials that grow more and more stately and voluptuous. The
sermon ceases to be a cavalry charge, and becomes soft and _pizzicato_.
The choir abandons “Throw Out the Life-Line” and “Are You Ready for
the Judgment Day?” and toys with Händel. The rev. pastor throws off
the uniform of a bank cashier and puts on a gown. It is an evolution
that has, viewed from a tree, a certain merit. The stock of nonsense
in the world is sensibly diminished and the stock of beauty augmented.
But what would the old-time circuit-riders say of it, imagining them
miraculously brought back from hell?

So much for the volatilization that is going on above the diaphragm.
What is in progress below? All I can detect is a rapid descent to
mere barbaric devil-chasing. In all those parts of the Republic where
Beelzebub is still as real as Babe Ruth or Dr. Coolidge, and men
drink raw fusel oil hot from the still--for example, in the rural
sections of the Middle West and everywhere in the South save a few
walled towns--the evangelical sects plunge into an abyss of malignant
imbecility, and declare a holy war upon every decency that civilized
men cherish. First the Anti-Saloon League, and now the Ku Klux Klan
and the various Fundamentalist organizations, have converted them
into vast machines for pursuing and butchering unbelievers. They have
thrown the New Testament overboard, and gone back to the Old, and
particularly to the bloodiest parts of it. Their one aim seems to be
to break heads, to spread terror, to propagate hatred. Everywhere they
have set up enmities that will not die out for generations. Neighbor
looks askance at neighbor, the land is filled with spies, every man
of the slightest intelligence is suspect. Christianity becomes a
sort of psychic cannibalism. Unfortunately, the doings of the rustic
gentlemen of God who furnish steam for this movement have been
investigated but imperfectly, and in consequence too little is known
about them. Even the sources of their power, so far as I know, have
not been looked into. My suspicion is that it has increased as the
influence of the old-time country-town newspapers has declined. These
newspapers, in large areas of the land, once genuinely molded public
opinion. They attracted to their service a shrewd and salty class of
rustic philosophers, mainly highly alcoholized; they were outspoken
in their views and responded only slightly to the prevailing crazes.
In the midst of the Bryan uproar, a quarter of a century ago, scores
of little weeklies in the South and Middle West kept up a gallant
battle for sound money and the Hanna idealism. There were red-hot
Democratic papers in Pennsylvania, and others in Ohio; there were
Republican sheets in rural Maryland, and even in Virginia. The growth
of the big city dailies is what chiefly reduced them to puerility.
As communications improved every yokel began following Brisbane, Dr.
Frank Crane, and Mutt and Jeff. The rural mail carrier began leaving a
24-page yellow in every second box. The hinds distrusted and detested
the politics of these great organs, but enjoyed their imbecilities.
The country weekly could not match the latter, and so it began to
decline. It is now in a low state everywhere in America. Half of it is
boiler-plate and the other half is cross-roads gossip. The editor is
no longer the leading thinker of his town; instead, he is commonly a
broken and despairing man, cadging for advertisements and hoping for a
political job. He used to aspire to the State Senate; now he is content
with the post of town bailiff or road supervisor.

His place has been taken by the village pastor. The pastor got into
public affairs by the route of Prohibition. The shrewd shysters who
developed the Anti-Saloon League made a politician of him, and once
he had got a taste of power he was eager for more. It came very
quickly. As industry penetrated to the rural regions the new-blown
Babbitts began to sense his capacity for safeguarding the established
order, and so he was given the job: he became a local Billy Sunday.
And, simultaneously the old-line politicians, taught a lesson by the
Anti-Saloon League, began to defer to him in general, as they had
yielded to him in particular. He was consulted about candidacies; he
had his say about policies. The local school-board soon became his
private preserve. The wandering cony-catchers of the tin-pot fraternal
orders found him a useful man. He was, by now, a specialist in all
forms of public rectitude, from teetotalism to patriotism. He was put
up on days of ceremony to sob for the flag, vice the county judge,
retired. When the Klan burst upon the peasants all of his new duties
were synthetized. He was obviously the chief local repository of its
sublime principles, theological, social, ethnological and patriotic.
In every country town in America to-day, wherever the Klan continues
to rowel the hinds, its chief engine is a clerk in holy orders. If the
Baptists are strong, their pastor is that engine. Failing Baptists, the
heroic work is assumed by the Methodist parson, or the Presbyterian, or
the Campbellite. Without these sacerdotal props the Invisible Empire
would have faded long ago.

What one mainly notices about these ambassadors of Christ, observing
them in the mass, is their vast lack of sound information and sound
sense. They constitute, perhaps, the most ignorant class of teachers
ever set up to lead a civilized people; they are even more ignorant
than the county superintendents of schools. Learning, indeed, is not
esteemed in the evangelical denominations, and any literate plowhand,
if the Holy Spirit inflames him, is thought to be fit to preach. Is
he commonly sent, as a preliminary, to a training camp, to college?
But what a college! You will find one in every mountain valley of
the land, with its single building in its bare pasture lot, and its
faculty of half-idiot pedagogues and broken-down preachers. One man, in
such a college, teaches oratory, ancient history, arithmetic and Old
Testament exegesis. The aspirant comes in from the barnyard, and goes
back in a year or two to the village. His body of knowledge is that
of a street-car motorman or a vaudeville actor. But he has learned the
clichés of his craft, and he has got him a long-tailed coat, and so he
has made his escape from the harsh labors of his ancestors, and is set
up as a fountain of light and learning.

It is from such ignoramuses that the lower half of American
Protestantdom gets its view of the cosmos. Certainly Fundamentalism
should not be hard to understand when its sources are inspected.
How can the teacher teach when his own head is empty? Of all that
constitutes the sum of human knowledge he is as innocent as an Eskimo.
Of the arts he knows absolutely nothing; of the sciences he has
never so much as heard. No good book ever penetrates to those remote
“colleges,” nor does any graduate ever take away a desire to read
one. He has been warned, indeed, against their blandishments; what
is not addressed solely to the paramount business of saving souls
is of the devil. So when he hears by chance of the battle of ideas
beyond the sky-rim, he quite naturally puts it down to Beelzebub. What
comes to him, vaguely and distorted, is unintelligible to him. He is
suspicious of it, afraid of it--and he quickly communicates his fears
to his dupes. The common man, in many ways, is hard to arouse; it is a
terrific job to ram even the most elemental ideas into him. But it is
always easy to scare him.

That is the daily business of the evangelical pastors of the Republic.
They are specialists in alarms and bugaboos. The rum demon, atheists,
Bolsheviki, the Pope, bootleggers, the Jews,--all these have served
them in turn, and in the demonology of the Ku Klux Klan all have been
conveniently brought together. The old stock company of devils has been
retired, and with it the old repertoire of private sins. The American
peasant of to-day finds it vastly easier to claw into heaven than he
used to. Personal holiness has now been handed over to the Holy Rollers
and other such survivors from a harsher day. It is sufficient now
to hate the Pope, to hate the Jews, to hate the scientists, to hate
all foreigners, to hate whatever the cities yield to. These hatreds
have been spread in the land by rev. pastors, chiefly Baptists and
Methodists. They constitute, with their attendant fears, the basic
religion of the American clod-hopper to-day. They are the essence of
the new Protestantism, second division, American style.

Their public effects are constantly underestimated until it is too
late. I ask no indulgence for calling attention to the case of
Prohibition. Fundamentalism, it may be, is sneaking upon the nation in
the same disarming way. The cities laugh at the yokels, but meanwhile
the politicians take careful notice; such mountebanks as Peay of
Tennessee and Blease of South Carolina have already issued their
preliminary whoops. As the tide rolls up the pastors will attain to
greater and greater consequence. Already, indeed, they swell visibly
in power and pretension. The Klan, in its earlier days, kept them
discreetly under cover; they labored valiantly in the hold, but only
lay go-getters were seen upon the bridge. But now they are everywhere
on public display, leading the anthropoid host. The curious thing is
that their activity gets little if any attention from the established
publicists. Let a lone Red arise to annoy a barroom full of Michigan
lumber-jacks, and at once the fire-alarm sounds and the full military
and naval power of the nation is summoned to put down the outrage.
But how many Americans would the Reds convert to their rubbish, even
supposing them free to spout it on every street-corner? Probably not
enough, all told, to make a day’s hunting for a regiment of militia.
The American moron’s mind simply does not run in that direction; he
wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights.
But the stuff that the Baptist and Methodist dervishes have on tap
is very much to his taste; he gulps it eagerly and rubs his tummy. I
suggest that it might be well to make a scientific inquiry into the
nature of it. The existing agencies of sociological snooting seem
to be busy in other directions. There are elaborate surveys of some
of the large cities, showing how much it costs to teach a child the
principles of Americanism, how often the average citizen falls into
the hands of the cops, how many detective stories are taken out of the
city library daily, and how many children a normal Polish woman has
every year. Why not a survey of the rustic areas, where men are he and
God still reigns? Why not an attempt to find out just what the Baptist
dominies have drilled into the heads of the Tennesseeans, Arkansans
and Nebraskans? It would be amusing, and it would be instructive. And
useful. For it is well, in such matters, to see clearly what is ahead.
The United States grows increasingly urban, but its ideas are still
hatched in the little towns. What the swineherds credit to-day is
whooped to-morrow by their agents and attorneys in Congress, and then
comes upon the cities suddenly, with all the force of law. Where do the
swineherds get it? Mainly from the only publicists and metaphysicians
they know: the gentlemen of the sacred faculty. It was not the bawling
of the mountebank Bryan, but the sermon of a mountain Bossuet that laid
the train of the Scopes case and made a whole State forever ridiculous.
I suggest looking more carefully into the notions that such ignoramuses
spout.

Meanwhile, what is the effect of all this upon the Protestant who
retains some measure of sanity, the moderate and peaceable fellow--him
called by William Graham Sumner the Forgotten Man? He is silent while
the bombs burst and the stink bombs go off, but what is he thinking?
I believe that he is thinking strange and dreadful thoughts--thoughts
that would have frozen his own spine a dozen years ago. He is thinking,
_imprimis_, that there must be something in this evolution heresy after
all, else Methodist bishops and other such bristling foes to sense
would not be so frantically against it. And he is thinking, secondly,
that perhaps a civilized man, in the last analysis, would not be worse
off if Sherman’s march were repeated by the Papal Guard. Between these
two thoughts American Protestantism is being squeezed, so to speak, to
death.




VIII. FROM THE FILES OF A BOOK REVIEWER


1

_Counter-Offensive_

  IS IT GOD’S WORD? by Joseph Wheless. New York: _Alfred A. Knopf_.
  [The American Mercury, May, 1926.]

The author of this book, who is an associate editor of the _American
Bar Association Journal_, was trained as a lawyer, but that training,
somewhat surprisingly, seems to have left his logical powers
unimpaired, and with them his capacity for differentiating between
facts and mere appearances. There is no hint of the usual evasions and
obfuscations of the advocate in his pages. His business is to examine
calmly the authority and plausibility of Holy Writ, both as history
and as revelation of the Omnipotent Will, and to that business he
brings an immense and meticulous knowledge, an exact and unfailing
judicial sense, and a skill at orderly exposition which is quite
extraordinary. There is no vaporing of the orthodox exegetes that
he is not familiar with, and none that he fails to refute, simply
and devastatingly. Nine-tenths of his evidence he takes out of the
mouths of his opponents. Patiently, mercilessly, irresistibly, he
subjects it to logical analysis, and when he is done at last--his
book runs to 494 pages of fine print--there is little left of the two
Testaments save a farrago of palpable nonsense, swathed, to be sure,
in very lovely poetry. He exposes all their gross and preposterous
contradictions, their violations of common sense and common decency,
their grotesque collisions with the known and indubitable facts, their
petty tergiversations and fraudulences. He goes behind the mellifluous
rhetoric of the King James Version to the harsh balderdash of the
originals, and brings it out into the horrible light of day. He exposes
the prophecies that have failed to come off. He exhibits the conflicts
of romantic and unreliable witnesses, most of them with something to
sell. He tracks down ideas to their barbaric sources. He concocts an
almost endless series of logical dilemmas. And he does it all with good
manners, never pausing to rant and nowhere going beyond the strict
letter of the record.

Obviously, there is room and need for such a book, and it deserves
to be widely read. For in the America of to-day, after a time of
quiescence, the old conflict between religion and science has been
resumed with great ferocity, and the partisans of the former, not
content with denouncing all free inquiry as evil, have now undertaken
to make it downright unlawful. Worse, they show signs of succeeding.
And why? Chiefly, it seems to me, because the cause of their opponents
has been badly handled--above all, because it has lacked vigorous
_offensive_ leadership. Even the defense is largely an abject running
away. We are assured with pious snuffling that there is actually no
conflict, that the domains of science and religion do not overlap, that
it is quite possible for a man to be a scientist (even a biologist!)
and yet believe that Jonah swallowed the whale. No wonder the whoopers
for Genesis take courage, and lay on with glad, _sforzando_ shouts.
At one stroke they are lifted to parity with their opponents, nay, to
superiority. The bilge they believe in becomes something sacrosanct;
its manifest absurdities are not mentioned, and hence tend to pass
unnoticed. But meanwhile they are quite free to belabor science with
their whole armamentarium of imbecilities. Every cross-roads Baptist
preacher becomes an authority upon its errors, and is heard gravely. In
brief, science exposes itself to be shot at, but agrees not to shoot
back. It would be difficult to imagine any strategy more idiotic.

Or to imagine a Huxley adopting it. Huxley, in his day, followed a far
different plan. When the Gladstones, Bishop Wilberforces and other such
obscurantists denounced the new biology, he did not waste any time upon
conciliatory politeness. Instead, he made a bold and headlong attack
upon Christian theology--an attack so vigorous and so skillful that the
enemy was soon in ignominious flight. Huxley knew the first principle
of war: he knew that a hearty offensive is worth a hundred defensives.
How well he succeeded is shown by the fact that even to-day, with
theology once more on the prowl and the very elements of science under
heavy attack, some of the gaudiest of the ancient theological notions
are not heard of. Huxley disposed of them completely; even in Darkest
Tennessee the yokels no longer give them credit. But if the Robert
Andrews Millikans and other such amiable bunglers continue to boss
the scientific camp you may be sure that all these exploded myths and
superstitions will be revived, and that the mob will once more embrace
them. For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what
is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient
to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce
the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that
it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it
and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it--to admit
this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion
inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and
without excuse.

It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science
and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable.
No one knows Who created the visible universe, and it is infinitely
improbable that anything properly describable as evidence on the point
will ever be discovered. No one knows what motives or intentions, if
any, lie behind what we call natural laws. No one knows why man has
his present form. No one knows why sin and suffering were sent into
this world--that is, why the fashioning of man was so badly botched.
Naturally enough, all these problems have engaged the interest of
humanity since the remotest days, and in every age, with every sort
of evidence completely lacking, men of speculative mind have sought
to frame plausible solutions. Some of them, more bold than the rest,
have pretended that their solutions were revealed to them by God,
and multitudes have believed them. But no man of science believes
them. He doesn’t say positively that they are wrong; he simply says
that there is no proof that they are right. If he admitted, without
proof, that they are right, he would not be a man of science. In his
view all such theories and speculations stand upon a common level.
In the most ambitious soarings of a Christian theologian he can find
nothing that differs in any essential way from the obvious hocus-pocus
of a medicine man in the jungle. Superficially, of course, the two
stand far apart. The Christian theologian, confined like all the
rest to the unknowable, has to be more careful than the medicine man,
for in Christendom the unknowable covers a far less extensive field
than in the jungle. Christian theology is thus, in a sense, more
reasonable than voodooism. But it is not more reasonable because its
professors know more than the voodoo-man about the unknowable; it is
more reasonable simply because they are under a far more rigorous and
enlightened scrutiny, and run a risk of being hauled up sharply every
time they venture too near the borders of the known.

This business of hauling them up is one of the principal functions of
science. Its prompt execution is the gauge of a high and progressive
civilization. So long as theologians keep within their proper bounds,
science has no quarrel with them, for it is no more able to prove that
they are wrong than they themselves are able to prove that they are
right. But human experience shows that they never keep within their
proper bounds voluntarily; they are always bulging over the line, and
making a great uproar over things that they know nothing about. Such
an uproar is going on in the United States at the present moment.
Hordes of theologians come marching down from the Southern mountains,
declaring raucously that God created the universe during a certain
single week of the year 4004 B. C., and demanding that all persons
who presume to doubt it be handed over to the secular arm. Here,
obviously, science cannot suffer them gladly, nor even patiently. Their
proposition is a statement of scientific fact; it may be examined and
tested like any other statement of scientific fact. So examined and
tested, it turns out to be wholly without evidential support. All the
known evidence, indeed, is against it, and overwhelmingly. No man
who knows the facts--that is, no man with any claim to scientific
equipment--is in any doubt about that. He disbelieves it as thoroughly
as he believes that the earth moves ’round the sun. Disbelieving it, it
is his professional duty, his first obligation of professional honor,
to attack and refute those who uphold it. Above all, it is his duty to
attack the false evidence upon which they base their case.

Thus an actual conflict is joined, and it is the height of absurdity
for the Millikans and other such compromisers to seek to evade it
with soft words. That conflict was not begun by science. It did not
start with an invasion of the proper field of theological speculation
by scientific raiders. It started with an invasion of the field of
science by theological raiders. Now that it is on, it must be pressed
vigorously from the scientific side, and without any flabby tenderness
for theological susceptibilities. A defensive war is not enough;
there must be a forthright onslaught upon the theological citadel,
and every effort must be made to knock it down. For so long as it
remains a stronghold, there will be no security for sound sense
among us, and little for common decency. So long as it may be used
as a recruiting-station and rallying-point for the rabble, science
will have to submit to incessant forays, and the same forays will be
directed against every sort of rational religion. The latter danger
is not unobserved by the more enlightened theologians. They are well
aware that, facing the Fundamentalists, they must either destroy or be
destroyed. It is to be hoped that the men of science will perceive the
same plain fact, and so give over their vain effort to stay the enemy
with weasel words.


2

_Heretics_

  ALTGELD OF ILLINOIS, by Waldo R. Browne, New York: _B. W. Huebsch_.
  THE LAST OF THE HERETICS, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. New York:
  _Alfred A. Knopf_. [The American Mercury, October, 1924.]

When I was a boy, in the early nineties of the last century, the
reigning hobgoblin of the United States was John P. Altgeld, Governor
of Illinois. From this distance the ill-fame that played about him
seems almost fabulous. He was a sort of horrendous combination of
Trotsky and Raisuli, Darwin and the German Crown Prince, Jesse James
and Oscar Wilde, with overtones of Wayne B. Wheeler and the McNamara
brothers. We have had, in these later years, no such communal devil.
The La Follette of 1917 was a popular favorite compared to him; the
Debs of the same time was a spoiled darling. What I gathered from
my elders, in the awful years of adolescence, when my voice began
to break and vibrissæ sprouted on my lip, was that Altgeld was a
shameless advocate of rapine and assassination, an enemy alike to
the Constitution and the Ten Commandments--in short, a bloody and
insatiable anarchist. I was thus bred to fear him even more than I
feared the anonymous scoundrels who had stolen Charlie Ross. When I
dreamed, it was of catching him in some public place and cutting off
his head, to the applause of the multitude.

The elders that I have mentioned were mainly business men, with a few
_Gelehrte_ thrown in. I learned later on, by hard experience, that
the opinions of such gentlemen, particularly of public matters and
public men, were not always sound. Nevertheless, I continued to have
a bilious suspicion of the Hon. Mr. Altgeld, and it survived even the
discovery, made much later, that men who had actually known him--for
example, Theodore Dreiser--regarded him very highly. I remember very
well how shocked I was when Dreiser made me privy to this fact. It
made a dent, I suppose, in my old view, but it surely did not dispose
of it altogether. I continued to believe that Altgeld, though perhaps
not an anarchist, as alleged, was at least a blathering Socialist, and
hence deserving of a few prophylactic kicks in the pantaloons. I was
far gone in my forties before ever I got at the truth. Then I found
it in this modest book of Mr. Browne’s--a volume that is dreadfully
written, but extremely illuminating. That truth may be put very simply.
Altgeld was not an anarchist, nor was he a Socialist: he was simply
a sentimentalist. His error consisted in taking the college yells of
democracy seriously.

I do not go into the evidence, but refer you to the book. It is very
completely documented, and it leaves little room for doubt, despite Mr.
Browne’s obvious prejudice in favor of some of Altgeld’s more dubious
ideas, especially the idea of government ownership. On the main points
his argument is quite beyond cavil. Did Altgeld pardon the Chicago
anarchists? Then it was simply because they had been railroaded to
jail on evidence that should have made the very judge on the bench
guffaw--as men are still railroaded in California to-day. Did he
protest against Cleveland’s invasion of Chicago with Federal troops
at the time of the Pullman strike? Then it was because he knew only
too well how little they were needed--and what sinister influences had
cajoled poor old Grover into sending them. In brief, Altgeld was one
of the first public men in America to protest by word and act against
government by usurers and their bashi-bazouks--the first open and
avowed advocate of the Bill of Rights since Jackson’s time. A romantic
fellow, and a firm believer in the virtues of the common people,
he couldn’t rid himself of the delusion that they would follow him
here--that after the yell of rage there would come a resounding cheer.
That belief gradually degenerated into a hope, but I doubt that it ever
disappeared altogether. The common people met it by turning Altgeld out
of office, swiftly and ignominiously. After they had got rid of him as
Governor of Illinois, they even rejected him as mayor of Chicago. His
experience taught him a lesson, but like that of the Aframerican on the
gallows, it came too late.

What lesson is in his career for the rest of us? The lesson, it seems
to me, that any man who devotes himself to justice and common decency,
under democracy, is a very foolish fellow--that the generality of men
have no genuine respect for these things, and are always suspicious of
the man who upholds them. Their public relations, like their private
relations, are marked by the qualities that mark the inferior man at
all times and everywhere: cowardice, stupidity and cruelty. They are
in favor of whoever is wielding the whip, even when their own hides
must bear the blows. How easy it was to turn the morons of the American
Legion upon their fellow-slaves! How heroically they voted for
Harding, and then for Coolidge after him--and so helped to put down the
Reds! Dog eats dog, world without end. In the Pullman strike at least
half the labor unions of the United States were against the strikers,
as they were against the more recent steel strikers, and helped to beat
them. Altgeld battled for the under dog all his life--and the under
dog bit him in the end. A pathetic career, but not without its touches
of sardonic comedy. Altgeld, in error at bottom, was often also in
error on the surface, and not infrequently somewhat grotesquely. He
succumbed to the free silver mania. He supported Bryan--nay more, he
may be said to have discovered and made Bryan. It is fortunate for him
that he was dead and in hell by 1902, and so not forced to contemplate
the later states of his handiwork. He was excessively romantic, but
certainly no ignoramus. Imagine him listening to one of good Jennings’
harangues against the elements of biology! Such men, indeed, are always
happier dead. This world, and especially this Republic, is no place for
idealists.

Another proof of it is offered by the career of Dr. Crapsey, whose
trial for heresy entertained the damned in 1906. He is still alive as
I write, and still full of steam. But I doubt that he is as sure as
he used to be that common sense and common honesty pay. Many of the
frauds who drove him out of the church, though they knew that he was
right, are bishops to-day, and licensed to bind and loose. Others have
been called by God, and sit upon His right hand. The church itself, as
it has grown more sordid and swinish, has only grown more prosperous.
In New York City its income approaches that of the bootleggers and it
is almost as well regarded. Every new profiteer, even before he tries
to horn into the Piping Rock Club, subscribes to its articles. It is
robbing the Church of Christ Scientist of all the rich Jews; they are
having their sons baptized in its fonts and christened Llewellyn,
Seymour and Murray. Certainly it would be difficult to imagine a more
gloriously going concern. The rising spires of its steel and concrete
cathedrals begin to bulge the floor of heaven; its clergy are sleek,
fat and well-oiled; its bishops come next in precedence after movie
stars and members of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. Lately it
threw out another heretic--like Dr. Crapsey, one accused of putting the
Sermon on the Mount above the conflicting genealogies of the Preacher.
As for Crapsey himself, he has naught to console him in his old age
save the thought that hell will at least be warm.

His book is extremely amusing and instructive. Like Altgeld, he
confesses to foreign and poisonous blood. The _Stammvater_ of the
American Crapseii was a fellow named Kropps, apparently a Hessian.
But his great-great grandson, the father of the heretic, married the
daughter of a United States Senator, and so there is some amelioration
of the horror. Like Altgeld again, Crapsey went to the Civil War as a
boy scarcely out of knee breeches. Altgeld was so poor that he gladly
took the $100 offered by a patriot who had been drafted and wanted a
substitute; Crapsey volunteered. Both succumbed to camp fevers and were
discharged. Both then took to Service among the downtrodden, Altgeld in
politics and the law, and Crapsey in one of the outlying hereditaments
of Trinity parish. Both were safe so long as they appeared to be
fraudulent; the moment they began to show genuine belief in their
doctrines they found themselves in difficulties. So Altgeld became the
favorite hobgoblin of the Republic and Crapsey became its blackest
heretic.


3

_The Grove of Academe_

  THE GOOSE-STEP, by Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, Calif.: _Published by
  the Author_. [The Smart Set, May, 1923.]

The doctrine preached in this fat volume--to wit, that the American
colleges and universities, with precious few exceptions, are run by
stock-jobbers and manned by intellectual prostitutes--this doctrine
will certain give no fillip of surprise to steady readers of my
critical compositions. I have, in fact, maintained it steadily since
the earliest dawn of the present marvelous century, and to the
support of it I have brought forward an immense mass of glittering
and irrefragable facts and a powerful stream of eloquence. Nor have
I engaged in this moral enterprise _a cappella_. A great many other
practitioners have devoted themselves to it with equal assiduity,
including not a few reformed and conscience-stricken professors, and
the net result of that united effort is that the old assumption of
the pedagogue’s _bona fides_ is now in decay throughout the Republic.
In whole departments of human knowledge he has become suspect, as it
were, _ex officio_. I nominate, for example, the departments of history
and of what is commonly called English language and literature. If a
professor in the first field shows ordinary honesty, or, in the second
field, ordinary sense, it is now regarded as a sort of marvel, and with
sound reason. Barring a scant dozen extraordinary men, no American
professor of history has written anything worth reading since the year
1917; nearly all the genuine history published in the United States
since then has come from laymen, or from professors who have ceased to
profess. And so in the domain of the national letters. The professors,
with a few exceptions, mainly belated rice-converts, are unanimously
and furiously consecrated to vain attacks upon the literature that
is in being. Either, like the paleozoic Beers, of Yale, they refuse
to read it and deny that it exists, or, like the patriotic Matthews,
of Columbia, they seek to put it down by launching Ku Klux anathemas
against it. The net result is that the professorial caste, as a
whole, loses all its old dignity and influence. In universities large
and small, East, West, North and South, the very sophomores rise in
rebellion against the incompetence and imbecility of their preceptors,
and in the newspapers the professor slides down gradually to the level
of a chiropractor, a press-agent or a Congressman.

