Chapter 5 of 7 · The Freeman Book by Albert Jay Nock
IV. Middle Articles
MIDDLE ARTICLES
A DEAR MEMORY
THE revival of “Parsifal” at the Metropolitan seems to have passed without reminiscent mention of the greatest Wagnerian conductor of his time, Anton Seidl. Perhaps it is natural; the memory of a generation is short at its longest; but though it is twenty-one years, to the month, since he came to his untimely end in New York City, I feel somehow that but yesterday I last met him on his way to Fleischmann’s old café, by Grace Church. Seidl’s association with “Parsifal” was very close, for he was with Wagner in the days when the great work was composed, and knew the work as Wagner wished it to be known.
The night he received the cable-message from Cosima Wagner asking him to return to Bayreuth and conduct the festival performances of “Parsifal,” he was happy with the eager delight of boyhood. He received the message the day he was entertained by the Lotus Club. It was a great night, particularly memorable for the distinguished company of famous visiting musicians. I was then playing in “Secret Service,” at the Garrick Theatre; and, the night after the Lotus Club gathered, Seidl came around to my dressing-room and asked me if I would go with him to Bayreuth. I gladly accepted, though I could not for the life of me imagine how I could undertake the journey. Later on, Seidl was engaged by the Royal Opera syndicate at Covent Garden to conduct the Wagnerian performances to be given in the early part of the season. Then followed a period of anxious waiting on my part until Frohman arranged to send the “Secret Service” company to play at the Adelphi Theatre, London. I regarded this decision as an amazing piece of luck, for it meant I should be 3000 miles nearer Bayreuth. Seidl reached London before I did, and he was rehearsing at Covent Garden when I appeared on the scene. Many happy days we spent together, dining at Romano’s, the Café Royal, and the Continental, where Seidl had rooms. “Hair” Seidl, as Punch called him, was exceedingly popular with Covent Garden audiences, and was soon known to the passers-by in London streets. He was, however, much too simple-hearted to fall a victim to the social wiles of the upper ten, who would have lionized him without mercy. He said, “They are very good and kind, and some like the music, but I think I prefer their dogs and their horses.” Disraeli would have loved that sentence, and no less the quiet tolerance of Seidl when he said it. In after years, when I was stage-director of the Royal Opera, one of the real music-lovers of the syndicate told me he had never heard anything in opera like Seidl’s reading of “Tristan and Isolde” and “Walküre.” The men in the orchestra often spoke to me about him, and they marvelled at his power.
When I reached Bayreuth he was at the station to meet me; and in driving down to Graben where he lodged, he explained with that delightfully humorous smile flickering about his sensitive mouth, that Cosima had asked him to stay at Wahnfried, but “I told her I would like to be quiet.” So he took rooms over a tannery, at the edge of a little canal, where he had strolled many a time during his apprenticeship with Wagner. I shall never forget the first few days in that homely abode; the smell of the tannery was sometimes enough to drive one mad. But the simplicity of life, the charm of the tanner and his family—for Seidl knew how to pick his associates for their human qualities—their kindliness and thrifty neatness, were delightful. We had two beds in one large room at the back of the house, and many a night we lay awake for hours talking through the darkness to each other. One very warm day, I remember, we were in our shirt-sleeves and free of collars and ties, when the King of Württemberg came to call on Seidl. As soon as he was announced, I bolted into the bedroom. When I returned, presentably clothed, Seidl and the King were sitting together on the old sofa chatting intimately about Wagner, Liszt, and America.
The first rehearsal of the orchestra is unique in my memory of such events, for Cosima, en suite, sat up on the apron of the stage in something like royal state. Before Seidl had gone very far with the prelude, Cosima tapped with her parasol and murmured something about the rendition being rather strange to her. Seidl gave her a reproving glance which rather shocked her suite, and said, “If you will wait, you will know.” And she did wait, and she knew—when the orchestra rose to its feet at the end of the prelude and applauded enthusiastically. There was nothing but praise after that incident. The effect of the performance upon some of the people was extraordinary; I can see Emma Calve being led away after the third act, completely overwrought. Even George Moore, usually placid and self-contained, was so strangely moved that an hour or two afterwards, at Beierlein’s café, he trembled with emotion. And poor Felix Mottl, not by any means given to rendering praise when due, was deeply affected; some years afterwards, when he came to Covent Garden, he told me that it was one of the greatest musical events of his life. But what a company assembled that year at Bayreuth! Can it be really so long ago—so long ago since Seidl, Ernst Van Dyk, and I, in that slow-moving carriage, were drawn up the hill past Jean Paul Richter’s cottage, to Fantasie? How impatient Van Dyk, perhaps the greatest Parsifal of all, was with the coachman, and his lazy horses; Seidl the while chaffing him about the speed of American trotters! They spoke English—broken—out of courtesy to me. How Seidl roared with laughter when Van Dyk jumped up, shaking his fist at the back of the coachman, and cried, “I have horses in Vienna that can stand quicker than yours can walk.” Then at Fantasie we met as cosmopolitan a crowd as there was to be found anywhere attending any festival in any part of the world. There were Queen Alexandra, then Princess of Wales; German royalty, Russian royalty, Italian royalty; French princes and dukes; indeed, the baronage of Europe generally, seemed pretty well represented; but, more important, the intellectual commoners of both hemispheres, the servants of literature, art and music, were there.
One day Seidl got Kranich, the chief machinist of the Wagner Theatre, to show us the workings of the wonderful stage, on a day when no opera was given. That evening we were alone and enjoyed our meal under the trees in the garden of a café set on a hill overlooking the town. And Seidl told me, in the quiet of the dusk, that wonderful story of his association with Wagner. I think it was our last night together. The next day I returned to London with the thought in my mind that he would return early in the spring to resume his work at Covent Garden. Alas, for music here, in England, everywhere, he did not return. He passed away suddenly. And those who had enjoyed his genius at the Metropolitan and Carnegie Hall learned on the day of his funeral, that his memory was enshrined in the hearts of the common folk of New York. Si quis piorum manibus locus . . . placide quiescas!
F. N. 24. iii. 20.
RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON
THERE is pathos in the life of Bonington; it was so short, so busy, so full of beauty and charm. No young painter’s life was so rich in promise; he is the Keats of painting. They were contemporaries, and neither reached the age of thirty; but each left treasures which have enriched the race. Bonington was born in Nottinghamshire in October, 1801, and, as a lad, roamed the green glades of Sherwood Forest, and watched the sunlight and the summer breeze play upon the Trent. His father seems to have been a lover of nature, a humanitarian, and an artist of parts; indeed the boy was prepared for his career by his father in the open fields, where all the play of nature lay before him in his early years.
The Bonington family left England in 1816 for Paris, and shortly after they were settled there Richard was found studying in the Louvre. He was, occasionally, a pupil of Baron de Gros. But his spirit was too free to be caught in the routine of the schools. His early training had given him a long start of the students he met at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; and his new-found friends soon discovered that he would go his own way to the goal, expressing his conceptions with originality. How much he gained in positive instruction from the French artists cannot be computed, for it is pretty clear that he was a rebel from the first year of his sojourn in Paris. He was not the product of any school; he was original, and created the elements upon which the French school of landscape was founded. He could not have seen, much less have studied, the works of Constable and Turner before he left England for Paris in 1816. There is no record before that date of his spending any time away from Nottinghamshire. How often he visited London between 1816 and 1822, is not known; we do, however, know that he spent most of those years in France. He went to Italy in 1822, in which year he exhibited for the first time; two water-colors at the Salon, for which he received a premium from the Société des Amis des Arts. At the famous Salon of 1824 he was awarded a gold medal for his works. In 1824 Constable’s “Haywain” created a sensation when it was exhibited at the Louvre; but Bonington had already, when only twenty-three years old, won the admiration of the most eminent artists of France. That Constable and Turner should divide the credit of taking the secret of painting air and sunshine from England to France can be best explained by the fact that in later years their works attracted a circle of admirers who imagined that these masters were the precursors of Bonington.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this young artist was his abounding versatility. It did not matter what he put his hand to; even in lithography, he “achieved notable victories.” In oil his performances “were worthy of the masters of his time.”
As a lad [wrote Eugene Delacroix] he developed an astonishing dexterity in the use of water-colours, which were in 1817 an English novelty. Other artists were perhaps more powerful or more accurate than Bonington, but no one in the modern school, perhaps no earlier artists, possessed the ease of execution which makes his works, in a certain sense, diamonds by which the eye is pleased and fascinated, quite independently of the subject and the particular representation of nature. The same is true of the costume-pictures which he afterwards painted. Even here I could never grow weary of marvelling at his sense of effort and his great ease of execution. Not that he was quickly satisfied; on the contrary, he often began over again perfectly finished pieces which seemed wonderful to us. His dexterity was, however, so great that in a moment he produced with his brush new effects which were as charming as the first and more truthful.
Such is the glowing tribute of a great French artist who was the friend and comrade of Bonington. “No Frenchman before him had so painted the play of light on gleaming costumes and succulent greens,” says Richard Muther. One of the first to make an appearance in the Romantic school, “he was the most natural and the most delicate.” The training he received as a lad when he wandered with his father along the banks of English rivers, through the woods, and among the dells of a country full of subtle colour and ever-changing effects of light, gave him the alert vision of the artist who comprehends the secret charms of nature, and appreciates her grace and beauty everywhere. He, perhaps more than any other painter, could add a spiritual tone to the atmospheric vagaries of day and night and the changing colours of the seasons.
Most of his works are to be found in the Wallace collection and at Hartford House. There are three of his water-colours in the South Kensington Museum. Few are to be found in private collections. There are two Boningtons in the Metropolitan Museum of Art which are really fine examples of his work. One, a landscape, is a view of Mantes on the Seine, but it loses much in interest because its brilliance is dulled by a coat of discoloured varnish. If this varnish were removed, the picture would gain enormously in light and colour-values. As it is, the water and heavy logs in the foreground seem to be of the same tone and texture as the tree, which is without any value of shadow at all. Up the river in the distance are the spires of the church of Notre Dame, a foundation which dates from the twelfth century. The tower of St. Maclou rises above a group of trees. The banks of the river on the right should be full of light, showing cattle browsing on the rising ground and drinking at the water’s edge. There are figures in the foreground reclining on logs. One of these figures has, of course, the famous Bonington spot of red, a touch of color used with wonderful effect. Over all is the great spreading sky full of fine warm light; the sky the artist gave to most of his pictures, which seems always like a watching soul hovering tenderly over the earth.
The second picture, called “Seacoast,” gives a pretty good idea of what the other picture really contains in the way of fine values; for in this scene of sand and sea and sky there is a luminosity which only Bonington could produce. The radiant air seems to tremble, and suggests that feeling of exhilaration which comes when we walk along the shore and turn our faces to the reviving breeze. Here are simplicity and sincerity in all their grace. Again there is the glorious, spreading sky, rising from the deep horizon of the sea, like a curtain of glowing pearl. In the foreground there are heavy stretches of shore and sand interspersed with luminous pools; the sea rolls in, under the pressure of a light wind. There are several figures, full of animation and colour, with a magical atmospheric effect of fineness and clearness thrown about them. A glimmering path of light stretches from the edge of the water straight down the foreground; a reflection coming from we know not where—perhaps from the sun behind a great billow of cloud, perhaps shot across the sea and mirrored in the crests of wavelets thrown upon the shore.
In the Hearn Collection at the Metropolitan there is a third painting catalogued as by Bonington, which does not quite establish itself as a work of the young master, but rather as a good example of the work of William Shayer. Mr. John McFadden’s collection has a Bonington of singular beauty. It is a beach scene; again, nearly all sand and sea and sky, but of a purity of atmosphere unsurpassed anywhere. In the “Chateau of the Duchess DeBerri,” a scene on the Garonne, one enjoys, again, the exhilaration of great space, with its splendid rolling white clouds revealing here and there the blueness of a sky which exchanges colour with the ocean and feels its mists. Again, in this picture, there is the spot of red—the touch of colour used afterwards so often by Corot—in the coat of the boy. The river itself is almost without a ripple. The boats are in-shore, and their sails hang drowsily at the masts. The chateau lies away in the background, imbedded in a grove of trees, and does not dominate the scene.
The exhilaration of great space is communicated by some of his street scenes showing fine specimens of old architecture. The Venetian scenes are monumental in architectural effect, and they also give the sense of vastness, by the perspective, and by the sky that hangs like a canopy at the back. An exception to this characteristic of the greater number of his works, is to be found in a picture of quite unusual distinction that was shown at the Art-Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857. It is called “An Old Turk.” A man reclines upon a divan, his long narghile lies across his knees. The subject is simple enough, but it is so full of the languor of the East, both in its setting, and in the countenance and attitude of the Turk, that one wonders how an English boy who spent most of his life in England and France could have depicted so accurately the characteristics of an alien race. It is, however, the colour in this picture that is so wonderful; the greens, blues, and blacks glow with animation and they are harmonized in a masterly way. No better work of its kind has come from his contemporaries either of Britain or France. The technique is equal to Gainsborough’s; the brush-work and finish as smooth, as clear, as Raeburn’s and Decamps’.
Bonington died before he had completed his twenty-seventh year. Sir Thomas Lawrence said he had never known, except in the case of George Harlow, “the early death of talent so promising, and so rapidly and obviously improving.” The young artist whom the French called “our Bonington,” was characteristically English in self and work. He was perhaps more individualistic than any of his contemporaries. With all the care and pains he took to improve his work there could be in it no scamping of essentials; he was thorough and fundamental, there was nothing of the “scenic artist” about him. He revealed himself in his works; they show his full vision of things eternal, his yearning for beauty in life itself, his kinship with the immensities, his desire to linger in nature’s loveliness, and to enjoy her gifts to the full.
F. N. 31. iii. 20.
PAUL MANSHIP’S VISION
IN his bust of John D. Rockefeller now on exhibition in New York, Paul Manship has given us a work that will be remembered long after the Rockefeller bequests to universities and institutes are forgotten. Rarely is such exquisite workmanship to be found; the delicacy and finesse never for a moment lose surety of touch. Sincerity and candour are expressed in every line. It is the most penetrating and courageous portrait that has been produced by a sculptor for many a long day. It is a revelation of consummate artistry founded upon a large sense of drama and characterization. Here is something of which American art can justly be proud.
After studying Sargent’s portraits of John D. Rockefeller, the bust by Paul Manship comes as a revelation of the possibilities of expressing in marble the complexities of lineament and character. The Sargent portraits give something too much of the philanthropist and the repose of tie self-satisfied Baptist; they discover a man whose interesting past has been washed away in the godliness of large bequests. There is, however, something more to be observed in this subject than merely a well-groomed benevolent gentleman of great age enjoying his ripe years in hard-earned repose. It is one thing to depict the characteristics of a subject at a phase of life which is altogether exceptional, and so create an impression that the mood and period selected by the artist are typical. This is what is usually done, but it is never satisfactory, for each life has its own drama, its own conflicts, defeats and triumphs, and the test of the artist’s power comes in his appreciation of the traits and characteristics which have been instrumental in producing the whole man. This is what Paul Manship has succeeded in doing—he brings the whole man before us; he has dramatized the life of John D. Rockefeller.
Even to the choice of the colour and tone of the stone, which has a sear and yellow note, Manship has succeeded in obtaining astonishing completeness. The head, confidently poised, is set forward from the broad, round shoulders which slope gracefully away to the lithe arms. The right shoulder seems to be raised, and is somewhat shorter than the left. Indeed the right side of the bust reveals the tense determination of the man. It is indicative of a concentration of nervous energy which has been the propelling force of his career. In strange contrast to the head, so full of interest, the neatness of the clothes, the prim collar, and the tidy cravat, give an appearance of sleekness. The head has nobility—is well-balanced and has great depth and breadth, though there is a squareness about it which tells of obduracy, power of concentration, acquisitiveness. The expansion from the temples back over the ears is quite extraordinary. The temples are sunken, the cheek bones high with a fullness extending far towards the nostrils. The nose is Roman, the nostrils Gallic almost in their delicacy, and retroussé. But with the nose, as with every separate feature of this strangely fascinating face, there is found much more than form; there is something ferret-like about it, the wide-open nostrils seem to be scenting prey from afar. The upper lip, long and thin, emphasizes remarkably two strong, protruding muscles tapering down to its centre which seems to sag beneath their weight. Animal-like it overhangs the chin, and reveals a strange note of ferocity. The lower lip is also thin, with a feminine fineness and delicacy; here is all the cold, calculating power of the woman who will take what she wants no matter what the cost may be. From this beautifully modelled bow there is a slight recession in a chin of no great depth or strength. The notes here are feline in their quality; it is a beautiful chin, almost youthful, yet it adds no gracious quality to the face taken as a whole. The ears are the strangest that mortal ever possessed; turn them upside down and they are the ears of the fox. The wrinkled flesh falls from a sunken spot in the right cheek over the jaw where it joins the chin; the lines of care, determination, and tenacity show more on the right side than on the left, but nothing has disturbed the firmness and smoothness of the upper lip, the mouth and chin. The main muscles of the front neck are distended, and suggest the man’s great power of swallowing severe criticism and contemptuous opinion; all emotions seem suppressed by grim intellectual restraint. The eyes look far over the obstacles which have stood in his way. They see the goal shining in the distance; they stare into the future, cold, heartless, merciless, with a penetration that amounts to certainty; they are the eyes of a remorseless mathematician calculating every problem to a nicety and forecasting every difficulty. The brows are raised, for nothing must cast a shadow across that vision, indeed the brows seem to recede at the very point where the pupils of the eyes glare straight ahead. The bust carries in it absolutely nothing that strikes the note of human sympathy; it is barren of everything that is lovable. Here is intellectual force carried to the extreme, without compassion, without mercy. It is extraordinary how so much that is delicate and refined in line and poise can make up an ensemble that is so sinister and forbidding.
Nothing reveals the emptiness of success so much as this face. The Phoenicians might have placed this on the altar they raised to Mammon, the god of ill-gotten gains.
F. N. 21. iv. 20.
THOMAS HARDY AT EIGHTY
THAT was a great evening for Oxford, the 10th of last February. An enormous crowd was gathered in the theatre—all the fine youth of the University, those who had survived the war, those who had succeeded the dead, young men and young women with years of full life before them still, dons and their wives (breathing culture), and a few battered old travellers of life like myself. We had come partly to see a selection from the scenes of Thomas Hardy’s “Dynasts,” put on the stage by the Dramatic Society of the undergrads themselves. But chiefly we had come because it was known that the great poet himself was to be present. He was soon to be eighty, and youth longed to see him before he died.
For myself, good fortune had enabled me to meet him frequently before in the course of years, and I soon discovered that small and delicate figure which seemed only anxious to shrink out of sight at the end of a row of stalls. There was that fine, domed head, that delicately moulded face, pale and lean, covered with delicate wrinkles as though it were moulded in wax, each wrinkle seeming as though designed to express in combination with every other all the sorrows and pities and ironies of mankind. With shy melancholy, the pale grey eyes looked out upon the stage. In quiet and unaffected tones the low voice answered any observation, quite simply and without an effort at display. He recognized the occasion. He was pleased to see even fragments of his great epic-drama performed—indeed for some of us it counts among the very few great epics of the world. At the end, all longed for him to stand up, to go upon the stage and speak us a word or two, so that for the next sixty years some personal memory of his voice and look might remain with those eager youths, that they might tell their grandchildren that they had once beheld him. But ere the play was over he was gone. Like the Scholar Gypsy of old, he had slipped away to the Cumnor hills, and was gone.
What a record lay hidden behind that shy and delicate figure, that waxen and mournful face! There was the man who for fifty years had held the world entranced by the beauty of a mind capable of sharing all life’s sorrow and some of its joy, and by the beauty of a style which was but the expression of that inmost mind—the style that is both the substance and the architectural form of thought. As one looked at him, one recalled the great pictures of life which he had created and described in prose—“Far from the Madding Crowd,” “The Return of the Native,” “Tess,” and “Jude the Obscure,” besides so many other beautiful and ironic scenes, so many other beautiful and tragic personalities. For eighty years those pale, sad eyes had looked steadily out upon the world, and like the poet Heine he could cry, “O ancient Earth, I’ve counted all thy sorrows.” We thought of those immortal scenes—of Bathsheba and Trim, of Egdon Heath, of Tess christening her baby, of the Isle of Slingers, and of Jude who gazed with yearning upon our very Oxford from the Berkshire downs. No writer had ever come so close to the heart of ancient England—of the south-land which is the ancient heart of England, with its peculiarly English strain of men and women, humorous, kindly, ironic, capable of profound emotions that lie restrained and dumb. No imaginative writer in prose, I think, had ever come so near the heart of Earth. It was as though he felt still bound to her by the cord that binds a child to its mother’s life. Looking at him, I saw the vision of Man passing across a wide and desolate moorland under the obscure light of a moon behind driving clouds. Sprung from Earth, he was soon again to return to her. Under his feet lay the stony relics of uncouth creatures that lived and died and had been obliterated uncounted ages before Man himself appeared. Above his head moved uncounted stars, speechless and unknowable. On one hand rose the gaunt monuments of the “Hanging Stones,” where men once worshipped. On the other rose a gallows with clanking chains, and the ruins of a village church. Man’s eyes were fixed upon the dubious path before him, leading to a destination he could not name, and perhaps to no destination of any kind. But in the heart of wandering Man burned a compassion which consumed him like cruel rage, and in his brain moved thoughts that ranged beyond the flaming bulwarks of the stars.
What has been the deepest motive of Thomas Hardy’s life? Some might say beauty, some irony, some the complexities of human love. I do not know, but whenever I think of him I remember that divine saying of Francis Bacon: “The nobler a man’s nature is, the more objects of compassion he hath.” (I am obliged to quote from memory.) Hardy looks out upon all forms of life and feeling with a compassion all the more poignant for its sense of ironic fate. His compassion includes the horse that is wounded or slain in battle (in vain during the Boer War he pleaded that horses should not be ridden up to the firing line), and it includes the pheasants wounded to make sport for England’s landed gentry (after that pitiful chapter in “Tess,” as he once told me, the County Families resolved to have no more to do with him). I think he even feels compassion for the trilobite buried ages ago in the Dorset cliffs. But for men and women his compassion is boundless as the sea, his pity as deep. Human beings are so human, so capable of love and joy and sin and sweetness, so capable of sorrow, and so entangled in the ironic intricacies of existence as it moves. It is an obscure and fitfully lighted life through which he beholds them travelling: “Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna est iter in silvis.” As to Gods, Man knows nothing of them, and he should have the courage at all events to refuse a fool’s paradise of inane and unreasoning conjecture.
Hardy once told me that but for poverty he would never have written prose, but only poetry. Rich people have a pleasing habit of calling poverty a blessing in disguise, and in this case certainly one can perceive the blessing through it. If he had not written prose, we should all have been poorer. But poetry was always the darling of his heart, and now in old age he never ceases to cherish it. Beautiful in many ways the results have been, and most encouraging for vitality. I love to think of the man of eighty working at his poems, like Socrates turning Æsop’s fables into verse on the morning of his execution. But after all, the grandest result of his abandonment of the prose form is that epic-drama of “The Dynasts.” In that great poem the whole man’s inward self and thought found full expression. His sense of Time, his sense of Irony, his sense of Pity are here heard audibly speaking through the voices of the Spirits of the Years, the Spirits Ironic, and the Spirits of the Pities. Looking back over one short century alone, we see revealed to us again the battles of our great-grandfathers, the struggles of armies hostile or allied; the intrigues of monarchs, and the conspiracies of politicians driving millions to early death; the passions and sufferings of common, kindly men and women, all vanished now like the unsubstantial fabric of a vision, but that the poet calls them up. There the glorious armies go again, crawling over Europe like maggots on a leaf or mites in rotten cheese. Once more we hear the Ironic Spirit laughing its acrid laugh; once more the Spirits of the Pities utter their lamentation. Nor is the vision limited to a century past. What is Europe since the war but the scene which had been described by the poet ten years before the war began?—
The point of view then sinks downward through space, and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing, crawling, heaving and vibrating in their various cities and nationalities.
So moves the Immanent Will, inexplicable, irresistible, unconscious; and, with the Spirits of the Years, we can but ask:
O Immanence that reasonest not
In putting forth all things begot,
Thou build’st thy house in space—for what?
O Loveless, Hateless!—past the sense
Of kindly-eyed benevolence
To what tune dances this Immense?
The Spirit Ironic answers with the customary sneer. It is only from the Spirit of the Pities that we obtain one little gleam of possible hope—that Spirit of the Pities of whom Bacon said, “The nobler a man’s nature is, the more objects of compassion he hath.”
Yet, Great and Good, Thee, Thee we hail,
Who shak’st the strong, who shield’st the frail.
Who had’st not shaped such souls as we
If tendermercy lacked in Thee!
As Socrates said, of a similar conjecture, it is not a very secure raft to set sail upon through life, but after all it is the best we have, and it is built within the heart of man alone.
H. W. N. 16. vi. 20.
PANTOMIME
A MYTHOLOGY has grown around the motion-picture in behalf of pantomime. Literally the motion-picture is a pantomime now; it has been so from the beginning. But its progression does not lie in the path of more pantomime—much rather toward less of it.
In considering the art of acting, if the voice is left out altogether, the problem consists of a choice of those details of gesture that will best convey and recall and suggest the whole of life—the sense of actuality. Punch and Judy is this suggestion at its simplest. The puppet’s repertoire is an elementary one in which every move fits to a conventional, stereotyped and widely understood meaning.
This is, in the main, pantomime as it has been practised up to the present by most actors for the screen. The fault here has been with the material. The chief complaint against the motion-picture is that it is a stereotyped and easily anticipated product throughout, endowed with little beauty except that which may be accidental to it. Plot, narrative, characters, and characterization have all been set in a uniform mould. This uniformity has progressed to such an extent that producers themselves are now aware that the “studio type” must be eliminated before their work will assume both lifelike and artistic proportions. Pantomime, in its largest sense—the silent acting of a part—is much more than merely communication or expression. It is, to begin with, highly decorative. If the ballet has taught anything to the modern stage, it is that by the fine selection of his movements the actor may not only significantly and eloquently talk with his head, his eyes, his shoulders, his hands and his feet, and his entire carriage, but may make that utterance beautiful as well. Such actors as Miss Barrymore and her brothers, have certain moments of beauty that are almost exterior to the moment itself; bits of decorative line that are an added gift of the gods who see to the setting of stages.
