Chapter 4 of 7 · The Freeman Book by Albert Jay Nock
III. Miscellany
THE effect of Brieux’s play, “La Robe Rouge,” done in New York under the title “The Letter of the Law,” was to make me once more try to analyze the vague dissatisfaction and irritation that one feels against the propagandist and all his works and ways. The play is a first-rate sample of Brieux’s quality, and as such it is exceedingly good. Yet one left it with hardly any feeling except relief that it was over. Its purpose is to show that the law is not an instrument of justice; well, that is easily done, for a moment’s reflection will convince anyone that nobody ever goes to law with any view of justice. He goes for gain or for revenge, and gain or revenge are all that the law-courts are equipped to give him. Mr. Howells made this clear to the English-reading public, years ago, in a passage that no one, once reading it, can forget; and if that were not enough, the court-scene in “Resurrection” presents the same truth with all the skill and power of a master’s hand.
Count Tolstoy, too, was a most distinguished propagandist; but not primarily. He was first of all an artist, a literary artist, and never got over the artist’s trick of observation, of composing “with the eye on the subject.” He was a first-class reporter of what he saw, and he saw nearly everything in sight. Brieux is a first-class reporter of what goes on inside his own head. Hence Tolstoy’s court-scene gives a slice out of life, with all life’s trivialities and inconsistencies and infinite variety of colour. Brieux’s play presents one solid colour, and that colour is drab—and life is not like that. His purposefulness is incessant, hard, dogged, driving and inflexible; he pursues his characters along their appointed pathways with a relentless insistence amounting almost to savagery, never letting them look to the right or left—and life is not at all like that. Thus it is, I think, that one cannot take much interest in his people or be very sorry for them, or become over-much moralized by their fate. I came away thinking of Cervantes, Turgeniev, Rabelais, Dickens, Artemus Ward, Mr. Dooley—an oddly assorted run of names, yet strung together on a real thread of association. Their passage before my mind convinced me that the effective propagandist is the incidental one, and that to be such he must remain always primarily the observant artist and the imperturbable critic of art, the critic, above all, of his own art.
A. J. N. 17. iii. 20.
HERE is an interesting turn of human nature. Grandi, a carpenter, elected recently to the Italian Parliament as a revolutionary Socialist, went into the Chamber the day before the opening session, to have a look round and see what it was like. Workmen were erecting the throne and canopy for the King, who was to be present next day and preside at the opening of Parliament. Grandi watched the proceedings for a while with the trained eye of a carpenter, and then stepped forward and told the workmen that the canopy was not safe, that it might come tumbling down on the King’s head, and kill him; and then, without more ado, he took the job in hand himself and superintended it through to a safe and shipshape end. As a revolutionary Socialist, he was all for overthrowing the monarchy; but as a carpenter, he was against botchwork, even to get rid of a king. Human nature, left to itself, has an inveterate instinct for playing the game by the rules.
F. N. 24. iii. 20.
WHO will begin to comb and collate the material that will serve the scholars of 2020 A. D. who will write the cultural history of America? If we were as truly solicitous of our duty to posterity as we sometimes assert when anxious to justify acts that are really for the benefit of our own day, we would organize the data so as to report ourselves aright to the coming generations and to the civilizations that will succeed ours. We can save much effort for the student a century hence and obviate misconception and misinterpretation by preserving the documents and evidence which, otherwise, might be available only in such fragments as give rise to fruitless controversies. Much of our scattered literature in the periodical field, our unco-ordinated efforts to root the arts in the life of the people, our informal extension of popular education—other topics will spring to the reader’s mind—might be recorded and charted so as to present to-day in true perspective to the morrow. In some respects the future historian’s labours are being simplified by the publication of volumes that assess contemporary strivings and achievement in the arts and sciences, in religious and institutional life. But how, other than by patient gathering of what crumbs remain of our newspapers, catalogues and programmes, will the Schliemanns of the twenty-first century identify, corroborate and classify the countless abortive enterprises—the marginal sketches for culture—that precede and illuminate the finished achievement? “The Encyclopædia Britannica” bravely promised annual supplements to its eleventh edition, but only one volume, that for 1913, appeared. The Nelson “Encyclopædia” keeps abreast of life by means of loose leaves. Such works deal with accomplished facts rather than with experiments, and what they record is less interesting than what they omit. Though it is conceded that State activities calculated to assist the scientist, the merchant, the farmer and others will result in valuable heritage, besides paying their way to-day, the present archives alone will not afford a perfect cross-section of our intellectual life.
Why should we not have an official bureau of cultural research to discover, record, interpret and preserve the isolated endeavours of men and women, who, prompted by different ideals and motives, are contributing footnotes to what one day will evolve as an American culture? One need but examine one’s shelves, the daily post, the casual newspaper, to be impressed by the wealth of significant material, trivial when considered item by item, but of real value in its cumulation. What of the effect on our literary taste of the publications of Thomas B. Mosher during twenty-five years? How has our thinking been moulded by chautauquas, lyceums, open forums and teachers’ institutes? Should there not be a record, other than that in the dry index of newspapers, of the influence wielded by the Chap Book, the Seven Arts, and by personal journalism: consider Brann’s Iconoclast; William Marion Reedy’s Mirror; Elbert Hubbard’s Philistine and even Samuel E. Asbury’s Nativist, published at five cents at College Station, Texas? Everywhere there are competitions for the best stories, paintings, musical compositions; travelling exhibitions that aim to unite the country in a common love of the beautiful. Last autumn it remained for a Chicago department-store to make the most comprehensive display of American books ever seen outside of a public library, and under such conditions, and with such publicity, as no library could possibly supply. There is something alluring about the thought of registering the many apparently unrelated adventures in culture and pseudo-culture with a view to a more precise presentation of our era than we are able to obtain of the past.
B. W. H. 24. iii. 20.
I HAVE been standing before Rodin’s “Hand of God,” that marvellous portrayal of the first embrace, the primeval kiss, as God, in a moment of joy, tenderly created man and woman. The love which animates the beautiful hand infuses warmth and impulse into the entwined figures breaking into shape from the formless clay. The uncontracted knuckles, the deep shadows lying between the second and third fingers, the third finger lying over the point of the fourth, indicate easy and tender restraint. All the action is in the finger-tips, and all the power, the directing force, is in the thumb which supports the man’s thigh and upper leg, as they rest in the winding arm of the woman—the man’s head falling upon her bosom, and her face pressed down close to his. The figures come from the hand of the Creator, entwined like the petals of an unfolding flower. Wonderfully, indeed, does the piece proclaim the eternal truth that men and women leave the hand of God as free creatures blessed with love; and with love in our own eyes, we can discern the love in the artist’s soul.