Thus there is nothing novel in the thesis of Dr. Sinclair’s book,
which deals, in brief, with the internal organization of the American
universities, and their abject subjection to the Money Power, which
is to say, to Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club concepts of truth,
liberty and honor. But there is something new, and very refreshing,
in the manner of it, for the learned author, for the first time,
manages to tell a long and dramatic story without intruding his private
grievances into it. Sinclair’s worst weakness, next to his vociferous
appetite for Remedies that never cure, is his naïve and almost actorial
vanity. As everyone knows, it botched “The Brass Check.” So much of
that book was given over to a humorless account of his own combats with
yellow journals--which, in the main, did nothing worse to him than
laugh at him when he was foolish--that he left untold a great deal that
might have been said, and with perfect justice and accuracy, about the
venality and swinishness of American newspapers. In “The Profits of
Religion” he wobbled almost as badly; the subject, no doubt, was much
too vast for a single volume; the Methodists and Baptists alone, to say
nothing of Holy Church, deserved a whole shelf. But in “The Goose-Step”
he tells a straightforward story in a straightforward manner--simply,
good-humoredly and convincingly. When he comes into the narrative
himself, which is not often, he leaves off his customary martyr’s
chemise. There is no complaining, no pathos, no mouthing of platitude;
it is a plain record of plain facts, with names and dates--a plain
record of truly appalling cowardice, disingenuousness, abjectness, and
degradation. Out of it two brilliant figures emerge: first the typical
American university president, a jenkins to wealth, an ignominious
waiter in antechambers and puller of wires, a politician, a fraud and
a cad; and secondly, the typical American professor, a puerile and
pitiable slave.

Such are the common and customary bearers of the torch in the Republic.
Such is the usual machinery and inner nature of the higher learning
among us. Its aim, briefly stated, is almost indistinguishable from
the aim of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and Kiwanis. The
thing it combats most ardently is not ignorance, but free inquiry;
it is devoted to forcing the whole youth of the land into one rigid
mold. Its ideal product is a young man who is absolutely correct
in all his ideas--a perfect reader for the _Literary Digest_, the
_American Magazine_, and the editorial page of the New York _Times_.
To achieve this end Big Business has endowed it with unprecedented
liberality; there are single American universities with more invested
wealth and more income than all the universities of Germany, France
or England taken together. But in order to get that ocean of money,
and to pay for the piles of pseudo-Gothic that now arise all over the
land, scholarship in America has had to sacrifice free inquiry to
the prejudices and private interests of its masters--the search for
the truth has had to be subordinated to the safeguarding of railway
bonds and electric light stocks. As Sinclair shows, there is scarcely
a university in the United States, whether maintained out of the
public funds or privately endowed, that is not run absolutely, in all
departments, by precisely the same men who run the street railways,
the banks, the rolling-mills, the coal mines and the factories of the
country--in brief, by men who have no more respect for scholarship than
an ice-wagon driver has for beautiful letters. There is scarcely an
American university or college in which the scholars who constitute it
have any effective control over its general policies and enterprises,
or even over the conduct of their own departments. In almost every one
there is some unspeakable stockbroker, or bank director, or railway
looter who, if the spirit moved him, would be perfectly free to hound a
Huxley, a Karl Ludwig or a Jowett from the faculty, and even to prevent
him getting a seemly berth elsewhere. It is not only possible; it has
been done, and not once, but scores and hundreds of times.

Sinclair is content to set forth the basic facts; his book, as it
is, is very long; he neglects laboring all of the deductions and
implications that flow from his thesis, some of them obvious enough.
One of them is this: that the control of the universities by Mr.
Babbitt is making it increasingly difficult to induce intelligent
and self-respecting young men to embrace the birchman’s career, and
that the personnel of the teaching staffs thus tends to decline in
competence, steadily and sharply. This accounts, in large measure, for
the collapse of the old public influence of the scholar in America; he
begins to be derided simply because he is no longer the dignified man
that he once was. In certain departments, of no immediate interest to
trustees and contributors, a certain show of freedom, of course, still
prevails. What is taught in astronomy, or paleontology, or Greek cannot
menace the nail manufacturer on the board, and so he does not issue
any orders about it, nor does his agent, the university president.
But what is taught in economics, or modern history, or “education,” or
sociology, or even literature, involves a dealing with ideas that are
apt to hit him where he lives, and so he keeps a wary eye upon those
departments, and at the slightest show of heresy he takes measures to
protect himself. It is in these regions, consequently, that conformity
is most comfortable, and that professional character is most lamentably
in decay. Even here, to be sure, a few stout-hearted survivors of an
earlier day hold out, but they are surely not many, and they will have
no successors. The professor of to-morrow, in all departments that have
to do with life as men are now living it in the world, will either
be a scholastic goose-stepper or he will be out of a job. The screws
are tightening every year. In the past the Babbitts have contented
themselves with farming out the management of their intellectual
brothels to extra-plaint professors, but now they begin to turn to yet
more reliable men: army officers, lame-duck politicians, and engineers.
The time will come, no doubt, when the president of Columbia will be
just as frankly a partner in J. P. Morgan & Company as the head of the
Red Cross or the chief vestryman of Trinity Church.

How far will this debauching of education go? Will the universities
sink eventually to the level of the public-schools of such barbarous
States as Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi? Here education has been
reduced to a bald device for multiplying Shriners, Knights of Pythias
and Rotarians--in brief, ignoramuses. In the institutions of higher
learning one may reasonably look for some resistance to the process,
soon or late. I doubt, however, that it will come from the professors;
they are already too much cowed and demoralized, as Sinclair shows
abundantly. The American Association of University Professors, an
organization formed to protect pedagogues against wanton attack by the
Babbitts, numbers but 5000 members; the remaining 195,000 American
professors are either afraid to join, or already too much battered
to want to. How far their degradation has gone was made visible
during the late war, when all save an infinitesimal minority of them
yielded to the most extravagant manias of the time and thousands gave
astounding exhibitions of moronic sadism. The Neandertal qualities
thus awakened are still visible in many directions; in the Southern
States, I am informed by an exceptional professor, fully five-sixths
of his colleagues became charter members of the Ku Klux Klan. It is
hopeless to look for a _Freiheitskrieg_ among such poor serfs. But
the students remain, and in them lies some promise for the future.
The American university student, in the past, has been a victim of
the same process of leveling that destroyed his teacher. He has been
taught conformity, obedience, the social and intellectual goose-step;
the ideal held before him has been the ideal of correctness. But that
ideal, it must be plain, is not natural to youth. Youth is aspiring,
rebellious, inquisitive, iconoclastic, a bit romantic. All over the
country the fact is bursting through the chains of repression. In
scores of far-flung colleges the students have begun to challenge
their professors, often very harshly. After a while, they may begin
to challenge the masters of their professors. Not all of them will do
it, and not most of them. But it doesn’t take a majority to make a
rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.


4

_The Schoolma’m’s Goal_

  THE SOCIAL OBJECTIVES OF SCHOOL ENGLISH, by Charles S. Pendleton.
  Nashville, Tenn.: _Published by the Author_. [The American Mercury,
  March, 1925.]

Here, in the form of a large flat book, eight and a half inches wide
and eleven inches tall, is a sight-seeing bus touring the slums of
pedagogy. The author, Dr. Pendleton, professes the teaching of English
(not English, remember, but the teaching of English) at the George
Peabody College for Teachers, an eminent seminary at Nashville, in the
Baptist Holy Land, and his object in the investigation he describes
was, in brief, to find out what the teachers who teach English hope
to accomplish by teaching it. In other words, what, precisely, is the
improvement that they propose to achieve in the pupils exposed to their
art and mystery? Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to
increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to
inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in
the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic or military?

In order to find out, Prof. Pendleton, with true pedagogical diligence,
proceeded to list all the reasons for teaching English that he could
find. Some he got by cross-examining teachers. Others came from
educators of a higher degree and puissance. Yet others he dug out of
the text-books of pedagogy in common use, and the dreadful professional
journals ordinarily read by teachers. Finally, he threw in some from
miscellaneous sources, including his own inner consciousness. In all,
he accumulated 1581 such reasons, or, as he calls them, objectives,
and then he sat down and laboriously copied them upon 1581 very thin
3×5 cards, one to a card. Some of these cards were buff in color, some
were blue, some were yellow, some were pink, and some were green. On
the blue cards he copied all the objectives relating to the employment
of English in conversation, on the yellow cards all those dealing with
its use in literary composition, on the green cards all those having to
do with speech-making, and so on. Then he shook up the cards, summoned
eighty professional teachers of English, and asked them to sort out the
objectives in the order of appositeness and merit. The results of this
laborious sorting he now sets before the learned.

Don’t be impatient! I won’t keep you waiting. Here is the objective
that got the most votes--the champion of the whole 1581:

  The ability to spell correctly without hesitation all the ordinary
  words of one’s writing vocabulary.

Here is the runner-up:

  The ability to speak, in conversation, in complete sentences, not in
  broken phrases.

And here is No. 7:

  The ability to capitalize speedily and accurately in one’s writing.

And here is No. 9:

  The ability to think quickly in an emergency.

And here are some more, all within the first hundred:

  The ability to refrain from marking or marring in any way a borrowed
  book.

  An attitude of democracy rather than snobbishness within a
  conversation.

  Familiarity with the essential stories and persons of the Bible.

And some from the second hundred:

  The ability to sing through--words and music--the national anthem.

  The ability courteously and effectively to receive orders from a
  superior.

  The avoidance of vulgarity and profanity in one’s public speaking.

  The ability to read silently without lip movements.

  The habit of placing the page one is reading so that there will not
  be shadows upon it.

  The ability to refrain from conversation under conditions where it is
  annoying or disagreeable to others.

  The ability to converse intelligently about municipal and district
  civic matters.

  The ability to comprehend accurately the meaning of all common
  abbreviations and signs one meets with in reading.

  The ability, during one’s reading, to distinguish between an author’s
  central theme and his incidental remarks.

I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among
the first 200 objectives--200 out of 1581. Nor do I choose them
unfairly; most of those that I have not listed were quite as bad as
those I have. But, you may protest, the good professor handed his cards
to a jury of little girls of eight or nine years, or to the inmates
of a home for the feeble-minded! He did, in fact, nothing of the
kind. His jury was very carefully selected. It consisted of eighty
teachers of such professional keenness that they were assembled at the
University of Chicago for post-graduate study. Every one of them had
been through either a college or a normal school; forty-seven of them
held learned degrees; all of them had been engaged professionally in
teaching English, some for years. They came from Michigan, Nebraska,
Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Toronto, Leland Stanford, Chicago and
Northwestern Universities; from Oberlin, De Pauw, Goucher, Beloit and
Drake Colleges; from a dozen lesser seminaries of the higher learning.
They represented, not the lowest level of teachers of English in the
Republic, but the highest level. And yet it was their verdict by a
solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was
to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good
capitalizers!

I present Dr. Pendleton’s laborious work as overwhelming proof of a
thesis that I have maintained for years, perhaps sometimes with undue
heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the
estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among
pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful
to think that the young American species are exposed day in and day
out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of
education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How
can morons teach anything that is worth knowing? Here and there, true
enough, a competent teacher of English is encountered. I could name
at least twenty in the whole country. But it does not appear that Dr.
Pendleton, among his eighty, found even one. There is not the lightest
glimmer of intelligence in all the appalling tables of statistics
and black, zig-zag graphs that he has so painfully amassed. Nor any
apparent capacity for learning. The sound thing, the sane thing and the
humane thing to do with his pathetic herd of A. B.’s would be to take
them out in the alley and knock them in the head.


5

_The Heroic Age_

  JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON, by Claude G. Bowers. Boston: _The Houghton
  Mifflin Company_. JEFFERSON AND MONTICELLO, by Paul Wilstach. Garden
  City, L. I.: _Doubleday, Page & Company_. CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN
  ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1812-1826, selected by Paul Wilstach.
  Indianapolis: _The Bobbs-Merrill Company_. [The American Mercury,
  March, 1926.]

Jefferson, in one of his last letters to Adams, dated March 25,
1826, spoke of the time when both came into fame as the heroic age.
The phrase was certainly not mere rhetoric. The two men differed
enormously, both in their personalities and in their ideas--perhaps
quite as much as Jefferson differed from Hamilton or Adams from his
cousin Sam--but in one thing at least they were exactly alike: they
were men of complete integrity. As Frederick the Great said of the
Prussian _Junker_, one could not buy them, and they would not lie. The
fact, at times, made them bitter enemies, and the virtues of the one
were cancelled by the virtues of the other, to the damage of their
common country. But when they stood together, they were irresistible,
for complete integrity, when it does not spend itself against itself,
is always irresistible--one of the few facts, to me known, that is
creditable to the human race. The masses of men, like children, are
easily deceived, but in the long run, like children again, they show
a tendency to yield to character. Bit by bit it conquers them. They
see in it all the high values that they are incapable of reaching
themselves. They see the courage that they lack, and the honesty that
they lack, and the resolution that they lack. All these things were in
both Adams and Jefferson. They fell, in their day, into follies, but
I don’t think that anyone believes they were ever _pushed_ into them.
Adams, no doubt, could be bamboozled, but neither he nor Jefferson
could be scared.

I fear that the gallant iconoclasts who revise our history-books
sometimes forget all this. Engaged upon the destruction of legends,
all of them maudlin and many of them downright insane, they also, at
times, do damage to facts. One of these facts, it seems to me, ought
not to be forgotten, to wit, that it took a great deal of courage, in
the Summer of 1776, to sign Jefferson’s celebrated exercise in colonial
Johnsonese. There were ropes dangling in the air, and they were
uncomfortably near. There were wives and children to be considered, and
very agreeable estates. However dubious their primary motives, the men
who signed took a long chance, quietly, simply, and with their faces
to the front. How many of their successors in our own time have ever
followed their example? I find it hard to think of one. The politician
of to-day lacks their courage altogether; he lacks their incorruptible
integrity. He is a complete coward. The whip of the Anti-Saloon League
is enough to make him leap and tremble; the shadow of the rope would
paralyze him with terror. He is for sale to anyone who has anything
valuable to offer him, and the day after he has sold out to A he is
ready to sell out to A’s enemy, B. His honor is that of a street-walker.

So far we have progressed along the highroad of democracy. The
gentleman survives in our politics only as an anachronism; his day is
done. Mr. Bowers, in “Hamilton and Jefferson,” traces the beginning of
the decline; Mr. Wilstach, in the volume of Adams-Jefferson letters,
shows it in full tide. Both authors are partial to Jefferson, and
present charming portraits of him, especially Mr. Wilstach, in his
other book, “Jefferson at Monticello.” It seems to me that they often
confuse the man and his ideas, especially Mr. Bowers. Jefferson was
unquestionably one of our giants. There was more in his head than
there has been in the heads of all the Presidents in office since he
went out. He was a man of immense intellectual curiosity, profound
originality, and great daring. His integrity was of Doric massiveness.
But was he always right? I don’t think many reflective Americans
of to-day would argue that he was. Confronting enemies of great
resourcefulness and resolute determination, he was forced, bit by bit,
into giving his democratic doctrine a sweep and scope that took it
far beyond the solid facts. It became a religious dogma rather than a
political theory. Once he was gone, it fell into the hands of vastly
inferior men, and soon it had reached its _reductio ad absurdum_.
Jefferson died in 1826. By 1829, when Jackson came in, it was a
nuisance; by 1837, when he went out, it was a joke.

Jefferson’s enthusiasm blinded him to the fact that the liberty to
which he had consecrated the high days of his early manhood was a
two-headed boon. There was, first, the liberty of the people as a whole
to determine the forms of their own government, levy their own taxes,
and make their own laws--in brief, freedom from the despotism of the
King. There was, second, the liberty of the individual man to live his
own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased--in
brief, freedom from the despotism of the majority. Hamilton was as much
in favor of the first kind of liberty as Jefferson: he made, in fact,
even greater sacrifices for it. But he saw that it was worth nothing
without the second kind--that it might easily become worth less than
nothing, for the King, whatever his oppressions _en gros_, at least
gave some protection to the isolated subject. Monarchy might be the
protector of liberty as well as the foe of liberty. It had been so,
in fact, in the Prussia of Frederick. And democracy might be far more
the foe than the protector. It was obviously so in the France of the
Reign of Terror. Hamilton, a hard-headed man, given to figures rather
than to theories, saw all this; Jefferson, a doctrinaire, even in his
best moments, saw only half of it. That failure to see together was at
the bottom of their difference--and their difference came very near
wrecking the United States. Burr’s bullet probably prevented a colossal
disaster. But it also opened the way for troubles in the years to come.
We are in the midst of them yet, and we are by no means near the end of
them.

The shadow of Jeffersonism, indeed, is still over us. We are still
bound idiotically by the battle-cries of a struggle that was over more
than a century ago. We have got the half of liberty, but the other half
is yet to be wrested from the implacable fates, and there seems little
likelihood that it will be wrested soon. All the fears of Hamilton have
come to realization--and some of the fears of Jefferson to fill the
measure. Minorities among us have no rights that the majority is bound
to respect; they are dragooned and oppressed in a way that would make
an oriental despot blush. Yet behind the majority, often defectively
concealed, there is always a sinister minority, eager only for its own
advantage and willing to adopt any device, however outrageous, to get
what it wants. We have a puppet in the White House, pulled by wires,
but with dangerous weapons in its hands. Law Enforcement becomes the
new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can hornswoggle
B, C, D, E and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying, by bluff and
bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound to yield it
respect--nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To question it is
to sin against the Holy Ghost.

I wonder what Jefferson would think if he could come out of his tomb
and examine the Republic that he helped to fashion. He was a man
of towering enthusiasms, but he was also sharply intelligent: he
knew an accomplished fact when he saw one. My guess is that, at the
first Jefferson Day dinner following his emergence, he would make a
startling and scandalous speech.


6

_The Woes of a 100% American_

  THE NEW BARBARIANS, by Wilbur C. Abbott. Boston: _Little, Brown &
  Company_. [The American Mercury, May, 1925.]

It would be easy to poke fun at this disorderly and indignant tract;
even, perhaps, to denounce the learned author, in a lofty manner, as
a mere jackass. His argument, at more than one place, is so shaky
that it tempts ribaldry with a powerful lure, almost a suction. His
premisses are often gratuitous and absurd; his conclusions are often
fantastic. Worse, he argues in circles, and it is frequently hard to
make out what he is advocating, and why. Worst of all, the urbanity
suitable to a learned gentleman resident in Sparks street, Cambridge,
Mass., sometimes yields to a libido far more suitable to an auctioneer,
a Federal district attorney or a Methodist bishop, and he rants
dreadfully. But against all this there is yet something to be said, and
that something, I think, is sufficient to stay the impulse to have at
him brutally, either with cackles or with invective. It is, in brief,
this: that what he inveighs against, given his natural and laudable
prejudices, is plentifully sufficient to excuse all his indignation,
and all his incoherence, and even his occasional departures from the
strict letter of the record--that it is a merit in any man, facing what
he deems to be incubi and succubi, to belabor them in a hearty and
vociferous manner, and without too pedantic a respect for the rules of
evidence. That merit has nothing to do, at bottom, with his rightness
or wrongness; it lies in his mere sincerity. Dr. Abbott is obviously
full of sincerity; no fair reader can doubt it for an instant. But
he has something more: he has under him a respectable body of facts,
sound ones as well as shaky ones. The deductions he draws from them are
often extravagant, and now and then he mingles them with assumptions
that seems to me to do violence to the most elemental common sense.
Nevertheless, his basic facts remain, and if I were an Anglo-Saxon as
he is I suspect that they would fever me as they fever him.

What he complains of, in a few words, is the assault that has been
made of late upon the old American tradition and the fundamental
canons of American idealism, _i. e._, upon the body of ideas that
Americans cherish as peculiarly their own, and believe in with a
romantic devotion. What he complains of, especially, is that this
assault has been made, in the main, by men who are not “Anglo-Saxons”
(the professor himself quotes the term: a touching concession to
ethnological exactness)--that it has been largely led by men whose
very Americanism, when they claim to be Americans at all, is open
to question. When I say open to question, I mean, of course, by
“Anglo-Saxon” Americans. Dr. Abbott seems to be firmly convinced
that these are the only ones entitled to the name. They are the pure
stock; their ancestors conquered the continent unaided. They alone
partake of the true national spirit, and may be trusted to guard the
national hearth. All other Americans are in the position of visitors,
interlopers, relatives-in-law. They may become in time, if they are
good, creditable assistant Americans, but they can no more enter
into the full national heritage, as free equals, than they can lift
themselves by their boot-straps. The American tradition, it appears,
must forever remain a bit strange to them; they are the children, not
of heroes, but of serfs. Thus it is no wonder that their political
notions, when they make bold to state them, are exotic and subversive.
They can imagine government only as a power above and beyond the
citizen. If they are not in favor of kaiserism, then they are in favor
of communism, which is simply kaiserism imposed from below. Their
politics is essentially a slave politics. They stand opposed eternally
to that self-reliant and somewhat pugnacious individualism which is
the mark of the true “Anglo-Saxon.” If they ever come into power the
Constitution will be destroyed and freedom will perish.

Dr. Abbott’s book, as I have said, is somewhat difficult; perhaps
I misrepresent him in a few details. But in the main, I believe, I
gather his doctrine correctly; it is, indeed, a doctrine that has
grown very familiar. The Ku Klux has carried it into every hamlet in
the land, and bolstered it with the authority of Holy Writ. I could,
if I would, amuse myself by exhibiting the holes in it. Is it a fact,
then, that the “Anglo-Saxons” conquered the continent unaided? What
of the Spaniards and French? What of the Dutch and Germans? What of
the Scotch-Irish? Is it a fact that they invented the American scheme
of government? What of Rousseau? Is it a fact that all assaults upon
that scheme have been made by assistant Americans? What of Jefferson,
Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, Bryan? Is it a fact that all the
enemies of the Constitution came from below the salt? What of the
Eighteenth Amendment: does it damage the Bill of Rights more or less
than the late Dr. La Follette’s vaporous schemes? Such questions
suggest themselves in great variety. I could roll them off until you
stood agape. But I have no desire to press a professor of history
unduly; his authority, in the last analysis, cannot be upset by facts.
And in the present case, whatever his errors in detail, it seems to me
to be quite clear that the fundamental facts are on his side. There
_is_ unquestionably a difference between the “Anglo-Saxon” American
and the non-“Anglo-Saxon”--a difference in their primary instincts,
in their reactions to common stimuli, in their ways of looking at the
world. And that difference, of late years, _has_ come to the estate of
a conflict, with the “Anglo-Saxon” striving to keep what he has--his
point of view, his cultural leadership, his political hegemony--and
the non-“Anglo-Saxon” trying to take it away from him. To deny that
conflict is to fall into an absurdity far worse than any Dr. Abbott is
guilty of. To admit it is to admit his clear right, nay, his bounden
duty, to do battle for his side, passionately, desperately, and with
any weapon at hand.

This he does in his book, and up to the limit of his forensic skill,
which, I regret to have to add, is not noticeably great. If, at times,
he grows a bit muddled, and even maudlin, then let us not hold the
fact against him, for a man performing a _pas seul_ upon a red-hot
stove cannot be expected to achieve an impeccable step. It seems to
me that this red-hot stove, at the moment, is under every conscious
“Anglo-Saxon” in our great Republic--that he must be an insensate clod,
indeed, if he does not feel the heat. The cultural leadership of the
country is passing out of his hands, and he is beginning to lose even
his political hegemony. I sat in the Democratic National Convention
in 1924 as the Hon. Al Smith rolled up his votes, and watched the Ku
Kluxers on the floor. They were transfixed with horror: if it was a
comedy, then pulling tonsils is also a comedy. Dr. Abbott mentions
Dreiser. The influence of Dreiser upon the literature of to-morrow in
this land--upon all the youngsters who are now coming to maturity in
the universities, and turning away from their ordained professors--will
be a hundred times as potent as that of any New Englander now alive.
Who is Dreiser? When the grandfathers of the Republic were hanging
witches at Salem his forbears were raising grapes on the Rhine. Dr.
Abbott professes history at Harvard. During the past ten years but one
professor at that great university has materially colored the stream
of ideas in America. He has since escaped abroad--and is a Spaniard.
Every day a new Catholic church goes up; every day another Methodist or
Presbyterian church is turned into a garage. But there is no need to
labor the point. The fact is too obvious that the old easy dominance
of the “Anglo-Saxon” is passing, that he must be up and doing if he
would fasten his notions upon the generations to come. And the fact
is equally obvious that his success in that emprise, so far, has been
extremely indifferent--that, despite the great advantages that he
enjoys, of position, of authority, of ancient right, he is making very
heavy weather of it, and not even holding his own. I am frankly against
him, and believe, as I have often made known, that he is doomed--that
his opponents will turn out, in the long run, to be better men than
he is. But I confess that I’d enjoy the combat more if he showed less
indignation and more skill.

Dr. Abbott himself reveals many characteristic “Anglo-Saxon”
weaknesses. His incoherence I have mentioned. There is also a
downright inconsistency, often glaring. On one page he denounces all
non-“Anglo-Saxons” as opponents of democracy; on another (for example,
page 242) he denounces the fundamental tenets of democracy himself.
This inconsistency is visible in nine “Anglo-Saxon” gladiators out of
ten. What ails them all is that they have to defend democracy, and yet
do not believe in it. Has any good “Anglo-Saxon” ever believed in it?
I sometimes doubt it. Did Washington? Did John Adams? Jefferson did,
but wasn’t there a Celtic strain in him--wasn’t he, after all, somewhat
dubious, a sort of assistant American? In any case, the surviving
Fathers were all apparently against him. In our own time how many
“Anglo-Saxons” of the educated class actually believe in democracy?
I know of none, and have heard of none. The late war revealed their
true faith very brilliantly and even humorously. It was a crusade for
democracy, and yet one of the shining partners was the late Czar of
Russia! The assault upon the Kaiser was led by Roosevelt! The chief
official enemy of absolutism was Wilson! No wonder the whole thing
collapsed into absurdity. Dr. Abbott falls into a similar absurdity
more than once. His book would be vastly more effective if he took all
the idle prattle about democracy out of it, and grounded it upon the
forthright doctrine that the “Anglo-Saxons,” having got here first, own
the country, and have a clear right to impose political disabilities
upon later comers--in other words, if he advocated the setting up of
an “Anglo-Saxon” aristocracy, with high privileges and prerogatives,
eternally beyond the reach of the mongrel commonalty. This, in point
of fact, is what he advocates, however much he may cloud his advocacy
in democratic terms. I call upon him with all solemnity to throw off
his false-face and come out with the bald, harsh doctrine. There is
more logic in it than in his present nonsense; he could preach it more
powerfully and beautifully. More, he would get help from unexpected
quarters. I can speak, of course, only for one spear. I might quibble
and protest, but I’d certainly be sorely tempted.


