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PREJUDICES 

THIRD       SERIES' 

By      H.      L.      MENCKEN 


PUBLISHED  AT  THE  BORZOI  •  NEW  YORK  •  BY 

ALFRED-A-KNOPF 


r- 


COPTEIGHT,  1922,  BY  ALFRED  A.  KNOPT,  INC. 


Published,  October,  1922 
Second  Printing,  November,  192% 

Third  Printing,  March,  19*S 

Fourth  Printing,  February,  19%U 

Fifth  Printing,  October,  192k 


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Set  up,  electrotyped,  and  printed  by  the  Vail-Ballou  Press,  Inc.,  BingJiamton,  N.  Y. 

Paper  furnished  by  W.  F.  Etherington  A  Co.,  New  York. 

Bound  lv  the  Plimpton  Press,  'Norwood,  Mass. 


MANUFACTURED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OP    AMERICA 


THE  WORKS  OF  H.  L  MENCKEN 

PREJUDICES:      FIRST   SERIES1 
PREJUDICES       SECOND  SERIES1 
PREJUDICES:      THIRD  SERIES  l 
PREJUDICES:      FOURTH  SERIES 
A   BOOK   OF    BURLESQUES  x 
A  BOOK  OF  PREFACES1 
IN  DEFENSE  OF  WOMEN  l  * 
THB  AMERICAN  LANGUAGE1 

THE  AMERICAN  CREDO 

[With  Gnrgt  Jfan  Nathan] 

OUT  OF  PRINT 
VENTURES  INTO  VERSE 
GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW:     HIS  PLAYS 
THE  ARTIST 

A  LITTLE  BOOK  IN   C  MAJOR 
A  BOOK  OF  CALUMNY 

MEN  VS.  THE  MAN 

[With  R.  R.  LaMtntt} 

HELIOGABALUS  * 

I  With  Mr.  Nathan} 

EUROPE  AFTER  8:15 

[With  Mr.  Nathan  and  W.  B.  Wright] 

THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  FRIEDRICH  NIETZSCHE1 

1  Also  Published  in  England 

2  Also  Published  in  Germany  in  tranilttion 

TRANSLATIONS 
THE  ANTICHRIST,  BY  F.  W.  NIETZSCHE 

NEW  YORK:  ALFRED  •  A  •  KNOPF 


PREJUDICES 
THIRD  SERIES 


CONTENTS 

I  ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN,  9   ^ 

II  HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY,  65 

III  FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM,  84 

IV  DAS  KAPITAL,  105 

N/V    AD  IMAGINEM  DEI  CREAVIT  ILLUM,  120 

1.  The  Life  of  Man,  120 

2.  The   Anthropomorphic   Delusion,   121 

3.  Meditation  on  Meditation,  125 

4.  Man  and  His  Soul1,  131 

5.  Coda,  132 

\/VI    STAR-SPANGLED  MEN,  133 
VII    THE  POET  AND  His  ART,  146 

VIII    FIVE  MEN  AT  RANDOM,  171 

1.  Abraham  Lincoln,  171  *  ' 

2.  Paul  Elmer  More,  176  "^ 

3.  Madison  Cawein,  179 

4.  Frank  Harris,   182 

5.  Havelock  Ellis,  189 

V'  IX  THE  NATURE  OF  LIBERTY, 

>/X  THE  NOVEL,  201 

^  XI  THE  FORWARD-LOOKER,  213 

XII  MEMORIAL  SERVICE,  232 

XIII  EDUCATION,  238 


CONTENTS 

>.  XIV    TYPES  OF  MEN,  266 

1.  The  Romantic,  266  * 

2.  The  Skeptic,  266 

3.  The  Believer,  267 

4.  The  Worker,  268  ' 

5.  The  Physician,  269' 

6.  The  Scientist,  269' 

7.  The  Business  Man,  270 

8.  The  King,  271  - 

9.  The  Average  Man,  273 r 

10.  The  Truth-Seeker,  274 

11.  The  Pacifist,  274  ' 

12.  The  Relative,  275  * 

13.  The  Friend,  276 

XV    THE  DISMAL  SCIENCE,  278    / 

XVI    MATTERS  OF  STATE,  289 

1.  Le  Contrat  Social,  289  ^ 

2.  On  Minorities,  292 

XVII    REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  DRAMA,  299 

•"XVIII    ADVICE  TO  YOUNG  MEN,  310      i/ 

1.  To  Him  That  Hath,  310 

2.  The  Venerable  Examined,  311 

3.  Duty,  313 

4.  Martyrs,  314 

5.  The  Disabled  Veteran,  318 

6.  Patriotism,  319 

/XIX    SUITE  AMERICAINE,  320 

1.  Aspiration,  320 

2.  Virtue,  321 

3.  Eminence,  323 


PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

I.     ON    BEING    AN    AMERICAN 

I 

APPARENTLY  there  are  those  who  begin  to 
find  it  disagreeable — nay,  impossible. 
Their  anguish  fills  the  Liberal  weeklies, 
and  every  ship  that  puts  out  from  New  York  carries 
a  groaning  cargo  of  them,  bound  for  Paris,  London, 
Munich,  Rome  and  way  points — anywhere  to  escape 
the  great  curses  and  atrocities  that  make  life  intoler 
able  for  them  at  home.  Let  me  say  at  once  that  I  find 
little  to  cavil  at  in  their  basic  complaints.  In  more 
than  one  direction,  indeed,  I  probably  go  a  great  deal 
further  than  even  the  Young  Intellectuals.  It  is,  for 
example,  one  of  my  firmest  and  most  sacred  beliefs, 
reached  after  an  inquiry  extending  over  a  score  of 
years  and  supported  by  incessant  prayer  and  medita 
tion,  that  the  government  of  the  United  States,  in 
both  its  legislative  arm  and  its  executive  arm,  is  ig 
norant,  incompetent,  corrupt,  and  disgusting — and 

from  this  judgment  I  except  no  more  than  twenty  liv- 

9 


':-iO      •  ':  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

'• '  'ihgV^w^akerjs/ancl.no  more  than  twenty  executioners 
of  their  laws.  It  is  a  belief  no  less  piously  cherished 
that  the  administration  of  justice  in  the  Republic  is 
stupid,  dishonest,  and  against  all  reason  and  equity 
— and  from  this  judgment  I  except  no  more  than 
thirty  judges,  including  two  upon  the  bench  of  the 
Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States.  It  is  another 
that  the  foreign  policy  of  the  United  States — its  habit 
ual  manner  of  dealing  with  other  nations,  whether 
friend  or  foe — is  hypocritical,  disingenuous,  knavish, 
and  dishonorable — and  from  this  judgment  I  consent 
to  no  exceptions  whatever,  either  recent  or  long  past. 
And  it  is  my  fourth  (and,  to  avoid  too  depressing  a 
bill,  final)  conviction  that  the  American  people,  tak 
ing  one  with  another,  constitute  the  most  timorous, 
sniveling,  poltroonish,  ignominious  mob  of  serfs  and 
goose-steppers  ever  gathered  under  one  flag  in  Chris 
tendom  since  the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  that 
they  grow  more  timorous,  more  sniveling,  more  pol 
troonish,  more  ignominious  every  day. 

So  far  I  go  with  the  fugitive  Young  Intellectuals — 
and  into  the  Bad  Lands  beyond.  Such,  in  brief,  are 
the  cardinal  articles  of  my  political  faith,  held  pas 
sionately  since  my  admission  to  citizenship  and  now 
growing  stronger  and  stronger  as  I  gradually  dis 
integrate  into  my  component  carbon,  oxygen,  hydro 
gen,  phosphorus,  calcium,  sodium,  nitrogen  and  iron. 
This  is  what  I  believe  and  preach,  in  nomine  Domini, 