F. N. 31. iii. 20.
Is there not something significant about the fact that censorship of books and plays, as practised in English-speaking countries, had its origin in the king’s fool? The office of master of the revels evolved from the function of the jester, and, under Elizabeth, this master became the dramatic censor. Finally, the abuses that arose prompted the demand for statutory regulation. Early in the eighteenth century Lord Chesterfield said, “If the players are to be punished, let it be by the laws of their country, and not by the will of an irresponsible despot.” Since that time, in England, plays require a license from the lord chamberlain or, at least, a play may not be produced if that person makes objection within seven days of the submission of a manuscript. The vagaries of the modern English censorship are illustrated by the banning of such plays as Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and Maeterlinck’s “Monna Vanna,” on the one hand, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado” on the other. Laurence Housman, well-known to Freeman readers, some ten years ago wrote a play dealing with George IV, which was accorded the honour of being forbidden. There is no record of plays about George V., but newspaper readers may remember that the British Government found other means than the lord chamberlain’s office in dealing with fiction by one Mylius, regarding that monarch. In America we are not even abreast of the England of 1545, for we still piously refuse to concede the existence of a censorship, while we cheerfully submit to the unregulated exercise and abuse of the power that accompanies it. The jester of 1545 functions to-day in these United States as a police lieutenant or a post-office inspector.
B. W. H. 28. vii. 20.
CYNICAL observers who profess to be puzzled at what form of compensation the frustrated impulse towards the drinking of strong liquor will take might profitably study the actions of the crowd at a baseball game. The “fans” follow the game with more intensity than of yore—in fact on a holiday afternoon, when the score is close, the proceedings at the Polo grounds have many of the emotional aspects of a lynching-party. If the umpire makes a glaring mistake or unfair decision not favouring the local team, he runs a good chance of having a soda-water bottle bounced off his head by some irate member of the assembled citizenry. I counted fifteen such shining missiles last Saturday when the umpire called Mr. Pipp out, when it was shockingly clear to at least 20,000 of the 38,000 present that he was safe. Three or four such decisions in a row, and an umpire courts violence.
Similar in its impulse, like the old thumbs-down of the Roman amphitheatre, is the aggressive booing of the opposing pitcher when he shows signs of weakening. Let him throw three “balls” without a single strike, and an hysterically monotonous hand-clapping will begin throughout the grandstand. “Take him out,” “Tie a can to him,” “You tell ’em, ocean, he hasn’t got the sand,” and similar pleasantries are shrieked by the sportsmen. There is usually applause for some particularly well-executed play by the opposing team, but it is perfunctory compared with the screams of joy when a member of the local team scurries over the plate. Let the redoubtable Babe knock a home run, as seems to be his daily habit of late, and scores of brand-new straw hats come whirling down through the air to the field, flung by the excited business men who can find no other way to vent their emotions.
Baseball is more than any other sport the one fitted to be popular in America, for it is a game where at any moment, from first to last, something may happen; the situation is always tense—it is never like those last two despairing minutes before time in a football game when the other team has one touchdown to the good and the ball is on your own twenty yard line. “The game isn’t over,” as some sapient fan will be sure to say at least once a day, “until the last man is out.” That is one reason Americans like it. But the other, and perhaps the deeper, is that the ballpark is the one place left in our civilization where a man is permitted “jocundly and with fulness of freedom,” as Rabelais says, to make a fool of himself in public. It is almost as satisfying as a lynching-party, and on the whole, considerably safer.
H. ST. 4. viii. 20.
MIDDLE-AGED students of the high cost of living must sometimes think longingly of the good old days of the free-lunch counter; when for a few cents and a trifle of cheek one could enjoy a hearty meal in any first-class hotel on Broadway. In those happy days the sybarite could get on in fashionable places on fifty cents a day for food no matter where he might be roomed; whether in a hall-bedroom at $2.50 per week, or on a high scale of magnificence in a front or back bedroom, “with or without,” in a boarding house within the confines of Respectabilia which bordered the old Tenderloin. He could saunter into the Vendome or the St. James or the old Fifth Avenue, and do himself very well indeed on a glass of beer, a cocktail, or a milk-and-seltzer. He could seat himself at a table, beckon to a real waiter, call for his drink, and ask for a few samples of “the viands you have spread out over there,” and the real waiter would grant his request with something more than union alacrity, and for a tip of a nickel return him a gracious smile. The dear old days! gone, never to return. Yes, life was worth living then, and people really lived. Once for $1.50—think of it!—five persons, four of them hungry, sat at a table in the Hoffman House, and enjoyed each a drink and a square meal, and the waiter was most affable throughout. Indeed on parting he urged them pleasantly to come again.
What is civilization, when you have to pay at a place of most moderate distinction at least a quarter for a baked apple, and ten cents extra for a spoonful of cream—and withal no smile from the waitress? How absurd to enter into a discussion of food-values and the dietetic qualities of the apple. Life is not wholly expressed in calories; at least congenial life is not. Calories connote the porte-malheur, the prohibitionist, Mr. Palmer, martial law and other such dampers of the jocund spirit.
But there is more to it than this; for with the passing of the free-lunch counter there is gone the clever debonair race of men who were particular about the places where they ate and the way their food was served. Almost any day of the week might be found between the hours of eleven and one, in the bar-rooms of Broadway’s big hotels, a sprinkling of men connected with the drama, literature, journalism and art who were always ready to crack a joke and take a drink, with whatever might go with both; generous souls who spent it when they had it, but whether they had it to spend or no, loved life and lived it for its own sake. Where are they now, those warm-hearted fellows who looked so debonair on meagre wardrobes—many of them at times the matinée idols of a vanished race of women who would have scoffed at the movies, preferring flesh to film? What names must come to the mind of the man of middle life who knew his Broadway well, say, twenty-five or thirty years ago!
In those days the man of business, the scientist, the doctor and lawyer would be found in the company of artists, glad to be in close touch with them and to dispense their quips and sallies to an ever widening circle. On one occasion I recall four well-known dramatic critics and a famous inventor together at the bar of the St. James Hotel, sampling the liquor and free-lunch trimmings with all the gusto of connoisseurs. What raconteurs they were! the things they talked about, the subjects they were familiar with, the celebrities they had met, amazed the stranger and delighted the heart of the hero-worshipper. One of them had met Ibsen face to face; another knew Anatole France; another had shaken Verdi by the hand; and Albert S. was in Venice when Wagner died and went on to Bayreuth with the body.
It sounds like a saga now to speak of those men who gathered round the free-lunch bar in the good old days of thirty years ago. Who meets anybody now? Still, Government must have something to do even if it be but to make austere consideration of our health and morals—not that there were lacking people in that day who would have us wiser but sadder men. The middle-aged must remember how Broadway was affected by Dr. Parkhurst and the Raines-law sandwich, that dusty, fly-specked legal tender that forced a man to eat when he only wanted a drink. One thinks of the famous cardboard sandwich that Charlie J., the artist, carried about with him for months. He made it himself and painted it himself, and wherever he produced it, the house felt secure that the law was not infringed. Was it not as honest and more humorous to carry a counterfeit sandwich in your breast-pocket than to carry a loaded flask on your hip? Who can impeach the morality of the old days? Has the contraband flask so wonderfully improved and regenerated our social life and manners, elevated our companionships and purged the dross out of our ethics? Si quaris, cricumspice.