7

_Yazoo’s Favorite_

  AN OLD-FASHIONED SENATOR, by Harris Dickson. New York: _The Frederick
  A. Stokes Company_. [The Nation, October 14, 1925.]

Some time ago, essaying a literary survey of the Republic, I
animadverted sadly upon the dreadful barrenness of the great State
of Mississippi. Speaking as a magazine editor, I said that I had
never heard of a printable manuscript coming out of it. Speaking as
a frequenter of the Athenian grove, I said that I had never heard
of it hatching an idea. Instantly there was an uproar from Iuka to
Pascagoula. The vernacular press had at me with appalling yells;
there were demands from the Ku Klux that I come down to Jackson and
say it again; Kiwanis joined the Baptist Young People’s Society in
denouncing me as one debauched by Russian gold. Worse, the Mississippi
intelligentsia also had at me. Emerging heroically from the crypts
and spring-houses where they were fugitive from Rotary, they bawled
me out as ignorant and infamous. Had I never heard, they demanded, of
Harris Dickson, the Mississippi Balzac? Had I never heard of John Sharp
Williams, the Mississippi Gladstone?

I had, but remained unmoved. I now continue unmoved after reading
Balzac’s tome on Gladstone. It is, in its small way, a tragic book.
Here, obviously, is the best that Mississippi can do, in theme and
treatment--and it is such puerile, blowsy stuff that reviewing it
realistically would be too cruel. Here the premier literary artist of
Mississippi devotes himself _con amore_ to the life and times of the
premier Mississippi statesman--and the result is a volume so maudlin
and nonsensical that it would disgrace a schoolboy. The book is simply
mush--and out of the mush there emerges only a third-rate politician,
professionally bucolic and as hollow as a jug.

Yet this Williams, during his long years in Congress, passed in
Washington as an intellectual. Cloak-room and barroom gossip credited
him with a profound education and very subtle parts. Such ideas, when
they prevail in Washington, perhaps need and deserve no investigation;
the same astute correspondents who propagated this one later coupled
the preposterous Coolidge with Pericles. But maybe there was some
logic in it, after all; Williams, at some time in the past, had
been to Heidelberg and knew more or less German and French. That
accomplishment, in a Southern politician, was sufficient to set the
capital by the ears. So the Williams legend grew, and toward the end
it rose to the dignity of a myth, like that of Dr. Taft’s eminence as
a constitutional lawyer. Even the learned hero’s daily speeches on
Teutonic mythology during the war did not drag him out of Valhalla
himself. The press-gallery gaped and huzzahed.

But the Heidelberg chapter in Mr. Dickson’s book leaves the myth rather
sick. It starts off, indeed, with a disconcerting couplet:

  In Germany ’twas very clear
  He’d leave the rapiers for beer.

And what follows is distressingly silent about cultural accretions.
Young Williams’ main business at Heidelberg, it appears, was putting
the abominable Prussian _Junker_ in their place. They naturally
assumed that their American fellow-student could be thrown about with
impunity. Encountering him on the sidewalk, they tried, in the manner
made historic by the Creel Press Bureau, to shove him off. Presently
one of these fiends in human form came melodramatically to grief.
Williams challenged him, and “according to Prussian ethics,” named the
weapons--pistols. A shock, indeed! The monster expected sabers, at
which he was diabolically expert, but Williams didn’t intend “to go
home with his face all slashed, and have folks jeer at him for getting
his jaw cut on a beer glass.” Facing cold lead, the Prussian was so
scared that he fired prematurely. Worse, he so lost his wits that he
addressed his antagonist as Freiherr Williams. That antagonist fired
into a snowbank. Some time later, having thus got all that was of
worth out of Heidelberg, he came sailing home, “full even then of his
ultimate intention: he’d go in for politics, he’d become a professional
politician.”

A professional politician he remained for thirty years, always in
office, first in the House and then in the Senate. His start was
slow--he practiced law for a time--, but once he was on the payroll
he stayed there until old age was upon him. For a number of years he
was Democratic leader in the House; twice he got the party vote for
the Speakership. In the Senate he was technically in the ranks, but on
great occasions he stepped forward. His specialties, toward the end,
were the divine inspiration of Woodrow Wilson, the incomparable valor
of the American soldier, the crimes of the Kaiser, the superiority of
the “Anglo-Saxon,” the godlike bellicosity of the Confederate gentry,
and the nature and functions of a gentleman. On these themes he
discoursed almost every afternoon. The boys in the press-gallery liked
him, and he got plenty of space. Always his rodomontades brought forth
dark hints about his esoteric learning, and the news that, next after
Henry Cabot Lodge, he was the most cultivated man in the Senate.

Mr. Dickson prints extracts from some of his speeches. Criticism,
obviously, is an art not yet in practice in Mississippi, even among
the literati. I used to read him in the _Congressional Record_; he
was really not so bad as Dickson makes him out. His career, seen in
retrospect, seems to have been mainly a vacuum. Once or twice he showed
a certain fine dignity, strange in a Southern politician. He opposed
the Prohibition frenzy. He voted against the bonus. But usually,
despite his constant talk of independence, he ran with the party pack.
For years a professional Jeffersonian, he brought his career to a
climax by giving lyrical support to the Emperor Woodrow, who heaved the
Jeffersonian heritage into the ash-can. During the La Follette uproar
he was one of the most vociferous of the witch-burners. He passed out
in silence, regretted for his rustic charm, but not much missed.

I commend “An Old-Fashioned Senator” to all persons who are interested
in the struggle of the South to throw off its cobwebs. Both as document
and as work of art the book makes it very plain why Mississippi’s place
in that struggle is in the last rank.


8

_The Father of Service_

  THE LIFE STORY OF ORISON SWETT MARDEN, by Margaret Connolly. New
  York: _The Thomas Y. Crowell Company_. [The American Mercury,
  February, 1926.]

If Dr. Martin had not written his first book, said Frank A. Munsey
one day, he would have been a millionaire. By Munseyan standards,
praise could go no higher--and Munsey knew his man, for they were
fellow-waiters in a Summer hotel back in the ’70’s and kept up friendly
exchange until Marden’s death in 1924. Both sprang from the hard,
inhospitable soil of Northern New England, both knew dire poverty in
youth, both got somewhere a yearning for literary exercises, and both
cherished an immense respect for the dollar. But though fate brought
them together when they were young, they chose different paths later
on. Munsey, with “Afloat in a Great City,” “The Boy Broker,” and other
inspirational master-works behind him, abandoned beautiful letters
for the stock market, and eventually gathered in so much money that
he could afford to butcher great newspapers in sheer excess of animal
spirits, as lesser men butcher clay pigeons. Marden, going the other
way, abandoned the hotel business, for which he seemed to have had
genius, for the pen, and devoted the last thirty years of his life to
composition.

His bibliography runs to a hundred or more volumes--a colossal,
relentless, overwhelming deluge of bilge. All his books have the
same subject: getting on in the world. That was, to him, the only
conceivable goal of human aspiration. Day in and day out, for three
decades, he preached his simple gospel to all mankind, not only in his
books, but also in countless pamphlets, in lectures, and in the pages
of his magazine, _Success_. Its success was instantaneous and durable.
His first book, “Pushing to the Front,” rapidly went through a dozen
editions, and was presently translated into a dozen foreign languages.
It remained, to the end, his best-seller, but it had many formidable
rivals. Altogether, his writings in book-form must have reached a total
of 20,000,000 copies, including 3,000,000 in twenty-five tongues other
than English. In Germany alone he sold more than 500,000 copies of
thirty volumes. He remains to-day the most popular of American authors
in Europe, and by immense odds. I have encountered translations of
his books on the news-stands of remote towns in Spain, Poland and
Czecho-Slovakia. In places where even Mark Twain is unknown--nay, even
Jack London, Upton Sinclair and James Oliver Curwood--he holds aloft
the banner of American literature.

I lack the stomach for the job myself, but I think a lot could be
learned about the psychology of _Homo boobiens_ through an intensive
study of Marden’s vast shelf of books. The few I have read seem to be
exactly alike; no doubt all the rest resemble them very closely. What
they preach, in brief, is the high value of hopefulness, hard work,
high purpose and unflagging resolution. The appeal is to the natural
discontent and vague aspiration of the common man. The remedy offered
is partly practical and partly mystical--practical in its insistence
upon the sound utility of the lowly virtues, mystical in its constant
implication that matter will always yield to mind, that high thinking
has a cash value. An evil philosophy? Surely not. A valid one? There
it is not so easy to answer. Marden is full of proofs that what he
preaches works--but only too often those proofs show the incredible
appositeness and impeccability of patent-medicine testimonials. How
many false hopes he must have raised in his day! One imagines humble
hearts leaping to the gaudy tales of Judge Elbert Gary, Beethoven and
Edison in the darkest reaches of Montenegro, Norway and Tennessee.
Down went the dose, but was the patient actually cured? Well, perhaps,
he at least _felt_ better--and that was something. Marden was not to
be pinned down to clinical records; he was, in his way, a poet, and
even more a prophet. A religious exaltation was in him; he knew how to
roll his eyes. The first article of his creed was that it was a sin
to despair--that realism was a black crime against the Holy Ghost. He
reduced the Beatitudes to one: Blessed are they that believe in their
stars, and are up and doing.

His influence was immense, and perhaps mainly for the good. He soothed
his customers with his optimistic taffy, and made them happier. It
is, indeed, small wonder that eminent figures in finance and industry
admired him greatly, and gave his books to their slaves. He turned the
discontents of those slaves inward; instead of going on strike and
breaking windows they sat up nights trying to generate inspiration
and practicing hope and patience. He was thus a useful citizen in a
democratic state, and comparable to the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. He
preached a Direct Action of a benign and laudable sort, with Service
running through it. His mark shines brilliantly from the forehead of
every Y. M. C. A. secretary in the land, and from the foreheads, too,
of most of the editorial writers. Many lesser platitudinarians followed
him--for example, Dr. Frank Crane and the Rev. Dr. Henry van Dyke--,
but he kept ahead of all of them. None other could put the obvious
into such mellow and caressing terms. None other could so completely
cast off all doubts and misgivings. When he spit on his hands and let
himself out, the whole world began to sparkle like a Christmas tree. He
was Kiwanis incarnate, with whispers of the Salvation Army. In early
manhood he had cast off the demoniacal theology of his native hills,
but one treasure of his Puritan heritage he retained to the end: he
knew precisely and certainly what God wanted His children to be and do.
God wanted them to be happy, and He wanted them to attain to happiness
by working hard, saving money, obeying the boss, and keeping on the
lookout for better jobs. Thus, after a hiatus of 137 years, Marden
took up the torch of Poor Richard. He was, in his way, the American
St. Paul. He was the pa of Kiwanis. He carried the gospel of American
optimism to all the four quarters of the world.


9

_A Modern Masterpiece_

  THE POET ASSASSINATED, by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated from
  the French by Matthew Josephson. New York: _The Broom Publishing
  Company_. [The American Mercury, March, 1924.]

Whatever may be said against the young literary lions of the Foetal
School, whether by such hoary iconoclasts as Ernest Boyd or by such
virginal presbyters as John S. Sumner, the saving fact remains that
the boys and girls have, beneath their false-faces, a sense of humor,
and are not shy about playing it upon one another. Such passionate
pioneers of the movement as _Broom_ and the _Little Review_ printed, in
their day, capital parodies in every issue, many of them, I believe,
deliberate and malicious--parodies of Ezra Pound by the Baroness Elsa
von Freytag-Loringhoven, and of the Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven
by E. E. Cummings, and of E. E. Cummings by young Roosevelt J.
Yahwitz, Harvard ’27. And the thing goes on to this day. Ah, that the
rev. seniors of the Hypoendocrinal School were as gay and goatish!
Ah, specifically, that Dr. Paul Elmer More would occasionally do a
salacious burlesque of Dr. Brander Matthews, and that Dr. Matthews
would exercise his forecastle wit upon the Pennsylvania Silurian, Prof.
Fred Lewis Pattee!

In the present work, beautifully printed by the _Broom_ Press, there is
jocosity in the grand manner. For a long while past, as time goes among
such neo-logomaniacs, the youths of the movement have been whooping up
one Guillaume Apollinaire. When this Apollinaire died in 1918, so they
lamented, there passed out the greatest creative mind that France had
seen since the Middle Ages. He was to Jean Cocteau, even, as Cocteau
was to Eugène Sue. His books were uncompromising and revolutionary;
had he lived he would have done to the banal prose of the Babbitts of
letters what Eric Satie has done to the art of the fugue. Such news
was not only printed in the _Tendenz_ magazines that come and go; it
was transmitted by word of mouth from end to end of Greenwich Village.
More, it percolated to graver quarters. The estimable _Dial_ let it be
known that Apollinaire was a profound influence on the literature and
perhaps still more on the art and spirit of this modern period. Once,
when Dr. Canby was off lecturing in Lancaster, Pa., his name even got
into the _Literary Review_.

This electric rumor of him was helped to prosperity by the fact that
specific data about him were extremely hard to come by. His books
seemed to be rare--some of them, indeed, unprocurable--, and even
when one of them was obtained and examined it turned out to be largely
unintelligible. He wrote, it appeared, in an occult dialect, partly
made up of fantastic slang from the French army. He gave to old words
new and mysterious meanings. He kept wholly outside the vocabulary at
the back of “College French.” Even returning exiles from La Rotonde
were baffled by some of his phrases; all that they could venture was
that they were unprecedented and probably obscene. But the Village,
as everyone knows, does not spurn the cabalistic; on the contrary, it
embraces and venerates the cabalistic. Apollinaire grew in fame as he
became unscrutable. Displacing Cocteau, Paul Morand, Harry Kemp, T. S.
Eliot, André Salmon, Paul Valéry, Maxwell Bodenheim, Jean Giraudoux
and all the other gods of that checkered dynasty, he was lifted to
the first place in the Valhalla of the Advanced Thinkers. It was
Apollinaire’s year....

The work before us is the pricking of the bladder--a jest highly
effective, but somewhat barbarous. M. Josephson simply translates
Apollinaire’s masterpiece, adds an _apparatus criticus_ in the manner
of T. S. Eliot, and then retires discreetly to wait for the yells. They
will make a dreadful din, or I am no literary pathologist! For what
does “The Poet Assassinated” turn out to be? It turns out to be a dull
pasquinade in the manner of a rather atheistic sophomore, with a few
dirty words thrown in to shock the _booboisie_. From end to end there
is not as much wit in it as you will hear in a genealogical exchange
between two taxicab drivers. It is flat, flabby and idiotic. It is as
profound as an editorial in the Washington _Star_ and as revolutionary
as Ayer’s Almanac. It is the best joke pulled off on the Young
Forward-Lookers since Eliot floored them with the notes to “The Waste
Land.”

M. Josephson rather spoils its effect, I believe, by rubbing it
in--that is, by hinting that Apollinaire was of romantic and mysterious
origin--that his mother was a Polish lady of noble name and his father
a high prelate of the Catholic Church--that he himself was born at
Monte Carlo and baptized in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. This is
too much. Apollinaire was, like all Frenchmen of humor, a German
Jew. His father was a respectable waiter at Appenrodt’s, by name
Max Spritzwasser: hence the _nom de plume_. His mother was a Mlle.
Kunigunda Luise Schmidt, of Holzkirchen, Oberbayern.


10

_Sweet Stuff_

  SIX DAYS OF THE WEEK: A BOOK OF THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE AND RELIGION, by
  Henry van Dyke. New York: _Charles Scribner’s Sons_. [The American
  Mercury, March, 1925.]

I offer a specimen:

  As living beings we are part of a universe of life.

A second:

  Unless we men resolve to be good, the world will never be better.

A third:

  Behind Christianity there is Christ.

A fourth:

  If Washington had not liberated the American Republic, Lincoln would
  have had no Union to save.

A fifth:

  Some people say that a revolution is coming on in our own age and
  country. It is possible.

A sixth:

  God made us all.

A seventh:

  It is a well-known fact that men can lie, and that very frequently
  they do.

An eighth:

  To be foolish is an infirmity. To fool others is a trick.

A ninth:

  The Bible was not given to teach science, but religion.

A tenth:

  A whole life spent with God is better than half a life.

An eleventh:

  Drunkenness ruins more homes and wrecks more lives than war.

A twelfth:

  Anything out of the ordinary line will attract notice.

Tupper _est mort_! _Hoch_ Tupper! _Hoch, hoch! Dreimal hoch!_




IX. THE FRINGES OF LOVELY LETTERS


1

_Authorship as a Trade_

It is my observation as an editor that most beginning authors are
attracted to the trade of letters, not because they have anything
apposite and exigent to say, but simply, because it seems easy. Let us
imagine an ambitious and somewhat gassy young gal, turned out of the
public high-school down the street with good marks in English--that is,
in the sort of literary composition practiced by schoolma’ms. Having
read “Ulysses,” “Jurgen” and “Babbitt,” she is disinclined to follow
her mother too precipitately into the jaws of holy monogamy--or, at
all events, she shrinks from marrying such a clod as her father is,
and as her brothers and male classmates will be to-morrow. What to do?
The professions demand technical equipment. Commerce is sordid. The
secretary, even of a rich and handsome man, must get up at 7.30 A. M.
Most of the fine arts are regarded, by her family, as immoral. So she
pays $3 down on a second-hand typewriter, lays in a stock of copy
paper, and proceeds to enrich the national literature.

It is such aspirants, I suppose, who keep the pot boiling for the
schools of short-story writing and scenario writing that now swarm in
the land. Certainly these schools, in so far as I have any acquaintance
with them, offer nothing of value to the beginner of genuine talent.
They seem to be run, in the main, by persons as completely devoid of
critical sense as so many Congressmen, street railway curve-greasers
or Methodist revivalists. Their text-books are masses of unmitigated
rubbish. But no doubt that rubbish seems impressive enough to the
customers I have mentioned, for it is both very vague and very
cocksure--an almost irresistible combination. So a hundred thousand
second-hand Coronas rattle and jingle in ten thousand remote and lonely
towns, and the mail of every magazine editor in America is as heavy as
the mail of a get-rich-quick stockbroker.

Unluckily, there is seldom anything in this mail to bulge his eyes
and make his heart go pitter-pat. What he finds in it, day in and day
out, is simply the same dull, obvious, shoddy stuff--the same banal
and threadbare ideas set forth in the same flabby and unbeautiful
words. They all seem to write alike, as, indeed, they all seem to think
alike. They react to stimuli with the machine-like uniformity and
precision of soldiers in a file. The spectacle of life is to all of
them exactly the same spectacle. They bring no more to it, of private,
singular vision, than so many photographic lenses. In brief, they are
unanimously commonplace, unanimously stupid. Free education has cursed
them with aspirations beyond their congenital capacities, and they
offer the art of letters only the gifts suitable to the lowly crafts
of the jazz-baby and the schoolma’m. They come from an intellectual
level where conformity seems the highest of goods, and so they lack
the primary requisite of the imaginative author: the capacity to see
the human comedy afresh, to discover new relations between things,
to discover new significances in man’s eternal struggle with his
fate. What they have to say is simply what any moderately intelligent
suburban pastor or country editor would have to say, and so it is not
worth hearing.

This disparity between aspiration and equipment runs through the whole
of American life; material prosperity and popular education have made
it a sort of national disease. Two-thirds of the professors in our
colleges are simply cans full of undigested knowledge, mechanically
acquired; they cannot utilize it; they cannot think. We are cursed
likewise with hordes of lawyers who would be happier and more useful
driving trucks, and hordes of doctors who would be strained even
as druggists. So in the realm of beautiful letters. Poetry has
become a recreation among us for the intellectually unemployed and
unemployable: persons who, a few generations ago, would have taken it
out on china-painting. The writing of novels is undertaken by thousands
who lack the skill to describe a dog-fight. The result is a colossal
waste of paper, ink and postage--worse, of binding cloth and gold
foil. For a great deal of this drivel, by one dodge or another, gets
into print. Many of the correspondence-school students, after hard
diligence, learn how to write for the cheap magazines; not a few of
them eventually appear between covers, and are solemnly reviewed.

Does such stuff sell? Apparently it does, else the publishers would
not print so much, of it. Its effect upon those who read it must be
even worse than that of the newspapers and popular magazines. They come
to it with confident expectations. It is pretentiously bound; _ergo_,
there must be something in it. That something is simply platitude.
What has been said a thousand times is said all over again. This time
it must be true! Thus the standardization of the American mind goes
on, and against ideas that are genuinely novel there are higher and
higher battlements erected. Meanwhile, on the lower levels, where the
latest recruits to letters sweat and hope, this rubbish is laboriously
imitated. Turn to any of the cheap fiction magazines, and you will
find out how bad it can be at its worst. No, not quite at its worst,
for the contributors to the cheap fiction magazines have at least
broken into print--they have as they say, made the grade. Below them
are thousands of aspirants of even slenderer talents--customers of
the correspondence schools, patrons of lectures by itinerant literary
pedagogues, patient manufacturers of the dreadful stuff that clogs
every magazine editor’s mail. Here is the ultimate reservoir of the
national literature--and here, unless I err, is only bilge.

The remedy? I know of none. Moreover, I do not believe in remedies. So
long as the prevailing pedagogues are not found out, and the absurd
effort to cram every moron with book-learning goes on in the Republic,
that long there will be too much reading, and too much writing. But let
us get out of the fact whatever consolation is in it: too much writing,
at worst, is at least a bearable evil. Certainly it is vastly less
dangerous than too much religion, and less a nuisance than too much
politics. The floggers of Coronas, if they were halted by law, might
take to the uplift--as, indeed, many corn-fed pedagogues are already
doing, driven out of their jobs by the murrain of Fundamentalism. If
I yell against them it is because, on days when the rain keeps me
indoors, I am a critic. Perhaps other folks suffer less. Nevertheless,
I often wonder what the genuinely competent novelists of the nation
think of it--how the invasion of their craft by so many bunglers and
numskulls appears to them, and affects them. Surely it must tend to
narrow the audience they appeal to, and so do them damage. Who was it
who said that, in order that there may be great poets, there must be
great audiences too? I believe it was old Walt. He knew. Facing an
audience deluged with molasses by Whittier, Felicia Hemans and Fanny
Fern, he found the assumptions all against him. He was different, and
hence suspicious: it took him two generations to make his way. The
competent novelist, setting up shop in America to-day, is confronted
by the same flood. If he is pertinacious, he may win in the end,
but certainly it takes endurance. Hergesheimer, in his first book,
unquestionably had something to say. Its point of view was new;
there was a fine plausibility in it; it was worth attending to. But
Hergesheimer drove along for eight or ten years, almost in a vacuum.
I could add others: Anderson, Cabell, even Dreiser. Cabell became
known to the women’s clubs with his twelfth book. Meanwhile, a dozen
cheesemongers had been adored, and a thousand had made good livings
with their sets of rubber-stamps.


2

_Authors as Persons_

My trade forces me into constant association with persons of literary
skill and aspiration, good and bad, male and female, foreign and
domestic. I can only report, after a quarter of a century of commerce
with them, that I find them, with a few brilliant exceptions, very
dull, and that I greatly prefer the society of Babbitts. Is this
heresy? If so, I can only offer my sincere regrets. The words are wrung
from me, not by any desire to be unpleasant, but simply by a lifelong
and incurable affection for what, for want of a better name, is called
the truth. Nine-tenths of the literary gents that I know, indeed, are
hotter for the dollar than any Babbitt ever heard of. Their talk is not
about what they write, but about what they get for it. Not infrequently
they get a great deal. I know a number who make more annually
than honest bank presidents, even than Christian bank presidents.
A few probably top the incomes of railroad purchasing-agents and
nose-and-throat specialists, and come close to the incomes of realtors,
lawyers and bootleggers. They practice a very profitable trade.

And no wonder, for they pursue it in the most assiduously literate
country in Christendom. Our people, perhaps, seldom read anything that
is good, but they at least read--day and night, weekdays and Sundays.
We have so many magazines of more than 500,000 circulation that a list
of them would fill this page. We have at least a dozen above 1,000,000.
These magazines have immense advertising revenues, and are thus very
prosperous. They can therefore pay high prices for manuscripts. The
business of supplying such manuscripts has made a whole herd of authors
rich. I do not object to their wealth; I simply report its lamentable
effects upon them, and upon the aspirants who strive to imitate them.
For those effects go down to the lowest levels. The neophyte, as I
have said, seldom shows any yearning to discharge ideas, to express
himself, to tackle and master a difficult enterprise; he shows only a
desire to get money in what seems to him to be an easy way. Short cuts,
quick sales, easy profits--it is all very American. Do we gabble about
efficiency? Then the explanation is to be sought in the backwashes of
Freudism. Nowhere else on earth is genuine competence so rare. The
average American plumber cannot plumb; the average American cook cannot
cook; the average American literary gent has nothing to say, and says
it with rubber-stamps.

But I was speaking of the literati as persons. They suffer, I believe
from two things. The first is what I have just described: their general
fraudulence. The second springs out of the fact that their position,
in the Republic, is very insecure--that they have no public dignity.
It is no longer honorable _per se_ to be engaged in travails of the
spirit, as it used to be in the New England of the _Aufklärung_; it
is honorable only if it pays. I believe that the fact discourages
many aspirants who, if they went on, might come to something. They
are blasted in their tender years, and so literature loses them. Too
sensitive to sit below the salt, they join the hearty, red-blooded men
who feast above it, admired by the national gallery. It is, indeed,
not surprising that the majority of college graduates, once headed as
a matter of course for the grove of Athene, now go into business--that
Harvard now turns out ten times as many bond salesmen every year as
metaphysicians and martyrs. Business, in America, offers higher rewards
than any other human enterprise, not only in money but also in dignity.
Thus it tends to attract the best brains of the country. Is Kiwanis
idiotic? The answer is that Kiwanis no more represents business than
Greenwich Village represents literature. On the higher levels its bilge
does not flow--and on those higher levels, as I have hinted, there are
shrewder fellows, and more amusing, than ever you will find in the
Authors’ Club. These fellows, by the strict canons of ethnology, are
Babbitts, but it seems to me that they are responsible nevertheless for
everything that makes life in the United States tolerable. One finds,
in their company, excellent wines and liquors, and one seldom hears any
cant.

I don’t believe that this is a healthy state of affairs. I believe
that business should be left to commonplace and insensitive minds, and
that men of originality, and hence of genuine charm, should be sucked
automatically into enterprises of a greater complexity and subtlety.
It is done in more ancient countries; it has been done from remote
antiquity under civilizations that have aged in the wood, and are
free from fusel oil. But it is not yet done in These States. Only an
overwhelming natural impulse--perhaps complicated by insanity--can urge
an American into the writing of fugues or epics. The pull is toward
the investment securities business. That pull, yielded to, leads to
high rewards. The successful business man among us--and only the sheer
imbecile, in such gaudy times as these, is not successful--enjoys the
public respect and adulation that elsewhere bathe only bishops and
generals of artillery. He is treated with dignity in the newspapers,
even when he appears in combat with his wife’s lover. His opinion is
sought upon all public questions, including the æsthetic. In the stews
and wine-shops he receives the attention that, in old Vienna, used to
be given to Beethoven. He enjoys an aristocratic immunity to most forms
of judicial process. He wears the _legion d’honneur_, is an LL. D. of
Yale, and is received cordially at the White House.