BEING  AN  AMERICAN  11 

Amen.  Yet  I  remain  on  the  dock,  wrapped  in  the 
flag,  when  the  Young  Intellectuals  set  sail.  Yet  here 
I  stand,  unshaken  and  undespairing,  a  loyal  and  de 
voted  Americano,  even  a  chauvinist,  paying  taxes 
without  complaint,  obeying  all  laws  that  are  physio 
logically  obeyable,  accepting  all  the  searching  duties 
and  responsibilities  of  citizenship  unprotestingly^in- 
vesting  the  sparse  usufructs  of  my  miserable  toil  in 
the  obligations  of  the  nation,\voiding  all  commerce 
with  men  sworn  to  overthrow  the  government,  con 
tributing  my  mite  toward  the  glory  of  the  national 
arts  and  sciences,  enriching  and  embellishing  the 
native  language,  spurning  all  lures  (and  even  all  in 
vitations)  to  get  out  and  stay  out — here  am  I,  a  bach 
elor  of  easy  means,  forty-two  years  old,  unhampered 
by  debts  or  issue,  able  to  go  wherever  I  please  and  to 
stay  as  long  as  I  please — here  am  I,  contentedly  and 
even  smugly  basking  beneath  the  Stars  and  Stripes, 
a  better  citizen,  I  daresay,  and  certainly  a  less  mur 
murous  and  exigent  one,  than  thousands  who/gut  the 
Hon.  Warren  Gamaliel  Harding  beside  Friedrich 
Barbarossa  and  Charlemagne,  andjhold  the  Supreme 
Court  to  be  directly  inspired  by  the  Holy  Spirit,  and 
belong  ardently  to  every  Rotary  Club,  Ku  Klux  Klan, 
and  Anti-Saloon  League,  and  choke  with  emotion 
when  the  band  plays  "The  Star-Spangled  Banner," 
and  believe  with  the  faith  of  little  children  that  one 
of  Our  Boys,  taken  at  random,  could  dispose  in  a 


12  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

fair  fight  of  ten  Englishmen,  \  .verity  Germans,  thirty 
Frogs,  forty  Wops,  fifty  Japs,  or  a  hundred  Bolshe- 
viki. 

Well,  then,  why  am  I  still  here?  Why  am  I  so 
complacent  (perhaps  even  to  the  point  of  offensive- 
ness),  so  free  from  bile,  so  little  fretting  and  indig 
nant,  so  curiously  happy?  C Why  did  I  answer  only 
with  a  few  academic  "Hear,  Hears"  when  Henry 
James,  Ezra  Pound,  Harold  Stearns  and  the  emigres 
of/-  Greenwich  Village  issued  their  successive  calls 
to  the  corn  fed  intelligentsia  to  flee  the  shambles, 
escape  to  fairer  lands,  throw  off  the  curse  forever?) 
The  answer,  of  course,  is  to  be  sought  in  the  nature 
of  happiness,  which  tempts  to  metaphysics.  But  let 
me  keep  upon  the  ground.  To  me,  at  least  (and  I 
can  only  follow  my  own  nose)  happiness  presents 
itself  in  an  aspect  that  is  tripartite.  To  be  happy 
(reducing  the  thing  to  its  elementals)  I  must  be: 

a.  Well-fed,  unbounded  by  sordid  cares,  at  ease  in  Zion. 

b.  Full   of  a  comfortable  feeling  of  superiority  to  the 

masses  of  my  fellow-men. 

c.  Delicately   and  unceasingly  amused  according  to  my 

taste. 

It  is  my  contention  that,  if  this  definition  be  ac 
cepted,  there  is  no  country  on  the  face  of  the  earth 
wherein  a  man  roughly  constituted  as  I  am — a  man 
of  my  general  weaknesses,  vanities,  appetites,  pre- 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  13 

idices,  and  aversions — can  be  so  happy,  or  even 
one-half  so  happy,  as  he  can  be  in  these  free  and 
independent  states.  Going  further,  I  lay  down  the 
proposition  that  it  is  a  sheer  physical  impossibility 
for  such  a  man  to  live  in  These  States  and  not  be 
happy — that  it  is  as  impossible  to  him  as  it  would  be 
to  a  schoolboy  to  weep  over  the  burning  down  of  his 
school-house.  If  he  says  that  he  isn't  happy  here, 
then  he  either  lies  or  is  insane.  ^  Here  the  business 
of  getting  a  living,  particularly  since  the  war  brought 
the  loot  of  all  Europe  to  the  national  strong-box,  is 
enormously  easier  than  it  is  in  any  other  Christian 
land — so  easy,  in  fact,  that  an  educated  and  fore 
handed  man  who  fails  at  it  must  actually  make,  de 
liberate  efforts  to  that  end.  Here  the  general  aver 
age  of  intelligence,  of  knowledge,  of  competence, 
of  integrity,  of  self-respect,  of  honor  is  so  low  that 
any  man  who  knows  his  trade,  does  not  fear  ghosts, 
has  read  fifty  good  books,  and  practices  the  common 
decencies  stands  out  as  brilliantly  as  a  wart  on  a 
bald  head,  and  is  thrown  willy-nilly  into  a  meager 
and  exclusive  aristocracy.  And  here,  more  than 
anywhere  else  that  I  know  of  or  have  heard  of,  the 
daily  panorama  of  human  existence,  of  private  and 
communal  folly — the  unending  procession  of  govern 
mental  extortions  and  chicaneries,  of  commercial 
brigandages  and  throat-slittings,  of  theological  buf 
fooneries,  of  aesthetic  ribaldries,  of  legal  swindles  and 