But pantomime is always much more than expressive or decorative. It is at its best suggestive and reflective. In its power of suggestion it can be the finest of all instruments for tragic drama, awakening vast cycles of epic memory with the appropriate sweep of the hands or lift of the eyes. It is always concerned with compressing a host of human memories into a single formula that will stand for the lot of them. Because it does, by this very act, drop so much that is disordered and unfinished and realistic, and because it is in its very nature balanced and patterned, pantomime is able to call to mind all the large generalizations of life, on which much tragic drama is based. Synge, in his essay on “The Tragic Theatre” says for tragedy, “we summon rhythm, balance, pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance . . .” This was the acting of Bernhardt, florid with an excess of formula, by which nevertheless great hinterlands of emotion were called forth.
Indeed, pantomime is French in many of its avenues, and most French in its awareness, and by the purposes of self-consciousness it sometimes serves. The acting of such players as the Guitrys, father and son, has references and implications, with France behind them, that lead deeply into the entire art of illusion. The son writes pungent, witty farces and comedies, related closely to the sex-hunt, that are just so much better than our own gross transcriptions of the fundamental human adventure as most French prefiguring and vision of human beings and their affairs is clearer, more accurate and less dishonest than our own. The father acts with delicacy and precision in scoring the shades and passages of emotion and thought. His selected art throws into relief the insensitive method of many British and American actors who stand in the first rank in their own countries. Comparatively, the Guitrys have much in their favour.
The French stage, like the Italian stage in a less well-defined fashion, has an obviously well-developed alphabet of interpretation, a complete gamut of pantomimic expression. The French passion for making everything clear has had something to do with this development of definite symbols for dramatic ideas. But French culture generally is an instance of the increasing conventionalization of any well-founded and sophisticated life. In music and in painting, French art has spread through layer on layer of restatement and revision into the cool atmospheres of a patterned beauty. In the theatre, the French objective has always been a high clear laughter at human folly. And comedy, close to life but always just outside its gates, demands a ritual and routine of expression, a schematic structure on which to survey the scene and from which to shoot at it.
Copeau disclosed this when he played at the Garrick Theatre in New York. But the Guitrys have an even more sensitive and highly developed sign-language, so complete and so well organized and closely interwoven and impinging, that it even has moments of overcoming the impediment of conventionalization, to the point of imparting the emotion of reality. It does not have many moments of this kind, because, being French, it deals for the most part with material that is in itself full of attitudes, commentary upon life, draws constantly a trajectory of intellectual observation, as distinct from the representation of life itself. Even in “Pasteur,” which Lucien Guitry plays with a quietude, a lack of gesture and an absence of rising and falling tonality that is astonishing, the procession of facts in a great man’s life is not accomplished without accompanying overtones of fine comedy and philosophic wit. Its delicate regard for the sentiment of the occasion does not keep it from penetrating into the whole humbuggery of great men, the ceremonial about them, illuminating the rise of human careers to climax and recognition, and exposing the stupidity of the human audience to the actual elements of greatness growing before it.
These have been the purposes, before Molière and since, of the French theatre, and they have brought an increasing refinement to the use of pantomime. It is not without astonishment for the observer that Lucien Guitry becomes reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin. The Continental music-hall is full of such actors, and doubtless the great Chaplin found the bare materials for his genius there. Comedy best can use and can thrive upon a stenography of the kind the French have given to their stage. Life itself is not comic at all; it is the bare bone of facts. Only human intervention, human observation, the sudden interruption of a human attitude, makes comedy out of a handful of common things. Chaplin, it might be said, with the very smallest bag of tricks, stands constantly as the figure of such intervention.
The problem of the motion-picture as it refers to pantomime is not one, however, that Chaplin can solve. It becomes clear now, as the motion-picture goes on its way that a Chaplin can have little effect on the main stream of it. He is unique, availing himself of the machinery of cinematography for expression, but contributing nothing to the infinitely troubling problem of expressing the aspect of life itself in terms of motion.
There are well-defined differences between the stage and the screen. Both are alike now in their swift movement toward naturalism. In this light, the acting of fine if limited artists such as the Guitrys has no meaning outside of being an abundant exposition of an art that is purely French, more French than dramatic. The tendency on the modern stage, a belated ripple of the widening circle from Moscow, is an effort to show life in the very essence of its accidental, unfinished, and despotic quality, to thrust into the very texture of the presentation an imputation of the flux, and constant change and transformation of colour and form that modern persons find in living itself. No formulized, established mode or ritual of expression is equal to such a great task. It needs most of all an unflagging and constant imaginative heat, which will throw no imagery into the same style twice and will give to presentation the differentiation, the strange quality of each moment, which is in life itself.
The public itself asks more and more for the bare bodkin of existence, the stuff of fact. Life is seldom so neatly trimmed as the conventional drama makes it out to be, and a tide has set in against its conventional presentation on the stage. The frustration of modern life has created a hunger and desire for an art that will show these incompletions in all their intimacy. That is why a set pantomimic style will not survive now in the movie. It is apparent that the elliptical and conventionalized gesture, of studied “pantomime,” is what the cinema must be rid of, along with all the rigid formula of plot, of action and of characterization that have stupefied and choked it. In place of a great formulization of acting, the problem of the motion picture today is that of a more exact and more appropriate selection of gesture, harmonious and decorative, and a more closely woven texture of representation.
Mechanically considered, aside from the effort of the actor himself, the motion-camera always makes the first choice of the details of illusion; and this choice is an automatic one. No camera yet invented can run swiftly enough in its flow of film to catch every subtle rhythm in unbroken smoothness, every fine shade of movement in its complete quality. The actor’s constant fight, if he assumes the burden of modern illusion, is not to further this elimination. It is instead to make his own selection of gesture so evocative in the single movement and so complete in the gamut, that he is certain to give at every moment actual proof of that complete absorption of the substance and spaces of contemporary life that every art gives at its zenith.
R. B. 1. ix. 20.
THE DIVINE RIGHT OF LINEAGE
TRULY, the progress of knowledge is slow and painful. For at least a score of years, anthropologists have been pointing out that race has often little to do with either language or nationality. Indeed, during the great war some of them made heroic efforts to put the essential information before the public, but, as Schiller might say, against folk-science even the anthropologist battles in vain.
Yet the relevant facts are by no means difficult to get at. Go to any large gathering of Germans and scrutinize the crowd. Then compare them with the people you saw at the French theatre two or three winters ago. The chances are that you can match rather more than half the individuals of either group in the other; on the score of mere looks the greatest specialist in the world could never tell which were Germans and which were French. On the other hand, even a careless observer would note that neither the French audience nor the German Verein represents a homogeneous group. If they are truly representative gatherings, a number of conspicuously tall men will be found to stand out sharply in either case from a larger body of moderately-sized ones. There will be a few markedly fair individuals amidst a number of distinctly darker type. Again, there will be decided differences in the shape of the heads: in both assemblies there will be men, the width of whose heads is rather more than eight-tenths of the length, while in others the relative width descends towards three-fourths or even falls below that ratio.
Having regard then to the way in which these three traits are associated, we might classify each of our artificial national groups into natural biological ones. From this point of view we should then be able to set off in both of them a subdivision of tall, fair and rather long-headed men, leaving another made up of stocky, darker-haired and markedly broad-headed individuals. From the French audience we might further segregate some men of pronouncedly swarthy complexion, shorter than the broad-skulled group, rather longer-headed even than the tall group. To this last subdivision there would be no equivalent among the Germans. Ignoring it, however, for the present, we may say that a scientist classifying mankind as to physical appearance alone would not hesitate to combine certain Frenchmen and Germans into one division and certain others into a second division altogether irrespective of the differences in speech and political affiliation. To use the accepted nomenclature, he would recognize not a French and a German race, but a tall Nordic or Teutonic and a medium-sized Alpine race, each including at the same time natives of both countries.
But in making this classification the investigator is creating two ideal types, to which only a minority of individuals conform at all closely. There are many men who are both tall and dark, for example; just as there are many short blonds. Nature, in other words, has not really segregated all existing individuals into the two types, Nordic and Alpine. In the total population individuals of intermediate character bulk far more prominently than “pure” representatives of the Nordic and the Alpine complex.
These two races, then, are not so much realities coming under our direct observation as they are concepts by means of which the anthropologist can more or less satisfactorily describe much of the extant population of Europe. By assuming that at one time there existed a distinct Teutonic and a distinct Alpine stock, which mixed in varying degree in different parts of Europe, we are able to give a fairly consistent account of the regional differences of the European type. Tall, fair and long-skulled individuals occur most abundantly in Scandinavia and the British Isles, the percentage attaining a maximum in Sweden, where over ten per cent of the total population still conforms to the Nordic type. Southwards its representatives decrease in relative numbers, finally dwindling down to an inconsiderable fraction of the whole people. Thus, comparing the Swedes with the peasants of central France, we find that while a man of five feet, seven inches, ranks as tall among the latter, the net height of nearly sixty per cent of all Swedes is in excess of that height; while the fair hair and long heads prevailing among the Scandinavians are correspondingly rare in the French group.
Of this dwindling of Nordic traits as one departs from the Scandinavian centre, Germany furnishes a striking example. The physical differences noted in our German Verein are not by any means freakish, but follow a fairly definite geographical law. It is the Mecklenburger and his immediate neighbours who are almost indistinguishable from the Scandinavian; it is the native of the Black Forest who resembles the peasant of central France. This regional difference persists in spite of all the modern conditions so favourable to migration and interbreeding. Applying the useful symbols of an Alpine and a Nordic race, we can readily interpret the observed phenomena. If, for example, the Mecklenburger proves to be a little shorter and broader-skulled than the Swede, we can explain his departure from the Teutonic norm by a slight infusion of Alpine blood. If the Tyrolese towers above his broad-headed neighbours, a Nordic strain will account for the anomaly.
A corresponding local analysis can be made of the French, and the final result of both studies would lend greater precision to our initial comparison of the two national groups. It is not merely certain Frenchmen and certain Germans, but the French of Normandy and the Germans of Mecklenburg that belong together, while the Breton is similarly united with the Badenser rather than with his Norman compatriot. The Teutonic category includes the French-speaking Norman and quite as definitely excludes the German-speaking inhabitant of the Black Forest.
So far, all is smooth sailing. But it is otherwise when we turn from the study of bodily traits to a comparison of races in the matter of psychology. There is a widespread belief that with racial differences as to outward appearance there are associated profound differences, equally hereditary, in intellectual capacity and ethical outlook. Thus, during the war, some Allied propagandists, ignoring the simple fact that the German people did not represent a racial unit, attempted to prove that the atrocities of the German soldiers were the necessary result of their organic constitution; that they were as ferocious during the war as they had been in the days of the Caesars and as they are bound to be to the end of time. Others—and there were scientists among them—showed to their own satisfaction that the Germans were by nature altogether debarred from creative effort. These views, resting, of course, on sheer ignorance, can be briefly dismissed; for the Germans are not a race, and therefore no hereditary traits whatsoever can be ascribed to them as a group. If such qualities as brutality and imitativeness are ascribed to the Nordic racial strain, then they must be at least equally characteristic of the Nordics of the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. If, on the other hand, all their deficiency is due to the Alpine alloy, then the very same shortcomings must be expected of the natives of Central France. In a word, the question whether Germans are innately inferior to English or French is scientifically meaningless; there can be question only of the comparative merits of the Nordic and the Alpine race.
As a matter of fact, some of our recent controversialists possessed a sufficient smattering of anthropological knowledge to formulate the problem in these terms. It is interesting to note that the most prominent, certainly the most vociferous, combatants on both sides were agreed in one point—the vast superiority of the Nordic. When German chauvinists proclaimed the glories of their civilization as a distinctively Nordic product, their English-speaking opponents did not challenge the basic assumption of Nordic supremacy, but contented themselves with showing, correctly enough, that the Nordic airs put on by the Germans were absurd since so large a proportion of Germans are of Alpine blood. This is, of course, a neat dialectic thrust, but it fails to touch the core of the problem.
What, then, is the evidence for the greater worth of the Nordic? This question can be answered briefly but fairly, that it is precisely nil. No more exhilarating source of innocent merriment exists than the literature of the school headed by Count Gobineau and Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain. All the great men of European history are passed in review by these gentlemen and, with complete assurance, are solemnly pronounced to be one and all of Nordic stock; at least, by a miraculous intuition all their desirable traits are assigned to Nordic heritage. Do actual measurements make Bismarck a broad-head? If they do, then of course the measurements must be wrong: “our great Bismarck” must assuredly have had a long head. Richard Wagner’s diminutive frame is obviously the dire result of interbreeding with Alpines; his genius must be an unadulterated creation of Nordic germ-plasm.
Quite apart from such palpable absurdities, this Gobineau-Chamberlain theory is objectionable from every possible angle. In the first place, while modern science does not dogmatically proclaim the equality of all races, the differences between any two of them are certainly far less than is popularly assumed. Indeed, it can be stated quite definitely that no satisfactory proof has yet been furnished that the European is by native endowment superior to the Malay or the Negro. Until such proof is offered, the assumption of a vast hereditary difference between Nordic and Alpine European has not the slightest plausibility. Secondly, it would be interesting to know on what grounds any specific psychological traits are ascribed to the Nordic race. Intellectual and spiritual capacities are not so readily measured as are the colour of hair or skin; nor is it easy in appraising them to disengage the acquired from the natural factors.
But difficult as the problem is, it becomes insoluble when we recall that nowhere nowadays, certainly nowhere in Germany, do we find a large group from which we can be certain that Alpine influences are wholly excluded. As the eugenist Schallmayer remarks, there is probably in the whole of Germany not a single individual of purely Nordic descent. In other words, we can not isolate a pure Nordic group from a pure Alpine group and compare their respective mental characteristics. For a rough classification, these ideal concepts do very well, but they are quite inadequate for so delicate a psychological inquiry. Assuming, then, for the sake of argument, that the Nordic stock originally possessed a distinctive psyche, how are we to ascertain its characteristics to-day? We can determine only what mental traits are combined with the relatively purest physical complex that gave rise to the concept of the Nordic type. But, apart from the technical difficulties of establishing the higher qualities of imagination, reasoning power and spiritual faculties, there is nothing in the law of heredity to prevent a Nordic physique from being again and again associated with an Alpine mentality, and vice versa. Nordic mentality, an improbable a priori notion, thus passes into the realm of the unknowable. The Nordic concept is an abstraction based on physical data, and to transfer it to the psychological sphere can lead only to disastrous results.
There would be a semblance of plausibility in the contentions of the Chamberlainists, if populations preponderantly Teutonic exhibited any marked superiority over Alpine groups living under generally similar social conditions. But this test is a lamentable failure. It is a notorious fact that the South Germans contributed rather more than their proportional share to the roster of great Germans. An excellent case in point is provided by the history of the Walloons in Sweden. These people are descendants of Belgian blacksmiths who settled in Sweden in the seventeenth century; for a long period intermarried exclusively among themselves, and only in recent years have come to mingle in some measure with the Swedes. With their dark skin and hair these immigrants present a marked contrast to their fair-haired hosts. Yet this handful of Alpine intruders hold their own among the purest Nordic population of the world. Professor Retzius, who can not be accused of an anti-Nordic bias, not only gives these Walloons an excellent civic character but points out that a number of them have risen to eminence in science and in public life.
But of course reasoned argument is of no avail against the race-enthusiast, because at bottom nothing interests him less than the dispassionate quest of truth. As some of his guild candidly avow, the cult of their race is not for them a matter to be rationally discussed, it is a full-fledged faith embodying their dearest ideal values. They thus present to the critical anthropologist the impregnable front of religious fanatics for whom the worship of the Nordic fills the emotional void left by the decay of older creeds. Viewing the situation from this angle, the scientist might well turn his back upon it, for it is by no means his function to prove to any group of devotees that their values are not values—to themselves. “Religious opinions,” says Ernst Mach, the wisest spokesman of modern science, “remain each man’s most individual private affair so long as he does not obtrude them on others and transfer them to matters belonging before a different forum.”
So long as he does not obtrude them on others, there’s the rub: it is the Teutonomaniac’s propagandist activity that rouses scientific hostility. For unlike Yum-Yum he is not content to thrill with rapture at the contemplation of his own transcendent loveliness. His is a faith less tolerant than that of Islam, for its aim is not the conversion but the damnation of the infidel; salvation is only by predestination, by the divine right of Nordic lineage. It is because the follower of Gobineau, like all bigots, contends that his values represent absolute values to be recognized alike by Nordic and non-Nordic, because by a quasi-scientific theodicy he tries to sublimate his individual belief into an objective standard that the scientist is compelled to take up arms against him. The scientist will do so without venom against the honest enthusiasts among his opponents but also without fear of wounding their sensibilities, for the matter is too important to permit an excess of delicacy. The scientist will not dogmatize as to racial equality when not even the foundation has been laid for an accurate determination of the higher racial capacities. He will simply point out again and again, calmly and authoritatively, that in the light of present knowledge nothing warrants the idolatry of whatever bit of reality may lurk behind that concept of a “Nordic race” which for purposes of classifying human groups by their physical traits is of some use and convenience to anthropological science.
R. H. L. 3. xi. 20.
JOHN REED
JOHN REBD, American poet, died, a communist, in Moscow, the capital of the future State, of the disease of the revolutionary present: typhus; he was bitten by a sick louse, a doomed parasite.
Jack could have made a song of that, a laughing song, in the days when he sang and laughed. He was a joyous spirit then; I tried to keep him glad. His father asked me to. Jack’s father was my friend, and a brilliant man he was; a wit. He was the leading spirit of the leading club of Portland, Oregon; and he played himself, as he wished his boy to play, till he was bitten, as the boy was, by those same deadly, dying things.
Francis J. Heney came to Oregon, prosecuting timber-frauds, seeking with William J. Burns for the proofs of the process by which our forests fell into private hands. The evidence reached up among the commanding men of Oregon, and they controlled, among other things, the machinery of the law. Their U. S. Marshal picked the juries. Heney asked Reed—Jack’s father—to be U. S. Marshal and so see that the panels were free and fair. Reed laughed. He guessed what it meant to him, but he took the job; and he did the job. There were convictions and there were hates. Reed’s club hated Reed, who faced the hate and bit it with his wit. He had a tongue, as Jack had. It is a story of breed I’m telling.
One day, several years after the timber-fraud scandal, ex-U. S. Marshal Reed invited me to his club. He led me into the main dining-room up to the centre table where “the crowd” lunched. It was the noon-hour; most of the crowd were there.
“There they are,” said Reed to me, but for them to hear. “That’s the crowd that got the timber and tried to get me. And there, at the head of the table, that vacant chair, that’s my place. That’s where I sat. That’s where I stood them off, for fun for years, and then for months in deadly earnest; but gaily, always gaily. I haven’t sat in that place since the day I rose and left it, saying I’d never come back to it and saying that I would like to see which one of them would have the nerve to think that he could take and hold and fill my place. I have heard, and I am glad to see, that it is vacant yet, my vacant chair.”
That was Jack Reed’s father: tall, handsome, audacious and a wit; a gay and, later, a bitten, bitter wit. He told me about his boy at Harvard and he asked me “to look out for Jack” when he came out of college into life in New York.
“He is a gay spirit,” the father said, “a joyous thing. Keep him so. He is a poet, I think; keep him singing. Let him see everything, but don’t—don’t let him get like me.”
I couldn’t. I tried, and not for his father’s sake only. When John Reed came, big and growing, handsome outside and beautiful inside, when that boy came down from Cambridge to New York, it seemed to me that I had never seen anything so near to pure joy. No ray of sunshine, no drop of foam, no young animal, bird or fish, and no star, was as happy as that boy was. If only we could keep him so, we might have a poet at last who would see and sing nothing but joy. Convictions were what I was afraid of. I tried to steer him away from convictions, that he might play; that he might play with life; and see it all, love it all, live it all; tell it all; that he might be it all; but all, not any one thing. And why not? A poet is more revolutionary than any radical. Great days they were, or rather nights, when the boy would bang home late and wake me up to tell me what he had been and seen that day; the most wonderful thing in the world. Yes. Each night he had been and seen the most wonderful thing in the world.
He wrote some of those things. He became all of those things. He fell head over heels in love with every single one of those most wonderful things: with his job; with his friends; with labour; with girls; with strikes; with the I. W. W.; with socialism; with the anarchists; with the bums in the Bowery; with the theatre; with God and Man and Being. I pulled him out of each such love-affair anxiously at first, but so easily and so often that I soon felt he was safe. I thought I could trust the next most wonderful thing to save him from the last most wonderful thing, so I went off on a long journey, to Mexico. So did Jack, but Jack went, as a poet, to Villa, the bandit, while I went, as U. S. Marshal Reed would have gone, to Carranza’s side.
I don’t know just what it was that finally caught and took the joy of this poet and turned him into a poem. He loved a girl, one girl, but Louise is a poet, too, and a vagabond, or she was when she left here in boy’s clothes last summer to follow Jack to Russia. And he loved the I. W. W. faithfully and the Red Left of the Socialist party, and, like his father, he hated hate and—all that. I really think it was in the breed. Anyhow, he got a conviction and so, the revolutionary spirit got him. He became a fighter; out for a cause; a revolutionist at home here, and in Russia a communist. He didn’t smile any more.
A friend of his and of mine, who travelled, and worked with Jack in Russia last summer said that Jack was “like the other communists in there”: he was hard, intolerant, ruthless, clinched for the fight. I could see that Jack had hurt our friend who, having said this, brooded a moment. But then said his friend:
“I wish I could be a communist.”
You see, in Moscow, in Soviet Russia, where there are lice and hunger and discipline and death; where it is hell now; they see—even a non-communist can see something to live or to die for. They can see that life isn’t always going to be as it is now. The future is coming; it is in sight; it is coming, really and truly coming, and soon. And it is good. They can see this with their naked eyes, common men can; I did, for example. So, to a poet, to a spirit like Jack Reed, the communist, death in Moscow must have been a vision of the resurrection and the life of Man.
L. S. 3. xi. 20.
THE PYGMY AND THE HEIGHTS
IT is a common epigram that to be a mountaineer one must have a strong back and a weak mind. But quite aside from the fact that the risk which a skilled mountaineer takes is seldom greater than the risk which is taken when one drives one’s motor-car fifty miles an hour, it is by no means demonstrable that it is foolish to risk one’s life. At the worst, mountaineers are voluntary climbers, and risk nobody’s life but their own. There is a great deal of talk—but very little practice—about hazarding one’s life for a principle. Thus the soldier on the battlefield is persuaded that he takes a sacrificial risk for “democracy,” and though he gets very little pleasure out of it, nobody calls him a fool—or not with impunity. But let the mountaineer risk his life for one of the most exalted pleasures known to man, the intoxication of the imagination, and behold the dwellers in the plain rise in mass and call him foolish. But only the mountaineer knows anything about the wild delights into which he climbs, or has ever heard the siren-whispers of the peak. Nobody else, therefore, is competent to pass judgment upon his wisdom or his folly. It is enough that for him the reward is worth the risk; and, after all, who else is concerned?
A snow-capped mountain, seen from afar, rising from the plain and the blue foothills which surround it, and hanging like a dream against the sky, is a beautiful thing. One comes to love it, to turn toward it every day. Japan has made a holy place of Fuji, and the people of Portland, Oregon, are only a little less worshipful of Mount Hood, speaking of it with pantheistic affection. The beauty of a snow-peak, however, increases as you approach it, and familiarity with a great mountain breeds awe and humility and challenges those unknown reserves of human power which William James used to talk about. It puts the pygmy in his place—and then it rewards him with a new feeling of self-respect.
One of the finest mountaineers I know, six-feet-one of hardened steel muscle, with a resourceful technique that never fails him, once stood beside me above the last tortured tree at timber-line and looked up beyond the spines of naked lava and the vast inclines of glittering snow, to the ice-hung precipices of the summit-crag sharply outlined against the pink dawn-sky, and drawing a deep breath, he murmured passionately: “It’s so big. . . . My God, it’s so big!”
An hour later we were roped together, and out on the first traverse, and he was cutting every step we took from sun-up till one o’clock, in order to conquer that bigness.
Were you ever out on a wide traverse far up on the side of a great snow-mountain? Don’t talk of foolishness unless you have been! Bound to a few of your fellow-pygmies by the slender thread of an alpine rope, with nothing but your alpenstock driven into the snow and the spikes in your boots set into the tiny, chopped-out steps to give you a hold on the perilous incline, you look up and up a narrowing chute of white to the summit-pinnacles, and you look down and down upon a great field of white tilted at an angle of forty, fifty, sixty degrees, dropping away from you for five thousand feet into the bottomless cavern of the cañon! Even the summit itself is less thrilling, for though the height is so much the greater, there is no vast snow-field towering above.
Across the traverse, you climb perhaps one hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet at an angle so close to the perpendicular that it is only just possible to conquer it by cutting each step in the snow or in the blue glacial ice, and thus attain a spine that leads you toward the peak. It is hard, monotonous work, and your eyes burn despite your goggles, with the snow-glare so close to your face. But wait till you hit that same spot on the descent! You do not, of course, descend forwards, but neither do you descend backwards, as you would come down a ladder. You stand with your left side to the wall, drive in your stock, and swing your left foot behind the right, down to the next step, immediately sinking the right foot to the step below that. Then you brace yourself, extract your stock, and drive it home again two steps lower down.
Once you have mastered the rhythm of this method, you can descend an almost precipitous snow-wall, using the stairway of steps which you made in the early morning, with approximate rapidity. But each time that you swing down your left foot behind your right, you look between your arms, as your hands grasp the alpenstock, to see where your foot is going, and in that glimpse you see not only the step for your foot, but the top of the head of the man below you, and beneath him, it may be, the bottom of the snow-field, or perhaps the great hole of the cañon thousands of feet below. You are a crawling fly on the side wall of tremendousness, yet a fly who has willed, and dared, and conquered. There is no sensation quite like it.
Or only one. That is the sensation which comes to you after you have crossed the traverse on the return, when the low sun is sending long blue shadows from the lava spines out across the glacial slopes, and you turn and look upon the track of your ascent. It goes back from your heels, a tiny dotted line across the great incline of white, and then shoots straight up the mountainside, till near the top it runs into a shadow that shades the slope, and then the tracks seem to your deceived vision actually to curve outward as well as upward! You have accomplished the impossible, you have defied the law of gravitation! How infinitesimal those tracks now appear across the great traverse and up the shoulder, yet each one was cut with your ax and broadened by the tread of your boots. No steps, perhaps, were ever there before. To-morrow’s sun will see that no steps remain. But for one glorious, memorable day you have scaled the heights of immensity and left your mark on the sky-borne, eternal snows.