F. N. 15. ix. 20.
ONE of the kindliest souls that ever tapped a conductor’s desk was Louis Saar, who for years was with the Metropolitan and Covent Garden. I never heard of an opera that he did not know. When some high-priced tenor or coloratura soprano importuned for the revival of some ancient work which had faded out of memory, Maurice Grau and Sir Augustus Harris went straightway to Saar, and his knowledge never failed them. He was a walking encyclopædia of music. New works sent in for consideration were passed on to him as a matter of routine. I remember spending an afternoon with him, going over the score of Paderewski’s “Manru,” when it was just out. Saar was also the factotum, the handy man, about the stage. He looked after the stage band; he accompanied artists who were preparing or rehearsing parts; he gave the cues for light-effects, for the operation of mechanical appliances, for changes in scenery, and for the numberless other effects that must be kept in time and harmony with the orchestra. And all the time he did his work with precision and cheerfulness far into a long life.
One day, at a trial of young singers, he sat quite alone at the back of the house. A buxom woman of great size, recommended by a friend of Grau, had sung the “Caro Nome,” and Grau, evidently in a quandary as to what to say to her, walked back to where Saar was sitting, and asked, “How about it, Saar?” The old gentleman, unable to suppress his laughter, put his hand up to his mouth and said in a whisper that could be heard all over the house—one of the few things he could not do was to whisper—“She vill fill de stage if her voice does not fill de house.” Then he added, quickly, “But it iss a nice voice for a small concert-room.” Grau turned to me and said, “I’d rather see him smile than hear her sing.” Indeed, it was worth something to see a smile playing over his sensitive and mobile lips; his massive head, his grey beard, bushy brows and beaming eyes, always reminded me of Michelangelo’s marbles of the patriarchs.
It was no easy task to win the respect and admiration of choruses in those days, at least, but Saar did it. At Covent Garden there were the German, French, Belgian and English choruses, each having its own opinion of the others and no great hesitation or reluctance about expressing it; but they were of one mind about Saar. He did so many kindly things, not only in the easy way of lending money or showing the little favours that mean so much to the folk connected with the stage, but such as are prompted by a deep and kindly understanding. “It vill make dem happy,” he said, as he asked on one occasion for a better arrangement of dressing-rooms, “I like to see dem all comfortable.”
His first appearance in the “Meistersinger” was sensational. It was his duty to see the stage-band seated in the pavilion for the last scene; which was simple enough, for the old stage at Covent Garden did not permit the change between the first and second scenes of the third act to be made without dropping the curtain. After the curtain fell, Saar always walked into the centre of the stage, where he could see the band and give the cue for coming in with the orchestra; and when he did this, he was in street dress, ready to go home, as this was his last duty of the evening. Lohse, who was conducting, was known not to be above having a bit of fun out of a practical joke; but whether by chance or plan, this night the curtain was rung up before Saar had a chance to get off the stage: there he stood in the centre with his back to the audience, a big silk hat pulled down on the back of his head, a huge umbrella under his arm—a figure far more comic than any Beckmesser. A moment or so elapsed before he became aware of the situation; then the roar of laughter that burst from the audience startled him out of his wits, and with one frightened glance around, he bounded off the stage. The Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VII, was present at the performance and enjoyed Saar’s exit so much that he sent word to have it repeated whenever he came to hear the “Meistersinger.”
Under the conditions prevailing before the Covent Garden stage was rebuilt, it was a heartbreaking job to get through a performance without tumbling the scenery over or doing something equally disconcerting. Saar distinguished himself again, in the third act of the “Valkyrie.” The machinery used for the ride of the valkyries was the old-fashioned switchback railway. Papier-mâché horses were mounted on trucks, and on the backs of these steeds, ballet-girls were rushed across the stage through pieces of scenery which did duty for clouds. The device was supposed to be timed so that at the centre of the stage each horse and rider was lighted up by a flash of lightning; but in spite of all the stage-machinists could do, the thing never went right. When the flash came, the horse and the ballet-girl were not in it. This was convenient for the critics, because they could write the notices in advance. It got on Saar’s nerves; and at the beginning of the season he said to me, “My tear, I vill told you—dis time you see de ride of de valkyrie. I vill do it right. All I do is to tell Stanford and his men just before de act a few vords.” When the scene was set, I went behind and found him talking to Stanford, the chief machinist, and his men.
“Now, pay attention to vat I say,” he began, “Here, on dis side, is de horses; de railvay runs across de stage. You, at dis horse,” (picking a man) “you, at dat horse,” (picking another and so on). “I go to ze oder side of de stage and stand vere you can see me. Right across, dere vill be a liddle light on me so you see vat I do. Now vatch. I know de music ven de horses should leave, and I take my handkerchief so” (holding his open handkerchief by one corner). “Ven de cue comes in de music, I lift it up and shake it vonce—so! Den you push de first horse, and, it vill be in time for de lightning. Ven de next von comes, I lift my hand and vave my handkerchief—so! Den you push de next horse and it vill be in time for de lightning.” A broad smile came over his face, and giving us all a sanguine glance, he put his handkerchief back in his pocket and said, “Dat is all.”
The music began and the curtain rose. But, alas, in the Covent Garden of that day, a change of scene meant dust, dust in clouds. Saar took up his vantage-point, the men were watching closely, each ready to push his horse when the signal was given. Suddenly Saar let forth a tremendous sneeze and raised his handkerchief to his nose several bars before the cue. Bang! came the first horse across the stage. Saar was overcome by rage and amazement, shook his handkerchief violently across the stage, and bang! came the second horse, then another and another, until they were all across before the first one should have started. Saar lost his head and shouted, “Send dem back!” Back they went—and met the lightning-flash at the centre of the stage while they were flying across tail foremost. No audience in the world, probably, ever laughed as that one did. Poor Saar!—how everyone chaffed him, and how good-natured and apologetic he was through it all! One night some time afterwards he came to me and said, “My tear, it is de ‘Valkyrie’ to-morrow night. I will not interfere. Only vonce in my life I insult Votan by sending his daughters to him in heaven vith de rump of de horses galloping first.”.
F. N. 22. ix. 20.
IN his amazing autobiography “Steeplejack” Mr. Huneker tells a story of a corn-cutter at Bayreuth who, when questioned by the redoubtable and curious James as to what kind of a looking man Wagner was, replied that he was a little bow-legged Jew who always wore a long cloak to hide his crooked legs. This reminds me of another story that once upon a time I picked up in Bayreuth. An old tanner who knew Seidl when he was associated with Wagner told me that the master was not a Jew but that he had all the musical genius of the race. Seidl did not think that Wagner was a Jew, but that doesn’t prove very much. Wagner was a revolutionist and that fact may explain why so many people have held to what I may perhaps call the Hunekerian theory of race in connexion with music. The Jews have certainly provided the world with many of its greatest revolutionists. Indeed the race has provided pretty nearly every department of life with an outstanding genius. The old German who said “Ach God, the Jews must be a great people to have given us Moses, Jesus and Offenbach” seems to me to clinch the matter.
