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PREJUDICES

SECOND SERIES

PREJUDICES

SECOND SERIES

By H. L. MENCKEN

JONATHAN

.11 GOWER STREET

GAPE

LONDON

First published 1921
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

I THE NATIONAL LETTERS, 9

1. Prophets and Their Visions, 9

2. The Answering Fact, 14

3. The Ashes of New England, 18

4. The Ferment Underground, 25

5. In the Literary Abattoir, 32

6. Underlying Causes, 39

7. The Lonesome Artist, 54

8. The Cultural Background, 65

9. Under the Campus Pump, 78

10. The Intolerable Burden, 87

11. Epilogue, 98

II ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY, 102

III THE SAHARA OF THE BOZART, 136

IV THE DIVINE AFFLATUS, 155

V SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION OF A POPULAR VIRTUE, 172

VI EXEUNT OMNES, 180

VII THE ALLIED ARTS, 194

1. On Music-Lovers, 194

2. Opera, 197

3. The Music of To-morrow, 201

4. Tempo di Valse, 204

CONTENTS

5. The Puritan as Artist, 206

6. The Human Face, 206

7. The Cerebral Mime, 208

VIII THE CULT OF HOPE, 211

IX THE DRY MILLENNIUM, 219

1. The Holy War, 219

2. The Lure of Babylon, 222

3. Cupid and Well-Water, 225

4. The Triumph of Idealism, 226

X APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME, 229

1. The Nature of Love, 229

2. The Incomparable Buzzsaw, 236

3. Women as Spectacles, 238

4. Woman and the Artist, 240

5. Martyrs, 243

6. The Burnt Child, 244

7. The Supreme Comedy, 244

8. A Hidden Cause, 245

9. Bad Workmanship, 245

PREJUDICES

SECOND SERIES

PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

I. THE NATIONAL LETTERS

Prophets and Their Visions

IT is convenient to begin, like the gentlemen of
God, with a glance at a text or two. The first,
a short one, is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's
celebrated oration, "The American Scholar," deliv-
ered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge
on August 31st, 1837. Emerson was then thirty-
four years old and almost unknown in his own coun-
try, though he had already published "Nature" and
established his first contacts with Landor and Carlyle.
But "The American Scholar" brought him into in-
stant notice at home, partly as man of letters but more
importantly as seer and prophet, and the fame thus
founded has endured without much diminution, at
all events in New England, to this day. Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes, giving words to what was undoubtedly
the common feeling, hailed the address as the intel-
lectual declaration of independence of the American
people, and. that judgment, amiably passed on by
three generations of pedagogues, still survives in the

'literature books. I quote from the first paragraph:

9

10 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the
learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . . Events, ac-
tions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves.
Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new
age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames
in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the
pole-star for a thousand years?

This, as I say, was in 1837. Thirty-three years
later, in 1870, Walt Whitman echoed the prophecy
in his even more famous "Democratic Vistas." What
he saw in his vision and put into his gnarled and gasp-
ing prose was

a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher
in grade, than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to
cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass
of American morality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new
breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more
than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside
and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congress
radiating, begetting appropriate teachers, schools, man-
ners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what
neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have
hitherto accomplished, and without which this nation will
no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will
stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral char-
acter beneath the political and productive and intellectual
bases of the States.

And out of the vision straightway came the grog-
nostication:

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 11

The promulgation and belief in such a class or order a
new and greater literatus order its possibility, (nay, cer-
tainty,) underlies these entire speculations. . . . Above all
previous lands, a great original literature is sure to become
the .justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole
reliance,) of American democracy.

Thus Whitman in 1870, the time of the first
draft of "Democratic Vistas." He was of the same
mind, and said so, in 1888, four years before his
death. I could bring up texts of like tenor in great
number, from the years before 1837, from those
after 1888, and from every decade between. The
dream of Emerson, though the eloquence of its state-
ment was new and arresting, embodied no novel pro-
jection of the fancy; it merely gave a sonorous W aid-
horn tone to what had been dreamed and said before.
You will find almost the same high hope, the same
exuberant confidence in the essays of the elder Chan-
ning and in the "Lectures on American Literature" of
Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, LL.D., the first native critic
of beautiful letters the primordial tadpole of all our
later Mores, Brownells, Phelpses, Mabies, Brander
Matthewses and other such grave and glittering fish.
Knapp believed, like Whitman long after him, that
the sheer physical grandeur of the New World would
inflame a race of bards to unprecedented utterance.
"What are the Tibers and Scamanders," he demanded,

M *

measured by the Missouri and the Amazon? Or

12 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by the Con-
necticut or the Potomack? Whenever a nation wills
it, prodigies are born." That is to say, prodigies lit-
erary and ineffable as well as purely material prodi-
gies aimed, in his own words, at "the olympick
crown" as well as at mere railroads, ships, wheat-
fields, droves of hogs, factories and money. Nor
were Channing and Knapp the first of the haruspices.
Noah Webster, the lexicographer, who "taught mil-
lions to spell but not one to sin," had seen the early
starlight of the same Golden Age so early as 1789,
as the curious will find by examining his "Dis-
sertations on the English Language," a work
fallen long since into undeserved oblivion. Nor was
Whitman, taking sober second thought exactly a cen-
tury later, the last of them. Out of many brethren
of our own day, extravagantly articulate in print and
among the chautauquas, I choose one not because
his hope is of purest water, but precisely because, like
Emerson, he dilutes it with various discreet where-
ases. He is Van Wyck Brooks, a young man far
more intelligent, penetrating and hospitable to fact
than any of the reigning professors a critic who is
sharply differentiated from them, indeed, by the sim-
ple circumstance that he has information and sense.
Yet this extraordinary Mr. Brooks, in his "Letters
and Leadership," published in 1918, rewrites "The
American Scholar" in terms borrowed almost bodily

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 13

from "Democratic Vistas" that is to say, he
prophesies with Emerson and exults with Whit-
man. First -there is the Emersonian doctrine of the
soaring individual made articulate by freedom and
realizing "the responsibility that lies upon us, each
in the measure of his own gift." And then there is
Whitman's vision of a self -interpretative democracy,
forced into high literary adventures by Joseph Con-
rad's "obscure inner necessity," and so achieving a
"new synthesis adaptable to the unique conditions of
our life." And finally there is the specific prediction,
the grandiose, Adam Forepaugh mirage: "We shall
become a luminous people, dwelling in the light and
sharing our light." . . .

As, I say, the roll of such soothsayers might be
almost endlessly lengthened. There is, in truth,
scarcely a formal discourse upon the national letters
(forgetting, perhaps, Barrett Wendell's sour threnody
upon the New England Aufkldrung) that is without
some touch of this previsional exultation, this confi-
dent hymning of glories to come, this fine assurance
that American literature, in some future always ready
to dawn, will burst into so grand a flowering that his-
tory will cherish its loveliest blooms even above such
salient American gifts to culture as the moving-pic-
ture, the phdnograph, the New Thought and the bi-
cjilojide tablet. If there was ever a dissenter from
the national optimism, in this as in other departments,

14 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

it was surely Edgar Allan Poe without question
the bravest and most original, if perhaps also the
least orderly and judicious, of all the critics
that we have produced. And yet even Poe, despite
his general habit of disgust and dismay, caught
a flash or two of that engaging picture even Poe,
for an instant, in 1846, thought that he saw the
beginnings of a solid and autonomous native litera-
ture, its roots deep in the soil of the republic as you
will discover by turning to his forgotten essay on J. G.
C. Brainard, a thrice-forgotten doggereleer of Jack-
son's time. Poe, of course, was too cautious to let his
imagination proceed to details; one feels that a cer-
tain doubt, a saving peradventure or two, played
about the unaccustomed vision as he beheld it. But,
nevertheless, he unquestionably beheld it. ...

The Answering Fact

Now for the answering fact. How has the issue
replied to these visionaries? It has replied in a way
that is manifestly to the discomfiture of Emerson as a
prophet, to the dismay of Poe as a pessimist disarmed
by transient optimism, and to the utter collapse of
Whitman. We have, as every one knows, produced
no such "new and greater literatus order"* as that
announced by old Walt. We have given a apirig,

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 15

world no books that "radiate," and surely none in-
telligibly comparable to stars and constellations. We
have achieved no prodigies of the first class, and very
few of the second class, and not many of the third and
fourth classes. Our literature, despite several false
starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now
as always, for its respectable mediocrity. Its typi-
cal great man, in our own time, has been Howells, as
its typical great man a generation ago was Lowell,
and two generations ago, Irving. Viewed largely, its
salient character appears as a sort of timorous flac-
cidity, an amiable hollowness. In bulk it grows more
and more formidable, in ease and decorum it makes
undoubted progress, and on the side of mere technic,
of the, bald capacity to write, it shows an ever-widen-
ing competence. But when one proceeds from such
agencies and externals to the intrinsic substance, to
the creative passion within, that substance quickly
reveals itself as thin and watery, and that passion
fades to something almost puerile. In all that mass
of suave and often highly diverting writing there is
no visible movement toward a distinguished and sin-

gular excellence, a signal national quality, a ripe and
stimulating flavor, or, indeed, toward any other de-
scribable goal. What one sees is simply a general
irresolution, a pervasive superficiality. There is
no^^ber grappling with fundamentals, but only
a shy Sporting on the surface; there is not even

16 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

any serious approach, such as Whitman dreamed of,
to the special experiences and emergencies of the
American people. When one turns -to any other
national literature to Russian literature, say, or
French, or German or Scandinavian one is conscious
immediately of a definite attitude toward the primary
mysteries of existence, the unsolved and ever-fascinat-
ing problems at the bottom of human life, and of a
definite preoccupation with some of them, and a defi-
nite way of translating their challenge into drama.
These attitudes and preoccupations raise a literature
above mere poetizing and tale-telling; they give it dig-
nity and importance; above all, they give it national
character. But it is precisely here that the literature
of America, and especially the later literature, is most
colorless and inconsequential. As if paralyzed by
the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of
whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it
evades all resolute and honest dealing with what,
after all, must be every healthy literature's elemen-
tary materials. One is conscious of no brave and
noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for
intellectual and spiritual -adventure, of no organized
determination to think things out. What is there is a
highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a blood-
less respectability, a submergence of mattes in man-
ner in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring
quality of German painting and English music.

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 17

It was so in the great days and it is so to-day.
There has always been hope and there has always
been failure. Even the most optimistic prophets
of future glories have been united, at all times,
in their discontent with the here and now. "The
mind of this country," said Emerson, speaking
of what was currently visible in 1837, "is taught to
aim at low objects. . . . There is no work for any
but the decorous and the complaisant. . . . Books
are written ... by men of talent . . . who start
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from
their own sight of principles." And then, turning
to the way out: "The office of the scholar (i.e., of
Whitman's 'literatus') is to cheer, to raise and to
guide* men by showing them facts amid appearances."
Whitman himself, a full generation later, found that
office still unfilled. "Our fundamental want to-day
in the United States," he said, "with closest, amplest
reference to present conditions, and to the future, is
of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native
authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade,
than any yet known" and so on, as I have already
quoted him. And finally, to make an end of the
prophets, there is Brooks, with nine-tenths of his
book given over, not to his prophecy it is crowded,
indeed,. into the last few pages but to a somewhat
hswy mourning over the actual scene before him.
On the side of letters, the aesthetic side, the side of

18 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

ideas, we present to the world at large, he says, "the
spectacle of a vast, undifferentiated herd of good-
humored animals" Knights of Pythias, Presbyte-
rians, standard model Ph.D.'s, readers of the Satur-
day Evening Post, admirers of Richard Harding Davis
and O. Henry, devotees of Hamilton Wright Mabie's
"white list" of books, members of the Y. M. C. A. or
the Drama League, weepers at chautauquas, wearers
of badges, 100 per cent, patriots, children of God.
Poe I pass over; I shall turn to him again later
on. Nor shall I repeat the parrotings of Emer-
son and Whitman in the jeremiads of their in-
numerable heirs and assigns. What they all estab-
lish is what is already obvious : that American think-
ing, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as
when it concerns itself with religious dogma or po-
litical theory, is extraordinarily timid and superfi-
cial that it evades the genuinely serious problems of
life and art as if they were stringently taboo that
the outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always
the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of
originality, but merely those of an emasculated and
often very trashy dilettantism.

3

The Ashes of New England

The current scene is surely depressing enoagk.
What one observes is a literature in three lay-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 19

ers, and each inordinately doughy and unin-
spiring each almost without flavor or savor. It is
hard to say, with much critical plausibility, which
layer deserves to be called the upper, but for deco-
rum's sake the choice may be fixed upon that which
meets with the approval of the reigning Lessings.
This is the layer of the novels of the late Howells,
Judge Grant, Alice Brown and the rest of the dwin-
dling survivors of New England Kultur, of the brittle,
academic poetry of Woodberry and the elder Johnson,
of the tea-party essays of Crothers, Miss Repplier and
company, and of the solemn, highly judicial, cor-
oner's inquest criticism of More, Brownell, Babbitt
and their imitators. Here we have manner, undoubt-
edly; The thing is correctly done; it is never crude or
gross; there is in it a faint perfume of college-town
society. But when this highly refined and attenuated
manner is allowed for what remains is next to nothing.
One never remembers a character in the novels of
these aloof and de- Americanized Americans; one
never encounters an idea in their essays; one never
carries away a line out of their poetry. It is liter-
ature as an academic exercise for talented gramma-
rians, almost as a genteel recreation for ladies and
gentlemen of fashion the exact equivalent, in the
field of. letters, of eighteenth century painting and Ger-

Augenmusik.
What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual

20 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through
it, and characterizing the work of almost every man
and woman producing it, there is an unecapable sug-
gestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts
as such of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for
good citizens only when some ulterior and superior
purpose is carried into them. This purpose, natu-
rally enough, most commonly shows a moral tinge.
The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with
lofty thoughts not to give it joy, but to give it a
grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The es-
say is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of
the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means
of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely
to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man. The Pur-
itan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feel-
ing. He has a taste for good form; he responds to
style; he is even capable of something approaching a
purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic
emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief
business in life: the sober consideration of the all-
important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation,
a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely
have traffic with it only when it is broken to moral
uses in other words, when its innocence is pumped
out of it, and it is purged of gusto. It is precisely
this gusto that one misses in all the work of the New
England school, and in all the work of the formal

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 21

schools that derive from it. One observes in such a
fellow as Dr. Henry Van Dyke an excellent specimen
of the whole clan. He is, in his way, a genuine artist.
He has a hand for pretty verses. He wields a facile
rhetoric. He shows, in indiscreet moments, a touch
of imagination. But all the while he remains a sound
Presbyterian, with one eye on the devil. He is a
Presbyterian first and an artist second, which is just
as comfortable as trying to be a Presbyterian first and
a chorus girl second. To such a man it must in-
evitably appear that a Moliere, a Wagner, a Goethe
or a Shakespeare was more than a little bawdy.

The criticism that supports this decaying caste of
literary Brahmins is grounded almost entirely upon
ethical criteria. You will spend a long while going
through the works of such typical professors as More,
Phelps, Boynton, Burton, Perry, Brownell and Bab-
bitt before ever you encounter a purely aesthetic judg-
ment upon an aesthetic question. It is almost as if
a man estimating daffodils should do it in terms of
artichokes. Phelps' whole body of "we church-
goers" criticism the most catholic and tolerant, it
may be said in passing, that the faculty can show
consists chiefly of a plea for correctness, and particu-
larly for moral correctness; he never gets very far
from "the axiom of the moral law." Brownell ar-
gusa eloquently for standards that would bind an
imaginative author as tightly as a Sunday-school su-

22 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

perintendent is bound by the Ten Commandments and
the Mann Act. Sherman tries to save Shakespeare
for the right-thinking by proving that he- was an Iowa
Methodist a member of his local Chamber of Com-
merce, a contemner of Reds, an advocate of democ-
racy and the League of Nations, a patriotic dollar-a-
year-man during the Armada scare. Elmer More de-
votes himself, year in and year out, to denouncing the
Romantic movement, i. e., the effort to emancipate
the artist from formulae and categories, and so make
him free to dance with arms and legs. And Babbitt,
to make an end, gives over his days and his nights to
deploring Rousseau's anarchistic abrogation of "the
veto power" over the imagination, leading to such
"wrongness" in both art and life that it threatens "to
wreck civilization." In brief, the alarms of school-
masters. Not many of them deal specifically with the
literature that is in being. It is too near to be quite
nice. To More or Babbitt only death can atone for
the primary offense of the artist. But what they
preach nevertheless has its echoes contemporaneously,
and those echoes, in the main, are woefully falsetto.
I often wonder what sort of picture of These States is
conjured up by foreigners who read, say, Crothers,
Van Dyke, Babbitt, the later Winston Churchill, and
the old maids of the Freudian suppression, school.
How can such a foreigner, moving in those d^flip,
asthmatic mists, imagine such phenomena as Hoose-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 23

velt, Billy Sunday, Bryan, the Becker case, the I. W.
W., Newport, Palm Beach, the University of Chicago,
Chicago itself the whole, gross, glittering, exces-
sively dynamic, infinitely grotesque, incredibly stu-
pendous drama of American life?

As I have said, it is not often that the ordentlichen
Professoren deign to notice contemporary writers,
even of their own austere kidney. In all the Shel-
burne Essays there is none on Howells, or on
Churchill, or on Mrs. Wharton; More seems to think
of American literature as expiring with Longfellow
and Donald G. Mitchell. He has himself hinted that
in the department of criticism of criticism there enters
into the matter something beyond mere aloof ignor-
ance. "I soon learned (as editor of the pre-Bolshevik
Nation) 9 " he says, "that it was virtually impossible to
get fair consideration for a book written by a scholar
not connected with a university from a reviewer so
connected." This class consciousness, however,
should not apply to artists, who are admittedly in-
ferior to professors, and it surely does not show itself
in such men as Phelps and Spingarn, who seem to be
very eager to prove that they are not professorial.
Yet Phelps, in the course of a long work on the novel,
pointedly omits all mention of such men as Dreiser,
and Spingana, as the aforesaid Brooks has said, "ap-
pears to be less inclined even than the critics with
wfiom* he is theoretically at war to play an active,

24 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

public part in the secular conflict of darkness and
light." When one comes to the Privat-Dozenten there
is less remoteness, but what takes the place of it is
almost as saddening. To Sherman and Percy Boyn-
ton the one aim of criticism seems to be the enforce-
ment of correctness in Emerson's phrase, the up-
holding of "some great decorum, some fetish of a
government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or
man" e. g., Puritanism, democracy, monogamy, the
League of Nations, the Wilsonian piffle. Even among
the critics who escape the worst of this schoolmaster-
ing frenzy there is some touch of the heavy "culture"
of the provincial schoolma'm. For example, con-
sider Clayton Hamilton, M.A., vice-president of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters. Here are the
tests he proposes for dramatic critics, i. e., for gentle-
men chiefly employed in reviewing such characteristic
American compositions as the Ziegfeld Follies, "Up
in Mabel's Room," "Ben-Hur" and "The Witching
Hour":

1. Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of
Amiens?

2. Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by moonlight?

3. Have you ever walked with whispers into the hushed
presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini?

What could more brilliantly evoke an image of the
eternal Miss Birch, blue veil flying and Baedeker* in

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 25

hand, plodding along faithfully through the intermin-
able corridors and catacombs of the Louvre, the while
bands are playing across the river, and young bucks
in three-gallon hats are sparking the gals, and the
Jews and harlots uphold the traditions of French hig
leef at Longchamps, and American deacons are
frisked and debauched up on martyrs' hill? The
banality of it is really too exquisite to be borne; the
lack of humor is almost that of a Fifth avenue divine.
One seldom finds in the pronunciamentoes of these
dogged professors, indeed, any trace of either Attic
or Gallic salt. When they essay to be jocose, the re-
sult is usually simply an elephantine whimsicality,
by the chautauqua out of the Atlantic Monthly. Their
satire is mere ill-nature. One finds it difficult to be-
lieve that they have ever read Lewes, or Hazlitt, or,
above all, Saintsbury. I often wonder, in fact, how
Saintsbury would fare, an unknown man, at the hands
of, say, Brownell or More. What of his iconoclastic
gayety, his boyish weakness for tweaking noses and
pulling whiskers, his obscene delight in slang? . . .

4
The Ferment Underground

So much for the top layer. The bottom layer is
given over to the literature of Greenwich Village, and
by Greenwich Village, of course, I mean the whole of

26 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

the advanced wing in letters, whatever the scene of its
solemn declarations of independence and forlorn
hopes. Miss Amy Lowell is herself a fully-equipped
and automobile Greenwich Village, domiciled in Bos-
ton amid the crumbling gravestones of the New Eng-
land intelligentsia, but often in waspish joy-ride
through the hinterland. Vachel Lindsay, with his pil-
grim's staff, is another. There is a third in Chicago,
with Poetry: A Magazine of Verse as its Exhibit A;
it is, in fact, the senior of the Village fornenst Wash-
ington Square. Others you will find in far-flung fac-
tory towns, wherever there is a Little Theater, and a
couple of local Synges and Chekovs to supply its
stage. St. Louis, before Zoe Akins took flight, had
the busiest of all these Greenwiches, and the most in-
teresting. What lies under the whole movement is
the natural revolt of youth against the pedagogical
Prussianism of the professors. The oppression is ex-
treme, and so the rebellion is extreme. Imagine a
sentimental young man of the provinces, awaking one
morning to the somewhat startling discovery that he
is full of the divine afflatus, and nominated by the
hierarchy of hell to enrich the literature of his father-
land. He seeks counsel and aid. He finds, on con-
sulting the official treatises on that literature, that its
greatest poet was Longfellow. He is warned, reading
More and Babbitt, that the literatus who lets feeling
get into his compositions is a psychic fornicator, and

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 27

under German influences. He has formal notice from
Sherman that Puritanism is the lawful philosophy of
the country, -and that any dissent from it is treason.
He gets the news, plowing through the New York
Times Book Review, the Nation (so far to the left in
its politics, but hugging the right so desperately in
letters!) the Bookman, the Atlantic and the rest, that
the salient artists of the living generation are such
masters as Robert Underwood Johnson, Owen Wister,
James Lane Allen, George E. Woodberry, Hamlin
Garland, William Roscoe Thayer and Augustus
Thomas, with polite bows to Margaret Deland, Mary
Johnston and Ellen Glasgow. It slowly dawns upon
him that Robert W. Chambers is an academician and
Theodore Dreiser isn't, that Brian Hooker is and
George Sterling isn't, that Henry Sydnor Harrison is
and James Branch Cabell isn't, that "Chimmie Fad-
den" Townsend is and Sherwood Anderson isn't.

Is it any wonder that such a young fellow, after one
or two sniffs of that prep-school fog, swings so vastly
backward that one finds him presently in corduroy
trousers .and a velvet jacket, hammering furiously
upon a pine table in a Macdougal street cellar, his
mind full of malicious animal magnetism against even
so amiable an old maid as Howells, and his discourse
full of insane hair-splittings about vers libre, futur-
ism, spectrism, vorticism, Expressionismus, helioga-
balisme? The thing, in truth, is in the course of na-

28 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

ture. The Spaniards who were outraged by the Pal-
merism of Torquemada did not become members of
the Church of England; they became atheists. The
American colonists, in revolt against a bad king, did
not set up a good king; they set up a democracy, and
so gave every honest man a chance to become a rogue
on his own account. Thus the young literatus, emerg-
ing from the vacuum of Ohio or Arkansas. An early
success, as we shall see, tends to halt and moderate
him. He finds that, after all, there is still a place for
him, a sort of asylum for such as he, not over-popu-
lated or very warmly-heated, but nevertheless quite
real. But if his sledding at the start is hard, if the
corrective birch finds him while he is still tender,
then he goes, as Andrew Jackson would say, the whole
hog, and another voice is added to the raucous bellow-
ing of the literary Reds.

I confess that the spectacle gives me some joy, de-
spite the fact that the actual output of the Village is
seldom worth noticing. What commonly engulfs and
spoils the Villagers is their concern with mere tech-
nique. Among them, it goes without saying, are a
great many frauds poets whose yearning to write is
unaccompanied by anything properly describable as
capacity, dramatists whose dramas are simply Schnitz-
ler and well-water, workers in prose* fiction who
gravitate swiftly and inevitably to the machine-made
merchandise of the cheap magazines in brief,

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 29

American equivalents of the bogus painters of the
BouP Mich'. These pretenders, having no ideas, nat-
urally try to make the most of forms. Half the wars
in the Village are over form; content is taken for
granted, or forgotten altogether. The extreme left-
ists, in fact, descend to a meaningless gibberish, both
in prose and in verse; it is their last defiance to in-
tellectualism. This childish concentration upon ex-
ternals unfortunately tends to debauch the small mi-
nority that is of more or less genuine parts; the good
are pulled in by the bad. As a result, the Village
produces nothing that justifies all the noise it makes.
I have yet to hear of a first-rate book coming out of
it, or a short story of arresting quality, or even a
poem of any solid distinction. As one of the edi-
tors of a magazine which specializes in the work of
new authors I am in an exceptional position to report.
Probably nine-tenths of the stuff written in the dark
dens and alleys south of the arch comes to my desk
soon or late, and I go through all of it faithfully. It
is, in the overwhelming main, jejune and imitative.
The prose is quite without distinction, either in mat-
ter or in manner. The verse seldom gets beyond a
hollow audaciousness, not unlike that of cubist paint-
ing. It is not often, indeed, that even personality is
in it; all of the Villagers seem to write alike. "Un-
less one is an expert in some detective method," said a
recent writer in Poetry, "one is at a loss to assign cor-

30 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

rectly the ownership of much free verse that is, if
one plays fairly and refuses to look at the signature
until one has ventured a guess. It is. difficult, for
instance, to know whether Miss Lowell is writing Mr.
Bynner's verse, or whether he is writing hers."
Moreover, this monotony keeps to a very low level.
There is no poet in the movement who has produced
anything even remotely approaching the fine lyrics
of Miss Reese, Miss Teasdale and John McClure, and
for all its war upon the cliche it can show nothing to
equal the cliche-free beauty of Robert Loveman's
"Rain Song." In the drama the Village has gone
further. In Eugene O'Neill, Rita Wellman and Zoe
Akins it offers dramatists who are obviously many
cuts above the well-professored mechanicians who
pour out of Prof. Dr. Baker's Ibsenfabrik at Cam-
bridge. But here we must probably give the credit,
not to any influence residing within the movement
itself, but to mere acts of God. Such pieces as
O'Neill's one-acters, Miss Wellman's "The Gentile
Wife" and Miss Akins' extraordinary "Papa" lie
quite outside the Village scheme of things. ^ There is
no sign of formal revolt in them. They are simply
first-rate work, done miraculously in a third-rate land.
But if the rebellion is thus sterile of direct results,
and, in more than one aspect, fraudulent and ridicu-
lous, it is at all events an evidence of something not to

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 31

be disregarded, and that something is the gradual for-
mulation of a challenge to the accepted canons in
letters and to -the accepted canon lawyers. The first
hoots come from a tatterdemalion horde of rogues
and vagabonds without the gates, but soon or late,
let us hope, they will be echoed in more decorous
quarters, and with much greater effect. The Village,
in brief, is an earnest that somewhere or other new
seeds are germinating. Between the young tutor who
launches into letters with imitations of his seminary
chief's imitations of Agnes Repplier's imitations of
Charles Lamb, and the young peasant who tries to get
his honest exultations into free verse there can be
no hesitant choice: the peasant is, by long odds, the
sounder artist, and, what is more, the sounder Amer-
ican artist. Even the shy and somewhat stagey carn-
ality that characterizes the Village has its high sym-
bolism and its profound uses. It proves that, despite
repressions unmatched in civilization in modern
times, there is still a sturdy animality in American
youth, and hence good health. The poet hugging his
Sonia in a Washington square beanery, and so giving
notice to all his world that he is a devil of a fellow, is
at least a better man than the emasculated stripling in
a Y. M. C. A. gospel-mill, pumped dry of all his
natural appetites and the vacuum filled with double-
entry book-keeping, business economics and auto-

32 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

erotism. In so foul a nest of imprisoned and fer-
menting sex as the United States, plain fornication
becomes a mark of relative decency.

In the Literary Abattoir

But the theme is letters, not wickedness. The
upper and lower layers have been surveyed.
There remains the middle layer, the thickest and
perhaps the most significant of the three. By the
middle layer I mean the literature that fills the maga-
zines and burdens the book-counters in the depart-
ment-stores the literature adorned by such artists
as Richard Harding Davis, Rex Beach, Emerson
Hough, 0. Henry, James Whitcomb Riley, Augustus
Thomas, Robert W. Chambers, Henry Sydnor Har-
rison, Owen Johnson, Cyrus Townsend Brady, Irvin
Cobb and Mary Roberts Rinehart in brief, the lit-
erature that pays like a bucket-shop or a soap-factory,
and is thus thoroughly American. At the bottom this
literature touches such depths of banality that it would
be difficult to match it in any other country. The
"inspirational" and patriotic essays of Dr. Frank
Crane, Orison Sweet Marden, Porter Emerson
Browne, Gerald Stanley Lee, E. S. Martin, Ella
Wheeler Wilcox and the Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight
Hillis, the novels of Harold Bell "Wright, Ele'anor H.

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 33

Porter and Gene Stratton-Porter, and the mechanical
sentimentalities in prose and verse that fill the cheap
fiction magazines this stuff has a native quality
that is as unmistakable as that of Mother's Day, Billy-
Sundayism or the Junior Order of United American
Mechanics. It is the natural outpouring of a naive
and yet half barbarous people, full of delight in a
few childish and inaccurate ideas. But it would be
a grave error to assume that the whole of the liter-
ature of the middle layer is of the same infantile
quality. On the contrary, a great deal of it for ex-
ample, the work of Mrs. Rinehart, and that of Corra
Harris, Gouverneur Morris, Harold MacGrath and the
late 0. Henry shows an unmistakably technical ex-
cellence, and even a certain civilized sophistication
in point of view. Moreover, this literature is con-
stantly graduating adept professors into something
finer, as witness Booth Tarkington, Zona Gale, Ring
W. Lardner and Montague Glass. S. L. Clemens
came out of forty years ago. Nevertheless, its gen-
eral tendency is distinctly in the other direction. It
seduces by the power of money, and by the power of
great acclaim no less. One constantly observes the
collapse and surrender of writers who started out with
aims far above that of the magazine nabob. I could
draw up a long, long list of such victims : Henry Mil-
ner Rideout, Jack London, Owen Johnson, Chester
Bailey Fernald, Hamlin Garland, Will Levington

34 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Comfort, Stephen French Whitman, James Hopper,
Harry Leon Wilson, and so on. They had their fore-
runner, in the last generation, in Bret Harte. It is,
indeed, a characteristic American phenomenon for a
young writer to score a success with novel and meri-
torious work, and then to yield himself to the best-
seller fever, and so disappear down the sewers. Even
the man who struggles to emerge again is commonly
hauled back. For example, Louis Joseph Vance,
Rupert Hughes, George Bronson-Howard, and, to go
back a few years, David Graham Phillips and Elbert
Hubbard all men flustered by high aspiration, and
yet all pulled down by the temptations below. Even
Frank Norris showed signs of yielding. The pull is
genuinely powerful. Above lies not only isolation,
but also a dogged and malignant sort of opposition.
Below, as Morris has frankly admitted, there is the
place at Aiken, the motor-car, babies, money in the
bank, and the dignity of an important man.

It is a commonplace of the envious to put all the
blame upon the Saturday Evening Post, for in its
pages many of the Magdalens of letters are to be
found, and out of its bulging coffers comes much of
the lure. But this is simply blaming the bull for the
sins of all the cows. The Post, as a matter of fact,
is a good deal less guilty than such magazines as the
Cosmopolitan, Hearst's, McClure's and the Metropoli-
tan, not to mention the larger women's magazines. In

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 35

the Post one often discerns an effort to rise above the
level of shoe-drummer fiction. It is edited by a man
who, almost alone among editors of the great periodi-
cals of the country, is himself a writer of respectable
skill. It has brought out (after lesser publications
unearthed them) a member of authors of very solid
talents, notably Glass, Lardner and E. W. Howe. It
has been extremely hospitable to men not immediately
comprehensible to the mob, for example, Dreiser and
Hergesheimer. Most of all, it has avoided the Bar-
num-like exploitation of such native bosh-mongers as
Crane, Hillis and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and of such
exotic mountebanks as D'Annunzio, Hall Gaine and
Maeterlinck. In brief, the Post is a great deal better
than ever Greenwich Village and the Cambridge cam-
pus are disposed to admit. It is the largest of all the
literary Hog Islands, but it is by no means the worst.
Appealing primarily to the great masses of right-
thinking and unintelligent Americans, it must neces-
sarily print a great deal of preposterous tosh, but it
flavors the mess with not a few things of a far higher
quality, and at its worst it is seldom downright idiotic.
In many of the other great magazines one finds stuff
that it would be difficult to describe in any other
words. It is gaudily romantic, furtively sexual, and
full of . rubber-stamp situations and personages a
sort of amalgam of the worst drivel of Marie Corelli,
Elinor ' Glyn, E. Phillips Oppenheim, William Le

36 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Quex and Hall Caine. This is the literature of the
middle layer the product of the national Rockefel-
lers and Duponts of letters. This is the sort of thing
that the young author of facile pen is encouraged to
manufacture. This is the material of the best sellers
and the movies.

Of late it is the movies that have chiefly pro-
voked its composition : the rewards they offer are even
greater than those held out by the commercial book-
publishers and the train-boy magazines. The point
of view of an author responsive to such rewards was
recently set forth very naively in the Authors 9 League
Bulletin. This author undertook, in a short article,
to refute the fallacies of an unknown who ventured
to protest against the movies on the ground that they
called only for bald plots, elementary and generally
absurd, and that all the rest of a sound writer's equip-
ment "the artistry of his style, the felicity of his apt
expression, his subtlety and thoroughness of observa-
tion and comprehension and sympathy, the illuminat-
ing quality of his analysis of motive and character,
even the fundamental skillful development of. the bare
plot" was disdained by the Selznicks, Goldfishes,
Zukors and other such entrepreneurs, and by the over-
whelming majority of their customers. I quote from
the reply:

There are some conspicuous word merchants who deal in

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 37

the English language, hut the general public doesn't clamor
for their wares. They write for the "thinking class." The
elite, the discriminating. As a rule, they scorn the crass
commercialism of the magazines and movies and such catch-
penny devices. However, literary masterpieces live because
they have been and will be read, not by the few, but by the
many. That was true in the time of Homer, and even to-day
the first move made by an editor when he receives a manu-
script, or a gentle reader when he buys a book, or a T. B. M.
when he sinks into an orchestra chair is to look around for
John Henry Plot. If Mr. Plot is too long delayed in arriv-
ing or doesn't come at all, the editor usually sends regrets,
the reader yawns and the tired business man falls asleep.
It's a sad state of affairs and awful tough on art, but it can't
be helped.

Observe the lofty scorn of mere literature the su-
perior irony at the expense of everything beyond the
bumping of boobs. Note the sound judgment as to
the function and fate of literary masterpieces, e. g. 9
"Endymion," "The Canterbury Tales," "Faust," "Ty-
phoon." Give your eye to the chaste diction "John
Henry Plot," "T. B. M.," "awful tough," and so on.
No doubt you will at once assume that this curious
counterblast to literature was written by some former
bartender now engaged in composing scenarios for
Pearl White and Theda Bara. But it was not. It
was written and signed by the president of the Au-
thors' League of America.