The literary gent, however worthy, scales no such heights under our
_Kultur_. Only one President since the birth of the Republic has
ever welcomed men of letters at the White House, and that one, the
sainted Roosevelt, judged them by their theological orthodoxy and the
hair upon their chests. A few colored poets were added to make the
first pages; that was all. The literati thus wander about somewhat
disconsolately among us, and tend to become morose and dull. If they
enjoy the princely fees of the train-boy magazines, they are simply
third-rate business men--successful, perhaps, but without the Larger
Vision. If they happen to be genuine artists--and now and then it
_does_ happen--they are as lonely as life insurance solicitors at a
convention of Seventh Day Adventists. Such sorrows do not make for
_Gemütlichkeit_. There is much more of it in the pants business.


3

_Birth Pangs_

I have just said that the typical American author, when he talks
intelligibly at all, talks of money. I have said also that his aim in
writing is not to rid himself of ideas that bulge and fever his skull,
but to get that money in an easy way. Both statements, though true,
need a certain qualification. Writing looks easier to the neophyte than
any other job open to him, but once he settles down to its practice
he finds that it is full of unanticipated pains. So he tends, as he
grows older, to talk of those pains almost as much as he talks of their
rewards in cash. Here, indeed, all the authors that I know agree,
if they agree on nothing else, and in their agreement they show the
greatest heat and eloquence. And the beautiful ladies of the trade
reënforce and ratify the plaint of the bucks. Writing, they all say,
is the most dreadful chore ever inflicted upon human beings. It is not
only exhausting mentally; it is also extremely fatiguing physically.
The writer leaves his desk, his day’s work done, with his mind empty
and the muscles of his back and neck full of a crippling stiffness. He
has suffered horribly that the babies may be fed and beauty may not die.

The worst of it is that he must always suffer alone. If authors
could work in large, well-ventilated factories, like cigarmakers or
garment-workers, with plenty of their mates about and a flow of lively
professional gossip to entertain them, their labor would be immensely
lighter. But it is essential to their craft that they perform its
tedious and vexatious operations _a cappella_, and so the horrors of
loneliness are added to its other unpleasantnesses. An author at work
is continuously and inescapably in the presence of himself. There is
nothing to divert and soothe him. So every time a vagrant regret or
sorrow assails him, it has him instantly by the ear, and every time
a wandering ache runs down his leg it shakes him like the bite of a
tiger. I have yet to meet an author who was not a hypochondriac. Saving
only physicians, who are always ill and in fear of death, the literati
are perhaps the most lavish consumers of pills and philtres in this
world, and the most willing customers of surgeons. I can scarcely think
of one, known to me personally, who is not constantly dosing himself
with medicines, or regularly resorting to the knife. At the head of the
craft stand men who are even more celebrated as invalids than they are
as authors. I know of one who----

But perhaps I had better avoid invading what, after all, may be private
confidences, though they are certainly not imparted in confidential
tones. The point is that an author, penned in a room during all his
working hours with no company save his own, is bound to be more
conscious than other men of the petty malaises that assail all of us.
They tackle him, so to speak, in a vacuum; he can’t seek diversion
from them without at the same time suffering diversion from his work.
And what they leave of him is tortured and demoralized by wayward
and uncomfortable thoughts. It must be obvious that other men, even
among the intelligentsia, are not beset so cruelly. A judge on the
bench, entertaining a ringing in the ears, can do his work almost
as well as if he heard only the voluptuous rhetoric of the lawyers.
A clergyman, carrying on his degraded mummery, is not appreciably
crippled by a sour stomach: what he says has been said before, and only
scoundrels question it. And a surgeon, plying his exhilarating art
and mystery, suffers no professional damage from the wild thought that
the attending nurse is more sightly than his wife. But I defy anyone
to write a competent sonnet with a ringing in his ears, or to compose
sound criticism with a sour stomach, or to do a plausible love scene
with a head free of private amorous fancies. These things are sheer
impossibilities. The poor literatus encounters them and their like
every time he enters his work-room and spits on his hands. The moment
the door bangs he begins a depressing, losing struggle with his body
and his mind.

Why then, do rational men and women engage in so barbarous and
exhausting a vocation--for there are relatively intelligent and
enlightened authors, remember, just as there are relatively honest
politicians, and even bishops. What keeps them from deserting it
for trades that are less onerous, and, in the eyes of their fellow
creatures, more respectable? The first, and perhaps the foremost reason
I have already exposed at length: the thing pays. But there is another,
and it ought to be heard too. It lies, I believe, in the fact that an
author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal
vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer
impossibility to hold it in. His overpowering impulse is to gyrate
before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells.
This being forbidden by the _Polizei_ of all civilized countries, he
takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called
self-expression.

In the confidences of the literati, of course, it is always depicted as
something much more mellow and virtuous. Either they argue that they
are moved by a yearning to spread the enlightenment and save the world,
or they allege that what steams them and makes them leap is a passion
for beauty. Both theories are quickly disposed of by an appeal to the
facts. The stuff written by nine authors out of ten, it must be plain
at a glance, has as little to do with spreading the enlightenment as
the state papers of the late Dr. Warren Gamaliel Harding. And there is
no more beauty in it, and no more sign of a feeling of beauty, than
you will find in a hotel dining-room or a college yell. The impulse
to create beauty, indeed, is rather rare in literary men, and almost
completely absent from the younger ones. If it shows itself at all, it
comes as a sort of afterthought. Far ahead of it comes the yearning to
make money. And after the yearning to make money comes the yearning
to make a noise. The impulse to create beauty lingers far behind;
not infrequently there is a void where it ought to be. Authors, as a
class, are extraordinarily insensitive to beauty, and the fact reveals
itself in their customary (and often incredibly extensive) ignorance
of the other arts. I’d have a hard job naming six American novelists
who could be depended upon to recognize a fugue without prompting, or
six poets who could give a rational account of the difference between
a Gothic cathedral and a Standard Oil filling-station. The thing
goes even further. Most novelists, in my experience, know nothing of
poetry, and very few poets have any feeling for the beauties of prose.
As for the dramatists, three-fourths of them are unaware that such
things as prose and poetry exist at all. It pains me to set down such
inconvenient and blushful facts. They will be seized upon, I daresay,
by the evangelists of Kiwanis, and employed to support the doctrine
that authors are public enemies, and ought to be deported to Russia. I
do not go so far. I simply say that many who pursue the literary life
are less romantic and high-toned than they might be--that communion
with them is anything but the thrilling thing that provincial club
ladies fancy. If the fact ought to be concealed, then blame my babbling
upon scientific passion. That passion, to-day, has me by the ear.


4

_Want Ad_

The death of William Dean Howells in 1920 brought to an end a decorous
and orderly era in American letters, and issued in a sort of anarchy.
One may best describe the change, perhaps, by throwing it into
dramatic form. Suppose Joseph Conrad and Anatole France were still
alive and on their way to the United States on a lecture tour, or to
study Prohibition or sex hygiene, or to pay their respects to Henry
Ford. Suppose they were to arrive in New York at 2 P. M. to-day. Who
would go down the bay on a revenue-cutter to meet them--that is, who
in addition to the newspaper reporters and baggage-searchers--who to
represent American Literature? I can’t think of a single fit candidate.
So long as Howells kept to his legs he was chosen almost automatically
for all such jobs, for he was the dean of the national letters, and
acknowledged to be such by everyone. Moreover, he had experience at the
work and a natural gift for it. He looked well in funeral garments. He
had a noble and ancient head. He made a neat and caressing speech. He
understood etiquette. And before he came to his growth, stretching back
into the past, there was a long line precisely like him--Mark Twain,
General Lew Wallace, James Russell Lowell, Edmund Clarence Stedman,
Richard Watson Gilder, Bryant, Emerson, Irving, Cooper, and so on back
to the dark abysm of time.

Such men performed a useful and highly onerous function. They
represented letters in all public and official ways. When there was a
grand celebration at one of the older universities they were present
in their robes, freely visible to the lowliest sophomore. When there
was a great banquet, they sat between generals in the Army and members
of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. When there was a solemn petition
or protest to sign--against fiat money, the massacres in Armenia,
municipal corruption, or the lack of international copyright--they
signed in fine round hands, not for themselves alone, but for the
whole fraternity of American literati. Most important of all, when a
literary whale from foreign parts was sighted off Fire Island, they
jumped into their frock coats, clapped on their plug-hats and made the
damp, windy trip through the Narrows on the revenue-cutter, to give the
visitor welcome in the name of the eminent living and the illustrious
dead. It was by such men that Dickens was greeted, and Thackeray, and
Herbert Spencer, and Max O’Rell, and Blasco Ibáñez, and Matthew Arnold,
and James M. Barrie, and Kipling, and (until they found his bootleg
wife under his bed) Maxim Gorky. I name names at random. No worthy
visitor was overlooked. Always there was the stately committee on the
revenue-cutter, always there was the series of polite speeches, and
always there was the general feeling that the right thing had been done
in the right way--that American literature had been represented in a
tasteful and resounding manner.

Who is to represent it to-day? I search the country without finding
a single suitable candidate, to say nothing of a whole posse. Turn,
for example, to the mystic nobles of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. I pick out five at random: William C. Brownell, Augustus
Thomas, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister and Henry van Dyke. What is wrong
with them? The plain but dreadful fact that no literary foreigner has
even heard of them--that their appearance on the deck of his incoming
barge would puzzle and alarm him, and probably cause him to call for
the police. These men do not lack the homely virtues. They all spell
correctly, write neatly, and print nothing that is not constructive.
In the five of them there is not enough sin to raise a Congressman’s
temperature one-hundredth of a degree. But they are completely devoid
of what is absolutely essential to the official life: they have, so to
speak, no stage presence. There is nothing rotund and gaudy about them.
No public and unanimous reverence bathes them. What they write or say
never causes any talk. To be welcomed by them, jointly or severally,
would appear to Thomas Hardy or Gabriel D’Annunzio as equal to being
welcomed by representatives of the St. Joe, Mo., Rotary Club. Nor do I
find any better stock among their heirs and apprentices in the National
Institute. Put Henry Sydnor Harrison, say, against Howells: it is a
wart succeeding Ossa. Match Clayton Hamilton with Edmund Clarence
Stedman: Broadway against Wall Street. Shove Robert W. Chambers or
Herman Hagedorn into the coat of Lowell: he would rattle in one of its
pockets.

Worse, there are no better candidates outside the academic cloister.
I daresay that most literate foreigners, asked to name the principal
American novelist in practice to-day, would nominate Theodore Dreiser.
He would get probably seventy-five per cent of the votes, with the rest
scattered among Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Cabell, Hergesheimer
and Sherwood Anderson. But try to imagine any of these gentlemen togged
out in a long-tailed coat, shivering on the deck of a revenue-cutter
while Gerhart Hauptman got a grip on himself aboard the _Majestic_!
Try to imagine Cabell presiding at a banquet to Knut Hamsun, with Dr.
A. Lawrence Lowell to one side of him and Otto Kahn to the other!
Try to picture Sinclair handing James Joyce a wreath to put upon the
grave of James Whitcomb Riley! The vision, indeed, is more dismal
than ludicrous. Howells, the last of his lordly line, is missed
tremendously; there is something grievously lacking in the official
hospitality of the country. The lack showed itself the instant he
was called away. A few weeks later Columbia University gave a soirée
in honor of the centenary of Lowell. The president of Columbia, Dr.
Nicholas Murray Butler, is a realist. Moreover, he is a member of the
American Academy himself, elected as a wet to succeed Edgar Allan Poe.
He was thus privy to the deficiencies of his colleagues. To conceal the
flabbiness of the evening he shoved them into back seats--and invited
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Tex Rickard, General Pershing and the board
of governors of the New York Stock Exchange to the platform!

I believe that, of living masters of letters, H. G. Wells was the first
to feel the new chill. When he last visited the Republic he was made
welcome by a committee of ship-news reporters. It was as if one of the
justices of the King’s Bench, landing in America, had been received by
a committee of police-court lawyers from Gary, Ind. Later on American
literature bestirred itself and gave Wells a banquet in New York. I was
present at this feast, and a singular one it was. Not a single author
read in Iowa or taught at Harvard was present. The principal literatus
at the board was the late Frank A. Munsey, author of “Derringforth” and
“The Boy Broker,” and the principal address was made by Max Eastman,
formerly editor of the _Masses_!...

I come to a constructive suggestion. Let the literati of America meet
in their respective places of social relaxation, each gang determining
the credentials of its own members, and elect delegates to a national
convention. Then let the national convention, by open ballot, choose
ten spokesmen and ten alternates to represent the national letters
on all formal occasions--not only when an eminent foreigner is to
be made welcome, but also when Columbia University holds memorial
services, when a President is inaugurated, when Harvard meets Yale,
when monuments are unveiled--in brief at all times of solemn public
ceremonial. Let these representatives practice deportment and
elocution. Let them employ good tailors and trustworthy bootleggers. I
have, alas, no candidates for the committee. As I have said, there is a
dreadful dearth of them. Does Dr. Frank Crane wear whiskers? If so, I
nominate him.


5

_Literature and the Schoolma’m_

With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are
by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to
exercise a special and dreadful fascination over schoolma’ms, bucolic
college professors, and other such pseudo-literates. One never hears
of treatises on it by George Moore or James Branch Cabell, but the
pedagogues, male and female, are at it all the time. In a thousand
texts they set forth their depressing ideas about it, and millions of
suffering high-school pupils have to study what they say. Their central
aim, of course, is to reduce the whole thing to a series of simple
rules--the over-mastering passion of their melancholy order, at all
times and everywhere. They aspire to teach it as bridge whist, the
American Legion flag-drill and double-entry bookkeeping are taught.
They fail as ignominiously as that Athenian of legend who essayed to
train a regiment of grasshoppers in the goose-step.

For the essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to
rules--that it is a living and breathing thing, with something of
the devilish in it--that it fits its proprietor tightly and yet ever
so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as securely
an integral part of him as that skin is. It hardens as his arteries
harden. It has _Katzenjammer_ on the days succeeding his indiscretions.
It is gaudy when he is young and gathers decorum when he grows old. On
the day after he makes a mash on a new girl it glows and glitters. If
he has fed well, it is mellow. If he has gastritis it is bitter. In
brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and
it cannot be anything else. To attempt to teach it is as silly as to
set up courses in making love. The man who makes love out of a book
is not making love at all; he is simply imitating someone else making
love. God help him if, in love or literary composition, his preceptor
be a pedagogue!

The schoolma’m theory that the writing of English may be taught is
based upon a faulty inference from a sound observation. The sound
observation is that the great majority of American high-school pupils,
when they attempt to put their thoughts upon paper, produce only a
mass of confused and puerile nonsense--that they express themselves
so clumsily that it is often quite impossible to understand them at
all. The faulty inference is to the effect that what ails them is
a defective technical equipment--that they can be trained to write
clearly as a dog may be trained to walk on its hind legs. This is
all wrong. What ails them is not a defective technical equipment but
a defective natural equipment. They write badly simply because they
cannot think clearly. They cannot think clearly because they lack
the brains. Trying to teach them is as hopeless as trying to teach
a dog with only one hind leg. Any human being who can speak English
understandably has all the materials necessary to write English
clearly, and even beautifully. There is nothing mysterious about the
written language; it is precisely the same, in essence, as the spoken
language. If a man can think in English at all, he can find words
enough to express his ideas. The fact is proved abundantly by the
excellent writing that often comes from so-called ignorant men. It is
proved anew by the even better writing that is done on higher levels by
persons of great simplicity, for example, Abraham Lincoln. Such writing
commonly arouses little enthusiasm among pedagogues. Its transparency
excites their professional disdain, and they are offended by its use
of homely words and phrases. They prefer something more ornate and
complex--something, as they would probably put it, demanding more
thought. But the thought they yearn for is the kind, alas, that they
secrete themselves--the muddled, highfalutin, vapid thought that one
finds in their own text-books.

I do not denounce them because they write so badly; I merely record the
fact in a sad, scientific spirit. Even in such twilight regions of the
intellect the style remains the man. What is in the head infallibly
oozes out of the nub of the pen. If it is sparkling Burgundy the
writing is full of life and charm. If it is mush the writing is mush
too. The late Dr. Harding, twenty-ninth President of the Federal Union,
was a highly self-conscious stylist. He practiced prose composition
assiduously, and was regarded by the pedagogues of Marion, Ohio, and
vicinity as a very talented fellow. But when he sent a message to
Congress it was so muddled in style that even the late Henry Cabot
Lodge, a professional literary man, could not understand it. Why?
Simply because Dr. Harding’s thoughts, on the high and grave subjects
he discussed, were so muddled that he couldn’t understand them himself.
But on matters within his range of customary meditation he was clear
and even charming, as all of us are. I once heard him deliver a brief
address upon the ideals of the Elks. It was a topic close to his heart,
and he had thought about it at length and _con amore_. The result
was an excellent speech--clear, logical, forceful, and with a touch
of wild, romantic beauty. His sentences hung together. He employed
simple words, and put them together with skill. But when, at a public
meeting in Washington, he essayed to deliver an oration on the subject
of the late Dante Alighieri, he quickly became so obscure and absurd
that even the Diplomatic Corps began to snicker. The cause was plain:
he knew no more about Dante than a Tennessee county judge knows about
the Institutes of Justinian. Trying to formulate ideas upon the topic,
he could get together only a few disjected fragments and ghosts of
ideas--here an ear, there a section of tibia, beyond a puff of soul
substance or other gas. The resultant speech was thus enigmatical,
cacophonous and awful stuff. It sounded precisely like a lecture by a
college professor on style.

A pedagogue, confronted by Dr. Harding in class, would have set him
to the business of what is called improving his vocabulary--that is,
to the business of making his writing even worse than it was. Dr.
Harding, in point of fact, had all the vocabulary that he needed, and
a great deal more. Any idea that he could formulate clearly he could
convey clearly. Any idea that genuinely moved him he could invest
with charm--which is to say, with what the pedagogues call style. I
believe that this capacity is possessed by all literate persons above
the age of fourteen. It is not acquired by studying text-books; it is
acquired by learning how to think. Children even younger often show
it. I have a niece, now eleven years old, who already has an excellent
style. When she writes to me about things that interest her--in other
words, about the things she is capable of thinking about--she puts her
thoughts into clear, dignified and admirable English. Her vocabulary,
so far, is unspoiled by schoolma’ms. She doesn’t try to knock me out by
bombarding me with hard words, and phrases filched from Addison. She
is unaffected, and hence her writing is charming. But if she essayed
to send me a communication on the subject, say, of Balkan politics or
government ownership, her style would descend instantly to the level of
that of Dr. Harding’s state papers.

To sum up, style cannot go beyond the ideas which lie at the heart
of it. If they are clear, it too will be clear. If they are held
passionately, it will be eloquent. Trying to teach it to persons who
cannot think, especially when the business is attempted by persons who
also cannot think, is a great waste of time, and an immoral imposition
upon the taxpayers of the nation. It would be far more logical to
devote all the energy to teaching, not writing, but logic--and
probably just as useless. For I doubt that the art of thinking can be
taught at all--at any rate, by school-teachers. It is not acquired, but
congenital. Some persons are born with it. Their ideas flow in straight
channels; they are capable of lucid reasoning; when they say anything
it is instantly understandable; when they write anything it is clear
and persuasive. They constitute, I should say, about one-eighth of one
per cent. of the human race. The rest of God’s children are just as
incapable of logical thought as they are incapable of jumping over the
moon. Trying to teach them to think is as vain an enterprise as trying
to teach a streptococcus the principles of Americanism. The only thing
to do with them is to make Ph.D.’s of them, and set them to writing
handbooks on style.


6

_The Critic and his Job_

The assumption that it may be scientific is the worst curse that
lies upon criticism. It is responsible for all the dull, blowsy,
“definitive” stuff that literary pedagogues write, and it is
responsible, too, for the heavy posturing that so often goes on among
critics less learned. Both groups proceed upon the theory that there
are exact facts to be ascertained, and that it is their business to
ascertain and proclaim them. That theory is nonsense. There is,
in truth, no such thing as an exact fact in the whole realm of the
beautiful arts. What is true therein to-day may be false to-morrow, or
vice versa, and only too often the shift is brought about by something
that, properly speaking, is not an æsthetic consideration at all.

The case of Whitman comes to mind at once. Orthodox criticism, in his
own time, was almost unanimously against him. At his first appearance,
true enough, a few critics were a bit dazzled by him, notably Emerson,
but they quickly got control of their faculties and took to cover.
Down to the time of his death the prevailing doctrine was that he was
a third-rate poet and a dirty fellow. Any young professor who, in the
seventies or even in the early eighties, had presumed to whoop for
him in class would have been cashiered at once, as both incompetent
and immoral. If there was anything definitively established in those
days, it was that old Walt was below the salt. To-day he is taught
to sophomores everywhere, perhaps even in Tennessee, and one of the
most unctuously respectable of American publishing houses brings out
“Leaves of Grass” unexpurgated, and everyone agrees that he is one
of the glories of the national letters. Has that change been brought
about by a purely critical process? Does it represent a triumph of
criticism over darkness? It does not. It represents, rather, a triumph
of external forces over criticism. Whitman’s first partisans were
not interested in poetry; they were interested in sex. They were
presently reënforced by persons interested in politics. They were
finally converted into a majority by a tatterdemalion horde of persons
interested mainly, and perhaps only, in making a noise.

Literary criticism, properly so-called, had little if anything to do
with this transformation. Scarcely a critic of any recognized authority
had a hand in it. What started it off, after the first furtive, gingery
snuffling over “A Woman Waits for Me” and the “Calamus” cycle, was
the rise of political radicalism in the early eighties, in reaction
against the swinish materialism that followed the Civil War. I am
tempted to say that Terence V. Powderly had more to do with the
rehabilitation of Whitman than any American critic, or, indeed, than
any American poet. And if you object to Powderly, then I offer you
Karl Marx, with William Jennings Bryan--no less!--peeping out of his
coat-pocket. The radicals made heavy weather of it at the start. To the
average respectable citizen they seemed to be mere criminals. Like the
Bolsheviki of a later era, they were represented by their opponents
as the enemies of all mankind. What they needed, obviously, was some
means of stilling the popular fear of them--some way of tapping the
national sentimentality. There stood Whitman, conveniently to hand.
In his sonorous strophes to an imaginary and preposterous democracy
there was an eloquent statement of their own vague and windy yearnings,
and, what is more, a certificate to their virtue as sound Americans. So
they adopted him with loud hosannas, and presently he was both their
poet and their philosopher. Long before any professor at Harvard dared
to mention him (save, perhaps, with lascivious winks), he was being
read to tatters by thousands of lonely Socialists in the mining-towns.
As radicalism froze into Liberalism, and so began to influence the
intelligentsia, his vogue rose, and by the end of the century even
school-teachers had begun to hear of him. There followed the free verse
poets, _i. e._, a vast herd of emerging barbarians with an itch to make
an uproar in the world, and no capacity for mastering the orthodox
rules of prosody. Thus Whitman came to Valhalla, pushed by political
propagandists and pulled by literary mountebanks. The native Taines and
Matthew Arnolds made a gallant defense, but in vain. In the remoter
denominational colleges some of them still hold out. But Whitman is now
just as respectable at Yale as Martin Tupper or Edmund Clarence Stedman.

The point is that his new respectability is just as insecure as his old
infamy--that he may be heaved out, on some bright to-morrow, just as
he was heaved in, and by a similar combination of purely non-literary
forces. Already I hear rumors of a plan to make Dr. Coolidge King. If
his conscience stays him, then the throne may go to William Wrigley,
Jr., or Judge Elbert H. Gary, LL.D. Democracy, indeed, begins to sicken
among us. The doctors at its bedside dose it out of a black bottle, and
make sinister signals to the coroner. If it dies, then Whitman will
probably die with it. Criticism, of course, will labor desperately to
save him, as it once labored to dispose of him, but such struggles
are nearly always futile. The most they ever accomplish is to convert
the author defended into a sort of fossil, preserved in a showcase to
plague and puzzle schoolboys. The orthodox literature books, used in
all schools, are simply such showcases. They represent the final effort
of pedants to capture zephyrs and chain torrents. They are monuments
to the delusion that criticism may be definitive--that appeals to the
emotions, which shift and change with every wind, may be appraised and
sorted out by appeals to the mind, which is theoretically unchangeable.
Certainly every reflective student of any of the fine arts should know
that this is not so. There is no such thing as a literary immortality.
We remember Homer, but we forget the poets that the Greeks, too,
forgot. You may be sure that there were Shakespeares in Carthage, and
more of them at the court of Amenophis IV, but their very names are
lost. Our own Shakespeare, as year chases year, may go the same way; in
fact, his going the same way is quite as certain as anything we can
imagine. A thousand years hence, even five hundred years hence, he may
be, like Beowulf, only a name in a literature book, to be remembered
against examination day and then forgotten.

Criticism is thus anything but scientific, for it cannot reach
judgments that are surely and permanently valid. The most it can do,
at its best, is to pronounce verdicts that are valid here and now, in
the light of living knowledge and prejudice. As the background shifts
the verdict changes. The best critic is not that fool who tries to
resist the process--by setting up artificial standards, by prattling
of laws and principles that do not exist, by going into the dead
past for criteria of the present--, but that more prudent fellow who
submits himself frankly to the flow of his time, and rejoices in its
aliveness. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a good critic, for he saw
everything as a Frenchman of the Second Empire, and if his judgments
must be revised to-day it still remains true that they were honest
and intelligent when he formulated them. Professor Balderdash is a
bad critic, for he judges what is done in the American Empire of 1926
in the light of what was held to be gospel in the pastoral Republic
of a century ago. For the rest, the critic survives, when he survives
at all, mainly as artist. His judgments, in the long run, become
archaic, and may be disregarded. But if, in stating them, he has
incidentally produced a work of art on his own account, then he is read
long after they are rejected, and it may be plausibly argued that he
has contributed something to the glory of letters. No one takes much
stock in Macaulay’s notions to-day. He is, in fact, fair game for any
college tutor who has majored in what is called history. He fell into
many gross errors, and sometimes, it is probable, he fell into them
more or less deliberately. But his criticism is still read--that is, as
much as any criticism is read. It holds all its old charm and address.
For Macaulay, when he sat himself down to be critical, did not try
fatuously to produce a scientific treatise. What he tried to do was to
produce a work of art.