14  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

harlotries,  of  miscellaneous  rogueries,  villainies,  iir> 
becilities,  grotesqueries,  and  extravagances  —  is  so  in 
ordinately  gross  and  preposterous,  so  perfectly 
brought  up  to  the  highest  conceivable  amperage,  so 
steadily  enriched  with  an  almost  fabulous  daring 
and  originality,  that  only  the  man  who  was  born  with 
a  petrified  diaphragm  can  fail  to  laugh  himself  to 
sleep  every  night,  and  to  awake  every  morning  with 
all  the  eager,  unflagging  expectation  of  a  Sunday- 
school  superintendent  touring  the  Paris  peep-shows. 
A  certain  s«t*gh  of  rhetoric  may  be  here.  Per 
haps  I  yield  to  words  as  a  chautauqua  lecturer  yields 
to  them,  belaboring  and  fermenting  the  hinds  with 
his  Message  from  the  New  Jerusalem.  But  funda 
mentally  I  am  quite  as  sincere  as  he  is.  For  example, 
in  the  matter  of  attaining  to  ease  in  Zion,  of  getting 
a  fair  share  of  the  national  swag,  now  piled  so  moun- 
tainously  high.  It  seems  to  me,  sunk  in  my  Egyp 
tian  night,  that  the  man  who  fails  to  do  this  in  the 
United  States  to-day  is  a  man  who  is  somehow 
stupid  —  -maybe  not  on  the  surface,  but  certainly  deep 
down.  (Either  he  is  one  who  cripples  himself  un 
duly,  say  by  setting  up  a  family  before  he  can  care 
for  it,  or  by  making  a  bad  bargain  for  the  sale  of 

his  wares,  or  by  concerning  himself  too.  much  about 

„  .  '         ;,  0>l&j;*iS  r*-»*MJk 

the  affairs  of  other  men  ;  piMse-w-eiie  who  endeavors 


fatuously  to  sell  something  that  no  normal  American 
wants.     Whenever  I  hear  a  professor  of  philosophy 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  15 

complain  that  his  wife  has  eloped  with  some  moving- 
picture  actor  or  bootlegger  who  can  at  least  feed 
and  clothe  her,  my  natural  sympathy  for  the  man  is 
greatly  corrupted  by  contempt  for  his  lack  of  sense. 
Would  it  be  regarded  as  sane  and  laudable  for  a  man 
to  travel  the  Soudan  trying  to  sell  fountain-pens,  or 
Greenland  offering  to  teach  double-entry  bookkeep 
ing  or  counterpoint  r\  Coming  closer,  would  the  judi 
cious  pity  or  laugh  at  a  man  who  opened  a  shop  for 
the  sale  of  incunabula  in  Little  Rock,  Ark.,  or  who 
demanded  a  living  in  McKeesport,  Pa.,  on  the  ground 
that  he  could  read  Sumerian?  JIn  precisely  the  same 
way  it  seems  to  me  to  be  nonsensical  for  a  man  to 
offer  generally  some  commodity  that  only  a  few  rare 
and  dubious  Americans  want,  and  then  weep  and 
beat  his  breast  because  he  is  not  patronized  *\i  One 
seeking  to  make  a  living  in  a  country  must  pay  due 
regard  to  the  needs  and  tastes  of  that  country.  Here 
in  the  United  States  we  have  no  jobs  for  grand  dukes, 
fand  none  for  Wirkliche  Geheimrate\3*d  none  for 
palace  eunuchs,  and  none  for  masters  of  the  buck- 
hounds,  (and  none  (any  more)  for  brewery 
Todsaufer-^and  very  few  for  oboe-players,  meta 
physicians,  astrophysicists,  assyriologists,  water- 
colorists,  stylites  and  epic  poets^  There  was 
a  time  when  the  Todsaufer  served  a  public  need 
and  got  an  adequate  reward,  but  it  is  no  more.)  *' 
There  may  come  a  time  when  the  composer  of  string 