Here we have, unconsciously revealed, the secret

38 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

of the depressing badness of what may be called the
staple fiction of the country the sort of stuff that is
done by the Richard Harding Davises, Rex Beaches,
Houghs, McCutcheons, and their like, male and fe-
male. The worse of it is not that it is addressed pri-
marily to shoe-drummers and shop-girls; the worst of
it is that it is written by authors who are, to all in-
tellectual intents and purposes, shoe-drummers and
shop-girls. American literature, even on its higher
levels, seldom comes out of the small and lonesome
upper classes of the people. An American author
with traditions behind him and an environment about
him comparable to those, say, of George Moore, or
Hugh Walpole, or E. F. Benson is and always has
been relatively rare. On this side of the water the
arts, like politics and religion, are chiefly in the keep-
ing of persons of obscure origin, defective education
and elemental tastes. Even some of the most violent
upholders of the New England superstition are aliens
to the actual New England heritage; one discovers,
searching "Who's Who in America," that they are re-
cent fugitives from the six-day sock and saleratus
Kultur of the cow and hog States. The artistic mer-
chandise produced by liberated yokels of that sort is
bound to show its intellectual newness, which is to say,
its deficiency in civilized culture and sophistication.
It is, on the plane of letters, precisely what evangeli-
cal Christianity is on the plane of religion, to wit, the

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 39

product of ill-infbrmed, emotional and more or less
pushing and oafish folk. Life, to such Harvardized
peasants, is jnot a mystery; it is something absurdly
simple, to be described with surety and in a few words.
If they set up as critics their criticism is all a matter of
facile labeling, chiefly ethical; find the pigeon-hole,
and the rest is easy. If they presume to discuss the
great problems of human society, they are equally
ready with their answers: draw up and pass a harsh
enough statute, and the corruptible will straightway
put on incorruption. And if, fanned by the soft breath
of beauty, they go into practice as creative artists, as
poets, as dramatists, as novelists, then one learns from
them that we inhabit a country that is the model and
despair of other states, that its culture is coextensive
with human culture and enlightenment, and that every
failure to find happiness under that culture is the
result of sin.

6
Underlying Causes

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American
fiction perhaps the one character that sets it off
sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary
fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate
organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy
of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and ele-

40 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

mental desires yielding himself gladly to his environ-
ment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civili-
zation, passes for success. To get on: this is the
aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is
the tiling to be avoided. I describe the optimistic,
the inspirational, the Authors' League, the popular
magazine, the peculiarly American school. In char-
acter creation its masterpiece is the advertising agent
who, by devising some new and super-imbecile boob-
trap, puts his hook-and-eye factory "on the map,"
ruins all other factories, marries the daughter of his
boss, and so ends as an eminent man. Obviously, the
drama underlying such fiction what Mr. Beach
would call its John Henry Plot is false drama, Sun-
day-school drama, puerile and disgusting drama. It
is the sort of thing that awakens a response only in men
who are essentially unimaginative, timorous and de-
graded in brief, in democrats, bagmen, yahoos.
The man of reflective habit cannot conceivably take
any passionate interest in the conflicts it deals with.
He doesn't want to marry the daughter of the owner of
the hook-and-eye factory; he would probably burn
down the factory itself if it ever came into His hands.
What interests this man is the far more poignant and
significant conflict between a salient individual and
the harsh and meaningless fiats of destiny, the unin-
telligible mandates and vagaries of God. flis hero

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 41

is not one who yields and wins, but one who resists
and fails.

Most of these conflicts, of course, are internal, and
hence do not make themselves visible in the overt
melodrama of the Beaches, Davises and Chamberses.
A superior man's struggle in the world is not with
exterior lions, trusts, margraves, policemen, rivals in
love, German spies, radicals and tornadoes, but with
the obscure, atavistic impulses within him the im-
pulses, weaknesses and limitations that war with his
notion of what life should be. Nine times out of ten
he succumbs. Nine times out of ten he must yield to
the dead hand. Nine times out of ten his aspiration
is almost infinitely above his achievement. The re-
sult is that we see him sliding downhill his ideals
breaking up, his hope petering out, his character in
decay. Character in decay is thus the theme of the
great bulk of superior fiction. One has it in Dos-
toievsky, in Balzac, in Hardy, in Conrad, in Flaubert,
in Zola, in TurgeniefF, in Goethe, in Sudermann, in
Bennett, and, to come home, in Dreiser. In nearly
all first-rate novels the hero is defeated. In perhaps
a majority he is completely destroyed. The hero of
the inferior i. e., the typically American novel en-
gages in no such doomed and fateful combat. His
conflict is not with the inexplicable ukases of destiny,
the limitations of his own strength, the dead hand

42 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

upon him, but simply with the superficial desires of
his elemental fellow men. He thus has a fair chance
of winning and in bad fiction that chance is always
converted into a certainty. So he marries the daugh-
ter of the owner of the factory and eventually gobbles
the factory itself. His success gives thrills to per-
sons who can imagine no higher aspiration. He em-
bodies their optimism, as the other hero embodies the
pessimism of more introspective and idealistic men.
He is the protagonist of that great majority which is
so inferior that it is quite unconscious of its in-
feriority.

It is this superficiality of the inferior man, it seems
to me, that is the chief hallmark of the American
novel. Whenever one encounters a novel that rises
superior to it the thing takes on a subtle but unmistak-
able air of foreignness for example, Frank Norris'
"Vandover and the Brute," Hergesheimer's "The Lay
Anthony" and Miss Gather's "My Antonia," or, to
drop to short stories, Stephen Crane's "The Blue
Hotel" and Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan Frome." The
short story is commonly regarded, at least t by Amer-
ican critics, as a preeminently American form; there
are even patriots who argue that Bret Harte invented
it. It meets very accurately, in fact, certain charac-
teristic demands of the American temperament: it is
simple, economical and brilliantly effective. Yet the

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 43

same hollowness that marks the American novel also
marks the American short story. Its great masters,
in late years, have been such cheese-mongers as Davis,
with his servant-girl romanticism, and 0. Henry, with
his smoke-room and variety show smartness. In the
whole canon of 0. Henry's work you will not find a
single recognizable human character; his people are
unanimously marionettes; he makes Mexican bri-
gands, Texas cowmen and New York cracksmen talk
the same highly ornate Broadwayese. The successive
volumes of Edward J. O'Brien's "Best Short-Story"
series throw a vivid light upon the feeble estate of the
art in the land. O'Brien, though his aesthetic judg-
ments are ludicrous, at least selects stories that are
thoroughly representative; his books are trade suc-
cesses because the crowd is undoubtedly with him.
He has yet to discover a single story that even the
most naive professor would venture to mention in the
same breath with Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Dark-
ness," or Andrieff's "Silence," or Sudermann's "Das
Sterbelied," or the least considerable tale by Anatole
France. In many of the current American makers of
magazine short stories for example, Gouverneur
Morris one observes, as I have said, a truly admir-
able technical skill. They have mastered the externals
of the form. They know how to get their effects. But
in content their work is as hollow as a jug. Such stuff

44 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

has no imaginable relation to life as men live it in the
world. It is as artificial as the heroic strut and ro-
mantic eyes of a moving-picture actor.

I have spoken of the air of foreignness that clings
to certain exceptional American compositions. In
part it is based upon a psychological trick upon the
surprise which must inevitably seize upon any one
who encounters a decent piece of writing in so vast a
desert of mere literacy. But in part it is grounded
soundly enough on the facts. The native author of
any genuine force and originality is almost invariably
found to be under strong foreign influences, either
English or Continental. It was so in the earliest
days. Freneau, the poet of the Revolution, was thor-
oughly French in blood and traditions. Irving, as
H. R. Haweis has said, "took to England as a duck
takes to water," and was in exile seventeen years.
Cooper, with the great success of "The Last of the Mo-
hicans" behind him, left the country in disgust and
was gone for seven years. Emerson, Bryant, Lowell,
Hawthorne and even Longfellow kept their eyes
turned across the water; Emerson, in facty was little
more than an importer and popularizer of German
and French ideas. Bancroft studied in Germany;
Prescott, like Irving, was enchanted by Spain. Poe,
unable to follow the fashion, invented mythical travels
to save his face to France, to Germany, to the Greek
isles. The Civil War revived the national conscious-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 45

ness enormously, but it did not halt the movement of
emigres. Henry James, in the seventies, went to
England, Bierce and Bret Harte followed him, and
even Mark Twain, absolutely American though he
was, was forever pulling up stakes and setting out for
Vienna, Florence or London. Only poverty tied
Whitman to the soil; his audience, for many years,
was chiefly beyond the water, and there, too, he often
longed to be. This distaste for the national scene is
often based upon a genuine alienness. The more, in-
deed, one investigates the ancestry of Americans who
have won distinction in the fine arts, the more one
discovers tempting game for the critical Know Noth-
ings. Whitman was half Dutch, Harte was half Jew,
Poe was partly German, James had an Irish grand-
father, Howells was largely Irish and German,
Dreiser is German and Hergesheimer is Pennsylvania
Dutch. Fully a half of the painters discussed in
John C. van Dyke's "American Painting and Its Tra-
dition" were of mixed blood, with the Anglo-Saxon
plainly recessive. And of the five poets singled out
for encomium by Miss Lowell in "Tendencies in Mod-
ern American Poetry" one is a Swede, two are partly
German, one was educated in the German language,
and three of the five exiled themselves to England as
soon as they got out of their nonage. The exiles are
of all sorts: Frank Harris, Vincent O'Sullivan, Ezra

\

Pound, Herman Scheffauer, T. S. Eliot, Henry B.

46 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Fuller, Stuart Merrill, Edith Wharton. They go to
England, France, Germany, Italy anywhere to es-
cape. Even at home the literatus is perceptibly for-
eign in his mien. If he lies under the New England
tradition he is furiously colonial more English than
the English. If he turns to revolt, he is apt to put
on a French hat and a Russion red blouse. The Little
Review, the organ of the extreme wing of revokes, is
so violently exotic that several years ago, during the
plupatriotic days of the war, some of its readers pro-
tested. With characteristic lack of humor it replied
with an American number and two of the stars of
that number bore the fine old Anglo-Saxon names of
Ben Hecht and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

This tendency of American literature, the moment
it begins to show enterprise, novelty and significance,
to radiate an alien smell is not an isolated phenome-
non. The same smell accompanies practically all
other sorts of intellectual activity in the republic.
Whenever one hears that a new political theory is in
circulation, or a scientific heresy, or a movement to-
ward rationalism in religion, it is always safe to guess
that some discontented stranger or other has a hand
in it. In the newspapers and on the floor of Con-
gress a new heterodoxy is always denounced forth-
with as a product of foreign plotting, and here public
opinion undoubtedly supports both the press and the
politicians, and with good reason. The native culture

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 47

of the country that is, the culture of the low caste
Anglo-Saxons who preserve the national tradition is
almost completely incapable of producing ideas. It
is a culture that roughly corresponds to what the cul-
ture of England would be if there were no universi-
ties over there, and no caste of intellectual individu-
alists and no landed aristocracy in other words, if
the tone of the national thinking were set by the non-
conformist industrials, the camorra of Welsh and
Scotch political scoundrels, and the town and coun-
try mobs. As we shall see, the United States
has not yet produced anything properly describable
as an aristocracy, and so there is no impediment to
the domination of the inferior orders. Worse, the
Anglo-Saxon strain, second-rate at the start, has
tended to degenerate steadily to lower levels in New
England, very markedly. The result is that there is
not only a great dearth of ideas in the land, but also
an active and relentless hostility to ideas. The
chronic suspiciousness of the inferior man here has
full play; never in modern history has there been
another civilization showing so vast a body of prohi-
bitions and repressions, in both conduct and thought.
The second result is that intellectual experimentation
is chiefly left to the immigrants of the later migra-
tions, and -to the small sections of the native popula-
tion that have been enriched with their blood. For
such a pure Anglo-Saxon as Cabell to disport him-

48 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

self in the field of ideas is a rarity in the United
States and no exception to the rule that I have just
mentioned, for Cabell belongs to an aristocracy that
is now almost extinct, and has no more in common
with the general population than a Baltic baron has
with the indigenous herd of Letts and Esthonians.
All the arts in America are thoroughly exotic. Music
is almost wholly German or Italian, painting is
French, literature may be anything from English to
Russian, architecture (save when it becomes a mere
branch of engineering) is a maddening phantas-
magoria of borrowings. Even so elemental an art
as that of cookery shows no native development, and
is greatly disesteemed by Americans of the Anglo-
Saxon majority; any decent restaurant that one blun-
ders upon in the land is likely to be French, and if
not French, then Italian or German or Chinese. So
with the sciences: they have scarcely any native de-
velopment. Organized scientific research began in
the country with the founding of the Johns Hopkins
University, a bald imitation of the German universi-
ties, and long held suspect by native opinion. Even
after its great success, indeed, there was rancorous
hostility to its scheme of things on chauvinistic
grounds, and some years ago efforts were begun to
Americanize it, with the result that it is now sunk to
the level of Princeton, Amherst and other such glor-
ified high-schools, and is dominated by native savants

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 49

who would be laughed at in any Continental univer-
sity. Science, oppressed by such assaults from be-
low, moves out of the academic grove into the freer
air of the great foundations, where the pursuit of the
shy fact is uncontaminated by football and social
pushing. The greatest of these foundations is the
Rockefeller Institute. Its salient men are such in-
vestigators as Flexner, Loeb and Carrel all of them
Continental Jews.

Thus the battle of ideas in the United States is
largely carried on under strange flags, and even the
stray natives on the side of free inquiry have to sac-
rifice some of their nationality when they enlist. The
effects of this curious condition of affairs are both
good and evil. The good ones are easily apparent.
The racial division gives the struggle a certain des-
perate earnestness, and even bitterness, and so makes
it the more inviting to lively minds. It was a benefit
to the late D. C. Gilman rather than a disadvantage
that national opinion opposed his traffic with Huxley
and the German professors in the early days of the
Johns Hopkins; the stupidity of the opposition stimu-
lated him, and made him resolute, and his resolution,
in the long run, was of inestimable cultural value.
Scientific research in America, indeed, was thus set
securely upon its legs precisely because the great
majority of right-thinking Americans were violently
opposed to it. In the same way it must be obvious

50 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

that Dreiser got something valuable out of the gro-
tesque war that was carried on against him during
the greater war overseas because of -his German
name a jehad fundamentally responsible for the
suppression of "The 'Genius.' " The chief danger
that he ran six or seven years ago was the danger
that he might be accepted, explained away, and so
seduced downward to the common level. The attack
of professional patriots saved him from that calamity.
More, it filled him with a keen sense of his isolation,
and stirred up the vanity that was in him as it is in
all of us, and so made him cling with new tenacity to
the very peculiarities that differentiate him from his
inferiors. Finally, it is not to be forgotten that, with-
out this rebellion of immigrant iconoclasts, the whole
body of the national literature would tend to sink to
the 100% American level of such patriotic literary
business men as the president of the Authors' League.
In other words, we must put up with the aesthetic
Bolshevism of the Europeans and Asiatics who rage
in the land, for without them we might not have any
literature at all.

But the evils of the situation are not to be gainsaid.
One of them I have already alluded to: the tendency
of the beginning literatus, once he becomes fully
conscious of his foreign affiliations, to desert the re-
public forthwith, and thereafter view it from afar,
and as an actual foreigner. More solid and various

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 51

cultures lure him; he finds himself uncomfortable at
home. Sometimes, as in the case of Henry James,
he becomes a downright expatriate, and a more or
less active agent of anti-American feeling; more often,
he goes over to the outlanders without yielding up his
theoretical citizenship, as in the cases of Irving, Har-
ris, Pound and O'Sullivan. But all this, of course,
works relatively light damage, for not many native
authors are footloose enough to indulge in any such
physical desertion of the soil. Of much more evil
importance is the tendency of the cultural alienism
that I have described to fortify the uncontaminated
native in his bilious suspicion of all the arts, and par-
ticularly of all artists. The news that the latest poet
to flutter the dovecotes is a Jew, or that the last novel-
ist mauled by comstockery has a German or Scandi-
navian or Russian name, or that the critic newly taken
in sacrilege is a partisan of Viennese farce or of the
French moral code or of English literary theory
this news, among a people so ill-informed, so horribly
well-trained in flight from bugaboos, and so savagely
suspicious of the unfamiliar in ideas, has the in-
evitable effect of stirring up opposition that quickly
ceases to be purely aesthetic objection, and so be-
comes increasingly difficult to combat. If Dreiser's
name were Tompkins or Simpson, there is no doubt
whatever that he would affright the professors a good
deal less, and appear less of a hobgoblin to the in-

52 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

telligentsia of the women's clubs. If Oppenheim were
less palpably levantine, he would come much nearer
to the popularity of Edwin Markham and Walt
Mason. And if Cabell kept to the patriotic business
of a Southern gentleman, to wit, the praise of Gen-
eral Robert E. Lee, instead of prowling the strange
and terrible fields of mediaeval Provence, it is a safe
wager that he would be sold openly over the counter
instead of stealthily behind the door.

In a previous work I have discussed this tendency
in America to estimate the artist in terms of his sec-
ular character. During the war, when all of the
national defects in intelligence were enormously ac-
centuated, it went to ludicrous lengths. There were
then only authors who were vociferous patriots and
thus geniuses, and authors who kept their dignity and
were thus suspect and without virtue. By this gauge
Chambers became the superior of Dreiser and Cabell,
and Joyce Kilmer and Amy Lowell were set above
Sandburg and Oppenheim. The test was even ex-
tended to foreigners: by it H. G. Wells took prece-
dence of Shaw, and Blasco Ibanez became ,a greater
artist than Romain Rolland. But the tiling is not pe-
culiar to war times; when peace is densest it is to be
observed. The man of letters, pure and simple, is a
rarity in America. Almost always he is something
else and that something else commonly determines
his public eminence. Mark Twain, with only his

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 53

books to recommend him, would probably have
passed into obscurity in middle age; it was in the
character of" a public entertainer, not unrelated to
Coxey, Dr. Mary Walker and Citizen George Francis
Train, that he wooed and won his country. The official
criticism of the land denied him any solid literary
virtue to the day of his death, and even to-day the
campus critics and their journalistic valets stand
aghast before "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What
is Man?" Emerson passed through almost the same
experience. It was not as a man of letters that he
was chiefly thought of in his time, but as the prophet
of a new cult, half religious, half philosophical, and
wholly unintelligible to nine-tenths of those who dis-
cussed it. The first author of a handbook of Amer-
ican literature to sweep away the codfish Moses and
expose the literary artist was the Polish Jew, Leon
Kellner, of Czernowitz. So with Whitman and Poe
both hobgoblins far more than artists. So, even,
with Howells: it was as the exponent of a dying cul-
ture that he was venerated, not as the practitioner of
an art. Few actually read his books. His celebrity,
of course, was real enough, but it somehow differed
materially from that of a pure man of letters say
Shelley, Conrad, Hauptmann, Hardy or Synge. That
he was himself keenly aware of the national tendency
to judge an artist in terms of the citizen was made
plain at the time of the Gorky scandal, when he joined

54 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Clemens in an ignominious desertion of Gorky, scared
out of his wits by the danger of being manhandled for
a violation of the national pecksniffery. Howells
also refused to sign the Dreiser Protest. The case of
Frank Harris is one eloquently in point. Harris has
written, among other books, perhaps the best biog-
raphy ever done by an American. Yet his politics
keep him in a sort of Coventry and the average Amer-
ican critic would no more think of praising him than
of granting Treitschke any merit as an historian.

The Lonesome Artist

Thus falsely judged by standards that have no in-
telligible appositeness when applied to an artist, how-
ever accurately they may weigh a stockbroker or a
Presbyterian elder, and forced to meet not only the
hunkerous indifference of the dominant mob but also
the bitter and disingenuous opposition of the classes
to which he might look reasonably for understanding
and support, the American author is forced into a
sort of social and intellectual vacuum, and lives out
his days, as Henry James said of Hawthorne, "an
alien everywhere, an aesthetic solitary."

The wonder is that, in the face of so metallic and

7

unyielding a front, any genuine artists in letters come
to the front at all. But they constantly emefge; the

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 55

first gestures are always on show; the prodigal and
gorgeous life of the country simply forces a sensi-
tive minority- to make some attempt at representa-
tion and interpretation, and out of many trying there
often appears one who can. The phenomenon of
Dreiser is not unique. He had his forerunners in
Fuller and Frank Norris and he has his compactions
du voyage in Anderson, Charles G. Norris and more
than one other. But the fact only throws up his
curious isolation in a stronger light. It would be dif-
ficult to imagine an artist of his sober purpose and
high accomplishment, in any civilized country, stand-
ing so neglected. The prevailing criticism, when it
cannot dispose of him by denying that he exists in
the two chief handbooks of latter-day literature by
professors he is not even mentioned! seeks to dis-
pose of him by arraying the shoddy fury of the mob
against him. When he was under attack by the Corn-
stocks, more than one American critic gave covert aid
to the common enemy, and it was with difficulty that
the weight of the Authors' League was held upon his
side. More help for him, in fact, came from Eng-
land, and quite voluntarily, than could be drummed
up for him at home. No public sense of the menace
that the attack offered to free speech and free art was
j visible; it would have made a nine-days' sensation for
any layman of public influence to have gone to his
rescue, as would have certainly happened in France,

56 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

England or Germany. As for the newspaper-reading
mob, it probably went unaware of the business alto-
gether. When Arnold Bennett, landing in New York
some time previously, told the reporters that Dreiser
was the American he most desired to meet, the news
was quite unintelligible to perhaps nine readers out
of ten: they had no more heard of Dreiser than their
fathers had heard of Whitman in 1875.

So with all the rest. I have mentioned Harris. It
would be difficult to imagine Holland meeting such a
fate in France or Shaw in England as he has met in
the United States. O'Sullivan, during the war, came
home with "A Good Girl" in his pocket. The book
was republished here and got vastly less notice than
the latest piece of trade-goods by Kathleen Norris.
Fuller, early in his career, gave it up as hopeless.
Norris died vainly battling for the young Dreiser.
An Abraham Cahan goes unnoticed. Miss Gather,
with four sound books behind her, lingers in the twi-
light of an esoteric reputation. Cabell, comstocked,
is apprehended by his country only as a novelist to
be bought by stealth and read in private. When
Hugh Walpole came to America a year or two ago
he favored the newspapers, like Bennett before him,
with a piece of critical news that must have puzzled
all readers save a very small minority. Discussing
the living American novelists worth heeding, he nomi-
nated three and of them only one was familiar to

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 57

the general run of novel-buyers, or had ever been
mentioned by a native critic of the apostolic succes-
sion. Only the poets of the land seem to attract the
notice of the professors, and no doubt this is largely
because most of the more salient of them notably
Miss Lowell and Lindsay are primarily press-
agents. Even so, the attention that they get is seldom
serious. The only professor that I know of who has
discussed the matter in precise terms holds that Alfred
Noyes is the superior of all of them. Moreover, the
present extraordinary interest in poetry stops short
with a few poets, and one of its conspicuous phe-
nomena is its lack of concern with the poets outside
the movement, some of them unquestionably superior
to any within.

Nor is this isolation of the artist in America new.
The contemporary view of Poe and Whitman was al-
most precisely like the current view of Dreiser and
Gabell. Both were neglected by the Brahmins of
their time, and both were regarded hostilely by the
great body of right-thinking citizens. Poe, indeed,
was the victim of a furious attack by Rufus W. Gris-
wold, the Hamilton Wright Mabie of the time, and it
set the tone of native criticism for years. Whitman,
living, narrowly escaped going to jail as a public
nuisance. One thinks of Hawthorne and Emerson as
writers decently appreciated by their contemporar-
ies, but it is not to be forgotten that the official

58 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

criticism of the era saw no essential difference be-
tween Hawthorne and Cooper, and that Emerson's
reputation, to the end of his life, was far more that
of a theological prophet and ethical platitudinarian,
comparable to Lyman Abbott or Frank Crane, than
that of a literary artist, comparable to Tennyson or
Matthew Arnold. Perhaps Carlyle understood him,
but who in America understood him? To this day
he is the victim of gross misrepresentation by en-
thusiasts who read into him all sorts of flatulent bom-
bast, as Puritanism is read into the New Testament
by Methodists. As for Hawthorne, his extraordinary
physical isolation during his lifetime was but the sym-
bol of a complete isolation of the spirit, still surviv-
ing. If his preference for the internal conflict as
opposed to the external act were not sufficient to set
him off from the main stream of American specula-
tion, there would always be his profound ethical skep-
ticism a state of mind quite impossible to the nor-
mal American, at least of Anglo-Saxon blood. Haw-
thorne, so far as T know, has never had a single pro-
fessed follower in his own country. Even his son,
attempting to carry on his craft, yielded neither to his
meticulous method nor to his detached point of view.
In the third generation, with infinite irony, there is a
grand-daughter who is a reviewer of books for the
New York Times, which is almost as if Wagner should

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 59

have a grand-daughter singing in the operas of Mas-
senet.

Of the four indubitable masters thus named, Haw-
thorne, Emerson, Whitman and Poe, only the last two
have been sufficiently taken into the consciousness of
the country to have any effect upon its literature, and
even here that influence has been exerted only at
second-hand, and against very definite adverse pres-
sure. It would certainly seem reasonable for a man
of so forceful a habit of mind as Poe, and of such
prodigal and arresting originality, to have founded a
school, but a glance at the record shows that he did
nothing of the sort. Immediately he was dead, the
shadows of the Irving tradition closed around his
tomb, and for nearly thirty years thereafter all of his
chief ideas went disregarded in his own country. If,
as the literature books argue, Poe was the father of the
American short story, then it was a posthumous child,
and had step-fathers who did their best to conceal its
true parentage. When it actually entered upon the
vigorous life that we know to-day Poe had been dead
for a generation. Its father, at the time of its be-
lated adolescence, seemed to be Bret Harte and
Harte's debt to Dickens was vastly more apparent,
first and last, than his debt to Poe. What he got
from Poe was essential; it was the inner structure of
the modern short story, the fundamental devices

60 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

whereby a mere glimpse at events could be made to
yield brilliant and seemingly complete images. But
he himself was probably largely unaware of this in-
debtedness. A man little given to critical analysis,
and incompetent for it when his own work was under
examination, he saw its externals much more clearly
than he saw its intrinsic organization, and these ex-
ternals bore the plain marks of Dickens. It re-
mained for one of his successors, Ambrose Bierce, to
bridge belatedly the space separating him from Poe,
and so show the route that he had come. And it re-
mained for foreign criticism, and particularly for
French criticism, to lift Poe himself to the secure
place that he now holds. It is true enough that he
enjoyed, during his lifetime, a certain popular repu-
tation, and that he was praised by such men as N. P.
Willis and James Russell Lowell, but that reputation
was considerably less than the fame of men who were
much his inferiors, and that praise, especially in
Lowell's case, was much corrupted by reservations.
Not many native critics of respectable position, dur-
ing the 50's and 60's, would have ranked him clearly
above, say, Irving or Cooper, or even above Long-
fellow, his old enemy. A few partisans argued for
him, but in the main, as Saintsbury has said, he was
the victim of "extreme and almost incomprehensible
injustice" at the hands of his countrymen. It is
surely not without significance that it took ten years

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 61

to raise money enough to put a cheap and hideous
tombstone upon his neglected grave, that it was not
actually set up until he had been dead twenty-six
years, that no contemporary American writer took
any part in furthering the project, and that the only
one who attended the final ceremony was Whitman.
It was Baudelaire's French translation of the prose
tales and Mallarme's translation of the poems that
brought Poe to Valhalla. The former, first printed
in 1856, founded the Poe cult in France, and during
the two decades following it flourished amazingly,
and gradually extended to England and Germany. It
was one of the well-springs, in fact, of the whole so-
called decadent movement. If Baudelaire, the fa-
ther of that movement, "cultivated hysteria with de-
light and terror," he was simply doing what Poe had
done before him. Both, reacting against the false
concept of beauty as a mere handmaiden of logical
ideas, sought its springs in those deep feelings and
inner experiences which lie beyond the range of ideas
and are to be interpreted only as intuitions. Emer-
son started upon the same quest, but was turned off
into mazes of contradiction and unintelligibility by
his ethical obsession the unescapable burden of his
Puritan heritage. But Poe never wandered from the
path. You will find in "The Poetic Principle" what
is perhaps the clearest statement of this new and
sounder concept of beauty that has ever been made

62 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

certainly it is clearer than any ever made by a French-
man. But it was not until Frenchmen had watered
the seed out of grotesque and vari-colored pots that it
began to sprout. The tide of Poe's ideas, set in
motion in France early in the second half of the
century, did not wash England until the last de-
cade, and in America, save for a few dashes of
spray, it has yet to show itself. There is no
American writer who displays the influence of
this most potent and original of Americans so
clearly as whole groups of Frenchmen display it,
and whole groups of Germans, and even a good many
Englishmen. What we have from Poe at first hand
is simply a body of obvious yokel-shocking in the
Black Cat manner, with the tales of Ambrose Bierce
as its finest flower in brief, an imitation of Poe's
externals without any comprehension whatever of his
underlying aims and notions. What we have from
him at second-hand is a somewhat childish Maeter-
linckism, a further dilution of Poe-and-water. This
Maeterlinckism, some time ago, got itself inter-
mingled with the Whitmanic stream flowing back to
America through the channel of French Imagism, with
results destructive to the sanity of earnest critics and
fatal to the gravity of those less austere. It is sig-
nificant that the critical writing of Poe, in which there
lies most that was best in him, has not came back;
no normal American ever thinks of him as a critic,

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 63

but only as a poet, as a raiser of goose-flesh, or as an
immoral fellow. The cause thereof is plain enough.
The French, instead of borrowing his critical theory
directly, deduced it afresh from his applications of it ;
it became criticism of him rather than by him. Thus
his own speculations have lacked the authority of
foreign approval, and have consequently made no im-
pression. The weight of native opinion is naturally
against them, for they are at odds, not only with its
fundamental theories, but also with its practical doc-
trine that no criticism can be profound and respect-
able which is not also dull.

"Poe," says Arthur Ransome, in his capital study
of the man and the artist, "was like a wolf chained
by the leg among a lot of domestic dogs." The simile
here is somewhat startling, and Ransome, in a foot-
note, tries to ameliorate it: the "domestic dogs" it
refers to were magnificoes of no less bulk than Long-
fellow, Whittier, Holmes and Emerson. In the case
of Whitman, the wolf was not only chained, but also
muzzled. Nothing, indeed, could be more amazing
than the hostility that surrounded him at home until
the very end of his long life. True enough, it was
broken by certain feeble mitigations. Emerson, in
1855, praised him though later very eager to forget
it and desert him, as Clemens and Howells, years af-
terward, deserted Gorky. Alcott, Thoreau, Lowell
and even Bryant, during his brief Bohemian days,

64 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

were polite to him. A group of miscellaneous en-
thusiasts gradually gathered about him, and out of
this group emerged at least one man..of some distinc-
tion, John Burroughs. Young adventurers of let-
ters for example, Huneker went to see him and
hear him, half drawn by genuine 'admiration ancthalf
by mere deviltry. But the general tone of the opinion
that beat upon him, the attitude of domestic criticism,
was unbrokenly inimical; he was opposed by misrep-
resentation and neglect. "The prevailing range of
criticism on my book," he wrote in "A Backward
Glance on My Own Road" in 1884, "has been either
mockery or denunciation and ... I have been the
marked object of two or three (to me pretty serious)
official buffetings." "After thirty years of trial," he
wrote in "My Book and I," three years later, "public
criticism on the book and myself' as author of it shows
marked anger and contempt more than anything else."
That is, at home. Abroad he was making headway
all the while, and long years afterward, by way of
France and England, he began to force his way into
the consciousness of his countrymen. .What could
have been more ironical than the solemn celebrations
of Whitman's centenary that were carried off in
various American universities in 1919? One can
picture the old boy rolling with homeric mirth in
hell. Imagine the fate of a university don of 1860,
or 1870, or 1880, or even 1890 who had ventured to

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 65

commend "Leaves of Grass" to the young gentlemen
of his seminary! He would have come to grief as
swiftly as that Detroit pedagogue of day before yes-
terday who brought down the Mothers' Legion upon
him by commending "Jurgen."

8

The Cultural Background

So far, the disease. As to the cause, I have de-
livered a few hints. I now describe it particularly.
It is, in brief, a defect in the general culture of the
country one reflected, not only in the national lit-
erature, but also in the national political theory, the
national attitude toward religion and morals, the na-
tional habit in all departments of thinking. It is the
lack of a civilized aristocracy, secure in its position,
animated by an intelligent curiosity, skeptical of all
facile generalizations, superior to the sentimentality
of the mob, and delighting in the battle of ideas for
its own sake.

The word I use, despite the qualifying adjective,
has got itself meanings, of course, that I by no means
intend to convey. Any mention of an aristocracy, to
a public fed upon democratic fustian, is bound to
bring up images of stockbrokers' wives lolling ob-
scenely in opera boxes, or of haughty Englishmen
slaughtering whole generations of grouse in an in-

66 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

ordinate and incomprehensible manner, or of Junkers
with tight waists elbowing American schoolmarms off
the sidewalks of German beer towns, or of perfumed
Italians coming over to work their abominable magic
upon the daughters of breakfast-food and bathtub
kings. Part of this misconception, I suppose, 'has its
roots in the gaudy imbecilities of the yellow press,
but there is also a part that belongs to the general
American tradition, along with the oppression of mi-
norities and the belief in political panaceas. Its depth
and extent are constantly revealed by the naive as-
sumption that the so-called fashionable folk of the
large cities chiefly wealthy industrials in the inte-
rior-decorator and country-club stage of culture con-
stitute an aristocracy, and by the scarcely less remark-
able assumption that the peerage of England is iden-
tical with the gentry that is, that such men as Lord
Northcliffe, Lord Iveagh and even Lord Reading are
English gentlemen, and of the ancient line of the
Percys.

Here, as always, the worshiper is the father of the
gods, and no less when they are evil than when they
are benign. The inferior man must find himself
superiors, that he may marvel at his political equality
with them, and in the absence of recognizable supe-
riors de facto he creates superiors de jure. .The sub-
lime principle of one man, one vote must be trans-
lated into terms of dollars, diamonds, fashionable in-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 67

telligence; the equality of all men before the law must
have clear and dramatic proofs. Sometimes, per-
haps, the thing, goes further and is more subtle. The
inferior man needs an aristocracy to demonstrate,
not only his mere equality, but also his actual su-
periority. The society columns in the newspapers
may have some such origin: they may visualize once
more the accomplished journalist's understanding of
the mob mind that he plays upon so skillfully, as upon
some immense and cacophonous organ, always going
fortissimo. What the inferior man and his wife see
in the sinister revels of those amazing first families,
I suspect, is often a massive witness to their own
higher rectitude to their relative innocence of cigar-
ette-smoking, poodle-coddling, child-farming and the
more abstruse branches of adultery in brief, to their
firmer grasp upon the immutable axioms of Christian
virtue, the one sound boast of the nether nine-tenths
of humanity in every land under the cross.

But this bugaboo aristocracy, as I hint, is actually
bogus, and the evidence of its bogusness lies in the
fact that it is insecure. One gets into it only oner-
ously, but out of it very easily. Entrance is effected
by dint of a long and bitter struggle, and the chief
incidents of that struggle are almost intolerable
humiliations. The aspirant must school and steel
himself to sniffs and sneers; he must see the door

t '

unrm him a Vmnrlrprl timpQ lipfnrp PVPr it

68 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

is thrown open to him. To get in at all he must
show a talent for abasement and abasement makes
him timorous. Worse, that timorousness is not cured
when he succeeds at last. On the contrary, it is made
even more tremulous, for what he faces within the
gates is a scheme of things made up almost wholly of
harsh and often unintelligible taboos, and the penalty
for violating even the least of them is swift and dis-
astrous. He must exhibit exactly the right social hab-
its, appetites and prejudices, public and private. He
must harbor exactly the right political enthusiasms
and indignations. He must have a hearty taste for
exactly the right sports. His attitude toward the fine
arts must be properly tolerant and yet not a shade too
eager. He must read and like exactly the right
books, pamphlets and public journals. He must put
up at the right hotels when he travels. His wife must
patronize the right milliners. He himself must stick
to the right haberdashery. He must live in the right
neighborhood. He must even embrace the right doc-
trines of religion. It would ruin him, for all opera
box and society column purposes, to set up. a plea for
justice to the Bolsheviki, or even for ordinary de-
cency. It would ruin him equally to wear celluloid
collars, or to move to Union Hill, N. J., or to serve
ham and cabbage at his table. And it would ruin
him, too, to drink coffee from his saucer, or to marry
a chambermaid with a gold tooth, or to join the Sev-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 69

enth Day Adventists. Within the boundaries of his
curious order he is worse fettered than a monk in a
cell. Its obscure conception of propriety, its nebu-
lous notion that this or that is honorable, hampers him
in every direction, and very narrowly. What he re-
signs when he enters, even when he makes his first
deprecating knock at the door, is every right to at-
tack the ideas that happen to prevail within. Such
as they are, he must accept them without question.
And as they shift and change in response to great in-
stinctive movements (or perhaps, now and then, to the
punished but not to be forgotten revolts of extraordi-
nary rebels) he must shift and change with them, si-
lently and quickly. To hang back, to challenge and
dispute, to preach reforms and revolutions these are
crimes against the brummagenv Holy Ghost of the
order.