Let him talk of the folly of climbing who has climbed—if any climber can be found to do it. But let all others be silent.
W. P. E. 5. x. 21.
VINCENT D’INDY
THE visits to America, in one season, of the foremost living composers of Germany and of France—Richard Strauss and Vincent d’lndy—irresistibly suggest certain comparisons between the musical arts of the two countries, as enlightening as they are paradoxical. A plausible case could be made for the theory that modern Germany and France, like two chemicals in a reaction, have exchanged elements, and reversed each other’s character. Thus the realistic movement, or “programme music” as it is more frequently called, beginning in France with Berlioz, passed through Liszt into Germany, where it finds its greatest contemporary representative in Strauss. During this same period, moreover, while “tone painting” was thus being transmitted from the naturally literary and dramatic French to the more subjective and emotional Germans, the other type of music, which, to distinguish it from the outward-looking art of the scene-painter, we may call “inward-looking” or “pure” music—this older type, born in the land of innigkeit and so gloriously nurtured by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, crossed the Rhine in the other direction, established itself in Paris though the labours of the half-Teutonic Belgian, Cesar Franck, and now finds possibly its most eloquent living representative in the highly Gallic Vincent d’Indy. Thus, while the symphonic poem, born in France, was reaching a resplendent maturity in Germany, its older brother, the symphony, had quietly emigrated from its native land and was enjoying in France a new lease of unexpected life.
As long ago as 1905, M. Romain Rolland clearly described these tendencies.
German music [he wrote], is daily losing its intimate spirit; there are still traces of this spirit in Wolf, thanks to his exceptionally unhappy life; but there is very little of it in Mahler, in spite of all his efforts to concentrate his mind on himself; and there is hardly any at all in Strauss, although he is the most interesting of the three composers. German composers have no longer any depth.
In the sixteen years since these words were written their truth has been strikingly corroborated by the career of Strauss. He has become constantly more brilliantly external. In his early works, brilliant externality gave place to moments at least of introspection and pure beauty. In “Death and Transfiguration,” despite its cruel realism in the depiction of the death-struggle, the panting for breath, the intolerable tension of pain, there is the sweet innocence of the childhood music, there is the grandeur of the theme of transfiguration. In “Till Eulenspiegel” the literal episodes in the life of the ingratiating rogue which make the body of the work, are idealized and grasped in their essential human spirit in the prologue and epilogue, in which, as in the last of Schumann’s “Childhood Scenes,” “the poet speaks.” Even in the “Sinfonia Domestica” there is the magnificently imaginative treatment of the Husband-theme to offset the puerile futilities of the squalling baby, as in the “Hero’s Life” there is the love music to make up for those silly “Adversaries.” But from about the time of the “Hero’s Life” the tendency towards literal scene-painting, towards a crass and vulgar materialism, which Mr. Ernest Newman has so skilfully analysed, gained steadily on the better elements in Strauss, until we have the reductio ad absurdum of his method in the “Alpine Symphony,” with its sorry inanities of stage-carpentered sunrises, “real” cowbells and imitation thunder, unredeemed by any true emotional penetration of the sentiment of mountains. In his work, with its extravagant luxury of means, its pathetic spiritual poverty, Strauss is at last pitilessly revealed as, in Mr. Paul Rosenfeld’s phrase, “the false dawn of modern music.”
But is the true dawn to be found any more in France than in Germany? M. Rolland thought in 1905 that it was.
At this German music festival [he said], it was a Frenchman [César Franck] who represented not only serious music moulded in a classical form, but a religious spirit. The characters of two nations have been reversed. The Germans have so changed that they are only able to appreciate this seriousness and religious faith with difficulty. I watched the audience on this occasion; they listened politely, a little astonished and bored, as if to say, “What business has this Frenchman with depth and piety of soul?” . . . It was only the other day that German music enjoyed the privilege of boring us in France.
If M. Rolland were writing to-day he would probably be obliged to admit that the Franckists now “enjoy the privilege of boring” not only the Germans, but many of their compatriots; and this would be an admission damaging not to the Franckists but to modern French taste.
Have not France and the rest of Europe, in fact, the false emphasis of war-propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, been about as much debased as Germany itself by the materialism, growing ever more mad for thirty years before 1914, that was the true cause of the war? Modern France would seem, to an unprejudiced observer, as would modern America for that matter, about as materialistic as modern Germany. To such an observer, Franckism appears, unfortunately, as only an oasis of vitalism in a desert of materialism and its by-products, a small group inspired by faith outclamoured by a disillusioned herd. Of the three other groups in clique-ridden France which struggle with this forlorn hope for supremacy, each bears the mark clearly enough of our world-wide modern materialism, either in fulfilment of it or in reaction against it. The impressionism of which Debussy was the leader was in part a wholesome revolt against the megalomania of Strauss, Mahler and Reger, an assertion eminently Gallic of the superiority of quality to quantity, of distinction to size, of refinement to brute force. But it was also, less happily, with its emphasis on sensuous charm, its retirement to the ivory tower, a confession of the spiritual exhaustion which materialism brings in its train. Debussy has been especially successful “in his appeal to the modern preference of sensation to thought and emotion, of subjective day-dreaming to the impersonal perception of beauty.” In these preferences he has, of course, many more sympathizers in contemporary France than has d’Indy in his austerer ideal of thought and emotion embodied in objective beauty.
The fatigue of modern life has led to another kind of reaction in the reversion to barbaric stimuli of modern primitives like Stravinsky, Schmitt and the other devotees of dance-rhythms and the pantomime. Exhausted nerves, minds rendered incapable, by the distractions and useless complications of our machinery, of concentrating themselves upon the syntheses of sensation that are required by genuine art, fall back on the crude sensations themselves. It is strange and somewhat repulsive to see European musicians, with long and intensive culture behind them, at the behest of tired nerves throwing it all away and acclaiming American rag-time, the sweepings of our streets, as the rejuvenator of their senile art. Even stranger is the arid intellectualism that in those whose emotions are dead, or never lived, gives birth to all manner of fads and fashions based upon formulae. Those who, like Erik Satie and the “Six” who just now make so much talk in Paris, try to substitute process and idiom for the living instincts out of which alone real art is made, are another kind of victims of materialism, victims of its languor, its ennui and disillusion, breeding irony, self-consciousness and unwillingness to risk a loyalty. . . . No, modern France is not a good place for a vitalist. It is a wilderness of impressionism, barbarism, and intellectualism. Vincent d’Indy is a voice crying in that wilderness, and his cry is: “Il n’est vraiment, en art, que le cœur pour engendrer de la beauté.” At seventy, despite his imposing reputation, which few trouble to understand, and surrounded as he is by a small group of friends more of whom are sentimental idolators than intelligent supporters, and by many enemies (for he is a well-hated man), Vincent d’Indy is perhaps more alone than ever. Yet there is power in that solitude, for he has with him the truth. “Il n’est que le cœur pour engendrer de la beauté.”
Born in Paris in 1851 of an aristocratic and strongly Roman Catholic family, Vincent d’Indy became a pupil of César Franck in 1873, and through the Société Nationale of which he became president after Franck’s death in 1890, and the Schola Cantorum, a music school strongly impregnated with the principles of plain chant, which he founded with Alexander Guilmant and Charles Bordes in 1896, has done more than any other one man to disseminate the Franck spirit, both in creation and in education. Among his works are three symphonies and the beautiful programme symphony “A Summer Day on the Mountain,” “Istar: Symphonic Variations,” and several smaller orchestral works; for chamber music, a violin sonata, and two string quartettes; the cantata “Chant de la Cloche”; and three works for the stage, “Fervaal,” “L’Etranger,” and “La Legende de St. Christophe,” the latter, a “drame sacré” occupying in his work somewhat the position that “Parsifal” does in Wagner’s. D’Indy has been indefatigable also as a teacher, conductor, editor, and writer. His best-known books are his life of César Franck and his monumental treatise, “Cours de Composition Musicale,” not yet completed.
It is interesting to compare his programme symphony, “A Summer Day on the Mountain,” with Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony.” The French master, who is a devout lover of mountains, whether his own Cévennes where he spends his summers in the province of Ardèche or the larger and more famous range of which he can see Mt. Blanc from the window of his study on a clear day, contents himself with comparatively few suggestions of external nature. In the first movement, “Dawn,” there is the empty blankness of the mist before sunrise, the twittering of birds, the gradually increasing light and animation suggested by changes of key and rhythm, the final gorgeous appearance of the sun in a blaze of B major. In the second movement, “Day—Afternoon Under the Pines” we have almost no tone-painting, but rather an unforgettable evocation of the mood of the scene and place. Then come realistic suggestions of a peasant’s song in the valley, and later a sort of marching theme—perhaps a regiment going by. In the last movement, “Evening,” there is first the animation of full day; then gradually an abatement, an almost imperceptible darkening and saddening, and a lovely melody that is like a song as one goes home at evening, a song profoundly characteristic of d’Indy, full of happy serenity and devout thankfulness. Then gradually the shades descend, the passages early in the symphony suggestive of mist and half-light recur, there is faint clashing of chimes in the distance, and after the song of thankfulness has been sung once more a heavenly passage made from a variant of the theme of full day, in which all is calmed and quieted to the mood of dusk. It is hard to listen to such a passage without tears; for it is not sticks and stones that it gives us, but the very accent of what this beauty of the darkening day means to a responsive spirit.
In M. d’Indy’s latest orchestral work, “Poëme des Rivages,” there are four movements, suggested by scenes in Italy during a recent tour. The first movement, “Calme et Lumière,” begins with a wide and spacious scheme not unlike that of the opening of the “Summer Day on the Mountain.” There is considerable development and an exciting climax with suggestion of a storm; but the most individual feature is a theme suggesting “human nature,” as the composer puts it, that is, summing up the human response to the scene. The second and third movements are briefer and more sketch-like; one inspired by an intensely blue sea seen downward through trees; the other, a scherzo, recording an impression of intensely green sea and sky, seen from a train on the coast of the Adriatic. Curious passages for bassoon, English horn, oboe, and clarinet solos, in their highest registers, depict this rarefied green. The last movement, “Mystère de l’Ocean,” is the most individual and impressive. The saxophone, an instrument of which M. d’Indy has grown very fond in recent years, has an important part in establishing the proper impersonal tone at the start. Later in the movement many earlier themes, including the “human nature,” recur.
For all his solitude in a Paris largely given to fads and fashions, and to the pursuit of what is called “originality,” Vincent d’Indy impresses one as tranquil and content. He has the French knack of discounting enmity by understanding it, and even by ironically rallying it. In his “Legende de St. Christophe,” there is an amusing scene wherein are introduced in succession “Les Faux Penseurs,” “Les Faux Savants,” “Une Foule Nombreuse et Burlante,” “Les Arrivistes Orgueilleux,” and “Les Faux Artistes.” The False Artists proclaim and condemn themselves as follows:
Falsifiers of an art fine and rare,
We make the fashion, and we follow it.
Let everything be pulled down to our stature.
Hatred to enthusiasm!
Hatred to ideal art!
No more rules! No more study!
Let us be little, let us be original.
Better still than irony, however, is the calm religious faith, the genuinely Christian confidence in all that is permanent and good in human life, that sustains this priest of beauty and love in a modern world so largely given over to ugliness and hatred. As one talks with d’Indy about the eccentricities and perversities that make up so much of our modern artistic activity, one gradually loses the hatred of them that comes from fear, one catches a little of his tolerance and quizzical amusement, one goes back as he has done to Bach, Beethoven, Franck, that august stream of beauty which comes down through ages, washing away with it so much temporary jetsam too flimsily made, and one finally remembers only a sentence that one heard from him twenty years ago, and that obviously sustains him now in his old age as it armed him then in the struggles of his prime: “Les principes d’art sont eternelles; ils restent.”
D. G. M. 23. xi. 21.
THE DEATH OF BASHKIN
Translated by George E. Haendelman
I AM only thirty years old, but when I look back, it seems to me that I have passed through an immense cemetery and have seen nothing but graves and crosses. Sooner or later a fresh grave appears somewhere and no matter with what kind of monument it be marked, a plain cross or a granite column, it is the same—this is all that will be left of me. In the end this is not even important: immortality is a tedious thing, and life itself is of little interest. The worst is that death is terrible; you will not resolve to consign yourself to the devil with your own hands; you will prefer rather to continue to live long, to wander through this cemetery which is called life; and around you, endlessly arising, you will see new crosses. Everything that is loved, everything beautiful will remain behind, everything dear to the heart will fall away, like autumn leaves, and you will stagger in at the end alone, like an orphan.
And now Bashkin has died too—one more of those with whom I embarked upon my literary career has passed away.
Yet he did well to die. There was so little of happiness in his life that it would not suffice the most humdrum peasant even for a single day. The time has long since passed when literature was the repository of all virtue. From every crevice there has crept into our little world so much trash, it has come to be such a stock-exchange, such a brothel, that a modest, quiet man like Bashkin feels himself as fit for it as a violet thrown into the dust of a market-square. Perhaps, in times past, his pensively tender talent and the soft beauty of his soul would have been appraised differently, but to-day, upon the broad highway of literature, amidst the hustle and bustle of buying and selling, in the cunningly interwoven struggle of intrigue and advertisement, what are needed are strong hands, a robust mind, a cruel heart. Nothing of this had Bashkin, and he lived in penury and in hiding, like one hunted; denying himself, till he died, as befits a Russian writer, of consumption.
Very few knew of him; the name of Bashkin will not occupy a foremost place in literature. His talent was not great; his whole beauty consisted in his sweet, modest, fine personality—sincere to the depths of his soul. These personal qualities were reflected in his writings like a blue sky in clear water, and they imparted to his small talent a rare, pensive beauty.
Some day, if I ever fulfil one of my desires—to leave a broad canvas of the lives of those whom fate has decreed shall be the salt of the earth, hunters of men who have turned the temple of literature into a den of petty scoundrels—I will create in a novel a type like Bashkin, which shall be true to that bright memory which I have retained of him. Just now his face is still too near; trivial recollections shimmer before my eyes too vividly. Especially clear three pictures stand before me, three moments of his death and funeral, which I can not yet generalize.
I had not seen Bashkin for about a year. The same disease in us both had sent us apart in different directions. Only a day before his death we saw each other for the last time. When I entered the room, Bashkin was asleep; he was under the influence of morphine, a strange and terrifying sleep. Some one held a candle, and the yellow light moved in blotches upon the ceiling and the walls which were covered with a strangely patterned wallpaper. Why does a trifling detail strike us so forcibly at certain times? I remember that I glanced with a painful feeling upon this wall-paper; in its strange and coarse lines one perceived the figures of guitars, and for some reason it seemed unpleasant and even disgusting to think that they had never played. . . . As the light crept stealthily along the walls, the guitars stretched their thin, drawn necks, and upon the bed, rattling and whistling, heaved the breast of the man who at this moment was struggling with terrible force somewhere on the border-line between life and death. Perhaps it was the death agony, and Bashkin might have died if we had not wakened him. At first, when he opened his eyes, he was evidently wholly unconscious. Strange and terrifying was the gaze of those eyes, directed straight upon me, as if regarding me from somewhere terribly far off.
“Vassili Vassilievitch,” I cried.
Suddenly his look changed. It was as if something dreadful and incomprehensible vanished at the sound of my voice. The familiar expression of tenderness and greeting appeared upon the half dead face, and the invalid stretched himself toward me. I bent down and kissed him. Suddenly Bashkin encircled my head, pressed it to his breast, in which something wheezed, bubbled and beat, and began to stroke my head softly, tenderly, like a mother her child. Silently, as though with great love, and as though with tender sorrow, and as if imploring me to protect and save him.
It is strange that I who met Bashkin upon the appearance of his first story, and have been helping him all his life as his oldest protector and patron, should have felt myself so small, and puny, and weak, as I heard that dull wheezing and beating in his breast and felt his hand sliding feebly along my hair.
Not from the day of birth but from the nearness to death should we count the age of a person. What Bashkin knew at that moment, what he suffered, I shall not soon learn. Before that last wisdom of a great love and pity, which death imparted to Bashkin, as he lay there before me, how insignificant and comic were my fame, my name and my God.
There was a time when I often argued with Bashkin. We lived together for many years, and as the stronger one I pressed upon him with my authority. Now the time had come to strike a balance. One of us had reached the last page of his life, and I asked him with dread curiosity: “Well, how now, Vassili Vassilievitch, are we agreed or are we still further separated in our views?”
Bashkin, without smiling, with his bright, kind eyes looked me straight in the face. “Separated!” said he. “We must love and pity all.”
Perhaps, maybe he is right. I do not know. . . .
But what else besides anger and hatred could I have had in my soul as we followed Bashkin’s coffin to the grave? How scant were the followers! In the midst of that immense white field, knee deep in snow, swept by a hurricane, how small and pitiful we must have appeared. In front of us the white coffin moved slowly, the storm tore at the two or three coloured ribbons on the wreaths; nothing was visible all around save the white field and the endlessly whirling white snow. I trod behind the coffin, stumbling through the snow, and for the hundredth time read the inscription upon a wreath: “To our beloved father and husband from his wife and son.” It was a small and pitiful wreath, and the inscription was not on a ribbon, but on a piece of tin, such as is nailed to crosses in the poorest cemeteries.
As I read the inscription, I thought of the two hundred roubles that I had in my pocket, which I had collected with the greatest difficulty for the survivors of Bashkin’s family. I thought of Bashkin’s wife who did not yet know of his death; I thought of her giving birth upon almost the same day that he had died; I thought also of what his “wife and son” were going to do now. I thought also that after all this was the “funeral of an author,” and, by God, it seemed strange at that moment to ask love and pity of me for those millions of shop-keepers, lords of life, beasts and blackguards, who mumbled something, growling and thundering in the belly of the great city, which was vaguely outlined on the edge of the horizon, behind the canopy of the ceaseless storm.
May they be all thrice damned!
Yet from this funeral something bright remained in the soul. Why bright, when in reality—nonsense, it is a mere trifle and purely accidental—I do not know, still something was left.
While we were lowering the coffin into the grave that had been dug in a peasants’ cemetery, the storm ceased. Suddenly it was a bright, white, clear winter day, smelling with frost. The crosses stood around dressed in round, white fluffy hats. A flock of pigeons descended upon the grave from God knows where. Fluttering their wings, the birds circled round us. One tried his utmost to alight upon the coffin, and turning aside, flew down to perch upon the nearest cross. It was beautiful.
Perhaps the justification of the whole universe is in beauty? Perhaps everything exists only that there may be beauty?
The beauty of pigeons, of a white winter day, a white coffin, soft snow, quiet sorrow, the beauty of the dead, tender soul of Bashkin.
M. A. 22. ii. 22.
THE DRUNKARD’S CHILD
THE striking social transformation of my time was a natural result of the decay of drunkenness. It was a hideous thing, this unromantic drunkenness of an American industrial population cooped up in a big city and rushing from the despotism of the factory-foreman to the hospitality of the bartender. This drunkenness had nothing in common with the merry sprees of Falstaff or the religious intoxication one finds in Greek tragedy. How vividly still I recall the sensation created during the Hayes Administration in the circles among which my lot was cast, by the announcement that beer, whisky and wine had been banished from the White House table! This eccentricity threw a cloud over the Administration. I judge from what I saw and heard about me. I was then nine.
An historian of the American people, dealing with his subject in the manner of Green, would not create the proper atmosphere if he failed to make liquor his background while reviewing this period. Indeed, I do not see how the historian will collect his material when he comes to deal with the drunkenness of those days. All the pictures of it are distorted. The facts are supposed to be available in the literature of prohibition, in the records of the police courts, in the memoirs of all foes of the Demon Rum. Now, this Demon Rum, with whom as a child I was brought up, must not be conceived as a hideous and devouring monster. That picture of the drunkard’s child—how ridiculous it is! The drunkard’s child in those days was as often as not better clad and better fed than the child of the total abstainer. The drunkard’s child was the object of a universal sympathy. Shoes were bought for him by everybody. Allowances were made for his shortcomings. If his mother could not pay her rent, she had but to mention the fact and the sum was supplied by total abstainers, who did not advertise their charity in the newspapers.
There is a theory, originating with the temperance-advocates, that a drunkard neglected his family, lost his earning-power and wound up in the gutter. This impression is too conventionalized. Exceptions are assumed to have been the rule. In all my experience of drunkards when I was a boy—and nearly all the homes to which I then had access were drunkards’ homes—I can recall none which did not contain comforts and in some cases luxuries; a piano, perhaps, or a little library of books or an equipment of queer clocks under glass domes. I think I am correct in the assertion that a great majority of the intimate friends of my mother were the wives of drunkards—the period comprised the whole of the Administrations of Presidents Hayes, Garfield and Arthur—and the home of every one of these women had a parlour, well swept and brightly carpeted.
The notion that a drunkard’s home was mean and dirty may be set beside that other odd belief that a drunkard sometimes came home and beat his wife. Anyone with the least practical experience of drunkards knows that such men are easily knocked down when they are in liquor. Many a time, as a mere boy, I have knocked a man down when he was drunk. When a man is drunk he is likely to move in a series of lurches, although it is a fact that if he be in the very first stages of drunkenness he will walk with a peculiarly rigid and determined straightness. If he comes home wholly under the influence of liquor he executes a series of slides against the parlour wall. The moment a drunken man lurches, give him the least push in the direction of his lurch and down he will go. I was not yet seven years old when I became aware of this peculiarity in drunkards. I have in the period to which I refer seen a heavy, big, powerful drunkard sent sprawling to the floor by a slight push from the hand of a slim and delicate wife. Nevertheless, it happens often enough nowadays that when one picks up a newspaper one reads that a man has been sent to prison for beating his wife while he was drunk. I think it will be found in such cases that the woman took her drunken husband by his ears and pounded his head against the wall. The man is almost certain to fall to the floor and when the woman falls with him—as she is sure to do—she fancies she has been beaten. Our magistrates have evidently never lived in drunkards’ homes.
If it be suspected that as a child I must have moved in queer society, I can only make the observation that I once saw the pastor of our church, a magistrate of local repute and an uncle of my own, all drunk together in my mother’s parlour. The spectacle did not impress me at the time as being in the least extraordinary. We children in those days accepted the drunkenness of our elders as a normal factor of the environment to which we had to adjust ourselves. There were, indeed, people who set themselves firmly against the habit of drinking intoxicating liquors. Such people were almost invariably Methodists—concerning whom my mother told me that they shouted to God in the belief that they would be forgiven their sins by shouting—or miserly fanatics who wanted to accumulate money in the savings bank. I used to be told as a boy that John B. Gough, a noted temperance-crusader of the time, and Neal Dow, another, went to bed drunk every night. We children got the idea that advocates of total abstention from alcoholic drink were really hypocrites. As all these people painted pictures of drunkards and of drunkards’ homes which I knew from daily observation and experience corresponded to no reality recognizable in the life around me, I could only marvel at their depravity. My father told me that men like John B. Gough, Neal Dow and Francis Murphy got rich by getting money from deluded Methodists. Methodists drank only water, it seemed, and I could not understand it.
My father’s, extenuation of his own indulgence in alcoholic drinks—and he was the heaviest drinker I ever met in my life with the exception of the pastor of our church—was based upon the stimulating effect it had upon business. I often heard my father say that if the prohibitionists ever “carried” this country it would be the death of business and the poor would then have to emigrate to Mexico and South America. My father lived by effecting the sale of things—patent medicines in vast quantities, books that weighed five pounds each, fire escapes and the equipment for dime museums—and one of his theories was that no man could be a salesman who did not know how to drink with his patrons.
My father certainly knew how to drink, and all the men in our circle knew how to drink. There was, among these, a fiddler in an orchestra connected with a cheap theatre who made, as the phrase ran, “good money.” I saw this man regularly Sunday after Sunday, week in and week out, always drunk. There was likewise the policeman on the beat whose drunkenness, I must admit, was inevitable because of the intimacy of his association with my father’s circle. There was the clergyman to whom I have referred, remarkable, besides his intemperance, for the fact that he only, besides my father, could speak German and French fluently.
This clergyman would turn up occasionally with an ordained friend from a neighbouring city who usually left our house the worse for liquor. I would be told that the unfortunate man had not been able to get a drink in his own town for months owing to the prejudice against alcohol among certain peculiar Christians. I dare affirm that behind many a flourishing bar the supply of intoxicating beverages could not compare in quantity or in quality with those in my father’s cellar, or so I have heard our landlord say when he came to collect the rent. His infirmity—our landlord’s not my father’s—was known as a “quarrelling” drunk. He would call for the rent, to be sure, but by the time he got it, his state bordered on inebriety. His practice then was to pick up the dishes from the dining-room table and hurl them into our back yard. We always had to put the baby to bed when the landlord came lest he kill it with a demijohn. I was fairly well acquainted as a boy with the prominent residents of the neighbourhood in which I lived and I can not now remember one who did not at least occasionally indulge in alcoholic liquors to excess. Among them were a hero of Gettysburg and a woman portrait-painter.
Drunkenness, then, was the note of the period. I think this drunkenness set in with the great centennial celebration in Philadelphia, the home of my childhood. This saturation of the American consciousness with drunkenness as a natural fact of civilization, to be accepted like tuberculosis and hard times, endured, it seems to me, until almost the dawn of the twentieth century. What a picturesque element it comprised in the narrow lives of those of us who were the children of the poor! We enjoyed it hugely. There were dreary intervals during which the parents of some of us “swore off”; intervals which meant stricter attendance of school, less staying out at night and—the most terrible thing of all—prompt obedience to our parents! Luckily, these periods were of short duration. When, as the stars came out, we missed a familiar playmate and were told that a little friend could no longer roam the streets at night because his father had “swore off,” we consoled ourselves with the reflection that the old man—one’s father was always the old man—would in due time go on a spree.
A typical experience of a childhood passed in such an atmosphere was to be sent for beer. A man who has never in his childhood been sent for beer to a “saloon”—an establishment for the sale of beer and whisky was then known by no other name—might conjecture that an errand of that description must have been simple. In reality the mission was complex.