16  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

quartettes  is  paid  as  much  as  a  railway  conductor, 
but  it  is  not  yet.;  /Then  why  practice  such  trades  — 
that  is,  as  trades?  The  man  of  independent  means 
may  venture  into  them  prudently;  when  he  does  so, 
he  is  seldom  molested  ;  it  may  even  be  argued  that  he 
performs  a  public  service  by  adopting  them.  But 
the  man  who  has  a  living  to  make  is  simply  silly  if 
he  goes  into  them  ;  he  is  like  a  soldier  going  over  the 
top  with  a  coffin  strapped  to  his  back.  Let  him  aban 
don  such  puerile  vanities,  and  take  to  the  uplift  in 
stead,  as,  indeed,  thousands  of  other  victims  of  the 
industrial  system  have  already  done.)/  Let  him  bear 
in  mind  that,  whatever  its  neglect  of  the  humanities 
and  their  monks,  the  Republic  has  never  got  half 
enough  bond  salesmen,  quack  doctors,  ward  leaders, 
phrenologists,  Methodist  evangelists,  circus  clowns, 
magicians,  soldiers,  farmers,  popular  song  writers, 
moonshine  distillersftorgers  of  gin  labels^  miae 
;jnrdnr3Sli^  inmnin  f  iim 


The  rules  are  set  by  Omnipotence;  the 
discreet  man  observes  them.  Observing  them,  he  is 
safe  beneath  the  starry  bed-tick,  in  fair  weather  or 
foul.  The  boobus  Americanus  is  a  bird  that  knows 
no  closed  season  —  and  if  he  won't  come  down  to 
Texas  oil  stock,  or  one-night  cancer  cures,  or  building 
lots  in  Swampshurst,  he  will  always  come  down  to  In 
spiration  and  Optimism,  whether  political,  theologi 
cal,  pedagogical,  literary,  or  economic. 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  17 

The  doctrine  that  it  is  infra  digitatem  for  an  edu 
cated  man  to  take  a  hand  in  the  snaring  of  this  goose 
is  one  in  which  I  see  nothing  convincing.  It  is  a 
doctrine  chiefly  voiced,  I  believe,  by  those  who  have 
tried  the  business  and  failed.  They  take  refuge  be 
hind  the  childish  notion  that  there  is  something  hon 
orable  about  poverty  per  se — the  Greenwich  Village 
complex.  This  is  nonsense.  Poverty  may  be  an 
unescapable  misfortune,  but  that  no  more  makes  it 
honorable  than  a  cocked  eye  is  made  honorable  by 
the  same  cause.  Do  I  advocate,  then,  the  ceaseless, 
senseless  hogging  of  money?  I  do  not.  All  I  ad 
vocate — and  praise  as  virtuous — is  the  hogging  of 
enough  to  provide  security  and  ease.  Despite  all 
the  romantic  superstitions  to  the  contrary,  the  artist 
cannot  do  his  best  work  when  he  is  oppressed  by  un 
satisfied  wants.  Nor  can  the  philosopher.  Nor  can 
the  man  of  science.  The  best  and  clearest  thinking 
of  the  world  is  done  and  the  finest  art  is  produced, 
not  by  men  who  are  hungry,  ragged  and  harassed, 
but  by  men  who  are  well-fed,  warm  and  easy  in 
mind.  It  is  the  artist's  first  duty  to  his  art  to  achieve 
that  tranquility  for  himself.  Shakespeare  tried  to 
achieve  it;  so  did  Beethoven,  Wagner,  Brahms,  Ibsen 
and  Balzac.  Goethe,  Schopenhauer,  Schumann  and 
Mendelssohn  were  born  to  it.  Joseph  Conrad,  Rich 
ard  Strauss  and  Anatole  France  have  got  it  for  them 
selves  in  our  own  day.  In  the  older  countries,  where 


18  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

competence  is  far  more  general  and  competition  is 
thus  more  sharp,  the  thing  is  often  cruelly  diffi 
cult,  and  sometimes  almost  impossible.  But  in  the 
United  States  it  is  absurdly  easy,  given  ordinary 
luck.  Any  man  with  a  superior  air,  the  intelligence 
of  a  stockbroker,  and  the  resolution  of  a  hat-check 
girl — in  brief,  any  man  who  believes  in  himself 
enough,  and  with  sufficient  cause,  to  be  called  a 
journeyman — can  cadge  enough  money,  in  this  glor 
ious  commonwealth  of  morons,  to  make  life  soft 
for  him. 