Seidl was always very fond of telling stories about Wagner. One I remember may be worth telling here. On one occasion Wagner and Seidl were waiting for a train at Bayreuth station. It was a wet and stormy day and they were cooped up in the waiting room. But Wagner was very happy telling jokes and every now and then stopping to chat with the townsfolk. Suddenly he stopped before an old woman seated on a bench, and his eye fell upon a market basket on the floor before her. Seidl noticed that the lid of the basket was moved spasmodically every now and then as if it contained some living thing that was trying to get out. Wagner bent down, looked the woman in the face and asked humorously, “Who is the gentleman you have in the basket?” He thought it might be a rabbit or a fowl, as he told Seidl afterwards. The woman, knowing him, entered into the humour of his mood and playfully jumped the lid off the basket and revealed a live fish lying on some hay. In a moment Wagner was furious with anger. “Bring me a knife, bring me a knife,” he cried, and Seidl, producing a pocket knife, stood by and watched Wagner kill the fish. He threw it back in the basket, stamped his foot and shouted, “Oh, you terrible, cruel woman.” The woman after her first astonishment was very much upset and cried bitterly, but after a while when Wagner had regained his composure he soothed her and gave her some money to pay for the fish.
F. N. 20. x. 20.
BEING fond of cultivated beauty, I find the South County of Rhode Island—the stretch between Westerly and Wickford—quite the loveliest sight that the country can furnish; or, no, strictly speaking, my allegiance wavers between that and the county of Sussex, in New Jersey. When I am in either, I am heart and soul for it, but always philandering with memories of the other. Both show the marks of having long been lived in by a comfortably sparse but settled population. The county of Sussex somewhat reminds one of the Auvergne, whose wheatfields were tilled to the hill-tops in Julius Cæsar’s time, and no one knows how much before. The South County also is hilly and rolling ground, and its careful cultivation gives it the air of solvency which to me means much in a landscape. It has no hypochondriac’s climate. Its seasons are sharply marked, and each one conscientiously fills out its annual engagement, giving you the worth of your money at any time of year; and the air is soft and heavy. Mr. Thomas Robinson Hazard maintains that the South County was the ancient Atlantis, the abode of the gods, and that their food, known as Ambrosia, was merely the meal of Rhode Island white corn, ground secundum artem between millstones fashioned from rock of a peculiar grain and fineness which he calls Narragansett granite. Mr. Hazard’s mythology may be fanciful, but when in South County one really does not see anything unreasonable in attributing to the gods at least as good taste and good judgment as one attributes to oneself.
Distinction!—that is the great thing; and the South County has it. Distinction is the product of years, of abundant and worthy history, of tradition, and of a certain segregation of interest. Localities take on a character from all these, a character that is immediately perceived by anyone who is sensitive to such impressions, and that above all else recommends them. There is wonderful natural beauty throughout the country and those of us who are content with that can be abundantly satisfied. Those who, like myself, are most of all interested in the evidence of human co-operation with nature, and most deeply affected by seeing that man has been at it a long time and has made a good job of his share, do not fare so well. Sir Joshua Reynolds looked long at a painting: “Yes,” he said, “perspective right, drawing right, colour right, everything right—but, hang it, man,” he added, snapping his fingers, “hang it, man, it wants that!” And the that is precisely what is missed out of so much of our natural sightliness—it lacks distinction, it carries on its face the expression of a big, stupid, beautiful blonde, lovely to glance at and pass on from, with never a turn of the head. The abode, for a decade or so, of undistinguished men, following out undistinguished interests—standardized, unindividual, conforming men, untouched by tradition or by any sense of history—may show everything done for it that nature can do, and technical art as well, but it wants distinction, it wants that! The people of the South County are still in the main—not wholly, it is no Eden—in the main, children of the covenant, individualists, as respectful of the prerogatives of others as they are jealous of their own, immensely independent, reflective, shrewd, kindly, dignified. Thus the fine original tradition of Rhode Island still marks the face of the South County and its invigorating flavour permeates the air.
The South County is one of the few regions of the country that has distinctive food. Bret Harte noted, without being aware of it, the first, perhaps, of the dismal processes of standardization which have sapped American life of so much interest, when he remarked that one could traverse the land from end to end and not find a local dish; that the country inns were but a weak reflex of the metropolitan hotels. In one or two districts, a local kitchen still survives after a fashion; and the South County has kept to its tradition rather better than any, as far as I have observed. Mr. Hazard has filled a great many pages of his book with ample descriptions of the South County diet of half or three-quarters of a century ago, and one would no more have the temerity to take up the subject after him than one would undertake to write an epic poem after reading Homer! Alas! change, inevitable and unwelcome change, has set in on the South County’s standard of living. The South County is not of the world, but it is in the world, worse luck!—and if not beaten by the billows, it feels the ground-swell. It has lost less, however, than the rest of us. South County corn, rye, apples, ducks, turkeys, fish, shell-fish, are still the best of their kind and the South County has still, thank fortune, respect enough for them to treat them decently; cookery still survives there as an honoured art, and there is ground for hope that as such it may overlive even the iconoclasm of this generation.
Food-products of the South County, however, do not very well bear eating away from home. Jonny-cakes, for instance, baked in New York out of South County meal by a South County cook, in the established and regular South County mode, lose something. They are still the best in the world, but not by the same magnificent margin of superiority. This is true of Kingston sausage and many other things. I have always thought that Horace’s cœlum non animam mutant has, and was intended to have, only a special and restricted application, even to human beings. Normality, or normalcy if you like, is one thing here and another there, differing subtly by many imponderables. Perhaps this is the secret of the local dish, of the well-known vagaries of tobacco, and other curious matters. Italian friends once told me that real grissini could be made only in Genoa, and that a painstaking effort to reproduce their peculiar quality had been made at Turin, no great way from Genoa, and had failed. Another friend brought English tobacco home with him in air-tight tins, but found, so he said, that it tasted like ravelled rope. Some say that all this is imagination, others say that a multitude of slight and indeterminable changes take place in the chemistry of the substance, and again others say—which I think more likely—that the changes are in the chemistry of the percipient’s body.
A. J. N. 27. x. 20.
MR. JAMES HUNEKER little knows what a flood of memories of old New York his volume “Steeplejack” has let loose, in my mind; nor does he know, and I do not either, where they will run to. He starts me thinking first of all about those old haunts that lay between Eighth Street and Madison Square. Once again I am popping in and out of restaurants and hotels where so many of the old friends he mentions were to be seen; once again I go marching up the stairs of the Musical Courier office in Union Square hoping to find there James Huneker himself. What days those were! I can still see Jim Hill sauntering between the old Coleman House and the Union Square Theatre, his splendid Dundrearys floating in the breeze. And Billy Crane, always alert, happy and dapper, saluting all and sundry as he passed on his way to the Star Theatre where “The Senator” was having a wonderful run. What stories those stones at the corner of Fourteenth Street could tell. It was there Henry Irving’s wonderful hat was carried off by a sudden gust of wind into the Square. For a moment the discomfited tragedian looked like Lear with his white hair,
Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,
Catch in their fury, and make nothing of.
But Sir Henry was never the man to run after his hat. He stood his ground firmly, and presently a hack-driver brought it back to him.
I am often puzzled when I think what the unhappy historian will say ten or fifteen years hence when he applies himself to the task of telling the next generation something about New York of the ’eighties. There won’t be a vestige of it left standing. The house-breakers are always at work. Where alas! is old Tony Pastor’s, the Academy of Music, and old Tammany Hall? Tony Pastor was a significant figure in the life of old New York, and so was Ned Gilmore. And what a wonderful place in those spacious days was Lüchow’s. Think of the folk who came to eat at his tables! And Lüchow himself. Why, he ought to be as famous to his generation as, say, Louis Eustace Ude was to his. How blurred our memories are becoming in these modern times.