The saloon was almost always on a street-corner. It might happen, even in a respectable neighbourhood, that there would be a saloon on every corner. The saloon might, it is true, be set up in the middle of the block, but this was unusual, unless an alley was available. There was quite a choice of saloons before the child, and there was often a brisk competition among the bartenders for what was known as family trade. A boy coming in for a pint of beer would expect a large pretzel at the least, and in order to retain his interest in the place it was usual to give him a large sausage now and then, or a whole pie. He had the run of the free-lunch counter when there happened to be one. This free provender alone sufficed to reduce to absurdity the temperance-lecturer’s picture of the drunkard’s starving child. Those of us who went for beer in my childhood—and we all went unless we had the ill luck to be girls—were actually overfed. There was, indeed, a convention among drinking parents which forbade them to send their own children for beer. You could not send your own child but there was nothing to prevent you from sending the neighbour’s child. My own regular and frequent visits to lager beer saloons during the Hayes, Garfield and Arthur Administrations were invariably in my capacity as the neighbour’s child.
Choice of a particular saloon among so many presented perplexing embarrassments to a child because it was always possible that the proprietor might have been in difficulty recently for having sold his wares to a minor. The establishment was in that event not necessarily off one’s visiting-list. There might be an available alley. It was often possible to enter a neighbour’s front door and climb a fence. An entrance through a back cellar door was at hand occasionally. I remember I achieved distinction through the ease and assurance with which I effected entries into the most notorious saloons even on Sundays in the very teeth of the dirty Methodists. (Most opponents of saloons in my boyhood were assumed to be Methodists and dirty.)
If the choice of the saloon was of critical importance now and then, the receptacle for the beer always called for careful consideration. Personally as a boy I had no objection to any form of receptacle whatever. I have gone for beer with an iron vessel as heavy and as large as a soup tureen. This was unusual, however, because the women who sent me for beer—they were nearly always women—did not like the look of a thing of that sort. A boy of nine bringing a frothing can of beer up the front steps was not a spectacle to appeal to a lady who painted portraits and who seems, as I look back upon these days, almost to have set me up in the liquor business. It happened once that I went four times to a saloon in one afternoon for that particular lady. (She was giving an exhibition of her works in her studio.) This was unusual good luck. She let me keep the change each time.
The usual fee for such commissions was a nickel three-cent piece, then in circulation. It was precisely the amount of the change from one dime after the purchase of a pint of beer, until the price rose to eight cents, whereupon a boy who went for beer got only a two-cent piece. How young I am made by the sight of a two- or a three-cent piece, bringing back to me the pervasive whiff of that eternal beer and the interior settings of those hospitable saloons! It was the habit of the women of the period to assemble in the kitchen and to send the first available boy—under ten usually—for a pint of beer. Some of these gatherings would keep me busily employed for a whole afternoon. If any man infers that these beer-parties were made up of servants exclusively, I can correct him from personal observation. There were servants, indeed, but the hardest drinker was the wife of the president of a local street-railway company. I remember her particularly because I once climbed two back fences and narrowly escaped the clutches of a Methodist to get that woman a pint of beer, and then she gave me exactly one cent, after scolding me for being so long.
Sundays were the great days for us children. Equipped with a hat box of the Victorian period or armed with a violin case, within which was concealed a tin receptacle that would hold a pint, we would walk boldly through the streets of Philadelphia until we came to a “speak-easy.” This is one way of saying that we did not have to walk far. The term “speak-easy” is an anachronism, for it was not popularized until I had attained the age of twelve or more. When the police were known to be strict, the lady who had sent the little boy for beer was expected to walk ahead of him to see that the coast was clear. The child—I speak from personal experience—walked through a door into an alley and down into a cellar. I gained admittance only because I was so well-known to the bartenders. It was nothing for me to visit a “speak-easy” twice after Sunday school.
It never struck me at the time but it has often struck me since that there should be anything out of the ordinary or in the least unconventional in the kind of childhood I have been describing. All my playmates, boys of my own age, went for beer in this fashion and the fathers of nearly all of them were seen by us under the influence of liquor. In the circle in which I moved drunkenness seemed a sort of jest, and in the writings of this period—not excepting those of Dickens—drunkenness was not taken at all seriously. It was never regarded as a tragedy to the souls steeped in its airs of light and shadow, its medley of laughter and shame. It involved for us neither hunger nor rags. To the children of sober parents we were wont to assume an attitude of disdain. This drunkenness was so completely the “note” of that period that all the eminent statesmen, not only in this country but in England, were assumed to be heavy drinkers. I, myself, as a lad have seen an exalted judicial dignitary of the county in which I lived call the crowd in a saloon up to the bar for a drink at his expense.
The respectable people of those days, it seems to me, materialized the whole case against the drunkard. If he had been the poor, ragged, hungry object of the temperance-lecturers, that would not have mattered so very much. Instead, these drunkards were good fathers. They provided for their children. They won the love of their children. But a child surrounded by drunken elders associated with the word “father” ideas that were a negation of Christianity. It was impossible for the children of that generation to regard their fathers with reverence. This destruction of the capacity for reverence in the child has been affirmed by a great educator to comprise the greatest of all spiritual catastrophes that can overtake it. The difficulty here was all the greater because the instruction in our Sunday schools was imparted by young men and women who seemed to have only the temperance-lecturer’s theory of the drunkard’s child. What these educators and temperance-lecturers never suspected was that from the material point of view the advantages were all on the side of the drunkard’s child, that the drunkard’s child had not a care in the world. He did not even have to go to school. He could not be Christianized, that is all. Mention of his Heavenly Father merely effected in his mind a magnified abstraction of the essential trait of his earthly father.
A. H. 12. vii. 22.
ASPECTS OF CORNWALL
INFINITY itself, I conceive, might lose some of its horror when, beside the sea, the world itself seems no more to have a limit; for, as in Aristotle’s profound saying that in art there must be continual sight-variety, so the sea alone, of all things, to us ephemeral mortals who may perchance put on the shifting vesture of immortality, has the continual sight-variety of all great art. To our lawless minds, to our rebellious instincts, to our passionate imaginings, restlessness is inevitable; that restlessness which must abide always in the nerves and in the blood of those who create. One creates one’s images out of the body’s discontent and out of the rage of unsatiated eyes and out of the lust of satiated lips and out of the sweet bitterness of the serpent’s sting. One creates figures that are symbols of one’s bodily sensitiveness and of the spirit’s sensitiveness: we see their wasted veins and bloodless faces, those who are lost in luxurious passions, who sin inevitably. Evil, I have said, evil itself, carried to the point of a perverse ecstasy, becomes a kind of good, by means of that energy which, otherwise directed, is virtue; and which can never, no matter how its course may be changed, fail to retain something of its original efficacy. So, in Hogarth and in Goya, as in Daumier and in Méryon, a profound spiritual corruption is in some mysterious fashion—by some mysterious marriage of Heaven and Hell—set in fiery motion, into a form of divine possession, which can never be the triumph of the Spirit over the Flesh. Yet evil can be justified of itself, and the revelation of evil in art equally justified. Plotinus, in his treatise “On the Nature of Good and Evil,” declares:
But evil is permitted to remain by itself alone on account of the superior power and nature of good; because it appears from necessity everywhere comprehended and bound, in beautiful bonds, like men fettered with golden chains, lest it should be produced openly to the view of divinity, or lest mankind should always behold its horrid shape when perfectly naked; and such is the supervening power of good, that whenever a glimpse of perfect evil is obtained we are immediately recalled to the memory of good by the image of the beautiful with which evil is invested.
I have never forgotten the summer of 1895, which I spent with Charles Conder and Aubrey Beardsley in Dieppe; Beardsley who liked the large, deserted rooms in the Casino, at hours when no one was there; the sense of frivolous things caught at a moment of suspended life, en déshabillé. At night he was almost always watching the gamblers at petits chevaux, studying them with a kind of hypnotized attention for that picture of “The Little Horses,” which was never done. He never walked; I never saw him look at the sea. Yet one enters with him into a world where the soul, infinite in its curious capacity for sin, follows with inevitable weariness the sins that were once a pleasure, the sins that have turned into images of disgust; it has become more than ever languid, somewhat less luxurious, more than ever imbued with mockery. It was because he admired and hated Oscar Wilde that Beardsley created a Salome entirely of his own fashioning, into which entered a diabolical beauty, beauty not yet divided against its passion for its own beauty and for its own nakedness. He introduces “Pierrot Gamin” of Verlaine into the irreverent design of “The Black Cape”; he introduces tragic horror into the austere and terrible design of “The Dancer’s Reward,” in the dripping head of John the Baptist, thrust aloft by a long black arm. He symbolizes his evil genius in that abominable drawing of a hideous monster who opens a book on which is inscribed—inscribed in sheer and devilish irony—Dante’s inscription to Love: Incipit Vita Nova. He symbolized his evil genius in “The Scarlet Pastorale,” where a harlequin of his invention struts close to the footlights, turning his back on the play; and, beyond him—with Beardsley’s sense of profanity—sacramental candles have been lighted which, under an unseen wind, gutter down in solitude. . . .
I came to Kynance Cove on a miraculous morning; on the way there I plunged into deep abysses of mud and of bog. The bog and the yielding pressure of the heather reminded me of Rosses Point in Ireland; here, on the Lizard Downs, as there, the ground which one fancies to be solid, proves, if one tries to cross it, to be a great, yielding bog, with intervals of rock on hard soil; to walk over it is to move in short jumps, with an occasional longer leap. I had to take great leaps here, across a dried-up watercourse. The bog is treacherous: the heather has the treachery which is one of the allurements of voluptuous things; and for this reason I like the voluptuous softness of the bog, for one’s feet sink luxuriously into the pale, golden mounds of moss which rise between the rusty heather and the starveling grasses. I always find it luxurious to lie on my back on the scented heather, which evokes visions; luxurious also when one’s feet slide gently into its soft depths, which have no resistance, which rise again as the waves rise.
So, on the way there, I tried that experiment: I lay sideways on the heather and cast my eyes in all directions. The moor seemed endless, covered with its inevitable sombre colours. It is not desolate, not barren; it is full of strange savage beauty; it has an enigmatical fascination; there is something inexplicable in the enigma this moor presents to one: there is nothing inexplicable in the fact that I am alone. Even the narrow muddy track to the sea has, for my imagination, its attraction.
No sooner had I arrived on that huge height, from which I saw on the right enormous slopes like the creation of giants—giants risen from a deep pit under the earth—covered with savage, sombre tints of colours, intricate and bewildering, and, between that and the slope on which I stood, a steep path through a notch of serpentine which leads to the beach, which one has to scramble over, so as to reach a corner of the rocks washed by the tide, from which one enters a land-locked amphitheatre deserted by the waves at low water; than I was seized by the glamour and by the fearful fascination of this wizard’s work. Sublime, secluded from the jealous world’s eyes, with giant heads staring at one, grim and gaunt on the horizon, with immense caverns that hid huge depths between them, formidable gullies, uncouth shapes of stones flung this way and that way on the uneven ground; and, with all this, such rarities in the way of colours as one sees only in Cornwall. I thought then of the mediæval humor in old Cornish legends, which still plays freakishly with the saints and with the Devil. Here, however, there is nothing of the satanic humour, the games of giants, the goblin-gambols of the Spirits of the Sea and of the Earth, that one finds at Land’s End. Everywhere in Cornwall, as in Wales, in Ireland and in Spain, the people are superstitious. I find on the seacoast of Cornwall, just as I found on the seacoasts of Ireland and Wales, besides the dignity of the peasants, a fine laziness when they are in the open air, and a subduing sense of the sea’s peril, its hold upon their fortunes and lives, which often moulds them into a self-sufficing manliness, a hardy womanhood.
This almost supernatural night, almost spectacular, almost theatrical, almost spectral, creeps over my senses with an intense sense of the mystery that exists in all things: in Hell and in Heaven, in the fire, the sea, the wind, in life, in death, in passion, in abnegation, in despair and in ecstasy. All this comes over me. with an inexplicable thrill, an enigmatical insistence on I know not what: this soft sense of being enveloped, as one always is in a Cornish sea-mist, in an atmosphere unknown to one—an atmosphere of this world and not of this world.
I hear the sea-gulls crying with scornful laughter, chattering in a bizarre fashion, shrieking aloud their hatred, shouting with inhuman mockery, with infinite contempt, as they shake in intense nervous excitement. These sea-birds, who have the ferocity of their race, and a savage abandonment to their lawless natures; whose will is not the wind’s will or the sea’s will, but a will that directs their course and that rules over their lives and their loves, that is shown in their indomitable sense of flight, in their unflagging energy; these sea-birds, when they are not resting or poising on their wings, have always in their savage throats a hunger for the utterance of unimaginable things and of those “lawless and uncertain thoughts,” that one imagines they express at their wildest point of ecstasy, in their contact with the deadly and storm-swept air, and in the very hearts of the fiercest tempests where alone they find exultation. At the Land’s End, where I felt at once secure and alone, like a bird in a cleft of a rock, there was the restlessness of space, the noise of the sea and of the sea-birds: there the sea-gulls cry and laugh night and day: night and day one hears the sea crying and laughing.
The other night I heard a sound that resembled the sound of thunder: it was literally the storm-tossed sea surging with an intense and unrelaxing violence on the rocks in Kennack Bay. The full moon cast a shining and a shifting shadow on the sea—almost “a pathway of gold,” as in Browning’s verses.
Whenever the serpent-headed waves toss maliciously, green, not venomous, those lines of Rossetti’s surge before me.
Consider the sea’s listless chime:
Time’s self it is, made audible—
The murmur of the earth’s own shell.
Secret continuance sublime
Is the sea’s end: our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was
This sound hath told the lapse of time.
Such are the limits of the sea: beyond these limits there may be the quiet which is death’s; only, in our own mournfulness, we must image the sea’s mournfulness, “enduring always at dull strife.” It is this dull strife, that makes the sea one’s invincible enemy: a strife with the wind, with the rocks, the sand, the dunes, the ships, and with our own existences.
The sea, which changes like music, continually, is a mirror, not only to the stars and to the moon, but to all one’s dreams; and that room of mirrors, painted by Holman Hunt, in which the fabulous Lady of Shalott wove her fate, is but an image of the sea’s irresistible imprisonment of oneself with oneself. So, at Mullion Cove, one is, as it were, imprisoned, deep inside a narrow harbour, no more than two boat’s lengths wide at the entrance, where the sea chafes at the wall and at the rocks, planted hugely without; great black heights which cut off half the sunlight as one passes into their shadow. There is something fierce in its seclusion; so much so that I always felt there as I felt in Cadiz, when at night I used to wander on the desolate stretch of ground behind the Cathedral, pushing my way against the wild wind until I leaned over the wall, and could watch the grey waves heaving up and down with the long roll of the Atlantic. The sea tells us that nothing ever changes, that all existence is a rhythm, that tides go out and return, and that it can give us the sleep of a narcotic.
A. S. 18. x. 22.
NOVEMBER DAYS
THE west was radiant with colour as I reached the lake and looked beyond the encircling hills. Immediately above the horizon, in an apple-green sky, floated two sunset clouds—coral islands in a tranquil sea. Above, in the robin’s-egg blue, massive clouds were aflame, their edges touched with grey; and higher still, billowy opal clouds against a background of deeper blue. A flaming cornucopia slowly uncurled itself until it was only a long slender ribbon floating across the heavens. What fascination to watch their ever-changing shape and colour; to see them turn from white to vivid rose and, as the sun’s rays touch them, take on a deeper, richer red; until, turning drab and, melting into mist, they finally merge into the steel-blue sky! In the east all was dark, forbidding, cold. Near the water’s edge rested an austere purple cloud, but suddenly, kissed by the sun, it seemed to blush rosily and dimple. But the glamour vanished almost as soon as it came. In the west I saw a proud white gull rise, with a whir of wings, from the water at my feet, and glide into the gold of the sunset, like an airship sailing off in quest of some happy adventure. In these few moments the whole west had changed. What had seemed a blue-green sea was now a desert on whose saffron sands the erstwhile rosy, boat-like clouds were patches of dark and dusty herbage; the cloudlets, a caravan of camels toiling its weary way across the desert.
In the track of the sun a fisherman cast away his minnow, stood up in his boat and raised his anchor, frightening a flock of grebe which scurried and scuttled along the! surface of the water. Then there was a harsh cry, and a dextrous kingfisher swooped down from an overhanging branch and, seizing the minnow, flew exultantly with it along the wooded shore. A light breeze stirred the water into dancing ripples. Away in the southeast the scene was Oriental, with its soft gradations of saffron, yellow, rose, blue, green, like the iridescent sands of the desert beneath a cloudless sky of pure gold. Were it not for the chill winds of autumn how easy it would be to imagine oneself in the land where “the vine hath budded and its blossom is open and the pomegranates are in flower.” On the hill beneath the setting sun a field of alfalfa lay green and shining between two russet woods, and in the midst of it rose a solitary ruddy oak. For a moment before the sun reached the rim of the hill a great splash of glowing light flooded the field and the woods; then the shadows came and robbed the scene of all its garish colours. I watched all this fade, as I listened to the twittering of the bank swallows flitting along the shore, the lowing of the distant cattle and, now and then, the harsh, discordant note of the blue-jay, and the “caw caw” of the crows, which seemed to be begging for a longer day. Over the tree-tops a cormorant flew swiftly into the west; its black body and bullet-like head, with its long pink bill, gleamed for a moment in the after-glow. I wondered if it were the last of the birds seeking a night’s rest. As I climbed the hill to my cottage I turned to look back at the tall oak trees silhouetted against the lake and sky. All was hushed, bathed in a silver glow as gentle as moonlight.
Later I went out into the night. Through the tree-tops the stars shone brightly—Venus, the ever-faithful, blue Vega above, Deneb the guardian of the Milky Way, Altair and ruddy Antares. Through an avenue of trees I caught a glimpse of the red embers of my neighbour’s bonfire; the thin blue smoke curled lazily upward, and the light breeze brought me the scent of burning leaves and birch twigs. The air was redolent of the odours of an autumn night—the aroma of dew-laden shrubs, the pungent smoke, and the smell of the damp earth. How vividly odours bring back old memories: the sweetbrier at the gate of our childhood home; pennyroyal as we gathered blueberries in our youth; the aromatic perfume of the balsam as we searched for lady-slippers beneath its branches!
Passing through the woods to reach the open hill, I was startled by the eerie wail of a screech owl; two bats darted past my face. I heard the cheery voices of two country lads. “It’s fine and clear.” “Think we’ll have frost.” “Good night.” Good, indeed! It was absolutely calm, not even a leaf rustled; one could hear only the deep breathings of the night. Dimly I could see Sadman’s lonely cedar on Breakneck Hill a mile away. The long ridge beyond the lake was distinct, and hung like a deep hem on the spangled robe of the firmament. Lights flamed in windows of a little farmhouse not far away. Within, the daily tasks were over—for all but the weary mother—and one could imagine the family seated about the lamp, the rest with books and papers, she with the never-empty mending-basket on her lap. But what light is that—now a silvery mist, and now a golden glow! It increases in strength; it lights up Smenkin’s farm—the huge barns, the hay-ricks, the great, gaunt, leafless trees. Suddenly it comes into full view—the two head-lamps of a motorcar! Swiftly over the brow of the hill it sweeps, down into the valley, as into an abyss, and is lost. I was not sorry to see it disappear, and turned with a sigh of relief to the fitful glow of the lights from Bramleigh town, and to the panorama of the sky. The blue-black sky was aglow. It looked like the Milky Way. Surely there never were so many stars. So large they seemed, so bright, so near! I scarcely dared stretch out my hand lest I should touch them. I watched the Big Dipper sink slowly in the north and the Pleiades tremble in the east, and the waning moon, touching the distant hill-tops with silver. As I turned towards home I felt the wind rising, and heard the rustle of the dead leaves as they scurried about the ground, and in a few hours the whole sky was overcast, and the moon hidden by great banks of rolling clouds. Ah, it is November, and with a pang of regret, I know that my days in the country are numbered.
H. SW. 29. xi. 22.
A NOTE ON THE SCOTTISH BALLADS
IT is a thing worth noting that the one or two great poets whom Scotland has produced have been men in the ordinary sense uncultivated. Excepting Scott, those of whom we know anything have sprung from peasant or humble stock; and there was even before Burns, who set a fashion, a tradition of peasant poetry and a belief that an artificer of Scottish song might most congruously be a ploughman or a weaver. In poets of this degree, so scarce in English literature, Scottish poetry has almost always been prolific; and against the solitary figure of Blomfield it can set Fergusson, Ramsay, Tannahill, and a host of others, the worst of whom are sentimental and the best, if minor poets, most authentically poets. Outside these, among her imaginative prose writers, Scotland has shown a disposition for common and even mean conditions. Carlyle was the son of a mason, and George Douglas, the young student of Glasgow University who wrote one novel of passionate genius, “The House with the Green Shutters” and then died, was the illegitimate offspring of a servant girl. Since English became the literary language of Scotland there has been no Scots imaginative writer who has attained greatness in the first or even the second rank through the medium of English. Scott achieved classical prose, prose with the classical qualities of solidity, force and measure, only when he wrote in the Scottish dialect; his Scottish dialogue is great prose, and his one essay in Scottish imaginative literature, “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” is a masterpiece of prose, of prose which one must go back to the seventeenth century to parallel. The style of Carlyle, on the other hand, was taken bodily from the Scots pulpit; he was a parish minister of genius, and his English was not great English, but great Scots English; the most hybrid of all styles, with some of the virtues of the English Bible and many of the vices of the Scottish version of the Psalms of David; a style whose real model may be seen in Scott’s anticipatory parody of it in “Old Mortality.” He took the most difficult qualities of the English language and the worst of the Scots and through them attained a sort of absurd, patchwork greatness. But—this can be said for him—his style expressed, in spite of its overstrain, and even through it, something real, the struggle of a Scots peasant, born to other habits of speech and of thought, with the English language. Stevenson—and it was the sign of his inferiority, his lack of fundamental merit—never had this struggle, nor realized that it was necessary that he should have it. He was from the first a mere literary man, a man to whom language was a literary medium and nothing more, and with no realization of the unconditional mystery and strength of utterance. He sweated over words, but the more laboriously he studied them the more superficial he became, and to the end his conception of an English style remained that of a graceful and coloured surface for his thoughts and sensations. Below this were concealed, as pieces of unresolved matter, almost an irrelevancy, the plots of his novels, his knobbly or too smooth characters, and his thoughts which he had never the courage to face. What he achieved was more akin than anything else to what another foreigner, Mr. Joseph Conrad, has since achieved: a picturesque display of words, with something unspanned between the sense and the appearance. The other two Scots-English writers of the last half-century, John Davidson and James Thomson, the author of “The City of Dreadful Night,” were greater men than Stevenson, less affected and more fundamental: but fundamental as they were, they lacked something which in English poetry is fundamental, and the oblivion into which they are fallen, undeserved as it seems when we consider their great talents, is yet, on some ground not easy to state, just. The thing I am examining here, superficial in appearance, goes deep. No writer can write great English who is not born an English writer and in England; and born moreover in some class in which the tradition of English is pure, and it seems to me, therefore, in some other age than this. English as it was written by Bunyan or by Fielding can not be written now except by some one who like them has passed his days in a tradition of living English speech. A whole life went into that prose; and all that Stevenson could give to his was a few decades of application. And because the current of English is even at this day so much younger, poorer and more artificial in Scotland than it is in England, it is improbable that Scotland will produce any writer of English of the first rank, or at least that she will do so until her tradition of English is as common, as unforced and unschooled as if it were her native tongue.
Nor does this exhaust the possibilities, or impossibilities, of the Scottish manipulation of English. The superficially significant thing about Scottish writers is that they generally come from some humble rank of life; the superficially significant thing about English writers is that they come, as a rule, from some class cultivated, or with a tradition of culture. This difference is, taking a purely literary view, a matter of speech, but it is not entirely nor indeed chiefly so. What distinguishes the Scottish peasantry is not only its cradling in the dialect, but a whole view of life, a view of life intensely simple on certain great, human things, but naturalistic, perhaps in a certain sense materialistic. This simple vision of life, of life as a thing of sin and pleasure, passing, but passing with an intense vividness as of a flame, before something eternal, is the greatest thing which Scotland has given to the literature of the world. Everything which obscures the clearness of this vision, making it less simple than itself when it is most simple, is antagonistic to the Scottish genius; and here, and here only, in defence of their naturalism, of this terrific, sad and simple vision of life, the Scots are iconoclasts, and contemptuous of the thing called culture or humanism which in other lands has had such glorious fruits. Knox expressed the national temper when, disdainfully asserting that the image of the Madonna was only “a bit painted wuid,” he threw it into the sea; and Carlyle repeated it on a grand scale in his Dumfriesshire judgments on all the figures which the culture of the West gave into his hands. Carlyle, in genius one of the greatest of all the writers born in Scotland, was in attainment one of the most patchy and immature, simply because he constantly passed judgments on men and cultures foreign to him; judgments which of Scotsman and Scots culture would have been true, but which of them were valid perhaps only on some intensely human plane, and on every other absurd.
This sense of life and death, of pleasure and sin, of joy and loss, not thrown out lavishly into all the manifestations of life as Shakespeare threw them out, but intensified to one point, to the breaking point where a flame springs forth: that is the sense which has inspired the greatest Scottish poetry: the poetry of Burns, the poetry of the ballads. Burns, it is true, was more nearly than any other Scottish poet a humanist, and had more than any other a delight in the variety of life; but when he was greatest he came to simplicity, that simplicity of stark, fundamental human things which the ballads more perfectly than any other poetry express. He is not greatest in lines, magical as they are, such as
Yestreen when to the trembling string
The dance gaed through the lighted ha’,
but in
And sae I sat, and sae I sang,
And wistna o’ my fate,
or in
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn
Frae morning sun to dine,
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin’ auld lang syne,
or in
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Though a’ the seas gang dry.
The unquenchability of desire, the inexorability of separation, the lapse of time, and all these seen against something eternal and as if, expressed in a few lines, they were what human beings have felt from the beginning of time and must feel until time ends: these things, uttered with entire simplicity, are what at its best Scottish poetry can give us, and it can give them with the intensity and the inevitability of the greatest poetry. The ballads go immediately to that point beyond which it is impossible to go, and touch the very bounds of passion and of life; and they achieve great poetry by an unconditionality which rejects, where other literatures use, the image. In no poetry, probably, in the world is there less imagery than in the ballads. But this, once more, is not the sign of poetic debility, but of a terrific simplicity and intensity, an intensity which never loosens into reflection; and reflection is one of the moods in which images are given to the mind. There is nothing in the ballads but passion, terror, instinct, action: the states in which soul and body alike live most intensely; and this accounts for the impression of full and moving life which, stark and bare as they are, they leave with us. It is this utter absence of reflection which distinguishes them also from the English ballads, not only from those surrounding the name of Robin Hood, which are nothing but simple folk-art, but from really beautiful English ballads such as “The Unquiet Grave.” There are several Scottish ballads containing, like it, a dialogue between two lovers, the one living and the other dead; but there is none which treats the subject in this way:
“The wind doth blow to-day, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true love;
In cold grave she is lain. . . .