And  if  a  lining  for  the  purse  is  thus  facilely  ob 
tainable,  given  a  reasonable  prudence  and  resource 
fulness,  then  balm  for  the  ego  is  just  as  unlaboriously 
got,  given  ordinary  dignity  and  decency.  Simply 
to  exist,  indeed,  on  the  plane  of  a  civilized  man 
is  to  attain,  in  the  Republic,  to  a  distinction  that 
should  be  enough  for  all  save  the  most  vain;  it 
is  even  likely  to  be  too  much,  as  the  frequent  chal 
lenges  of  the  Ku  Klux  Klan,  the  American  Legion, 
the  Anti-Saloon  League,  and  other  such  vigilance 
committees  of  the  majority  testify.  Here  is  a  coun 
try  in  which  all  political  thought  and  activity  are 
concentrated  upon  the  scramble  for  jobs — in  which 
the  normal  politician,  whether  he  be  a  President  or 
a  village  road  supervisor,  is  willing  to  renounce  any 
principle,  however  precious  to  him,  and  to  adopt  any 
lunacy,  however  offensive  to  him,  in  order  to  keep 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  19 

his  place  at  the  trough.  Go  into  politics,  then,  with 
out  seeking  or  wanting  office,  and  at  once  you  are 
as  conspicuous  as  a  red-haired  blackamoor — in  fact, 
a  great  deal  more  conspicuous,  for  red-haired  blacka- 
moors  have  been  seen,  but  who  has  ever  seen  or 
heard  of  an  American  politician,  Democrat  or  Re 
publican,  Socialist  or  Liberal,  Whig  or  Tory,  who 
did  not  itch  for  a  job?  Again,  here  is  a  country  in 
which  it  is  an  axiom  that  a  business  man  shall  be  a 
member  of  a  Chamber  of  Commerce,  an  admirer  of 
Charles  M.  Schwab,  a  reader  of  the  Saturday  Eve 
ning  Post,  a  golfer — in  brief,  a  vegetable.  Spend 
your  hours  of  escape  from  Geschaft  reading  Remy 
de  Gourmont  or  practicing  the  violoncello,  and  the 
local  Sunday  newspaper  will  infallibly  find  you  out 
and  hymn  the  marvel — nay,  your  banker  will  sum 
mon  you  to  discuss  your  notes,  and  your  rivals  will 
spread  the  report  (probably  truthful)  that  you  were 
pro-German  during  the  war.  Yet  again,  here  is  a 
land  in  which  women  rule  and  men  are  slaves. 
Train  your  women  to  get  your  slippers  for  you,  and 
your  ill  fame  will  match  Galileo's  or  Darwin's. 
Once  more,  here  is  the  Paradise  of  back-slappers, 
of  democrats,  of  mixers,  of  go-getters.  Maintain 
ordinary  reserve,  and  you  will  arrest  instant  attention 
— and  have  your  hand  kissed  by  multitudes  who, 
despite  democracy,  have  all  the  inferior  man's  un 
quenchable  desire  to  grovel  and  admire. 


20  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

Nowhere  else  in  the  world  is  superiority  more 
easily  attained  or  more  eagerly  admitted.  The  chief 
business  of  the  nation,  as  a  nation,  is  the  setting  up 
of  heroes,  mainly  bogus.  It  admired  the  literary 
style  of  the  late  Woodrow;  it  respects  the  theological 
passion  of  Bryan;  it  venerates  J.  Pierpont  Morgan; 
it  takes  Congress  seriously;  it  would  be  unutterably 
shocked  by  the  proposition  (with  proof)  that  a  ma 
jority  of  its  judges  are  ignoramuses,  and  that  a  respec 
table  minority  of  them  are  scoundrels.  The  manu 
facture  of  artificial  Durchlauchten,  k.k.  Hoheiten  and 
even  gods  goes  on  feverishly  and  incessantly ;  the  will 
to  worship  never  flags.  Ten  iron-molders  meet  in 
the  back-room  of  a  near-beer  saloon,  organize  a  lodge 
of  the  Noble  and  Mystic  Order  of  American  Rosicru- 
cians,  and  elect  a  wheelwright  Supreme  Worthy 
Whimwham;  a  month  later  they  send  a  notice  to 
the  local  newspaper  that  they  have  been  greatly  hon 
ored  by  an  official  visit  from  that  Whimwham,  and 
that  they  plan  to  give  him  a  jeweled  fob  for  his 
watch-chain.  The  chief  national  heroes — Lincoln, 
Lee,  and  so  on — cannot  remain  mere  men.  The 
mysticism  of  the  mediaeval  peasantry  gets  into  the 
communal  view  of  them,  and  they  begin  to  sprout 
haloes  and  wings.  As  I  say,  no  intrinsic  merit — 
at  least,  none  commensurate  with  the  mob  estimate 
— is  needed  to  come  to  such  august  dignities. 
Everything  American  is  a  bit  amateurish  and  child- 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  21 