Am I all wrong about Union Square in the old days? Is it merely the fantasy of one who years ago came to the city filled with the spirit of romance and merely glorified the tawdry events of a tawdry period. Surely that is not the case. Union Square was a centre—we have no such centres now in our modern city. There was the old Café Hungaria. One never-to-be-forgotten Sunday night, in the rooms at the top of the building, three of the world’s greatest pianists took turns at the Steinway. On another occasion, I remember in the Café downstairs a great company, with Catenhausen and Lilli Lehmann, feasted and talked of composers and singers who are seldom mentioned nowadays. Then there was Brubacher’s where the Rhine wine was of the best; a place where every one talked of music, music, music and nothing but music. In those far-off days, dear old Ernest Catenhausen had an apartment on Irving Place. I remember one Sunday afternoon seeing Lilli Lehmann turn majestically out into Gramercy Park just as the old gentleman was leaving the stoop. What a greeting passed between them—the old style greeting.
But everything is scattered now. The times are out of joint. There are no coteries, no rendezvous. We are all merely acquaintances of one another. Where is that old camaraderie, that old intimacy which we used to enjoy so freely and so happily. That room upstairs at Fleischmann’s was once the most famous rendezvous in the world. We have nothing like it in New York or in any of our cities to-day. I lived in Ninth Street in those days, and Martin’s restaurant in University Place was at its hey-day. Mary Siddons and Harry Waller and I, when we were in funds, would go there to lunch or dine and enjoy as good cooking as even Paris could provide. Martin’s was a great place at the beginning of the opera season. Victor Maurel and Jean and Edouard de Reszke (in their early days) were often there. What bustle and excitement there was when the singers arrived from Europe. On Sunday night there was a party of about a dozen lions dining there—the de Reszkes, Seidl, Rosenthal, Henry Irving, Mary Siddons and Dvorak, all as happy as boys and girls at a clam-bake. Thank God, the old building still stands—but not for long I fear.
What has come over us in this city during these thirty years? We all seem to be under such restraint, nowadays. We all seem to be hedged in, afraid to let ourselves go. Is it because we have so few opportunities for meeting and understanding one another? Of course, it is true that as one grows older one is inclined to glorify “the good old days,” and overlook what is best in the present. But I would like to ask my older readers whether they feel that there is really the same frankness and friendship in the life of to-day? Enthusiasm seems to have cooled. Perhaps, the upheaval caused by the war and its outcome has done much to sour our dispositions and to make us all cynical. Whatever it may be, something has been withdrawn from life that was very delightful while it lasted.
F. N. 3. xi. 20.
I WONDER if the Irish Free State will set up a monument to or even write the epitaph of James Fintan Lalor. Probably it will not. Now that the class that Lalor strove to liberate—the Irish farmers—have become peasant proprietors, a reminder of Lalor’s doctrine might not be at all welcome, and yet of the Evangelists of Irish revolution—Padraic Pearse named them as Wolfe Tone, John Mitchel, Thomas Davis and Fintan Lalor—Lalor is the one whose speech still lives. He saw what Davitt and Parnell were led to see—that the Irish legislative question could never be forced to a solution until it became linked to something that had actual driving power. It was he who discovered the engine that Parnell and Davitt were to use, the engine of agrarian revolution. “An engine ready-made too,” wrote Lalor, “one too that will generate its own steam without cost or care—a self-acting engine, if once the fire be kindled, and the fuel to kindle—the sparks for the kindling are everywhere. . . . This I speak of will carry itself, as the cannon-ball carries itself down the hill.”
Lalor prophesied an agrarian revolution, not only for Ireland but for every civilized country. He wrote for Ireland of the ’forties but he knew that secret agencies would bear his words to other lands. “I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of rights to the entire people of that country, and is the rightful property, not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession, to let to whom they will on whatever tenures, terms, rents, services and conditions they will; one condition, however, being unavoidable and essential, the condition that the tenant shall bear full, true and undivided fealty and allegiance to the nation, and the laws of the nation, whose lands he holds, and own no allegiance to any other prince, power, or people. . . . I hold further and firmly believe that the enjoyment by the people of this right of first ownership in the soil is essential to the vigour and vitality of all other rights; to their validity, efficiency and value, to their secure possession and safe exercise.”
There are some writers whose statements are so significant and so simple that their proper literary form is the aphorism. James Fintan Lalor was such a writer. Circumstance often prevents a man from getting to his own proper expression and Lalor had such circumstance against him. The aphorism corresponds to the whisper, and Lalor had to shout. He saw the old Celtic people being swept out of their own country; it was necessary to shout out the excellent plan he had for their salvation. Therefore he wrote editorials in The Irish Felon and letters to various persons and various organizations. His statements too often are rhetorical. But again and again one finds sentences that show that Lalor was properly a maker of aphorisms, of maxims, of watchwords. The one sentence of his that is really remembered in Ireland is such an aphorism: “Not the constitution that Wolfe Tone died to abolish, but the constitution Tone died to obtain—independence.” One might glean from his writings certain aphorisms that should have a place in a Revolutionist’s Handbook: “Every question is little until some one makes it great.” “It is easier to convince a million men than a single man.” “It is never the mass of the people that forms its real and efficient strength—it is the men by whom the mass is moved and managed.” “Wisdom knows that in national action littleness is more fatal than the wildest rashness.”
What made Fintan Lalor an important—perhaps the most important—Irish revolutionist was that he was able to perceive a weak place in the English domination of Ireland, and that he was able to direct the whole power of his intellectual being to striking at that place. There were eight thousand landowners in Ireland made up of the descendants of the conquerors or of renegades from the native race. If the tenant-farmers of Ireland refused to pay rent to them England would have to abandon them or send her armies to snatch the Irish harvests. The struggle with the landlords would generate power for a further struggle. “I see clearly,” Lalor wrote “that the reconquest of our liberties would be incomplete and worthless without a reconquest of our lands—would not necessarily involve or produce that of our lands, and could not, on its own means, be possibly achieved; while the reconquest of our lands would involve the other—would at least be complete in itself, and adequate to its own purposes; and could possibly, if not easily, be achieved. . . . I selected as the mode of reconquest to refuse payment of rent, and to resist process of ejectment.”’ His policy was laid down in his letter “To the Irish Confederate and Repeal Clubs,” written in January, 1847—the dreadful famine year. But his suggestions were too sweeping for the middle-class group who were agitating for Repeal of the Union.
John Mitchel, however, saw the importance of Lalor’s policy. Before he was kidnapped and sent to his exile at the other side of the world Mitchel wrote a letter in which he said that he had fully adopted Lalor’s views and meant to act upon them as soon as occasion should fit and serve. It was through Mitchel the exile, and afterwards the American journalist, that Lalor’s views had a chance of being internationalized. He knew they would be internationalized. He urged all the nations to lay deep and strong “the only foundation that is firm under the foot of a nation—a secure and independent agricultural peasantry.” He saw that it was the established social order and not any political constitution that really affected the people of a country—“political rights are but parchment. It is the social constitution that determines the condition of a people, that makes and moulds the life of a man.”