Obviously, that order cannot constitute a genuine
aristocracy, in any rational sense. A genuine aris-
tocracy is grounded upon very much different princi-
ples. Its first and most salient character is its in-
terior secu-rity, and the chief visible evidence of that
security is the freedom that goes with it not only
freedom in act, the divine right of the aristocrat to
do what he jolly well pleases, so long as he does not
violate the primary guarantees and obligations of his
class, bujt also and more importantly freedom in
thought, the liberty to try and err, the right to be his

70 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

own man. It is the instinct of a true aristocracy, not
to punish eccentricity by expulsion, but to throw a
mantle of protection about it to safeguard it from
the suspicions and resentments of the lower orders.
Those lower orders are inert, timid, inhospitable to
ideas, hostile to changes, faithful to a few maudlin
superstitions. All progress goes on on the higher lev-
els. It is there that salient personalities, made secure
by artificial immunities, may oscillate most widely
from the normal track. It is within that entrenched
fold, out of reach of the immemorial certainties of the
mob, that extraordinary men of the lower orders
may find their city of refuge, and breathe a clear air.
This, indeed, is at once the hall-mark and the justifica-
tion of an aristocracy that it is beyond responsibility
to the general masses of men, and hence superior to
both their degraded longings and their no less de-
graded aversions. It is nothing if it is not autono-
mous, curious, venturesome, courageous, and every-
thing if it is. It is the custodian of the qualities
that make for change and experiment; it is the class
that organizes danger to the service of the race; it
pays for its high prerogatives by standing in the fore-
front of the fray.

No such aristocracy, it must be plain, is now on
view in the United States. The makings of one were
visible in the Virginia of the later eighteenth cen-
tury, but with Jefferson and Washington the promise

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 71

died. In New England, it seems to me, there was
never any aristocracy, either in being or in nascency:
there was only a theocracy that degenerated very
quickly into a plutocracy on the one hand and a caste
of sterile Gelehrten on the other the passion for Cod
splitting into a lust for dollars and a weakness for
mere words. Despite the common notion to the con-
trary a notion generated by confusing literacy with
intelligence New England has never shown the
slightest sign of a genuine enthusiasm for ideas. It
began its history as a slaughter-house of ideas, and it
is to-day not easily distinguishable from a cold-stor-
age plant. Its celebrated adventures in mysticism,
once apparently so bold and significant, are now seen
to have been little more than an elaborate hocus-pocus
respectable Unitarians shocking the peasantry and
scaring the horned cattle in the fields by masquerad-
ing in the robes of Roscicrucians. The ideas that it
embraced in those austere and far-off days were stale,
and when it had finished with them they were dead:
to-day one hears of Jakob Bohme almost as rarely as
one hears .of Allen G. Thurman. So in politics. Its
glory is Abolition an English invention, long under
the interdict of the native plutocracy. Since the Civil
War its six states have produced fewer political ideas,
as political ideas run in the Republic, than any aver-
age county in Kansas or Nebraska. Appomattox
seemed to be a victory for New England idealism. It

72 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

was actually a victory for the New England plutoc-
racy, and that plutocracy has dominated thought
above the Housatonic ever since. The. .sect of profes-
sional idealists has so far dwindled that it has ceased
to be of any importance, even as an opposition.
When the plutocracy is challenged now, it is chal-
lenged by the proletariat.

Well, what is on view in New England is on view
in all other parts of the nation, sometimes with
ameliorations, but usually with the colors merely ex-
aggerated. What one beholds, sweeping the eye over
the land, is a culture that, like the national literature,
is in three layers the plutocracy on top, a vast mass
of undifferentiated human blanks at the bottom, and
a forlorn intelligentsia gasping out a precarious life
between. I need not set out at any length, I hope,
the intellectual deficiencies of the plutocracy its ut-
ter failure to show anything even remotely resembling
the makings of an aristocracy. It is badly educated,
it is stupid, it is full of low-caste superstitions and
indignations, it is without decent traditions or inform-
ing vision ; above all, it is extraordinarily Jacking in
the most elemental independence and courage. Out
of this class comes the grotesque fashionable society
of our big towns, already described. Imagine a
horde of peasants incredibly enriched and with al-
most infinite power thrust into their hands, and you
will have a fair picture of its habitual state of mind.

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 73

It shows all the stigmata of inferiority moral cer-
tainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear. Never did it
function more., revealingly than in the late pogrom
against the so-called Reds, i. e., against humorless
idealists who, like Andrew Jackson, took the plati-
tudes of democracy quite seriously. The machinery
brought to bear upon these feeble and scattered fa-
natics would have almost sufficed to repel an invasion
by the united powers of Europe. They were hunted
out of their sweat-shops and coffee-houses as if they
were so many Carranzas or Ludendorffs, dragged to
jail to the tooting of horns, arraigned before quaking
judges on unintelligible charges, condemned to depor-
tation without the slightest chance to defend them :
selves, torn from their dependent families, herded
into prison-ships, and then finally dumped in a snow
waste, to be rescued and fed by the Bolsheviki. And
what was the theory at the bottom of all these astoun-
ing proceedings? So far as it can be reduced to com-
prehensible terms it was much less a theory than a
fear a shivering, idiotic, discreditable fear of a
mere banshee an overpowering, paralyzing dread
that some extra-eloquent Red, permitted to emit his
balderdash unwhipped, might eventually convert a
couple of courageous men, and that the courageous
men, filled with indignation against the plutocracy,
might take to the highroad, burn down a nail-factory
or two, and slit the throat of some virtuous profiteer.

74 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

In order to lay this fear, in order to ease the jangled
nerves of the American successors to the Hapsburgs
and Hohenzollerns, all the constitutional guarantees
of the citizen were suspended, the statute-books were
burdened with laws that surpass anything heard of
in the Austria of Maria Theresa, the country was
handed over to a frenzied mob of detectives, inform-
ers and agents provocateurs and the Reds departed
laughing loudly, and were hailed by the Bolsheviki
as innocents escaped from an asylum for the crim-
inally insane.

Obviously, it is out of reason to look for any hospi-
tality to ideas in a class so extravagantly fearful of
even the most palpably absurd of them. Its philos-
ophy is firmly grounded upon the thesis that the ex-
isting order must stand forever free from attack, and
not only from attack, but also from mere academic
criticism, and its ethics are as firmly grounded upon
the thesis that every attempt at any such criticism is
a proof of moral turpitude. Within its own ranks,
protected by what may be regarded as the privilege
of the order, there is nothing to take the place of this
criticism. A few feeble platitudes by Andrew Car-
negie and a book of moderate merit by John D. Rock-
efeller's press-agent constitute almost the whole of
the interior literature of ideas. In other .countries
the plutocracy has often produced men of reflective
and analytical habit, eager to rationalize its instincts

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 75

and to bring it into some sort of relationship to the
main streams of human thought. The case of David
Ricardo at once comes to mind. There have been
many others: John Bright, Richard Cobden, George
Grote, and, in our own time, Walther von Rathenau.
But in the United States no such phenomenon has been
visible. There was a day, not long ago, when cer-
tain young men of wealth gave signs of an unaccus-
tomed interest in ideas on the political side, but the
most they managed to achieve was a banal sort of
Socialism, and even this was abandoned in sudden
terror when the war came, and Socialism fell under
suspicion of being genuinely international in brief,
of being honest under the skin. Nor has the plutoc-
racy of the country ever fostered an inquiring spirit
among its intellectual valets and footmen, which is to
say, among the gentlemen who compose headlines and
leading articles for its newspapers. What chiefly
distinguishes the daily press of the United States from
the press of all other countries pretending to culture
is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dig-
nity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to
the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of
ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of
fundamentals by translating all issues into a few
elemental' fears, its incessant reduction of all reflec-
tion to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never
well-informed. It is seldom intelligent, save in the

76 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

arts of the mob-master. It is never courageously
honest. Held harshly to a rigid correctness of opin-
ion by the plutocracy that controls it wit-h less and less
attempt at disguise, and menaced on all sides by
censorships that it dare not flout, it sinks rapidly into
formalism and feebleness. Its yellow section is per-
haps its most respectable section, for there the only
vestige of the old free journalist survives. In the
more conservative papers one finds only a timid and
petulant animosity to all questioning of the existing
order, however urbane and sincere a pervasive and
ill -concealed dread that the mob now heated up
against the orthodox hobgoblins may suddenly begin
to unearth hobgoblins of its own, and so run amok.
For it is upon the emotions of the mob, of course, that
the whole comedy is played. Theoretically the mob
is the repository of all political wisdom and virtue;
actually it is the ultimate source of all political power.
Even the plutocracy cannot make war upon it openly,
or forget the least of its weaknesses. The business
of keeping it in order must be done discreetly, warily,
with delicate technique. In the main that business
consists of keeping alive its deep-seated fears of
strange faces, of unfamiliar ideas, of unhackneyed
gestures, of untested liberties and responsibilities.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man, as of
all the simpler mammals, is fear fear o the un-
known, the complex, the inexplicable. What he

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 77

wants beyond everything else is safety. His instincts
incline him toward a society so organized that it will
protect him at all hazards, and not only against perils
to his hide but also against assaults upon his mind
against the need to grapple with unaccustomed prob-
lems, to weigh ideas, to think things out for himself,
to scrutinize the platitudes upon which his everyday
thinking is based. Content under kaiserism so long
as it functions efficiently, he turns, when kaiserism
falls, to some other and perhaps worse form of pater-
nalism, bringing to its benign tyranny only the docile
tribute of his pathetic allegiance. In America it is
the newspaper that is his boss. From it he gets sup-
port for his elemental illusions. In it he sees a vis-
ible embodiment of his own wisdom and consequence.
Out of it he draws fuel for his simple moral passion,
his congenital suspicion of heresy, his dread of the
unknown. And behind the newspaper stands the
plutocracy, ignorant, unimaginative and timorous.

Thus at the top and at the bottom. Obviously,
there is no aristocracy here. One finds only one of
the necessary elements, and that only in the plutoc-
racy, to wit, a truculent egoism. But where is in-
telligence? Where are ease and surety of manner?
Where are enterprise and curiosity? Where, above
all, is courage, and in particular, moral courage the
capacity for independent thinking, for difficult prob-
lems, for what Nietzsche called the joys of the laby-

78 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

rinth? As well look for these things in a society of
half-wits. Democracy, obliterating the old aristoc-
racy, has left only a vacuum in its plage; in a century
and a half it has failed either to lift up the mob to
intellectual autonomy and dignity or to purge the
plutocracy of its inherent stupidity and swinishness.
It is precisely here, the first and favorite scene of the
Great Experiment, that the culture of the individual
has been reduced to the most rigid and absurd regi-
mentation. It is precisely here, of all civilized coun-
tries, that eccentricity in demeanor and opinion has
come to bear the heaviest penalties. The whole drift
of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all
ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted
platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far
more potent force of growing custom, and under that
custom there is a national philosophy which erects
conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free
functioning of personality into a capital crime against
society.

9

Under the Campus Pump

But there remain the intelligentsia, the free spirits
in the middle ground, neither as anaesthetic to ideas
as the plutocracy on the one hand nor as much the
slaves of emotion as the proletariat on the other.
Have I forgotten them? I have not. Bur what ac-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 79

tually reveals itself when this small brotherhood of
the superior is carefully examined? What reveals
itself, it seems-. to me, is a gigantic disappointment.
Superficially, there are all the marks of a caste of
learned and sagacious men a great book-knowledge,
a laudable diligence, a certain fine reserve and snif-
fishness, a plain consciousness of intellectual superior-
ity, not a few gestures that suggest the aristocratic.
But under the surface one quickly discovers that the
whole thing is little more than play-acting, and not
always very skillful. Learning is there, but not curi-
osity. A heavy dignity is there, but not much gen-
uine self-respect. Pretentiousness is there, but not a
trace of courage. Squeezed between the plutocracy
on on side and the mob on the other, the intelligentsia
face the eternal national problem of maintaining their
position, of guarding themselves against challenge
and attack, of keeping down suspicion. They have
all the attributes of knowledge save the sense of
power. They have all the qualities of an aristocracy
save the capital qualities that arise out of a feeling of
security, of complete independence, of absolute im-
munity to onslaught from above and below. In
brief, the old bogusness hangs about them, as about
the fashionable aristocrats of the society columns.
They are safe so long as they are good, which is to
say, so lovig as they neither aggrieve the plutocracy
nor startle the proletariat. Immediately they fall

80 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

into either misdemeanor all their apparent dignity
vanishes, and with it all of their influence, and they
become simply somewhat ridiculous. rebels against a
social order that has no genuine need of them and is
disposed to tolerate them only when they are not ob-
trusive.

For various reasons this shadowy caste is largely
made up of men who have official stamps upon their
learning that is, of professors, of doctors of philos-
ophy; outside of academic circles it tends to shade
off very rapidly into a half-world of isolated an-
archists. One of those reasons is plain enough: the
old democratic veneration for mere schooling, in-
herited from the Puritans of New England, is still in
being, and the mob, always eager for short cuts in
thinking, is disposed to accept a schoolmaster without
looking beyond his degree. Another reason lies in
the fact that the higher education is still rather a
novelty in the country, and there have yet to be de-
veloped any devices for utilizing learned men in any
trade save teaching. Yet other reasons will suggest
themselves. Whatever the ramification of causes, the
fact is plain that the pedagogues have almost a mo-
nopoly of what passes for the higher thinking in the
land. Not only do they reign unchallenged in their
own chaste grove; they also penetrate to all other
fields of ratiocination, to the almost complete exclu-
sion of unshrived rivals. They dominate the week-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 81

lies of opinion; they are to the fore in every review;
they write nine-tenths of the serious books of the
country; they 'begin to invade the newspapers; they
instruct and exhort the yokelry from the stump; they
have even begun to penetrate into the government.
One cannot turn in the United States without encount-
ering a professor. There is one on every municipal
commission. There is one in every bureau of the
federal government. There is one at the head of
every intellectual movement. There is one to explain
every new mystery. Professors appraise all works of
art, whether graphic, tonal or literary. Professors
supply the brain power for agriculture, diplomacy,
the control of dependencies and the distribution of
commodities. A professor was until lately sovereign
of the country, and pope of the state church.

So much for their opportunity. What, now, of
their achievement? I answer as one who has had
thrown upon him, by the impenetrable operations of
fate, the rather thankless duties of a specialist in the
ways of pedagogues, a sort of professor of profes-
sors. The job has got me enemies. I have been ac-
cused of carrying on a defamatory jehad against vir-
tuous and laborious men; I have even been charged
with doing it in the interest of the Wilhelmstrasse,
the White Slave Trust and the ghost of Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche. Nothing could be more absurd.
All my instincts are on the side of the professors. I

82 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

esteem a man who devotes himself to a subject with
hard diligence; I esteem even more a man who puts
poverty and a shelf of books above profiteering and
evenings of jazz; I am naturally monkish. More-
over, there are more Ph.D.'s on my family tree than
even a Boston bluestocking can boast; there was a
whole century when even the most ignorant of my
house was at least Juris utriusque Doctor. But such
predispositions should not be permitted to color sober
researches. What I have found, after long and ar-
duous labors, is a state of things that is surely not al-
together flattering to the Gelehrten under examination.
What I have found, in brief, is that pedagogy turned
to general public uses is almost as timid and flatulent
as journalism that the professor, menaced by the
timid dogmatism of the plutocracy above him and
the incurable suspiciousness of the mob beneath him,
is almost invariably inclined to seek his own security
in a mellifluous inanity that, far from being a cour-
ageous spokesman of ideas and an apostle of their
free dissemination, in politics, in the fine arts, in prac-
tical ethics, he comes close to being the most prudent
and skittish of all men concerned with them in brief,
that he yields to the prevailing correctness of thought
in all departments, north, east, south and west, and is,
in fact, the chief exponent among us of the democratic
doctrine that heresy is not only a mistake, but also a
crime.

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 83

A philosophy is not put to much of a test in ordi-
nary times, for in ordinary times philosophies are
permitted to lie like sleeping dogs. When it shows
its inward metal is when the band begins to play.
The turmoils of the late lamentable war, it seems to
me, provided for such a trying out of fundamental
ideas and attitudes upon a colossal scale. The whole
thinking of the world was thrown into confusion; all
the worst fears and prejudices of ignorant and emo-
tional men came to the front; it was a time, beyond
all others in modern history, when intellectual in-
tegrity was subjected to a cruel strain. How did the
intelligentsia of These States bear up under that
strain? What was the reaction of our learned men
to the challenge of organized hysteria, mob fear, in-
citement to excess, downright insanity? How did
they conduct themselves in that universal whirlwind?
They conducted themselves, I fear, in a manner that
must leave a brilliant question mark behind their
claim to independence and courage, to true knowledge
and dignity, to ordinary self-respect in brief, to
every quality that belongs to the authentic aristocrat.
They constituted themselves, not a restraining influ-
ence upon the mob run wild, but the loudest spokes-
men of its worst imbecilities. They fed it with bogus
history, bogus philosophy, bogus idealism, bogus hero-
ics. They manufactured blather for its entertain-
ment. They showed themselves to be as naive as so

84 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

many Liberty Loan orators, as emotional, almost, as
the spy hunters, and as disdainful of the ordinary

intellectual decencies as the editorial writers. I ac-

.

cumulated, in those great days, for the instruction and
horror of posterity, a very large collection of aca-
demic arguments, expositions and pronunciamentos ;
it fills a trunk, and got me heavily into debt to three
clipping-bureaux. Its contents range from solemn
hymns of hate in the learned (and even the theolog-
ical) reviews and such official donkeyisms as the for-
mal ratification of the so-called Sisson documents
down to childish harangues to student-bodies, public
demands that the study of the enemy language and
literature be prohibited by law, violent denunciations
of all enemy science as negligible and fraudulent,
vitriolic attacks upon enemy magnificos, and elaborate
proofs that the American Revolution was the result of
a foul plot hatched in the Wilhelmstrasse of the time,
to the wanton injury of two loving bands of brothers.
I do not exaggerate in the slightest. The proceedings
of Mr. Creel's amazing corps of "twenty-five hundred
American historians" went further than anything I
have described. And in every far-flung college town,
in every one-building "university" on the prairie,
even the worst efforts of those "historians" were vastly
exceeded.

But I am forgetting the like phenomena on the
other side of the bloody chasm? I am overlooking

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 85

the darker crimes of the celebrated German profes-
sors? Not at all. Those crimes against all reason
and dignity, had they been committed in fact, would
not be evidence in favor of the Americans in the dock:
the principle of law is too well accepted to need argu-
ment. But I venture to deny them, and out of a very
special and singular knowledge, for I seem to be
one of the few Americans who has ever actually read
the proclamations of the German professors: all the
most indignant critics of them appear to have ac-
cepted second-hand accounts of their contents. Hav-
ing suffered the onerous labor of reading them, I
now offer sworn witness to their relative mildness.
Now and then one encounters in them a disconcerting
bray. Now and then one weeps with sore heart.
Now and then one is bogged in German made wholly
unintelligible by emotion. But taking them as they
stand, and putting them fairly beside the correspond-
ing documents of American vintage, one is at once
struck by their comparative suavity and decorum,
their freedom from mere rhetoric and fustian above
all, by their effort to appeal to reason, such as it is,
rather than to emotion. No German professor, from
end to end of the war, put his hand to anything as
transparently silly as the Sisson documents. No Ger-
man professor essayed to prove that the Seven Years'
War was* caused by Downing Street. No German
professor argued that the study of English would

86 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

corrupt the soul. No German professor denounced
Darwin as an ignoramus and Lister as a scoundrel.
Nor was anything of the sort done, so far as I
know, by any French professor. Nor even by
any reputable English professor. All such honor-
able efforts on behalf of correct thought in war-
time were monopolized by American professors.
And if the fact is disputed, then I threaten upon
some future day, when the stealthy yearning to
forget has arisen, to print my proofs in parallel col-
umns the most esteemed extravagances of the Ger-
man professors in one column and the corresponding
masterpieces of the American professors in the other.
I do not overlook, of course, the self-respecting men
who, in the midst of all the uproar, kept their counsel
and their dignity. A small minority, hard beset and
tested by the fire! Nor do I overlook the few senti-
mental fanatics who, in the face of devastating evi-
dence to the contrary, proceeded upon the assumption
that academic freedom was yet inviolable, and so got
themselves cashiered, and began posturing in radical
circles as martyrs, the most absurd of men. But I
think I draw a fair picture of the general. I think
I depict with reasonable accuracy the typical response
of the only recognizable intelligentsia of the land to
the first great challenge to their aristocratic aloof-
ness the first test in the grand manner of *their free-
dom alike frnm thp. hellirnse imher.ilitv of the nln-

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 87

tocracy and the intolerable fears and childish moral
certainties of the mob. That test exposed them
shamelessly. It revealed their fast allegiance to the
one thing that is the antithesis of all free inquiry, of
all honest hospitality to ideas, of all intellectual in-
dependence and integrity. They proved that they
were correct and in proving it they threw a brilliant
light upon many mysteries of our national culture.

10
The Intolerable Burden

Among others, upon the mystery of our literature
its faltering feebleness, its lack of genuine gusto, its
dearth of salient personalities, its general air of pov-
erty and imitation. What ails the beautiful letters of
the Republic, I repeat, is what ails the general culture
of the Republic the lack of a body of sophisticated
and civilized public opinion, independent of pluto-
cratic control and superior to the infantile philos-
ophies of the mob a body of opinion showing the
eager curiosity, the educated skepticism and the hos-
pitality to ideas of a true aristocracy. This lack is
felt by the American author, imagining him to have
anything new to say, every day of his life. He can
hope for no support, in ordinary cases, from the
mob: it is too suspicious of all ideas. He can hope
for no support from the spokesmen of the plutocracy :

88 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

they are too diligently devoted to maintaining the in-
tellectual status quo. He turns, then, to the intel-
ligentsia and what he finds is correctness! In his

two prime functions, to represent the life about him
accurately and to criticize it honestly, he sees that
correctness arrayed against him. His representation
is indecorous, unlovely, too harsh to be borne. His
criticism is in contumacy to the ideals upon which
the whole structure rests. So he is either attacked
vigorously as an anti-patriot whose babblings ought
to be put down by law, or enshrouded in a silence
which commonly disposes of him even more effec-
tively.

Soon or late, of course, a man of genuine force and
originality is bound to prevail against that sort of
stupidity. He will unearth an adherent here and an-
other there; in the long run they may become numer-
ous enough to force some recognition of him, even
from the most immovable exponents of correctness.
But the business is slow, uncertain, heart-breaking.
It puts a burden upon the artist that ought not to be
put upon him. It strains beyond reason his diligence
and passion. A man who devotes his life to creating
works of the imagination, a man who gives over all
his strength and energy to struggling with problems
that are essentially delicate and baffling and. pregnant
with doubt such a man does not ask for recognition
as a mere reward for his industry; he asks for it as a

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 89

necessary help to his industry ; he needs it as he needs
decent subsistence and peace of mind. It is a grave
damage to the artist and a grave loss to the literature
when such a man as Poe has to seek consolation
among his inferiors, and such a man as the Mark
Twain of "What Is Man?" is forced to conceal his
most profound beliefs, and such men as Dreiser and
Cabell are exposed to incessant attacks by malignant
stupidity. The notion that artists flourish upon ad-
versity and misunderstanding, that they are able to
function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indiffer-
ence or hostility this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.
If it were true, then one would never hear of painters
going to France or of musicians going to Germany.
What the artist actually needs is comprehension of
his aims and ideals by men he respects not neces-
sarily approval of his products, but simply an intel-
ligent sympathy for him in the great agony of crea-
tion. And that sympathy must be more than the
mere fellow-feeling of other craftsmen ; it must come,
in large part, out of a connoisseurship that is beyond
the bald trade interest; it must have its roots in the
intellectual curiosity of an aristocracy of taste. Bill-
roth, I believe, was more valuable to Brahms than
even Schumann. His eager interest gave music-
making a solid dignity. His championship offered
the musician a visible proof that his labors had got
for him a secure place in a civilized and stable so-

90 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

ciety, and that he would be judged by his peers, and
safeguarded against the obtuse hostility of his in-
feriors.

No such security is thrown about an artist in Amer-
ica. It is not that the country lacks the standards that
Dr. Brownell pleads for; it is that its standards are
still those of a primitive and timorous society. The
excesses of Comstockery are profoundly symbolical.
What they show is the moral certainty of the mob in
operation against something that is as incomprehen-
sible to it as the theory of least squares, and what
they show even more vividly is the distressing lack of
any automatic corrective of that outrage of any firm
and secure body of educated opinion, eager to hear
and test all intelligible ideas and sensitively jealous
of the right to discuss them freely. When "The
Genius" was attacked by the Comstocks, it fell to my
lot to seek assistance for Dreiser among the intelli-
gentsia. I found them almost unanimously disin-
clined to lend a hand. A small number permitted
themselves to be induced, but the majority held back,
and not a few, as I have said, actually offered more
or less furtive aid to the Comstocks. I pressed the
matter and began to unearth reasons. It was, it ap-
peared, dangerous for a member of the intelligentsia,
and particularly for a member of the academic in-
telligentsia, to array himself against the mob inflamed
against the moral indignation of the sort of folk

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 91

who devour vice reports and are converted by the
Rev. Billy Sunday! If he came forward, he would
have to come "forward alone. There was no organ-
ized support behind him. No instinctive urge of
class, no prompting of a great tradition, moved him
to speak out for artistic freedom . . . England sup-
plied the lack. Over there they have a mob too, and
something akin to Comstockery, and a cult of hollow
correctness but they also have a caste that stands
above all that sort of thing, and out of that caste came
aid for Dreiser.

England is always supplying the lack England,
or France, or Germany, or some other country, but
chiefly England. "My market and my reputation,"
said Prescott in 1838, "rest principally with Eng-
land." To Poe, a few years later, the United States
was "a literary colony of Great Britain." And there
has been little change to this day. The English lei-
sure class, says Prof. Dr. Veblen, is "for purposes of
reputable usage the upper leisure class of this coun-
try." Despite all the current highfalutin about melt-
ing pots and national destinies the United States re-
mains almost as much an English colonial possession,
intellectually and spiritually, as it was on July 3,
1776. The American social pusher keeps his eye on
Mayfair;' the American literatus dreams of recogni-
tion by the London weeklies; the American don is
lifted to bliss by the imprimatur of Oxford or Cam-

92 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

bridge; even the American statesman knows how to
cringe to Downing Street. Most of the essential pol-
icies of Dr. Wilson between 1914 and 1920 when
the realistic English, finding him no longer useful,
incontinently dismissed him were, to all intents and
purposes, those of a British colonial premier. He
went into the Peace Conference willing to yield every-
thing to English interests, and he came home with a
treaty that was so extravagantly English that it fell an
easy prey to the anti-English minority, ever alert for
the makings of a bugaboo to scare the plain people.
What lies under all this subservience is simple enough.
The American, for all his braggadocio, is quite
conscious of his intrinsic inferiority to the English-
man, on all cultural counts. He may put himself
first as a man of business, as an adventurer in prac-
tical affairs or as a pioneer in the applied arts and
sciences, but in all things removed from the mere
pursuit of money and physical ease he well under-
stands that he belongs at the second table. Even his
recurrent attacks of Anglophobia are no more than
Freudian evidences of his inferiority complex. He
howls in order to still his inner sense of inequality, as
he howls against imaginary enemies in order to con-
vince himself that he is brave and against fabulous
despotisms in order to prove that he is free. The
Englishman is never deceived by this hoc*us-pocus.
He knows that it is always possible to fetch the rebel

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 93

back into camp by playing upon his elemental fears
and vanities. A few dark threats, a few patronizing
speeches, a few Oxford degrees, and the thing is
done. More, the English scarcely regard it as hunt-
ing in the grand manner; it is a business of subal-
terns. When, during the early stages of the war, they
had occasion to woo the American intelligentsia, what
agents did they choose? Did they nominate Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad, George Moore and com-
pany? Nay, they nominated Conan Doyle, Con-
ingsby Dawson, Alfred Noyes, Ian Hay, Chesterton,
Kipling, Zangwill and company. In the choice there
was high sagacity and no little oblique humor as
there was a bit later in the appointment of Lord Read-
ing and Sir Auckland Geddes to Washington. The
valuation they set upon the aluminados of the Republic
was exactly the valuation they were in the habit of
setting, at home, upon MM. of the Free Church Fed-
eration. They saw the eternal green-grocer beneath
the master's gown and mortarboard. Let us look
closely and we shall see him, too.

The essence of a self-reliant and autonomous cul-
ture is an unshakable egoism. It must not only re-
gard itself as the peer of any other culture; it must
regard itself as the superior of any other. You will
find this indomitable pride in the culture of any truly
first-rate ^nation: France, Germany or England.
But you will not find it in the so-called culture of

94 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

America. Here the decadent Anglo-Saxon majority
still looks obediently and a bit wistfully toward the
motherland. No good American ever seriously ques-
tions an English judgment on an aesthetic question, or
even on an ethical, philosophical or political ques-
tion. There is, in fact, seldom any rational reason
why he should : it is almost always more mature, more
tolerant, more intelligent than any judgment hatched
at home. Behind it lies a settled scheme of things,
a stable point of view, the authority of a free intel-
lectual aristocracy, the pride of tradition and of
power. The English are sure-footed, well-informed,
persuasive. It is beyond their imagination that any
one should seriously challenge them. In this over-
grown and oafish colony there is no such sureness.
The American always secretly envies the Englishman,
even when he professes to flout him. The English-
man never envies the American.

The extraordinary colonist, moved to give utter-
ance to the ideas bubbling within him, is thus vastly
handicapped, for he must submit them to the test of a
culture that, in the last analysis, is never quite his
own culture, despite its dominance. Looking within
himself, he finds that he is different, that he diverges
from the English standard, that he is authentically
American and to be authentically American is to be
officially inferior. He thus faces dismay at the very

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 95

start: support is lacking when he needs it most.
In the motherland in any motherland, in any
wholly autonomous nation there is a class of
men like himself, devoted to translating the higher
manifestations of the national spirit into ideas
men differing enormously among themselves,
but still united in common cause against the
lethargy and credulity of the mass. But in a
colony that class, if it exists at all, lacks coher-
ence and certainty; its authority is not only disputed
by the inertia and suspiciousness of the lower orders,
but also by the superior authority overseas; it is tim-
orous and fearful of challenge. Thus it affords no
protection to an individual of assertive originality,
and he is forced to go as a suppliant to a quarter in
which nothing is his by right, but everything must go
by favor in brief to a quarter where his very ap-
plication must needs be regarded as an admission of
his inferiority. The burden of proof upon him is
thus made double. Obviously, he must be a man of
very strong personality to surmount such obstacles
triumphantly. Such strong men, of course, some-
times appear in a colony, but they always stand alone;
their worst opposition is at home. For a colonial of
less vigorous soul the battle is almost hopeless.
Either he submits to subordination and so wears
docilely the inferior badge of a praiseworthy and tol-

96 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

crated colonist, or he deserts the minority for the far
more hospitable and confident majority, and so be-
comes a mere mob-artist.

Examples readily suggest themselves. I give you
Poe and Whitman as men strong enough to weather
the adverse wind. The salient thing about each of
these men was this: that his impulse to self-expres-
sion, the force of his "obscure, inner necessity," was
so powerful that it carried him beyond all ordinary
ambitions and prudences in other words, that the
ego functioned so heroically that it quite disregarded
the temporal welfare of the individual. Neither Poe
nor Whitman made the slightest concession to what
was the predominant English taste, the prevailing
English authority, of his time. And neither yielded
in the slightest to the maudlin echoes of English no-
tions that passed for ideas in the United States; in
neither will you find any recognizable reflection of
the things that Americans were saying and doing all
about them. Even Whitman, preaching democracy,
preached a democracy that not one actual democrat
in a hundred thousand could so much as imagine.
What happened? Imprimis, English authority, at the
start, dismissed them loftily; they were, at best, sim-
ply rare freaks from the colonies. Secondly, Amer-
ican stupidity, falling into step, came near overlook-
ing them altogether. The accident that "maintained
them was an accident of personality and environment.

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 97

They happened to be men accustomed to social isola-
tion and of the most meager wants, and it was thus
difficult to deter them by neglect and punishment.
So they stuck to their guns and presently they were
"discovered," as the phrase is, by men of a culture
wholly foreign to them and perhaps incomprehensible
to them, and thereafter, by slow stages, they began
to win a slow and reluctant recognition in England
(at first only from rebels and iconoclasts), and finally
even in America. That either, without French
prompting, would have come to his present estate I
doubt very much. And in support of that doubt I
cite again the fact that Poe's high talents as a critic,
not having interested the French, have never got their
deserts either in England or at home.

It is lesser men that we chiefly have to deal with in
this world, and it is among lesser men that the lack
of a confident intellectual viewpoint in America
makes itself most evident. Examples are numerous
and obvious. On the one hand, we have Fenimore
Cooper first making a cringing bow for English favor,
and then, on being kicked out, joining the mob against
sense; he wrote books so bad that even the Americans
of 1830 admired them. On the other hand, we have
Henry James, a deserter made by despair; one so
depressed by the tacky company at the American
first table' that he preferred to sit at the second table
of the English. The impulse was, and is common;

98 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

it was only the forthright act that distinguished him.
And in the middle ground, showing both seductions
plainly, there is Mark Twain at one moment striving
his hardest for the English imprimatur, and childishly
delighted by every favorable gesture; at the next, re-
turning to the native mob as its premier clown
monkey-shining at banquets, cavorting in the news-
papers, shrinking poltroonishly from his own ideas,
obscenely eager to give no offense. A much greater
artist than either Poe or Whitman, so I devoutly be-
lieve, but a good deal lower as a man. The ultimate
passion was not there; the decent householder always
pulled the ear of the dreamer. His fate has irony
in it. In England they patronize him: he is, for an
American, not so bad. In America, appalled by his
occasional ascents to honesty, his stray impulses to
be wholly himself, the dunderheads return him to
arm's length, his old place, and one of the most emi-
nent of them, writing in the New York Times, argues
piously that it is impossible to imagine him actually
believing the commonplace heresies he put into
"What Is Man?"