7

_Painting and its Critics_

Having emerged lately from a diligent course of reading in so-called
art criticism, and especially in that variety of it which is concerned
with the painters since Cézanne, I can only report that I find it windy
stuff, and sadly lacking in clarity and sense. The new critics, indeed,
seem to me to be quite as vague and absurd as some of the new painters
they celebrate. The more they explain and expound the thing they
profess to admire, the more unintelligible it becomes. Criticism, in
their hands, turns into a sort of cabbalism. One must prepare for it,
as one prepares for the literature of Service or of the New Thought, by
acquiring a wholly new vocabulary, and a new system of logic.

I do not argue here that the new painting, in itself, is always absurd.
On the contrary, it must be manifest to anyone with eyes that some
of its inventions are bold and interesting, and that now and then it
achieves a sort of beauty. What I argue is simply that the criticism it
has bred does not adequately account for it--that no man of ordinary
sense, seeking to find out just what it is about, will get any light
from what is currently written about it. All he will get will be a bath
of metaphysics, heated with indignation. Polemics take the place of
exposition. One comes away with a guilty feeling that one is somehow
grossly ignorant and bounderish, but unable to make out why. The same
phenomenon is occasionally witnessed in other fields. I have mentioned
the cases of Service and the New Thought. There was, a generation
ago, the case of Ibsen and the symbolists. These imbeciles read such
extravagant meanings into the old man’s plays that he was moved,
finally, to violent protests. He was not trying to compose cryptograms,
he said; he was simply trying to write stage plays. In much the same
way Cézanne protested against the balderdash of his earliest disciples
and interpreters. He was no messiah, he said; he was only a painter
who tried to reduce what he saw in the world to canvas. The Ibsen
symbolists eventually subsided into Freudism and other such rubbish,
but the Cézannists continue to spoil paper with their highfalutin and
occult tosh. I have read nearly all of them, and I denounce all that I
have read as quacks.

This tendency to degenerate into a mere mouthing of meaningless words
seems to be peculiar to so-called art criticism. There has never been,
so far as I know, a critic of painting who wrote about it simply and
clearly, as Sainte-Beuve, say, wrote about books, or Schumann and
Berlioz about music. Even the most orthodox of the brethren, when he
finds himself before a canvas that genuinely moves him, takes refuge
in esoteric winks and grimaces and mysterious gurgles and belches. He
can never put his feelings into plain English. Always, before he is
done, he is sweating metaphysics, which is to say, nonsense. Painters
themselves, when they discuss their art, commonly go the same route.
Every time a new revolutionist gives a show he issues a manifesto
explaining his aims and achievements, and in every such manifesto there
is the same blowsy rodomontadizing that one finds in the texts of the
critics. The thing, it appears, is very profound. Something new has
been discovered. Rembrandt, poor old boy, lived and died in ignorance
of it. Turner, had he heard of it, would have yelled for the police.
Even Gaugin barely glimpsed it. One can’t make out what this new
arcanum is, but one takes it on faith and goes to the show. What one
finds there is a series of canvases that appear to have been painted
with asphalt and mayonnaise, and by a man afflicted with binocular
diplopic strabismus. Is this sound drawing? Is this a new vision of
color? Then so is your grandmother left-fielder of the Giants. The
exceptions are very few. I have read, I suppose, at least two hundred
such manifestos during the past twenty years; at one time I even
started out to collect them, as odd literary delicatessen. I can’t
recall a single one that embodied a plain statement of an intelligible
idea--that is, intelligible to a man of ordinary information and
sanity. It always took a special talent to comprehend them, as it took
a special talent to paint the fantastic pictures they discussed.

Two reasons, I believe, combine to make the pronunciamentos of painters
so bombastic and flatulent. One lies in the plain fact that painting
is a relatively simple and transparent art, and that nothing much of
consequence is thus to be said about it. All that is remarkable in even
the most profound painting may be grasped by an educated spectator in a
few minutes. If he lingers longer he is simply seeing again what he has
seen before. His essential experience, in other words, is short-lived.
It is not like getting shaved, coming down with the cholera morbus,
or going to the wars; it is like jumping out of the way of a taxicab
or getting kissed. Consider, now, the position of a critic condemned
to stretch this experience into material for a column article or for
a whole chapter in a book. Obviously, he soon finds it insufficient
for this purpose. What, then, is he to do? Tell the truth, and then
shut up? This, alas, is not the way of critics. When their objective
facts run out they always turn to subjective facts, of which the supply
is unlimited. Thus the art critic begins to roll his eyes inward. He
begins to poetize and philosophize his experience. He indulges himself
in dark hints and innuendos. Putting words together aimlessly, he
presently hits upon a combination that tickles him. He has invented a
new cliché. He is a made man. The painter, expounding his work, falls
into the same bog. The plain fact, nine times out of ten, is that
he painted his picture without any rational plan whatever. Like any
other artist, he simply experimented with his materials, trying this
combination and then that. Finally he struck something that pleased
him. Now he faces the dreadful job of telling why. He simply doesn’t
know. So he conceals his ignorance behind recondite and enigmatical
phrases. He soars, insinuates, sputters, coughs behind his hand. If he
is lucky, he, too, invents a cliché. Three clichés in a row, and he is
a temporary immortal.

Behind what is written about painting there is always, of course,
the immense amount of drivel that is talked about it. No other art
is so copiously discussed by its practitioners, or encrusted with so
much hollow theorizing. The reason therefor--the second of the two I
mentioned above--lies in the obvious fact that painters can talk while
they work, and are debarred from working at least half of their waking
hours. A poet, when his hormones begin to ferment, not infrequently
labors all night; when there is a fog, a thunder-storm or a torch-light
parade he is specially inspired. So with a musical composer. But
a painter can work only while the light is good, and in the north
temperate zone that is not often. So he has much time on his hands,
and inasmuch as he seldom has money enough to venture into general
society and is usually too ignorant to enjoy reading, he puts in that
time talking. Nowhere else on this earth is there so much gabbling as
you will find in painters’ studios, save it be in the pubs and more or
less public bed-rooms that they frequent. It begins as soon as the sun
goes down, and it keeps on all night. And it is always about painting,
painting, painting. No other class of artists is so self-centered.
Once a youth gets a brush into his hand and turpentine in his hair,
he appears to join a race apart, and is interested no longer in the
general concerns of the world. Even the other arts do not commonly
engage any of his attention. If he ventures into music, it is into the
banal music of college boys and colored stevedores. If he reads it is
only the colicky nonsense that I have been describing. Even his amours
are but incidents of his trade. Now put this immense leisure and this
great professional keenness against the plain fact that the problems of
painting, in the main, are very simple--that very little that is new is
to be said about any of them. The result is a vast dilution of ideas, a
stormy battle of mere words, an infinite logomachy. And on its higher
levels, embellished with all the arts of the auctioneer, it is art
criticism.


8

_Greenwich Village_

The whole saga of Greenwich Village is in Alfred Kreymborg’s
autobiography, which he calls, very appropriately, “Troubadour.” The
story begins with an earnest and insolvent young man in a garret,
fighting cockroaches and writing free verse. It ends with a respectable
gentleman of passing forty, legally married to one very charming wife,
and in receipt of a comfortable income in royalties from the 6000
Little Theatres which now freckle and adorn our eminent Republic,
distracting the males of the Younger Married Set from the Red Peril and
Service, and their wives from millinery and birth control.

Of all the motley revolutionaries who flourished in the Village in
its heyday, say fifteen years ago, Kreymborg was surely one of the
most engaging, as he was one of the most honest. Most of the others,
for all their heroic renunciation of commercialism, were quite as
hot for the _mazuma_ as other literary artists. With one breath
they pledged themselves to poverty--though not, surely, to chastity
or obedience!--and denounced such well-heeled poets as Kipling and
Shakespeare as base harlots of the marts. With the next they bargained
with such editors as ventured to buy their wares like Potash tackling
One-Eye Feigenbaum. From this lamentable trafficking Kreymborg held
aloof, a genuine Parnassian. He composed his bad poetry and his worse
novels on a diet of _Schnecken_ and synthetic coffee, and paid for that
meager fare by teaching Babbitts the elements of chess.

Gradually the tumult died, and Greenwich Village fell into decay.
The poets moved out, and Philistines moved in; it was all over. But
Kreymborg kept the faith--at all events, longer than most. He continued
to write poems like a series of college yells, plays unearthly and
impossible, novels that brought the Comstocks sliding down their poles
like firemen. But gradually he, too, began to show change. His hair
grew thin on top; his blood grew sluggish. Presently some of his plays
were produced; he had at last squeezed through the proscenium arch.
Then he began to accept calls to read his dithyrambs before provincial
Poetry Societies. Then he became an editor and an anthologist--ten
paces behind his ancient enemy, Louis Untermeyer. Then he went through
two divorces, one of them legal, and married an estimable lady of
Brooklyn. Now he is past forty, has an agent, and pays income-tax.
_Schön ist die Jugendzeit; sie kommt nicht mehr!_ As I have hinted,
there was always something charming about Kreymborg, even in the days
of his most raucous verse. He threw up a good job with the Aeolian
Company, demonstrating mechanical-piano records, in order to become
a poet, and he stuck to his dream through many a long year. The
waspishness of the other Villagers was not in him, and he was happily
free of their worst imbecilities. Between cantos of free verse, I
suspect, he often read Swinburne and even Tennyson; in his mandolute he
concealed Howells and Mark Twain.

As one who poked many heavy jocosities at it while it lasted, I hope I
may now say with good grace that I believe Greenwich Village did a good
service to all the fine arts in this great land, and left a valuable
legacy behind it. True enough, its own heroes were nearly all duds,
and most of them have been forgotten, but it at least broke ground,
it at least stirred up the animals. When it began to issue smoke and
flame, the youth of the country were still under the hoof of the
schoolma’m; when it blew up at last they were in full revolt. Was it
Greenwich Village or Yale University that cleared the way for Cabell?
Was it the Village or the Philharmonic Society that made a place for
Stravinsky? Was it the Village or the trustees of the Metropolitan
Museum that first whooped for Cézanne? That whooping, of course, did
not stop with Cézanne, or Stravinsky, or Cabell. There were whoops
almost as loud for Sascha Gilhooly, who painted sunsets with a shaving
brush, and for Raoul Goetz, who wrote quartettes for automobile horns
and dentist’s drills, and for Bruce J. Katzenstein, whose poetry was
all figures and exclamation points. But all that excess did no harm.
The false prophets changed from day to day. The real ones remained.




X. ESSAY IN PEDAGOGY


1

On the purely technical side the American novel has obviously made
immense progress. As ordinarily encountered, it is very adeptly
constructed, and not infrequently it is also well written. The old-time
amorphous novel, rambling all over the place and ending with pious
platitudes, has pretty well gone out. The American novelists of
to-day, and especially the younger ones, have given earnest study to
form--perhaps, indeed, too much. For in concentrating their powerful
intellects upon it they have lost sight of something that is far more
important. I allude, of course, to the observation of character. Thus
the average contemporary American novel, though it is workmanlike and
well-mannered, fails to achieve its first business. It does not evoke
memorable images of human beings. One enjoys reading it, perhaps, but
one seldom remembers it. And when it gets beyond the estate of a mere
technical exercise, it only too often descends to the even worse estate
of a treatise. It attempts to prove something--usually the simple fact
that its author is a clever fellow, or a saucy gal. But all a novel of
genuine bulk and beam ever proves is that the proper study of mankind
is man--the proper study and the most engrossing.

In brief, a first-rate novel is always a character sketch. It may be
more than that, but at bottom it is always a character sketch, or, if
the author is genuinely of the imperial line, a whole series of them.
More, it is a character sketch of an individual not far removed from
the norm of the race. He may have his flavor of oddity, but he is never
fantastic; he never violates the common rules of human action; he never
shows emotions that are impossible to the rest of us. If Thackeray had
made Becky Sharp seven feet tall, and given her a bass voice, nine
husbands and the rank of lieutenant-general in the British Army, she
would have been forgotten long ago, along with all the rest of “Vanity
Fair.” And if Robinson Crusoe had been an Edison instead of a normal
sailorman, he would have gone the same way.

The moral of all this is not lost upon the more competent minority
of novelists in practice among us. It was not necessary to preach
it to Miss Cather when she set out to write “My Antonía,” nor to
Abraham Cahan when he tackled “The Rise of David Levinsky,” nor to
Sinclair Lewis when he was at work on “Babbitt.” All such novelists
see the character first and the story afterward. What is the story
of “Babbitt”? Who remembers? Who, indeed, remembers the story of “The
Three Musketeers”? But D’Artagnan and his friends live brilliantly,
and so, too, I believe, will George F. Babbitt live brilliantly--at
all events, until Kiwanis ceases to trouble, and his type ceases to
be real. Most of the younger American novelists, alas, seem to draw
no profit from such examples. It is their aim, apparently, to shock
mankind with the vivacity of their virtuosity and the heterodoxy of
their ideas, and so they fill their novels with gaudy writing and banal
propaganda, and convert their characters into sticks. I read novel
after novel without getting any sense of contact with actual human
beings. I am, at times, immensely amused and sometimes I am instructed,
but I seldom carry away anything to remember. When I do so, it is not
an idea, but a person. Like everyone else, I have a long memory for
persons. But ideas come and go.

All this becomes the more remarkable when one considers the peculiar
richness of the American scene in sharply-outlined and racy characters.
Our national ideas, indeed, are mainly third-rate, and some of them are
almost idiotic, but taking one year with another we probably produce
more lively and diverting people than all the rest of the world taken
together. More, these lively and diverting people tend to cluster into
types. Mark Twain put half a dozen of them into “Huckleberry Finn” and
as many more into “Roughing It,” a novel disguised as history. Montague
Glass collared a whole flock for his Potash and Perlmutter stories, and
Ring Lardner has got another flock into his studies of the American
bounder. But the younger novelists, or at least the overwhelming
majority of them, stick to their sticks. Thus even the most salient and
arresting of American types still lack historians, and seem doomed to
perish and be forgotten with the Bill of Rights. Babbitt stood around
for a dozen years, waiting for Lewis; the rest of the novelists of
the land gaped at him without seeing him. How long will they gape at
the American politician? At the American university president? At the
American policeman? At the American lawyer? At the American insurance
man? At the Prohibition fanatic? At the revival evangelist? At the
bootlegger? At the Y. M. C. A. secretary? At the butter-and-egg man? At
the journalist?


2

I have put the politician at the top of my list. He probably embodies
more typical American traits than any other; he is, within his limits,
the arch-Americano. Yet how seldom he gets into a novel! And how
seldom, having got there, is he real! I can recall, indeed, but one
American political novel of any value whatever as a study of character,
and that is Harvey Fergusson’s story of Washington, “Capitol Hill”--a
series of casual sketches, but all of them vivid and true. Fergusson
really understands the American politician. There is, in “Capitol
Hill,” no division of the _dramatis personæ_ between Democrats
and Republicans, progressives and reactionaries, materialists and
idealists, patriots and traitors; the only division is between men and
women who have something, and men and women who want it. In that simple
fact lies most of the book’s curious reality. For the truth about
Washington is that it is not a town of politics, in the conventional
and romantic sense; it is, if anything, a town almost devoid of
politics. The people in the industrial cities and out on the farms take
political ideas seriously; what they cherish in that department they
refuse passionately to surrender. But so far as I know there are not a
dozen professional politicians in Washington, high or low, who would
not throw overboard, instantly and gladly, every political idea they
are assumed to be devoted to, including especially every political idea
that has helped them into public office, if throwing it overboard would
help them to higher and gaudier and more lucrative office. I say high
or low, and I mean it literally. There has not been a President of the
United States for half a century who did not, at some time or other in
his career, perform a complete _volte face_ in order to further his
career. There is scarcely a United States Senator who does not flop at
least three times within the limits of a single session.

The novelists who write about Washington are partly recruited from
the ranks of the Washington newspaper correspondents, perhaps the
most naïve and unreflective body of literate men in Christendom, and
for the rest from the ranks of those who read the dispatches of such
correspondents, and take them seriously. The result is a grossly
distorted and absurd picture of life in the capital city. One carries
off the notion that the essential Washington drama is based on a
struggle between a powerful and corrupt Senator and a sterling young
uplifter. The Senator is about to sell out the Republic to the Steel
Trust, J. P. Morgan or the Japs. The uplifter detects him, exposes him,
drives him from public life, and inherits his job. The love interest
is supplied by a fair stenographer who steals the damning papers
from the Senator’s safe, or by an Ambassador’s wife who goes to the
White House at 3 A. M., and, at the peril of her virtue, arouses the
President and tells him what is afoot. All this is poppycock. There
are no Senators in Washington powerful enough to carry on any such
operations single-handed, and very few of them are corrupt: it is too
easy to bamboozle them to go to the expense of buying them. The most
formidable bribe that the average Senator receives from year’s end
to year’s end is a bottle or two of very dubious Scotch, and that is
just as likely to come from the agent of the South Central Watermelon
Growers’ Association as from John D. Rockefeller or the Mikado of
Japan. Nor are there any sterling young uplifters in the town. The
last was chased out before the Mexican War. There are to-day only
gentlemen looking for something for themselves--publicity, eminence,
puissance, jobs--especially jobs. Some take one line and some another.
Further than that the difference between them is no greater than the
difference between a Prohibition agent and a bootlegger, or tweedledum
and tweedledee.

Ideas count for nothing in Washington, whether they be political,
economic or moral. The question isn’t what a man thinks, but what he
has to give away that is worth having. Ten years ago a professional
Prohibitionist had no more standing in the town than a professional
astrologer, Assyriologist or wart-remover; five years ago, having
proved that his gang could make or break Congressmen, he got all the
deference that belonged to the Chief Justice; now, with the wet wolves
chasing him, he is once more in eclipse. If William Z. Foster were
elected President to-morrow, the most fanatical Coolidge men of to-day
would flock to the White House the day after, and try to catch his
eye. Coolidge, while Harding was living, was an obscure and impotent
fellow, viewed with contempt by everyone. The instant he mounted the
throne he became a Master Mind. Fergusson got all of this into “Capitol
Hill,” which is not the story of a combat between the True and the
False in politics, but the simple tale of a typical Washingtonian’s
struggle to the front--a tale that should be an inspiration to every
Rotarian in the land. He begins as a petty job-holder in the Capitol
itself, mailing congressional speeches to constituents on the steppes;
he ends at the head of a glittering banquet table, with a Senator to
one side of him and a member of the Cabinet to the other--a man who has
somehow got power into his hands, and can dispense jobs, and is thus an
indubitable somebody. Everybody in Washington who has jobs to dispense
is somebody.

This eternal struggle is sordid, but, as Fergusson has shown, it is
also extremely amusing. It brings out, as the moralists say, the
worst that is in human nature, which is always the most charming. It
reduces all men to one common level of ignominy, and so rids them of
their customary false-faces. They take on a new humanity. Ceasing to
be Guardians of the Constitution, Foes to the Interests, Apostles of
Economy, Prophets of World Peace, and such-like banshees, they become
ordinary men, like John Doe and Richard Roe. One beholds them sweating,
not liquid idealism, but genuine sweat. They hope, fear, aspire,
suffer. They are preyed upon, not by J. P. Morgan, but by designing
cuties. They go to the White House, not to argue for the World Court,
but to hog patronage. From end to end of Fergusson’s chronicle there
is absolutely no mention of the tariff, or of the farmer and his woes,
or of the budget system, or of the Far Eastern question. I marvel that
more American novelists have not gone to this lush and delightful
material. The supply is endless and lies wide open. Six months in
Washington is enough to load an ambitious novelist for all eternity.
(Think of what George Moore has made of his one love-affair, back in
1877!) The Washington correspondents, of course, look at it without
seeing it, and so do all the Washington novelists save Fergusson.
But that is saying nothing. A Washington correspondent is one with
a special talent for failing to see what is before his eyes. I have
beheld a whole herd of them sit through a national convention without
once laughing.

Fergusson, in “Capitol Hill,” keeps mainly to that end of Pennsylvania
avenue which gives his book its name. I believe that the makings of
a far better novel of Washington life are to be found at the other
end, to wit, in and about the alabaster cage which houses the heir
of Washington, Lincoln and Chester A. Arthur. Why, indeed, has no one
ever put _kaiserliche Majestät_ into fiction--save, of course, as a
disembodied spirit, vaguely radiating idealism? The revelations in the
Daugherty inquiry gave a hint of unworked riches--but there is enough
dramatic and even melodramatic material without descending to scandal.
A President is a man like the rest of us. He can laugh and he can
groan. There are days when his breakfast agrees with him, and days when
it doesn’t. His eyes have the common optical properties: they can see
a sweet one as far as they can see a member of the Interstate Commerce
Commission. All the funnels of intrigue are aimed at him. He is the
common butt of every loud-speaker. No other man in this sad vale has so
many jobs to give out, or one-half so many. Try to imagine a day in his
life, from dawn to midnight. Do it, and you will have the best American
novel ever heard of.


3

But I am forgetting my other candidates--for example, the American
university president. I mean, of course, the university president
of the new six-cylinder, air-cooled, four-wheel-brake model--half
the quack, half the visionary, and wholly the go-getter--the brisk,
business-like, confidential, button-holing, regular fellow who
harangues Rotary and Kiwanis, extracts millions from usurers by
alarming them about Bolshevism, and so builds his colossal pedagogical
slaughter-house, with its tens of thousands of students, its professors
of cheese-making, investment securities and cheer-leading, its galaxy
of football stars, and its general air of Barnum’s circus. Why has this
astounding mountebank not got into a book? He fairly yells for loving
embalming _à la_ Babbitt. He is not only stupendously picaresque and
amusing in himself--the final heir, at once, of Abelard, Cagliostro,
Increase Mather, the Fox sisters, Pestalozzi, Dr. Munyon, Godey of
the _Ladies’ Book_, and Daniel Drew--; he is also thoroughly and
magnificently characteristic of the great land we live in. No other
country has ever produced anything quite like him. No other country, I
suspect, would tolerate him. But here he lives and flourishes, a superb
and perfect American--and yet our novelists all neglect him.

Worse and more incredible still, they neglect the most American of all
Americans, the very _Ur-Amerikaner_--to wit, the malignant moralist,
the Christian turned cannibal, the snouting and preposterous Puritan.
Where is there the American novel in which he is even half limned?
There are, to be sure, glimpses of him in “The Song of the Lark,”
by Willa Cather, and in “Babbitt,” and there is a more elaborate
but still incomplete sketch in E. W. Howe’s “The Story of a Country
Town.” But Howe, unfortunately, had other fish to fry: he slapped in
his bucolic wowser brilliantly, and then passed on to melodrama and
the agonies of young love. So, too, with Lewis and Miss Cather. Thus,
though the Puritan Father lies embalmed magnificently in the pages of
Hawthorne, his heir and assign of the present day, the high-powered
uplifter, the prophet of harsh and unenforceable laws, the incurable
reformer and nuisance--this sweet fellow yet awaits his anatomist.

What a novel is in him! Indeed, what a shelf of novels! For he has
as many forms as there are varieties of human delusion. Sometimes
he is a tin-pot evangelist, sweating to transform Oklahoma City or
Altoona, Pa., into the New Jerusalem. Sometimes he is a hireling of the
Anti-Saloon League, sworn to Law Enforcement. Sometimes he is a strict
Sabbatarian, bawling for the police whenever he detects his neighbor
washing bottles or varnishing the Ford on Sunday morning. Again he is a
vice-crusader, chasing the scarlet lady with fierce Christian shouts.
Yet again he is a comstock, wearing out his eyes in the quest for smut.
He may even be female--a lady Ph.D. in a linoleum hat, patrolling
the cow towns and the city slums, handing out edifying literature,
teaching poor Polish women how to have babies. Whatever his form,
he is tremendously grotesque and tremendously amusing--and always he
drips with national juices, always he is as thoroughly American as a
bootlegger or a college yell. If he exists at all in other lands, it is
only in rudimentary and aberrant forms. Try to imagine a French Wayne
B. Wheeler, or a Spanish Billy Sunday, or a German William Jennings
Bryan. It is as impossible as imagining a Coolidge in the Rome of
Julius.

Since the earliest days, as everyone knows, American jurisprudence has
been founded upon the axiom that it is the first duty of every citizen
to police his neighbors, and especially those he envies, or otherwise
dislikes. There is no such thing, in this grand and puissant nation,
as privacy. The yokels out in Iowa, neglecting their horned cattle,
have a right, it appears--nay, a sacred duty!--to peek into my home in
Baltimore, and tell me what I may and may not drink with my meals. An
out-at-elbow Methodist preacher in Boston sets himself up to decide
what I may read. An obscure and unintelligent job-holder in Washington,
inspired by God, determines what I may receive in the mails. I must
not buy lottery tickets because it offends the moral sentiment of
Kansas. I must keep Sunday as the Sabbath, which is in conflict with
Genesis, because it is ordered by persons who believe that Genesis
can’t be wrong. Such are the laws of the greatest free nation ever
seen on earth. We are all governed by them. But a government of laws,
of course, is a mere phantasm of political theorists: the thing is
always found, on inspection, to be really a government of men. In the
United States, it seems to me, the tendency is for such men to come
increasingly from the class of professional uplifters. It is not the
bankers who run the ostensible heads of the state, as the Liberals
believe, nor the so-called bosses, as the bosses themselves believe,
but the wowsers. And what is a wowser? What does the word mean? It
means precisely what you think of inevitably when you hear it. A wowser
is a wowser. He bears a divine commission to regulate and improve the
rest of us. He knows exactly what is best for us. He is what Howe calls
a Good Man. So long as you and I are sinful, he can’t sleep. So long as
we are happy, he is after us.

I throw off the guess that there are at least forty novels in the
wowser--that is, forty good ones. He has, as I have said, as many
forms as the demons who ride him, and every one of them should make a
competent novelist, authentically called to the vocation, leap in air
with loud hosannas, and spit upon his hands. His psychology remains
mysterious. The Freudians, I believe, have misunderstood him, and the
psychiatrists have avoided him. What are the springs of his peculiar
frenzy to harass and punish his fellow men? By what process of malign
eugenics is he hatched? And what is his typical life history? Here is
work for the novelist, which is to say, for the professional anatomist
of character. I believe that Frank Norris, had he lived, would have
tackled it with enthusiasm, and made a great success of its execution.
Norris, like Dreiser after him, had a romantic and even a mystical
inclination, but at bottom he was a satirist--and the American Puritan
was made for satirists as catnip was made for cats. It is easy to laugh
at him, but it is hard to hate him. He is eternally in the position of
a man trying to empty the ocean with a tin-dipper. He will be mauled,
and the chance he offers thrown away, if the novelist who attempts him
in the end forgets the tragedy under his comedy. I have known many
American wowsers in my time, some of them intimately. They were all
intensely unhappy men. They suffered as vastly as Prometheus chained to
his rock, with the buzzards exploring his liver. A novelist blind to
that capital fact will never comprehend the type. It needs irony--but
above all it needs pity.