Lalor told Charles Gavan Duffy—the father of George Gavan Duffy whose signature appears on the Anglo-Irish Treaty—that the thing he had in mind dwarfed Repeal into a petty parish question. The movement which he wanted to see begun was one on which “Ireland may not alone try her own right, but try the right of the whole world.” It was a movement “on which you would be, not merely an asserter of old principles, often asserted and better asserted before her, an humble and feeble imitator and follower of other countries, but an original inventor, propounder and propagandist, in the van of the earth and heading the nations.” Thirty years after Lalor had first expounded his idea Michael Davitt created the organization that carried it and that also gave, as Lalor prophesied it would give, a driving force to every other Irish issue. Meanwhile other countries had become alive to the great issue. Did Lalor’s thought, I wonder, pass into America with Mitchel the exile? Standish O’Grady thinks it did. “It has come back into Europe,” he wrote, “advertising itself as ‘Progress and Poverty.’ Lalor’s idea, now well-clad, that is to say, well-printed, well-bound, less Irish and more nice, possibly, but beyond question robust and vehement, walks abroad everywhere to-day.” The consumptive hunchback who announced it in Ireland was put in jail and was kept there long enough to save the Government the necessity of exiling him with Mitchel. He was released and he died and no fuss was made about his passing.
P. C. 18. i. 22.
IT was the Persian delegate at Geneva, it seems, who told the League of Nations the simple truth about itself. Has any one noticed how regularly, almost invariably, it has been the Eastern peoples and their representatives who have set forth and acted upon the plain natural truth of things in all the recent international colloquies—the Indians, Turks, Egyptians, Russians and Chinese? The Russians, for instance, really apply the principle of self-determination which the Western Powers only talk about. In handing back territory and other property stolen from the Chinese and Persians, they really prove themselves anti-imperialists instead of contenting themselves, like us, with pretending to be such. It is rather odd that the only exhibits of good Christian ethics since the armistice have been furnished by those who in their blindness bow down to wood and stone. Yet in our modesty we send missionaries to those people. Some one who thought it worth while to do so could stand the church missionary organizations on their heads by simply drawing up in parallel columns the record of the actual public behaviour of the Christian Powers and the heathen Powers from, say, October, 1917, to the present time, and then asking the missionary organizations whether they had ever read “Bleak House” or heard of Mrs. Jellyby.
A. J. N. 26. ix. 23.
I SEE that Mr. Henry L. Mencken has been offering a philosophic consideration of prohibition which is worth attention. “There is not the slightest visible sign,” he says, “that within the lifetime of men now living, the voluptuous consumption of ethyl alcohol will be countenanced by law in the Republic, and neither is there the slightest sign that it will ever be stopped by law.” On the other hand, he foresees a change “in the direction of a better order of bootlegging, as the disfranchisement of the Negroes has been better ordered in the South.” The disreputable little bootlegger with his poisonous concoctions will, in Mr. Mencken’s view, gradually be pushed to the wall by more responsible vendors until the business becomes established on a relatively wholesome basis, while Congress and the States will gradually forget to provide money for enforcement. In short, the prophet of the Terrapin Belt predicts that the Nineteenth Amendment will eventually drop to the status of other blue laws that lie unhonoured on the statute-books, and while in principle the country will remain bone-dry, in practice “good liquor will be obtainable at reasonable prices.”
This seems to me a well-thought-out conclusion from one who has pondered deeply on the subject, and I am happy to pass along its comforting implications for the benefit of persons interested. In the good old days the distribution of liquor furnished a tidy revenue to the Federal and State Governments, and furnished wherewithal for the school systems of our principal cities; in fact, it was so thoroughly taxed and blackmailed that it was next to impossible for an honest man to make a living at it. Under the new moral dispensation the business is tax-exempt, and is compelled to yield tribute only to the official grafters. Though the number of these has greatly increased, as well as the scale of their exactions, it is a fair guess that as the industry adjusts itself to its extra-legal and taxless status, it will be found that the very fact that the trade has no standing in the courts of law will compel its merchants to adopt an exceptionally high standard of integrity and scrupulousness.
In this connexion I am reminded of a story that Lincoln Steffens picked up some years ago while rambling in the Far East. One of Steffens’s British friends in that part of the world had established an intimacy with one of the Elder Statesmen of Japan, a man rich in honours and experience. One day the Englishman bluntly asked the Japanese how it was that an Occidental, in trading in the Orient, found that he could trust a Chinese merchant implicitly, while the briefest experience taught him that the Japanese merchant must be watched even more sharply than the tricky Levantine. “The explanation is simple,” replied the Japanese. “Some time ago a period of particularly brilliant corruption set in in Chinese politics, and as far as the courts were concerned, justice became a mockery. Hence, in order to save the processes of trade from complete chaos and stagnation, the Chinese merchant was compelled to adopt the strictest ethical standards; and since that time his word has been as good as his bond. In Japan, however, the merchant has been under no such compulsion, for we have probably the finest code of legal justice in the world. Hence when you do business with a Japanese, you must take your chances.” It is pleasant to recall this story when conversing with some disheartened misanthrope who professes to believe that human beings can be honest only when in the rigid strait-jacket of what is called law and order.
H. K. 26. ix. 23.
PROBABLY I ought to be ashamed to confess that I waited until my maturity to read a novel by one of the Brontës. It is true, nevertheless, that I read “Jane Eyre” but a few years ago, and have only now fallen victim to “Shirley.” I have paid my due to the “moderns”; some I have read with admiration, some have engaged my fancy by their treatment of the mechanics of contemporary life, some have fascinated me by their sheer skill, photographic or psychological. Others, needless to say, have bored me, just as some Victorian authors have bored me. But a book by George Eliot or such a work as “Shirley” serves to restore the old sense of direction. Eager as I am, in my twentieth-century impatience, to whip out a blue pencil and tell these leisurely women tint they are obstructing the progress of their own story, I find myself at one with the milieu, absorbed in the development of the narrative, keen to discover the next move. The pains these writers took to chart the terrain, to weave a plot, to introduce their characters at the right time and place, to relate their background, action and persons! If it were for “composition” alone, as painters use the word, such a book as “Shirley” would repay perusal. But it yields so much more than insight into the novelist’s craft: here is a wellspring of good English, a bit of social history, a living picture of England a century ago, and the revelation of an orderly mind that is well-attuned to a warm heart. Perhaps I am over-enthusiastic; late converts are likely to be more ardent than those caught young.
B. W. H. 26. ix. 23.
SEEING Mr. Cyril Maude in his excellent new comedy, “Aren’t We All?” gives one a hint of the distance that we have already gone towards civilizing our conception of marriage. The play is most happily devoid of “moral purpose,” but I have not seen anything in years which brings about a better rapport between the moral sense of an audience and that of a playwright. By far the most interesting feature of the evening is the quick and intelligent response of the audience to certain lines which in the bad old days of my youth—Mrs. Wharton’s “age of innocence”—would, I am sure, have been received in pensive and embittered silence. The moral of the play—for though it is free from any pestiferous moralities, it has a moral, and a sound one—is that the best insurance of happiness in such a delicate and difficult relation as marriage, is freedom. Even this the audience caught and approved at once, which I thought quite remarkable because it has long seemed to me that any such thing as faith in freedom had long ago disappeared from among us.