11

Epilogue

I have described the disease. Let me say at once
that I have no remedy to offer. I simply set down a

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 99

few ideas, throw out a few hints, attempt a few modest
inquiries into causes. Perhaps my argument often
turns upon itself: the field is weed-grown and paths
are hard to follow. It may be that insurmountable
natural obstacles stand in the way of the development
of a distinctively American culture, grounded upon a
truly egoistic nationalism and supported by a native
aristocracy. After all, there is no categorical impera-
tive that ordains it. In such matters, when the con-
ditions are right, nature often arranges a division of
labor. A nation shut in by racial and linguistic isola-
tion a Sweden, a Holland or a France is forced
into autonomy by sheer necessity; if it is to have any
intellectual life at all it must develop its own. But
that is not our case. There is England to hold up
the torch for us, as France holds it up for Belgium,
and Spain for Latin America, and Germany for
Switzerland. It is our function, as the younger and
less confident partner, to do the simpler, rougher
parts of the joint labor to develop the virtues of
the more elemental orders of men: .industry, piety,
docility, endurance, assiduity and ingenuity in practi-
cal affairs the wood-hewing and water-drawing of
the race. It seems to me that we do all this very well;
in these things we are better than the English. But
when it comes to those larger and more difficult
activities which concern only the superior minority,
and are, in essence, no more than products of its efforts

100 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

to demonstrate its superiority when it comes to the
higher varieties of speculation and self-expression, to
the fine arts and the game of ideas then we fall into
a bad second place. Where we stand, intellectually,
is where the English non-conformists stand; like
them, we are marked by a fear of ideas as disturbing
and corrupting. Our art is imitative and timorous.
Our political theory is hopelessly sophomoric and
superficial; even English Toryism and Russian Bol-
shevism are infinitely more profound and pene-
trating. And of the two philosophical systems that
we have produced, one is so banal that it is now im-
bedded in the New Thought, and the other is so
shallow that there is nothing in it either to puzzle or
to outrage a school-marm.

Nevertheless, hope will not down, and now and then
it is supported by something rather more real than
mere desire. One observes an under-current of re-
volt, small but vigorous, and sometimes it exerts its
force, not only against the superficial banality but
also against the fundamental flabbiness, the in-
trinsic childishness of the Puritan Anschauung. The
remedy for that childishness is skepticism, and
already skepticism shows itself: in the iconoclastic
political realism of Harold Stearns, Waldo Frank and
company, in the groping questions of Dreiser, Cabell
and Anderson, in the operatic rebellions of the Village.
True imagination, I often think, is no more than a

THE NATIONAL LETTERS 101

function of this skepticism. It is the dull man who
is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
The more a man dreams, the less he believes. A great
literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and
inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable cer-
tainties of the nation. Shakespeare, at a time of
rising democratic feeling in England, flung the whole
force of his genius against democracy. Cervantes,
at a time when all Spain was romantic, made a head-
long attack upon romance. Goethe, with Germany
groping toward nationalism, threw his influences on the
side of internationalism. The central trouble with
America is conformity, timorousness, lack of enter-
prise and audacity. A nation of third-rate men, a
land offering hospitality only to fourth-rate artists.
In Elizabethan England they would have bawled for
democracy, in the Spain of Cervantes they would
have yelled for chivalry, and in the Germany of
Goethe they would have wept and beat their breasts
for the Fatherland. To-day, as in the day of Emer-
son, they set the tune. . . . But into the singing there
occasionally enters a discordant note. On some dim
to-morrow, perhaps, perchance, peradventure, they
may be challenged.

II. ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY

ONE thinks of Dr. Woodrow Wilson's bio-
graphy of George Washington as of one of
the strangest of all the world's books.
Washington: the first, and perhaps also the last
American gentleman. Wilson: the self -bamboozled
Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great moral states-
man, the perfect model of the Christian cad. It is as
if the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday should do a biography
of Charles Darwin almost as if Dr. Wilson him-
self should dedicate his senility to a life of the Cheva-
lier Bayard, or the Cid, or Christ. . . . But such
phenomena, of course, are not actually rare in the
republic; here everything happens that is forbidden
by the probabilities and the decencies. The chief na-
tive critic of beautiful letters, for a whole generation,
was a Baptist clergyman; he was succeeded by a
literary Wall Street man, who gave way, in turn, to
a soviet of ninth-rate pedagogues; this very curious
apostolic succession I have already discussed. The
dean of the music critics, even to-day, is a trans-
lator of grand opera libretti, and probably one of
the worst that ever lived. Return, now, to political

biography. Who can think of anything in American

102

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 103

literature comparable to Morley's life of Gladstone,
or Trevelyan's life of Macaulay, or Carlyle's Fred-
erick, or even Winston Churchill's life of his father?
'

I dredge my memory hopelessly; only William Gra-
ham Sumner's study of Andrew Jackson emerges an
extraordinarily astute and careful piece of work by
one of the two most underestimated Americans of his
generation, the other being Daniel Coit Gilman. But
where is the first-rate biography of Washington
sound, fair, penetrating, honest, done by a man cap-
able of comprehending the English gentry of the
eighteenth century? And how long must we wait
for adequate treatises upon Jefferson, Hamilton, Sam
Adams, Aaron Burr, Henry Clay, Calhoun, Webster,
Sumner, Grant, Sherman, Lee?

Even Lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the
covers of a book. The Nicolay-Hay work is quite
impossible; it is not a biography, but simply a huge
storehouse of biographical raw materials; whoever
can read it can also read the official Records of the
Rebellion. All the other standard lives of old Abe
for instance, those of Lamon, Herndon and Weil,
Stoddard, Morse and Miss Tarbell fail still worse;
when they are not grossly preachy and disingenuous
they are trivial. So far as I can make out, no genu-
inely scientific study of the man has ever been at-
tempted. * The amazing conflict of testimony about
him remains a conflict; the most elemental facts are

104 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

yet to be established; he grows vaguer and more
fabulous as year follows year. One would think that,
by this time, the question of his religious views (to
take one example) ought to be settled, but apparently
it is not, for no longer than a year ago there came
a reverend author, Dr. William E. Barton, with a
whole volume upon the subject, and I was as much in
the dark after reading it as I had been before I opened
it. All previous biographers, it appeared by this au-
thor's evidence, had either dodged the problem, or
lied. The official doctrine, in this as in other depart-
ments, is obviously quite unsound. One hears in the
Sunday-schools that Abe was an austere and pious
fellow, constantly taking the name of God in whispers,
just as one reads in the school history-books that he
was a shining idealist, holding all his vast powers by
the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue. Imagine
a man getting on in American politics, interesting and
enchanting the boobery, sawing off the horns of other
politicians, elbowing his way through primaries and
conventions, by the magic of virtue! As well talk of
fetching the mob by hawking exact and arctic justice!
Abe, in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled
at the great democratic art of gum-shoeing. I like to
think of him as one who defeated such politicians as
Stanton, Douglas and Sumner with their own weapons
deftly leading them into ambuscades, boldly pull-
ing their noses, magnificently ham-stringing and horn-

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 105

swoggling them in brief, as a politician of extraor-
dinary talents, who loved the game for its own sake,
and had the measure of the crowd. His official por-
traits, both in prose and in daguerreotype, show him
wearing the mien of a man about to be hanged; one
never sees him smiling. Nevertheless, one hears that,
until he emerged from Illinois, they always put the
women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few
gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescap-
able record that his career in the State Legislature was
indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche.
But, as I say, it is hopeless to look for the real
man in the biographies of him: they are all full of
distortion, chiefly pious and sentimental. The defect
runs through the whole of American political biog-
raphy, and even through the whole of American
history. Nearly all our professional historians are
poor men holding college posts, and they are ten times
more cruelly beset by the ruling politico-plutocratic-
social oligarchy than ever the Prussian professors
were by the Hohenzollerns. Let them diverge in the
slightest from what is the current official doctrine, and
they are turned out of their chairs with a ceremony
suitable for the expulsion of a drunken valet. Dur-
ing the recent war a herd of two thousand and five
hundred such miserable slaves was organized by Dr.
Creel to lie for their country, and they at once fell
upon the congenial task of rewriting American his-

106 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

tory to make it accord with the ideas of H. P. Davison,
Admiral Sims, Nicholas Murray Butler, the Astors,
Barney Baruch and Lord Northcliffe. It was a com-
mittee of this herd that solemnly pledged the honor of
American scholarship to the authenticity of the cele-
brated Sisson documents. . . .

In the face of such acute miliary imbecility it is
not surprising to discover that all of the existing
biographies of the late Colonel Roosevelt and they
have been rolling off the presses at a dizzy rate since
his death are feeble, inaccurate, ignorant and pre-
posterous. I have read, I suppose, at least ten of
these tomes during the past year or so, and in all of
them I have found vastly more gush than sense. Law-
rence Abbott's "Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt"
and William Roscoe Thayer's "Theodore Roosevelt"
may well serve as specimens. Abbott's book is the
composition, not of an unbiased student of the man,
but of a sort of groom of the hero. He is so ex-
tremely eager to prove that Roosevelt was the perfect
right-thinker, according to the transient definitions of
right-thinking, that he manages to get a flavor of
dubiousness into his whole chronicle. I find myself
doubting him even when I know that he is honest and
suspect that he is right. As for Thayer, all he offers
is a hasty and hollow pot-boiler such a work as
might have been well within the talents ef, say, the
late Murat Halstead or the editor of the New York

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 107

Times. This Thayer has been heavily praised of
late as the Leading American Biographer, and one
constantly hears that some new university has made
him Legum Doctor, or that he has been awarded a
medal by this or that learned society, or that the post
has brought him a new ribbon from some literary
potentate in foreign parts. If, in fact, he is actually
the cock of the walk in biography, then all I have said
against American biographers is too mild and mellow.
What one finds in his book is simply the third-rate
correctness of a Boston colonial. Consider, for ex-
ample, his frequent discussions of the war a neces-
sity in any work on Roosevelt. In England there is
the mob's view of the war, and there is the view of
civilized and intelligent men, e. g., Lansdowne, Lore-
burn, Austin Harrison, Morel, Keynes, Haldane,
Hirst, Balfour, Robert Cecil. In New England, it
would appear, the two views coalesce, with the first
outside. There is scarcely a line on the subject in
Thayer's book that might not have been written by
Horatio Bottomley. . . .

Obviously, Roosevelt's reaction to the war must
occupy a large part of any adequate biography of
him, for that reaction was probably more comprehen-
sively typical of the man than any other business of
his life. It displayed not only his whole stock of
political principles, but also his whole stock of politi-
cal tricks. It plumbed, on the one hand, the depths

108 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

of his sagacity, and on the other hand the depths of
his insincerity. Fundamentally, I am convinced, he
was quite out of sympathy with, and even quite unable
to comprehend the body of doctrine upon which the
Allies, and later the United States, based their case.
To him it must have seemed insane when it was not
hypocritical, and hypocritical when it was not insane.
His instincts were profoundly against a new loosing
of democratic fustian upon the world; he believed
in strongly centralized states, founded upon power
and devoted to enterprises far transcending mere in-
ternal government; he was an imperialist of the type
of Cecil Rhodes, Treitschke and Delcasse. But the
fortunes of domestic politics jockeyed him into the
position of standing as the spokesman of an almost
exactly contrary philosophy. The visible enemy
before him was Wilson. What he wanted as a poli-
tician was something that he could get only by wrest-
ing it from Wilson, and Wilson was too cunning to
yield it without making a tremendous fight, chiefly
by chicane whooping for peace while preparing for
war, playing mob fear against mob fear, concealing
all his genuine motives and desires beneath clouds
of chautauqual rhetoric, leading a mad dance whose
tune changed at every swing. Here was an opponent
that more than once puzzled Roosevelt, -and in the end
flatly dismayed him. Here was a mob-master with
a technique infinitely more subtle and effective than

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 109

his own. So lured into an unequal combat, the Rough
Rider got bogged in absurdities so immense that only
the democratic, anaesthesia to absurdity saved him.
To make any progress at all he was forced into fight-
ing against his own side. He passed from the scene
bawling piteously for a cause that, at bottom, it is
impossible to imagine him believing in, and in terms
of a philosophy that was as foreign to his true faith
as it was to the faith of Wilson. In the whole affair
there was a colossal irony. Both contestants were
intrinsically frauds.

The f raudulence of Wilson is now admitted by all
save a few survivors of the old corps of official press-
agents, most of them devoid of both honesty and
intelligence. No unbiased man, in the presence of
the revelations of Bullitt, Keynes and a hundred other
witnesses, and of the Russian and Shantung perform-
ances, and of innumerable salient domestic phenom-
ena, can now believe that the Doctor dulcifluus was
ever actually in favor of any of the brummagem ideals
he once wept for, to the edification of a moral universe.
They were, at best, no more than ingenious ruses de
guerre, and even in the day of their widest credit it
was the Espionage Act and the Solicitor-General to
the Postoffice, rather than any plausibility in their
substance, that got them their credit. In Roosevelt's
case the imposture is less patent; he died before it
was fully unmasked. What is more, his death put

110 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

an end to whatever investigation of it was under way,
for American sentimentality holds that it is indecent
to inquire into the weaknesses of the dead, at least until
all the flowers have withered on their tombs. When,
a year ago, I ventured in a magazine article to call
attention to Roosevelt's philosophical kinship to the
Kaiser I received letters of denunciation from all
parts of the United States, and not a few forthright
demands that I recant on penalty of lynch law. Pru-
dence demanded that I heed these demands. We
live in a curious and often unsafe country. Haled
before a Roosevelt judge for speeding my automobile,
or spitting on the sidewalk, or carrying a jug, I might
have been railroaded for ten years under some con-
structive corollary of the Espionage Act. But there
were two things that supported me in my contumacy
to the departed. One was a profound reverence for
and fidelity to the truth, sometimes almost amounting
to fanaticism. The other was the support of my ven-
erable brother in epistemology, the eminent Iowa
right-thinker and patriot, Prof. Dr. S. P. Sherman.
Writing in the Nation, where he survives from more
seemly days than these, Prof. Dr. Sherman put the
thing in plain terms. "With the essentials in the
religion of the militarists of Germany," he said,
"Roosevelt was utterly in sympathy."

Utterly? Perhaps the adverb is a bit too strong.
There was in the man a certain instinctive antipathy

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 111

to the concrete aristocrat and in particular to the
aristocrat's private code the product, no doubt, of
his essentially bourgeois origin and training. But
if he could not go with the Junkers all the way, he
could at least go the whole length of their distrust
of the third order the undifferentiated masses of men
below. Here, I daresay, he owed a lot to Nietzsche.
He was always reading German books, and among
them, no doubt, were "Also sprach Zarathustra" and
"Jenseits von Gut und Bose." In fact, the echoes
were constantly sounding in his own harangues.
Years ago, as an intellectual exercise while con-
fined to hospital, I devised and printed a give-away of
the Rooseveltian philosophy in parallel columns in
one column, extracts from "The Strenuous Life"; in
the other, extracts from Nietzsche. The borrowings
were numerous and unescapable. Theodore had
swallowed Friedrich as a peasant swallows Peruna
bottle, cork, label and testimonials. Worse, the draft
whetted his appetite, and soon he was swallowing the
Kaiser of the Garde-Kavallerie-mess and battleship-
launching speeches another somewhat defective
Junker. In his palmy days it was often impossible
to distinguish his politico-theological bulls from those
of Wilhelm; during the war, indeed, I suspect that
some of them were boldly lifted by the British press
bureau, and palmed off as felonious imprudences out
of Potsdam. Wilhelm was his model in Weltpolitik,

112 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

and in sociology, exegetics, administration, law, sport
and connubial polity no less. Both roared for
doughty armies, eternally prepared for the theory
that the way to prevent war is to make all conceivable
enemies think twice, thrice, ten times. Both dreamed
of gigantic navies, with battleships as long as Brook-
lyn Bridge. Both preached incessantly the duty of the
citizen to the state, with the soft pedal upon the duty
of the state to the citizen. Both praised the habitually
gravid wife. Both delighted in the armed pursuit
of the lower fauna. Both heavily patronized the
fine arts. Both were intimates of God, and announced
His desires with authority. Both believed that all
men who stood opposed to them were prompted by
the devil and would suffer for it in hell.

If, in fact, there was any difference between them,
it was all in favor of Wilhelm. For one thing, he
made very much fewer speeches ; it took some colossal
event, such as the launching of a dreadnaught or the
birthday of a colonel-general, to get him upon his
legs; the Reichstag was not constantly deluged with
his advice and upbraiding. For another thing, he
was a milder and more modest man one more accus-
tomed, let us say, to circumstance and authority, and
hence less intoxicated by the greatness of his state.
Finally, he had been trained to think, not only of
his own immediate fortunes, but also of the remote
interests of a family that, in his most expansive days,

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 113

promised to hold the throne for many years, and so
he cultivated a certain prudence, and even a certain
ingratiating suavity. He could, on occasion, be ex-
tremely polite to an opponent. But Roosevelt was
never polite to an opponent; perhaps a gentleman, by
American standards, he was surely never a gentle man.
In a political career of nearly forty years he was never
even fair to an opponent. All of his gabble about the
square deal was merely so much protective coloration,
easily explicable on elementary Freudian grounds.
No man, facing Roosevelt in the heat of controversy,
ever actually got a square deal. He took extravagant
advantages; he played to the worst idiocies of the mob;
he hit below the belt almost habitually. One never
thinks of him as a duelist, say of the school of Dis-
raeli, Palmerston and, to drop a bit, Elaine. One
always thinks of him as a glorified longshoreman
engaged eternally in cleaning out bar-rooms and
not too proud to gouge when the inspiration came to
him, or to bite in the clinches, or to oppose the rela-
tively fragile brass knuckles of the code with chair-
legs, bung-starters, cuspidors, demijohns, and ice-
picks.

Abbott and Thayer, in their books, make elaborate
efforts to depict their hero as one born with a deep
loathing of the whole Prussian scheme of things,
and particularly of the Prussian technique in combat.
Abbott even goes so far as to hint that the attentions

114 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

of the Kaiser, during Roosevelt's historic tour of
Europe on his return from Africa, were subtly revolt-
ing to him. Nothing could be more absurd. Prof.
Dr. Sherman, in the article I have mentioned, blows
up that nonsense by quoting from a speech made by
the tourist in Berlin a speech arguing for the most
extreme sort of militarism in a manner that must have
made even some of the Junkers blow their noses
dubiously. The disproof need not be piled up; the
America that Roosevelt dreamed of was always a
sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regi-
mented within. There was always a clank of the
saber in his discourse; he could not discuss the tamest
matter without swaggering in the best dragoon fashion.
Abbott gets into yet deeper waters when he sets up
the doctrine that the invasion of Belgium threw his
darling into an instantaneous and tremendous fit of
moral indignation, and that the curious delay in the
public exhibition thereof, so much discussed since, was
due to his (Abbott's) fatuous interference a faux pas
later regretted with much bitterness. Unluckily, the
evidence he offers leaves me full of doubts. What
the doctrine demands that one believe is simply this:
that the man who, for mere commercial advantage
and (in Frederick's famous phrase) "to make him-
self talked of in the world," tore up the treaty of 1848
between the United States and Colombia (geb. New
Granada), whereby the United States forever guaran-

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 115

teed the "sovereignty and ownership" of the Colom-
bians in the isthmus of Panama that this same man,
thirteen years .later, was horrified into a fever when
Germany, facing powerful foes on two fronts, tore
up the treaty of 1832, guaranteeing, not the sover-
eignty, but the bald neutrality of Belgium a neu-
trality already destroyed, according to the evidence
before the Germans, by Belgium's own acts.

It is hard, without an inordinate strain upon the
credulity, to believe any such thing, particularly in
view of the fact that this instantaneous indignation
of the most impulsive and vocal of men was dili-
gently concealed for at least six weeks, with reporters
camped upon his doorstep day and night, begging him
to say the very thing that he left so darkly unsaid.
Can one imagine Roosevelt, with red-fire raging within
him and sky-rockets bursting in his veins, holding
his peace for a month and a half? I have no doubt
whatever that Abbott, as he says, desired to avoid em-
barrassing Dr. Wilson but think of Roosevelt show-
ing any such delicacy! For one, I am not equal to
the feat. All that unprecedented reticence, in fact,
is far more readily explicable on other and less lofty
grounds. What really happened I presume to guess.
My guess is that Roosevelt, like the great majority of
other Americans, was not instantly and automatically
outraged by the invasion of Belgium. On the con-
trary, he probably viewed it as a regrettable, but not

116 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

unexpected or unparalleled device of war if any-
thing, as something rather thrillingly gaudy and
effective a fine piece of virtuosity,, pleasing to a
military connoisseur. But then came the deluge of
Belgian atrocity stories, and the organized campaign
to enlist American sympathies. It succeeded very
quickly. By the middle of August the British press
bureau was in full swing; by the beginning of Sep-
tember the country was flooded with inflammatory
stuff; six weeks after the war opened it was already
hazardous for a German in America to state his
country's case. Meanwhile, the Wilson administra-
tion had declared for neutrality, and was still making
a more or less sincere effort to practice it, at least
on the surface. Here was Roosevelt's opportunity,
and he leaped to it with sure instinct. On the one
side was the adminstration that he detested, and that
all his self-interest (e. g., his yearning to get back his
old leadership and to become President again in
1917) prompted him to deal a mortal blow, and on
the other side was a ready-made issue, full of emo-
tional possibilities, stupendously pumped up by ex-
tremely clever propaganda, and so far unembraced by
any other rabble-rouser of the first magnitude. Is
it any wonder that he gave a whoop, jumped upon his
cayuse, and began screaming for war? In war lay
the greatest chance of his life. In war lay the con-
fusion and destruction of Wilson, and the melodrama-

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 117

tic renaissance of the Rough Rider, the professional
hero, the national Barbarossa.

In all this, of course, I strip the process of its
plumes and spangles, and expose a chain of causes
and effects that Roosevelt himself, if he were alive,
would denounce as grossly contumelious to his na-
tive purity of spirit and perhaps in all honesty. It
is not necessary to raise any doubts as to that honesty.
No one who has given any study to the developement
and propagation of political doctrine in the United
States can have failed to notice how the belief in
issues among politicians tends to run in exact ratio
.to the popularity of those issues. Let the populace
begin suddenly to swallow a new panacea or to take
fright at a new bugaboo, and almost instantly nine-
tenths of the master-minds of politics begin to believe
that the panacea is a sure cure for all the malaises of
the republic, and the bugaboo an immediate and un-
bearable menace to all law, order and domestic tran-
quillity. At the bottom of this singular intellectual
resilience, of course, there is a good deal of hard cal-
culation; a man must keep up with the procession of
crazes, or his day is swiftly done. But in it there
are also considerations a good deal more subtle, and
maybe less discreditable. For one thing, a man de-
voted professionally to patriotism and the wisdom of
the fathers is .very apt to come to a resigned sort of
acquiescence in all the doctrinaire rubbish that lies

118 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

beneath the national scheme of things to believe, let
us say, if not that the plain people are gifted with
an infallible sagacity, then at least that they have an
inalienable right to see their follies executed. Poll-
parroting nonsense as a matter of daily routine, the
politician ends by assuming that it is sense, even
though he doesn't believe it. For another thing,
there is the contagion of mob enthusiasm a much
underestimated murrain. We all saw what it could
do during the war college professors taking their
tune from the yellow journals, the rev. clergy per-
forming in the pulpit like so many Liberty Loan or-
ators in five-cent moving-picture houses, hysteria
grown epidemic like the influenza. No man is so re-
mote and arctic that he is wholly safe from that con-
tamination; it explains many extravagant phenomena
of a democratic society; in particular, it explains why
the mob leader is so often a victim to his mob.

Roosevelt, a perfectly typical politician, devoted to
the trade, not primarily because he was gnawed by
ideals, but because he frankly enjoyed its rough-and-
tumble encounters and its gaudy rewards, was prob-
ably moved in both ways and also by the hard cal-
culation that I have mentioned. If, by any ineptness
of the British press-agents, tear-squeezers and orphan-
exhibitors, indignation over the invasion of Belgium
had failed to materialize if, worse still, some gross
infringement of American rights by the English had

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 119

caused it to be forgotten completely if, finally, Dr.
Wilson had been whooping for war with the populace
firmly against him in such event it goes without
saying that the moral horror of Dr. Roosevelt would
have stopped short at a very low amperage, and that he
would have refrained from making it the center of his
polity. But with things as they were, lying neatly to
his hand, he permitted it to take on an extraordinary
virulence, and before long all his old delight in Ger-
man militarism had been converted into a lofty de-
testation of German militarism, and its chief spokes-
man on this side of the Atlantic became its chief op-
ponent. Getting rid of that old delight, of course,
was not easily achieved. The concrete enthusiasm
could be throttled, but the habit of mind remained.
Thus one beheld the curious spectacle of militarism
belabored in terms of militarism of the Kaiser ar-
raigned in unmistakably kaiserliche tones.

Such violent swallowings and regurgitations were
no novelties to the man. His whole political career
was marked, in fact, by performances of the same sort.
The issues that won him most votes were issues that,
at bottom, he didn't believe in; there was always a
mental reservation in his rhetoric. He got into pol-
itics, not as a tribune of the plain people, but as an
amateur reformer of the snobbish type common in
the eighties, by the Nation out of the Social Register.
He was a young Harvard man scandalized by the dis-

120 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

covery that his town was run by men with such names
as Michael O'Shaunnessy and Terence Googan that
his social inferiors were his political superiors. His
sympathies were essentially anti-democratic. He had
a high view of his private position as a young fellow
of wealth and education. He believed in strong cen-
tralization the concentration of power in a few
hands, the strict regimentation of the nether herd, the
abandonment of democratic platitudes. His heroes
were such Federalists as Morris and Hamilton; he
made his first splash in the world by writing about
them and praising them. Worse, his daily associa-
tions were with the old Union League crowd of high-
tariff Republicans men almost apoplectically op-
posed to every movement from below safe and sane
men, highly conservative and suspicious men the
profiteers of peace, as they afterward became the
profiteers of war. His early adventures in politics
were not very fortunate, nor did they reveal any ca-
pacity for leadership. The bosses of the day took
him in rather humorously, played him for what they
could get out of him, and then turned him loose. In
a few years he became disgusted and went West. Re-
turning after a bit, he encountered catastrophe: as a
candidate for Mayor of New York he was drubbed
unmercifully. He went back to the West. He was,
up to this time, a comic figure an anti-politician vie-

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 121

timized by politicians, a pseudo-aristocrat made ridic-
ulous by the mob-masters he detested.

But meanwhile something was happening that
changed the whole color of the political scene, and
was destined, eventually, to give Roosevelt his chance.
That something was a shifting in what might be called
the foundations of reform. Up to now it had been
an essentially aristocratic movement superior, snif-
fish and anti-democratic. But hereafter it took on a
strongly democratic color and began to adopt demo-
cratic methods. More, the change gave it new life.
What Harvard, the Union League Club and the Nation
had failed to accomplish, the plain people now under-
took to accomplish. This invasion of the old citadel
of virtue was first observed in the West, and its man-
ifestations out there must have given Roosevelt a good
deal more disquiet than satisfaction. It is impos-
sible to imagine him finding anything to his taste in
the outlandish doings of the Populists, the wild
schemes of the pre-Bryan dervishes. His instincts
were against all that sort of thing. But as the move-
ment spread toward the East it took on a certain ur-
banity, and by the time it reached the seaboard it had
begun to be quite civilized. With this new brand of
reform Roosevelt now made terms. It was full of
principles that outraged all his pruderies, but it at
least promised to work. His entire political history

122 PREJUDICES : SECOND SERIES

thereafter, down to the day of his death, was a history
of compromises with the new forces of a gradual
yielding, for strategic purposes, to ideas that were in-
trinsically at odds with his congenital prejudices.
When, after a generation of that sort of compromis-
ing, the so-called Progressive party was organized and
he seized the leadership of it from the Westerners who
had founded it, he performed a feat of wholesale
englutination that must forever hold a high place upon
the roll of political prodigies. That is to say, he
swallowed at one gigantic gulp, and out of the same
herculean jug, the most amazing mixture of social,
political and economic perunas ever got down by one
hero, however valiant, however athirst a cocktail
made up of all the elixirs hawked among the boobery
in his time, from woman suffrage to the direct pri-
mary, and from the initiative and referendum to the
short ballot, and from prohibition to public owner-
ship, and from trust-busting to the recall of judges.

This homeric achievement made him the head of
the most tatterdemalion party ever seen in American
politics a party composed of such incompatible in-
gredients and hung together so loosely that it began
to disintegrate the moment it was born. In part it
was made up of mere disordered enthusiasts believ-
ers in anything and everything, pathetic victims of the
credulity complex, habitual followers of jitney mes-
siahs, incurable hopers and snufflers. But in part it

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 123

was also made up of rice converts like Roosevelt him-
self men eager for office, disappointed by the old
parties, and no\\r quite willing to accept any aid that
half -idiot doctrinaires could give them. I have no
doubt that Roosevelt himself, carried away by the
emotional storms of the moment and especially by the
quasi-religious monkey-shines that marked the first
Progressive convention, gradually convinced himself
that at least some of the doctrinaires, in the midst of
all their imbecility, yet preached a few ideas that were
workable, and perhaps even sound. But at bottom he
was against them, and not only in the matter of their
specific sure cures, but also in the larger matter of
their childish faith in the wisdom and virtue of the
plain people. Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of
democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all
the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had
no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn't be-
lieve in democracy; he believed simply in govern-
ment. His remedy for all the great pangs and long-
ings of existence was not a dispersion of authority,
but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in
favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a
rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired
prophets and policemen. He was not for democracy
as his followers understood democracy, and as it ac-
tually is and must be; he was for a paternalism of the
true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic or

124 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Ludendorffian pattern a paternalism concerning it-
self with all things, from the regulation of coal-min-
ing and meat-packing to the regulation, of spelling and
marital rights. His instincts were always those of
the property-owning Tory, not those of the romantic
Liberal. All the fundamental objects of Liberalism
free speech, unhampered enterprise, the least pos-
sible governmental interference were abhorrent to
him. Even when, for campaign purposes, he came
to terms with the Liberals his thoughts always ranged
far afield. When he tackled the trusts the thing that
he had in his mind's eye was not the restoration of
competition but the subordination of all private trusts
to one great national trust, with himself at its head.
And when he attacked the courts it was not because
they put their own prejudice before the law but be-
cause they refused to put his prejudices before the
law.

In all his career no one ever heard him make an
argument for the rights of the citizen; his eloquence
was always expended in expounding the duties of the
citizen. I have before me a speech in which he
pleaded for "a spirit of kindly justice toward every
man and woman," but that seems to be as far as he
ever got in that direction and it was the gratuitous
justice of the absolute monarch that he apparently had
in mind, not the autonomous and inalienable justice of
a free society. The duties of the citizen, as he under-

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 125

stood them, related not only to acts, but also to
thoughts. There was, to his mind, a simple body of
primary doctrine, and dissent from it was the foulest
of crimes. No man could have been more bitter
against opponents, or more unfair to them, or more
ungenerous. In this department, indeed, even so
gifted a specialist in dishonorable controversy as Dr.
Wilson has seldom surpassed him. He never stood
up to a frank and chivalrous debate. He dragged
herrings across the trail. He made seductive faces at
the gallery. He capitalized his enormous talents as
an entertainer, his rank as a national hero, his public
influence and consequence. The two great law-suits
in which he was engaged were screaming burlesques
upon justice. He tried them in the newspapers be-
fore ever they were called ; he befogged them with ir-
relevant issues; his appearances in court were not the
appearances of a witness standing on a level with
other witnesses, but those of a comedian sure of his
crowd. He was, in his dealings with concrete men as
in his dealings with men in the mass, a charlatan of
the very highest skill and there was in him, it goes
without saying, the persuasive charm of the charlatan
as well as the daring deviousness, the humanness of
naivete as well as the humanness of chicane. He
knew how to woo and not only boobs. He was, for
all his ruses and ambuscades, a jolly fellow.

It 'seems to be forgotten that the current American

126 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

theory that political heresy should be put down by
force, that a man who disputes whatever is official has
no rights in law or equity, that he is lucky if he fares
no worse than to lose his constitutional benefits of
free speech, free assemblage and the use of the mails
it seems to be forgotten that this theory was in-
vented, not by Dr. Wilson, but by Roosevelt. Most
Liberals, I suppose, would credit it, if asked, to Wil-
son. He has carried it to extravagant lengths; he is
the father superior of all the present advocates of it;
he will probably go down into American history as
its greatest prophet. But it was first clearly stated,
not in any Wilsonian bull to the right-thinkers of all
lands, but in Roosevelt's proceedings against the so-
called Paterson anarchists. You will find it set forth
at length in an opinion prepared for him by his At-
torney-General, Charles J. Bonaparte, another curious
and almost fabulous character, also an absolutist
wearing the false whiskers of a democrat. Bona-
parte furnished the law, and Roosevelt furnished the
blood and iron. It was an almost ideal combina-
tion; Bonaparte had precisely the touch of Italian
finesse that the Rough Rider always lacked. Roose-
velt believed in the Paterson doctrine in brief, that
the Constitution does not throw its cloak around here-
tics to the end of his days. In the face of what he
conceived to be contumacy to revelation his fury took
on a sort of lyrical grandeur. There was nothing too

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 127

awful for the culprit in the dock. Upon his head
were poured denunciations as violent as the wildest
interdicts of a mediaeval pope.

The appearance of such men, of course, is inevi-
table under a democracy. Consummate showmen,
they arrest the wonder of the mob, and so put its sus-
picions to sleep. What they actually believe is of
secondary consequence; the main thing is what they
say; even more, the way they say it. Obviously, their
activity does a great deal of damage to the democratic
theory, for they are standing refutations of the pri-
mary doctrine that the common folk choose their lead-
ers wisely. They damage it again in another and
more subtle way. That is to say, their ineradicable
contempt for the. minds they must heat up and bam-
boozle leads them into a fatalism that shows itself in
a cynical and opportunistic politics, a deliberate
avoidance of fundamentals. The policy of a de-
mocracy thus becomes an eternal improvisation,
changing with the private ambitions of its leaders and
the transient and often unintelligible emotions of its
rank and file. Roosevelt, incurably undemocratic in
his habits of mind, often found it difficult to gauge
those emotional oscillations. The fact explains his
frequent loss of mob support, his periodical journeys
into Coventry. There were times when his magnifi-
cent talents as a public comedian brought the prole-
tariat to an almost unanimous groveling at his feet,

128 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

but there were also times when he puzzled and dis-
mayed it, and so awakened its hostility. When he
assaulted Wilson on the neutrality, issue, early in
1915, he made a quite typical mistake. That mistake
consisted in assuming that public indignation over the
wrongs of the Belgians would maintain itself at a high
temperature that it would develop rapidly into a de-
mand for intervention. Roosevelt made himself the
spokesman of that demand, and then found to his con-
sternation that it was waning that the great masses
of the plain people, prospering under the Wilsonian
neutrality, were inclined to preserve it, at no matter
what cost to the Belgians. In 1915, after the Lusi-
tania affair, things seemed to swing his way again, and
he got vigorous support from the British press bureau.
But in a few months he found himself once more at-
tempting to lead a mob that was fast slipping away.
Wilson, a very much shrewder politician, with little
of Roosevelt's weakness for succumbing to his own
rhetoric, discerned the truth much more quickly and
clearly. In 1916 he made his campaign for reelec-
tion on a flatly anti-Roosevelt peace issue, and not
only got himself reelected, but also drove Roosevelt
out of the ring.

What happened thereafter deserves a great deal
more careful study than it will ever get from the tim-
orous eunuchs who posture as American historians.
At the moment, it is the official doctrine in England,

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 129

where the thing is more freely discussed than at home,
that Wilson was forced into the war by an irresistible
movement from below that the plain people com-
pelled him to abandon neutrality and move reluctantly
upon the Germans. Nothing could be more untrue.
The plain people, at the end of 1916, were in favor
of peace, and they believed that Wilson was in favor
of peace. How they were gradually worked up to
complaisance and then to enthusiasm and then to hys-
teria and then to acute mania this is a tale to be told
in more leisurely days and by historians without
boards of trustees on their necks. For the present
purpose it is sufficient to note that the whole thing was
achieved so quickly and so neatly that its success left
Roosevelt surprised and helpless. His issue had
'been stolen from directly under his nose. He was
left standing daunted and alone, a boy upon a burning
deck. It took him months to collect his scattered
wits, and even then his attack upon the administra-
tion was feeble and ineffective. To the plain people
it seemed a mere ill-natured snapping at a successful
rival, which in fact it was, and so they paid no heed
to it, and Roosevelt found himself isolated once more.
Thus he passed from the scene in the shadows, a
broken politician and a disappointed man.