“’Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.
“The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God call you away.”
That is beautiful, and as poetry as perfect in its way as anything in the Scottish ballads; but what a difference there is in spirit and in atmosphere. Here there is retrospection and resignation; but there only the present, the eternal present, and the immediate acceptance of it, exist, and we never escape from the unmixed joy, the absolute pain,. There is philosophy in “The Unquiet Grave,” the quality of a great reflective poetry; there is morality in it, the inescapable ethical sense of the English, and that feeling of ultimate surrender which goes always with a genuine morality. But see with what a total lack of moral, compensation, or of moral bluntening, or of resignation, or of alleviation—with what a lyrical and unconditional passion the same theme is treated in a great Scottish ballad, in “Clerk Saunders”:
“Is there ony room at your head, Saunders?
Is there ony room at your feet?
Or ony room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain, fain wad I sleep?”
“There’s nae room at my head, Marg’ret,
There’s nae room at my feet;
My bed it is fu’ lowly now,
Amang the hungry worms I sleep.”
Or, almost as simple and great:
“O cocks are crowing on merry middle earth,
I wot the wild fowls are boding day;
Give me my faith and troth again,
And let me fare me on my way.”
“Thy faith and troth thou sallna get,
And our true love sail never twin,
Until ye tell what comes o’ women,
I wot, who die in strong traivelling”
I do not wish to make any comparison between these two poems, both great in their kind, or to praise one at the expense of the other. I wish merely, what is infinitely more important, to make clear what are the peculiar attributes of the Scottish ballads, and what it is that they have given to the poetry of the world. And it is pre-eminently this sense of immediate love, terror, drama; this ecstatic living in passion at the moment of its expression and not on reflection, and the experiencing of it therefore purely, as unmixed joy, as complete terror, in a concentration on the apex of the moment, in a shuddering realization of the moment, whatever it may be, whether it is
I wish that horn were in my kist,
Yea, and the knight in my arms neist.
or
And I am weary o’ the skies
For my love that died for me.
or
Yestreen I made my bed fu’ braid,
The night I’ll make it narrow.
or
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Everie nighte and alle,
Fire and sleete and candle lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
This world in which there is no reflection, no regard for the utility of action, nothing but pure passion seen through pure vision, is, if anything is, the world of art. To raise immediate passion to poetry in this way, without the alleviation of reflection, without the necromancy of memory, requires a vision of unconditional clearness, like that of a child; and it may be said of the Scottish ballad-writers that they attained poetry by pure, unalleviated insight, by unquestioning artistic heroism; and this quality it is that, in the last analysis, makes the very greatest poetry great, that makes “Lear” great, and “Antony and Cleopatra.” In Shakespeare and in Dante it is united with other qualities through which its utterance becomes infinitely various and rich: in the greatest of the Scottish ballads there is this quality, and this alone. This, and not the occasional strangeness of their subject matter, is what gives them their magic, a magic of ultimate simplicity, of supernatural simplicity, as in
O they rade on, and farther on,
And they waded rivers abune the knee,
And they saw neither sun nor moon
But they heard the roaring of the sea.
from “Thomas the Rhymer.” Or, from “Tam Lin”:
About the dead hour o’ the night
She heard the bridles ring.
There is here nothing but a final clearness of vision which finds of itself, as by some natural, or rather, supernatural, process, an absolute reality of utterance which does not need the image. The thing is given in the ballads and not a simile either illuminating or cloaking it; and this absence of the image has in itself an artistic value, and produces an effect which can not be produced in any other way: it makes the real form and colour of things stand out with a distinctness which is that, not of things seen by daylight, but of those, more absolute, more incapable of being questioned, which we see in dreams. When a colour is set before us in the ballads it has a reality which colour has not in poetry where imagery is used; it has not merely a poetic value, it has the ultimate value of pure colour. This is the reason why the ballad of “Jamie Douglas” gives us an impression of richness as of some intricate tapestry, though the means are as simple as
When we cam’ in by Glasgow toun
We were a comely sicht to see;
My Love was clad in the black velvet,
And I mysel’ in cramasie,
or
I had lock’d my heart in a case o’ gowd
And pinn’d it wi’ a siller pin.
There the qualities of the velvet, the crimson, the gold and silver are seen as they are only seen in childhood, for the first time, and with something solid in the vision of them; something which we have perhaps for ever lost, and which the painters of our day, with their preoccupation with volume, are trying to rediscover; but which was given to the ballad-writers by the sheer unconditionally of their vision, and by that something materalistic in the imagination of the Scots which is one of their greatest qualities.
The art of these ballads may appear to us untutored, rough, falling occasionally into absurdities, and, regarding such things as diction and rhyme, showing a contempt for the perfection towards which all art necessarily strives. But the more we study them the more astonished we must become at their perfection on another side: that completeness of organic form which makes each an economically articulated thing. There is, it is true, a sort of logic of ballad-writing, a technique of repetition, of question and answer, not difficult to handle and handled in some of the ballads far too freely; but in the greatest, in “Clerk Saunders,” “May Colvin,” “The Lass of Lochroyan,” and “Sir Patrick Spens,” the technique is fused in the inevitability of the movement from beginning to end, so that one can see them in one glance as one sees a short lyric. The sensation which these give us is the sensation which can only be given by great conscious art. It is not a matter of the compulsory unity which folk-ballads, sung before a company, must have: for that one need only go to the English ballads about Robin Hood, ballads definitely beneath the level of poetry, which can run on in the style of
The King cast off his coat then,
A green garment he did on,
And every knight had so, i-wis,
They clothed them full soon,
for as long as one likes. The difference between that and
The King sits in Dunfermline toun
Drinking the blude-red wine
is the difference between a thing seen and shaped by a company of common men in a jovial mood, and a thing seen and shaped by a great spirit, lifted up on the wings of imagination. All these English ballads are timid, ordinary, and have the mediocre happy ending which crowds love. For example, three of Robin Hood’s followers, we are told, go down to London, cast themselves on the King’s mercy and nevertheless are condemned to death: they are reprieved at the last moment by the Queen. This would not happen in a great Scottish ballad. Johnnie Armstrong, in the ballad of that name, puts himself in the power of the Scots King, and he, too, is condemned to die, but there is no reprieve. The difference in treatment between the two episodes is the difference once more between great poetry, imagined by a heroic and sincere spirit, and second rate folk-poetry, recounted by good-natured and insincere men. In the ballads of Robin Hood we are not told, as we are in the Scottish, what must happen, the circumstances being such and such; we are told what the ballad-makers wish to happen. The vulgarity of the happy ending, which has disfigured so much of the greatest English imaginative literature since, making it less great than it should have been, is already full-fledged here. I say vulgarity, for the fault of the happy ending is that it is vulgar; it is a descent from the level of aesthetic vision where tragedy is bearable to that of our ordinary wishes, where it is not; a complete betrayal of truth and beauty at the bidding of an impulse perfectly natural and perfectly common. This surrender negates form by its own spirit, just as the unflinching grasp of aesthetic vision holds and fulfills form. The dependence of style upon this thing is in poetry absolute; and it is by virtue of their spirit, and because they are conceived and executed entirely on the level of aesthetic vision, that the Scottish ballads are opulent in examples of great form and great style, as, to quote an example of both:
“Why does your brand sae drop wi’ blude,
Edward, Edward?
“Why does your brand sae drop wi’ blude,
And why sae sad gang ye, O?”
“O I hae kill’d my hawk sae gude,
Mither, mither;
O I hae kill’d my hawk sae gude,
And I had nae mair but he, O.”
To write poetry such as that, not only an exquisite sense of form was needed, but a great and sincere spirit, an elevated and intrepid mind.
Looking back on that tremendous world mirrored in the Scottish ballads, one is tempted to exclaim, What a culture there must have been once in that narrow tract of land between Edinburgh and the Border, and what a tragedy it was that its grand conception of life as a thing of sin and enjoyment, of life and death, of time and eternity, realized in pure imagination, was turned by Knox and the Reformation into a theology and a set of intellectual principles! But Knox’s work has been done; it has not been undone; and time alone will show whether it ever will be. Certainly only a people who saw life so intensely as a matter of sin and pleasure, of sin in pleasure and pleasure in sin, could have accepted with such passion a theology which saw life as a thing of transgression and damnation. There is something unswerving, and however we may dislike and deplore it, heroic, in the theology as well as the poetry of Scotland. A burning contemplation of things which take men beyond time made her equally the destined victim of Calvinism and the chosen land of the ballads. But of that national tragedy it is idle now to speak. To those, however, who deny that a poetry so immediate as that of Scotland, so entirely without reflection, can be great human poetry and of value in a world in which so much of the dignity of the life of men is involved in the fact that they are capable of reflection, one can only say that a mighty reflection, or rather something more than a reflection, is implied in the very spirit of the ballads, a reflection on supreme issues which is unerring and absolute and has come to an end; a reflection not tentative, not concerned with this or that episode in a poem, with this or that quality, moral or immoral, or with the practicality or impracticality of life but of life itself, finally and greatly; a reflection which is a living vision of life seen against eternity: the final reflection beyond which it is impossible for the human spirit to go. In the Scottish ballads life is not seen, as it is seen so often in English imaginative literature, as good and bad, moral or immoral, but on a greater and more intense level, as a vision of sin, tremendous, fleeting, always the same and always to be the same, set against some unchangeable thing. In this world, so clear is the full vision that pity is not a moral quality, but simply pity; passion not egoistic, but simply passion; and life and death have the greatness and simplicity of things comprehended in a tremendously spacious horizon. It is idle to attribute this simplicity, which is a capacity for seeing things as they are eternally, to the primitiveness of the existence which the ballads mirror. Life was at that time, as it has been always, complex, a mystery not easily to be pierced. If one wishes to see what mere simplicity without an over-powering vision of life seen sub specie æternitatis can do, one can go in any case to the folk-ballads surrounding Robin Hood. But the Scottish ballads have something which ordinary folk-poetry has not, that great quality, that magnanimity about life, inadequately called philosophic, which Arnold found in Homer.
Whether the Scottish genius will ever return to some modified form of the ballad as its pre-ordained medium it is useless to consider to-day. Probably Scottish writers are fated hereafter to use English, and to use it, taking all things into account, not with supreme excellence. But it is difficult to avoid two conclusions: that the ballads enshrine the very essence of the Scottish spirit, and that they could have been written only in the Scottish tongue.
E. M. 17. i. 23.
A WORKING-CLASS ARISTOCRACY
THE present form of government in Russia might be fairly accurately described as a predominantly working-class oligarchy. Behind the transparent fagade of the Soviet Constitution all real political power rests in the hands of the Communist party, an organization of about 500,000 members. The Russian Communists are not a parliamentary political party in the ordinary sense of the term. They could not, for instance, be turned out of power without some sort of violent upheaval. Their grip on the organs of executive, legislative and judicial power is absolute. The elections to the All-Russian Soviet Congress invariably result in the election of eighty or ninety per cent of the Communist candidates, with a minority of sympathetic non-partisans and here and there a lonely Menshevik or Social Revolutionist. Party-members hold all the most responsible governmental positions. The highest courts, the so-called revolutionary tribunals, which alone possess the right to impose death-sentences, are dominated by Communists. In the economic field it is sometimes found necessary to employ in important posts politically neutral or hostile specialists and engineers; but there is always some more or less effective provision for Communist supervision and control. The new officers of the Red army are trained in special military schools, where they are surrounded with memorials of the civil war, given courses in the Marxist interpretation of history, and imbued in every possible way with an ardent faith in the ideals and achievements of the revolution.
The Russian Communists have built up one of the strongest political dictatorships in history. Organized opposition to it inside Russia at the present time has practically ceased to exist. It lies outside the scope of this article to analyse in detail the causes which have led to this dictatorship. It was brought into existence by the same factor which was responsible for the Jacobin dictatorship in France: the absolute necessity, from the revolutionary standpoint, of creating a powerful and ruthless centralized authority in order to cope effectively with the double menace of foreign invasion and domestic counter-revolution. It has survived far and beyond its Jacobin counterpart, partly because of the flexibility of the Communists in accommodating their programme to changing circumstances and to the pressure of popular demand, and partly because of the extraordinary political apathy of the great mass of Russia’s illiterate peasants. Putting aside the rather academic question whether there was a moral justification for the dictatorship (a question which every individual is certain to answer in accordance with his own sympathies and prejudices), it is my purpose to describe some of the outstanding characteristics of the revolutionary sect which now possesses full mastery over Russia’s political faith.
The first thing that must impress every foreign observer of the Russian Communist party is its genuinely working-class character. According to the latest available statistics, 46.5 per cent of the party-membership is composed of manual workers, 24.2 per cent of office-workers, 24 per cent of peasants, and 5.3 per cent of members of other classes, including, presumably, Government officials and intellectuals. These figures do not, I think, give an adequate idea of the predominance of the manual workers in the Communist ranks. Many of the peasant Communists, for instance, are former factory-operatives who have gone back to their villages; and office-workers, especially those in responsible positions, are often hastily trained manual workers whose loyalty to the new regime is considered unquestionable. It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that at least two-thirds of the party-membership possess a background of industrial labour; and this in a country where the number of strictly industrial workers is less than one-tenth of the total population.
It is not only in the rank and file of the party that one finds this genuinely proletarian character. At least as high a proportion of former manual workers are to be found among the men who have risen to high positions on the wave of revolution. This fact was brought home to me very forcibly during a visit to the Ukraine. The President of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was a metal-worker. The head of the Kharkov provincial Supreme Economic Council (the body regulating the local State industries) was a blacksmith. The Ukrainian Commissar for Justice was a Cossack farmer. The manager of a large textile-factory near Kharkov was a woman who had sweated out her youth in a Petrograd factory at a wage of three kopecks a day. These instances could be multiplied indefinitely. The fact that so many high posts are held by former workers and peasants has unquestionably strengthened the hold of the Soviet Government on the loyalty of the Russian masses. Officials who come from the people, who dress and live, in most cases, little better than the ordinary worker or peasant, who are known usually for their work and their sufferings in the revolutionary movement, can demand sacrifices and survive blunders which would send a Government of business-men and middle-class politicians tottering to its fall.
At the same time a Government in which the most responsible posts are held by men who are learning their technique of political and industrial administration on the job, so to speak, labours under some obvious and appalling handicaps. That a rough working-men’s party, a party led by strike-agitators and Marxist theoreticians, should have seized and held power, even without foreign interference, would in itself have been amazing enough. But the first three years of the revolution were marked by continuous foreign interference in the shape of armed intervention, blockade and subsidized counter-revolution. That the Communists should have developed sufficient military and administrative effectiveness to drive out the foreign invaders, to crush the counterrevolution at home, and to set their own power, after five years of difficult testing, on the firmest possible basis, is one of the most remarkable triumphs of sheer fanatical energy recorded in history. This triumph can only be understood in the light of the two most striking characteristics of the party: its discipline and its idealism.
The Russian Communists in their organization strongly resemble the Jesuits. In securing recruits they aim at quality rather than number; and for this reason the membership of the party has tended to decrease during the last two years. It is far from easy to secure admission to the party. Industrial workers are given preference over peasants and intellectuals as candidates; but even an industrial worker must first be recommended by three party-members in good standing and pass through a six months probationary period, during which time every step he takes is closely watched. If his conduct and theoretical knowledge are judged satisfactory, his application for membership is formally granted at the end of this period. He must then be prepared to leave all personal life behind him; his place of residence, his work, his manner of life are dictated entirely by the party. He may want to write poems or paint pictures; but if he is ordered to serve in the Red army for propaganda-work or to collect the grain-tax in a refractory district, he must carry out his instructions unquestioningly.
The party constantly struggles to get rid of its unworthy and incompetent elements. Drunkenness and gambling are regarded as serious offences, and are liable to be punished with expulsion. Any pursuit of private gain is also a fatal disqualification, although under the new economic policy the Communist managers of nationalized industries are expected to drive as good bargains as possible for the State. Party-members convicted of corruption are not only expelled, but often shot. Lesser sins are more mildly punished. If, for instance, a party-member becomes what the Russians call bureaucratized, if he becomes overbearing and arrogant in the exercise of his power, he is likely to find himself sent to work in a factory in order to get a new baptism of the proletarian spirit. As a further means of self-purification, the party resorts to periodic cleansings, in which members who are considered to have fallen short of the highest standards of duty are expelled by tens of thousands. At the beginning of the last great cleansing, which took place in 1921, the Communist party in Russia (excluding the Ukraine) numbered 560,970 members. At the end of the weeding-out process 138,095, more than a quarter of the total membership, had been expelled. Of course no system of control is perfect; and it is undeniable that there are careerists in the Communist ranks who are clever enough to escape all the cleansings, while honest party-members are sometimes unjustly cast out. But in the main this policy of rigorous and constant self-examination saves the party from the danger of degenerating into a stagnant bureaucracy, and keeps it representative of the best character and intelligence of the Russian working-class. If the critics of the Communists can justly call their Governmental system an oligarchy, the Communists can reply with equal justice that it is also an aristocracy, an aristocracy not of birth or of wealth, but of merit.
Any new problem that comes up is discussed with the utmost freedom within the party-ranks. All the phases of the question are threshed out at public and private meetings, and the columns of the party-press are thrown open to prolonged and often heated debates. Parenthetically it must be observed that, while no opposition newspapers are tolerated in Russia, the Communists are quite unsparing in self-criticism whenever a case of corruption or incompetence is brought to light. Once a decision is taken by either the party-executive or the party-congress, individual judgment is absolutely subordinated to the will of the majority. Whether the decision involves a new land-policy, a strengthening of the co-operatives or a carrying out of some new scheme of industrial organization, every party-member is bound to work for its success, regardless of his personal opinion about its advisability.
Such strict discipline as the Russian Communists impose upon themselves could only be the product of a compelling inner idealism. The prophet of their faith is Karl Marx, whose portrait can be found in almost every Government office, factory, and workers’ club in Russia. Only a few of the Communist leaders are thorough Marxian scholars; but every member of the party must possess a rudimentary knowledge of the outstanding points of the Marxist doctrine.
The Communists are severely and dogmatically materialistic in their interpretation of history, politics, philosophy and human character. They lay tremendous stress upon the environmental factor in conduct. I recall vividly a long argument which I had with the editor of a Communist paper who insisted that Maxim Gorky’s repeated shifts of attitude towards the revolution could be attributed to the circumstance that Gorky, having always been a casual labourer, never enjoyed the opportunity to acquire the disciplined collectivist will which comes from working with many other men in a large factory.
Any form of religious faith, like any form of nationalist feeling, is a bar to party-membership. The Communists are not philosophic sceptics or doubters; they are dogmatic atheists. In all their publications they drive home their firm conviction that God and immortality are bourgeois myths, invented for the purpose of enslaving the proletarian masses. The willingness of men who hold as a primary article of faith that death is the end of human existence, to give up their lives for their ideal should furnish an interesting subject of philosophic and psychological investigation. The Puritans, the Jesuits and the early Mohammedans all paralleled the courageous fanaticism of the Communists, but these groups were sustained by an intense, glowing faith in personal immortality. That Communism should exact equal sacrifices from its devotees without promising any similar definite compensation is an impressive testimony of the extent to which the Marxist economic theory has been transformed into a potent spiritual force by the grime and rush and fatigue of the modern factory-system.
The Russian Communists are not revolutionary impossibilists of the type of Robespierre and De Valera. They will always compromise and retreat, rather than immolate themselves on a barren altar of devotion to some absolutely unattainable goal. Perhaps it is the predominance of realistic workingmen over doctrinaire intellectuals within the party-ranks that accounts for the fact that so much practical flexibility exists side by side with so much theoretical rigidity. The most striking demonstration of Communist realism was the adoption of the new economic policy, or, as the Russians call it, the Nep. The adoption of this policy, with its free trade, its relaxation of monopolistic management of industry by the State, its revival of money- and banking-systems, its toleration of open speculation and glaring material inequality—all this involved a most radical departure from the policies which had prevailed during the era of military communism and civil war. Some of the more tender-minded Communists could not reconcile themselves to the changes. Some of them withdrew from the party, a few of them despairingly committed suicide. But, once convinced by Lenin’s arguments and by the still more cogent teachings of experience, that the Nep offered the only way of escape from economic catastrophe, the great majority of the party-members grimly set to work to ensure its success, while at the same time guarding as far as possible against its worst evils. So, on one hand, they permit full freedom of internal private trade, while combating excesses of profiteering and speculation by means of co-operative and Government stores. They lease factories which the State is unable to operate, holding the lessees to a strict observance of the labour-laws and to definite standards of production. They discount and tolerate an enormous amount of cheating and sabotage on the part of the old specialists and factory-owners, punishing the more flagrant cases of corruption with the firing-squad, but placing more reliance on the thousands of young workers whom they are already training in high schools and universities to be the “krasnie spets” (Red specialists) of the future. The older party-members spend every minute of their spare time in study, desperately struggling to make up for their lack of commercial and technical training in order that they may be able to compete with the new business-men of the Nep on something like equal terms.
In this connexion I remember one pale, harassed-looking Communist worker who had just been appointed financial controller of a very important State undertaking. Like nearly all the young and able-bodied Communists whom I met, he had served on several fronts in the civil war. Now he felt himself confronted with a more complicated problem than that of beating down Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenitch.
“Our old-time specialists cheat me right and left now,” he said bitterly. “They bring me a paper to sign that seems quite proper on the surface; and then it turns out that I have given away some valuable concession which ought to have been kept for the State. I have always been a worker, and I never had a chance to learn much about finance. But now I stay up late every night, studying methods of auditing and accounting and control; and a year from now I do not think it will be so easy to cheat me.”
Is the new economic policy, as the Communists themselves are honestly convinced, only a stage in Russia’s progress towards their ideal of a classless State in which the enormous amount of energy that has always been expended on bickerings between capital and labour can be turned to more social and productive ends? Or will the Nep do what blockade and intervention could not do? Will Russia be imperceptibly transformed into a middle-class republic, with all the class-divisions and inequalities which might have existed under a Government headed by Miliukov or Kerensky? It is too soon, I think, to venture an answer to these questions. To-day one can find in Russia things which would seem to warrant either the gloomiest or the most hopeful prophecies about the country’s future.
In the meantime, what can one say of this audacious band of working-class revolutionists, who fought their way from East Side tenements and Swiss emigre boarding-houses and Siberian prisons to the highest seats of power, who inaugurated the most advanced of social experiments in the most backward of European countries, who now occupy the paradoxical position of being at once the bogyman of foreign conservatives and the most sober constructive force working for Russia’s economic restoration? A Western liberal is likely to be alienated at every turn by the dogmatic philosophy and the rough methods of the Russian Communist. Yet it is difficult to withhold a tribute of admiration to the daring of their faith and the scope of their achievement. With no military experience, they created the strongest army in Eastern Europe. With absolutely no practical knowledge of political and economic administration, they not only ousted the former Russian privileged class from power, but also maintained the revolution against the intermittent assaults of the strongest military Powers of the world. They made energy and devotion a substitute for technique to a degree that seems simply incredible; and they are learning to become merchants and engineers with the same untiring zeal and application which they showed in making themselves soldiers and statesmen.
“The sacred madness of the brave.” This is how Maxim Gorky, who perhaps saw as clearly as anyone both the good and the evil of the revolution, once apostrophized Lenin. However the Communist adventure may turn out, this phrase of Gorky’s is worthy to stand as its historic epitaph.
W. H. C. 14. ii. 23.
A GRAND PROVINCIAL
ONE has only to look through a collection of old photographs in some Western State-house and note the lines of firmness and thought in the rugged faces of the pioneers and builders, to see the type of American of which the supreme example is Lincoln—who differed from the other men of his period in the degree of his idealism and power rather than in the cast of his mind. If one ask oneself whether any writer has evidenced in his work the character to which these men bore witness through their lives, one is made to pause. Whitman, Emerson and Mark Twain have each some of the qualities belonging to that period; and doubtless Whitman would to-day be regarded as its greatest representative. But although the expression of a people of Anglo-Saxon stock might naturally be supposed to come through literature, I believe that it is a painter who, by the quality of his art, with its excellences and its limitations, has given us the truest record of the America of his time. It is through this quality that one may best approach the pictures now at the Brummer gallery, and so realize the significance of the work of Thomas Eakins.
In person, the painter was of the type which he represented. His head was massive, his eyes clear and determined; his bronzed skin was that of a man who had faced rough weather, and his strong jaw was only half hidden under the sparse, iron-grey beard. I once observed Mr. Eakins in conversation with his friend William M. Chase, and the contrast between the two was striking. The personal verve and distinction of the brilliant technician were arresting, even as his paintings were conspicuous in the exhibitions of his time. But the memory of the scene that comes back most vividly to me is that of the heavy figure of the older artist (older by only a few years, yet seeming of another generation), in whose slow, impassive gestures there was something of the depth and dignity of his art.
We have been long in realizing the importance of his work. It lacks the surface-charm of Whistler; it knows nothing of the soft sentiment that Americans like so much in George Inness, though perhaps the day for that is passing. Winslow Homer is of this sterner stuff, and perhaps it is through our growing appreciation of Homer that we are coming to understand the even more searching scrutiny of appearances that occupied the long life of Thomas Eakins. Eakins was a realist, but one must see him as more than that. His observation of men and things; his dissecting of cadavers, human and animal; his study of the natural sciences; his willingness to avail himself of photographs for his work; his patient, impersonal search after character; his severe and salutary work as a teacher; these are the facts about Eakins that until now have most impressed us. But they are not enough to explain the irrepressible rise in esteem that has lifted his work from the neglect that even the great exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum seemed for a time unable to overcome.
Were the qualities touched on above the only ones to be mentioned; were Thomas Eakins merely the sharp-eyed, strong-brained recorder of the physical or even the intellectual characteristics of the people and things he saw (and, in certain pictures, it is true, he does not rise above this level), we should not find him filling the high place which he holds to-day. There is a force in this painter that comes from his embodying—not copying—the character of his country and generation; and such a force finds expression in relations of form and space and light that are not to be accounted for as realism. They are universal and absolute, like the truths of mathematics; they are the abstractions that we know best in music and architecture, but which must underlie the representation of the painter or sculptor if it is to live.