Of all things that human beings fear (and they are a timorous race) the one that strikes them with abject and utterly demoralizing terror is freedom. They are so afraid of it for other people that almost simultaneously they come to dread it for themselves. So they devise systems of checks and balances, restraints, moral sanctions, conventions and moral mass-expectations of one kind and another; they are willing to go to the most fantastic lengths in restriction and repression; but the one thing that they never yet have shown the courage to try is simple freedom, which some day they will have the happy surprise of discovering to be the only thing that really works. Pending this general discovery, each person can, in a much larger way than he thinks possible, discover it for himself, and thereby put himself in the way of a great deal of solid satisfaction and happiness. If one puts no expectation whatever, of any kind, upon any person, no matter how intimate one’s association with him, the returns that one gets are marvellous. This does not mean making no demands upon him, but really, in one’s inmost heart, not expecting anything of him, not wishing to make any demands upon him. Few are able to do this, fewer still are wise enough to wish to do it, and almost no one dares do it.
These considerations of course go far beyond their application to the very special and limited question of “how to be happy though married,” which is the basis of Mr. Maude’s new play. They apply to all relations of life, collective as well as individual, public as well as private. One of the things that will interest the historian of civilization in the United States is the progress of the principle of liberty since the Colonial period, to show what its actual practical applications have been, what their limitations were, and how the popular understanding and acceptance of the doctrine itself have become modified in consequence. But all this is a long way from Mr. Maude’s comedy, which shows merely that liberty—not a formal and factitious liberty, but liberty ex animo—is the indispensable condition of successful and happy love. The whole philosophy of success in this delicate and easily-marred relation was put strikingly in the remark of Philina to Wilhelm in Goethe’s novel, “If I love you, what business is that of yours?”
The very advantages which American women enjoy, which lead foreigners to say we spoil them, really work against their interests where companionship with men is concerned, whether in marriage or out of it. The American girl has, relatively, a pretty wide range of experience and cultivation, and she has unusual opportunities for developing what cleverness she has, so that she rather tends to outstrip her male associates. If she picks the exceptional man for companionship, she finds him hard to live with, as such men notoriously are; if she picks the commonplace man, who is the most amiable soul on earth to live with, and who pampers her shockingly, she finds him really, in the long run, pretty dull. Adjustment either way is therefore much harder for her than for her European sisters. While Englishmen and Europeans are always very keen to tell us how badly the American woman has been brought up, I notice that they get mightily interested in her in very short order, and that they remain interested as long as she is around.
American life is a little easier on a young woman’s willingness to become civilized than it is on a young man’s. It may not be said to encourage her intellectual curiosity and her aspirations after culture, but it does not, perhaps, so expressly and truculently discourage them. Hence one may put it broadly that there are not enough relatively first-rate men to go around among the relatively first-rate women. This has a bearing, insufficiently recognized, upon divorce, and upon the alienations and miserable misunderstandings that beset the maintenance of an arbitrary monogamy. Some one has said (I think it was Mr. George Shaw, thought I may be unconsciously slandering him) that a first-rate woman would rather have a part-interest in a first-rate man than all of a second-rate man. This is quite natural, too, for men as for women, I think; that is, when they have come to the time, as Mr. Maude says in his comedy, “when humour takes the place of jealousy and when tolerance takes the place of indignation.”
A. J. N. 3. x. 23.
THE Londoners are now paying honour to the memory of Dick Whittington, “thrice Lord Mayor of London,” who died five hundred years ago. It appear that the classic story of his poverty and his cat is devoid of foundation; the researches of historians are said to show that he was well-to-do and that he never owned a cat. Science rubs its hands cheerfully, I suppose, over the banishment of another illusion, on its genial assumption that human beings should not believe anything that is not scientifically true. I was never able to support this assumption, and while I would not go so far as to call it immoral, I do not believe that it represents any real moral obligation. Scientific truth is not the only mode of truth in the world, and exclusive allegiance to scientific truth is an abounding source of error.
There is poetic truth, for example, and there is religious truth. Professor Huxley professed himself unable to understand how Faraday “could be a great natural philosopher with one side of his being, and a Sandemanian with the other”; and here he spoke as one who recognizes and pays allegiance to only one form or mode of truth. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, in the midst of the bitter controversy that raged over the doctrine of inspiration, half a century ago, had the penetration to remark that one who believed all sorts of scientific errors about the Bible but who knew how to enjoy the Bible deeply—one, that is, whose spirit was open to its poetic and religious truth—was nearer the truth about the Bible than one who could pick it all to pieces but could not enjoy it.
To my mind, the point seems to be that the scientific truth of Whittington’s legend, or of the Bible, counts for precious little one way or the other, and that one’s allegiance to poetic truth in the one case and to poetic and religious truth in the other may quite safely disregard any pretension that science may make to any kind of jurisdiction in the premises. I believe that recognition of this simple principle would have obviated most of the wretched misunderstandings that have divided Protestant Christianity; that recognition of it even now would do more than anything to reunite and reconcile these divisions. What are the contentions that to-day are setting the fundamentalists and liberals, or latitudinarians, or whatever they are called, against one another—what are they but science? Truth about the parentage and birth of Jesus, for instance, is not religious truth but scientific truth—well, let science attend to it. Protestantism will have a long way to go to catch up with the observation of Arnold, fifty years ago, that “there is truth of science and truth of religion; and truth of science does not become truth of religion until it is made religious. Let us have all the science there is from the men of science; and from the men of religion let us have religion.”
By an easy association, my mind is led along to consider the statements of Professor van Dyke and others, about the palming off of bogus Rembrandts and other old masters upon museums and wealthy amateurs. Here, too, scientific truth seems in danger of assuming an undue predominance. From the commercial point of view it has undoubtedly great importance. From all other points of view, however, there can be little importance in the scientific truth about a picture which, if not a Rembrandt, is so much like a Rembrandt that no one can say beyond peradventure whether it is a Rembrandt or not. I am reminded of the great controversy over the composite authorship of the Homeric poems. I think that I never underestimated the importance of scientific truth in this matter, but I always ventured to believe that the interests of poetic truth were paramount, and that the poetic truth of the Odyssey, for example, remained unimpaired whether the poem were put together by one author or by eighteen. What difference does it make to the poetic and religious truth of the book of Isaiah, whether it were all composed by the same man, or whether the latter part of it were written, as some one wittily said, “by another man of the same name”?
A. J. N. 17. x. 23.
I HAVE not yet girded myself up to see many plays of the new crop. What few I have seen are such as deal with the morals of sex, and I therefore feel that my weekly reflections are proceeding from a mind that needs disinfection; notwithstanding it was by luck and not management that I fell in with that kind of play. How good it would be if some play-writer would become an outright realist in these matters, instead of for ever contenting himself with expounding factitious and superficial moralities in a routine and superficial way! Practically nothing that the modern drama, from Ibsen down to Brieux, has done in portraying the fate of the light-o’-love, ever made me feel that his or her fate was a very serious one or much to be considered, one way or the other. There would need to be better reasons than any to be found in “Ghosts” or “Damaged Goods,” for instance, to make an intelligent person think twice about larking to the top of his desire. These appeals to the passion of fear are based on a long chance; it is a hundred to one, or better, that their Nemesis will not arrive; and every intelligent person knows it.