I have a notion that he died too soon. His best
days were probably not behind him, but ahead of

him. Had he lived ten years longer, he might have

130 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

enjoyed a great rehabilitation, and exchanged his old
false leadership of the inflammatory and fickle mob
for a sound and true leadership of the civilized mi-
nority. For the more one studies his mountebanker-
ies as mob-master, the more one is convinced that
there was a shrewd man beneath the motley, and that
his actual beliefs were anything but nonsensical.
The truth of them, indeed, emerges more clearly day
by day. The old theory of a federation of free and
autonomous states has broken down by its own weight,
and we are moved toward centralization by forces that
have long been powerful and are now quite irresis-
tible. So with the old theory of national isolation:
it, too, has fallen to pieces. The United States can
no longer hope to lead a separate life in the world,
undisturbed by the pressure of foreign aspirations.
We came out of the war to find ourselves hemmed in
by hostilities that no longer troubled to conceal them-
selves, and if they are not as close and menacing to-
day as those that have hemmed in Germany for cen-
turies they are none the less plainly there and plainly
growing. Roosevelt, by whatever route of reflection
or intuition, arrived at a sense of these facts at a
time when it was still somewhat scandalous to state
them, and it was the capital effort of his life to recon-
cile them, in some dark way or other, to the prevailing
platitudes, and so get them heeded. To-day no one
seriously maintains, as all Americans once main-

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 131

tained, that the states can go on existing together as
independent commonwealths, each with its own laws,
its own legal theory and its own view of the common
constitutional bond. And to-day no one seriously
maintains, as all Americans once maintained, that the
nation may safely potter on without adequate means
of defense. However unpleasant it may be to con-
template, the fact is plain that the American people,
during the next century, will have to fight to maintain
their place in the sun.

Roosevelt lived just long enough to see his notions
in these directions take on life, but not long enough
to see them openly adopted. To the extent of his
prevision he was a genuine leader of the nation, and
perhaps in the years to come, when his actual ideas
are disentangled from the demagogic fustian in which
he had to wrap them, his more honest pronunciamen-
toes will be given canonical honors, and he will be
ranked among the prophets. He saw clearly more
than one other thing that was by no means obvious to
his age for example, the inevitability of frequent
wars under the new world-system of extreme national-
ism; again, the urgent necessity, for primary police
ends, of organizing the backward nations into groups
of vassals, each under the hoof of some first-rate
power; yet again, the probability of the breakdown
of the old system of free competition; once more, the
high social utility of the Spartan virtues and the

132 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

grave dangers of sloth and ease; finally, the incompat-
ibility of free speech and democracy. I do not say
that he was always quite honest, even when he was
most indubitably right. But in so far as it was pos-
sible for him to be honest and exist at all politically,
he inclined toward the straightforward thought and
the candid word. That is to say, his instinet
prompted him to tell the truth, just as the instinct of
Dr. Wilson prompts him to shift and dissimulate.
What ailed him was the fact that his lust for glory,
when it came to a struggle, was always vastly more
powerful than his lust for the eternal verities.
Tempted sufficiently, he would sacrifice anything and
everything to get applause. Thus the statesman was
debauched by the politician, and the philosopher was
elbowed out of sight by the popinjay.

Where he failed most miserably was in his reme-
dies. A remarkably penetrating diagnostician, well-
read, unprejudiced and with a touch of genuine scien-
tific passion, he always stooped to quackery when he
prescribed a course of treatment. For all his sen-
sational attacks upon the trusts, he never managed to
devise a scheme to curb them and even when he
sought to apply the schemes of other men he invar-
iably corrupted the business with timorousness and in-
sincerity. So with his campaign for national pre-
paredness. He displayed the disease magnificently,
but the course of medication that he proposed was

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 133

vague and unconvincing; it was not, indeed, without
justification that the plain people mistook his ad-
vocacy of an adequate army for a mere secret yearn-
ing to prance upon a charger at the head of huge
hordes. So, again, with his eloquent plea for na-
tional solidarity and an end of hyphenism. The dan-
gers that he pointed out were very real and very men-
acing, but his plan for abating them only made them
worse. His objurgations against the Germans surely
accomplished nothing; the hyphenate of 1915 is still
a hyphenate in his heart with bitter and unforget-
table grievances to support him. Roosevelt, very
characteristically, swung too far. In denouncing
German hyphenism so extravagantly he contrived to
give an enormous impetus to English hyphenism, a
far older and more perilous malady. It has already
gone so far that a large and influential party endeav-
ors almost openly to convert the United States into
a mere vassal state of England's. Instead of na-
tional solidarity following the war, we have only a
revival of Know-Nothingism ; one faction of hyphen-
ates tries to exterminate another faction. Roosevelt's
error here was one that he was always making. Car-
ried away by the ease with which he could heat up the
mob, he tried to accomplish instantly and by force
majeure what could only be accomplished by a long
and complex process, with more good will on both
sides than ever so opinionated and melodramatic a

134 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

pseudo- Junker was capable of. But though he thus
made a mess of the cure, he was undoubtedly right
about the disease.

The talented Sherman, in the monograph that I
have praised, argues that the chief contribution of the
dead gladiator to American life was the example of
his gigantic gusto, his delight in toil and struggle, his
superb aliveness. The fact is plain. What he stood
most clearly in opposition to was the superior pes-
simism of the three Adams brothers the notion that
the public problems of a democracy are unworthy the
thought and effort of a civilized and self-respecting
man the sad error that lies in wait for all of us
who hold ourselves above the general. Against this
suicidal aloofness Roosevelt always hurled himself
with brave effect. Enormously sensitive and resili-
ent, almost pathological in his appetite for activity,
he made it plain to every one that the most stimulating
sort of sport imaginable was to be obtained in fight-
ing, not for mere money, but for ideas. There was
no aristocratic reserve about him. He was not, in
fact, an aristocrat at all, but a quite typical member
of the upper bourgeoisie; his people were not
patroons in New Amsterdam, but simple traders; he
was himself a social pusher, and eternally tickled by
the thought that he had had a Bonaparte in his cabinet.
The marks of the thoroughbred were simply not there.
The man was blatant, crude, overly confidential, de-

ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY 135

vious, tyrannical, vainglorious, sometimes quite child-
ish. One often observed in him a certain pathetic
wistfulness, a reaching out for a grand manner that
was utterly beyond him. But the sweet went with
the bitter. He had all the virtues of the fat and com-
placent burgher. His disdain of affectation and
prudery was magnificent. He hated all pretension
save his own pretension. He had a sound respect for
hard effort, for loyalty, for thrift, for honest achieve-
ment.

His worst defects, it seems to me, were the defects
of his race and time. Aspiring to be the leader of
a nation of third-rate men, he had to stoop to the com-
mon level. When he struck out for realms above that
level he always came to grief: this was the "unsafe"
Roosevelt, the Roosevelt who was laughed at, the
Roosevelt retired suddenly to cold storage. This was
the Roosevelt who, in happier times and a better place
might have been. Well, one does what one can.

III. THE SAHARA OF THE BOZART

Alas, for the South ! Her books have grown fewer
She never was much given to literature. .

IN the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of
these elegaic lines, there was the insight of a
true poet. He was the last bard of Dixie, at
least in the legitimate line. Down there a poet is
now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point
etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing
to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the
interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now
mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could
be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy
cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in
France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for
the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its
wealth and all the "progress" it babbles of, it is
almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally,
as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in
Europe that house more first-rate men than all the
states south of the Potomac ; there are probably single
square miles in America. If the whole of the late
Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave to-
morrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men

136

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 137

in the world would be but little greater than that of a
flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible
in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a
civilization.

I say a civilization because that is what, in the old
days, the South had, despite the Baptist and Meth-
odist barbarism that reigns down there now. More,
it was a civilization of manifold excellences per-
haps the best that the Western Hemisphere has ever
seen undoubtedly the best that These States have
ever seen. Down to the middle of the last century,
and even beyond, the main hatchery of ideas on this
side of the water was across the Potomac bridges.
The New England shopkeepers and theologians never
really developed a civilization; all they ever de-
veloped was a government. They were, at their best,
tawdry and tacky fellows, oafish in manner and de-
void of imagination; one searches the books in vain
for mention of a salient Yankee gentleman; as well
look for a Welsh gentleman. But in the south there
were men of delicate fancy, urbane instinct and aristo-
cratic manner in brief, superior men in brief, gen-
try. To politics, their chief diversion, they brought
active and original minds. It was there that nearly
all the political theories we still cherish and suffer
under came to birth. It was there that the crude dog-
matism of New England was refined and humanized.
It was there, above all, that some attention was given

138 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

to the art of living that life got beyond and above
the state of a mere infliction and became an exhilarat-
ing experience. A certain noble spaciousness was
in the ancient southern scheme of things. The Ur-
Confederate had leisure. He liked to toy with ideas.
He was hospitable and tolerant. He had the vague
thing that we call culture.

But consider the condition of his late empire to-
day. The picture gives one the creeps. It is as if
the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the
torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field.
One thinks of Asia Minor, resigned to Armenians,
Greeks and wild swine, of Poland abandoned to the
Poles. In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-
rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going
into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine
symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or
a single theater devoted to decent plays, or a single
public monument (built since the war) that is worth
looking at, or a single workshop devoted to the making
of beautiful things. Once you have counted Robert
Loveman (an Ohioan by birth) and John McClure
(an Oklahoman) you will not find a single southern
poet above the rank of a neighborhood rhymester.
Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a ling-
ering survivor of the ancien regime: a scarlet dragon-
fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a
single southern prose writer who can actually write.

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 139

And once you have but when you come to critics,
musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects and
the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not
even a bad one between the Potomac mud-flats and the
Gulf. Nor an historian. Nor a sociologist. Nor
a philosopher. Nor a theologian. Nor a scientist.
In all these fields the south is an awe-inspiring blank
a brother to Portugal, Serbia and Esthonia.

Consider, for example, the present estate and dig-
nity of Virginia in the great days indubitably the
premier American state, the mother of Presidents and
statesmen, the home of the first American university
worthy of the name, the arbiter elegantiarum of the
western world. Well, observe Virginia to-day. It is
years since a first-rate man, save only Cabell, has
come out of it; it is years since an idea has come
out of it. The old aristocracy went down the red
gullet of war; the poor white trash are now in the sad-
dle. Politics in Virginia are cheap, ignorant, paro-
chial, idiotic; there is scarcely a man in office above
the rank of a professional job-seeker; the political
doctrine that prevails is made up of hand-me-downs
from the bumpkinry of the Middle West Bryanism,
Prohibition, vice crusading, all that sort of filthy
claptrap; the administration of the law is turned
over to professors of Puritanism and espionage; a
Washington or a Jefferson, dumped there by some act
of God, would be denounced as a scoundrel and jailed

140 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

overnight. Elegance, esprit, culture? Virginia has
no art, no literature, no philosophy, no mind or aspi-
ration of her own. Her education has sunk to the
Baptist seminary level; not a single contribution to
human knowledge has come out of her colleges in
twenty -five years; she spends less than half upon her
common schools, per capita, than any northern state
spends. In brief, an intellectual Gobi or Lapland.
Urbanity, politesse, chivalry? Go to! It was in Vir-
ginia that they invented the device of searching for
contraband whisky in women's underwear. . . .
There remains, at the top, a ghost of the old aristoc-
racy, a bit wistful and infinitely charming. But it
has lost all its old leadership to fabulous monsters
from the lower depths; it is submerged in an indus-
trial plutocracy that is ignorant and ignominious.
The mind of the state, as it is revealed to the nation,
is pathetically naive and inconsequential. It no
longer reacts with energy and elasticity to great prob-
lems. It has fallen to the bombastic trivialities of
the camp-meeting and the chautauqua. Its foremost
exponent if so flabby a thing may be said to have
an exponent is a stateman whose name is synony-
mous with empty words, broken pledges and false
pretenses. One could no more imagine a Lee or a
Washington in the Virginia of to-day than one could
imagine a Huxley in Nicaragua.

I choose the Old Dominion, not because I disdain

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 141

it, but precisely because I esteem it. It is, by long
odds, the most civilized of the southern states, now as
always. It has sent a host of creditable sons north-
ward; the stream kept running into our own time.
Virginians, even the worst of them, show the effects of
a great tradition. They hold themselves above other
southerners, and with sound pretension. If one turns
to such a commonwealth as Georgia the picture be-
comes far darker. There the liberated lower orders
of whites have borrowed the worst commercial bound-
erism of the Yankee and superimposed it upon a cul-
ture that, at bottom, is but little removed from sav-
agery. Georgia is at once the home of the cotton-
mill sweater and of the most noisy and vapid sort of
chamber of commerce, of the Methodist parson turned
Savonarola and of the lynching bee. A self-respect-
ing European, going there to live, would not only
find intellectual stimulation utterly lacking; he would
actually feel a certain insecurity, as if the scene were
the Balkans or the China Coast. The Leo Frank af-
fair was no isolated phenomenon. It fitted into its
frame very snugly. It was a natural expression of
Georgian notions of truth and justice. There is a
state with more than half the area of Italy and more
population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet
in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.
Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of
books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned

142 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the
local blacks that his works were really the products,
not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing
afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the
fifth rank. And he is not only the glory of the lit-
erature of Georgia; he is, almost literally, the whole
of the literature of Georgia nay, of the entire art of
Georgia.

Virginia is the best of the south to-day, and Georgia
is perhaps the worst. The one is simply senile; the
other is crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious. Between
lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, al-
most of dead silence. In the north, of course, there
is also grossness, crassness, vulgarity. The north, in
its way, is also stupid and obnoxious. But nowhere
in the north is there such complete sterility, so de-
pressing a lack of all civilized gesture and aspira-
tion. One would find it difficult to unearth a second-
rate city between the Ohio and the Pacific that isn't
struggling to establish an orchestra, or setting up a
little theater, or going in for an art gallery, or making
some other effort to get into touch with civilization.
These efforts often fail, and sometimes they succeed
rather absurdly, but under them there is at least an
impulse that deserves respect, and that is the impulse
to seek beauty and to experiment with ideas, and so
to give the life of every day a certain dignity and pur-
pose. You will find no such impulse in the south.

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 143

There are no committees down there cadging subscrip-
tions for orchestras; if a string quartet is ever heard
there, the news of it has never come out; an opera
troupe, when it roves the land, is a nine days' wonder.
The little theater movement has swept the whole
country, enormously augmenting the public interest in
sound plays, giving new dramatists their chance, forc-
ing reforms upon the commercial theater. Every-
where else the wave rolls high but along the line of
the Potomac it breaks upon a rock-bound shore.
There is no little theater beyond. There is no gal-
lery of pictures. No artist ever gives exhibitions.
No one talks of such things. No one seems to be in-
terested in such things.

As for the cause of this unanimous torpor and
doltishness, this curious and almost pathological es-
trangement from everything that makes for a civilized
culture, I have hinted at it already, and now state it
again. The south has simply been drained of all its
best blood. The vast blood-letting of the Civil War
half exterminated and wholly paralyzed the old aris-
tocracy, and so left the land to the harsh mercies of
the poor white trash, now its masters. The war, of
course, was not a complete massacre. It spared a
decent number of first-rate southerners perhaps even
some of the very best. Moreover, other countries,
notably France and Germany, have survived far more
staggering butfcheries, and even showed marked prog-

144 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

ress thereafter. But the war not only cost a great
many valuable lives; it also brought bankruptcy,
demoralization and despair in its train and so the
majority of the first-rate southerners that were left,
broken in spirit and unable to live under the new dis-
pensation, cleared out. A few went to South Amer-
ica, to Egypt, to the Far East. Most came north.
They were fecund ; their progeny is widely dispersed,
to the great benefit of the north. A southerner of
good blood almost always does well in the north. He
finds, even in the big cities, surroundings fit for a
man of condition. His peculiar qualities have a high
social value, and are esteemed. He is welcomed by
the codfish aristocracy as one palpably superior. But
in the south he throws up his hands. It is impossible
for him to stoop to the common level. He cannot
brawl in politics with the grandsons of his grand-
father's tenants. He is unable to share their fierce
jealousy of the emerging black the cornerstone of
all their public thinking. He is anaesthetic to their
theological and political enthusiasms. He finds him-
self an alien at their feasts of soul. And so he with-
draws into his tower, and is heard of no more. Ca-
bell is almost a perfect example. His eyes, for years,
were turned toward the past; he became a professor
of the grotesque genealogizing that decaying aristoc-
racies affect; it was only by a sort of accident that he
discovered himself to be an artist. K The south is

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 145

unaware of the fact to this day; it regards Woodrow
Wilson and Col. John Temple Graves as much finer
stylists, and Frank L. Stanton as an infinitely greater
poet. If it has heard, which I doubt, that Cabell has
been hoofed by the Comstocks, it unquestionably
views that assault as a deserved rebuke to a fellow
who indulges a lewd passion for fancy writing, and is
a covert enemy to the Only True Christianity.

What is needed down there, before the vexatious
public problems of the region may be intelligently
approached, is a survey of the population by com-
petent ethnologists and anthropologists. The immi-
grants of the north have been studied at great length,
and any one who is interested may now apply to the
Bureau of Ethnology for elaborate data as to their
racial strains, their stature and cranial indices, their
relative capacity for education, and the changes that
they undergo under American Kultur. But the older
stocks of the south, and particularly the emancipated
and dominant poor white trash, have never been in-
vestigated scientifically, and most of the current gen-
eralizations about them are probably wrong. For ex-
ample, the generalization that they are purely Anglo-
Saxon in blood. This I doubt very seriously. The
chief strain down there, I believe, is Celtic rather than
Saxon, particularly in the hill country. French
blood, too, shows itself here and there, and so does
Spanish, and' so does German. The last-named en-

146 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

tered from the northward, by way of the limestone
belt just east of the Alleghenies. Again, it is very
likely that in some parts of the south a good many of
the plebeian whites have more than a trace of negro
blood. Interbreeding under concubinage produced
some very light half-breeds at an early day, and no
doubt appreciable numbers of them went over into
the white race by the simple process of changing their
abode. Not long ago I read a curious article by an
intelligent negro, in which he stated that it is easy for
a very light negro to pass as white in the south on ac-
count of the fact that large numbers of southerners
accepted as white have distinctly negroid features.
Thus it becomes a delicate and dangerous matter for
a train conductor or a hotel-keeper to challenge a sus-
pect. But the Celtic strain is far more obvious than
any of these others. It not only makes itself visible
in physical stigmata e. g., leanness and dark color-
ing but also in mental traits. For example, the re-
ligious thought of the south is almost precisely iden-
tical with the religious thought of Wales. There is
the same na'ive belief in an anthropomorphic Creator
but little removed, in manner and desire, from an
evangelical bishop ; there is the same submission to an
ignorant and impudent sacerdotal tyranny, and there
is the same sharp contrast between doctrinal ortho-
doxy and private ethics. Read Caradoc Evans' iron-
ical picture of the Welsh Wesleyans in his preface

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 147

to "My Neighbors," and you will be instantly re-
minded of the Georgia and Carolina Methodists.
The most booming sort of piety, in the south, is not
incompatible with the theory that lynching is a benign
institution. Two generations ago it was not incom-
patible with an ardent belief in slavery.

It is highly probable that some of the worst blood
of western Europe flows in the veins of the southern
poor whites, now poor no longer. The original
strains, according to every honest historian, were ex-
tremely corrupt. Philip Alexander Bruce (a Vir-
ginian of the old gentry) says in his "Industrial His-
tory of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century" that the
first native-born generation was largely illegitimate.
"One of the most common offenses against morality
committed in the lower ranks of life in Virginia dur-
ing the seventeenth century," he says, "was bastardy."
The mothers of these bastards, he continues, were
chiefly indentured servants, and "had belonged to the
lowest class in their native country." Fanny Kem-
ble Butler, writing of the Georgia poor whites of a
century later, described them as "the most degraded
race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin
that can be found on the face of the earth filthy,
lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages."
The Sunday-school and the chautauqua, of course,
have appreciably mellowed the descendants of these
"savages," and their economic progress and rise to

148 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

political power have done perhaps even more, but the
marks of their origin are still unpleasantly plentiful.
Every now and then they produce a political leader
who puts their secret notions of the true, the good and
the beautiful into plain words, to the amazement and
scandal of the rest of the country. That amazement
is turned into downright incredulity when news comes
that his platform has got him high office, and that he
is trying to execute it.

In the great days of the south the line between the
gentry and the poor whites was very sharply drawn.
There was absolutely no intermarriage. So far as I
know there is not a single instance in history of a
southerner of the upper class marrying one of the
bondwomen described by Mr. Bruce. In other so-
cieties characterized by class distinctions of that sort
it is common for the lower class to be improved by ex-
tra-legal crosses. That is to say, the men of the up-
per class take women of the lower class as mistresses,
and out of such unions spring the extraordinary plebe-
ians who rise sharply from the common level, and so
propagate the delusion that all other plebeians would
do the same thing if they had the chance in brief,
the delusion that class distinctions are merely eco-
nomic and conventional, and not congenital and gen-
uine. But in the south the men of the upper classes
sought their mistresses among the blacks, and after
a few generations there was so much white blood

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 149

in the black women that they were considerably more
attractive than the unhealthy and bedraggled women
of the poor whites. This preference continued into
our own time. A southerner of good family once told
me in all seriousness that he had reached his majority
before it ever occurred to him that a white woman
might make quite as agreeable a mistress as the octa-
roons of his jejune fancy. If the thing has changed
of late, it is not the fault of the southern white man,
but of the southern mulatto women. The more
sightly yellow girls of the region, with improving eco-
nomic opportunities, have gained self-respect, and so
they are no longer as willing to enter into concubinage
as their grand-dams were.

As a result of this preference of the southern gen-
try for mulatto mistresses there was created a series
of mixed strains containing the best white blood of
the south, and perhaps of the whole country. As
another result the poor whites went unfertilized from
above, and so missed the improvement that so con-
stantly shows itself in the peasant stocks of other
countries. It is a commonplace that nearly all ne-
groes who rise above the general are of mixed blood,
usually with the white predominating. I know a
great many negroes, and it would be hard for me to
think of an exception. What is too often forgotten
is that this white blood is not the blood of the poor
whites but that of the old gentry. The mulatto girls

150 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

of the early days despised the poor whites as creatures
distinctly inferior to negroes, and it was thus almost
unheard of for such a girl to enter into relations with
a man of that submerged class. This aversion was
based upon a sound instinct. The southern mulatto
of to-day is a proof of it. Like all other half-breeds
he is an unhappy man, with disquieting tendencies
toward anti-social habits of thought, but he is intrin-
sically a better animal than the pure-blooded descend-
ant of the old poor whites, and he not infrequently
demonstrates it. It is not by accident that the negroes
of the south are making faster progress, economically
and culturally, than the masses of the whites. It is
not by accident that the only visible aesthetic activ-
ity in the south is wholly in their hands. No south-
ern composer has ever written music so good as that
of half a dozen white-black composers who might be
named. Even in politics, the negro reveals a curious
superiority. Despite the fact that the race question
has been the main political concern of the southern
whites for two generations, to the practical exclusion
of everything else, they have contributed nothing to
its discussion that has impressed the rest of the world
so deeply and so favorably as three or four books by
southern negroes.

Entering upon such themes, of course, one must re-
sign one's self to a vast misunderstanding and abuse.
The south has not only lost its old capacity for pro-

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 151

ducing ideas; it has also taken on the worst intoler-
ance of ignorance and stupidity. Its prevailing men-
tal attitude for several decades past has been that of
its own hedge ecclesiastics. All who dissent from its
orthodox doctrines are scoundrels. All who presume
to discuss its ways realistically are damned. I have
had, in my day, several experiences in point. Once,
after I had published an article on some phase of
the eternal race question, a leading southern news-
paper replied by printing a column of denunciation
of my father, then dead nearly twenty years a phi-
lippic placarding him as an ignorant foreigner of dubi-
ous origin, inhabiting "the Baltimore ghetto" and
speaking a dialect recalling that of Weber & Fields
two thousand words of incandescent nonsense, utterly
false and beside the point, but exactly meeting the
latter-day southern notion of effective controversy.
Another time, I published a short discourse on lynch-
ing, arguing that the sport was popular in the south
because the backward culture of the region denied the
populace more seemly recreations. Among such rec-
reations I mentioned those afforded by brass bands,
symphony orchestras, boxing matches, amateur ath-
letic contests, shoot-the-chutes, roof gardens, horse
races, and so on. In reply another great southern
journal denounced me as a man "of wineshop temper-
ament, brass-jewelry tastes and pornographic predi-
lections." In other words, brass bands, in the south,

152 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

are classed with brass jewelry, and both are snares of
the devil! To advocate setting up symphony orches-
tras is pornography! . . . Alas, when the touchy
southerner attempts a greater urbanity, the result is
often even worse. Sx>me time ago a colleague of
mine printed an article deploring the arrested cultural
development of Georgia. In reply he received a
number of protests from patriotic Georgians, and all
of them solemnly listed the glories of the state. I in-
dulge in a few specimens:

Who has not heard of Asa G. Candler, whose name is syn-
onymous with Coca-Cola, a Georgia product?

The first Sunday-school in the world was opened in Sa-
vannah.

Who does not recall with pleasure the writings of ...
Frank L. Stanton, Georgia's brilliant poet?

Georgia was the first state to organize a Boys' Corn Club
in the South Newton county, 1904.

The first to suggest a common United Daughters of the
Confederacy badge was Mrs. Raynes, of Georgia.

The first to suggest a state historian of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy was Mrs. C. Helen Plane
(Macon convention, 1896).

The first to suggest putting to music Heber's "From Green-
land's Icy Mountains" was Mrs. F. R. Goulding, of Savan-
nah.

And so on, and so on. These proud boasts came,
remember, not from obscure private persons, but

THE SAHARA OF BOZART 153

from "Leading Georgians" in one case, the state his-
torian. Curious sidelights upon the ex-Confederate
mind! Another conies from a stray copy of a negro
paper. It describes an ordinance lately passed by the
city council of Douglas, Ga., forbidding any trous-
ers presser, on penalty of forfeiting a $500 bond, to
engage in "pressing for both white and colored."
This in a town, says the negro paper, where prac-
tically all of the white inhabitants have "their food
prepared by colored hands," "their babies cared for
by colored hands," and "the clothes which they wear
right next to their skins washed in houses where ne-
groes live" houses in which the said clothes "re-
main for as long as a week at a time." But if you
marvel at the absurdity, keep it dark! A casual
word, and the united press of the south will be upon
your trail, denouncing you bitterly as a scoundrelly
Yankee, a Bolshevik Jew, an agent of the Wilhelm-
strasse. . . .

Obviously, it is impossible for intelligence to flour-
ish in such an atmosphere. Free inquiry is blocked
by the idiotic certainties of ignorant men. The arts,
save in the lower reaches of the gospel hymn, the
phonograph and the chautauqua harangue, are all
held in suspicion. The tone of public opinion is set
by an upstart class but lately emerged from indus-
trial slavery into commercial enterprise the class of
"hustling" business men, of "live wires," of commer-

154 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

cial club luminaries, of "drive" managers, of for-
ward-lookers and right-thinkers in brief, of third-
rate southerners inoculated with all the worst traits of
the Yankee sharper. One observes the curious effects
of an old tradition of truculence upon a population
now merely pushful and impudent, of an old tradition
of chivalry upon a population now quite without
imagination. The old repose is gone. The old ro-
manticism is gone. The philistinism of the new type
of town-boomer southerner is not only indifferent to
the ideals of the old south; it is positively antago-
nistic to them. That philistinism regards human life,
not as an agreeable adventure, but as a mere trial of
rectitude and efficiency. It is overwhelmingly utili-
tarian and moral. It is inconceivably hollow and
obnoxious. What remains of the ancient tradition is
simply a certain charming civility in private inter-
course often broken down, alas, by the hot rages of
Puritanism, but still generally visible. The south-
erner, at his worst, is never quite the surly cad that
the Yankee is. His sensitiveness may betray him
into occasional bad manners, but in the main he is a
pleasant fellow hospitable, polite, good-humored,
even jovial. . . . But a bit absurd. ... A bit pa-
thetic.

IV. THE DIVINE AFFLATUS

THE suave and cedematous Chesterton, in a late
effort to earn the honorarium of a Chicago
newspaper, composed a thousand words of
labored counterblast to what is called inspiration in
the arts. The thing itself, he argued, has little if any
actual existence; we hear so much about it because
its alleged coyness and fortuitousness offer a con-
venient apology for third-rate work. The man taken
in such third-rate work excuses himself on the ground
that he is a helpless slave of some power that stands
outside him, and is quite beyond his control. On
days when it favors him he teems with ideas and
creates masterpieces, but on days when it neglects him
he is crippled and impotent a fiddle without a bow,
an engine without steam, a tire without air. All
this, according to Chesterton, is nonsense. A man
who can really write at all, or paint at all, or compose
at all should be able to do it at almost any time, pro-
vided only "he is not drunk or asleep."

So far Chesterton. The formula of the argument
is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all
that is necessary is to deny that it exists. But there
are plenty of men, I believe, who find themselves

155

156 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

unable to resolve the difficulty in any such cavalier
manner men whose chief burden and distinction,
in fact, is that they do not employ formulae in their
thinking, but are thrown constantly upon industry,
ingenuity and the favor of God. Among such men
there remains a good deal more belief in what is
vaguely called inspiration. They know by hard ex-
perience that there are days when their ideas flow
freely and clearly, and days when they are dammed
up damnably. Say a man of that sort has a good
day. For some reason quite incomprehensible to
him all his mental processes take on an amazing
ease and slickness. Almost without conscious effort

t

he solves technical problems that have badgered him
for weeks. He is full of novel expedients, extraor-
dinary efficiencies, strange cunnings. He has a
feeling that he has suddenly and unaccountably broken
through a wall, dispersed a fog, got himself out of
the dark. So he does a double or triple stint of the
best work that he is capable of maybe of far better
work than he has ever been capable of before and
goes to bed impatient for the morrow. And on the
morrow he discovers to his consternation that he has
become almost idiotic, and quite incapable of any
work at all.

I challenge any man who trades in ideas to deny
that he has this experience. The truth is that he has
it constantly. It overtakes poets and contrapuntists,

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 157

critics and dramatists, philosophers and journalists;
it may even be shared, so far as I know, by advertise-
ment writers, chautauqua orators and the rev. clergy.
The characters that all anatomists of melancholy mark
in it are the irregular ebb and flow of the tides, and
the impossibility of getting them under any sort of
rational control. The brain, as it were, stands to one
side and watches itself pitching and tossing, full of
agony but essentially helpless. Here the man of
creative imagination pays a ghastly price for all his
superiorities and immunities; nature takes revenge
upon him for dreaming of improvements in the scheme
of things. Sitting there in his lonely room, gnawing
the handle of his pen, racked by his infernal quest,
horribly bedevilled by incessant flashes of itching,
toothache, eye-strain and evil conscience thus tor-
tured, he makes atonement for his crime of being
intelligent. The normal man, the healthy and honest
man, the good citizen and householder this man, I
daresay, knows nothing of all that travail. It is
reserved especially for artists and metaphysicians.
It is the particular penalty of those who pursue strange
butterflies into dark forests, and go fishing in en-
chanted and forbidden streams.

Let us, then, assume that the fact is proved: the
nearest poet is a witness to it. But what of the under-
lying mystery? How are we to account for that
puckish and inexplicable rise and fall of inspiration?

158 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

My questions, of course, are purely rhetorical. Ex-
planations exist; they have existed for all time; there
is always a well-known solution to every human
problem neat, plausible, and wrong. The ancients,
in the case at bar, laid the blame upon the gods:
sometimes they were remote and surly, and sometimes
they were kind. In the Middle Ages lesser powers
took a hand in the matter, and so one reads of works
of art inspired by Our Lady, by the Blessed Saints,
by the souls of the departed, and even by the devil.
.In our own day there are explanations less super-
natural but no less fanciful to wit, the explanation
that the whole thing is a matter of pure chance, and
not to be resolved into any orderly process to wit,
the explanation that the controlling factor is external
circumstance, that the artist happily married to a
dutiful wife is thereby inspired finally, to make an
end, the explanation that it is all a question of Freu-
dian complexes, themselves lurking in impenetrable
shadows. But all of these explanations fail to satisfy
the mind that is not to be put off with mere words.
Some of them are palpably absurd; others beg the
question. The problem of the how remains, even
when the problem of the why is disposed of. What
is the precise machinery whereby the cerebrum is
bestirred to such abnormal activity on one day that
it sparkles and splutters like an arclight, and reduced

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 159

to such feebleness on another day that it smokes and
gutters like a tallow dip?

In this emergency, having regard for the ages-long
and unrelieved sufferings of artists great and small,
I offer a new, simple, and at all events not ghostly
solution. It is supported by the observed facts, by
logical analogies and by the soundest known prin-
ciples of psychology, and so I present it without apolo-
gies. It may be couched, for convenience, in the
following brief terms: that inspiration, so-called, is
a function of metabolism, and that it is chiefly con-
ditioned by the state of the intestinal flora in larger
words, that a man's flow of ideas is controlled and
determined, both quantitatively and qualitatively, not
by the whims of the gods, nor by the terms of his armis-
tice with his wife, nor by the combinations of some
transcendental set of dice, but by the chemical content

> " tv "* >>

of the blood that lifts itself from his liver to his brain,
and that this chemical content is established in his
digestive tract, particularly south of the pylorus. A
man may write great poetry when he is drunk, when
he is cold and miserable, when he is bankrupt, when
he has a black eye, when his wife glowers at him
across the table, when his children lie dying of
smallpox; he may even write it during an earthquake,
or while crossing the English channel, or in the midst
of a Methodist revival, or in New York. But I am so

160 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

far gone in materialism that I am disposed to deny
flatly and finally, and herewith do deny flatly and
finally, that there has lived a poet in the whole history
of the world, ancient or modern, near or far, who
ever managed to write great poetry, or even passably
fair and decent poetry, at a time when he was suffer-
ing from stenosis at any point along the thirty-foot
via dolorosa running from the pylorus to the sigmoid
flexure. In other words, when he was

But perhaps I had better leave your medical adviser
to explain. After all, it is not necessary to go any
further in this direction; the whole thing may be
argued in terms of the blood stream and the blood
stream is respectable, as the duodenum is an outcast.
It is the blood and the blood only, in fact, that the
cerebrum is aware of; of what goes on elsewhere it
can learn only by hearsay. If all is well below, then
the blood that enters the brain through the internal
carotid is full of the elements necessary to bestir the
brain-cells to their highest activity; if, on the contrary,
anabolism and katabolism are going on ineptly, if the
blood is not getting the supplies that it needs and not
getting rid of the wastes that burden it, then the brain-
cells will be both starved and poisoned, and not all
the king's horses and all the king's men can make
them do their work with any show of ease and effi-
ciency. In the first case the man whose psyche dwells
in the cells will have a moment of inspiration that

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 161

is, he will find it a strangely simple and facile matter
to write his poem, or iron out his syllogism, or make
his bold modulation from F sharp minor to G major,
or get his flesh-tone, or maybe only perfect his swindle.
But in the second case he will be stumped and help-
less. The more he tries, the more vividly he will be
conscious of his impotence. Sweat will stand out in
beads upon his brow, he will fish patiently for the
elusive thought, he will try coaxing and subterfuge,
he will retire to his ivory tower, he will tempt the
invisible powers with black coffee, tea, alcohol and
the alkaloids, he may even curse God and invite death
but he will not write his poem, or iron out his syl-
logism, or find his way into C major, or get his flesh-
tone, or perfect his swindle.