4

So does another type that also awaits its Thackeray: to wit, the
American journalist. Most American novelists, before they challenge
Dostoevski, put in an apprenticeship on the public prints, and thus
have a chance to study and grasp the peculiarities of the journalistic
mind; nevertheless, the fact remains that there is not a single
genuine newspaper man, done in the grand manner, in the whole range
of American fiction. As in the case of the wowser, there are some
excellent brief sketches, but there is no adequate portrait of the
journalist as a whole, from his beginnings as a romantic young reporter
to his finish as a Babbitt, correct in every idea and as hollow as
a jug. Here, I believe, is genuine tragedy. Here is the matter that
enters into all fiction of the first class. Here is human character in
disintegration--the primary theme of every sound novelist ever heard
of, from Fielding to Zola and from Turgeniev to Joseph Conrad. I know
of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the
journalist. He is, in his first phase, genuinely romantic. He plans
to be both an artist and a moralist--a master of lovely words and a
merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing
jackass in his community--that is, if his career goes on to what is
called success. He becomes the repository of all its worst delusions
and superstitions. He becomes the darling of all its frauds and idiots,
and the despair of all its honest men. He belongs to a good club, and
the initiation fee was his soul.

Here I speak by the book, for I have been in active practice as
a journalist for more than a quarter of a century, and have an
immense acquaintance in the craft. I could name a man who fits my
specifications exactly in every American city east of the Mississippi,
and refrain only on the advice of counsel. I do not say that all
journalists go that route. Far from it! Many escape by failing; some
even escape by succeeding. But the majority succumb. They begin with
high hopes. They end with safe jobs. In the career of any such man,
it seems to me, there are materials for fiction of the highest order.
He is interesting intrinsically, for his early ambition is at least
not ignoble--he is not born an earthworm. And he is interesting as a
figure in drama, for he falls gradually, resisting all the while, to
forces that are beyond his strength. If he can’t make the grade, it is
not because he is unwilling or weak, but because the grade itself is
too steep. Here is tragedy--and here is America. For the curse of this
country, as of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats
its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to
have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public
sense, is a respectable vacuum.

I heave this typical American journalist to the massed novelists of
the Federal Union, and invite them to lay on. There is a capital novel
in him--a capital character sketch and a capital picture of the
American scene. He is representative and yet he is not commonplace.
People will recognize him, and yet they are not familiar with him. Let
the fictioneers have at him! But let them bear in mind that, like the
wowser, he is not to be done to the tune of superior sneers. He is a
wreck, but he has not succumbed to the gales without resistance. Let
him be done ironically, as Lewis did Babbitt, but let him be done also
with pity. He is not a comedian, but a tragedian. Above all, let him
be done without any mouthing of theories. His simple story is poignant
enough.

Is he too difficult? Then I offer a substitute: the American policeman.
Certainly it is high time for him to get into a book. I dedicate him to
the novelists of the nation at once, and provide them simultaneously
with all the plot they will need. A moron with an IQ of 53, despairing
of ever getting a better job, goes on the force and begins pounding a
beat. A chance favor to a saloonkeeper makes a sergeant of him, and
thereafter he slowly mounts the ladder. At the end he is an inspector,
and in charge of operations against a fabulous crime wave, imagined
by the city editor of a tabloid newspaper. Isn’t that enough? What
a vivid and exhilarating picture of American life could be got out
of it! What humors are there, and what genuine drama! Nor are the
materials esoteric. Every newspaper reporter’s head is stuffed with
them. I myself could do such a work in ten volumes folio. Nine young
journalists out of ten, I believe, aspire to the novel. Well, here is a
chance to write a novel as good as “Babbitt.”




XI. ON LIVING IN BALTIMORE


Some time ago, writing in an eminent Baltimore newspaper upon the
Baltimore of my boyhood, I permitted myself an eloquent passage
upon its charm, and let fall the doctrine that nearly all of that
charm had vanished. Mere rhetoric, I greatly fear. The old charm, in
truth, still survives in the town, despite the frantic efforts of the
boosters and boomers who, in late years, have replaced all its ancient
cobblestones with asphalt, and bedizened it with Great White Ways and
suburban boulevards, and surrounded it with stinking steel plants and
oil refineries, and increased its population from 400,000 to 800,000.
I am never more conscious of the fact than when I return to it from
New York. Behind me lies the greatest city of the modern world, with
more money in it than all Europe and more clowns and harlots than all
Asia, and yet it has no more charm than a circus lot or a second-rate
hotel. It can’t show a single genuinely distinguished street. It hasn’t
a single park that is more lovely than a cemetery lot. It is without
manner as it is without manners. Escaping from it to so ancient and
solid a town as Baltimore is like coming out of a football crowd into
quiet communion with a fair one who is also amiable, and has the gift
of consolation for hard-beset and despairing men.

I have confessed to rhetoric, but I surely do not indulge in it here.
For twenty-five years I have resisted a constant temptation to move to
New York, and I resist it more easily to-day than I did when it began.
I am, perhaps, the most arduous commuter ever heard of, even in that
Babylon of commuters. My office is on Manhattan Island and has been
there since 1914; yet I live, vote and have my being in Baltimore, and
go back there the instant my job allows. If my desk bangs at 3 P. M. I
leap for the 3.25 train. Four long hours in the Pullman follow, but the
first is the worst. My back, at all events, is toward New York! Behind
lies a place fit only for the gross business of getting money; ahead is
a place made for enjoying it.

What makes New York so dreadful, I believe, is mainly the fact that
the vast majority of its people have been forced to rid themselves of
one of the oldest and most powerful of human instincts--the instinct
to make a permanent home. Crowded, shoved about and exploited without
mercy, they have lost the feeling that any part of the earth belongs
to them, and so they simply camp out like tramps, waiting for the
constables to rush in and chase them away. I am not speaking here of
the poor (God knows how they exist in New York at all!); I am speaking
of the well-to-do, even of the rich. The very richest man, in New York,
is never quite sure that the house he lives in now will be his next
year--that he will be able to resist the constant pressure of business
expansion and rising land values. I have known actual millionaires to
be chased out of their homes in this way, and forced into apartments.
In Baltimore too, the same pressure exists, to be sure, but it is not
oppressive, for the householder can meet it by yielding to it half way.
It may force him into the suburbs, even into the adjacent country, but
he is still in direct contact with the city, sharing in its life, and
wherever he lands he may make a stand. But on Manhattan Island he is
quickly brought up by the rivers, and once he has crossed them he may
as well move to Syracuse or Trenton.

Nine times out of ten he tries to avoid crossing them. That is, he
moves into meaner quarters on the island itself, and pays more for
them. His house gives way to a flat--one offering perhaps half the
room for his goods and chattels that his house offered. Next year he
is in a smaller flat, and three-fourths of his goods and chattels have
vanished. A few years more, and he is in two or three rooms. Finally,
he lands in an hotel. At this point he ceases to exist as the head
of a house. His quarters are precisely like the quarters of 50,000
other men. The front he presents to the world is simply an anonymous
door on a gloomy corridor. Inside, he lives like a sardine in a can.
Such a habitation, it must be plain, cannot be called a home. A home
is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in its permanence,
in its capacity for accretion and solidification, in its quality of
representing, in all its details, the personalities of the people who
live in it. In the course of years it becomes a sort of museum of these
people; they give it its indefinable air, separating it from all other
homes, as one human face is separated from all others. It is at once a
refuge from the world, a treasure-house, a castle, and the shrine of a
whole hierarchy of peculiarly private and potent gods.

This concept of the home cannot survive the mode of life that prevails
in New York. I have seen it go to pieces under my eyes in the houses of
my own friends. The intense crowding in the town, and the restlessness
and unhappiness that go with it, make it almost impossible for anyone
to accumulate the materials of a home--the trivial, fortuitous and
often grotesque things that gather around a family, as glories and
debts gather around a state. The New Yorker lacks the room to house
them; he thus learns to live without them. In the end he is a stranger
in the house he lives in. More and more, it tends to be no more than
Job No. 16432b from this or that decorator’s studio. I know one New
Yorker, a man of considerable means, who moves every three years. Every
time he moves his wife sells the entire contents of the apartment she
is leaving, and employs a decorator to outfit the new one. To me, at
all events, such a mode of living would be unendurable. The charm of
getting home, as I see it, is the charm of getting back to what is
inextricably my own--to things familiar and long loved, to things
that belong to me alone and none other. I have lived in one house in
Baltimore for nearly forty-five years. It has changed in that time,
as I have--but somehow it still remains the same. No conceivable
decorator’s masterpiece could give me the same ease. It is as much a
part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I’d be as certainly
crippled as if I lost a leg.

I believe that this feeling for the hearth, for the immemorial lares
and penates, is infinitely stronger in Baltimore than in New York--that
it has better survived there, indeed, than in any other large city
of America--and that its persistence accounts for the superior charm
of the town. There are, of course, thousands of Baltimoreans in
flats--but I know of none to whom a flat seems more than a make-shift,
a substitute, a necessary and temporary evil. They are all planning to
get out, to find house-room in one of the new suburbs, to resume living
in a home. What they see about them is too painfully not theirs. The
New Yorker has simply lost that discontent. He is a vagabond. His
notions of the agreeable become those of a vaudeville actor. He takes
on the shallowness and unpleasantness of any other homeless man. He
is highly sophisticated, and inordinately trashy. The fact no doubt
explains the lack of charm that one finds in his town; the fact that
the normal man of Baltimore is almost his exact antithesis explains
the charm that is there. Human relations, in such a place, tend to
assume a solid permanence. A man’s circle of friends becomes a sort of
extension of his family circle. His contacts are with men and women who
are rooted as he is. They are not moving all the time, and so they are
not changing their friends all the time. Thus abiding relationships
tend to be built up, and when fortune brings unexpected changes, they
survive those changes. The men I know and esteem in Baltimore are, on
the whole, men I have known and esteemed a long while; even those who
have come into my ken relatively lately seem likely to last. But of
the men I knew best when I first began going to New York, twenty-five
years ago, not one is a friend to-day. Of those I knew best ten years
ago, not six are friends. The rest have got lost in the riot, and the
friends of to-day, I sometimes fear, will get lost in the same way.

In human relationships that are so casual there is seldom any
satisfaction. It is our fellows who make life endurable to us, and
give it a purpose and a meaning; if our contacts with them are light
and frivolous there is something lacking, and it is something of the
very first importance. What I contend is that in Baltimore, under a
slow-moving and cautious social organization, touched by the Southern
sun, such contacts are more enduring than elsewhere, and that life
in consequence is more agreeable. Of the external embellishments
of life there is a plenty there--as great a supply, indeed, to any
rational taste, as in New York itself. But there is also something much
better: a tradition of sound and comfortable living. A Baltimorean
is not merely John Doe, an isolated individual of _Homo sapiens_,
exactly like every other John Doe. He is John Doe _of_ a certain
place--of Baltimore, of a definite _house_ in Baltimore. It is not by
accident that all the peoples of Europe, very early in their history,
distinguished their best men by adding _of_ this or that place to their
names.




XII. THE LAST NEW ENGLANDER


The late Prof. Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, whose letters have been
done into a stately volume by M. A. DeWolfe Howe, will probably go down
into history as the last flower of the Puritan _Kultur_. Himself by no
means a pure New Englander, for his surname was obviously Dutch, he
yet had enough New England blood in him to feel himself wholly of that
forlorn region, and he was accepted as a fit representative of it by
all its tribal headmen. He was steeped in its tradition, and venerated
its heroes. What came out of New England seemed to him to be virtuous
and lovely, or, as he might have said, gentlemanly; what came out of
the rest of the country was simply barbarous.

Nevertheless, Wendell was himself a walking proof that all he admired
was passing into the shadows, for, try as he would, he could not, as
a contemporary man, squeeze himself into the old Puritan mold. Over
and over again he would make an effort to do so, but always, as he
struggled with the lid, a diabolical, iconoclastic mood would overcome
him, and he would leap up and emit a ribald yell. Harvard, startled
and uneasy, never knew what to make of him. His principles were
apparently impeccable; he was, in the current phrase, a consistent
booster for the lost Golden Age, its glories and high deeds. And
yet, whenever the answering cheer came back, he would make a mocking
face and say something awful. The Cambridge campus is still warmed
by these mockings. What saved him from downright infamy was the fact
that, whenever they were actually in contempt of the Puritan mores
and gnosiology, they were safely superficial--that is, they never
questioned fundamentals. Wendell had a lot to say about the transient
excesses and imbecilities of democracy, visible in his time, but he
nevertheless believed in all the primary democratic fallacies, and even
defended them eloquently. He was a tart critic of the whole educational
process, and went to the length, in his own department of English, of
denying it any value whatever; nevertheless, he remained a romantic
Harvard man to the end of his days, and venerated _alma mater_ with the
best of them. He must have seen clearly that there was little that was
sound and solid left in the New England culture, that the rest of the
country had little need of it and would quickly surpass it; all the
same, he clung to the superstition that the preposterous theologians of
its early days constituted an intellectual aristocracy, and even wrote
a book eulogizing the most absurd of them, Cotton Mather.

Wendell, in fact, was two men, separate and distinct, and they were
often at war. One of these men was highly intelligent (though surely
not very learned); the other was a romantic under the spell of a
disintegrating tradition. The latter was the more charming, but often
a prey to mere lyrical fancy. The picture of the American character
that Wendell presented to gaping throngs in his Sorbonne lectures was
a sort of fantastic chromo of the primeval New England character,
seen through nine thicknesses of amber gelatine--in brief, a thing
as bizarre as the accounts of the Revolution that used to be in
school-books. Fundamentally, he once said somewhere else, we believe
in fair play. It would be hard to imagine a more inaccurate saying. If
any single quality, indeed, has marked off the Americano from all other
civilized men since the start, it is his incapacity to purge combat
of passion, his strong disinclination to allow any merit whatever to
the other fellow;--in brief, his bad sportsmanship. Our history is a
history of minorities put down with clubs. Even the duel, during the
few years it flourished in America, took on a ferocity unheard of
elsewhere. Gentlemen, going out at daybreak, shot to kill. Aaron Burr
was a thorough American; Hamilton was an Englishman. In other fields,
Wendell indulged himself in similar sentimentalities. He reacted to the
shock of the late war in the correct manner of a State Street banker.
He succumbed to the Coolidge buncombe far back in 1920. Yet always
the sharply intelligent Wendell hauled up and stayed the orthodox
romantic. The tribute to him by Prof. Kuno Francke, quoted by Mr. Howe,
is a tribute not only to a gentleman, but also to a man of sense. And
even in the midst of his banal speculation whether Coolidge, after
all, would not turn out to be a Yankee Lincoln, he saw clearly the
“small, hatchet-faced, colorless man, with a tight-shut, thin-lipped
mouth”--in other words, the third-rate, small-town attorney, stuffed
with copy-book platitudes and quite without imagination. He saw, too,
the truth about Wilson, and stated it blisteringly in a letter to his
friend R. W. Curtis.

Wendell’s actual books, I believe, are now all dead, even his arbitrary
and ignorant but highly amusing “Literary History of America.” His
volume on Shakespeare, published in 1894, is admired by Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch and Mrs. Edith Wharton, but no one else seems to remember
it. His novels and dramas are long forgotten. His “English Composition”
was and is a school-book; he himself, in his old age, had doubts that
it had accomplished even its pedagogic purpose. His political essays,
once so salacious, now read like the heresies of the Jefferson era.
What remains, then, of Prof. Barrett Wendell, A.B., Litt.D.? A great
deal more, I believe, than a mere ghost. When, indeed, the roll of
American literati is drawn up at last, and the high deeds of each are
set down, it will be found that Wendell, too, did something, and that
what he did was of considerable importance. In a few words, he helped
to divert criticism from books to life itself--he was one of the first
to see that mere literature is, after all, mere literature--that it
cannot be understood without knowing something about the society which
produced it. Even Poe, masterly critic that he was, overlooked this
obvious and all-important fact. His discussion of books went on in a
sort of vacuum. He had brilliant (and often sound) opinions about every
technical problem imaginable, and about every question of taste, but
only too often he overlooked the fact that his author was also a man,
and that what the author wrote the man had first to think, feel and
endure. Wendell got rid of that narrow bookishness, still lingering
in Lowell. He was primarily a critic, not of literary manners and
postures, but of human existence under the Republic. There was no
scholarly affectation about him, for all his superficial play-acting,
his delight in impressing sophomores. He did not bury his nose in
books; he went out and looked at the world, and what he saw there
amused him immensely and filled him with ideas. In Mr. Howe’s index the
name of Longfellow appears but once, and that of Gilder but once, and
that of Aldrich not at all, but that of Blaine is there six times, and
after Democracy there are twenty-two entries.

It seems to me that this break with the old American tradition had its
high uses, and has left its mark upon American letters. Criticism among
us is vastly less cloistered than it once was. Even professors of the
loftiest tone, if they would have themselves attended to, must descend
from their ivory towers and show themselves at the sea-level. The aloof
and austere spirit is now viewed with suspicion. There are, I daresay,
ancients who deplore the change. A natural regret, for it has made
criticism vastly more difficult. But few deplore it, I believe, who
know what literature really is--few, that is, who know the difference
between mere intellectual prettiness and a body of living ideas.

As for Wendell’s amazing contradictions and inconsistencies, his
endless flounderings between orthodoxy and heresy, I believe that an
adequate explanation of them is to be found in the compositions of
Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, the Viennese necromancer. Freud, himself a
Jew, discusses in one of his books the curious fact that jokes at
the expense of the Jews are chiefly circulated by Jews themselves,
and especially by the younger ones. Two Jewish drummers in a Pullman
smoking-room fall into an exchange of such jocosities almost
automatically. Why? Because, says Freud, they attain thereby to an
escape from their Jewishness, which often irks them. It is not they are
ashamed of being Jews; it is that the Jewish practices of their elders
are burdensome. They dare not revolt openly, for their sense of filial
piety is strong, so they take it out by making jokes. By much the
same psychological process, I believe, Wendell arrived at his curious
mixture of contrarieties. Sentimentally and emotionally, he was moved
powerfully by the New England tradition, and felt a strong impulse to
defend it against the world. Intellectually, he saw clearly that it
was in collapse around him--worse, that it had been full of defects
and weaknesses even when, by his own doctrine, it had been strong. The
result was his endless shuttling between worship and ribaldry. The last
of the New Englanders, he clung pathetically to a faith which gradually
succumbed to doubts. In his later years he thus stood upon a burning
deck, whence all but him had fled.

Two things, for all his skepticism, he could never bring himself to
admit formally, both obvious: first, that the so-called culture of
Puritan New England was largely imaginary, that civilization was
actually introduced into the region by anti-Puritans, and second, that
when Transcendentalism came in, the leadership of Puritanism passed
from New England and went to the South and Middle West. To admit the
truth of either proposition was psychically impossible to a man of
his romantic feelings. Each, baldly stated, seemed to flout the local
Holy Ghost. And yet both were true, and their proofs were visible at a
glance. The first, I daresay, will never be granted formally, or even
heard patiently, by any genuine New Englander. Only a short while ago
Walter Prichard Eaton, a very able Puritan, was arguing eloquently that
his blue-nosed ancestors were really lovers of beauty, nay, downright
artists--and offering the charming old houses on Nantucket Island as
exhibits. Unfortunate examples, alas, alas! The houses on Nantucket
were not built until the Puritan theocracy was completely demoralized
and impotent--until Boston had a theatre, and was already two-thirds of
the way to hell. And if they were actually built by Puritans at all,
then it was by Puritans who had gone out into the wide, wide word and
savored its dreadful and voluptuous marvels--Puritans who had come back
from the Eastern seas with gaudy silks in their sea-chests, and the
perfume of strange gals upon their whiskers, and a new glitter to their
eyes.

Orthodox history, at least as it appears in school-books, assumes
that the witch-burners and infant-damners had it all their own way in
New England, even down to Revolutionary times. They actually met with
sturdy opposition from the start. All of their sea-ports gradually
filled up with sailors who were anything but pious Christian men,
and even the back-country had its heretics, as the incessant wars
upon them demonstrate. The fact that only Puritans could vote in the
towns has deceived the historians; they mistake what was the law for
what was really said and done. We have had proofs in our own time that
that error is easy. Made by students of early New England, it leads to
multiple absurdities. The fact is that the civilization that grew up in
the region, such as it was, owed very little to the actual Puritans; it
was mainly the product of anti-Puritans, either home-bred or imported.
Even the school system, so celebrated in legend, owed whatever value
was in it to what were currently regarded as criminals. The Puritans
did not found their schools for the purpose of propagating what is now
known as learning; they found them simply as nurseries of orthodoxy.
Beyond the barest rudiments nothing of any worldly value was taught in
them. The principal subject of study, first and last, was theology, and
it was theology of the most grotesque and insane sort ever cherished
by man. Genuine education began in New England only when the rising
minority of anti-Puritans, eventually to become a majority, rose
against this theology, and tried to put it down. The revolt was first
felt at Harvard; it gradually converted a seminary for the training
of Puritan pastors into a genuine educational institution. Harvard
delivered New England, and made civilization possible there. All the
men who adorned that civilization in the days of its glory--Emerson,
Hawthorne and all the rest of them--were essentially anti-Puritans.

To-day, save in its remoter villages, New England is no more Puritan
than, say, Maryland or Missouri. There is scarcely a clergyman in the
entire region who, if the Mathers could come back to life, would not
be condemned by them instantly as a heretic, and even as an atheist.
The dominant theology is mild, skeptical and wholly lacking in passion.
The evangelical spirit has completely disappeared. Save in a small
minority of atavistic fanatics, there is a tolerance that is almost
indistinguishable from indifference. Roman Catholicism and Christian
Science are alike viewed amiably. The old heat is gone. Where it
lingers in America is in far places--on the Methodist prairies of the
Middle West, in the Baptist back-waters of the South. There, I believe,
it still retains not a little of its old vitality. There Puritanism
survives, not merely as a system of theology, but also as a way of
life. It colors every human activity. Kiwanis mouths it; it is powerful
in politics; learning wears its tinge. To charge a Harvard professor
of to-day with agnosticism would sound as banal as to charge him with
playing the violoncello. But his colleague of Kansas, facing the same
accusation, would go damp upon the forehead, and his colleague of Texas
would leave town between days.

Wendell, a sentimentalist, tried to put these facts behind him, though
he must have been well aware of them. There got into his work, in
consequence, a sense of futility, even when he was discussing very real
and important things. He opened paths that he was unable to traverse
himself. Sturdier men, following him, were soon marching far ahead of
him. He will live in the history of American criticism, but his own
criticism is already dead.




XIII. THE NATION


One often hears lamentation that the American weeklies of opinion are
not as good as their English prototypes--that we have never produced
anything in that line to equal, say, the _Athenæum_ or the _Saturday
Review_. In the notion, it seems to me, there is nothing save that
melancholy colonialism which is one of the curses of America. The
plain fact is that our weeklies, taking one with another, are quite
as well turned out as anything that England has ever seen, and that
at least two of them, the _Nation_ and the _New Republic_, are a
great deal better. They are better because they are more hospitable
to ideas, because they are served by a wider and more various range
of writers, and because they show an occasional sense of humor. Even
the _New Republic_ knows how to be waggish, though it also knows,
especially when it is discussing religion, how to be cruelly dull.
Its Washington correspondence is better than any Parliamentary stuff
in any English weekly ever heard of, if only because it is completely
devoid of amateur statesmanship, the traditional defect of political
correspondence at all times and everywhere. The editors of the English
weeklies all ride political hobbies, and many of them are actively
engaged in politics. Their American colleagues, I suspect, have been
tempted in that direction more than once, but happily they have
resisted, or maybe fate has resisted for them.

Of all the weeklies--and I go through at least twenty each week,
American and English, including the Catholic _Commonweal_ and a Negro
journal--I like the _Nation_ best. There is something charming about
its format, and it never fails to print an interesting piece of news,
missed by the daily newspapers. Moreover, there is always a burst of
fury in it, and somewhere or other, often hidden in a letter from a
subscriber, a flash of wit--two things that make for amusing reading.
The _New Republic_, I suspect, is more authoritative in certain
fields,--for example, the economic--but it is also more pontifical.
The _Nation_ gets the air of a lark into many of its most violent
crusades against fraud and folly; one somehow gathers the notion that
its editors really do not expect the millennium to come in to-morrow.
Of late they have shown many signs of forsaking Liberalism for
Libertarianism--a far sounder and more satisfying politics. A Liberal
is committed to sure cures that always turn out to be swindles; a
Libertarian throws the bottles out of the window, and asks only that
the patient be let alone.

What the circulation of the _Nation_ may be I don’t know. In its
sixtieth anniversary number, published in 1925, there was a hint
that the number then sold each week ran far ahead of the 11,000 with
which E. L. Godkin began in 1865. I have heard gabble in the saloons
frequented by New York publishers that the present circulation is
above 30,000. But no one, so far as I know, has ever suggested that it
equals the circulation of even a third-rate daily paper. Such dull,
preposterous sheets as the New York _Telegram_, the Washington _Star_,
the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_ and the Atlanta _Constitution_ sell
two or three times as many copies. Such magazines for the herd as _True
Stories_ and _Hot Dog_ sell fifty times as many. Nevertheless, if I
were a fellow of public spirit and eager to poison the Republic with
my sagacity, I’d rather be editor of the _Nation_ than editor of any
of the other journals that I have mentioned--nay, I’d rather be editor
of the _Nation_ than editor of all of them together, with every other
newspaper and magazine in America, save perhaps four or five, thrown
in. For the _Nation_ is unique in American journalism for one thing:
it is read by its enemies. They may damn it, they may have it barred
from libraries, they may even--as they did during the war--try to have
it put down by the Postoffice, but all the while they read it. That
is, the more intelligent of them--the least hopeless minority of them.
It is to such minorities that the _Nation_ addresses itself, on both
sides of the fence. It has penetrated to the capital fact that they
alone count--that the ideas sneaked into them to-day will begin to
sweat out of the herd day after to-morrow.

Is the Creel Press Bureau theory of the late war abandoned? Is it
impossible to find an educated man who is not ashamed that he succumbed
to the Wilson buncombe? Then thank the _Nation_ for that deliverance,
for when it tackled Wilson it tackled him alone. Is the Coolidge
Golden Age beginning to be sicklied o’er with a pale cast of green?
Then prepare to thank the _Nation_ again, for it began to tell the
harsh, cold truth about good Cal at a time when all the daily journals
of America, with not ten exceptions, were competing for the honor of
shining his shoes. I often wonder, indeed, that the great success
of the _Nation_ under Villard has made such little impression upon
American journalists--that they are so dead to the lessons that it
roars into their ears. They all read it--that is, all who read anything
at all. It prints news every week that they can’t find in their own
papers--sometimes news of the very first importance. It comments upon
that news in a tart and well-informed fashion. It presents all the new
ideas that rage in the world, always promptly and often pungently. To
an editorial writer the _Nation_ is indispensable. Either he reads it,
or he is an idiot. Yet its example is very seldom followed--that is,
forthrightly and heartily. Editorial writers all over the land steal
ideas from it daily; it supplies, indeed, all the ideas that most of
them ever have. It lifts them an inch, two inches, three inches, above
the sedimentary stratum of Rotarians, bankers and ice-wagon drivers;
they are conscious of its pull even when they resist. Yet very few of
them seem to make the inevitable deduction that the kind of journalism
it practices is better and more effective than the common kind--that
they, too, might amount to something in this world if they would
imitate it.