A picture which shows this quality with special clearness is “The Swimming Hole.” Disregarding the questions of colour, of the minutiae of naturalism, and of the sense of out-door light—all of which may or may not be in a great picture, and yet have for too long kept us from perceiving what this artist has to offer us—disregarding these questions, there is, above all, the nobility of scale, the emphasis on the lines and masses that build up the work into a thing of large and harmonious proportions. This quality is basic, and it is evidence of Eakins’s intuitive understanding of the character of that America of the builders which finds so strong an expression in his art. Just as in a Roman portrait we see the character of the men who could conceive the great empire of that time, who could conceive the arch that traverses space with the invincible sweep of Rome itself, so every picture by Thomas Eakins is instinct with the forces that were sweeping the America of his day.
The admiration of the world of his time for the great thinkers and engineers is again and again celebrated by Thomas Eakins in his work, whether in pictures like “The Gross Clinic” and “The Agnew Clinic,” where actual episodes of the life of the scientists and teachers are shown in dramatic fashion, or in portraits of the man whom the artist preferred to characterize as “The Thinker.” Always there is the sense of the constructor about this painting; and the strength of Eakins’s art lies in the fullness with which his line follows the urge to mastery—physical or intellectual—of the men who incarnated the essential effort of his period. The youth who stands on the rock at the centre of “The Swimming Hole” is rendered with the energy of a Florentine; and in pose and buoyancy it contains more than a hint of the great “St. Christopher” of Pollaiuolo at the Metropolitan Museum. When one has perceived the quality, at once classical and yet contemporary, of the nude as represented by Thomas Eakins, one is better prepared to appreciate the splendid and dynamic balance attained in the portrait of Professor Leslie Miller. The realism of these pictures is their obvious feature, and has led some people to confuse the painter with those men who lose themselves in the maze of detail; but Eakins has the power to hold great masses in their essential and expressive directions even while painting wrinkles and hair, small reflections and exact textures.
The masculine character of his art concentrates on form as its medium. In the severity of his outlook, he is unconcerned with beauty of colour; while atmosphere and its unifying function, its drawing together of isolated objects into harmonious ensemble, had no interest for this mind that was for ever trying to penetrate to the thing and its meaning, independent of the enveloping air and the glamour of colour. Even in the picture wherein Eakins most successfully essays the rôle of lyricist, the admirable canvas of “Benjamin Rush Carving the Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River,” one feels that the mystery he imparts to the darkened space of the big studio is exceptional, and that the artist is most himself in making his carefully detailed statement about the central figure, the model. He is in harmony with the spirit of this scene of early American life, with the hint of decorum given by the presence of the chaperone; and he relishes the preoccupation with earnest work on the part of the three people. How all the literalness and the sobriety enhance the fresh and unexpected charm of the picture!
Critics have at times tried to establish a likeness between Eakins and some of the great French artists of the nineteenth century; but I think the attempt is more misleading than helpful. Eakins has nothing of the classicism of Ingres, the link between Raphael and Renoir. Neither has his realism the quality of Courbet’s; for the work of this rough mountaineer of the Jura who seemed in his time to trample underfoot the gracious wisdom of French art, appears to-day only as the expression of an aspect of the genius of his country which had lain dormant. The architecture of Courbet’s canvases, their colour—almost as restrained as that of Eakins, but still of the French school—and his instinctive use of design even while labouring at the problems of sight, all mark him as of that country whose ancient culture is never, apparently, to be carried beyond its borders by visitors from other lands. After Albert P. Ryder had drawn the inspiration for his art from the great dreamers and colourists of French Romanticism, he went back to American landscape and to Anglo-Saxon imagery in his imaginative pieces; with all his admirable qualities he would stand apart in a French museum. So also to-day, while we feel so confident that the work of Maurice B. Prendergast will bear comparison with the best of French painting after the Impressionists, we know that its roots are in our soil even if French sunlight brought it to maturity.
It was to the school-teachers of French art that Thomas Eakins addressed himself, and then only for his technical training. Yet even though he continued their method without radical change, one feels that he is incomparably farther removed from the lifeless academism of the followers of Gerôme and Bonnat than he is from the other line of French artists who preserve the country’s record of vital production. In reality, it is with neither group that we should identify him. The virtues of his works, as I have tried to show, are those of the life typified in his art, and the defects of the unsuccessful pictures are American defects. At times not even the powerful will of the man could lift him above the poverty and bleakness that are part of the American scene; and his painting is touched by the chill of it. At other times he seems to speculate on certain qualities of the old masters; and in reaching out for things that belonged to the opulence of the Venetians and the mystery of Rembrandt, his pictures show a certain confusion of purpose. Or perhaps, on the other hand, the intensity with which he fixes his eyes on form and character makes him forget that he is dividing his canvas into ungainly and ill-connected parts; a fault from which the instinct of an older culture would have saved him.
But the time has come when the sense of his limitations is dissipating, in our minds, through our grasp of his immense qualities. One jealously defends the autochthonic character of his art because one feels that we must have a solid native basis such as Thomas Eakins offers us, upon which we may build when we have mastered the European traditions we are slowly assimilating. With the passing of time, when Eakins seems as far away as Copley, our first great primitive, the figure of the old Philadelphian painter and teacher will take an ever higher place among American artists: his work, with its almost naïve self-reliance and its deep, homely truth, will take on a profounder beauty even than that which we see in it to-day.
W. P. 11. iv. 23.
NOCTURNE AT THE SPRINGS
WHEN I arrived at the Springs, the milky-green water of the pool was greying with twilight. The blackness that had already flooded the surrounding forest of cypress was spilling on to a pale, glassy surface ragged at the edges with umber, but still wanly alight at the centre where it stirred softly with sulphurous water welling from a subterranean source. The new foliage of the topmost branches of the western wall of cypress rose out of deep gloom into a feathery silhouette against the dying light, a crest of dark spray on an overwhelming wave of night. Beneath, in the darkness, the croaking and wailing of insects, birds and beasts had not yet blended into the hubbub of nightfall. It was still possible to distinguish in the rising tumult the call of whippoorwills, screeches of owls, the falsetto of tree-toads, grunting of frogs and the distant, giant barking of alligators. How clearly and sweetly, like a clean tributary entering a muddy river, came flowing into this lewd din of the subtropical forest the first notes of the band, rehearsing in the dance-pavilion some melancholy, sentimental air—some Southern version of the American wood-note with a touch of humour in its crazy tempo and startling changes. From that direction, too, came frequent flashes of white light that shot into the Gothic obscurity of the cypress swamp; revealing for an instant the vine-draped, heavy-footed columns. The soft guttural of arriving motors died with each flare, and the laughter and shouting of boys and girls began to echo under the broad roof of the pavilion.
When I paid down my “four bits” at the entrance to the dance-hall, I was dazzled first by the harsh light of electric globes, and then by the blaze of intense colour along the benches and railings that enclosed the dance-floor. The place was thronged with youth and vivid with the brightest hues that youth could find to rival the garish spring season of this southernmost part of the United States. Scarlet, orange and sky-blue were the favoured colours in the brilliant rows along the narrow promenade; but here a fairylike, immature little body made a bright variation with Indian red, her chattering mouth a tiny, dancing flame of carmine; and there a pair of sullen eyes of negroid cast smouldered above vermilion lips, their furtive glances taking in the effect of the dancing frock of black chiffon, the scarlet sandals and stockings. When the gown was white, a broad fillet of hot colour atoned for it, and the usual high flush of rouge was heightened to a hectic spot beneath eyes bright with belladonna and anticipation of the dance. All these gaudy flowers were as heavily steeped in artificial fragrance as in colour, refusing to be outdone by the suffocating sweetness of night-blooming jasmine or orange groves in full bloom. As I made my way along the promenade, the air seemed almost visibly and palpably saturated with perfume.
Eagerness for the first number shone in all faces, showed in quickened gesture and in an acceleration of the customary drawling speech. Even the indolent and assured grace of the young men and boys was ruffled with impatience for the premonitory rattle of the snaredrum, the first wild ululation of the saxophones. Their long, slim feet drummed the highly polished floor; their lithe bodies, clad in tightly fitting jackets and trousers, shifted and twisted with stifled agitation; their sleek heads kept turning from partner to bandsmen. Finally their surcharged excitement exploded; a red-haired youth above the hum of a hundred mellow voices implored the band-leader: “Oh, Georgie, let’s go!” The band-master grinned, took in appreciatively the lovely, eager face that peered past the red-haired fellow’s shoulder, winked and shouted back: “Sittin’ pretty to-night, ain’t you Robert. All right, Sugar! I’ll give you somethin’ new I got in Tampa yesterday. Let’s go!” He nodded to the bored drummer whose sticks hung loosely in his limp, pale hands, and put the mouthpiece of his bull-saxophone to his full lips. The dancers stirred and arose from bench and railing like a flock of startled birds—a medley of blackbirds, bluejays, tanagers, orioles, cardinals—and before the twentieth beat of the music were crowding the floor to its barriers.
As they swept by me, each couple seemed to be improvising an extravagant burlesque of the modern dance. One couple waved their dark heads in time—the girl’s black hair tossed like the mane of a capering pony—and lifted their heels high with a defiant jerk; another pair swooped down until their knees all but grazed the floor, then leapt in the air with the swift grace of a cat after a bird; still another long-limbed couple seemed to be engaged in a wild duet of the double-shuffle; a wide-eyed, laughing two flung themselves into a calculated stumble from which they regained balance in violent pirouetting; some moved slowly about the room with the ghastly antics of locomotor ataxia, their feet twitching and halting along the boards; others seemed to be rapidly and vigorously wiping their feet on a crawling door-mat. All were closely embraced with a frank sensuality that seemed to be limited to the posture and motion of their bodies; for their faces were free from the suggested preoccupation, were gay and alert with mischievous smiles, arch glances.
The air to which they moved in perfect rhythm—as if they were controlled by a single mechanism beneath the band-stand—was the artless, tenderly sad melody that the musicians had been rehearsing a while ago. It was, I suppose, a lyric of unrequited love or of homesickness for the South, but the favourite quality of erotic melancholy wailed on in undertone, submerged in the blatancies of jazz. Again and again the dancers demanded encores of this disguised expression of the sentimental sadness so dear to youth, and when at last the band-master waved them off the floor, they carried snatches of it out into the starlight. As they strolled along over the carpet-grass beneath a grove of live oaks at the back of the pavilion, or sat on benches by the darkened pool, I could hear their low voices lingering sentimentally over the simple motif that the finale had disentangled from the raging jazz.
As the evening wore on towards midnight, the note of dreamy romance vanished, and the obscene monotone and tunelessness of a more primitive lyricism held sway. Just as night had invaded the cool green bowl of the springs from the surrounding dismal fastness of cypress, so the hoarse clamour of the mating birds and beasts seemed to be conquering the sentimental mood of youth in the dance pavilion. The postures and movement of the dancers became extravagantly indecent. The elf in Indian red seemed to have swooned on the mountainous body of her blacksmith partner. Her thin, graceful, childlike arms were flung about the huge fellow’s ruddy neck and only the very tips of her tiny feet occasionally touched the floor as her gross support moved about with stately ease. His face wore a sleepy and lecherous expression, as if it had been at once lulled and incited by the orgiastic, tom-tom throb of the drums, by the insistent whimpering and screaming of the saxophones, by the heavy bass roar that the accompanist at the piano tore from the keys as he leapt upon them with crouching shoulders. The sweetish odour of moonshine exhaled from the stags along the railing, and the sheriff and his deputy slouched even lower against a disused bar; they eyed the corybantic scene with an ostentatious air of ennui which showed that they were becoming alert and anxious. Once they raised their backs simultaneously from the tarnished bar, and the three bloods who were about to come to blows over a girl in scarlet, observing this slight change of position, settled their disagreement without violence.
The hands of the clock above the bar were at right angles and closing upon midnight, when the red-haired youth again implored the band-master: “Oh, Georgie Boy! Give us those Caloosa-hatchee Blues for a strong finish.” Wild shouts seconded his suggestion, the sleepy drummer brightened, the band-master grinned triumphantly: “Some tune, ain’t it, Honey? All right, Boys and Girls, for the very last time this evening and to be followed by ‘Home Sweet Home’—for the very last time, Children, those terrible Caloosahatchee Blues, rendered by Clive Davis and his renowned jazz artists of Osceola Springs. Let’s go!”
Ten minutes later, as the dancers clambered into their cars, whistling and humming the simple motif of their song of the South, the new moon rose above the sombre wall of cypress. Its silver blade broke in the softly boiling water of the pool, and above the deep, bawdy chanting of the forest a mocking bird trilled his sweet and comic interpretation of the Florida nocturne.
E. T. B. 18. iv. 23.
LESSONS OF REVOLUTION
I HAVE found few people in Ireland deeply concerned about the ethics of civil war or revolution. The majority accept the principle that it is lawful to use physical force in support of high ideals. Their questioning is about the justice of the cause; and, if that be admitted, they seem to think the right to use physical force to secure its triumph follows in logical and unquestionable sequence. I will not discuss the morality of civil war or revolution. I remember a man, tired of ideal ethics, who cried out at a meeting many years ago: “Let us hear no more of the good man or the bad man. Let us speak of the wise man and the foolish man.” I am like that man. I desire to question the wisdom of a policy rather than discuss the original rightness of a cause.
A policy is wise if, in operation, it secures the triumph of the idea. It is unwise if, in destroying opposition, it does not at the same time establish in the hearts of men the lovable and desirable life for which the struggle was begun. I think few disinterested thinkers dispute the moral justice of the ideals of the Russian revolutionaries who desired to bring about such a control and use of the natural resources of their country that none would be poor or hungry or neglected. Was the policy adopted wise as the ideal was right? Did it succeed? Could it have succeeded even if there was no blockade or foreign intervention? Lenin and Bukharin have learned wisdom. They confess to great errors. Where lay the unwisdom?
Bukharin says it lay in this, that they provoked a revolution without the technical competence to realize their ideal. On the plane of physical force they won. On the intellectual plane they were defeated. Bukharin admits that, to save the economic situation, they had to restore the control of industry to the enemies of the revolution. Intellect, science, administrative ability, could not be improvised, being evolutionary products. The revolutionaries now fall back on evolution, and declare their hope lies in education. They begin again in the neglected sphere of culture.
The Irish revolution, which began in Easter Week, has also triumphed solely in externals. Our spiritual, cultural, and intellectual life has not changed for the better. If anything, it has retrograded. Nothing beautiful in the mind has found freer development. In so far as anything is done efficiently, it is done by administrators, educationists, officials and guiders of industry, who maintain, so far as permitted by circumstances, the habits engendered before the war for independence. The Anglicization of the Irish mind remains unaffected. The Gaelic movement was the one movement in Ireland with a truly national character. It began its work in the soul, not on the body. It inspired a few heroes to fight; but the transfer of energy to the plane of physical conflict weakened it; and now, when there is theoretical possibility of a Gaelic State, there are not Gaels in numbers and intellect competent to take control. The mass of people in the country continue to think as they did before the revolution.
If the Republicans succeeded in establishing a republic, the country would be as Anglicized as ever, because the Republic, no more than the Free State, could improvise culture, experience, intellect or administrative ability. It is practically certain that after a period of muddle—for their leaders have even less administrative experience that the Free State politicals—they would be forced, like the Russians, to fall back on the technical competents of the old order to prevent chaos. The Gaelic State can not be established unless there are Gaels in multitude to administer it. The momentum of the old order carries us along in Ireland, hardly deflected a hair’s breadth from the old cultural lines. It would carry us along despite the legal establishment of a republic—a purely external thing—just as that human momentum ignored the legal establishment of a Free State.
Inevitably also, after a victory brought about by the wreckage of the economic life of the people, the preoccupation of all with the work of material reconstruction would thrust all spiritual and cultural ideals out of sight. It would give people a sense of nausea to have them discussed. The moods by which high spiritual, political or cultural ideals are appreciated are engendered in times of peace. The Free State came into being with popular feeling stagnant. Why was this? Seven years of sensation had dulled the heart and made it insensitive. If a republic were proclaimed in Ireland next year or the year after, would there be any more exultation? I think not. Another year or two of civil conflict, and the heart would have been unhappy so long that it would have become fixed in sadness. The citizens would gaze with the same apathetic dulness on Republican deputies going to Dail meetings, that they now display when deputies attend the Free State assembly.
A deep mistrust exists in Ireland about the wisdom, character and intelligence of its politicals. As regards some of them this mistrust is, I believe, unjustified. In other times, these men might have won the rightly-placed confidence of the people; but they can not, and it is not their fault, win affection or excite enthusiasm in seared and cynical hearts. Our over-long employment of physical force has prohibited the spiritual genius from manifestation among the people. It has almost become atrophied from disuse. The triumph of spiritual or cultural ideals can not be brought about by physical force, but only by labours of the imagination and intellect. We have not laboured long enough in that field, and this is the cause of our failure in Ireland, of the moral depression, and why we seem immeasurably more distant from a spiritual nationalism than we were in 1914. We would not use the intelligence with which nature had so abundantly endowed us. We hated reading and thinking, like the old Turks. How many bookshops are there outside Dublin, Cork, and a few other towns? We have set up the machinery of self-government. The body is fashioned, but the Gaelic soul is incapable of functioning.
The champions of physical force have, I am sure without intent, poisoned the soul of Ireland. All that was exquisite and lovable is dying. They have squandered a spirit created by poets, scholars and patriots of a different order, spending the treasure lavishly, as militarists in all lands do, thinking little of what they squander save that it gives a transitory gilding to their propoganda. With what terrible images have they not populated the Irish soul as substitutes for that lovable life! The very children in the streets play at assassination, ambush and robbery. Manhood maintains in new forms the spirit of the games of youth. What future lies before the present generation? Modern psychology, after long years of research and experiment, has come to attach the utmost importance to the images in the mind. Once an image is implanted, an energy latent in the being operates through the image, as the earth gives energy to whatever seed may be flung in the clay. If these are images of health, the energy works through the image and the body becomes as the mind. If these are images of despair, the body itself grows listless. But if the images are of assassination and destruction, what follows? Thoughts and moods breed true to type, as do birds and beasts and fishes.
Where is it to end? If it be lawful for a section of the people, simply because they hold their ideal to be the highest, to use force to impose that ideal on the rest, every other group may consider itself justified in following the precedent. Why should not the proletarians in Ireland, suffering far more than middle-class nationalism has ever suffered under British rule, also use physical force to upset a social order which has never brought them physical plenty or intellectual life? Why should not Catholics or Protestants, holding sincerely to the truth of their religion, make war on those who differ from them to prevent injury to immortal souls—surely worse than injury to bodies? I could name a dozen causes, all of which could be made to appear as shining in the sight of Heaven and humanity as the political idealism which is now wrecking Ireland. If politicians refuse the democratic solution of our troubles, if they insist on force, we will have proletarian wars and religious wars. Does not recent history show how easy it would be to excite such passions, how ready they are to flare up with an accompaniment of burning houses? The end of it all would be that the most ruthless militarism would conquer; and how long might it be before the tiniest flower of the soul could push up through that ice to begin a new spring in the heart?
We can establish Irish nationality only by building in the heart and the imagination. When we fight, we level life to that of the primitive savage, before the imagination had built up the high poetry, arts, architecture and sciences, which make civilization and distinguish race from race. We extinguish national characteristics, for there is no difference between killers in any country. They are all beasts for the time being—Russians, Germans, French, English, Irish—all the same. It is easy for a nation to break with its past in a few tragic years. The Great Famine made such a break in Irish life. The heart was too dead to grow its flowers, and beautiful traditions and customs withered with human life out of memory. The civil conflict which is devastating Ireland, if it does not end speedily, will part us from what was saved of lovable national life and character. In the Apocalypse, a spirit blows a trumpet, and a third part of life perishes. Another trumpet is blown, and the waters of life turn bitter, and men die because of the bitterness. These images might stand for the tragedy which is past, and for the tragedy which is to come.
I can not understand the faith of those who act on the belief that a nation is immortal and can survive any strain. Nations are no more immortal than individuals. The dust of the desert is over great cities whose inhabitants loved their country with no less a passion than Irish nationalists have loved theirs. Earth is dense with traditions of perished nationalities. If a nation is like a dissolute youth who impairs his vitality by excesses, it will perish as surely and by as inexorable a law of life as the debauchee. There comes a point where recovery is impossible. Something—a skeleton or larva—may survive, but not the nation with confident genius. There will always be herdsmen to look after the bullocks; but the genius of the Gael, if this conflict continues for much longer, will have vanished from its place of birth. The curious in psychology may seek to trace a flash of character here and there in some state of the new world to a possible Gaelic ancestry—
a phrase,
As in wild earth a Grecian vase.
G. W. R. 25. vii. 23.
MRS. HARTIGAN AND THE “TITANIC”
ACCORDING to Mrs. Hartigan, it was “the Titanic’ began it all.” Mrs. Hartigan is the lady to whose ministrations my disorderly bachelor apartment is indebted for what “service” it receives. Her own understanding of the term is elastic and a little erratic, but he would be a braver man than I have ever been who attempted to impose bounds on it. It appears to include the disappearance of sundry shirts and socks on Saturday and their reappearance, darned, washed and re-buttoned the following week, not to mention cakes of fresh soap and plump tubes of tooth-paste where harsh alkaline shreds and coils of twisted lead foil had been before. “Men is forgetful,” comments Mrs. Hartigan. Her hand is feeble, her foot slow, but her back is still straight as a ramrod, her black hair only streaked with grey, and her blue eye untamed and piercing. I can imagine a day when her love was stronger than death, her hatreds deeper than the grave.
No Irish like her are born into the world to-day. She has seen the king of the fairies himself, the time she swooned with the pain was in her hand, dancing in rage round the stone stood up in the rath so fast he looked like a red streak. She has heard the “gentry”1 skirling and singing under the moon inside Sir Humfray Daly’s lodge-gates the night the young lad was drowned in New Zealand or them parts. Like many of the older Irish in America, her sense of tradition between the old world and the new is rather misty. She will tell, with an equal sense of ransacking a remote and colourful past, how the ——th Regiment marched down the Avenue to the war in Virginia that stole the chasuble off their chaplain’s back. She belongs to the older exodus, when the emigration was made “en famille” and the exiles were spared the sharpest pang of all, which is separation from the beloved. Such, at any rate, is Mrs. Hartigan, who believes the trouble started with the “Titanic.” When I tell her she must mean the “Lusitania,” she shakes her head and intimates, but without discourtesy, that she knows whereof she is speaking. It was the “Titanic,” she insists, that “broke the luck of the English.”
I sometimes wonder whether, in her transcendental Celtic twilight, Mrs. Hartigan has not groped upon a truth hidden from the practical mind. When one thinks back a little, one is struck with the comparative immunity from tragedy of the English race. Kipling is fond of telling us that “if blood be the price of admiralty” the English have paid in full. But they have really not paid for their abounding success in anything like the same measure that other races have paid for ambitions that came to naught. There is as yet no British Varus or Crassus. History records no British “Invincible Armada.” No colonial venture of hers has ended as tragically as Adowa. There have been regrettable incidents, disastrous battles—Mai wand, Majuba, the Kabul retreat. But, somehow or other, the sense of fighting against great odds, the heroism that casts a halo over defeat, has always been at hand to spare the race the shadow of national humiliation and shame, the Claudine Forks through which other peoples have had to pass. Even in the natural order a sentiment has arisen, which I would not call altogether fanciful, that great disasters avoid territory over which the Union Jack flies. I remember the comment of a despondent French acquaintance when the top of Mont Pélée blew off, erasing St. Pierre with its ten thousand inhabitants from the face of the earth. “Ces choses-là n’arrivent jamais à vous autres.” On the seismological face of things there was no good reason why the catastrophe should not have had Barbados or St. Kitts for its theatre. But “these things don’t happen to you.” The luck of the English!
If the “Titanic” really broke the spell, it broke it in a way that hurt. There was heroism aplenty in the dark moments that followed the crash on the iceberg. In its supreme trial the race showed true to form. Yet the story shows no signs of becoming a national tradition side by side with the deathless epic of the Birkenhead. I wonder why. Is its memory felt to be, on the whole, rather disquieting than heartening? Is there something in the rush of the doomed liner, at record-breaking speed, with feasting and merriment under decks, through ice-infested seas, that is “un-English,” that rings false to the tradition of competence, common sense and foresight on which the Empire has been built? Is it too distressingly like other disasters, suffered by other and “lesser breeds without the law”? Does it, for the first time, seem to range the Englishman, stolid, phlegmatic, apart, with races that admit the vertiginous attraction of fatality?
Two years later, in the last days of July, 1914, when all Europe was racing through the night to destruction, there were, perhaps, a few hours during which the fate of the world lay in the hands of a British Foreign Minister, and when the word that a Canning or a Palmerston would have spoken on instinct, might have spared civilization the blackest and most irremediable chapters in its history. To fancy that the word might have been uttered if, at a certain moment more than two years previously, a steersman, under orders from the bridge, had swung the wheel of the “Titanic” to port or starboard, is a conception too fanciful for utterance. To propose Captain Smith and Sir Edward Grey as two links in a chain of causation is a feat from which the most bigoted disciple of Hegel would recoil. Yet never is the conviction that I am standing in the presence of imponderables so strong upon me as when an ancient Irish lady, who has seen and heard the fairies, tells me that “it was the ‘Titanic’ began it all.”
H. L. S. 22. viii. 23.
THE CHICKEN-WOMAN AND THE HEN-MAN
I HAD just moved into my summer cottage on the bank of a lake in northern Michigan, when a large, angular, raw-boned woman drove up to my door.
“I am Mrs. Peel,” she said. “I live in the village. I raise chickens, and would like to supply you.”
“Very well,” I answered, pleased to have chickens brought to me instead of going to outlying farms to get them, “you may bring some every Saturday.”
Promptly, every Saturday morning, Mrs. Peel appeared with the chickens, received her money, and departed. She was a dour-faced woman. Her heavy iron-grey hair was brushed tightly back and twisted into a knot, above which set, or rather stood, a straight-brim black hat, trimmed with a faded bunch of lilacs. Her dress, of faded brown sateen, was full in the skirt; the tight-fitting basque buttoned down the front; new sleeves had replaced the old, and these were several shades darker than the rest; neither collar nor cuffs relieved the sombreness of her attire, but the high neck was fastened with a quaint agate brooch. Her feet, clad in heavy, flat, black shoes, looked determined as she deliberately climbed back into her wagon.