Fix your eye upon this hypothesis of metabolic
inspiration, and at once you will find the key to many
a correlative mystery. For one thing, it quickly ex-
plains the observed hopelessness of trying to pump
up inspiration by mere hard industry the essential
imbecility of the 1,000 words a day formula. Let
there be stenosis below, and not all the industry of a
Hercules will suffice to awaken the lethargic brain.
Here, indeed, the harder the striving, the worse the
stagnation as every artist knows only too well. And
why not? Striving in the face of such an interior
obstacle is the most cruel of enterprises a business
more nerve-wracking and exhausting than reading a

162 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

newspaper or watching a bad play. The pain thus
produced, the emotions thus engendered, react upon
the liver in a manner scientifically displayed by Dr.
George W. Crile in his "Man: An Adaptive Mechan-
ism," and the result is a steady increase in the intes-
tinal demoralization, and a like increase in the pollu-
tion of the blood. In the end the poor victim comes
to a familiar pass; beset on the one hand by impo-
tence and on the other hand by an impatience grown
pathological, he gets into a state indistinguishable
from the frantic. It is at such times that creative
artists suffer most atrociously. It is then that they
writhe upon the sharp spears and red-hot hooks of
a jealous and unjust Creator for their invasion of
His monopoly. It is then that they pay a grisly super-
tax upon their superiority to the great herd of law-
abiding and undistinguished men. The men of this
herd never undergo any comparable torture ; the agony
of the artist is quite beyond their experience and even
beyond their imagination. No catastrophe that could
conceivably overtake a lime and cement dealer, a
curb broker, a lawyer, a plumber or a Presbyterian
is to be mentioned in the same breath with the torments
that, to the most minor of poets, are familiar incidents
of his professional life, and, to such a man as Poe,
or Beethoven, or Brahms, are the commonplaces of
every day. Beethoven suffered more during the
composition of the Fifth symphony than all the judges

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 163

on the supreme benches of the world have suffered
jointly since the time of the Gerousia.

Again, my hypothesis explains the fact that inspira-
tion, save under extraordinary circumstances, is never
continuous for more than a relatively short period.
A banker, a barber or a manufacturer of patent medi-
cines does his work day after day without any notice-
able rise or fall of efficiency; save when he is drunk,
jailed or ill in bed the curve of his achievement is
flattened out until it becomes almost a straight line.
But the curve of an artist, even of the greatest of
artists, is frightfully zig-zagged. There are moments
when it sinks below the bottom of the chart, and im-
mediately following there may be moments when it
threatens to run off the top. Some of the noblest
passages written by Shakespeare are in his worst plays,
cheek by jowl with padding and banality; some of
the worst music of Wagner is in his finest music
dramas. There is, indeed, no such thing as a flawless
masterpiece. Long labored, it may be gradually en-
riched with purple passages the high inspirations of
widely separated times crowded together , but even
so it will remain spotty, for those purple passages will
be clumsily joined, and their joints will remain as ap-
parent as so many false teeth. Only the most ele-
mentary knowledge of psychology is needed to show
the cause of the zig-zagging that I have mentioned.
It lies in the 'elemental fact that the chemical consti-

164 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

tution of the blood changes every hour, almost every
minute. What it is at the beginning of digestion is
not what it is at the end of digestion, and in both
cases it is enormously affected by the nature of the
substances digested. No man, within twenty-four
hours after eating a meal in a Pennsylvania Railroad
dining-car, could conceivably write anything worth
reading. A tough beefsteak, I daresay, has ditched
many a promising sonnet, and bad beer, as every one
knows, has spoiled hundreds of sonatas. Thus in-
spiration rises and falls, and even when it rises twice
to the same height it usually shows some qualitative
difference there is the inspiration, say, of Spring
vegetables and there is the inspiration of Autumn
fruits. In a long work the products of greatly differ-
ing inspirations, of greatly differing streams of blood,
are hideously intermingled, and the result is the in-
evitable spottiness that I have mentioned. No one
but a maniac argues that "Die Meistersinger" is all
good. One detects in it days when Wagner felt, as
the saying goes, like a fighting cock, but one also
detects days when he arose in the morning full of
acidosis and despair days when he turned heavily
from the Pierian spring to castor oil.

Moreover, it must be obvious that the very condi-
tions under which works of art are produced tend to
cause great aberrations in metabolism. The artist
is forced by his calling to be a sedentary man. Even

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 165

a poet, perhaps the freest of artists, must spend a
good deal of time bending over a desk. He may con-
ceive his poems in the open air, as Beethoven conceived
his music, but the work of reducing them to actual
words requires diligent effort in camera. Here it
is a sheer impossibility for him to enjoy the ideal
hygienic conditions which surround the farmhand, the
curb-broker and the sailor. His viscera are con-
gested; his eyes are astrain; his muscles are without
necessary exercise. Furthermore, he probably
breathes bad air and goes without needed sleep. The
result is inevitably some disturbance of metabolism,
with a vitiated blood supply and a starved cerebrum.
One is always surprised to encounter a poet who is
ruddy and stout; the standard model is a pale and
flabby stenotic, kept alive by patent medicines. So
with the painter, the musical composer, the sculptor,
the artist in prose. There is no more confining work
known to man than instrumentation. The composer
who has spent a day at it is invariably nervous and ill.
For hours his body is bent over his music-paper, the
while his pen engrosses little dots upon thin lines.
I have known composers, after a week or so of such
labor, to come down with auto-intoxication in its most
virulent forms. Perhaps the notorious ill health
of Beethoven, and the mental break-downs of Schu-
mann, Tschaikowsky and Hugo Wolf had their origin
in this direction. It is difficult, going through the

166 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

history of music, to find a single composer in the
grand manner who was physically and mentally up to
par.

I do not advance it as a formal corollary, but no
doubt this stenosis hypothesis also throws some light
upon two other immemorial mysteries, the first being
the relative aesthetic sterility of women, and the other
being the low aesthetic development of certain whole
classes, and even races of men, e. g., the Puritans, the
Welsh and the Confederate Americans. That women
suffer from stenosis far more than men is a common-
place of internal medicine; the weakness is chiefly to
blame, rather than the functional peculiarities that
they accuse, for their liability to headache. A good
many of them, in fact, are habitually in the state of
health which, in the artist, is accompanied by an utter
inability to work. This state of health, as I have said,
does not inhibit all mental activity. It leaves the
powers of observation but little impaired; it does
not corrupt common sense; it is not incompatible
with an intelligent discharge of the ordinary duties
of life. Thus a lime and cement dealer, in the
midst of it, may function almost as well as when
his metabolic processes are perfectly normal, and
by the same token a woman chronically a victim
to it may yet show all the sharp mental competence
which characterizes her sex. But here the thing
stops. To go beyond to enter the realm of

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 167

constructive thinking, to abandon the mere application
of old ideas and essay to invent new ideas, to precip-
itate novel and intellectual concepts out of the chaos
of memory and perception this is quite impossible
to the stenotic. Ergo, it is unheard of among classes
and races of men who feed grossly and neglect per-
sonal hygiene; the pill-swallower is the only artist
in such groups. One may thus argue that the elder
Beecham saved poetry in England, as the younger
Beecham saved music. . . . But, as I say, I do not
stand behind the hypothesis in this department, save,
perhaps, in the matter of women. I could amass
enormous evidences in favor of it, but against them
there would always loom the disconcerting contrary
evidence of the Bulgarians. Among them, I suppose,
stenosis must be unknown but so are all the fine arts.
"La force et la foiblesse de 1'esprit," said Roche-
foucauld, "sont mal nominees; elles ne sont, en effect,
que la bonne ou la mauvaise des organes du corps."
Science wastes itself hunting in the other direction.
We are flooded with evidences of the effects of the
mind on the bodv, and so our attention is diverted

V '

from the enormously greater effects of the body en the
mind. It is rather astonishing that the Wassermann
reaction has not caused the latter to be investigated
more thoroughly. The first result of the general em-
ployment of that great diagnostic device was the dis-
covery that thousands of cases of so-called mental

168 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

disease were really purely physical in origin that
thousands of patients long supposed to have been
crazed by seeing ghosts, by love, by grief, or by re-
verses in the stock-market were actually victims of the
small but extremely enterprising spirochaete pallida.
The news heaved a bomb into psychiatry, but it has
so far failed to provoke a study of the effects of other
such physical agents. Even the effects of this one
agent remain to be inquired into at length. One now
knows that it mav cause insanitv, but what of the

^ '

lesser mental aberrations that it produces? Some of
these aberrations may be actually beneficial. That
is to say, the mild toxemia accompanying the less
virulent forms of infection may stimulate the brain
to its highest functioning, and so give birth to what
is called genius a state of mind long recognized, by
popular empiricism, as a sort of half-way station on
the road to insanity. Beethoven, Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer suffered from such mild toxemias, and
there is not the slightest doubt that their extraordinary
mental activity was at least partly due to the fact.
That tuberculosis, in its early stages, is capable of the
same stimulation is a commonplace of observation.
The consumptive may be weak physically, but he is
usually very alert mentally. The history of the arts,
in fact, shows the names of hundreds of inspired con-
sumptives.

Here a physical infirmity produces a -result that is

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 169

beneficial, just as another physical infirmity, the
stenosis aforesaid, produces a result that is baleful.
The artist often oscillates horribly between the two
effects; he is normally anything but a healthy animal.
Perfect health, indeed, is a boon that very few men
above the rank of clodhoppers ever enjoy. What
health means is a degree of adaptation to the organ-
ism's environment so nearly complete that there is no
irritation. Such a state, it must be obvious, is not
often to be observed in organisms of the highest com-
plexity. It is common, perhaps, in the earthworm.
This elemental beast makes few demands upon its
environment, and is thus subject to few diseases. It
seldom gets out of order until the sands of its life
are run, and then it suffers one grand illness and dies
forthwith. But man is forever getting out of order,
for he is enormously complicated and the higher
he rises in complexity, the more numerous and the
more serious are his derangements. There are whole
categories of diseases, e. g. 9 neurasthenia and hay-
fever, that afflict chiefly the more civilized and delicate
ranks of men, leaving the inferior orders unscathed.
Good health in man, indeed, is almost invariably a
function of inferiority. A professionally healthy
man, e. g., an acrobat, an osteopath or an ice-wagon
driver, is always stupid. In the Greece of the great
days the athletes we hear so much about were mainly
slaves. Not One of the eminent philosophers, poets or

170 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

statesmen of Greece was a good high-jumper. Nearly
all of them, in fact, suffered from the same malaises
which afflict their successors of to-day, as you will
quickly discern by examining their compositions.
The aesthetic impulse, like the thirst for truth, might
almost be called a disease. It seldom if ever ap-
pears in a perfectly healthy man.

But we must take the aloes with the honey. The
artist suffers damnably, but there is compensation in
his dreams. Some of his characteristic diseases
cripple him and make his whole life a misery, but
there are others that seem to help him. Of the latter,
the two that I have mentioned carry with them concepts
of extreme obnoxiousness. Both are infections, and
one is associated in the popular mind with notions
or gross immorality. But these concepts of obnox-
iousness should not blind us to the benefits that appar-
ently go with the maladies. There are, in fact, mala-
dies much more obnoxious, and they carry no com-
pensating benefits. Cancer is an example. Perhaps
the time will come when the precise effects of these
diseases will be worked out accurately, and it will
be possible to gauge in advance their probable influ-
ence upon this or that individual. If that time ever
comes the manufacture of artists will become a
feasible procedure, like the present manufacture of
soldiers, capons, right-thinkers and doctors of philos-
ophy. In those days the promising young men of

THE DIVINE AFFLATUS 171

the race, instead of being protected from such diseases
at all hazards, will be deliberately infected with them,
as soils are now inoculated with nitrogen-liberating
bacteria. ... At the same time, let us hope, some
progress will be made against stenosis. It is, after
all, simply a question of technique, like the artificial
propagation of the race by the device of Dr. Jacques
Loeb. The poet of the future, come upon a period
of doldrums, will not tear his hair in futile agony.
Instead, he will go to the nearest clinic, and there get
his rasher of Bulgarian bacilli, or an injection of
some complex organic compound out of a ductless
gland, or an order on a masseur, or a diet list, or
perchance a barrel of Russian oil.

V. SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION
OF A POPULAR VIRTUE

AN old Corpsbruder, assaulting my ear lately
with an abstruse tale of his sister's husband's
brother's ingratitude, ended by driving me
quite out of his house, firmly resolved to be his
acquaintance no longer. The exact offense I heard
inattentively, and have already partly forgotten
an obscure tort arising out of a lawsuit. My ex-
friend, it appears, was appealed to for help in a bad
case by his grapevine relative, and so went on the
stand for him and swore gallantly to some complex
and unintelligible lie. Later on, essaying to cash in
on the perjury, he asked the fellow to aid him in
some domestic unpleasantness, and was refused on
grounds of morals. Hence his indignation and my
spoiled evening. . . .

What is one to think of a man so asinine that he
looks for gratitude in this world, or so puerilely
egotistical that he enjoys it when found? The truth
is that the sentiment itself is not human but doggish,
and that the man who demands it in payment for his
doings is precisely the sort of man who feels noble
and distinguished when a dog licks his hand. What

172

A POPULAR VIRTUE 173

a man says when he expresses gratitude is simply
this : "You did something for me that I could not have
done myself. Ergo, you are my superior. Hail,
Durchlaucht!" Such a confession, whether true or
not, is degrading to the confessor, and so it is very
hard to make, at all events for a man of self-respect.
That is why such a man always makes it clumsily and
with many blushes and hesitations. It is hard for
him to put so embarrassing a doctrine into plain
words. And that is why the business is equally un-
comfortable to the party of the other part. It dis-
tresses him to see a human being of decent instincts
standing before him in so ignominious a position. He
is as flustered as if the fellow came in handcuffs, or
in rags, or wearing the stripes of a felon. Moreover,
his confusion is helped out by his inward knowledge
very clear if he is introspective, and plain enough
even if he is not that he really deserves no such
tribute to his high mightiness; that the altruism for
which he is being praised was really bogus ; that he did
the thing behind the gratitude which now assails him,
not for any grand and lofty reason, but for a purely
selfish and inferior reason, to wit, for the reason that
it pleases all of us to show what we can do when an
appreciative audience is present; that we delight to
exercise our will to power when it is safe and prof-
itable. This is the primary cause of the benefits
which inspire 'gratitude, real and pretended. This is

174 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

the fact at the bottom of altruism. Find me a man
who is always doing favors for people and I will show
you a man of petty vanity, forever trying to get fuel
for it in the cheapest way. And find me a man who
is notoriously grateful in habit and I'll show you a
man who is essentially third rate and who is conscious
of it at the bottom of his heart. The man of genuine
self-respect which means the man who is more or
less accurately aware, not only of his own value, but
also and more importantly, of his own limitations
tries to avoid entering either class. He hesitates to
demonstrate his superiority by such banal means, and
he shrinks from confessing an inferiority that he
doesn't believe in.

Nevertheless, the popular morality of the world,
which is the creation, not of its superior men but of its
botches and half-men in brief, of its majorities
puts a high value on gratitude and denounces the with-
holding of it as an offense against the proprieties.
To be noticeably ungrateful for benefits that is, for
the by-products of the egotism of others is to be dis-
liked. To tell a tale of ingratitude is to take on the
aspect of a martyr to the defects of others, to get
sympathy in an affliction. All of us are responsive
to such ideas, however much we may resent them
logically. One may no more live in the world without
picking up the moral prejudices of the world than
one will be able to go to hell without perspiring. . . .

A POPULAR VIRTUE 175

Let me recall a case within my own recent experi-
ence. One day I received a letter from a young
woman I had never heard of before, asking me to read
the manuscripts of two novels that she had written.
She represented that she had venerated my critical
parts for a long while, and that her whole future career
in letters would be determined by my decision as to
her talents. The daughter of a man apparently of
some consequence in some sordid business or other,
she asked me to meet her at her father's office, and
there to impart to her, under socially aseptic condi-
tions, my advice. Having a standing rule against
meeting women authors, even in their fathers' banks
and soap factories, I pleaded various imaginary en-
gagements, but finally agreed, after a telephone
debate, to read her manuscripts. They arrived
promptly and I found them to be wholly without
merit in fact, the veriest twaddle. Nevertheless I
plowed through them diligently, wasted half an hour
at the job, wrote a polite letter of counsel and re-
turned the manuscripts to her house, paying a blacka-
moor 50 cents to haul them.

By all ordinary standards, an altruistic service
and well deserving some show of gratitude. Had she
knitted me a pair of pulse-warmers it would have
seemed meet and proper. Even a copy of the poems
of Alfred Noyes would not have been too much. At
the very least 1 expected a note of thanks. Well,

176 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

not a word has ever reached me. For all my labori-
ous politeness and disagreeable labor my reward is
exactly nil. The lady is improved by my counsel
and I am shocked by her gross ingratitude. . . . That
is, conventionally, superficially, as a member of
society in good standing. But when on sour after-
noons I roll the affair in my mind, examining, not the
mere surface of it but the inner workings and anatomy
of it, my sense of outrage gradually melts and fades
away the inevitable recompense of skepticism.
What I see clearly is that I was an ass to succumb to
the blandishments of this discourteous miss, and that
she was quite right in estimating my service trivially,
and out of that clear seeing comes consolation, and
amusement, and, in the end, even satisfaction. I
got exactly what I deserved. And she, whether con-
sciously or merely instinctively, measured out the dose
with excellent accuracy.

Let us go back. Why did I waste two hours, or
maybe three, reading those idiotic manuscripts?
Why, in the first place, did I answer her opening
request the request, so inherently absurd, that I
meet her in her father's office? For a very plain
reason: she accompanied it with flattery. What she
said, in effect, was that she regarded me as a critic
of the highest talents, and this ludicrous cajolery
sound, I dare say, in substance, but reduced to naught
by her obvious obscurity and stupidity was quite

A POPULAR VIRTUE 177

enough to fetch me. In brief, she assumed that, being
a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this
assumption was correct, as it always is. To help out,
there was the concept of romantic adventure vaguely
floating in my mind. Her voice, as I heard it by
telephone, was agreeable; her appearance, since she
seemed eager to show herself, I probably judged
(subconsciously) to be at least not revolting. Thus
curiosity got on its legs, and vanity in another form.
Am I fat and half decrepit, a man seldom noticed
by cuties? Then so much the more reason why I
should respond. The novelty of an apparently
comely and respectable woman desiring to witness
me finished what the primary (and very crude) appeal
to my vanity had begun. I was, in brief, not only the
literary popinjay but also the eternal male and hard
at the immemorial folly of the order.

Now turn to the gal and her ingratitude. The
more I inspect it the more I became convinced that
it is not discreditable to her, but highly creditable
that she demonstrates a certain human dignity, de-
spite her imbecile writings, by exhibiting it. Would
a show of gratitude put her in a better light? I doubt
it. That gratitude, considering the unfavorable re-
port I made on her manuscripts, would be doubly
invasive of her amour propre. On the one hand it
would involve a confession that my opinion of her
literary gifts 'was better than her own, and that I was

178 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

thus her superior. And on the other hand it would
involve a confession that my own actual writings
(being got into print without aid) were better than
hers, and that I was thus her superior again. Each
confession would bring her into an attitude of abase-
ment, and the two together would make her position
intolerable. Moreover, both would be dishonest: she
would privately believe in neither doctrine. As for
my opinion, its hostility to her aspiration is obviously
enough to make her ego dismiss it as false, for no
organism acquiesces in its own destruction. And as
for my relative worth as a literary artist, she must
inevitably put it very low, for it depends, in the last
analysis, upon my dignity and sagacity as a man, and
she has proved by experiment, and quite easily, that
I am almost as susceptible to flattery as a moving
picture actor, and hence surely no great shakes.

Thus there is not the slightest reason in the world
why the fair creature should knit me a pair of pulse-
warmers or send me the poems of Noyes, or even write
me a polite note. If she did any of these things, she
would feel herself a hypocrite and hence stand embar-
rassed before the mirror of her own thoughts. Con-
fronted by a choice between this sort of shame and the
incomparably less uncomfortable shame of violat-
ing a social convention and an article of popular
morals, secretly and without danger of exposure, she
very sensibly chooses the more innocuous of the two.

A POPULAR VIRTUE 179

At the very start, indeed, she set up barriers against
gratitude, for her decision to ask a favor of me was,
in a subtle sense, a judgment of my inferiority.
One does not ask favors, if it can be avoided, of
persons one genuinely respects; one puts such burdens
upon the naive and colorless, upon what are called
the good natured; in brief, upon one's inferiors.
When that girl first thought of me as a possible aid
to her literary aspiration she thought of me (perhaps
vaguely, but none the less certainly) as an inferior
fortuitously outfitted with a body of puerile technical
information and competence, of probable use to her.
This unfavorable view was immediately reenforced by
her discovery of my vanity.

In brief, she showed and still shows the great in-
stinctive sapience of her sex. She is female, and
hence far above the nonsensical delusions, vanities,
conventions and moralities of men.

VI. EXEUNT OMNES

ONE of the hardest jobs that faces an American
magazine editor in this, the one-hundred-and
forty-fifth year of the Republic, is that of
keeping the minnesingers of the land from filling his
magazine with lugubrious dithyrambs to, on and
against somatic death. Of spiritual death, of course,
not many of them ever sing. Most of them, in fact,
deny its existence in plain terms; they are all sure of
the immortality of the soul, and in particular they are
absolutely sure of the immortality of their own souls,
and of those of their best girls. In this department
the most they ever allow to the materialism of the
herds that lie bogged in prose is such a benefit of the
half doubt as one finds in Christina Rossetti's "When
I am Dead." But when it comes to somatic death,
the plain brutal death of coroners' inquests and vital
statistics, their optimism vanishes, and, try as they
may, they can't get around the harsh fact that on such
and such a day, often appallingly near, each and every
one of us will heave a last sigh, roll his eyes despair-
ingly, turn his face to the wall and then suddenly
change from a proud and highly complex mammal,
made in the image of God, to a mere inert aggregate

180

EXEUNT OMNES 181

of disintegrating colloids, made in the image of a
stale cabbage.

The inevitability of it seems to fascinate them.
They write about it more than they write about any-
thing else save love. Every day my editorial desk is
burdened with their manuscripts poems in which the
poet serves notice that, when his time comes, he will
die bravely and even a bit insolently; poems in which
he warns his mistress that he will wait for her on the
roof of the cosmos and keep his harp in tune; poems
in which he asks her grandly to forget him, and, above
all, to avoid torturing herself by vain repining at his
grave; poems in which he directs his heirs and assigns
to bury him in some lonely, romantic spot, where the
whippoorwills sing; poems in which he hints that he
will not rest easily if Philistines are permitted to be-
gaud his last anchorage with couronnes des perles;
poems in which he speaks jauntily of making a rendez-
vous with death, as if death were a wench; poems in
which

But there is no need to rehearse the varieties. If
you read the strophes that are strung along the bottoms
of magazine pages you are familiar with all of them ;
even in the great moral periodical that I help to edit,
despite my own excessive watchfulness and Dr.
Nathan's general theory that both death and poetry
are nuisances and in bad taste, they have appeared
multitudinously, no doubt to the disgust of the intel*

182 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

ligentsia. As I say, it is almost impossible to keep
the minnesingers off the subject. When my negro
flops the morning bale of poetry manuscripts upon my
desk and I pull up my chair to have at them, I always
make a bet with myself that, of the first dozen, at
least seven will deal with death and it is so long
since I lost that I don't remember it. Periodically
I send out a circular to all the recognized poets of
the land, begging them in the name of God to be less
mortuary, but it never does any good. More, I doubt
that it ever will or any other sort of appeal. Take
away death and love and you would rob poets of both
their liver and their lights; what would remain would
be little more than a feeble gurgle in an illimitable
void. For the business of poetry, remember, is to
set up a sweet denial of the harsh facts that confront
all of us to soothe us in our agonies with emollient
words in brief, to lie sonorously and reassuringly.
Well, what is the worst curse of life? Answer: the
abominable magnetism that draws unlikes and incom-
patibles into delirious and intolerable conjunction
the kinetic over-stimulation called love. And what
is the next worst? Answer: the fear of death. No
wonder the poets give so much attention to both!
No other foe of human peace and happiness is one-
half so potent, and hence none other offers such oppor-
tunities to poetry, and, in fact, to all art. A sonnet
designed to ease the dread of bankruptcy, even if

EXEUNT OMNES 183

done by a great master, would be banal, for that dread
is itself banal, and so is bankruptcy. The same may
be said of the old fear of hell, now no more. There
was a day when this latter raged in the breast of nearly
every man and in that day the poets produced anti-
dotes that were very fine poems. But to-day only the
elect and anointed of God fear hell, and so there is
no more production of sound poetry in that depart-
ment.

As I have hinted, I tire of reading so much necrotic
verse in manuscript, and wish heartily that the poets
would cease to assault me with it. In prose, curi-
ously enough, one observes a corresponding shortage.
True enough, the short story of commerce shows a
good many murders and suicides, and not less than
eight times a day I am made privy to the agonies of a
widower or widow who, on searching the papers of
his wife or her husband immediately after her or his
death, discovers that she or he had a lover or a mis-
tress. But I speak of serious prose: not of trade
balderdash. Go to any public library and look un-
der "Death: Human" in the card index, and you
will be surprised to find how few books there are on
the subject. Worse, nearly all the few are by psy-
chical researchers who regard death as a mere re-
moval from one world to another or by New Thought-
ers who appear to believe that it is little more than a
sort of illusion. Once, seeking to find out what death

184 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

was physiologically that is, to find out just what
happened when a man died I put in a solid week
without result. There seemed to be nothing what-
ever on the subject even in the medical libraries.
Finally, after much weariness, I found what I was
looking for in Dr. George W. Crile's "Man: An
Adaptive Mechanism" incidentally, a very solid and
original work, much less heard of than it ought to be.
Crile said that death was acidosis that it was caused
by the failure of the organism to maintain the alka-
linity necessary to its normal functioning and in
the absence of any proofs or even arguments to the
contrary I accepted his notion forthwith and have
held to it ever since. I thus think of death as a sort
of deleterious fermentation, like that which goes on
in a bottle of Chateau Margaux when it becomes
corked. Life is a struggle, not against sin, not
against the Money Power, not against malicious
animal magnetism, but against hydrogen ions.
The healthy man is one in whom those ions,
as they are dissociated by cellular activity, are im-
mediately fixed by alkaline bases. The sick man is
one in whom the process has begun to lag, with the
hydrogen ions getting ahead. The dying man is one
in whom it is all over save the charges of fraud.

But here I get into chemical physics, and not only
run afoul of revelation but also reveal, perhaps, a
degree of ignorance verging upon intellectual coma.

EXEUNT OMNES 185

The thing I started out to do was to call attention to
the only full-length and first-rate treatise on death that
I have ever encountered or heard of, to wit, "Aspects
of Death and Correlated Aspects of Life," by Dr.
F. Parkes Weber, a fat, hefty and extremely interest-
ing tome, the fruit of truly stupendous erudition.
What Dr. Weber has attempted is to bring together in
one volume all that has been said or thought about
death since the time of the first human records, not
only by poets, priests and philosophers, but also by
painters, engravers, soldiers, monarchs and the popu-
lace generally. The author, I take it, is primarily a
numismatist, and he apparently began his work with
a collection of inscriptions on coins and medals.
But as it stands it covers a vastly wider area. One
traces, in chapter after chapter, the ebb and flow of
human ideas upon the subject, of the human attitude
to the last and greatest mystery of them all the no-
tion of it as a mere transition to a higher plane of life,
the notion of it as a benign panacea for all human
suffering, the notion of it as an incentive to this or
that way of living, the notion of it as an impenetrable
enigma, inevitable and inexplicable. Few of us quite
realize how much the contemplation of death has col-
ored human thought throughout the ages. There
have been times when it almost shut out all other con-
cerns; there has never been a time when it has not
bulked enorhiously in the racial consciousness.

186 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Well, what Dr. Weber does in his book is to detach
and set forth the salient ideas that have emerged
from all that consideration and discussion to isolate
the chief theories of death, ancient and modern, pagan
and Christian, scientific and mystical, sound and
absurd.

The material thus digested is appallingly copious.
If the learned author had confined himself to printed
books alone, he would have faced a labor fit for a new
Hercules. But in addition to books he has given his
attention to prints, to medals, to paintings, to en-
graved gems and to monumental inscriptions. His
authorities range from St. John on what is to happen
at the Day of Judgment to Sir William Osier on what
happens upon the normal human death-bed, and from
Socrates on the relation of death to philosophy to
Havelock Ellis on the effects of Christian ideas of
death upon the mediaeval temperament. The one field
that Dr. Weber has overlooked is that of music, a
somewhat serious omission. It is hard to think of a
great composer who never wrote a funeral march, or
a requiem, or at least a sad song to some departed
love. Even old Papa Haydn had moments when he
ceased to be merry, and let his thought turn stealthily
upon the doom ahead. To me, at all events, the slow
movement of the Military Symphony is the saddest
of music an elegy, I take it, on some young fellow
who went out in the incomprehensible wars of those

EXEUNT OMNES 187

times and got himself horribly killed in a far place.
The trumpet blasts towards the end fling themselves
over his hasty grave in a remote cabbage field; one
hears, before and after them, the honest weeping of
his comrades into their wine-pots. In truth, the
shadow of death hangs over all the music of Haydn,
despite its lightheartedness. Life was gay in those
last days of the Holy Roman Empire, but it was also
precarious. If the Turks were not at the gate, then
there was a peasant rising somewhere in the hinter-
land, or a pestilence swept the land. Beethoven, a
generation later, growled at death surlily, but Haydn
faced it like a gentleman. The romantic movement
brought a sentimentalization of the tragedy; it be-
came a sort of orgy. Whenever Wagner dealt with
death he treated it as if it were some sort of gaudy
tournament a thing less dreadful than ecstatic.
Consider, for example, the Char-Freitag music in
"Parsifal" death music for the most memorable
death in the history of the world. Surely no one
hearing it for the first time, without previous warning,
would guess that it had to do with anything so grue-
some as a crucifixion. On the contrary, I have a no-
tion that the average auditor would guess that it was
a musical setting for some lamentable fornication be-
tween a Bayreuth baritone seven feet in height and a
German soprano weighing at least three hundred
pounds.

188 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

But if Dr. Weber thus neglects music, he at least
gives full measure in all other departments. His
book, in fact, is encyclopaedic; he almost exhausts the
subject. One idea, however, I do not find in it: the
conception of death as the last and worst of all the
practical jokes played upon poor mortals by the gods.
That idea apparently never occurred to the Greeks,
who thought of almost everything, but nevertheless it
has an ingratiating plausibility. The hardest thing
about death is not that men die tragically, but that
most of them die ridiculously. If it were possible for
all of us to make our exits at great moments, swiftly,
cleanly, decorously, and in fine attitudes, then the
experience would be something to face heroically and
with high and beautiful words. But we commonly go
off in no such gorgeous, poetical way. Instead, we
die in raucous prose of arterio-selerosis, of diabetes,
of toxemia, of a noisome perforation in the ileo-caecal
region, of carcinoma of the liver. The abominable
acidosis of Dr. Crile sneaks upon us, gradually par-
alyzing the adrenals, flabbergasting the thyroid, crip-
pling the poor old liver, and throwing its fog upon
the brain. Thus the ontogenetic process is recapitu-
lated in reverse order, and we pass into the mental
obscurity of infancy, and then into the blank uncon-
sciousness of the prenatal state, and finally into the
condition of undifferentiated protoplasm. A man
does not die quickly and brilliantly, like a lightning

EXEUNT OMNES 189

stroke; he passes out by inches, hesitatingly and, one
may almost add, gingerly. It is hard to say just
when he is fully dead. Long after his heart has
ceased to beat and his lungs have ceased to swell him
up with the vanity of his species, there are remote
and obscure parts of him that still live on, quite un-
concerned about the central catastrophe. Dr. Alexis
Carrel has cut them out and kept them alive for
months. The hair keeps on growing for a long while.
Every time another one of the corpses of Barbarossa
or King James I is examined it is found that the hair
is longer than it was the last time. No doubt there
are many parts of the body, and perhaps even whole
organs, which wonder what it is all about when they
find that they are on the way to the crematory. Burn
a man's mortal remains, and you inevitably burn a
good portion of him alive, and no doubt that portion
sends alarmed messages to the unconscious brain, like
dissected tissue under anaesthesia, and the resultant
shock brings the deceased before the hierarchy of
heaven in a state of collapse, with his face white,
sweat bespangling his forehead and a great thirst
upon him. It would not be pulling the nose of reason
to argue that many a cremated Sunday-school super-
intendent thus confronting the ultimate tribunal in
the aspect of -a man taken with the goods, has been put
down as suffering from an uneasy conscience when
what actually ailed him was simply surgical shock.

190 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

The cosmic process is not only incurably idiotic; it
is also indecently unjust.

But here I become medico-legal. What I had in
mind when I began was this : that the human tendency
to make death dramatic and heroic has little excuse in
the facts. No doubt you remember the scene in the
last act of "Hedda Gabler," in which Dr. Brack comes
in with the news of Lovborg's suicide. Hedda imme-
diately thinks of him putting the pistol to his temple
and dying instantly and magnificently. The picture
fills her with romantic delight. When Brack tells
her that the shot was actually through the breast
she is disappointed, but soon begins to romanticise
even that. "The breast," she says, " is also a
good place. . . . There is somehing beautiful in
this!" A bit later she recurs to the charming theme,
"In the breast ah!" Then Brack tells her the plain
truth in the original, thus: "Nej, det traf ham
i underlivet!" . . . Edmund Gosse, in his first Eng-
lish translation of the play, made the sentence: "No
it struck him in the abdomen." In the last edition
William Archer makes it "No in the bowels!" Ab-
domen is nearer to underlivet than bowels, but belly
would probably render the meaning better than either.
What Brack wants to convey to Hedda is the news that
Lovborg's death was not romantic in the least that
he went to a brothel, shot himself, not through the
cerebrum or the heart, but through the duodenum or

EXEUNT OMNES 191

perhaps the jejunum, and is at the moment of report
awaiting autopsy at the Christiania Allgemeine-
krankenhaus. The shock floors her, but it is a shock
that all of us must learn to bear. Men upon whom
we lavish our veneration reduce it to an absurdity at
the end by dying of chronic cystitis, or by choking
upon marshmallows or dill pickles, or as the result of
getting cut by dirty barbers. Women whom we place
upon pedestals worthy of the holy saints come down
at last with mastoid abscesses or die obscenely of
hiccoughs. And we ourselves? Let us not have too
much hope. The chances are that, if we go to war,
eager to leap superbly at the cannon's mouth, we'll
be finished on the way by an ingrowing toenail or by
being run over by an army truck driven by a former
Greek bus-boy and loaded with imitation Swiss
cheeses made in Oneida, N. Y. And that if we die
in our beds, it will be of measles or albuminuria.

The aforesaid Crile, in one of his smaller books,
"A Mechanistic View of War and Peace," has a good
deal to say about death in war, and in particular,
about the disparity between the glorious and inspir-
ing passing imagined by the young soldier and the
messy finish that is normally in store for him. He
shows two pictures of war, the one ideal and the other
real. The former is the familiar print, "The Spirit
of '76," with the three patriots springing grandly to
the attack, one of them with a neat and romantic

192 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

bandage around his head apparently, to judge by
his liveliness, to cover a wound no worse than an
average bee-sting. The latter picture is what the
movie folks call a close-up of a French soldier who
was struck just below the mouth by a German one-
pounder shell a soldier suddenly converted into the
hideous simulacrum of a cruller. What one notices
especially is the curious expression upon what re-
mains of his face an expression of the utmost sur-
prise and indignation. No doubt he marched off to
the front firmly convinced that, if he died at all, it
would be at the climax of some heroic charge, up to
his knees in blood and with his bayonet run clear
through a Bavarian at least four feet in diameter.
He imagined the clean bullet through the heart, the
stately last gesture, the final words: "Therese!
Sophie! Olympe! Marie! Suzette! Odette!
Denise! Julie! . . . France!" Go to the book and
see what he got. . . . Dr. Crile, whose experience of
war has soured him against it, argues that the best
way to abolish it would be to prohibit such romantic
prints as "The Spirit of '76" and substitute therefor
a series of actual photographs of dead and wounded
men. The plan is plainly of merit. But it would
be expensive. Imagine a war getting on its legs be-
fore the conversion of the populace had become com-
plete. Think of the huge herds of spy-chasers, let-
ter-openers, pacifist-hounds, burlesons and other such

EXEUNT OMNES 193

operators that it would take to track down and con-
fiscate all those pictures! . . .