In such matters, alas, change is very slow. The whole press of
the United States, I believe, is moving in the direction of the
_Nation_--that is, in the direction of independence and honesty. Even
such papers as the New York _Herald-Tribune_ are measurably less stupid
and intransigeant than they used to be, in their news if not in their
opinions. But the majority of active journalists in the higher ranks
were bred on the old-time party organs, and it is very difficult for
them to reform their ways. They still think, not as free men, but as
party hacks. On the one side they put the truth; on the other side they
put what they call policy. Thus there are thousands of them who still
sit down nightly to praise Coolidge--though to the best of my knowledge
and belief there is not a single journalist in the whole United States
who ever speaks of Coolidge in private without sneering at him. This
resistance to change grows all the more curious when one observes
what happens to the occasional paper which abandons it. I offer the
Baltimore _Sunpaper_ as an example--an especially apposite one, for the
influence of the _Nation_ upon it must be apparent to everyone familiar
with its recent history. It was, a dozen years ago, a respectable
but immensely dull journal. It presented the day’s news in a formal,
unintelligent fashion. It was accurate in small things, and free from
sensationalism, but it seldom if ever went beyond the overt event to
the causes and motives behind it. Its editorial opinions were flabby,
and without influence. To-day it is certainly something far different.
It must still go a long, long way, I suspect, before it escapes its old
self altogether, but that must be a dull reader, indeed, who cannot see
how vastly it has improved. It no longer prints the news formally; it
devotes immense energy to discovering and revealing what is behind the
news. In opinion it has thrown off all chains of faction and party, and
is sharply and often intelligently independent. Its reaction to a new
public problem is not that of a party hack, but that of a free man. It
is, perhaps, sometimes grossly wrong, but no sane person believes that
it is ever deliberately disingenuous.

Well, the point is that this new scheme has been tremendously
successful--that it has paid in hard cash as well as in the
usufructs of the spirit. There is no sign that the readers of the
_Sunpaper_--barring a few quacks with something to sell--dislike its
new vigor, enterprise and independence. On the contrary, there is every
evidence that they like it. They have increased greatly in numbers. The
paper itself rises in dignity and influence. And every other newspaper
in America that ventures upon the same innovations, from the _World_
in New York to the _Enquirer-Sun_ down in Columbus, Ga., rises in the
same way. It is my contention that the _Nation_ has led the way in
this reform of American journalism--that it will be followed by many
papers to-morrow, as it is followed by a few to-day. Its politics
are sometimes outrageous. It frequently gets into lamentable snarls,
battling for liberty with one hand and more laws with the other. It
is doctrinaire, inconsistent, bellicose. It whoops for men one day,
and damns them as frauds the next. It has no sense of decorum. It
is sometimes a bit rowdy. But who will deny that it is honest? And
who will deny that, taking one day with another, it is generally
right--that its enthusiasms, if they occasionally send it mooning
after dreamers, at least never send it cheering for rogues--that its
wrongness, when it is wrong, is at all events not the dull, simian
wrongness of mere stupidity? It is disliked inordinately, but not, I
believe, by honest men, even among its enemies. It is disliked by
demagogues and exploiters, by frauds great and small. They have all
tasted its snickersnee, and they have all good reason to dislike it.

Personally, I do not subscribe to its politics, save when it advocates
liberty openly and unashamed. I have no belief in politicians: the good
ones and the bad ones seem to me to be unanimously thieves. Thus I
hope I may whoop for it with some grace, despite the fact that my name
appears on its flagstaff. How my name got there I don’t know; I receive
no emolument from its coffers, and write for it very seldom, and then
only in contravention of its ideas. I even have to pay cash for my
annual subscription--a strange and painful burden for a journalist
to bear. But I know of no other expenditure (that is, of a secular
character) that I make with more satisfaction, or that brings me a
better return. Most of the papers that I am doomed to read are idiotic
even when they are right. The _Nation_ is intelligent and instructive
even when it is wrong.




XIV. OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN


Hard luck pursues the American Navy. It is the common butt, not only
of political mountebanks, but also of all the brummagem uplifters and
soul-snatchers who now sweat to save us. If a Mr. Secretary Denby is
not permitting the Falls and Dohenys to raid its goods, a Mr. Secretary
Wilbur or Josephus Daniels is trying to convert it into a Methodist
Sunday-school. Worse, the Navy gets more than its fair share of the
national dirty work. It is told off to put down free speech in the
Virgin Islands, and it is delegated to flog, hang and butcher the poor
Haitians, and so convert them into black Iowans, with money in the
bank. Elsewhere in the world such disagreeable jobs are given to the
Army. The British Army, for example, performs all the massacres that
are necessary in India, and the French Army attends to whatever routine
murders and mayhems are called for in Syria and Morocco. But the
American custom puts all such Christian endeavor upon the Navy.

However, unless my agents lie, it is not the gore that revolts the
more high-toned naval officers, but the new rectitude that has been
thrust upon them. They are, as a class, excellent fellows, and full
of pride in their uniform. As officers, they are all theoretically
gentlemen, and many of them are so in fact. They have traveled widely,
and are familiar with the usages of the civilized world. They know what
is decent and seemly. Well, try to imagine how they must feel when
they read the daily papers. One day they read that the Secretary of
the Navy has ordered a group of their colleagues to prosecute a woman
nurse for bringing in a couple of jugs aboard a naval collier. The next
day they observe that a high officer in the Marines has filled the
newspapers with a meticulous and indignant account of what went on at
a table where he was a guest, in the house of one of his subordinates.
Explanations of this last episode have been offered, but they certainly
do not explain it away. The essential and immovable point is that
one officer snitched on another, his host--that the immemorial and
invariable obligations of a guest were sacrificed to Law Enforcement.
What would happen to an English naval officer who made any such assault
upon the code? What, indeed would happen to an honest Elk?

But I am not arguing here that any such things ought to happen; I am
merely calling attention to the fact that, under democracy, it is
becoming increasingly difficult for officers to be gentlemen, as the
term is commonly understood in the world, and perhaps also increasingly
improbable. We are, it would appear, passing through a time of
changing values, and what was considered decent by our fathers will
lose that quality to-morrow. The lower orders of men, having attained
to political power, now proceed to force their ideas upon their
betters, and some of those ideas naturally have to do with decorum.
It is already unlawful in America to take a bottle of wine to a sick
friend; in a few years it may also be indelicate. And simultaneously,
it may become quite proper to go to the police with anything that is
said or done in a friend’s house. Personally, I am inclined to oppose
such changes, if only in sheer hunkerousness, but I am surely under
no illusion that opposing them will stop them. They flow naturally
out of the character of the common man, now in the saddle, and are
thus irresistible. He is extremely and even excessively moral, but the
concept of what is called honor is beyond him. If, for example, he
aspires to public office, he believes that it is entirely proper to
abandon one conviction and take on its opposite in order to get votes.
And, having got into office, he believes that it is entirely proper to
hold on at any cost, even at the cost of common decency.

There is a familiar example. I allude to the Cathcart case. In
that case a high officer of State found himself confronting an
uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand he was bound by an outrageous
law to engage in a public and obscene chase of a woman taken in
adultery. On the other hand he was bound by the code of all civilized
men to refuse and refrain. What was the way out for him? The way out,
obviously, was for him to resign his office--in other words, to decline
flatly to perform any such ignoble and disgusting duty, and to spurn
as insults the honors and emoluments offered for doing it. But, as far
as I can make out, he never so much as thought of that. Instead he
played the bounder--and kept his dirty job. His conduct, I believe,
seemed quite proper to the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. The
newspapers, in discussing it, never once suggested that a man of honor,
in his boots, would resign forthwith. Instead, they simply denounced
him for doing his plain duty under the law--that is, they proposed
that he get out of his dilemma by violating his oath of office. The
device is characteristically American. Anything is fair and decent that
keeps a man his job. That has been the settled American doctrine since
Jackson’s time.

But it is only of late, I believe, that it has been defended openly,
and its antithesis denounced as, in some mysterious fashion, inimical
to democracy. We owe that change to the liberation of the lower orders
which began with the Civil War. That liberation produced, on one
side, an immense increase in political corruption, and, on the other,
a rise in moral frenzy. All the characteristic ideas of the mob began
to be reflected in public life and legislation. The typical American
public officer, who had been a theorist willing to sacrifice anything,
including his office, to his notions, became a realist willing to
sacrifice anything, including his principles and his honor, to his
job. We have him with us to-day, and he smells worse and worse as year
chases year. Grover Cleveland was perhaps the last lonely survivor
of the old days. He had his faults, God knows, but no one could have
imagined him yielding to the mob in order to make votes. Right or
wrong, he was his own man--and never more surely than when, by popular
standards, he was wrong. In his successor, Dr. Coolidge, we have an
almost perfect specimen of the new order. Coolidge is a professional
trimmer, who has made his living at the art since his early manhood. It
is impossible to imagine him sacrificing his political welfare to his
convictions. He has vanity, but nothing properly describable as dignity
or self-respect. One automatically pictures him doing, in the Cathcart
case, precisely what his subordinate did. He performed many comparable
acts during the stinking progress of the Fall case.

This general decay of honor is bound, plainly enough, to drive all
the decenter sort of men out of public life among us. The process,
indeed, has already gone a long way. I point to Congress. I point to
the Federal judiciary. In both directions one observes an increase
in trimmers and knee-benders and a decrease in independent and
self-respecting men. The bench, in particular, has suffered. The better
sort of judges, torn between their lawyer-like respect for all law
and their inescapable conviction that many of the new laws they are
called upon to enforce are unjust and dishonest, tend to throw off the
ermine and go back to practice. And their places are filled by limber
nonentities selected--and policed--by the Anti-Saloon League.

Until a few years ago the Army and the Navy escaped this general
degradation. Their officers stood apart from the main body of public
job-holders. They held office for life, and they were assumed to be
innocent of politics. Having no need to curry favor with the mob, they
could afford to disdain the common hypocrisies. Inheriting an austere
and exact tradition of professional honor, they were what is called
gentlemen. They did not blab upon one another. They had the fine
tolerance of civilized men. They had dignity. It was as impossible to
imagine a naval officer or an army officer playing the spy for the
Anti-Saloon League as it was to imagine him using a table-napkin as a
handkerchief or getting converted at a Methodist revival. But I fear
those days are past. The pressure from outside, exerted through such
mountebanks as Mr. Secretary Wilbur, becomes too heavy to be borne.
Worse, there is disintegration within, due in part, perhaps, to the
packing of the two Services with civilians from the gutter, but in part
also to changes in the method of selecting candidates for Annapolis
and West Point. Whatever the cause, the effects are already plain. In
a few short years, perhaps, we shall see a major-general in the Army
preaching Fundamentalism in Tennessee, and an admiral in the Navy going
to work for the Anti-Saloon League.




XV. GOLDEN AGE


The rest of us, struggling onward painfully, must wait in patience for
the boons and usufructs of Heaven; Judge Elbert Henry Gary, LL.D.,
chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, has them here and
now. To few men in history, I believe, has it been given to live in a
universe so nearly to their hearts’ desire. Let the learned ex-jurist
look East or West, he will find only scenes to content him. Let him
look North or South, and his eye will be caressed and frankincense will
spray his gills. The emperor and pope of all the Babbitts, he sits at
the center of a Babbitts’ paradise. For him and his like there dawns a
Golden Age, and its hero is good Cal.

I hope I do not exaggerate. No doubt Judge Gary, in the privacy of
his chamber, sweats and fumes against imperfections invisible to
the rest of us. He is a man of imagination, and has, I daresay, a
bold and soaring fancy. He can imagine a Republic even kinder and
more osculatory than this one--that is, to Babbitts. He can even,
perhaps, imagine a President more ineffable than Cal. But here we
shoot into mere human weaknesses--the voluptuous, Freudian day-dreams
of one who, like all of us, has his aberrant, goatish moods. Dr.
John Roach Straton, I suppose, can imagine improvements in the Holy
Scriptures--here a paragraph excised _pro bonos mores_, there a comma
inserted to make sense. I myself have dreamed of a malt liquor better
than Pilsner Bürgerbräu. But I do not sign my name to such inordinate
speculations, and neither does Dr. Straton. Judge Gary, too, holds
his tongue. The rest of us, contemplating him, can only envy him. A
vast nation of 110,000,000 human beings, all of them alike, seems to
be organized to the one end of making him happy. Whatever he wants it
to do, it does. Its laws are framed to his precise taste; its public
conscience approves his partisans and execrates his enemies; its high
officers of state are his excellent friends, and humble and obedient
servants. When he gives a feast, judges and ambassadors leap to grace
it. When he would dine out, he is welcome at the White House. The
newspapers fawn upon him. Labor licks his hand. His frown is dreaded
in the Senate house and on the bench. Altogether, his life is happier
than that of a Broadway actor, and if he is not content then it is only
because contentment is physiologically impossible to _Homo sapiens_.

The United States, I believe, is the first great empire in the history
of the world to ground its whole national philosophy upon business.
There have been, of course, eminent trading nations in the past, but
none ever went so far. Even in Carthage there was a _Junker_ hierarchy
that stood above the merchants; in Hannibal it actually had a Crown
Prince. And even in England, the nation of shopkeepers of Napoleon’s
derision, there has always been an aristocracy (made up mainly of
military freebooters, enterprising adulterers, the issue of the latter,
and, in modern times, shyster lawyers, vaudeville magnates, and the
proprietors of yellow newspapers) that has held its own against the men
of trade, even at the cost of absorbing the more pugnacious of them.
But here in this great Republic of the West the art of trafficking is
king--and Judge Gary is its grand vizier, as Cal is its chief eunuch.
No other human activity brings such great rewards in money and power,
and none is more lavishly honored. The one aim of our jurisprudence is
to safeguard business--to make its risks small and its profits sure.
If the rights of the citizen get in the way, then the rights of the
citizen must be sacrificed. Upon this point our higher courts have
delivered themselves more than once, and in eloquent, ringing terms.
Judge Gary and his friends prefer dry and dismal slaves to those who
are stewed and happy. _Also_, to hell with the Bill of Rights! They
prefer, when there is a strike, to win it rather than lose it. Out,
then, with the pad of blank injunctions! They sweat under criticism,
and shiver under attack. To the hoosegow, constable, with the
Bolsheviks!

All this, of course, was not achieved without a struggle. For years the
Constitution stood in the way--the Constitution and certain national
superstitions--the latter sprung from the blather of the Revolutionary
stump. But all those impediments are now surmounted. The bench gave
Judge Gary to business, and business has reciprocated the favor by
providing sound and sane men for the bench. To-day jurisprudence is
unfettered. When, a year or so ago, the Supreme Court finally got rid
of the Fourth Amendment, that delayed mopping up went almost unnoticed.
As I say, Judge Gary, ought to be a happy man. The sun shines upon him
from all four points of the compass. Congress, well rehearsed, plays
soft jazz for him; bishops bring him his toddy; a straw issues from the
White House and tickles him behind the ear. But never is his happiness
greater, I believe, than when his thoughts turn idly upon the subject
of labor, and he contemplates the state of the union movement in the
Federal Union.

For this state, it is plain, he has the late Sam Gompers to thank--that
great idealist and easy mark. If he sent less than ten hay-wagons of
roses to Sam’s funeral, then he is a niggard, indeed. For Sam got upon
the back of the American labor movement when it was beginning to be
dangerous, and rode it so magnificently that at the end of his life it
was as tame as a tabby cat. It retains that character to-day, and will
continue to do so as long as the Gompersian hierarchy lasts,--that is,
so long as Judge Gary and his friends continue to appoint Sam’s heirs
and assigns to high-sounding committees, and to invite them to gaudy
dinners. A plate of puddle duck and a chance to make a speech--that was
always enough to fetch Sam. And when Sam was fetched, the 4,000,000
members of the American Federation of Labor were also fetched. Where
else in the world is there a great union organization that has so long
and honorable a record as a strike-breaker? Or that is so diligently
devoted to keeping the lower ranks of labor in due subordination? If it
had been conceived and hatched by Judge Gary himself, it could not have
been more nearly perfect. Practically considered, it is not a labor
organization at all; it is simply a balloon mattress interposed between
capital and labor to protect the former from the latter. Gazing upon
it, I daresay, Judge Gary feels a glow flickering along the periphery
of his gizzard, and if he were not a Christian he would permit himself
a guffaw.

I leave the sweetest to the last. The courts might be docile, Congress
might be consecrated to right thought, labor might grovel and the
bench of bishops might applaud, but if there were an anarchist in the
White House it would all go for naught. Imagine, then, Judge Gary’s
joy in contemplating the incomparable Cal! It is almost as if, in New
York, a bootlegger were made king. The man’s merits, in the Babbitt
view, are almost fabulous. He seems, indeed, scarcely like a man at
all, but more like some miraculous visitation or act of God. He is the
ideal made visible, if not audible--perfection put into a cutaway coat
and trotted up and down like a mannequin in a cloak and suit atelier.
Nor was there any long stress of training him--no season of doubt
and misgiving. Nature heaved him forth full-blown, like a new star
shot into the heavens. In him the philosophy of Babbitt comes to its
perfect and transcendental form. Thrift, to him, is the queen of all
the virtues. He respects money in each and every one of its beautiful
forms--pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, five-dollar bills, and so on
_ad infinitum_. He venerates those who have it. He believes that they
have wisdom. He craves the loan and use of that wisdom. He invites them
to breakfast, and listens to them. The things they revere, he reveres.
The things they long for, he longs to give them.

Judge Gary is an old man--just how old I do not know, for he withholds
the date of his birth from “Who’s Who in America,” along with the
principal suffragettes. He remembers the dreadful days of Roosevelt,
with bombs going off every two hours. He remembers the turmoils
of the Taft administration. He remembers how _difficile_ Woodrow
was--how he had to be wooed, flattered, led by the nose, drenched
with goose-grease. He remembers the crude carnival under the martyr
Harding--Broadway sports, pug managers, small-town Elks at the trough.
And then he thinks of Washington to-day, and sees it bathed in pink
sunshine. There he is ever welcome. There he is _imperator in imperio_.
There is good _Geschäft_. There is the Athens of the new Golden Age.




XVI. EDGAR SALTUS


Forty years ago Edgar Saltus was a shining star in the national
literature, leading the way out of the Egyptian night of Victorian
sentimentality. To-day he survives only as the favorite author of the
late Warren Gamaliel Harding. I can recall, in the circle of Athene,
no more complete collapse. Saltus plunged from the top of the world to
the bottom of the sea. His books, of late, have been reissued, and his
surviving third wife has printed a biography of him. But all his old
following, save for a few romantic die-hards, has vanished.

The causes of the débâcle are certainly not hard to determine. They
were set forth twenty-five years ago by that ingenious man, the late
Percival Pollard, and you will find them in his book, “Their Day in
Court.” Saltus was simply a bright young fellow who succumbed to
his own cleverness. The gaudy glittering phrase enchanted him. He
found early in life that he had a hand for shaping it; he found soon
afterward that it had a high capacity for getting him notice. So he
devoted himself to its concoction--and presently he was lost. His
life after that was simply one long intoxication. He was drunk on
words. Ideas gradually departed from him. Day and night, for years
and years, he held his nozzle against the jug of nouns, adjectives,
verbs, pronouns, prepositions and interjections. Some of his phrases,
of course, were good ones. There were enough of that kind in “Imperial
Purple,” for example, to fascinate the sainted Harding, a voluptuary
in all the arts. But the rest quickly wore out--and with them Saltus
himself wore out. He passed into the shadows, and was forgotten. When
he died, a few years ago, all that remained of him was a vague name.

His wife’s biography is encased in an orange slip-cover which announces
melodramatically that it is “an extraordinary revealing life.” It is,
but I doubt that what it reveals will serve to resuscitate poor Saltus.
The man who emerges from it is simply a silly and hollow trifler--a
mass of puerile pretensions and affectations, vain of his unsound
knowledge and full of sentimentalities. He began life by hawking the
stale ribaldries of Arthur Schopenhauer, already dead twenty years;
he departed to realms of bliss chattering the blowsy nonsense of
theosophy. Mrs. Saltus, in the new and appalling fashion of literary
wives, is extremely frank. Her Edgar was a handsome dog, but extremely
foolish, and even childish. When he was engaged upon his rococo
compositions he had to be protected like a queen bee in childbed. The
slightest sound dissipated his inspiration, and set him to yelling. If
a fish-peddler stopped beneath his window he was done for the day. If
a cat came in and brushed his leg he was thrown into hysterics, and
had to go to bed. His love affairs were highly complex, and apparently
took up a great deal of his time. Early in life, while he was a student
at Heidelberg, he had an affair with a lady of noble birth, and even
ran away with her. The business was quickly broken up, apparently by
the allied sovereigns of Europe. The bride-elect was immured in a
convent, and died there “the year following.” Saltus then came back
to the Republic and married the daughter of a partner in J. P. Morgan
& Company. “She was no small catch,” but the alliance was doomed. The
man was too fascinating to women. His pulchritude charmed them, and
his epigrams finished them. In a few years Mrs. Saltus was suing for
divorce.

There followed a series of morganatic affairs, culminating in a second
marriage. This one also blew up quickly; the bride denounced Saltus as
a liar, and even hinted that he had induced her to marry him by fraud.
But though she soon left his bed and board, she clung resolutely to
her other rights as his wife, and thereafter, for many long years, he
devoted all the time he could spare from his writing to efforts to get
rid of her. He moved from New York to California, in fact, mainly
because the divorce laws on the Coast were easier than in the East. But
they were not easy enough to free him. Finally, after endless waiting,
he got news one day that the party of the second part was dead. He
displayed the correct regrets, but was obviously much relieved.
Meanwhile, Wife No. 3 was at call in the anteroom. She had been there,
in fact, for years. When Saltus first met her she was a school-girl
with her hair down her back, and his attentions to her--he was then
rising forty--naturally outraged her family. But her own heart was
lost, and so the effort to warn him off failed. He followed her, after
that, all over the civilized world. Did she go to London, he was at her
heels on the next steamer. Did she move to Los Angeles, he arrived by
the next train. In the end they were married in Montreal, on a very hot
day and after a pretty lovers’ quarrel.

This lady is the author of the biography with the orange slip-cover.
Facing page 310 there is a portrait of her showing her “sitting at the
table on which her husband wrote his books, burning incense before a
Siamese Buddha, and meditating on a stanza from the Bhagavad-Gita.” She
denies, however, that Saltus took to theosophy under her tutelage. The
actual recruiting officer was a certain Mr. Colville, of Pasadena, who
combined the “enthusiasm of a scholar and the erudition of a sage.”
This Colville introduced Saltus to the theosophical elements, and
later guided his faltering steps. In the end poor old Schopenhauer lost
a customer and the art of epigram a gifted and diligent practitioner.
Saltus passed into senility with his thoughts concentrated powerfully
upon Higher Things.

A grotesque and somewhat pathetic story. The man began life with
everything in his favor. His family was well-to-do and of good social
position in New York; he was sent to Eton and then to Heidelberg, and
apparently made useful friends at both places; he plunged into writing
at the precise moment when revolt against the New England Brahmins was
rising; he attracted attention quickly, and was given a lavish welcome.
No American author of 1885 was more talked about. When his first novel,
“The Truth About Tristrem Varick,” came out in 1888 it made a genuine
sensation. But the stick came down almost as fast as the rocket had
gone up. His books set the nation agog for a short while, and were then
quietly forgotten. He began as the hope of American letters, and ended
as a writer of yellow-backs and a special correspondent for the Hearst
papers. What ailed him was simply lack of solid substance. He could
be clever, as cleverness was understood during the first Cleveland
administration, but he lacked dignity, information, sense. His books of
“philosophy” were feeble and superficial, his novels were only facile
improvisations, full of satanic melodrama and wooden marionettes.

Of late I have been re-reading them--a sad job, surely, for when I was
a schoolboy they were nine-day wonders, barred from all the libraries
but devoured eagerly by every aspiring youth. Now their epigrams are
dulled, and there is nothing else left. “The Anatomy of Negation” and
“The Philosophy of Disenchantment” have been superseded by far better
books; “The Truth About Tristrem Varick” reads like one of the shockers
of Gertrude Atherton; “Mary Magdalen” is a dead shell; the essays
and articles republished as “Uplands of Dream” are simply ninth-rate
journalism. Of them all only “Imperial Purple” holds up. A certain fine
glow is still in it; it has gusto if not profundity; Saltus’s worst
faults do not damage it appreciably. I find myself, indeed, agreeing
thoroughly with the literary judgment of Dr. Harding. “Imperial Purple”
remains Saltus’s best book. It remains also, alas, his only good one!




XVII. MISCELLANEOUS NOTES


1

_Martyrs_

To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it
would be if men died for ideas that were true! Searching history, I can
find no such case. All the great martyrs of the books died for sheer
nonsense--often for trivial matters of doctrine and ceremonial, too
absurd to be stated in plain terms. But what of the countless thousands
who have perished in the wars, fighting magnificently for their
country? Well, show me one who knew precisely what the war he died in
was about, and could put it into a simple and plausible proposition.


2

_The Ancients_

The theory that the ancient Greeks and Romans were men of a vast and
ineffable superiority runs aground on the fact that they were great
admirers of oratory. No other art was so assiduously practiced among
them. To-day we venerate the architecture of Greece far more than we
venerate its orators, but the Greeks themselves put the orators first,
and so much better records of them are preserved to-day. But oratory,
as a matter of fact, is the most primitive and hence the lowest of all
the arts. Where is it most respected to-day? Among savages, in and out
of civilization. The yokels of the open spaces flock by the thousand
to hear imbeciles yawp and heave; the city proletariat glues its ears
to the radio every night. But what genuinely civilized man would turn
out to hear even the champion orator of the country? Dozens of the
most eminent professors of the art show off their tricks every day in
the United States Senate. Yet the galleries of the Senate, save when
news goes out that some Senator is stewed and about to make an ass of
himself, are occupied only by Negroes who have come in to get warm, and
hand-holding bridal couples from rural North Carolina and West Virginia.


3

_Jack Ketch as Eugenist_

Has any historian ever noticed the salubrious effect, on the English
character, of the frenzy for hanging that went on in England during
the Eighteenth Century? When I say salubrious, of course, I mean in
the purely social sense. At the end of the Seventeenth Century the
Englishman was still one of the most turbulent and lawless of civilized
men; at the beginning of the Nineteenth he was the most law-abiding;
_i. e._, the most docile. What worked the change in him? I believe that
it was worked by the rope of Jack Ketch. During the Eighteenth Century
the lawless strain was simply choked out of the race. Perhaps a third
of those in whose veins it ran were actually hanged; the rest were
chased out of the British Isles, never to return. Some fled to Ireland,
and revivified the decaying Irish race: in practically all the Irish
rebels of the past century there have been plain traces of English
blood. Others went to the Dominions. Yet others came to the United
States, and after helping to conquer the Western wilderness, begat the
yeggman, Prohibition agents, footpads and hijackers of to-day.