There is a sound reason, a good reason, against looseness and philandering, and its dramatic possibilities are so attractive that one wonders why some dramatist does not take them up and explore them. One feels with some impatience that if play-writers must occupy themselves with the dreadful consequences of this kind of dissipation, they ought to have a good reason behind them instead of continually trying to make so much of bad ones. This reason is found in the peculiar, inevitable, and as far as I know inexplicable subjective change produced in the person who indulges to any degree, even the slightest and apparently most insignificant, in these irregularities. The distaste for philandering, the resentfulness of it that obtains especially between congenial and well-mated persons, is based upon a true and salutary instinct. This instinct is usually interpreted, unfortunately, both in life and in fiction, as a coarse and self-defeating jealousy. The interpretation is vulgarizing and retarding, but the instinct itself is sound, for this Nemesis never fails to arrive promptly and exact its full pay by quietly, subtly but inexorably taking the edge off (I do not know how to put it better) those relations in which one is really happiest, and in which one is really all the time aware that one is happiest. Nothing is quite the same afterwards, for oneself is not quite the same.
It is rather an odd thing that the play-writers, who are presumably somewhat akin to the poets, should be so far behind the poets in finding this out, and that they should prefer to follow the specious and superficial moralities of the sociologists, the theologians, the National Purity League and Mr. Sumner. The poets have always known where the sound moralities of this matter lay and have expressed it clearly. Burns, for example, looks at the superficial moralities only to pass them by—
I waive the quantum o’ the sin,
The hazard o’ concealin’—
yes, for those are at most uncertain and usually at some rate or other to be gotten over; instinct does not support them as true moralities. He then lays his finger upon the actual moralities, aware, like a true poet, that he has human instinct and experience solidly with him—
But och! it hardens a’ within And
petrifies the feelin’.
Nothing could express better the retaliatory work of this Nemesis—it petrifies feeling. Now, what could be better for dramatic purposes than to trace and record, in a perfectly objective way, the process of this petrifaction of feeling? Turgenev did this in two of his novels; and a good playwright could do it on the stage in a way that would be no more spectacular than the intimate operations of nature ever are, but would be stupendous and grand—grand with the grandeur of Greek tragedy. It is odd, too, that the theologians have been so slow to discern the real penalty which nature invariably exacts from this form of error, when it is so clearly shown by one of their best-known poets. The first few chapters of the Book of Proverbs are an untouched mine for the dramatist. Little enough does Solomon say about the superficial moralities in his wonderful dramatic dissertation upon what he calls “the strange woman”; he would make dull reading for Mr. Sumner and the National Purity League; but, like Burns, with a true poetic instinct he touches the fundamental moralities when he says that none who go unto her return again. That is precisely what happens, and happens always. What returns is salvage, sometimes more, sometimes less; but the spirit never returns entire, as it was before.
A. J. N. 24. x. 23.
THE other evening, I paid my respects to a friend who had just returned from Washington, and found her in a somewhat caustic mood. I remarked that I, too, was not overly fond of Washington; but to this she replied that her grievance was more specific. Her mission to the capital had had some connexion or other with organized charity; and (as this seemed the regular thing to do) a lady whose husband had recently risen to a position of importance in the Administration, had entertained at a formal affair a number of the charitarians who had gathered in the city. The hostess was ill at ease, uncertain of her position and extremely overbearing, and in general her manner contrasted most unfavourably with the unassuming friendliness of a titled personage from abroad who happened to be numbered among the guests. The experience had so impressed my friend that she was ready to come out in full force for an established aristocracy.
Inasmuch as one hears this kind of thing rather frequently just now, it seems to me that the question may profitably be pushed a little farther and examined a little more closely. To begin with, I ought to say, I suppose, that my own experience tallies very nicely with that of my friend. I too have found the people who were bred to their position a sight more amiable than those who have climbed to theirs, but I have not become on this account an advocate of titular or hereditary social stratification. To my way of thinking, there is one attitude and one only, which may properly govern one’s relations with one’s fellows, and that is the humane attitude, that accepts each newcomer as an individual, standing altogether alone, from whom nothing is to be expected, and out of whom anything may come. On the surface, there is more of this indulgent humanity in the manner of the aristocrat than in that of the arriviste, and yet neither of them is genuinely humane. The former is amiable and unconcerned because he assumes that a social stratification favourable to himself is thoroughly well-established; the latter is nervous and aggressive because he is attempting to build up a distinction of the same sort; but I for one am still willing to believe that the society that has not yet put its aristocracy comfortably to sleep is the society that is farthest from a genuine individualism.G. T. R. 26. xii. 23.
CHARLES BEARD, the historian, has mentioned to me the humorous idea of potting a lot of obituary-notices from the daily press and working them up into a kind of anthology of vacuity and blather. Surely nothing more clearly marks the degeneration of dignity than the death-notices of prominent men. One may read through column after column of them and be met by nothing but the most obvious and business-like insincerity. I often think of the three friends of Job, who came to him in his affliction and “sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him; for they saw that his grief was very great.” They were rare old gentlemen, and they recognized the dignity of sorrow; and I wish with all my heart that they were here to write our modern obituary-notices.
Curiously, the very genius of our language appears to be against the journalistic obituary-writer. It makes for sincerity and depth of feeling, more, I am sure, than that of any modern language that I know of. I would go as far as to say that no person can counterfeit deep emotion through three paragraphs of written English without so giving himself away that anyone of very moderate literary experience can detect the fraud. In this respect, our language resembles Latin. The apostrophe of Tacitus to his dead father-in-law, beginning, Si quis piorum manibus locus, and the inscription on the tomb of one of the Scipios, Qui apicem gessisti, mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos fama virtusque, gloria atque ingenium, can probably not be matched in any literature for their majestic accent of sincerity and emotional depth. Next to them, however, I should be inclined to put certain specimens of English obituary prose that occur to me, though not from the pages of our newspapers.
No one, however, outside the New Testament, has contrived to put the accent of sincerity into a literary and philosophical treatment of death like Marcus Aurelius; no one has contrived to throw such striking freshness about his reflections on the shortness and uncertainty of human life, and on the activities that make our span of years really profitable. I have not space to quote, but the reader can easily find his best passages by reference to the index in Mr. Long’s translation; and he may convince himself of their truth by substituting other names for those of the dead emperors, statesmen and warriors whom he cites. Metternich’s work has crumbled to nothing, and Talleyrand’s, Richelieu’s, Bismarck’s, and innumerable others. But not Bach’s, Shakespeare’s, Homer’s, Rembrandt’s, Dante’s, and the work of many more whose names stand in their glorious company. Does not this fact of itself show the side of life upon which we should bear lightly and that upon which we should rest with our whole weight?.
A. J. N. 27. ii. 24.
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