Even so, the vulgar horror of death would remain,
for, as Ellen La Motte well says in her little book,
"The Backwash of War," the finish of a civilian in a
luxurious hospital, with trained nurses fluttering over
him and his pastor whooping and heaving for him at
the foot of his bed, is often quite as terrible as any
form of exitus witnessed in war. It is, in fact, al-
ways an unpleasant business. Let the poets disguise
it all they may and the theologians obscure the issue
with promises of post-mortem felicity, the plain truth
remains that it gives one pause to reflect that, on some
day not far away, one must yield supinely to acidosis,
sink into the mental darkness of an idiot, and so suf-
fer a withdrawal from these engaging scenes. "No.
8," says the nurse in faded pink, tripping down the
corridor with a hooch of rye for the diabetic in No. 2,
"has just passed out." "Which is No. 8?" asks the
new nurse. "The one whose wife wore that awful hat
this afternoon?" . . . But all the authorities, it is
pleasant to know, report that the final scene is placid
enough. Dr. Weber quotes many of them. The dy-
ing man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much
afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a
blest stupidity. His mind fogs. His will power van-
ishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a
damn.

VII. THE ALLIED ARTS

On Music-Lovers

OF all forms of the uplift, perhaps the most
futile is that which addresses itself to edu-
cating the proletariat in music. The theory
behind it is that a taste for music is an elevating pas-
sion, and that if the great masses of the plain people
could be inoculated with it they would cease to herd
into the moving-picture theaters, or to listen to Social-
ists, or to beat their wives and children. The defect
in this theory lies in the fact that such a taste, granting
it to be elevating, simply cannot be implanted. Either
it is born in a man or it is not born in him. If it is,
then he will get gratification for it at whatever cost
he will hear music if hell freezes over. But if it isn't,
then no amount of education will ever change him
he will remain stone deaf until the last sad scene on
the gallows.

No child who has this congenital taste ever has to
be urged or tempted or taught to love music. It takes
to tone inevitably and irresistibly; nothing can re-
strain it. What is more, it always tries to make

194

THE ALLIED ARTS 195

music, for the delight in sounds is invariably accom-
panied by a great desire to make them. I have never
encountered an exception to this rule. All genuine
music-lovers try to make music. They may do it
badly, and even absurdly, but nevertheless they do
it. Any man who pretends to a delight in the tone-
art and yet has never learned the scale of C major
any and every such man is a fraud. The opera-
houses of the world are crowded with such liars.
You will even find hundreds of them in the concert-
halls, though here the suffering they have to undergo
to keep up their pretense is almost too much for them
to bear. Many of them, true enough, deceive them-
selves. They are honest in the sense that they credit
their own buncombe. But it is buncombe none the
less.

Music, of course, has room for philanthropy. The
cost of giving an orchestral concert is so great that
ordinary music-lovers could not often pay for it.
Here the way is open for rich backers, most of whom
have no more ear for music than so many Chinamen.
Nearly all the opera of the world is so supported. A
few rich cads pay the bills, their wives posture ob-
scenely in the boxes, and the genuine music-lovers
upstairs and down enjoy the more or less harmonious
flow of sound. But this business doesn't make music-
lovers. It merely gives pleasure to music-lovers who
already exist. In twenty-five years, I am sure, the

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Metropolitan Opera Company hasn't converted a
single music-lover. On the contrary, it has probably
disgusted and alienated many thousands of faint-
hearted quasi-music-lovers, i. e., persons with no more
than the most nebulous taste for music so nebulous
that one or two evenings of tremendous gargling by
fat tenors was enough to kill it altogether.

In the United States the number of genuine music-
lovers is probably very low. There are whole states,
e. g., Alabama, Arkansas and Idaho, in which it
would be difficult to muster a hundred. In New
York, I venture, not more than one person in every
thousand of the population deserves to be counted.
The rest are, to all intents and purposes, tone-deaf.
They can not only sit through the infernal din made
by the current jazz-bands; they actually like it. This
is precisely as if they preferred the works of The
Duchess to those of Thomas Hardy, or the paintings
of the men who make covers for popular novels to
those of El Greco. Such persons inhabit the sewers
of the bozart. No conceivable education could rid
them of their native ignobility of soul. They are
born unspeakable and incurable.

THE ALLIED ARTS 197

Opera

Opera, to a person genuinely fond of aural beauty,
must inevitably appear tawdry and obnoxious, if only
because it presents aural beauty in a frame of purely
visual gaudiness, with overtones of the grossest sexual
provocation. The most successful opera singers of
the female sex, at least in America, are not those
whom the majority of auditors admire most as singers
but those whom the majority of male spectators desire
most as mistresses. Opera is chiefly supported in all
countries by the same sort of wealthy sensualists who
also support musical comedy. One finds in the direc-
tors' room the traditional stock company of the stage-
door alley. Such vermin, of course, pose in the news-
papers as devout and almost fanatical partisans of art;
they exhibit themselves at every performance; one
hears of their grand doings, through their press agents,
almost every day. But one has merely to observe the
sort of opera they think is good to get the measure of
their actual artistic discrimination.

The genuine music-lover may accept the carnal husk
of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within,
but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk
or enjoys gnawing through it. Most musicians,
indeed, prefer to hear operatic music outside the

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opera house; that is why one so often hears such things
as "The Ride of the Valkyrie" in the concert hall.
"The Ride of the Valkyrie" has a certain intrinsic
value as pure music ; played by a competent orchestra
it may give civilized pleasure. But as it is commonly
performed in an opera house, with a posse of flat bel-
dames throwing themselves about the stage, it can only
produce the effect of a dose of ipecacuanha. The
sort of person who actually delights in such spectacles
is the sort of person who delights in plush furniture.
Such half-wits are in a majority in every opera house
west of the Rhine. They go to the opera, not to hear
music, not even to hear bad music, but merely to see
a more or less obscene circus. A few, perhaps, have
a further purpose; they desire to assist in that circus,
to show themselves in the capacity of fashionables,
to enchant the yokel ry with their splendor. But the
majority must be content with the more lowly aim.
What they get for the outrageous prices they pay for
seats is a chance to feast their eyes upon glittering
members of the superior demi-monde, and to abase
their groveling souls before magnificoes on their own
side of the footlights. They esteem a performance,
not in proportion as true music is on tap, but in pro-
portion as the display of notorious characters on the
stage is copious, and the exhibition of wealth in the
boxes is lavish. A soprano who can gargle her way

up to G sharp in alto is more to such simple souls than

THE ALLIED ARTS 199

a whole drove of Johann Sebastian Bachs; her one
real rival, in the entire domain of art, is the contralto
who has a pension from a grand duke and is reported
to be enceinte by several profiteers. Heaven visual-
izes itself as an opera house with forty-eight Carusos,
each with forty-eight press agents. ... On the Conti-
nent, where frankness is unashamed, the opera audi-
ence often reveals its passion for tone very naively.
That is to say, it arises on its hind legs, turns its back
upon the stage and gapes at the boxes in charming in-
nocence.

That such ignobles applaud is usually quite as
shoddy as they are themselves. To write a successful
opera a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint is
not enough; one must also be a sort of Barnum. All
the first-rate musicians who have triumphed in the
opera house have been skillful mountebanks as well.
I need cite only Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.
The business, indeed, has almost nothing to do with
music. All the actual music one finds in many a
popular opera for example, "Thais" mounts up to
less than one may find in a pair of Gung'l waltzes.
It is not this mild flavor of tone that fetches the crowd ;
it is the tinpot show that goes with it. An opera may
have plenty of good music in it and fail, but if it has
a good enough show it will succeed.

Such a composer as Wagner, of course, could not
write even an opera without getting some music into

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it. In nearly all of his works, even including "Parsi-
fal," there are magnificent passages, and some of them
are very long. Here his natural genius overcame
him, and he forgot temporarily what he was about.
But these magnificent passages pass unnoticed by the
average opera audience. What it esteems in his music
dramas is precisely what is cheapest and most mounte-
bankish for example, the more lascivious parts of
"Tristan und Isolde." The sound music it dismisses
as tedious. The Wagner it venerates is not the musi-
cian, but the showman. That he had a king for a
backer and was seduced by Liszt's daughter these
facts, and not the fact of his stupendous talent, are
the foundation stones of his fame in the opera house.
Greater men, lacking his touch of the quack, have
failed where he succeeded Beethoven, Schubert,
Schumann, Brahms, Bach, Haydn, Haendel. Not one
of them produced a genuinely successful opera; most
of them didn't even try. Imagine Brahms writing
for the diamond horseshoe! Or Bach! Or Haydn!
Beethoven attempted it, but made a mess of it ; "Fide-
lio" survives to-day chiefly as a set of concert over-
tures. Schubert wrote more actual music every morn-
ing between 10 o'clock and lunch time than the aver-
age opera composer produces in 250 years, and yet
he always came a cropper in the opera house.

THE ALLIED ARTS 201

The Music of To-morrow

Viewing the current musical scene, Carl Van
Vechten finds it full of sadness. Even Debussy bores
him; he heard nothing interesting from that quarter
for a long while before the final scene. As for Ger-
many, he finds it a desert, with Arnold Schoenberg be-
hind the bar of its only inviting Gasthaus. Richard
Strauss? Pooh! Strauss is an exploded torpedo, a
Zeppelin brought to earth; "he has nothing more to
say." (Even the opening of the Alpine symphony, it
would appear, is more stick-candy.) England? Go
to! Italy? Back to the barrel-organ! Where,
then, is the tone poetry of to-morrow to come from?
According to Van Vechten, from Russia. It is the
steppes that will produce it or, more specifically,
Prof. Igor Strawinsky, author of "The Nightingale"
and of various revolutionary ballets. In the scores
of Strawinsky, says Van Vechten, music takes a vast
leap forward. Here, at last, we are definitely set
free from melody and harmony; the thing becomes
an ineffable complex of rhythms; "all rhythms are
beaten into the ears."

New? Of the future? I have not heard all of the
powerful shiverings and tremblings of M. Strawinsky,
but I presume to doubt it none the less. "The ancient

Greeks," says Van Vechten, "accorded rhythm a

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higher place than either melody or harmony." Well,
what of it? So did the ancient Goths and Huns. So
do the modern Zulus and New Yorkers. The simple
truth is that the accentuation of mere rhythm is a
proof, not of progress in music, but of a reversion to
barbarism. Rhythm is the earliest, the underlying
element. The African savage, beating his tom-tom,
is content to go no further; the American composer of
fox trots is with him. But music had scarcely any
existence as an art-form until melody came to
rhythm's aid, and its fruits were little save dullness
until harmony began to support melody. To argue
that mere rhythm, unsupported by anything save tone-
color, may now take their place is to argue something
so absurd that its mere statement is a sufficient answer
to it.

The rise of harmony, true enough, laid open a
dangerous field. Its exploration attracted meticulous
minds; it was rigidly mapped in hard, geometrical
forms; in the end, it became almost unnavigable to
the man of ideas. But no melodramatic rejection of
all harmony is needed to work a reform. The busi-
ness, indeed, is already gloriously under way. The
dullest conservatory pupil has learned how to pull
the noses of the old-time schoolmasters. No one cares
a hoot any more about the ancient laws of preparation
and resolution. (The rules grow so loose, indeed,
that I may soon be tempted to write a tone-poem my-

THE ALLIED ARTS 203

self). But out of this chaos new laws will inevitably
arise, and though they will not be as rigid as the old
ones, they will still be coherent and logical and intelli-
gible. Already, in fact, gentlemen of professorial
mind are mapping them out; one needs but a glance
at such a book as Rene Lenormand's to see that there
is a certain order hidden in even the wildest vagaries
of the moment. And when the boiling in the pot dies
down, the truly great musicians will be found to be,
not those who have been most daring, but those who
have been most discreet and intelligent those who
have most skillfully engrafted what is good in the new
upon what was sound in the old. Such a discreet fel-
low is Richard Strauss. His music is modern enough
but not too much. One is thrilled by its experi-
ments and novelties, but at the same time one can
enjoy the thing as music.

Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner belonged
to the same lodge. They were by no means the
wildest revolutionaries of their days, but they were
the best musicians. They didn't try to improve music
by purging it of any of the elements that made it
music; they tried, and with success, to give each ele-
ment a new force and a new significance. Berlioz, I
dare say, knew more about the orchestra than Wagner;
he surely went further than Wagner in reaching out
for new orchestral effects. But nothing he ever wrote
has a fourth of the stability and value of "Die Meister-

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singer." He was so intrigued by his tone-colors that
he forgot his music.

Tempo di Valse

Those Puritans who snort against the current dances
are quite right when they argue that the tango and the
shimmie are violently aphrodisiacal, but what they
overlook is the fact that the abolition of such provoca-
tive wriggles would probably revive something worse,
to wit, the Viennese waltz. The waltz never quite
goes out of fashion; it is always just around the
corner; every now and then it comes back with a bang.
And to the sore harassment and corruption, I suspect,
of chemical purity, the ideal of all right-thinkers.
The shimmie and the tango are too gross to be very
dangerous to civilized human beings; they suggest
drinking beer out of buckets ; the most elemental good
taste is proof enough against them. But the waltz!
Ah, the waltz, indeed! It is sneaking, insidious, dis-
arming, lovely. It does its work, not like a college-
yell or an explosion in a munitions plant, but like the
rustle of the trees, the murmur of the illimitable sea,
the sweet gurgle of a pretty girl. The jazz-band
fetches only vulgarians, barbarians, idiots, pigs.
But there is a mystical something in "Weiner Blut"
or "Kiinstler Leben" that fetches even philosophers.

THE ALLIED ARTS 205

The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper the
art of tone turned bawdy. I venture to say that the
compositions of one man alone, Johann Strauss II,
have lured more fair young creatures to lamentable
complaisance than all the hyperdermic syringes of all
the white slave scouts since the fall of the Western
Empire. There is something about a waltz that is
simply irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest
or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of
women, and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a
stealthy kiss behind the door nay, she will forthwith
impart the embarrassing news that her husband mis-
understands her, and drinks too much, and cannot
appreciate Maeterlinck, and is going to Cleveland, 0.,
on business to-morrow. . . .

I often wonder that the Comstocks have not under-
taken a crusade against the waltz. If they suppress
"The 'Genius' " and "Jurgen," then why do they over-
look "Rosen aus dem Siiden"? If they are so hot
against "Madame Bovary" and the Decameron, then
why the immunity of "Wein, Weib und Gesang"?
. . . I throw out the suggestion and pass on. Nearly
all the great waltzes of the world, incidently, were
written by Germans or Austrians. A waltz-pogrom
would thus enlist the American Legion and the
Daughters of the Revolution. Moreover, there is the
Public Health Service: it is already engaged upon a
campaign to enforce virginity in both sexes by statute

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and artillery. Imagine such an enterprise with every
band free to play "Wiener MadT'!

The Puritan as Artist

The saddest thing that I have ever heard in the con-
cert hall is Herbert K. Hadley's overture, "In Bo-
hemia." The title is a magnificent piece of profound,
if unconscious irony. One looks, at least, for a leg
flung in the air, a girl kissed, a cork popped, a flash
of drawer-ruffles. What one encounters is a meeting
of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Such prosy cor-
rectness and hollowness, in music, is almost inconceiv-
able. It is as if the most voluptuous of the arts were
suddenly converted into an abstract and austere
science, like comparative grammar or astro-physics.
"Who's Who in America" says that Hadley was born
in Somerville, Mass., and "studied violin and other
branches in Vienna." A prodigy thus unfolds itself:
here is a man who lived in Vienna, and yet never
heard a Strauss waltz! This, indeed, is an even
greater feat than being born an artist in Somerville.

6
The Human Face

Probably the best portrait that I have ever seen in
America is one of Theodore Dreiser by Bror Nord-

THE ALLIED ARTS 207

feldt. Who this Bror Nordfeldt may be I haven't the
slightest notion a Scandinavian, perhaps. Maybe
I have got his name wrong; I can't find any Nordfeldt
in "Who's Who in America." But whatever his name,
he has painted Dreiser in a capital manner. The por-
trait not only shows the outward shell of the man; it
also conveys something of his inner spirit his simple-
minded wonder at the mystery of existence, his con-
stant effort to argue himself out of a despairing pes-
simism, hisgenuine amazement before life as a spec-
tacle. The thing is worth a hundred Sargents, with
their slick lying, their childish facility, their general
hollowness and tackiness. Sargent should have been
a designer of candy-box tops. The notion that he is
a great artist is one of the astounding delusions of
Anglo-Saxondom. What keeps it going is the patent
fact that he is a very dexterous craftsman one who
understands thoroughly how to paint, just as a good
plumber knows how to plumb. But of genuine aes-
thetic feeling the man is almost as destitute as the
plumber. His portrait of the four Johns Hopkins
professors is probably the worst botch ever palmed
off on a helpless committee of intellectual hay and
feed dealers. But Nordfeldt, in his view of Dreiser,
somehow gets the right effect. It is rough painting,
but real painting. There is a knock-kneed vase in the
foreground, and a bunch of flowers apparently painted
with a shaving-brush but Dreiser himself is genuine.

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More, he is made interesting. One sees at once that
he is no common man.

The artist himself seems to hold the portrait in
low esteem. Having finished it, he reversed the can-
vas and used the back for painting a vapid snow
scene a thing almost bad enough to go into a Fifth
Avenue show-window. Then he abandoned both
pictures. I discovered the portrait by accidentally
knocking the snow scene off a wall. It has never been
framed. Drieser himself has probably forgotten it.
. . . No, I do not predict that it will be sold to some
Pittsburgh nail manufacturer, in 1950, for $100,000.
If it lasts two or three more years, unframed and dis-
esteemed, it will be running in luck. When Dreiser
is hanged, I suppose, relic-hunters will make a search
for it. But by that time it will have died as a door-
mat.

7

The Cerebral Mime

Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher
cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectual-
ity. His alleged intelligence, of course, is always
purely imaginary: no man of genuinely superior intel-
ligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a
young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured
upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured
into bordellos, his mind would be . inevitably and

THE ALLIED ARTS 209

almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense
issuing from his mouth every night. That nonsense
enters into the very fiber of the actor. He becomes
a grotesque boiling down of all the preposterous char-
acters that he has ever impersonated. Their charac-
teristics are seen in his manner, in his reactions to
stimuli, in his point of view. He becomes a walking
artificiality, a strutting dummy, a thematic catalogue
of imbecilities.

There are, of course, plays that are not wholly
nonsense, and now and then one encounters an actor
who aspires to appear in them. This aspiration
almost -always overtakes the so-called actor-manager
that is to say, the actor who has got rich and is thus
ambitious to appear as a gentleman. Such aspirants
commonly tackle Shakespeare, and if not Shake-
speare, then Shaw, or Hauptmann, or Rostand, or some
other apparently intellectual dramatist. But this is
seldom more than a passing madness. The actor-
manager may do that sort of thing once in a while,
but in the main he sticks to his garbage. Consider,
for example, the late Henry Irving. He posed as an
intellectual and was forever gabbling about his high
services to the stage, and yet he appeared constantly in
such puerile things as "The Bells," beside which the
average newspaper editorial or college yell was liter-
ature. So with the late Mansfield. His pretension,
deftly circulated by press-agents, was that he was a

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man of brilliant and polished mind. Nevertheless,
he spent two-thirds of his life in the theater playing
such abominable drival as "A Parisian Romance" and
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

It is commonly urged in defense of certain actors
that they are forced to appear in that sort of stuff
by the public demand for it that appearing in it
painfully violates their secret pruderies. This de-
fense is unsound and dishonest. An actor never dis-
dains anything that gets him applause and money; he
is almost completely devoid of that aesthetic con-
science which is the chief mark of the genuine artist.
If there were a large public willing to pay handsomely
to hear him recite limericks, or to blow a cornet, or
to strip off his underwear and dance a polonaise stark
naked, he would do it without hesitation and then
convince himself that such buffooning constituted a
difficult and elevated art, fully comparable to Wag-
ner's or Dante's. In brief, the one essential, in his
sight, is the chance to shine, the fat part, the applause.
Who ever heard of an actor declining a fat part on
the ground that it invaded his intellectual integrity?
The thing is simply unimaginable.

VIII. THE CULT OF HOPE

OF all the sentimental errors which reign and
rage in this incomparable republic, the
worst, I often suspect, is that which con-
fuses the function of criticism, whether aesthetic, polit-
ical or social, with the function of reform. Almost
invariably it takes the form of a protest: "The fellow
condems without offering anything better. Why tear
down without building up?" So coo and snivel the
sweet ones: so wags the national tongue. The mes-
sianic delusion becomes a sort of universal murrain.
It is impossible to get an audience for an idea that is
not "constructive" i. e. 9 that is not glib, and uplift-
ing, and full of hope, and hence capable of tickling
the emotions by leaping the intermediate barrier of
the intelligence.

In this protest and demand, of course, there is noth-
ing but a hollow sound of words the empty babbling
of men who constantly mistake their mere feelings
for thoughts. The truth is that criticism, if it were
thus confined to the proposing of alternative schemes,
would quickly cease to have any force or utility at
all, for in the overwhelming majority of instances no

alternative scheme of any intelligibility is imaginable,

211

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and the whole object of the critical process is to dem-
onstrate it. The poet, if the victim is a poet, is
simply one as bare of gifts as a herring is of fur:
no conceivable suggestion will ever make him write
actual poetry. The cancer cure, if one turns to
popular swindles, is wholly and absolutely without
merit and the fact that medicine offers us no better
cure does not dilute its bogusness in the slightest.
And the plan of reform, in politics, sociology or what
not, is simply beyond the pale of reason; no change
in it or improvement of it will ever make it achieve
the downright impossible. Here, precisely, is what
is the matter with most of the notions that go floating
about the country, particularly in the field of govern-
mental reform. The trouble with them is not only
that they won't and don't work; the trouble with them,
more importantly, is that the thing they propose to ac-
complish is intrinsically, or at all events most prob-
ably, beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the
problem they are ostensibly designed to solve is a
problem that is insoluble. To tackle them with a
proof of that insolubility, or even with a colorable
argument of it, is sound criticism ; to tackle them with
another solution that is quite as bad, or even worse,
is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an auto-
mobile.

Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind
to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of

THE CULT OF HOPE 213

poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other
thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion.
The number of persons so afflicted is far greater than
the records of the Patent Office show, for beyond the
circle of frankly insane enterprise there lie circles
of more and more plausible enterprise, and finally
we come to a circle which embraces the great majority
of human beings. These are the optimists and chronic
hopers of the world, the believers in men, ideas and
things. These are the advocates of leagues of na-
tions, wars to make the world safe for democracy, po-
litical mountebanks, "clean-up" campaigns, laws,
raids, Men and Religion Forward Movements, eugen-
ics, sex hygiene, education, newspapers. It is the
settled habit of such credulous folk to give ear to
whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that
whatever is desirable will come to pass. A caressing
confidence but one, unfortunately, that is not borne
out by human experience. The fact is that some of
the things that men and women have desired most ar-
dently for thousands of years are not nearer realiza-
tion to-day than they were in the time of Rameses, and
that there is not the slightest reason for believing that
they will lose their coyness on any near to-morrow.
Plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the
beginning; plans for forcing them overnight are in
copious and antagonistic operation to-day; and yet
they continue to hold off and elude us, and the chances

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are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us
until the angels get tired of the show, and the whole
earth is set off like a gigantic bomb, or drowned, like
a sick cat, between two buckets.

But let us avoid the grand and chronic dreams of
the race and get down to some of the concrete prob-
lems of life under the Christian enlightenment. Let
us take a look, say, at the so-called drink problem, a
small sub-division of the larger problem of saving
men from their inherent and incurable hoggishness.
What is the salient feature of the discussion of the
drink problem, as one observes it going on eternally in
These States? The salient feature of it is that very
few honest and intelligent men ever take a hand in the
business that the best men of the nation, distin-
guished for their sound sense in other fields, seldom
show any interest in it. On the one hand it is labored
by a horde of obvious jackasses, each confident that
he can dispose of it overnight. And on the other
hand it is sophisticated and obscured by a crowd of
oblique fellows, hired by interested parties, whose
secret desire is that it be kept unsolved. To one side,
the professional gladiators of Prohibition; to the other
side, the agents of the brewers and distillers. But
why do all neutral and clear-headed men avoid it?
Why does one hear so little about it from those who
have no personal stake in it, and can thus view it
fairly and accurate]y? Is it because they are afraid?

THE CULT OF HOPE 215

Is it because they are not intrigued by it? I doubt
that it would be just to accuse them in either way.
The real reason why they steer clear of the gabble is
simpler and more creditable. It is this: that none of
them that no genuinely thoughtful and prudent man
can imagine any solution which meets the tests of
his own criticism that no genuinely intelligent man
believes the thing is soluble at all.

Here, of course, I generalize a bit heavily. Honest
and intelligent men, though surely not many of them,
occasionally come forward with suggestions. In the
midst of so much debate it is inevitable that even a
man of critical mind should sometimes lean to one
side or the other that some salient imbecility should
make him react toward its rough opposite. But the
fact still remains that not a single complete and com-
prehensive scheme has ever come from such a man,
that no such man has ever said, in so many words,
that he thought the problem could be solved, simply
and effectively. All such schemes come from idiots
or from sharpers disguised as idiots to win the public
confidence. The whole discussion is based upon
assumptions that even the most casual reflection must
reject as empty balderdash.

And as with the drink problem, so with most of the
other great questions that harass and dismay the help-
less human race. Turn, for example, to the sex prob-
lem. There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in

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his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot, who
doesn't know precisely how it ought to be dealt with.
There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get
her revenge on man, who hasn't a sovereign remedy
for it. There is not a shyster of a district attorney,
ambitious for higher office, who doesn't offer to dis-
pose of it in a few weeks, given only enough help
from the city editors. And yet, by the same token,
there is not a man who has honestly studied it and
pondered it, bringing sound information to the busi-
ness, and understanding of its inner difficulties and a
clean and analytical mind, who doesn't believe and
hasn't stated publicly that it is intrinsically and
eternally insoluble. I can't think of an exception,
nor does a fresh glance through the literature suggest
one. The latest expert to tell the disconcerting truth
is Dr. Maurice Parmelee, the criminologist. His
book, "Personality and Conduct," is largely devoted
to demonstrating that the popular solutions, for all
the support they get from vice crusaders, complaisant
legislators and sensational newspapers, are unani-
mously imbecile and pernicious that their only effect
in practice is to make what was bad a good deal worse.
His remedy is what? An alternative solution?
Not at all. His remedy, in brief, is to abandon all
attempts at a solution, to let the whole thing go, to
cork up all the reformers and try to forget it.

And in this proposal he merely echoes Havelock

THE CULT OF HOPE 217

Ellis, undoubtedly the most diligent and scientific stu-
dent of the sex problem that the world has yet seen
in fact, the one man who, above all others, has made
a decorous and intelligent examination of it possible.
Ellis' remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He
admits that the disease is bad, but he shows that the
medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes go-
ing back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it
with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, mar-
riage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and the cer-
tainty of death. Man is inherently vile but he is
never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny
his vileness. No prostitute was ever so costly to a
community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader,
or as the dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who
jumps as he pipes.

Ellis, in all this, falls under the excommunication
of the sentimentalists. He demolishes one scheme
without offering an alternative scheme. He tears
down without making any effort to build up. This
explains, no doubt, his general unpopularity; into
mouths agape for peruna, he projects only paralyzing
streams of ice-water. And it explains, too, the curi-
ous fact that his books, the most competent and il-
luminating upon the subject that they discuss, are un-
der the ban of the Comstocks in both England and
America, Whereas the hollow treatises of ignorant
clerics and smutty old maids are merchanted with

218 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

impunity, and even commended from the sacred desk.
The trouble with Ellis is that he tells the truth, which
is the unsafest of all things to tell. His crime is that
he is a man who prefers facts to illusions, and knows
what he is talking about. Such men are never popu-
lar. The public taste is for merchandise of a pre-
cisely opposite character. The way to please is to
proclaim in a confident manner, not what is true, but
what is merely comforting. This is what is called
building up. This is constructive criticism.

IX. THE DRY MILLENNIUM

The Holy War

THE fact that the enforcement of Prohibition
entails a host of oppressions and injustices
that it puts a premium upon the lowest sort
of spying, affords an easy livelihood to hordes of pro-
fessional scoundrels, subjects thousands of decent men
to the worst sort of blackmail, violates the theoreti-
cal sanctity of domicile, and makes for bitter and re-
lentless enmities, this fact is now adduced by its
ever-hopeful foes as an argument for the abandon-
ment of the whole disgusting crusade. By it they
expect to convert even a large minority of the drys,
apparently on the theory that the latter got converted
emotionally and hastily, and that an appeal to their
sense of justice and fair-dealing will debamboozle
them.

No hope could be more vain. What all the current
optimists overlook is that the illogical and indefensi-
ble persecutions certain to occur in increasing number
under the Prohibition Amendment constitute the chief
cause of its popularity among the sort of men who are

219

220 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

in favor of it. The typical Prohibitionist, in other
words, is a man full of religious excitement, with the
usual sadistic overtones. He delights in persecution
for its own sake. He likes to see the other fellow
jump and to hear him yell. This thirst is horribly
visible in all the salient mad mullahs of the land
that is, in all the genuine leaders of American cul-
ture. Such skillful boob-bumpers as the Rev. Dr.
Billy Sunday know what that culture is; they know
what the crowd wants. Thus they convert the preach-
ing of the alleged Word of God into a rough-and-
tumble pursuit of definite sinners saloon-keepers,
prostitutes, Sabbath-breakers, believers in the Dar-
winian hypothesis, German exegetes, hand-books,
poker-players, adulterers, cigarette-smokers, users of
profanity. It is the chase that heats up the great
mob of Methodists, not the Word. And the fact that
the chase is unjust only tickles them the more, for
to do injustice with impunity is a sign of power, and
power is the thing that the inferior man always craves
most violently.

Every time the papers print another account of a
Prohibionist agent murdering a man who resists him,
or searching some woman's underwear, or raiding a
Vanderbilt yacht, or blackmailing a Legislature, or
committing some other such inordinate and anti-social
act, they simply make a thousand more votes for
Prohibition. It is precisely that sort of entertain-

THE DRY MILLENNIUM 221

ment that makes Prohibition popular with the boob-
ery. It is precisely because it is unjust, imbecile,
arbitrary and tyrannical that they are so hot for it.
The incidental violation of even the inferior man's
liberty is not sufficient to empty him of delight in the
chase. The victims reported in the newspapers are
commonly his superiors ; he thus gets the immemorial
democratic satisfaction out of their discomfiture.
Besides, he has no great rage for liberty himself. He
is always willing to surrender it at demand. The
most popular man under a democracy is not the most
democratic man, but the most despotic man. The
common folk delight in the exactions of such a man.
They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is
the goose-step.

It was predicted by romantics that the arrival of
Prohibition would see the American workingman in
revolt against its tyranny, with mills idle and indus-
try paralyzed. Certain boozy labor leaders even
went so far as to threaten a general strike. No such
strike, of course, materialized. Not a single Ameri-
can workingman uttered a sound. The only protests
heard of came from a few barbarous foreigners, and
these malcontents were quickly beaten into submis-
sion by the Polizei. In a week or two all the reserve
stocks of beer were exhausted, and every jug of au-
thentic hard' liquor was emptied. Since then, save
for the ghastly messes that he has brewed behind

222 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

locked doors, the American workingman has been dry.
Worse, he has also been silent. Not a sound has
come out of him. . . . But his liver is full of bile?
He nourishes an intolerable grievance? He will get
his revenge, soon or late, at the polls? All moon-
shine! He will do nothing of the sort. He will ac-
tually do what he always does that is, he will make
a virtue of his necessity, and straightway begin be-
lieving that he likes Prohibition, that it is doing him
a lot of good, that he wouldn't be without it if he
could. This is the habitual process of thought of
inferior men, at all times and everywhere. This is
the sturdy common sense of the plain people.

The Lure of Babylon

One of the ultimate by-products of Prohibition and
the allied Puritanical barbarities will probably be
an appreciable slackening in the present movement of
yokels toward the large cities. The thing that at-
tracted the peasant youth to our gaudy Sodoms and
Ninevehs, in the past, was not, as sociologists have
always assumed, the prospect of less work and more
money. The country boy, in point of fact that is,
the average country boy, the normal country boy
had to work quite as hard in the city as he ever worked
in the country, and his wages were .anything but

THE DRY MILLENNIUM 223

princely. Unequipped with a city trade, unprotected
by a union, and so forced into competition with the
lowest types of foreign labor, he had to be content
with monotonous, uninspiring and badly-paid jobs.
He did not become a stock-broker, or even a plumber;
until the war gave him a temporary chance at its gi-
gantic swag, he became a car conductor, a porter or
a wagon-driver. And it took him many years to
escape from that sordid fate, for the city boy, with
a better education and better connections, was always
a lap or two ahead of him. The notion that yokels
always succeed in the cities is a great delusion. The
overwhelming majority of our rich men are city-born
and city-bred. And the overwhelming majority of
our elderly motormen, forlorn corner grocerymen,
neighborhood carpenters and other such blank car-
tridges are country-bred.

No, it was not money that lured the adolescent hus-
bandman to the cities, but the gay life. What he
dreamed of was a more spacious and stimulating ex-
istence than the farm could offer an existence
crowded with intriguing and usually unlawful recrea-
tions. A few old farmers may have come in now and
then to buy gold bricks or to hear the current Henry
Ward Beechers, but these oldsters were mere trip-
pers they never thought of settling down the very
notion of it Would have appalled them. The actual
settlers were all young, and what brought them on was

224 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

less an economic impulse than an aesthetic one. They
wanted to live magnificently, to taste the sweets that
drummers talked of, to sample the refined divertise-
ments described in such works as "The Confessions of
an Actress," "Night Life in Chicago" and "What
Every Young Husband Should Know." Specifically,
they yearned for a semester or two in the theaters,
the saloons and the bordellos particularly, the sa-
loons and bordellos. It was this gorgeous bait that
dragged them out of their barn-yards. It was this
bait that landed a select few in Wall street and the
United States Senate and millions on the front seats
of trolley-cars, delivery-wagons and ash-carts.

But now Puritanism eats the bait. In all our great
cities the public stews are closed, and the lamentable
irregularities they catered to are thrown upon an in-
dividual initiative that is quite beyond the talents and
enterprise of a plow-hand. Now the saloons are
closed too, and the blind-pigs begin to charge such
prices that no peasant can hope to pay them. Only
the theater remains and already the theater loses its
old lavish devilishness. True enough, it still "deals
in pornography, but that pornography becomes ex-
clusive and even esoteric: a yokel could not under-
stand the higher farce, nor could he afford to pay for
a seat at a modern leg-show. The cheap burlesque
house of other days is now incurably moral; I saw a
burlesque show lately which was almost a dramatiza-

THE DRY MILLENNIUM 225

tion of a wall-card by Dr. Frank Crane. There re-
mains the movie, but the peasant needn't come to the
city to see movies there is one in every village.
What remains, then, of the old lure? What sane
youth, comfortably housed on a farm, with Theda
Bara performing at the nearest cross-roads, wheat at
$2.25 a bushel and milkers getting $75 a month and
board what jejune rustic, not downright imbecile,
itches for the city to-day?

Cupid and Well-Water

In the department of amour, I daresay, the first
effect of Prohibition will be to raise up impediments
to marriage. It was alcohol, in the past, that was the
primary cause of perhaps ' a majority of alliances
among civilized folk. The man, priming himself
with cocktails to achieve boldness, found himself sud-
denly bogged in sentimentality, and so yielded to the
ancient tricks of the lady. Absolutely sober men will
be harder to snare. Coffee will never mellow them
sufficiently. Thus I look for a fall in the marriage
rate.