One Tuesday I wanted a couple of chickens, so I drove into the village and stopped at Mrs. Peel’s house. It was a wooden building which had once been brown. There was a door in the centre, and the dirty windows were bare. There was no ornamentation inside or out. The veranda was covered with dust, the boards rotting, tufts of grass growing in the corners, and neglect was evident in every feature of the place. I knocked—no answer; again—no answer. I looked through the curtainless window into the parlour-bedroom which seemed to be the only habitable room in the house, except the little lean-to kitchen in the rear. Then I pounded on the door. Mrs. Peel appeared promptly from the lean-to.
“Can you let me have a couple of chickens to-day?” I asked.
“No, I can’t,” with a disappointed air, “mine are running loose. I can only catch them when they are shut up at night.” Then, hopefully, “To-morrow won’t do?”
“No, I’m sorry, but I want them to-day.”
“Well, maybe Mr. Peel can let you have them. I’ll run over and see. He lives just around the corner. Set down on the stoop there and wait for me.”
I sat on the “stoop,” idly meditating, “Peel—Peel; two people by the same name.” She returned in a few minutes: “Yes, Mr. Peel says you can have them. They’ll be ready in half an hour. He lives in a little house, the second one, just around the corner.”
I found “the little house, the second one, just around the corner.” It was nothing but an unpainted shanty but, all about, restrained by a wire netting, were scores of chickens, so I decided that this must be the place. I knocked at the door and, as it opened, my glance took in the interior; one room, not more than twelve feet square, an uninviting-looking pallet on the floor, a kitchen table, a kitchen chair, and a small oil-stove, with some hooks and a shelf above it for the food and cooking utensils; this was all the room contained.
“Is this Mr. Peel?” I asked, and my eyes travelled down to the man in the doorway before me. He was very small, with a twisted protruding hip, and his arms were too long for the rest of his body, but he had the merriest blue eyes I have ever seen. His face and hands were just the colour of his khaki shirt and trousers, which were not too clean, and from the former of which several buttons were missing. He doffed his once-white straw hat, and replied: “Yes, and your chickens are all fixed.” Then, in an anxious tone, “I’ve some mighty fine hens, good for soup; wouldn’t you like some?”
“Yes, I would. You might bring me a couple the last of the week.” His face lighted up: “I’ll bring ’em Saturday.”
The next Saturday, and many Saturdays thereafter, Mrs. Peel brought me my chickens, and Mr. Peel brought me my hens. They came together in the same antiquated spring wagon. They sat, side by side, on the springless seat; she, with the reins in her hands, towering above the mild creature who seemed to shrink away, and look more insignificant than ever in contrast. She took her money and he took his, and then she climbed back into the wagon, lifted up the reins, and seemed to wait impatiently until he gaily clambered up beside her. Off she drove without, as far as I could see, indulging in any conversation with the merry-looking gnome at her side.
“Curious,” I would murmur. “Her name is Peel; his name is Peel; I wonder what relation they are. He’s her brother-in-law, perhaps.” For awhile, this tentative solution satisfied me but, one morning, when she had climbed into the wagon, and he stood just below the porch making change, my curiosity suddenly got the better of me.
“What relation are you two?” I asked. He looked up at me, and his eyes danced.
“You want to know what relation we be?”
“Yes.” Then, after a glance over his shoulder, to make sure that Mrs. Peel was out of ear-shot, he raised himself to his tiptoes, and answered me thus: “Well, we war husband and wife, but we hain’t none.”
“You ‘war husband and wife but’ you ‘hain’t none,’” I weakly echoed. “How do you make that out?” Only the balustrade of the porch prevented his coming still closer as, with another glance over his shoulder at the occupant of the wagon, he whispered: “Divorced.”
This was certainly a surprise to me, for I had not supposed that divorces had penetrated to this simple little hamlet: “Well, you seem to be on very friendly terms for a divorced couple. That’s all I can say.”
Then, in his ordinary voice, which was a bit wistful and appealing, and seeming to take delight in the thought that she might hear, he said: “Oh, she’s all right as a neighbour, but a damn bad wife. And, besides, it’s cheaper to take her round with my horse and wagon and get her trade than to pay her alimony.”
For several years this went on. In fact, it came to be a family joke. “The Peel wagon is at the door. It must be Saturday,” we would often remark. Other times I rarely saw Mrs. Peel. She seemed to spend most of her time “back of the house”; but I saw Mr. Peel frequently. Always, he snatched the battered old straw hat off his head, and he greeted me with a strange twinkling smile, for all the world as if he were guarding a secret, and chuckling over it. I often wondered what that secret was.
A summer came when Mrs. Peel brought me the chickens and the hens. I did not see her but, in the kitchen, she dropped the laconic remark: “He’s dead.” This was the only time she ever mentioned him, but from the villagers I learned a little more about him. He had lived, summer and winter, in his little shanty, with only a kerosene stove for cooking and heating. His chickens ran in and out during the summer and, if one were ill during the winter, he took it in and warmed and tended it. Early one bitterly cold morning, neighbours saw flames in the direction of his hut, but they reached it too late. Underneath the embers they found what was left of Mr. Peel. Then they told me that “Mrs. Peel had a tidy sum put away and wouldn’t let him get hold of it, but did let him use her horse and buggy, and often drove him to and from his customers.” Perhaps this was the secret that he chuckled over. It may have pleased him to give me the impression that he was conferring the favours.
When next I saw Mrs. Peel, the faded lilacs on her hat had been replaced by a new black bow, and I thought she appeared a little less aggressive.
H. SW. 19. ix. 23.
ZACHARIAH JONES
AS we stepped into the rowboat, I looked out over the lake; apple-green it was, without a ripple, and crossed from shore to shore with broad bands of purple. On the closely-wooded shores the trees appeared purple, while those along the hill-tops seemed quite black. Only the open fields were green, except where the ripened grain stood in great golden patches. Above, great masses of fleecy white clouds floated in the clear blue sky.
“What does it matter if the fish don’t bite on such a day as this!” I said to my small son, William.
“But the fish gotta bite,” said Zachariah Jones. “See this minner?” holding up a lively chub, with which he deftly baited my hook.
“Why, yes. What splendid bait you have to-day!”
“Yep. Caught’m down stream. Fished all night for’m. Hed ter ketch ev’ry one on hook. Water too high ter use net. Nebber got home till four ’clock’n mornin’.”
“Well, you didn’t have much time to sleep, did you?”
“Sleep? Fer two hours? That’d just been a ’naggravation. Nope. Routed th’ old woman out’n made her hoe pertaters with me till time get breakfus’.”
Zack, as he was commonly called, never used two syllables where one would do. He had an impediment in his speech. Some might say it was a hare-lip; but it wasn’t a hare-lip. Others might say he was tongue-tied; but he wasn’t tongue-tied. He had an impediment in his speech, and without this impediment, Zack would not have been Zack.
Zack skilfully cast the minnow, then turned to bait the other hook. For years he had been our fishing companion. I had watched him grow from childhood to boyhood, from youth to manhood. He took an interest in the entire family, and had taught the boys to fish and shoot. What happy hours we spent listening to Zack’s tales of fishing and hunting; and how the children’s eyes bulged until they realized that Zack’s stories were never meant to be believed! Their sole purpose was to amuse. No work was too hard for Zack and his brothers. They trapped muskrats and sold the skins; caught whitefish through the ice; shot ducks, partridges and prairie chickens; chopped down trees and sawed them into fire wood. This they did for a livelihood during the winter. During the summer they subsisted on fish—and us. They were boys of fine habits, and their speech, though uncouth, was never unclean. In his youth Zack was lean, but strong and sinewy. He had a shambling gait; his shoes looked roomy enough for two pairs of feet. He was indescribably awkward, always choosing the most difficult way to achieve his object. He would jump from the launch into a rowboat, land upon a loose cushion on the seat, and fall sprawling to the floor. He was always the first to reach shore. Usually, in his haste, he would clamber up the bank with his arms full of packages, and, the loose soil giving way beneath him, would fall back on the beach almost covered with sand, pebbles, cooking-utensils, etc. His hands were usually ornamented with strips of adhesive plaster. Zack always fished in his shirt-sleeves and vest, in every sort of weather. His vest pockets were full of fish hooks and guimps, while his trousers’ pockets bulged with knives, wires, strings, and even live frogs, which he sometimes used for bait.
Silence reigned for some time, broken only by the thud of the minnow as the line was cast, or the swish as we pulled it through the water. Suddenly, a rapt expression on Zack’s face drew my attention to Will.
“That’s a fish sure,” said Zack. “Give ’m plenty o’ line. Steady, steady! Now jerk ’m! Don’t give ’m no slack. Keep’m com’n. Keep’m com’n.”
Will’s face was flushed as he rapidly pulled the line in, hand over hand.
“There! Let’m run—give’m line. Hold’m steady now er he’ll fool yer. Fish knows more ’bout boys’n boys knows about fish. Soon’s he stops runnin’, pull’m in quick!”
Will obeyed implicitly. The fish appeared on top of the water.
“Keep’m comin’. Keep’m comin’,’’ in great excitement; and Zack’s huge brown hand shot out and grabbed the fish. He proceeded to extract the hook with a running commentary: “Fine fish, Bill. Yer landed’m cause yer done jest what I tole yer. What d’ye think happened th’ other mornin’? I was woke up by ’norful noise in my curcumber patch. Went down there’n foun’ two pick’rel, fatter’n this’n, layin’ on ther sides dead. They’d et up mos’ all my curcumbers’n jes’ rolled over’n died with indergestion.”
Although this was said in the most serious manner imaginable, it brought the never-failing laugh with which Will greeted all Zack’s stories. Zack smiled contentedly and went on with his work.
A sudden breeze brought the white-caps dancing about us, and I looked up to find the white clouds turned to grey and purple and the trees rustling and quivering.
“Storm’s comin’,” said Zack, “ov’r Bramleigh way—comin’ pret’ fast. ’Most dinn’r time, en’way. Bett’ go in.” Without a by-your-leave he lifted the anchor and rowed to shore.
Zack was a famous cook; he took great pride in dressing the fish and cooking them over a glowing bonfire, always giving us the benefit of his comments: “See that knife? Ain’t none like it. Bes’ steel, sharp’s razor. Don’t lend that t’ nobody. Nope. Takes skin off ’n leaves fish jes’ like shinin’ silver. See?” He held the fish in his hand underneath the water. It did gleam like silver.
Usually Zack preferred to eat the cold meat which we brought along. One day we had a particularly fine piece of rare roast beef. Seeing him heap his plate with fish, I said: “Zack, why don’t you take a piece of the roast beef?”
“When I want m’ meat raw,” was the scornful reply, “I’ll eat it right off’n th’ block.”
He took a keen interest in all that went on; sometimes even joining in the conversation as he passed the coffee, fish, potatoes and corn: “Yer corn aint’s good’s las’ year. Nex’ week I’ll bring yer some’r mine. That’s corn”; or “We miss Dor- ’thy this year. Couldn’t she eat more corn’n en’one ye ever seen?” with a laugh; or “Say, Mis’ Leslie oughter be here. Gee! wasn’t ’t funny when she nearly fell in aft’r that fish sh’ lost?”
One day we were discussing my cousin, who was coming to make us a visit. Bob was an ardent fisherman and had fished many times with Zack. Zack listened with a satisfied smile, but made no comments until after luncheon. Then, as we began to fish, he commenced: “I’m orful glad Bob’s comin’. Like Bob; he ain’t like some er them city fellers,” in a tone of contempt, “thinks they knows it all! Why, some of ’em comes up here’n thinks all they gotter do’s to throw minner in th’ water to ketch fish; just like it was wheat pit where all the yaps’r waitin’ to take hook. It’s harder to ketch fish’n to make money. Bob’s diff’rent.”
“Zack,” said my small boy, who was particularly strong on the proprieties, “don’t you think it would be better to call him Mr. Mansfield instead of Bob?”
A look of astonishment passed over Zack’s face: “Mitta Man’field! Mitta Man’field! Why would I call him Mitta Man’field? Nobody nebber call me Mitta Jones.”
He was quick to do a kindly deed for those he liked. He overheard me say, one day, that I had seen a beautiful red honeysuckle and wanted one for my wild-flower garden.
“Tell me where’t is ’n I’ll get it for yer.”
“But you can’t. It is growing on the fence at Cedar Crest Farm.”
“Huh, yer show me where ’tis ’n when Mitta Cedar Crest gets up’n mornin’, he won’t fin’ nuttin’ but hole in ground.” I did not describe the location, but a week later he brought me a fine red honeysuckle.
The natives watched us with observant eyes. Any feeling of superiority which they thought they detected in a “summerer” was fatal to that “summerer’s” happiness. Here, as in most American hamlets, each person thought everybody was as good as anybody else and perhaps he was a little better. ‘Them summerers is all right,” they were fond of saying, “s’long’s they don’t put on no airs with us.” One autumn morning a neighbour’s barn burned down, and I said to Zack: “A pity, wasn’t it?”
“Yep,” in an indifferent tone.
“How do you think it happened?”
“Well, I do’ wanta say nuttin’ ’gainst Mitta Mawton, but he tried to sell th’ place; had lot of ‘surance on it’n—well, I do’ wanta say nuttin’ ’gainst Mr. Mawton but” and now he seemed almost to explode in his excitement, “if that’d a happened to me I’d a bin in penitentiary ’fore now.”
Some years before we were amazed to learn, upon our arrival, that Zack had married. I can not tell why it seemed so indescribably funny to us; but marriage had never entered into our scheme of life for him. But so it was. Zachariah Jones was married. We recalled his superior attitude when his brother had married the preceding year.
“Suppose you’ll be the next to go,” I had said to him.
“Nope. When a man’s single he does what he wants. When he’s married he can’t do nuttin’.” So we chaffed him.
“Zack, I hear you’re married.”
“Yep.”
“How do you like it?”
“I dunno.”
“You don’t know? How strange!”
“Well, I nebber bin inside church ’n all m’ life ’till I got married. Hed t’ go t’ church t’ get married. Nebber had doctor’n m’ life ’till I got married, ’n ’en got sick, hed t’ have doctor.” It was a long speech for Zack, and he kept on muttering something that sounded like “Dunno whether like it’r not.”
“Cheer up, Zack. Better times are coming. You look well-fed. The wife must be a good cook.”
“Yep,” and he lapsed into silence. He did look well-fed, and prosperous, for he had not only put on flesh, but he had a gleaming gold front tooth. But much of his cheerfulness and ready humour were gone.
“What is the matter, Zack?” I said to him very seriously.
“Nuttin’”; then after a long pause, “Can’t sleep. Lay ’wake nights thinkin’! Nebber did that afore. Bein’ married’s nuff to make a feller think.” But I wasn’t satisfied. I wondered if they got along well, what his thoughts were, and how he looked on life. I missed the frank and ready smile of my fishing companion.
Another year passed and the first bit of news we received on returning to the country was that Zack had a bouncing boy several months old.
“Fine boy,” he said, “Yes, sir! Named’m fer Bill, ’cause he’s finest boy I know. Willum Man’field Junior Jones. But I tell ye, I mos’ lost th’ old woman. Why I couldn’t eat ’r sleep las’ summer. Sure thought she was er goin’ to die.” After that Zack expanded.
“Yep. Th’ old woman cooks good ’s me. Keeps th’ house good too. Y’ought t’ see how clean she keeps th’ boy, an’ I don’ care if sh’ does bring’m up t’ go t’ church.” Then, “Say, I gonna take yer to th’ head er the lake n’ show yer where them red-wing blackbirds builds their nests. Ever seen ’em? Jest ’bove th’ water on th’ reeds en’ they rocks jes’ like a baby’s cradle.”
Now Zack’s ambition seems to be realized, for “Willum Man’field Junior Jones” is guide and fisherman. He is more taciturn than his father, but, as Zack says, “Times is changed ’n people isn’t what they used to be.”
H. SW. 26. ix. 23.
THE MAIDEN DEW
(Translated from the Polish by Stanislava Piotrowska.)
THERE was at Ludimier, near the river Black Dunajec, a monastery of Cistercian Brothers. It was the wojewoda, Ivo Cedro, who established it; and when he did so, a little devil peeped over his shoulder. One could see it even on his picture hanging behind the altar in the church.
In the monastery was a certain young monk, named Augustin. He was most ardent in his faith, and very severe with pagans. The peasants in that country were full of sin, and if anyone called to them, “May Jesus Christ be praised!” they would answer, “Praise him yourself, if you have time to spare.” So, one day, Brother Augustin said to the abbot, “Reverend father, I shall go out and convert these people.”
“But where?” asked the abbot, stroking his stomach. He had just had a nice salmon for supper.
“Up in the mountains.” Brother Augustin pointed from the Maryanski hills up to the great Tatra.
“Pooh!” shouted the abbot. “Brother Paul and Brother Jacob went there and they never came back. We do not even know, may the Lord give light to their souls, where their unburied bodies lie. Wolves ate them or robbers killed them. They may even have suffered a martyr’s death, and the monastery might have become famous for ever through them. Already the Dominicans reproach us for not producing enough saints. Whom would you convert out there? Those robber-mountaineers, among whom we can hardly live? I can not complain: there are game, deer, hares, stags; there are mushrooms, berries, martens, and lapwings’ eggs for Lent; there—there are— But people! Let the devil convert them! It is hard enough to live with them, the thieves! Thank God, they have never dared to rob the monastery yet. By St. Kunegunda and St. Remigeus our protector! Better to leave the church to God’s care and the monastery to owls and crows! Szczyrzyc is a nice place——”
“O, it is not right to speak thus, it is not, reverend father!” cried Brother Augustin. “The more difficult the task, the greater the glory. Let me go, reverend father. I feel God’s voice calling me and the spirit is stirring within me.”
Finally the abbot permitted him to go. He dared not disobey God’s voice, but he tried to justify himself before the sacristan: “He told me that the spirit is moving within him.”
“Perhaps so,” answered the sacristan. “Yes, I dare say it is. But I don’t know. In my time, it was called by a different name.”
One morning in May, with the rising of the sun, when the air was fresh and laden with the scent of blossoms, Brother Augustin went forth from the monastery-gate. He carried nothing in his hands wherewith to defend himself, nor was he even followed by one of the coarse-haired dogs which the monks bred. He went forth serene under the protection of the Providence that inspired him.
He crossed the Dunajec, and followed the rocks in the direction of the second fork in the river. The forest began a little farther on. There were a few settlements in it. Singing hymns, with a scapulary on his breast and a rosary in his hands, Brother Augustin proceeded on his mission to convert the heathen.
Terrible beasts crossed his path, wolves, wild boars of enormous size, bears as big as cows; but he passed them safely through faith. For half a day he walked through the forest without meeting a soul. But just at noon he heard the clap of hands and a woman’s voice singing. He rejoiced. He thirsted to begin his holy task; besides, he was already longing for the sight of human beings. He walked in the direction of the voice.
Already he heard quite plainly the words: “I’ll go, I’ll go on the river to-night!”
Among the trees he saw a meadow in which were several barns surrounded by an embankment, behind which were flower-beds. There were cultivated fields nearby with oats, cabbages and other crops which looked fresh and green. A young girl of about seventeen years was kneeling by the stream, washing shirts and beating them with a wooden stick. Several of them were stretched on the shore in the sun. She wore a white linen handkerchief bound under her chin, an open blouse showing her young breasts, and a linen skirt tucked up to her knees. Her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows.
The priest emerged from the trees. At the sight of him the girl got up quickly and raised the stick ready to strike him.
“May Jesus Christ be praised!” cried the priest, and involuntarily his eyes lingered on the open blouse.
“What do you want?” shouted the girl sharply.
“I praise God.”
“God?” The girl looked at the monk and lowered her arm. “He is not harmful, and he is handsome,” she thought.
“But what do you want?” she asked more softly.
“I bring God.”
“God does not need you to bring him. If he wishes, he will come himself.”
The priest approached the girl who, seeing his slender figure, regarded him with kind pity rather than fear.
“Who are you? Where do you come from? Do you want something to eat?”
“I ate berries in the forest and I brought cheese and bread with me. May God reward you. I come from the monastery at Ludimier, bringing the true God.”
“I have told you already that God does not need you to bring him. So, you are from the monastery? I know. You can not go with girls nor have a wife. Yes, I have heard about that.”
“O no——no——”
“Poor thing! How could you stand living without love? Perhaps it was just on that account that you ran away?”
The priest was offended, but restrained himself.
“O young pagan,” he said meekly, “he who gives his whole life to the Lord God, his holy Son and his Mother, the holy Virgin Mary, can not know any other kind of love.”
“What you say sounds very queer,” said the young girl; “you can easily confuse me. What sort of a God is this who has a son? And this Mary, or whatever her name is—she wasn’t married then? So they had the son together? Well?”
“I shall explain everything to you, young pagan,” said Brother Augustin. “What is your name?”
“My name? Dew. But people call me Little Dew.”
“Dew?”
“Yes, I am named after the dew.”
“Then listen, Little Dew, my child—” the priest began.
“Your child? But you are only a child yourself. I don’t think you are much older than I am.”
Brother Augustin approached the stream and sat on a stone.
“Are you tired?” asked Little Dew.
“I walked a long way.”
“Then rest a little. But you are not hungry, are you?”
“No, but listen, Little Dew, my child in Christ. What do you believe in?”
“Me? What could I believe in? The Weather and the Mischief, the Verdant Goddess, and the Goddess of Flowers, of Plague, of Showers, of Hail and Thunder. O, there are enough different gods, but above them all is Time.”
“By God’s name!” cried Brother Augustin. “So you are a true pagan!” He started to cross himself as though to send away the devil.
“What are you doing?” asked the girl in surprise. “Why do you swing your hands so fast?”
“I am crossing myself in God’s name, to drive the devil from me and from you. Did you really never hear about the Christian God?”
“Which is he?”
“He who rewards the good and punishes the evil. He whom one must praise and ask him——”
“Does he always give?”
Brother Augustin thought a while, then answered: “According to his will.”
“I usually ask only when I know it is not in vain.”
“He who created heaven and hell.”
“I know heaven; but hell?”
“Where burn the souls of people damned for ever!”
“Who are those people damned for ever?”
“Those who do not worship him.”
“Is that so? Then your God likes to take revenge. Well, but what is to be done to obtain his grace?”
“It is necessary to give up all the vanities of life.”
“Which are they?”
“Those created by the devil.”
“The devil? Still, he is always nearer to man.”
Brother Augustin sighed to himself. “They have heard of the devil here before they heard of God.” Then aloud he said, “One must for the love of God give up all earthly pleasures.”
“What! I am to give up dancing because of some god? Why, our gods are ready to dance with us themselves.”
“One must mortify the body, fast, flagellate, wear haircloth, sleep on the bare ground.”
“Oh,” cried the girl, much shocked. “I don’t want even to hear about such a god!”
Brother Augustin paused and thought. “She must be a very hardened pagan. She has no idea of the holy Catholic religion. To convert and save this soul is my duty. But it is first necessary to learn in detail all her mistakes and heresies.” He asked, “What are your gods?”
“My gods,” replied the girl, “are not like yours at all. They do not demand that one should give up everything. If you only give them a little honey and bread, and a green wreath, or flowers to hang up, and light a bonfire, they are quite satisfied. But the best of them all is the Verdant Goddess.” Half singing, half talking, she continued, “The Verdant Goddess walks through the meadows, through the green grass and the forests, through the waters and the mountains. It is she who sows for us the new flowers, plants, green herbs and leafy trees. She likes to wear a wreath of flowers, and clothe herself in fleecy clouds. You will see her in the sunshine in the Great and Little May, when she wanders through the fields. Girls with garlands in the moonlight, they raise to her an altar out of flowers and red berries in the great feast of the Green Goddess. Flowers, moonshine and big fires. All the people dance around the fire in that warm bright night of May. They sing around the fire. But those who are still maidens make a separate smaller circle and sing like this:
‘Verdant Goddess,
Our beloved Goddess,
Touch our little breasts.
Touch our eyes and cheeks.
Goddess, our beloved,
We are worthy still
Of your hand that sows
Flowers on the earth.
We have never yet
Shared our bed with man.
We are still as pure
As white snow; as dew
We have still the bloom
Painted like a rose.
Goddess, our beloved
Goddess, it is your day!’
“While they sing, the boys creep behind the bushes and suddenly rush out towards them. The girls flee into the forest. They try to escape, the boys in pursuit. Some of the boys seize fiery branches and run with them. All the forest is full of shrieking laughter, noise and fires. Such is the day of the Green Goddess! The girls who fail to escape belong to the boys who happen to catch them. But there are very few who really try to run away.
Such is the great feast of our Verdant Goddess at the full moon in the forest. The night of love, holy night——”
Brother Augustin listened, quite enthralled. He was so young and had never comprehended God’s world until now. He listened and was dazzled. “The night of love—holy night,” he repeated.
“Do you know what?” said the girl. “You shall help me to stretch my shirts on the grass. I’ll give you your lunch for it. But stretch them a little higher up, not so close to the stream.”
He hardly noticed when she gave him a couple of damp shirts, and without realizing what he was doing, he started to stretch them on the grass. His heart was beating, his hands were trembling, and the words “The night of love, holy night” still rang in his ears.
“Do you know, this little shirt, with the lace around the neck, this is for the feast. Only those who are still maidens may wear such a shirt.”
“You are a maiden then?” the priest cried involuntarily.
“Of course, I am a maiden!”
“And you washed this shirt for the holy night of love?”
“Yes, for the first time. I wove the linen and sewed it myself. That’s the custom. When a girl is fifteen, she is given a shirt like this to sew and to wash. But not before.”
“So you are only fifteen?”
“Yes, this summer I am fifteen.”
“And you are a maiden yet?”
“But why do you wonder so much? Perhaps you are still a youth. However you look quite a man already.”
The priest felt hot, but the big blue eyes of Little Dew, full of sparkling light, looked at him with a bold, naïve, inquiring laughter.
“Well, we have done our work nicely. The sun is awfully warm. Let’s go and lie down in the shade.”
The priest stood up and straightened himself.
“Come, let’s lie under that maple tree.”
The priest followed. Something had bewitched him. He lay down on the grass. The girl started to play with his rosary, next his scapulary, then she took off first one, then the other, and he did not defend himself at all, not at all.
Then she played with his curly youthful beard and his soft dark hair.
“You are handsome,” she said, and her breath came quickly. “Handsome,” she repeated, and two slender, strong arms encircled Brother Augustin’s neck.