ish,  even  the  national  gods.  The  most  conspicuous 
and  respected  American  in  nearly  every  field  of  en 
deavor,  saving  only  the  purely  commercial  (I  ex 
clude  even  the  financial)  is  a  man  who  would  attract 
little  attention  in  any  other  country.  The  leading 
American  critic  of  literature,  after  twenty  years  of 
diligent  exposition  of  his  ideas,  has  yet  to  make  it 
clear  what  he  is  in  favor  of,  and  why.  The  queen  of 
the  haul  monde,  in  almost  every  American  city,  is 
a  woman  who  regards  Lord  Reading  as  an  aristo 
crat  and  her  superior,  and  whose  grandfather  slept  in 
his  underclothes.  The  leading  American  musical 
director,  if  he  went  to  Leipzig,  would  be  put  to  pol 
ishing  trombones  and  copying  drum  parts.  The 
chief  living  American  military  man — the  national 
heir  to  Frederick,  Maryborough,  Wellington,  Wash 
ington  and  Prince  Eugene — is  a  member  of  the  Elks, 
and  proud  of  it.  The  leading  American  philosopher 
(now  dead,  with  no  successor  known  to  the  average 
pedagogue)  spent  a  lifetime  erecting  an  epistemo- 
logical  defense  for  the  national  aesthetic  maxim:  "I 
don't  know  nothing  about  music,  but  I  know  what  I 
like."  The  most  eminent  statesman  the  United 
States  has  produced  since  Lincoln  was  fooled  by 
Arthur  James  Balfour,  and  miscalculated  his  public 
support  by  more  than  5,000,000  votes.  And  the 
current  Chief  Magistrate  of  the  nation — its  defiant 
bstitute  for  czar  and  kaiser — is  a  small-town 


22  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

printer  who,  when  he  wishes  to  enjoy  himself  in  the 
Executive  Mansion,  invites  in  a  homeopathic  doctor, 
a  Seventh  Day  Adventist  evangelist,  and  a  couple 
of  moving-picture  actresses. 


All  of  which  may  be  boiled  down  to  this:  that 
the  United  States  is  essentially  a  commonwealth 
of  third-rate  men — that  distinction  is  easy  here  be 
cause  the  general  level  of  culture,  of  information, 
of  taste  and  judgment,  of  ordinary  competence  is 
so  low.  No  sane  man,  employing  an  American 
plumber  to  repair  a  leaky  drain,  would  expect  him 
to  do  it  at  the  first  trial,  and  in  precisely  the  same 
way  no  sane  man,  observing  an  American  Secretary 
of  State  in  negotiation  with  Englishmen  and  Japs, 
would  expect  him  to  come  off  better  than  second  best. 
Third-rate  men,  of  course,  exist  in  all  countries,  but 
it  is  only  here  that  they  are  in  full  control  of  the 
state,  and  with  it  of  all  the  national  standards.  The 
land  was  peopled,  not  by  the  hardy  adventurers  of 
legend,  but  simply  by  incompetents  who  could  not 
get  on  at  home,  and  the  lavishness  of  nature  that 
they  found  here,  the  vast  ease  with  which  they  could 
get  livings,  confirmed  and  augmented  their  native  in 
competence.  No  American  colonist,  even  in  the 
worst  days  of  the  Indian  wars,  ever  had  to  face  s  ^cj 
hardships  as  ground  down  the  peasants  of  Central 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  23 