But only temporarily. In the long run, Prohibi-
tion will make marriage more popular, at least among
the upper classes, than it has ever been in the past,
and for the plain reason that, once it is in full effect,

226 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

the life of a civilized bachelor will become intoler-
able. In the past he went to his club. But a club
without a 'bar is as hideously unattractive as a beau-
tiful girl without hair or teeth. No sane man will
go into it. In two years, in fact, nine out of ten clubs
will be closed. The only survivors will be a few
bleak rookeries for senile widowers. The bachelor
of less years, unable to put up with the society of such
infernos, will inevitably decide that if he must keep
sober he might just as well have a charming girl to
ease his agonies, and so he will expose himself in
society, and some fair one or other will nab him.

At the moment, observing only the first effect of
Prohibition, the great majority of intelligent women
are opposed to it. But when the secondary effect be-
gins to appear they will become in favor of it. They
now have the vote. I see no hope.

4
The Triumph of Idealism

Another effect of Prohibition will be that it will
gradually empty the United States of its present small
minority of civilized men. Almost every man that
one respects is now casting longing eyes across the
ocean. Some of them talk frankly of emigrating,
once Europe pulls itself together. Others merely
propose to go abroad every year and to stay there as

THE DRY MILLENNIUM 227

long as possible, visiting the United States only at
intervals, as a Russian nobleman, say, used to visit his
estates in the Ukraine. Worse, Prohibition will scare
off all the better sort of immigrants from the other
side. The lower order of laborers may continue to
come in small numbers each planning to get all the
money he can and then escape, as the Italians are
even now escaping. But no first-rate man will ever
come no Stephen Girard, or William Osier, or Carl
Schurz, or Theodore Thomas, or Louis Agassiz, or
Edwin Klebs, or Albert Gallatin, or Alexander Ham-
ilton. It is not Prohibition per se that will keep them
away; it is the whole complex of social and political
attitudes underlying Prohibition the whole clinical
picture of Puritanism rampant. The United States
will become a sort of huge Holland fat and con-
tented, but essentially undistinguished. Its superior
men will leave it automatically, as nine-tenths of all
superior Hollanders leave Holland.

But all this, from the standpoint of Prohibitionists,
is no argument against Prohibition. On the contrary,
it is an argument in favor of Prohibition. For the
men the Prohibitionist i. e., the inferior sort of Puri-
tan distrusts and dislikes most intensely is pre-
cisely what the rest of humanity regards as the su-
perior man. You will go wrong if you imagine that
the honest 'yeomen of, say, Mississippi deplore the
fact that in the whole state there is not a single dis-

228 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

tinguished man. They actually delight in it. It is a
source of genuine pride to them that no such irre-
ligious scoundrel as Balzac lives there, and no such
scandalous adulterer as Wagner, and no scoundrelly
atheist as Huxley, and no such rambunctious piano-
thumper as Beethoven, and no such German spy as
Nietzsche. Such men, settling there, would be visited
by a Vigilance Committee and sharply questioned.
The Puritan Commonwealth, now as always, has no
traffic with heretics.

X. APPENDIX ON A TENDER

THEME

The Nature of Love

WHATEVER the origin (in the soul, the
ductless glands or the convolutions of the
cerebrum) of the thing called romantic
love, its mere phenomenal nature may be very simply
described. It is, in brief, a wholesale diminishing
of disgusts, primarily based on observation, but often,
in its later stages, taking on an hallucinatory and
pathological character. Friendship has precisely the
same constitution, but the pathological factor is usu-
ally absent. When we are attracted to a person and
find his or her proximity agreeable, it means that he
or she disgusts us less than the average human being
disgusts us which, if we have delicate sensibilities,
is a good deal more than is comfortable. The ele-
mental man is not much oppressed by this capacity for
disgust; in consequence, he is capable of falling in
love with almost any woman who seems sexually nor-
mal. But 'the man of a higher type is vastly more
sniffish, and so the majority of women whom he meets

229

230 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

are quite unable to interest him, and when he suc-
cumbs at last it is always to a woman of special char-
acter, and often she is also one of uncommon shrewd-
ness and enterprise.

Because human contacts are chiefly superficial,
most of the disgusts that we are conscious of are physi-
cal. We are never honestly friendly with a man
who is dirtier than we are ourselves, or who has table
manners that are cruder than our own (or merely
noticeably different), or who laughs in a way that
strikes us as gross, or who radiates some odor that
we do not like. We never conceive a romantic pas-
sion for a woman who employs a toothpick in public,
or who suffers from ache, or who offers the subtle
but often quite unescapable suggestion that she has on
soiled underwear. But there are also psychical dis-
gusts. Our friends, in the main, must be persons
who think substantially as we do, at least about all
things that actively concern us, and who have the
same general tastes. It is impossible to imagine a
Brahmsianer being honestly fond of a man who en-
joys jazz, or a man who admires Joseph Conrad fall-
ing in love with a woman who reads Rex Beach. By
the same token, it is impossible to imagine a woman
of genuine refinement falling in love with a Knight
of Pythias, a Methodist or even a chauffeur; either
the chauffeur is a Harvard aviator in disguise or the
lady herself is a charwoman in disguise. 'Here, how-

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 231

ever, the force of aversion may be greatly diminished
by contrary physical attractions; the body, as usual,
is enormously more potent than the so-called mind.
In the midst of the bitterest wars, with every man of
the enemy held to be a fiend in human form, women
constantly fall in love with enemy soldiers who are
of pleasant person and wear attractive uniforms.
And many a fair agnostic, as every one knows, is on
good terms with a handsome priest. . . .

Imagine a young man in good health and easy cir-
cumstances, entirely ripe for love. The prompting
to mate and beget arises within his interstitial depths,
traverses his lymphatic system, lifts his blood pres-
sure, and goes whooping through his meatus audi-
torium externus like a fanfare of slide trombones.
The impulse is very powerful. It staggers and dis-
mays him. He trembles like a stag at bay. Why,
then, doesn't he fall head over heels in love with the
first eligible woman that he meets? For the plain
reason that the majority of women that he meets of-
fend him, repel him, disgust him. Often it is in some
small, inconspicuous and, at first glance, unanalyz-
able way. She is, in general, a very pretty girl
but her ears stand out too much. Or her hair re-
minds him of oakum. Or her mouth looks like his
aunt's. Or she has beer-keg ankles. Here very im-
palpable things, such as bodily odors, play a capital
part; their importance is always much underestimated.

232 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

Many a girl has lost a husband by using the wrong
perfume, or by neglecting to have her hair washed.
Many another has come to grief by powdering her
nose too much or too little, or by shrinking from the
paltry pain of having some of her eyebrows pulled,
or by employing a lip-salve with too much purple in
it, or by patronizing a bad dentist, or by speaking in-
cautiously of chilblains. . . .

But eventually the youth finds his love soon or
late the angel foreordained comes along. Who is
this prodigy? Simply the first girl to sneak over
what may be called the threshold of his disgusts
simply the first to disgust him so little, at first glance,
that the loud, insistent promptings of the Divine
Schadchen have a chance to be heard. If he muffs
this first, another will come along, maybe soon, maybe
late. For every normal man there are hundreds of
thousands in Christendom, thousands in his own town,
scores within his own circle of acquaintance. This
normal man is not too delicate. His fixed foci of
disgust are neither very numerous nor very sensitive.
For the rest, he is swayed by fashion, by suggestion,
by transient moods. Anon a mood of cynicism is
upon him and he is hard to please, but anon he suc-
cumbs to sentimentality and is blind to everything
save the grossest offendings. It is only the man of
extraordinary sensitiveness, the man of hypertrophied

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 233

delicacy, who must search the world for his elective
affinity.

Once the threshold is crossed emotion comes to the
aid of perception. That is to say, the blind, almost
irresistible mating impulse, now fortuitously relieved
from the contrary pressure of active disgusts, fortifies
itself by manufacturing illusions. The lover sees
with an eye that is both opaque and out of focus.
Thus he begins the familiar process of editing and
improving his girl. Features and characteristics that,
observed in cold blood, might have quickly aroused
his most active disgust are now seen through a rose-
tinted fog, like drabs in a musical comedy. The
lover ends by being almost anaesthetic to disgust.
While the spell lasts his lady could shave her head or
take to rubbing snuff, or scratch her leg at a com-
munion service, or smear her hair with bear's grease,
and yet not disgust him. Here the paralysis of the
faculties is again chiefly physical a matter of ob-
scure secretions, of shifting pressure, of metabolism.
Nature is at her tricks. The fever of love is upon its
vicfim. His guard down, he is little more than a
pathetic automaton. The shrewd observer of gauch-
eries, the sensitive sniffer, the erstwhile cynic, has be-
come a mere potential papa.

This spell, of course, doesn't last forever. Mar-
riage cools- the fever and lowers the threshold of dis-

234 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

gust. The husband begins to observe what the lover
was blind to, and often his discoveries affect hiih as
unpleasantly as the treason of a trusted friend. And
not only is the fever cooled: the opportunities for
exact observation are enormously increased. It is
a commonplace of juridical science that the great
majority of divorces have their origin in the connubial
chamber. Here intimacy is so extreme that it is
fatal to illusion. Both parties, thrown into the
closest human contact that either has suffered since
their unconscious days in utero, find their old capacity
for disgust reviving, and then suddenly flaming. The
girl who was perfect in her wedding gown becomes a
ghastly caricature in her robe de nuit; the man who
was a Chevalier Bayard as a wooer becomes a snuf-
fling, shambling, driveling nuisance as a husband
a fellow offensive to eyes, ears, nose, touch and im-
mortal soul. A learned judge of my acquaintance,
constantly hearing divorce actions and as constantly
striving to reconcile the parties, always tries to induce
plaintiff and defendant to live apart for a while, or,
failing that, to occupy separate rooms, or, failing that,
to at least dress in separate rooms. According to this
jurist, a husband who shaves in his wife's presence
is either an idiot or a scoundrel. The spectacle, he
argues, is intrinsically disgusting, and to force it upon
a refined woman is either to subject her to the most

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 235

exquisite torture or to degrade her gradually to the
insensate level of an Abortfrau.

The day is saved, as every one knows, by the power-
ful effects of habit. The acquisition of habit is the
process whereby disgust is overcome in daily life
the process whereby one may cease to be disgusted
by a persistent noise or odor. One suffers horribly
at first, but after a bit one suffers less, and in the
course of time one scarcely suffers at all. Thus a
man, when his marriage enters upon the stage of regu-
larity and safety, gets used to his wife as he might
get used to a tannery next door, and vice versa. I
think that women, in this direction, have the harder
row to hoe, for they are more observant than men,
and vastly more sensitive in small ways. But even
women succumb to habit with humane rapidity, else
every marriage would end in divorce. Disgusts pale
into mere dislikes, disrelishes, distastes. They cease
to gag and torture. But though they thus shrink into
the shadow, they are by no means disposed of. Deep
down in the subconscious they continue to lurk, and
some accident may cause them to flare up at any time,
and so work havoc. This flaring up accounts for a
familiar and yet usually very mystifying phenomenon
the sudden collapse of a marriage, a friendship or
a business association after years of apparent pros-
perity.

236 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

2
The Incomparable Buzzsaw

The chief (and perhaps the only genuine) charm
of women is seldom mentioned by the orthodox pro-
fessors of the sex. I refer to the charm that lies in
the dangers they present. The allurement that they
hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape
Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously
dangerous and hence enormously fascinating. To the
average man, doomed to some banal and sordid
drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand
hazard that he ever encounters. Take them away
and his existence would be as flat and secure as that
of a milch-cow. Even to the unusual man, the adven-
turous man, the imaginative and romantic man, they
offer the adventure of adventures. Civilization tends
to dilute and cheapen all other hazards. War itself,
once an enterprise stupendously thrilling, has been re-
duced to mere caution and calculation; already, in-
deed, it employs as many press-agents, letter-openers,
and chautauqua orators as soldiers. On some not dis-
tant to-morrow its salient personality may be Potash,
and if not Potash, then Perlmutter. But the duel of
sex continues to be fought in the Berserker manner.
Whoso approaches women still faces the immemorial
dangers. Civilization has not made them a bit more
safe than they were in Solomon's time; they are still

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 237

inordinately barbarous and menacing, and hence in-
ordinately provocative, and hence inordinately charm-
ing and romantic. . . .

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man
who, on grounds of decorum and morality, avoids
the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease
and security above the most laudable of philanthro-
pies. Women have a hard time of it in this world.
They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made
social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of
masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the as-
surance that, even though it may be impossible to
prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave
and torture a man. This feeling is fostered when one
makes love to them. One need not be a great beau,
a seductive catch, to do it effectively. Any man is
better than none. No woman is ever offended by
admiration. The wife of a millionaire notes the rev-
erent glance of a head-waiter. To withhold that
devotion, to shrink poltroonishly from giving so much
happiness at such small expense, to evade the business
on the ground that it has hazards this is the act of a
puling and tacky fellow.

238 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

3

Women as Spectacles

Women, when it comes to snaring men, through
the eye, bait a great many hooks that fail to fluster
the fish. Nine-tenths of their primping and decorat-
ing of their persons not only doesn't please men; it
actually repels men. I often pass two days, running
without encountering a single woman who is charm-
ingly dressed. Nearly all of them run to painful
color schemes, absurd designs and excessive over-
ornamentation. One seldom observes a man who
looks an absolute guy, whereas such women are very
numerous; in the average theater audience they consti-
tute a majority of at least nine-tenths. The reason is
not far to seek. The clothes of men are plain in
design and neutral in hue. The only touch of genuine
color is in the florid blob of the face, the center of
interest exactly where it ought to be. If there is
any other color at all, it is a faint suggestion in the
cravat adjacent to the face, and so leading the eye
toward it. It is color that kills the clothes of the
average woman. She runs to bright spots that take
the eye away from her face and hair. She ceases
to be woman clothed and becomes a mere piece of
clothing womaned.

Even at the basic feminine art of pigmenting their
faces very few women excel. The average woman

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 239

seems to think that she is most lovely when her sophis-
tication of her complexion is most adroitly concealed
when the poudre de riz is rubbed in so hard that it
is almost invisible, and the penciling of eyes and lips
is perfectly realistic. This is a false notion. Most
men of appreciative eye have no objection to artifi-
ciality per se, so long as it is intrinsically sightly.
The marks made by a lip-stick may be very beautiful;
there are many lovely shades of scarlet, crimson and
vermilion. A man with eyes in his head admires
them for themselves; he doesn't have to be first con-
vinced that they are non-existent, that what he sees is
not the mark of a lip-stick at all, but an authentic lip.
So with the eyes. Nothing could be more charming
than an eye properly reenforced; the naked organ is
not to be compared to it; nature is an idiot when it
comes to shadows. But it must be admired as a
work of art, not as a miraculous and incredible eye.
. . . Women, in this important and venerable art,
stick too closely to crude representation. They forget
that men do not admire the technique, but the result.
What they should do is to forget realism for a while,
and concentrate their attention upon composition,
chiaroscuro and color.

240 PRE] VOICES: SECOND SERIES

Woman and the Artist

Much gabble is to be found in the literature of the
world upon the function of woman as inspiration,
stimulant and agente provocateuse to the creative
artist. The subject is a favorite one with sentimen-
talists, most of whom are quite beyond anything prop-
erly describable as inspiration, either with or without
feminine aid. I incline to think, as I hint, that there
is little if any basis of fact beneath the theory.
Women not only do not inspire creative artists to high
endeavor; they actually stand firmly against every
high endeavor that a creative artist initiates spon-
taneously. What a man's women folks almost invari-
able ask of him is that he be respectable that he do
something generally approved that he avoid yield-
ing to his aberrant fancies in brief, that he sedu-
lously eschew showing any sign of genuine genius.
Their interest is not primarily in the self-expression
of the individual, but in the well-being of the family
organization, which means the safety of themselves.
No sane woman would want to be the wife of such a
man, say, as Nietzsche or Chopin. His mistress
perhaps, yes for a mistress can always move on
when the weather gets too warm. But,jiot a wife.
I here speak by the book. Both Nietzsche and Chopin

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 241

had plenty of mistresses, but neither was ever able to
get a wife.

Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway, Wagner and
Minna Planer, Moliere and Armande Bejart one
might multiply instances almost endlessly. Minna,
at least in theory, knew something of music; she was
thus what romance regards as an ideal wife for
Wagner. But instead of helping him to manufac-
ture his incomparable masterpieces, she was for
twenty-five years the chief impediment to their manu-
facture. "Lohengrin" gave her the horrors; she
begged Richard to give up his lunacies and return to
the composition of respectable cornet music. In the
end he had to get rid of her in sheer self-defense.
Once free, with nothing worse on his hands than the
illicit affection of Cosima Liszt von Bulow, he pro-
duced music drama after music drama in rapid suc-
cession. Then, married to Cosima, he descended to
the anticlimax of "Parsifal," a truly tragic mixture
of the stupendous and the banal, of work of genius
apd sinfonia domestica a great man dying by inches,
smothered by the smoke of French fried potatoes,
deafened by the wailing of children, murdered in his
own house by the holiest of passions.

Sentimentalists always bring up the case of Schu-
mann and his Clara in rebuttal. But does it actually
rebut? "I doubt it. Clara, too, perpetrated her

attentat against art. Her fair white arms, lifting

242 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

from the keyboard to encircle Robert's neck, squeezed
more out of him than mere fatuous smirks. He had
the best head on him that music had seen since Beetho-
ven's day; he was, on the cerebral side, a colossus;
he might have written music of the very first order.
Well, what he did write was piano music some of it
imperfectly arranged for orchestra. The sad eyes of
Clara were always upon him. He kept within the
limits of her intelligence, her prejudices, her wifely
love. No grand experiments with the orchestra. No
superb leapings and cavortings. No rubbing of sand-
paper over critical ears. Robert lived and died a
respectable musical Hausvater. He was a man of
genuine genius but he didn't leave ten lines that
might not have been passed by old Prof. Jadassohn.

The truth is that, no matter how great the domestic
concord and how lavish the sacrifices a man makes for
his women-folk, they almost always regard him se-
cretly as a silly and selfish fellow, and cherish the
theory that it would be easily possible to improve
him. This is because the essential interests of men
and women are eternally antithetical. A man may
yield over and over again, but in the long run he must
occasionally look out for himself and it is these
occasions that his women-folk remember. The typi-
cal domestic situation shows a woman trying to in-
duce a man to do something that he doesn't want to
do, or to refrain from something that he 'does want

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 243

to do. This is true in his bachelor days, when his
mother or his sister is his: antagonist. It is pre-
eminently true just before his marriage, when the girl
who has marked him down is hard at the colossal job
of overcoming his reluctance. And after marriage it
is so true that there is hardly need to state it. One
of the things every man discovers to his disquiet is
that his wife, after the first play-acting is over, regards
him essentially as his mother used to regard him that
is, as a self -worshiper who needs to be policed and
an idiot who needs to be protected. The notion that
women admire their men-folks is pure moonshine.
The most they ever achieve in that direction is to pity
them. When a woman genuinely loves a man it is a
sign that she regards him much as a healthy man re-
gards a one-armed and epileptic soldier.

Martyrs

Nearly the whole case of the birth-controllers who
now roar in Christendom is grounded upon the doc-
trine that it is an intolerable outrage for a woman
to have to submit to motherhood when her private
fancies may rather incline to automobiling, shopping
or going to the movies. For this curse the husband is
blamed; -the whole crime is laid to his swinish lascivi-
ousness. 'With the highest respect, nonsense! My

244 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

private suspicion, supported by long observation, copi-
ous prayer and the most laborious cogitation, is that no
woman delights in motherhood so vastly as this woman
who theoretically abhors it. She experiences, in fact,
a double delight. On the one hand, there is the caress-
ing of her vanity a thing enjoyed by every woman
when she achieves the banality of viable offspring.
And on the other hand, there is the fine chance it gives
her to play the martyr a chance that every woman
seeks as diligently as a man seeks ease. All these so-
called unwilling mothers wallow in their martyrdom.
They revel in the opportunity to be pitied, made
much over and envied by other women.

6

The Burnt Child

The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it
shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly
diminishes his general competence and effectiveness.
His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who
has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He never
quite trusts himself thereafter.

7
The Supreme Comedy

Marriage, at Best, is full of a sour and inescapable
comedy, but it never reaches the highest* peaks of

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 245

the ludicrous save when efforts are made to escape
its terms that is, when efforts are made to loosen its
bonds, and so ameliorate and denaturize it. All
projects to reform it by converting it into a free union
of free individuals are inherently absurd. The thing
is, at bottom, the most rigid of existing conventionali-
ties, and the only way to conceal the fact and so make
it bearable is to submit to it docilely. The effect of
every revolt is merely to make the bonds galling,
and, what is worse, poignantly obvious. Who are
happy in marriage? Those with so little imagination
that they cannot picture a better state, and those so
shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hopeless re-
bellion.

8

A Hidden Cause

Many a woman, in order to bring the man of her
choice to the altar of God, has to fight him with such
relentless vigilance and ferocity that she comes to hate
him. This, perhaps, explains the unhappiness of
many marriages. In particular, it explains the un-
happiness of many marriages based upon what is
called "love."

9

Bad Workmanship

The essential slackness and incompetence of women,
their congenital incapacity for small expertness,

246 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

already descanted upon at length in my psychological
work, "In Defense of Women," is never more plainly
revealed than in their manhandling of the primary
business of their sex. If the average woman were as
competent at her trade of getting a husband as the
average car conductor is at his trade of robbing the
fare-box, then a bachelor beyond the age of twenty-
five would be so rare in the world that yokels would
pay ten cents to gape at him. But women, in this
fundamental industry, pursue a faulty technique and
permit themselves to be led astray by unsound prin-
ciples. The axioms into which they have precipitated
their wisdom are nearly all untrue. For example,
the axiom that the way to capture a man is through his
stomach which is to say, by feeding him lavishly.
Nothing could be more absurd. The average man,
at least in England and America, has such rudimen-
tary tastes in victualry that he doesn't know good food
from bad. He will eat anything set before him by a
cook that he likes. The true way to fetch him is with
drinks. A single bottle of drinkable wine will fill
more men with the passion of love than ten sides of
beef or a ton of potatoes. Even a Seidel of beer,
deftly applied, is enough to mellow the hardest bache-
lor. If women really knew their business, they would
have abandoned cooking centuries ago, and devoted
themselves to brewing, distilling and bartending. It
is a rare man who will walk five blocks for a first-

APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME 247

rate meal. But it is equally a rare man who, even in
the old days of freedom, would not walk five blocks
for a first-rate cocktail. To-day he would walk five
miles.

Another unsound feminine axiom is the one to the
effect that the way to capture a man is to be distant
to throw all the burden of the courtship upon him.
This is precisely the way to lose him. A man face to
face with a girl who seems reserved and unapproach-
able is not inspired thereby to drag her off in the
manner of a caveman ; on the contrary, he is inspired
to thank God that here, at last, is a girl with whom
it is possible to have friendly doings without getting
into trouble that here is one not likely to grow mushy
and make a mess. The average man does not marry
because some marble fair one challenges his enter-
prise. He marries because chance throws into his
way a fair one who repels him less actively than
most, and because his delight in what he thus calls her
charm is reenforced by a growing suspicion that she
has fallen in love with him. In brief, it is chivalry
that undoes him. The girl who infallibly gets a hus-
band in fact, any husband that she wants is the
one who tracks him boldly, fastens him with sad eyes,
and then, when his conscience has begun to torture
him, throws her arms around his neck, bursts into
maidenly tears on his shoulder, and tells him that
she fears her forwardness will destroy his respect for

248 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES

her. It is only a colossus who can resist such
strategy. But it takes only a man of the intellectual
grade of a Y. M. C. A. secretary to elude the girl who
is afraid to take the offensive.

A third bogus axiom I have already discussed, to
wit, the axiom that a man is repelled by palpable
cosmetics that the wise girl is the one who effectively
conceals her sophistication of her complexion. What
could be more untrue? The fact is that very few
men are competent to distinguish between a layer of
talc and the authentic epidermis, and that the few
who have the gift are quite free from any notion that
the latter is superior to the former. What a man
seeks when he enters the society of women is some-
thing pleasing to the eye. That is all he asks. He
does not waste any time upon a chemical or spectro-
scopic examination of the object observed; he simply
determines whether it is beautiful or not beautiful.
Has it so long escaped women that their husbands,
when led astray, are usually led astray by women so
vastly besmeared with cosmetics that they resembje
barber-poles more than human beings? Are they
yet blind to the superior pull of a French maid, a
chorus girl, a stenographer begauded like a painter's
palette? . . . And still they go on rubbing off their
varnish, brushing the lampblack from their eyelashes,
seeking eternally the lip-stick that is so depressingly
purple that it will deceive! Alas, what folly!

INDEX

INDEX

Abbott, Lawrence, 106 et seq.

Abbott, Lyman, 58

Akins, Zoe, 26, 30

Alcott, A. B., 63

Allen, James Lane, 27

Also sprach Zarathustra, 111

American Painting and Its Tradi-
tion, 45

American Scholar, The, 9, 12

Amherst College, 48

Anderson, Sherwood, 27, 55, 100

Archer, William, 190

Aspects of Death and Correlated
Aspects of Life, 185 et seq.

Atlantic Monthly, 25, 27

Authors 9 League Bulletin, 36

Babbitt, Irving, 19, 21, 22, 26
Backward Glance Along My Own

Road, A 9 64

Backwash of War, The, 193
Baker, George P., 30
Bancroft, George, 44
Barton, Wm. E., 104
Baudelaire, Charles, 61
Beach, Rex, 32, 37, 40, 50, 230
Beethoven, Ludwig, 200, 203
Bennett, Arnold, 56
Benftm, E. F., 38
Bierce, Ambrose, 45, 60, 62
Billroth, Theodor, 89
Blasco, Ibafiez, V., 52
Blue Hotel, The, 42
Bohme, Jakob, 71
Bonaparte, Charles J., 126
Bookman, 27
Boynton, P. H., 21, 24
Brady, Cyrus^Townsend, 32
Brahms, Johannes, 89, 162, 200
Brainard, J. G: C, 14

251

Bright, John, 75
Bronson-Howard, George, 34
Brooks, Van Wyck, 12, 17, 23
Brown, Alice, 19
Browne, Porter Emerson, 32
Brownell, W. C, 11, 19, 21, 90
Bruce, Philip Alexander, 147
Bryant, Wm. Cullen, 44, 63
Burroughs, John, 64
Burton, Richard, 21
Butler, Fanny Kemble, 147
Bynner, Witter, 30

Cabell, James Branch, 27, 47, 52,

56, 57, 89, 100, 138, 139
Cahan, Abraham, 56
Caine, Hall, 35, 36
Candler, Asa G., 152
Carlyle, Thomas, 58
Carnegie, Andrew, 74
Carrel, Alexis, 48, 189
Gather, Willa Sibert, 42, 56
Chambers, Robert W., 32, 52
Channing, Wm. Ellery, 11
Chesterton, G. K., 93, 155
Churchill, Winston, 22, 23
Clemens, S. L., 33, 45, 52, 54, 63,

89, 98

Cobb, Irvin, 32
Cobden, Richard, 75
Comfort, Will Levington, 33
Comstockery, 55, 90
Confessions of an Actress, The,

224
Conrad, Joseph, 13, 41, 43, 53, 93,

230

Coogler, J. Gordon, 136
Cooper, J. Fenimore, 44, 58, 60,

97
Corelli, Marie, 35

252

INDEX

Cosmopolitan, 34

Crane, Frank, 32, 35, 225

Crane, Stephen, 42

Crile, George W., 162, 183, 191

Crothers, Samuel McC, 19, 22

D'Annunzio, Gabriel, 35

Dawson, Coningsby, 93

Davis, Richard Harding, 18, 32,
43

Debussy, Claude, 201

Deland, Margaret, 27

Democratic Vistas, 10

Dickens, Charles, 59

Die Meister singer, 164, 203

Dissertations on the English Lan-
guage, 12

Doyle, A. Conan, 93

Dreiser Protest, 54

Dreiser, Theodore, 23, 27, 35, 41,
45, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 89, 90,
100, 206 et seq.

Eliot, T. S., 45

Ellis, Havelock, 216

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9 et seq.,

17, 44, 57, 59, 63
Ethan Frome, 42
Evans, Caradoc, 146

Fernald, Chester Bailey, 33
Flexner, Simon, 48
Frank, Waldo, 100
Freneau, Philip, 44
Freytag-Loringhoven, Elga von,

46
Fuller, Henry B., 45, 55

Gale, Zona, 33

Garland, Hamlin, 27, 33

Geddes, Auckland, 93

" Genius," The, 50, 90

Georgia, 141 et seq.

Gilman, Daniel Coit, 49, 103

Glasgow, Ellen, 27

Glass, Montague, 33, 35

Glyn, Elinor, 35

Good Girl,, A., 56

Gorky, Maxim, 54
Gosse, Edmund, 190
Grant, Robert, 19
Graves, John Temple, 145
Greenwich Village, 25 et seq.
Griswold, Rufus W., 57
Grote, George, 75

Hadley, Herbert K., 206
Hamilton, Clayton, 24
Harris, Corra, 33
Harris, Frank, 45, 51, 54, 56
Harrison, Henry Sydnor, 27, 32
Harte, Bret, 34, 42, 45, 59
Haweis, H. R., 44
Hawthorne, Hildegarde, 58
Hawthorne, Julian, 58
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44, 54, 57,

58, 59
Hay, Ian, 93
Haydn, Josef, 187, 200
Heart of Darkness, 43
Hearst's, 34
Hecht, Ben, 46
Hedda Gabler, 190
Henry, 0., 18, 32, 33, 43
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 35, 42, 45
Hillis, Newell Dwight, 32, 35
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 9, 63
Hooker, Brian, 27
Hopper, James, 34
Hough, Emerson, 32
Howe, E. W., 35
Howells, Wm. Dean, 15, 19, 23,

27, 45, 53, 54, 63
Hubbard, Elbert, 34
Huneker, James, 64

Impressions of Theodore Roose-
velt, 106

In Defense of Women, 246

Industrial History of Virginia in
the Seventeenth Century, 147

Irving, Henry, 209

Irving, Washington, ,15, 44, 51, 60

Iveagh, Lord, 66

James, Henry, 45, 51, 54, 97

INDEX

253

Jens cits von Gut und Bose, 111
Johns Hopkins University, 48, 49
Johnson, Owen, 32, 33
Johnson, Robert U., 19, 27
Johnston, Mary, 27

Kellner, Leon, 53
Kilmer, Joyce, 52
Kipling, Rudyard, 93
Knapp, Samuel Lorenzo, 11

La Motte, Ellen, 193

Lardner, Ring W., 33, 35

Last of the Mohicans, The, 44

Lay Anthony, The, 42

Leaves of Grass, 65

Lectures on American Literature,

11

Lee, Gerald Stanley, 32
Le Quex, William, 35
Letters and Leadership, 12
Lincoln, Abraham, 103 et seq.
Lindsay, Vachel, 26, 57
Little Review, 46
Loeb, Jacques, 48, 171
London, Jack, 33
Longfellow, H. W., 23, 26, 44, 60,

63

Lowell, Amy, 26, 30, 45, 52, 57
Lowell, James Russell, 15, 44, 60,

63
Loveman, Robert, 30, 138

Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 11, 18

McClure, John, 30, 138

McClure's, 34

MacGrath, Harold, 33

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 35

Mallarme, Stephen, 61

Man: An Adaptive Mechanism,

162, 183

Mansfield, Richard, 209, 210
Marden, Orison Swett, 32
Markham, Edwin, 52
Martin, E. S.; 32
Mason, Walt, 52
Matthews, Brander, 11

Mechanistic View of War and

Peace, A, 191
Merrill, Stuart, 46
Metropolitan, 34
Mitchell, Donald G., 23
Moore, George, 38, 93
More, Paul Elmer, 11, 19, 21, 22,

26

Morris, Gouverneur, 33, 34, 43
My Antonia, 42
My Book and I, 64
My Neighbors, 147
Mysterious Stranger, The, 53

Nation, 23, 27, 121
Nietzsche, F. W., 81, 111, 240
Night Life in Chicago, 224
Nordfeldt, Bror, 206 et seq.
Norris, Charles G., 55
Norris, Frank, 34, 42, 55
Norris, Kathleen, 56
Northcliffe, Lord, 66
Noyes, Alfred, 93, 175

O'Brien, Edward J., 43
O'Neill, Eugene, 30
Oppenheim, E. Phillips, 35
Oppenheim, James, 52
O'Sullivan, Vincent, 45, 51, 56

Parmelee, Maurice, 216

Parsifal, 187

Perry, Bliss, 21

Personality and Conduct, 216

Phelps, Win. Lyon, 11, 21, 23

Phillips, David Graham, 34

Poe, Edgar Allan, 14, 18, 44, 45,

53, 57, 59 et seq., 60, 91, 96 et

seq., 162

Poetic Principle, The, 61
Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, 26,

29

Porter, Eleanor H., 32
Pound, Ezra, 45
Prescott, W. H., 44, 91
Puritanism, 20, 24, 27

Ransome, Arthur, 63

254

INDEX

Rathenau, Walther von, 75
Reading, Lord, 66, 93
Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 30
Repplier, Agnes, 19, 30
Ricardo, David, 75
Ride of the Valkyrie, The, 198
Rideout, Henry Milner, 33
Riley, James Whitcomb, 32
Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 32, 33
Rockefeller, John D., 74
Rolland, Romain, 52, 56
Roosevelt, Theodore, 102 et seq.
Rossetti, Christina, 180

Saintsbury, George, 60

Sandburg, Carl, 52

Sargent, John, 207

Saturday Evening Post, 18, 34 et

seq.

Scheffauer, Herman George, 45
Schubert, Franz, 200
Schumann, Robert, 89, 165, 241
Shakespeare, Wm., 21, 101, 241
Shaw, George Bernard, 52, 55
Shelburne Essays, 23
Sherman, S. P., 22, 24, 27, 110

et seq.

Sisson documents, 85, 105
Spingarn, J. E., 23
Stanton, Frank L., 145, 152
Stearns, Harold, 100
Sterbelied, Das, 43
Sterling, George, 27
Stratton-Porter, Gene, 33
Strauss, Johann, 205
Strauss, Richard, 199, 201, 203
Strawinsky, Igor, 201
Sudermann, Hermann, 41, 43
Sumner, William Graham, 103
Sunday, Billy, 102

Tarkington, Booth, 33
Teasdale, Sara, 30

Tendencies in Modern American

Poetry, 45
Thayer, William Roscoe, 27, 106

et seq.

Theodore Roosevelt, 106
Thomas, Augustus, 27, 32
Thoreau, Henry David, 63
Times Book Review, New York,

27, 58, 98
Townsend, E. W., 27

Vance, Louis Joseph, 34
handover and the Brute, 42
Van Dyke, Henry, 21, 22
van Dyke, John C., 45
Van Vechten, Carl, 201
Veblen, Thorstein, 91
Virginia, 139 et seq.

Wagner, Richard, 21, 163, 187,

199, 203, 241
Walpole, Hugh, 38, 56
Weber, F. Parkes, 185 et seq.
Webster, Noah, ]2
Wellman, Rita, 30
Wells, H. G., 52
Wendell, Barrett, 13
Wharton, Edith, 23, 42, 45, 46
What Every Young Husband

Should Know, 224
What is Man?, 53, 89, 98
Whitman, Stephen French, 34
Whitman, Walt, 10 et seq., 17, 53,

56, 57, 59, 64, 96 et seq.
Whittier, J. G., 63
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 32, 35
Willis, N. P., 60
Wilson, Harry Leon, 34
Wilson, Woodrow, 92, 102, 108 et

seq., 145

Wister, Owen, 27
Woodberry, George, E., 19, 27
Wright, Harold Bell, 32

Zangwill, Israel, 93r