The murder rate is very low in England, perhaps the lowest in the
world. It is low because nearly all the potential ancestors of
murderers were hanged or exiled in the Eighteenth Century. Why is it
so high in the United States? Because most of the potential ancestors
of murderers, in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries,
were _not_ hanged. And why did they escape? For two plain reasons.
First, the existing government was too weak to track them down and
execute them, especially in the West. Second, the qualities of daring
and enterprise that went with their murderousness were so valuable
that it was socially profitable to overlook their homicides. In other
words, the job of occupying and organizing the vast domain of the
new Republic was one that demanded the aid of men who, among other
things, occasionally butchered their fellow men. The butchering had
to be winked at in order to get their help. Thus the murder rate, on
the frontier, rose to unprecedented heights, while the execution rate
remained very low. Probably 100,000 men altogether were murdered in
the territory west of the Ohio between 1776 and 1865; probably not 100
murderers were formally executed. When they were punished at all, it
was by other murderers--and this left the strain unimpaired.


4

_Heroes_

Of human eminence there are obviously two varieties: that which issues
out of the inner substance of the eminent individual and that which
comes to him, either partially or wholly, from without. It is not
difficult to recognize men at the two extremes. No sane person would
argue seriously that the eminence of such a man, say, as Richard Wagner
was, in any plausible sense, accidental or unearned. Wagner created
“Tristan und Isolde” out of his own inherent substance. Allowing
everything for the chances of his education and environment, the
massive fact remains that no other man of the same general education
and environment has ever created anything even remotely comparable to
it. Wagner deserved the eminence that came to him quite as certainly
as the Lord God Jehovah deserves that which attaches to Him. He got it
by differing sharply from other men, and enormously for the better,
and by laboring colossally and incessantly to make that difference
visible. At the other extreme lies such a fellow, say, as young John
D. Rockefeller. He is, by all ordinary standards, an eminent man. When
he says anything the newspapers report it in full. If he fell ill of
gallstones to-morrow, or eloped with a lady Ph.D., or fell off the roof
of his house, or was taken in a rum raid the news would be telegraphed
to all parts of the earth and at least a billion human beings would
show some interest in it. And if he went to Washington and pulled
the White House bell he would be let in infallibly, even if the Heir
of Lincoln had to quit a saxophone lesson to see him. But it must be
obvious that young John’s eminence, such as it is, is almost purely
fortuitous and unearned. He is attended to simply because he happens
to be the son of old John, and hence heir to a large fortune. So far
as the records show, he has never said anything in his life that was
beyond the talents of a Rotary Club orator or a newspaper editorial
writer, or done anything that would have strained an intelligent
bookkeeper. He is, to all intents and purposes, a vacuum, and yet he
is known to more people, and especially to more people of means, than
Wagner, and admired and envied vastly more by all classes.

Between Wagner and young John there are infinite gradations, and
sometimes it is a hard matter to distinguish between them. To most
Americans, I daresay, a Harding or a Coolidge appears to enjoy an
eminence that is not only more gaudy but also more solid than that
of, say, an Einstein. When Einstein visited the United States, a few
years ago, he was taken to see Harding as a sort of treat, and many
worthy patriots, no doubt, regarded it as somewhat too rich for him,
an enemy alien and a Jew. If Thomas Hardy came here to-morrow, his
publisher would undoubtedly try to get an invitation to the White House
for him, not merely to advertise his books but also to honor the man.
Yet it must be plain that the eminence of Coolidge, however vastly
it may be whooped up by gentlemen of enlightened self-interest, is
actually greatly inferior to that of either Einstein or Hardy. These
men owe whatever fame they have to actual accomplishments. There is
no doubt whatever that what they have is wholly theirs. They owe
nothing to anyone, and no conceivable series of accidents could have
made them what they are. If superiority exists among men, then they are
indubitably superior. But is there any sign of superiority in Coolidge?
I can find none. His eminence is due entirely to two things: first, a
series of accidents, and secondly, the possession of qualities that, in
themselves, do not mark a superior man, but an inferior. He is a cheap,
sordid and grasping politician, a seeker of jobs all his life, willing
to do almost anything imaginable to get them. He has never said a word
worth hearing, or done a thing requiring genius, or even ordinary
skill. Put into his place and given the opportunities that have arisen
before him in a long succession, any other ninth-rate lawyer in the
land could have got as far as he has got.

Now for my point. It is, in brief, that the public estimation of
eminence runs almost directly in inverse ratio to its genuineness. That
is to say, the sort of eminence that the mob esteems most highly is
precisely the sort that has least grounding in solid worth and honest
accomplishment. And the reason therefor is not far to seek. The kind of
eminence that it admires is simply the kind that it can understand--the
kind that it can aspire to. The very puerility of a Coolidge, in fact,
is one of the principal causes of the admiration he excites. What he
has done in the world is within the capacities, given luck enough, of
any John Smith. His merits, such as they are, are almost universal,
and hence perfectly comprehensible. But what a Wagner or an Einstein
does is wholly beyond the understanding of an ordinary ignoramus, and
so it is impossible for the ignoramus to admire it. Worse, it tends
to arouse his suspicion, and hence his animosity. He is not merely
indifferent to the merits of a Wagner; he will, if any attempt is made
to force them upon his attention, challenge them sharply. What he
admires fundamentally, in other words, is himself, and in a Coolidge,
a Harding, a baseball pitcher, a movie actor, an archbishop, or a bank
president he can see himself. He can see himself, too, though perhaps
more dimly, in a Dewey, a Pershing, a Rockefeller or a Jack Dempsey.
But he can no more see himself in a Wagner or an Einstein than he can
see himself on the throne of the Romanoffs, and so he suspects and
dislikes such men, as he suspects and dislikes Romanoffs.

Unluckily, it is one thing to denounce his stupidity, and quite another
thing to escape its consequences. The history of mankind is peopled
chiefly, not with the genuinely great men of the race, but with the
flashy and hollow fellows who appealed to the mob. Every American
remembers vividly the contribution that Theodore Roosevelt made to the
building of the Panama Canal--a contribution that might have been made
by any other American thrown fortuitously into his place, assuming
only that the substitute shared his normal American lack of a sense
of honor. But who remembers the name of the man who actually designed
the canal? I turn to the New International Encyclopedia and find nine
whole pages about the canal, with many drawings. There is eloquent
mention of Col. Goethals--who simply carried out the designer’s plans.
There is mention, too, of Col. Gorgas--whose sanitary work was a simple
application of other men’s ideas. There is ample space for Roosevelt,
and his blackjacking of Colombia. But so far as I can find, the name of
the designer is not there. The mob did not admire him, and so history
has overlooked him.


5

_An Historic Blunder_

The Southern gentry made a thumping mistake when, after the Civil War,
they disfranchised the blacks. Had they permitted the latter to vote,
they would have retained political control of all the Southern States,
for the blacks, like the peasants everywhere else, would have followed
their natural masters. As it was, control quickly passed to the poor
white trash, who still maintain it, though many of them have ceased
to be poor. The gentry struggle in vain to get back in the saddle;
they lack the votes to achieve the business unaided, and the blacks,
who were ready to follow them in 1870, are now incurably suspicious
of them. The result is that politics in the South remain fathomlessly
swinish. Every civilized Southerner knows it and is ashamed of it, but
the time has apparently passed to do anything about it. To get rid of
its Bleases, Mayfields, Slemps, Peays and Vardamans, the South must
wait until the white trash are themselves civilized. This is a matter
demanding almost as much patience as the long vigil of the Seventh Day
Adventists.


6

_On Cynicism_

One of the most curious of human delusions lies in the theory that
cynics are unhappy men--that cynicism makes for a general biliousness
and malaise. It is a false deduction, I believe, from the obvious fact
that cynics make _other_ men unhappy. But they are themselves among the
most comfortable and serene of mammals; perhaps only bishops, pet dogs
and actors are happier. For what a cynic believes, though it may be too
dreadful to be put into formal words, at least usually has the merit of
being true--and truth is ever a rock, hard and harsh, but solid under
the feet. A cynic is chronically in the position of a wedding guest
who has known the bride for nine years, and has had her confidence.
He is a great deal less happy, theoretically, than the bridegroom.
The bridegroom, beautifully barbered and arrayed, is about to launch
into the honeymoon. But the cynic looks ahead two weeks, two months,
two years. Such, to borrow a phrase from the late Dr. Eliot, are the
durable satisfactions of life.


7

_Music and Sin_

Among Christian workers and other intellectual cripples the delusion
seems to persist that jazz is highly aphrodisiacal. I never encounter
a sermon on the subject without finding it full of dark warnings to
parents, urging them to keep their nubile daughters out of the jazz
palaces on the ground that the voluptuous music will inflame their
passions and so make them easy prey to bond salesmen, musicians and
other such carnal fellows. All this seems to me to be nonsense. Jazz,
in point of fact, is not voluptuous at all. Its monotonous rhythm and
puerile tunes make it a sedative rather than a stimulant. If it is an
aphrodisiac, then the sound of riveting is also an aphrodisiac. What
fetches the flappers who come to grief in the jazz parlors is not
the music at all, but the alcohol. Drinking it out of flasks in the
washrooms, they fail to keep the dose in harmony with their natural
resistance, and so they lose control of their faculties, and what
follows is lamentable. Jazz, which came in with Prohibition, gets
the blame that belongs to its partner. In the old days, when it was
uncommon for refined women to get drunk at dances, it would have been
quite harmless. To-day even Chopin’s funeral march would be dangerous.

The truth is that jazz is probably the least voluptuous variety of
music commonly heard in Christendom. There are plenty of Methodist
hymns that are ten times as aphrodisiacal, and the fact is proved
by the scandals that follow every camp-meeting. In most parts of
the United States, indeed, the Methodists have begun to abandon
camp-meetings as subversive of morality. Where they still flourish
it is not unusual for even the rev. clergy to be taken in byzantine
practices. But so-called good music is yet worse than the Methodist
hymns. Has the world so soon forgotten James Huneker’s story of the
prudent opera mamma who refused to let her daughter sing Isolde, on
the ground that no woman could ever get through the second act without
forgetting God? That second act, even so, is much overestimated. There
are piano pieces of Chopin that are a hundred times worse; if the
Comstocks really had any sense, they would forbid their performance.
And what of the late Puccini? If “La Bohème” is not an aphrodisiac,
then what is it? Yet it is sung publicly all over the world. Only in
Atlanta, Ga., is there a law against it, and even that law was probably
inspired by the fact that it was written by a Catholic and not by the
fact that it has brought hundreds of thousands of Christian women to
the edge of the abyss.

Old Ludwig himself was not without guilt. His “Egmont” overture is a
gross and undisguised appeal to the medulla oblongata. And what of
his symphonies and quartettes? The last movement of his Eroica is not
only voluptuous to the last degree; it is also Bolshevistic. Try to
play it with your eyes on a portrait of Dr. Coolidge. You will find
the thing as impossible as eating ice-cream on roast beef. At the time
of its first performance in Vienna the moral sense of the community
was so greatly outraged that Beethoven had to get out of town for a
while. I pass over Wagner, whose “Tristan und Isolde” was probably
his most decorous work, despite Huneker--think of “Parsifal”!--and
come to Richard Strauss. Here I need offer no argument: his “Salomé”
and “Elektra” have been prohibited by the police, at one time or
another, in nearly every country in the world. I believe that “Der
Rosenkavalier” is still worse, though the police leave it unmolested.
Compare its first act to the most libidinous jazz ever heard of on
Broadway. It is like comparing vodka to ginger-pop. No woman who hears
it is ever the same again. She may remain within the law, but her
thoughts are wayward henceforth. Into her ear the sirens have poured
their abominable song. She has been beset by witches. There is a
sinister glitter in her eye.


8

_The Champion_

Of the forty-eight sovereign States of this imperial Federation,
which is the worst? In what one of them is a civilized man most
uncomfortable? Over half the votes, if the question were put to a
vote, would probably be divided between California and Tennessee.
Each in its way, is almost unspeakable. Tennessee, of course, has
never been civilized, save in a small area; even in the earliest days
of the Republic it was regarded as barbaric by its neighbors. But
California, at one time, promised to develop a charming and enlightened
civilization. There was a touch of tropical balm in its air, and
a touch of Latin and oriental color in its ideas. Like Louisiana,
it seemed likely to resist Americanization for many years; perhaps
forever. But now California, the old California, is simply extinct.
What remains is an Alsatia of retired Ford agents and crazy fat
women--a paradise of 100% Americanism and the New Thought. Its laws
are the most extravagant and idiotic ever heard of in Christendom. Its
public officers, and particularly its judges, are famous all over the
world for their imbecilities. When one hears of it at all, one hears
that some citizen has been jailed for reading the Constitution of the
United States, or that some new swami in a yellow bed-tick has got all
the realtors’ wives of Los Angeles by the ears. When one hears of it
further, it is only to learn that some obscure movie lady in Hollywood
has murdered another lover. The State is run by its Chambers of
Commerce, which is to say, by the worst variety of resident shysters.
No civilized man ever seems to take any part in its public life. Not
an idea comes out of it--that is, not an idea beyond the grasp of a
Kiwanis Club secretary, a Christian Science sorcerer, or a grand goblin
of the American Legion. Twice, of late, it has offered the country
candidates for the presidency. One was the Hon. Hiram Johnson and the
other was the Hon. William Gibbs McAdoo! Only Vermont can beat that
record.

The minority of civilized Californians--who lately, by the way, sent
out a call from Los Angeles for succor, as if they were beset by
wolves!--commonly lay the blame for this degeneration of a once-proud
commonwealth upon the horde of morons that has flowed in from Iowa,
Nebraska and the other cow-States, seeking relief from the bitter
climate of the steppes. The California realtors have been luring
in these hinds for a generation past, and they now swarm in all
the southern towns, especially Los Angeles. They come in with their
savings, are swindled and sent home, and so make room for more. While
they remain and have any part of their money left, they patronize the
swamis, buy oil stock, gape at the movie folk, and pack the Methodist
churches. Unquestionably, the influence of such vacuums has tended to
degrade the general tone of California life; what was once a Spanish
_fiesta_ is now merely an upper Mississippi valley street-carnival. But
it is not to be forgotten that the Native Sons have gone down the chute
with the newcomers--that there is no more sign of intellectual vigor in
the old stock than there is in the new stock. A few intransigeants hold
out against the tide of 100% Americanism, but only a few. The rest bawl
against the Reds as loudly as any Iowa steer-stuffer.

The truth is that it is unjust to blame Iowa for the decay of
California, for Iowa itself is now moving up, not down. And so is
Nebraska. A few years ago both States were as sterile, intellectually,
as Spain, but both are showing signs of progress to-day, and in
another generation or two, as the Prohibition lunacy passes and the
pall of Methodism begins to lift, they will probably burst into very
vigorous activity. Some excellent stock is in them; it is very little
contaminated by what is called Anglo-Saxon blood. Iowa, even to-day,
is decidedly more civilized than California. It is producing more
ideas, and, more important still, it is carrying on a much less violent
war _against_ ideas. I doubt that any man who read the Constitution
in Davenport or Des Moines would be jailed for it, as Upton Sinclair
(or one of his friends) was in Pasadena. The American Legion would
undoubtedly protest, but the police would probably do nothing, for the
learned judges of the State would not entertain the charge.

Thus California remains something of a mystery. The whole United
States, of course, has been going downhill since the beginning of the
century, but why should one State go so much faster than the others?
Is the climate to blame? Hardly. The climate of San Francisco is
thoroughly un-Californian, and yet San Francisco is almost as dead as
Los Angeles. It was there, indeed, that that California masterpiece,
the Mooney case, was staged; it was here that the cops made three
efforts to convict poor Fatty Arbuckle of murder in the first-degree;
it was there that the late Dr. Abrams launched a quackery that went
Mother Eddy one better. San Francisco, once the home of Mark Twain and
Bret Harte, is now ravaged by Prohibition enforcement officers. But if
the climate is not to blame, then what is? Why should a great State,
lovely physically and of romantic history, so violently renounce all
sense and decency? What has got into it? God alone knows!


9

_Honor in America_

Some time ago I enjoyed the distinguished honor of entertaining an
American university professor in my house. The fellow had a resilient
gullet, and in the course of the evening we got down a quart of Scotch.
Made expansive by the liquor, he told me this story:

A short while before, at his university, one of the professors gave a
booze party for a group of colleagues, including the president of the
institution. It was warm weather, and they sat on the veranda, guzzling
moonshine and ginger-ale. There was so much chatter that they didn’t
hear a student coming up the path. Suddenly he was on them, and they
almost fainted....

At this point I asked why they were alarmed.

“Well,” said my visitor, “suppose the student had turned out to be a
Christian? He would have blabbed, and then our host would have lost his
chair. The president would have been forced to cashier him.”

“But the president,” I argued, “was a guest in the man’s house. How
could he have dismissed him?”

“What else would there have been for him to do?” asked the professor.

“Resign at once,” I replied. “Wasn’t he under the obligations of a
guest? Wasn’t he _particeps criminis_? How could he separate himself
from his host? How could he sit as judge upon his host, even if only
formally?”

But the professor couldn’t see the point. I began to fear that he was
in his cups, but it soon appeared that he was quite clear. We argued
for half an hour: he was still unable to see the point. The duty of a
president to enforce an unwilling and dishonest obedience to an absurd
law--this duty was superior to his duty as a guest, _i. e._, it was
superior to his obligation as a man of honor! We passed on to another
point.

“What of the student?” I asked. “I take it that he turned out to be a
gentleman. Suppose he had been a Christian? Suppose he had blabbed?
What would the other boys have done to him?”

The professor stared at me blankly.

“Nothing,” he said at length. “After all, we _were_ boozing.”

This professor, I should add, was a man of the old American stock--in
fact, a fellow very proud of his colonial ancestry. When he got back to
his university he joined in signing a public statement that Prohibition
was a great success there.

I proceed to another case. One day in the Summer of 1924, during the
Republican National Convention at Cleveland, I met an eminent American
publicist in a hotel lobby there. He told me at once that he was
suffering from a dreadful bellyache. I had a jug in my room, but my
own hotel was far away, so I suggested that help might be got from a
journalist on the premises. We went to his room, and I introduced the
publicist. The journalist promptly got out a bottle and gave him a
policeman’s drink. The publicist had recovered in three minutes....
When he got home, he joined, like the professor, in signing a public
statement praising Prohibition.


10

_Note in the Margin of a Treatise on Psychology_

As I stoop to lace my shoe you hit me over the coccyx with a length
of hickory (_Carya laciniosa_). I conclude instantly that you are a
jackass. This is a whole process of human thought in little. This also
is free will.


11

_Definition_

Democracy is that system of government under which the people, having
35,717,342 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands
who are handsome and many who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head
of the State. It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared
by master cooks and covering a table an acre in area, should turn his
back upon the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.




XVIII. CATECHISM


_Q._ If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United
States, then why do you live here?

_A._ Why do men go to zoos?




INDEX


  Abbott, Wilbur C., 152

  Adams, John, 146, 158

  Altgeld, John Peter, 127 _ff._

  American Academy of Arts and Letters, 194

  American Association of University Professors, 140

  American Legion, 136

  _American Mercury_, 120, 127, 141, 146, 152, 164, 169, 172

  Americans, 100%, 152 _ff._

  Anderson, Sherwood, 56, 180, 194

  Anglo-Saxons, 153 _ff._, 163

  Anti-Saloon League, 23, 106, 111, 113, 148, 229, 268, 269

  Apollinaire, Guillaume, 169 _ff._

  Aristotle, 24


  Bach, Johann Sebastian, 34

  Baltimore, 237 _ff._

  Baltimore _Sun_, 260

  Baptists, 108 _ff._

  Beers, Henry A., 135

  Beethoven, Ludwig van, 34, 87 _ff._, 167, 184

  Bible, 17, 66, 76 _ff._, 120 _ff._

  Bill of Rights, 155

  Birth Control, 9 _ff._

  Blease, Cole L., 116

  Bowers, Claude G., 146

  Boyd, Ernest, 169

  Brahms, Johannes, 89, 90

  _Broom_, 169

  Browne, Waldo R., 127

  Brownell, William C., 193

  Bryan, William Jennings, 64 _ff._, 86, 112, 131, 155, 204, 230

  Bryant, William Cullen, 191

  Butler, Nicholas Murray, 194


  Cabell, James Branch, 180, 194, 196, 217

  Cahan, Abraham, 219

  Canby, Henry Seidel, 170

  Capital Punishment, 21 _ff._

  Cathcart case, 265

  Cather, Willa, 53, 57, 219, 228

  Catholic Church, 106 _ff._, 157

  Chambers, Robert W., 194

  Chopin, F. F., 87

  Christians, 25, 120 _ff._

  Clean Books Bill, 21

  Clemens, Samuel L., 50, 166, 191, 221

  Cleveland, Grover, 24, 129, 267

  Coca-cola, 77 _ff._

  Cocteau, Jean, 170

  Comstock, Anthony, 13, 15 _ff._

  Comstockery, 15 _ff._, 98

  _Congressional Record_, 163

  Connolly, Margaret, 164

  Conrad, Joseph, 34 _ff._, 191

  Coolidge, Calvin, 72, 111, 206, 247, 259, 272, 275, 289

  Cooper, James Fenimore, 191

  Crapsey, Algernon Sidney, 127, 131 _ff._

  Cummings, E. E., 169

  Curwood, James Oliver, 166


  Daniels, Josephus, 263

  Darrow, Clarence, 69, 72, 86

  Davis, Jefferson, 155

  Dayton, Tenn., 65 _ff._, 75 _ff._

  Denmark, 33

  _Dial_, 170

  Dickson, Harris, 159

  Dreiser, Theodore, 16, 21, 43, 57, 128, 157, 180, 194


  Eastman, Max, 195

  Eaton, Walter Prichard, 251

  Eddy, Mary Baker G., 67

  Education, 133 _ff._, 141 _ff._

  Eighteenth Amendment, 155

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 191, 203

  Episcopalians, 105 _ff._


  Fergusson, Harvey, 222

  Foetal School, 169

  Ford, Henry, 191

  Foster, William Z., 224

  France, Anatole, 43, 191

  Frederick the Great, 147

  Freud, Sigmund, 249

  Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von, 169

  Fundamentalism, 74, 75 _ff._, 111, 115 _ff._, 269


  Garland, Hamlin, 193

  Gary, Elbert H., 167, 206, 270 _ff._

  German Army, 31

  Gilder, Richard Watson, 191

  Glass, Montague, 221

  _Godey’s Ladies’ Book_, 15

  Gompers, Samuel, 70

  Greenwich Village, 170, 183, 214 _ff._


  Hagedorn, Herman, 194

  Haliburton, Thomas C., 49

  Hamilton, Alexander, 146 _ff._, 246

  Hamilton, Clayton, 193

  Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 189, 199, 282, 288, 289

  Harrison, Henry Sydnor, 193

  Haydn, Josef, 88

  Hergesheimer, Joseph, 42 _ff._, 180, 194

  Holy Rollers, 78 _ff._

  _Homo neandertalensis_, 64

  Howe, E. W., 229

  Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, 244

  Howells, William Dean, 190, 193

  Huxley, W. H., 122, 138

  Hypoendocrinal School, 169


  Ibsen, Henrik, 209

  International Sunday-school Lessons, 48

  Irving, Washington, 191


  Jackson, Andrew, 155

  James, Henry, 43, 53

  Jefferson, Thomas, 146 _ff._, 155, 158, 164

  Josephson, Matthew, 169


  Kaiser Wilhelm II, 158

  Kiwanis, 136, 168, 183, 189

  Kreymborg, Alfred, 214

  Ku Klux Klan, 106, 111, 116, 136, 140, 155, 156


  La Follette, Robert M., 155, 164

  Lardner, Ring W., 49 _ff._, 221

  Lee, Robert E., 155

  Lewis, Sinclair, 54, 194, 219, 228, 235

  Lincoln, Abraham, 198

  Lodge, Henry Cabot, 199

  Lord’s Day Alliance, 14

  Lowell, James Russell, 191, 194

  Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, 77


  Macaulay, T. B., 208

  Manning, William T., 91

  Marden, Orison Swett, 164 _ff._

  Masters, Edgar Lee, 56 _ff._

  Matthews, Brander, 135, 169

  Mendelssohn, Felix, 90

  Methodists, 105 _ff._, 157

  Middle Ages, 108

  Millikan, Robert Andrews, 123

  Mississippi, 160

  Moore, George, 196, 226

  More, Paul Elmer, 169

  Morgan, J. P. & Co., 132, 139, 192, 279

  Mozart, W. A., 88, 90

  Munsey, Frank A., 164, 195


  Napoleon III, 32

  _Nation_, 70, 159, 255 _ff._

  _New Republic_, 255

  New Thought, 42, 209

  New York, 238 _ff._

  Nobel Prize, 41

  Norris, Frank, 232


  Pattee, Fred Lewis, 170

  Peay, Austin, 116

  Pendleton, Charles S., 141

  Poe, Edgar Allan, 248

  Pound, Ezra, 169

  Powderly, Terence V., 204

  Presbyterians, 108 _ff._, 157

  Prohibition, 10, 23, 113, 224

  Protestantism, 104 _ff._


  Raulston, Judge, 86

  Reformation, 108

  Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 287

  Roosevelt, Theodore, 158, 290

  Rotary, 135, 140, 193


  Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 207

  Saltus, Edgar, 277 _ff._

  _Saturday Evening Post_, 43

  Schönberg, Arnold, 88

  Schubert, Franz, 34, 38, 87

  Schumann, Robert, 87, 210

  Scopes, John Thomas, 75 _ff._

  Sex, 95 _ff._

  Shakespeare, William, 43, 206

  Sinclair, Upton, 133 _ff._, 166

  _Smart Set_, 133

  Smith, Alfred Emanuel, 156

  Stall, Sylvanus, 18

  Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 191, 193, 205

  Strauss, Richard, 39

  _Success_, 165

  Sumner, John S., 15, 169

  Sumner, William Graham, 118


  Taft, W. H., 161

  Thackeray, W. M., 219

  Thomas, Augustus, 193


  Untermeyer, Louis, 216


  Van Dyke, Henry, 172 _ff._, 193

  Villard, Oswald Garrison, 258


  Wagner, Richard, 87, 286

  Wallace, Lew, 191

  War, 27 _ff._

  Washington, George, 158, 173

  Washington _Star_, 172, 257

  Wells, H. G., 195

  Wendell, Barrett, 244 _ff._

  Wesley, John, 109

  Wharton, Edith M., 53, 247

  Wheless, Joseph, 120

  Whitman, Walt, 16, 180, 203

  Williams, John Sharp, 159

  Wilson, Woodrow, 66, 158, 247

  Wilstach, Paul, 146

  Wister, Owen, 193

  Wrigley, William, Jr., 206


  Y. M. C. A., 20




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  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

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