Not long after that, the Christians had to think of leaving Ludimier. Robbers had started to take their cattle from their pastures and to burn their barns. Like demons they appeared from the dark forest and robbed, burned and destroyed everything around the monastery. They robbed not only by night, but even in broad daylight.
One day the father abbot was standing on the monastery walls, watching the robbers who were trying to drive away the herdsmen. Suddenly he cried:
“Good gracious! Look there, brothers! Can you see that tall peasant in front, wearing the coat with the fur turned out, with a big stick in his hand? And beside him a young girl, also with a stick? By Saint Kunegunda and Saint Remigeus our protector! my eyes do not deceive me. It is Brother Augustin, whom we took for a martyr!”
And the sacristan murmured: “It moved in him . . . it moved . . . it moved . . .”
Soon after, the persecuted brethren left for Szczyrzyc.
K. T. 10. x. 23.
THE REASON FOR RHYME
THE attack upon formal poetic metre which our age has witnessed, and which we see to be falling, springs, I suspect, rather from a surfeit of “sure returns of still expected rhymes” than from a disgust with metre as such. I am aware that in the minds of many of the moderns, free verse is vaguely associated with freedom in general; but few of the moderns are philosophical enough to make even a philosophical mistake. They do not understand principles, but they can understand that free verse becomes a practical necessity once rhyme is discarded. Blank verse in English, owing to the character of our language, is necessarily confined either to the decasyllabic line or to imitations of classical forms. How little chance these have of success may be observed in Long-fellow’s hexameters and in “Hiawatha.” But even were they successful, it would still mean that the scope of poetry is immediately restricted once rhyme is abandoned. For noble instrument as blank verse is, it is insufficient for the lyric reaches; hence the attempt to get over the difficulty by abandoning metre. The baby is thrown out with the bath.
This irritation with rhyme is not new. Milton was its first mouthpiece—the Milton of the gloriously rhymed “Lycidas”; and Wordsworth, who had written a mealy-mouthed and slovenly sonnet in defence of the sonnet, went on to write another, and a much better, sonnet to prove that
The grandeur of the forest tree
Comes not by casting in a formal mould,
But from its own divine vitality.
Wordsworth was, of course, too good a poet to deny metre its place in poetry, but he was for the moment irritated by rhyme, possibly owing to his notorious difficulty with it. Both Milton and Wordsworth, however, contented themselves with grumbling. They attempted no technical experiments; they had no longing to burst barriers. They accepted the limits imposed by the English tongue, and went on rhyming when rhymes were called for. Their irritation was not nearly so acute as our own.
But we shall get ourselves into endless trouble if we continue to base our æsthetics upon a mood of impatience. Blank verse alone can not satisfy us. Nothing is more nauseating than a mediocre talent affecting the massive magnificence of the bare line; and although modern blank verse has, in the hands of such men as Frost, Abercrombie and Robinson, shown fresh possibilities, it would soon be wearisome as a steady diet. Moreover, Wilfred Owen’s use of assonance in his fine poem “Strange Meeting” (an assonance that is all but rhyme), would cease, if persisted in, to be refreshing. If we are not to return to rhyme, we must either discover a new blank-verse line or be vers-librists.
We can do neither of these things with any likelihood of success; the language will not suffer it. And even if it were metrically and melodically possible, the fact remains that centuries of Christian civilization have set our spirits hungering for wilder visions and deeper emotions than ever could disturb the serene and sad soul of a pagan. These visions and emotions have sought to find in rhyme one of their outlets. I do not propose, however, to argue the case against free verse: I merely record my conviction. My purpose is to say a few kind words about rhyme.
Rhyme is no more than a device designed to heighten poetic perception. Incidentally, it is an invaluable aid to the memory, but although critics now and then defend it on that score, that is not why poets use it. They use it as a net to capture the elusive Muse. It is unnecessary, and would besides be absurd, to contend that the ecstasy of poetic feeling could not be achieved without it. Merely to take one out of a hundred possible citations, lines such as:
In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage—
achieve without rhyme all that it would have been possible to achieve with it. But however many examples one might adduce on this side of the question, there are far more examples that could be cited upon the side of rhyme; examples of rhymes that cease to be an accident of the poetry and become its very essence. Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet, for example, would have been a good poem without the double rhyme that transforms it into a marvel:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
The bird, and the imagination, mount from mere words (“like” and “lark”—half-rhymes) upward until the extra syllable of the rhyme carries it out of sight and carries us into the empyrean. The line would have lacked the final touch of rapturous lightness had it not responded to its conclusive rhyme; for this rhyme is the actual embodiment of a certain balance of ideas which, as always happens when rhyme is successfully employed, seem themselves to rhyme together.
Such felicity is not, of course, always attained. It is this felicity however, that is aimed at in rhyme, so that the ringing of two words in unison (a simple affair in itself) shall by its appropriateness illuminate, transfigure and be fused with the content of the poem, thereby adding, as the rhythm has already added, a new but more emphatic corroboration than unsupported rhythm can give to the thought in the poet’s mind. The chiming of these bells triumphantly announces the birth of poetry, and is inseparable from the spirit of the holiday.
Every poet knows that the perfect rhyme exists, could he but find it. He knows, too, that felicity in rhyming bears slight relation to facility in rhyming. Swift, who won his wager by matching “Nebuchadonozer” with “the curse of God, on you sir!” and Browning with his fantastic, Byron with his humorous, and Swinburne with his rhetorical effects were led by their mere aptitude for jingling to use rhyme for its own sake, in order to show off, or to amuse themselves with the pretty bells. Wordsworth, who plodded heavily after his rhymes and could attempt no feats, was saved by sheer slowness from abusing loveliness by too dexterous an exploitation of it.
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
Anyone who had tried to write poetry can see that even here Wordsworth had difficulty with his rhymes. Yet, as is almost always the case with Wordsworth, the sincerity of his artistic purpose enabled him so to use his hackneyed rhymes that their appropriateness bestows inevitability, though hardly a startling inevitability, upon his work.
Keats, however, who possessed gifts that Wordsworth lacked, was often able to do much more. Take his most famous stanza:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I heard this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
That would have been fine poetry even without rhyme; but it is so much finer with rhyme that we can scarcely conceive of it without. It becomes what it is, moreover, because of one singularly fortunate rhyme: “hath” rhyming with “path” does the trick. It is at once the only possible and (especially because of the splitting of the whole verb) an unusual rhyme, one that is at the same instant surprising and what was expected. This is the secret of its charm. The absence of complete identity of vowel-sound is the key that opens the magic casement over those fairy lands; and the fact that “hath” can be uttered only in a whisper awakens the sense of mystery. This kind of thing could never have been brought about deliberately; it was a slice of the luck that comes to none save great artists; or is it that only great artists are able to take advantage of such luck?
Whatever else rhyme is, it is not an artificiality. I admit that it can be so mishandled, by being overstressed, as almost to be isolated at times from the rest of the poem; but that is no more than another phase of the delicate problem of what constitutes exact poise and proportion. We all know the man who is too well dressed and too elaborate in his politeness to be quite a gentleman. In the same way writers who, like Pope or Poe—to select extremes—obtrude their virtuosity, are really guilty of bad technique, and make their muse rather vulgar by over-dressing the poor thing. Yet all this may be admitted, without admitting that clothes, or rhymes, are nothing but conventions. The matter may easily be tested. It is precisely the simple and happy people who employ rhyme, or some similar device. It is the highly sophisticated person who needs the sharp, bitter taste of free verse as a stimulant to a jaded appetite. A child of his own accord will make up rhymes all day long; my own children do it, even going to the length of inventing words where none exist for their purpose. I do not draw the conclusion that they will be poets; but I think I am correct in concluding that every poet who rhymes has first the simple pleasure of the child in any rhyme before he discovers the subtle pleasure of the apt rhyme. If we were all as natural as children, or as Wordsworth’s forest tree, and had “divine vitality” in sufficient quantity, we would lisp in numbers because the numbers came; and, perhaps, when our simplicity was complete, would make every post-card a sonnet, and frame in triolets our request for a second cup of coffee. It is our unhappy modern prigs and pedants who can not endure the complexity of nature. Like godless Puritans they regard themselves as superior to the gold on the vestments and the carving on the altar, and insist on singing their dreary psalms within whitewashed walls—bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
If ever there was a spontaneous poem it is “Kubla Khan”; and yet these very lines, composed in dream or directly “received,” are more crowded with varied metrical and melodic device than perhaps any others in our literature. Had Coleridge consciously written them, he might not have dared to let their flashing fountains play so audaciously in the sun. At any rate he knew that, broad awake, he could not hope to finish the poem. He would have toned it down and spoiled it.
But oh! that deep, romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Even the most miserable vers-librist, however, would use nothing but metre and rhyme if he could do it with no more effort than Coleridge had to make. The trouble is that although rhyme is so easy that any child can manage it, excellence of rhyme, rhyme that heightens poetic emotion and is a part of the content of the poem, is a thing so difficult as to be almost a miracle. Mere ingenuity is within the compass of any clever man; and there is a genuine, if not a high, kind of literary delight to be obtained through the rhyming of a Barham or a Gilbert. It is like the pleasure one takes in seeing a man balance a chair on a walking-stick, and a knife on the chair, and a billiard-ball on the knife, and a bowl of gold-fish on the billiard-ball, and the whole affair, spining round, on his nose; but it is a smaller pleasure than one takes in seeing a great actor do what seems more easy and yet is far more difficult. I do not wish an actor to play Hamlet with so much as a walking-stick on his nose, but I do want Hamlet to be spoken as blank verse; and I also want to see a poet adding to the difficulty of his art by writing in rhyme. I want to see this because rhyme is appropriate, even though it is now and then not absolutely essential, to lyric poetry. I want to see it because the difficulty of art is the artist’s opportunity. The poet has not only more freedom but also more fun by recognizing his limits and by working within them. The same thing that holds him down is also his spur. The ship must be ballasted to be buoyant; the bird flies by its weight as well as by its wings.
T. M. 23. i. 24.
CHANGEABLE SILK
IN the American political scheme, so realistically adapted for keeping the bit in the mouth of the common man, the Supreme Court occupies a position of peculiar power in that it is the only political organism which in common repute possesses qualities of divination verging on the supernatural. It wears a halo of antiquity and brings to our matter-of-fact world some of the properties of the old mysteries which were so highly regarded as adjuncts of the ancient State. Its high priests are clad in symbolical robes of silk which no ordinary citizen would dare to adopt. Its decisions not only carry all the finality of a Sibylline prophecy, but the mystic sanctity of such prophecy is attached to them. When the robed prophets of the tribunal retire to consult the legalistic omens, presidents and legislatures fade into insignificance and the gods of social progress bow their heads upon the sacrificial altar. Their utterances are weighted with dicta from the earliest beginnings of law and order, and with a marvellous consistency they measure the problems of our complicated society with yardsticks reverently preserved from ancient days when industry was represented by shepherds tending their flocks on the hill-side and husbandmen scratching the stubborn earth with a stick. In this fashion these oracles, serenely aloof and removed from the clamour of struggling men, conserve our society in the mould of continuity and stability.
The history of our court of finalities is of peculiar interest to the student of what certain European economists have called “the political means.” Particularly interesting, as illustrating the mystic divagations of this venerable institution, is its treatment of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Doubtless a higher consistency has inspired the tribunal in its successive interpretations of this Constitutional postscript. On the surface the court would seem to have reversed itself and re-reversed itself, to have doubled on its tracks, and strayed and wandered to and fro in an amazingly erratic fashion. As a result this simple Amendment, designed to cover a specific situation, has been magnified until it casts its shadow over the entire social horizon.
The Fourteenth Amendment was proposed after the close of the Civil War and was ratified by 1868. Its projection was the result of a crop of post-war statutes, hastily passed in the Southern States, which, as they were interpreted in the North, were designed to rob the liberated slaves of their rights as freedmen. “No State,” read the vital clause in the Amendment, “. . . shall deprive any citizen of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Amendment was strictly a partisan affair. The brilliant Judge Hough of the Federal District Court of New York has pointed out that in all the State legislatures only a single Democrat voted for it—one Barney Cregan of Tammany Hall.
In its early decisions, the Supreme Court took occasion to declare the special function of the Fourteenth Amendment. It would never apply, insisted the Court in 1877, except in cases involving the rights of freedmen. In another decision the Court announced that the “due process” clause afforded no protection against an unreasonable regulation by the legislature of public-utility rates. “For protection against abuses by the legislature,” ran the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Waite, “the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts.” It was an era of innocence. The first American case involving the validity of a legislative restriction on women’s hours of labour came before a Massachusetts court in 1876, but the Fourteenth Amendment was never mentioned. The legislation was sustained. As late as 1885 we find the Supreme Court reiterating its language of 1868 and expressing its “increased surprise at the continued misconception of the purpose of the [due process] provision.” Thus, as Professor Robert Eugene Cushman of the University of Minnesota has pointed out, the Court began its interpretation of the Amendment by complete acceptance of the doctrine of judicial noninterference with social and economic legislation.
The Court, however, carefully refrained from committing itself to any definition of the terms “due process” and “equal protection”; and thus, as Professor Cushman again points out, it left the way open for a change of mind. In later years, when a more involved application of the Amendment brought forward the relative status of such things as “police power” and “public interest” as opposed, in legislation, to such matters as “liberty of contract” or “property rights,” these collateral phrases likewise were never subjected to definition; for, as Justice Holmes remarked in one of his opinions, the Court never defines anything if it can help it. Once or twice, in emergency, the Court took refuge in pious ambiguities that might mean anything or nothing. “Where legislative action is arbitrary and has no reasonable relation to a purpose which it is competent for government to effect, legislation transcends the limit of its power,” ran one opinion, written by the cautious Justice Hughes. In another opinion, by Justice Day, the Court conceded that a State legislature might pass a law to protect the health, safety or welfare of the people, but only so far as it did not interfere arbitrarily with “the right to contract and carry on business.” As Abe Potash might say, such definitions, like third mortgages, are nix.
II
By the later ’eighties the personnel of the Court had completely changed from the naïve days of ’68, for even Supreme Court justices are subject to the laws of mortality. In addition, there was a curious ferment in the times. The industrial revolution was beginning to strain the social order. The simple democracy of earlier days had given place to a stratified society in which the majority in the “lower orders” felt themselves under great disadvantage. As yet there was no demand for a complete readjustment of the social system, but a growing sentiment was manifest for tempering social injustices by remedial laws. Under this impulsion, legislation attempting to deal with concrete social and economic problems was cropping up in the States, and the powerful interests affected by it were becoming active in opposition. The trend of the times was towards laws enabling members of the lower caste to rise above the status of mere beasts of burden, and this evolutionary change highly disturbed many worthy people. Historically, however, it would seem correct enough. As Justice Brandeis has stated in one of his distinguished dissenting opinions, up to 1813 English wage-earners were confronted with laws limiting what they could demand. Up to 1824 they could be punished as criminals if they combined, even without striking, to raise wages, shorten hours, or “affect the business in any way.” Up to 1871 it was a crime to go on strike. Not until 1875 was the right of workers to combine conceded by Parliament, and not until 1906 was the ban on peaceful picketing lifted. By the later decades of the last century the toilers were no longer content to secure negative gains from the political power, and in this country, as elsewhere, legislatures were responding more or less reluctantly to their importunities. Laws curbing privilege were actually beginning to replace laws curbing the under dog.
Professor Cushman notes that members of the bar and interests affected by these laws were bringing pressure on the courts for a broader interpretation of the Constitution. Unknown to fame is the name of that shrewd attorney who first persuaded the judicial high priests to dam the rising tide of social legislation with the Fourteenth Amendment. He deserves a niche in the Hall of Fame along with those of Choate and Mr. Elihu Root and other loyal servants of the God of Things as They Are. In 1889 appeared the first nullification of a State law regulating transportation-lines. The court, wrote Judge Hough, in discussing the case in the Harvard Law Review in 1919, “practically arraigned legislators at the bar, and passed judgment, not, mark you, on the justice or wisdom, but on the reason of what they had done.” He adds that of course the term “reason” was not defined. By 1897 the Supreme Court even went so far, however, as to commit itself to a definitive outline of its revised view of the Amendment. This development occurred in a case in which the Court nullified a Louisiana statute forbidding contracts with foreign insurance companies which had not complied with the law of the State. “The liberty mentioned in the Amendment,” ran the opinion, “means not only the right of the citizen to be free from the mere physical restraint of his person . . . but to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties; to be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he will; to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any livelihood or avocation and for that purpose to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary and essential.” With this the worthy tribunal formally declared its own sacred opinion of 1868 spurlos versenkt.
Fortified by this opinion and by subsequent decisions, the lesser courts set happily about the work of scrapping social legislation of even the mildest brand. “There is no reasonable ground . . . for fixing upon eight hours in one day as the limit within which a woman can work without injury to her physique,” declared the court in Illinois. In New York the court, in killing the statute forbidding night work for women in factories, declared that liberty as defined in the Amendment permitted a woman “to work at any time of the day that suits her.” In California a corporation that employed a man for sixty days and then paid him off by presenting him with an old horse, ran afoul of a State law. Under the statute, the court declared indignantly, “the workingman of intelligence is treated as an imbecile. He is deprived of the right to make a contract.” “In a government like ours,” declared the New York Court of Appeals in its stateliest manner, in the course of throwing out an employers’ liability law, “theories of public good or necessity are often so plausible or sound as to command popular approval, but the courts are not permitted to forget that law is the only chart by which the Ship of State is to be guided.”
III
In the United States Supreme Court the transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment reached its climax with the famous Lochner case, decided in 1905. Under the Fourteenth Amendment an employer was contesting a New York statute limiting the working-hours of bakers to ten hours a day, sixty hours a week. The Court had shortly before declared valid a law creating an eight-hour day for miners; but in the present instance it refused to apply the same principle to bakers on the ground that “innocuous trades can not be arbitrarily regulated by the legislature.” The majority opinion, written by Justice Peckham, is interesting as an illustration of the mental processes of the supreme arbiters of American life.
“An enactment . . . can not invade the rights of persons and property under the guise of police regulation, where it is not such in fact. . . . The general right to make a contract in relation to his business is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. . . . The right to purchase and sell labour is part of the liberty protected by this Amendment.” To these considerations the Court appended a tender reminder of the right of the individual, “to labour for such time as he may choose,” and to this he added that the law involved “neither the safety, the morals nor the welfare of the public.”
There is no contention that bakers as a class are not equal in intelligence and capacity to men in other trades or manual occupations, or that they are not able to assert their rights. It may be true that the trade of a baker is not as healthy as some other trades, and is also vastly more healthy than still others. . . . Very likely physicians would not recommend the exercise of that or any other trade or ill health. It is unfortunately true that labour, even in any department, may carry with it the seeds of unhealthiness. But are we all, on that account, at the mercy of legislative majorities?
If it was all right for a baker to work ten hours, asked the Court, why if he worked ten and a half hours would his health be endangered and his bread be rendered unhealthy? Would not limiting his working-hours cripple his ability to support his family? If a baker’s hours were to be limited, where would such restrictions stop? With obvious anxiety the Court suggested the possibility of a physician, having finished his legalized daily stint, being faced with the alternatives of sacrificing the life of a fellow-man or becoming a criminal. “We do not believe,” concluded Justice Peckham, “in the soundness of the views which upheld this law”; and he wound up with the intimation, drawn from his inner consciousness, that “there was some other motive dominating the legislature than the purpose to subserve the public health and welfare.”
On this sort of taradiddle no comment is necessary. Justice Peckham has since been called before a court of final decision beside which the Supreme Court seems relatively impermanent. Justices Harlan, White and Day dissented from his opinion on the ground that voiding that statute set a mischievous precedent which might seriously cripple the power of the States to care for the health and well-being of the citizens. Justice Holmes, who also dissented, held that the validity of the statute was none of the Court’s business. “A Constitution,” he reminded his colleagues, “is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State, or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether the statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.” It may be added that through all the record of backing and filling by the majority of the Court where social or economic issues were involved, Justice Brandeis has consistently refused assent to decisions which tended to usurp the legislative power.
The slaughter of social legislation aroused an increasing degree of public rancour. Outcries arose against judicial dictatorship. Theodore Roosevelt, then in the White House and in full eruption, was lending a not unsympathetic ear to the protests, and later gave vent to a contagious slogan, “the recall of judicial decisions.” Possibly the high priests of the temple, as they sat in their carven chairs hurling the thunderbolts of the law, were impelled to muse uneasily on the dismal tale of a certain Bourbon monarch, and on the story of that ancient king who defied a rising sea. Perhaps their assurance was disturbed by the barbed dissent of Messrs. Holmes, Harlan, White and Day; and perhaps, under a less hasty judgment, Justice Peckham’s opinion looked a bit shabby. At any rate, two years after Justice Peckham’s decision in the Lochner case, the Court deftly shifted its position once more and decided that an Oregon law decreeing a ten-hour day for women employed in laundries was altogether permissible. An attorney by the name of Louis D. Brandeis had been retained to argue for the law, and he offered such an array of statistics showing that similar legislation was common in every civilized country, that the Court was persuaded to give heed to his extra-legal evidence. “We take judicial cognizance of all matters of general knowledge,” declared the Court urbanely; and again, “It may not be amiss, before examining the Constitutional question, to notice the course of legislation as well as expressions of opinion from other than judicial sources.” By 1915, when a general ten-hour law for manufacturing-establishments in Oregon came up for consideration under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court had apparently completely forgotten the decision in the Lochner case; at least it never mentioned it.
It was inevitable that these vacillations of the highest tribunal should create some confusion in the lower courts. In their efforts to keep up with the intellectual gyrations of the sacred Nine on Capitol Hill, the State judges were forced into odd mental gymnastics. In 1907, in accordance with the Lochner decision, the Court of Appeals of New York unanimously declared void a State law forbidding night work for women and minors in factories. The Legislature promptly passed a new law of the same character, and in 1915 the same court placidly sanctioned the measure, with the explanation that during the intervening years there had risen a widespread belief that such work was injurious to health, and in the previous case their attention had not been attracted to facts bearing on the hygienic necessity for such a law! The Supreme Court of Illinois executed a similar somersault in the case of a law establishing a ten-hour day for women. In the maze of conflicting opinions the Fourteenth Amendment was not infrequently utilized to crush and to sustain laws of virtually the same character, in different States, on virtually the same date.
IV
Meanwhile the Supreme Court kept a steady course, for over a decade, towards the emancipation of the legislative power of the States. In case after case it withheld the lethal application of the Fourteenth Amendment. It permitted the States to regulate insurance companies, to pass laws guaranteeing bank deposits, to establish rent-laws. It sustained a law forbidding the sale of preservatives containing boric acid. “It is plainly not enough that the subject be regarded as debatable,” declared the opinion in this case. “If it be debatable the legislature is entitled to its own judgment, and that judgment is not to be superseded by the verdict of a jury, upon the issue which the legislature has decided.” The court tolerated a Maine statute permitting cities to sell fuel at cost, and despite loud appeals to the Fourteenth Amendment by certain taxpayers, it permitted the Government of North Dakota to issue bonds to establish State warehouses and a State bank. In fact, it appeared, as Professor Cushman remarked at the end of 1921, that after long and varied wanderings the Supreme Court had at last brought the famous Amendment safely to anchor in a sure harbour. It had reached the point of acknowledging that the legislatures, in matters of fact and of public necessity, were entitled to their own judgment.
Even while Professor Cushman was penning his prophecy, however, the Court had put to sea and was tacking back on its track again. The composition of the venerable tribunal had changed, and Mr. Harding, that indefatigable collector of old ivory, had made several of his characteristically happy appointments. The first case to mark the change involved an Arizona law forbidding the use of injunctions in labour-disputes, except to prevent the destruction of physical property. The owner of a restaurant in Bisbee had had a dispute about wages with his hands; they had struck, picketed his place, and tried to keep off his customers by distributing handbills setting forth their alleged wrongs; and the proprietor sought to nullify the statute in order to obtain an injunction forcing the recalcitrants to accept his terms or sit at home and pray. Justice Taft’s majority opinion, nullifying the State law, was an interesting pæan on property-rights. He declared that the “due process” clause had come down from Magna Charta, and he enfolded the restaurant man in that hoary old parchment. Four justices dissented, Justice Brandeis reminding the Court that “the rights of property and the liberty of the individual must be remoulded, from time to time, to meet the changing needs of society.”
The Court went even farther back in overthrowing a minimum-wage law for women and children in the District of Columbia, in April, 1923. The majority opinion, written by Justice Sutherland, dragged from its long obscurity the Lochner decision, and also the decision invalidating the Louisiana insurance law. It was true, conceded Justice Sutherland, that the court had once permitted an Oregon statute limiting the hours of employment for women, but this decision was based on the theory of inequality between the sexes, and this “ancient inequality” had now come “almost, if not quite, to the vanishing point.” No public body, he contended, could possibly be competent to determine a just minimum wage, for “the amount necessary to maintain a woman in health and morals varies with temperament, habits and thrift.” Moreover, such legislation was likely to ruin employers, while the evidence of its beneficiary effects were only “mildly persuasive.” Therefore, concluded the Justice, the law was “a naked and arbitrary exercise of power that can not be allowed to stand.”
Clearly the Court had gone prancing back to dear old Justice Peckham. It is interesting to note that Chief Justice Taft, in a dissenting opinion, completely overturned his own opinion in the Arizona case of the previous year. “It is not the function of this Court,” he declared, “to hold congressional acts invalid because they are passed to carry out economic views which the Court believes to be unwise or unsound.” Thus, by a neat handspring, the Chief Justice had landed beside Justice Brandeis.
Here, for the present, ends a long record of errancy. After being dragged hither and yon for over half a century, the Fourteenth Amendment is for the time firmly established as a lever for the assumption of supra-legislative power by the judiciary. Its original purpose of protecting the coloured brethren from peculiar discriminations has been completely bleached out. In its adventurous course with the Amendment, our supreme tribunal has given a rare demonstration in prestidigitation. It has swallowed its own decisions and eventually regurgitated them in their pristine integrity. It has stood fast on abstract legal concepts and precedents, and later discarded them in favour of a reasonable consideration of essential realities; and, as the wind shifted, it has again shut its eyes to realities and stuck its head back in the comfortable sands of legal abstraction. It has been aggressively dictatorial one year and passively acquiescent the next. “Mutabile semper,” the motto should read; or, as Abe Potash might remark, “Minds like changeable silk they got it.”
H. K. 5. iii. 24.
1 Leinster name for the fairies.
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