rope  during  the  Hundred  Years  War,  nor  even  such 
hardships  as  oppressed  the  English  lower  classes  dur 
ing  the  century  before  the  Reform  Bill  of  1832.  In 
most  of  the  colonies,  indeed,  he  seldom  saw  any  In 
dians  at  all:  the  one  thing  that  made  life  difficult  for 
him  was  his  congenital  dunderheadedness.  The  win 
ning  of  the  West,  so  rhetorically  celebrated  in  Amer 
ican  romance,  cost  the  lives  of  fewer  men  than  the 
single  battle  of  Tannenberg,  and  the  victory  was  much 
easier  and  surer.  The  immigrants  who  have  come 
in  since  those  early  days  have  been,  if  anything,  of 
even  lower  grade  than  their  forerunners.  The  old 
notion  that  the  United  States  is  peopled  by  the  off 
spring  of  brave,  idealistic  and  liberty  loving  mi 
norities,  who  revolted  against  injustice,  bigotry  and 
mediaevalism  at  home — this  notion  is  fast  succumb 
ing  to  the  alarmed  study  that  has  been  given  of  late 
to  the  immigration  of  recent  years.  The  truth  is  that 
the  majority  of  non-Anglo-Saxon  immigrants  since 
the  Revolution,  like  the  majority  of  Anglo-Saxon 
immigrants  before  the  Revolution,  have  been,  not 
the  superior  men  of  their  native  lands,  but  the 
botched  and  unfit:  Irishmen  starving  to  death  in  Ire 
land,  Germans  unable  to  weather  the  Sturm  und 
Drang  of  the  post-Napoleonic  reorganization,  Italians 
weed-grown  on  exhausted  soil,  Scandinavians  run  to 
all  bone  and  no  brain,  Jews  too  incompetent  to 
swindle  even  the  barbarous  peasants  of  Russia,  Po- 


24  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

land  and  Roumania.  Here  and  there  among  the  im 
migrants,  of  course,  there  may  be  a  bravo,  or  even  a 
superman — e.  g.,  the  ancestors  of  Volstead,  Ponzi, 
Jack  Dempsey,  Schwab,  Daugherty,  Debs,  Persh- 
ing — but  the  average  newcomer  is,  and  always  has 
been  simply  a  poor  fish. 

Nor  is  there  much  soundness  in  the  common  as 
sumption,  so  beloved  of  professional  idealists  and 
wind-machines,  that  the  people  of  America  constitute 
"the  youngest  of  the  great  peoples."  The  phrase 
turns  up  endlessly;  the  average  newspaper  editorial 
writer  would  be  hamstrung  if  the  Postoffice  suddenly 
interdicted  it,  as  it  interdicted  "the  right  to  rebel" 
during  the  war.  What  gives  it  a  certain  specious 
plausibility  is  the  fact  that  the  American  Republic, 
compared  to  a  few  other  existing  governments,  is 
relatively  young.  But  the  American  Republic  is  not 
necessarily  identical  with  the  American  people;  they 
might  overturn  it  to-morrow  and  set  up  a  monarchy, 
and  still  remain  the  same  people.  The  truth  is  that, 
as  a  distinct  nation,  they  go  back  fully  three  hundred 
years,  and  that  even  their  government  is  older  than 
that  of  most  other  nations,  e.  g.,  France,  Italy,  Ger 
many,  Russia.  Moreover,  it  is  absurd  to  say  that 
there  is  anything  properly  describable  as  youthful- 
ness  in  the  American  outlook.  It  is  not  that  of 
young  men,  but  that  of  old  men.  All  the  character 
istics  of  senescence  are  in  it:  a  great  distrust  of  ideas, 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  25 

an  habitual  timorousness,  a  harsh  fidelity  to  a  few 
fixed  beliefs,  a  touch  of  mysticism.  The  average 
American  is  a  prude  and  a  Methodist  under  his  skin, 
and  the  fact  is  never  more  evident  than  when  he  is 
trying  to  disprove  it.  His  vices  are  not  those  of  a 
healthy  boy,  but  those  of  an  ancient  paralytic  escaped 
from  the  Greisenheim.  If  you  would  penetrate  to 
the  causes  thereof,  simply  go  down  to  Ellis  Island 
and  look  at  the  next  shipload  of  immigrants*.  You 
will  not  find  the  spring  of  youth  in  their  step ;  you  will 
find  the  shuffling  of  exhausted  men.  From  such 
exhausted  men  the  American  stock  has  sprung.  It 
was  easier  for  them  to  survive  here  than  it  was  where 
they  came  from,  but  that  ease,  though  it  made  them 
feel  stronger,  did  not  actually  strengthen  them.  It 
left  them  what  they  were  when  they  came:  weary 
peasants,  eager  only  for  the  comfortable  security 
of  a  pig  in  a  sty.  Out  of  that  eagerness  has  issued 
many  of  the  noblest  manifestations  of  American 
Kultur:  the  national  hatred  of  war,  the  pervasive 
suspicion  of  the  aims  and  intents  of  all  other  nations, 
the  short  way  with  heretics  and  disturbers  of  the 
peace,  the  unshakable  belief  in  devils,  the  implac-v 
able  hostility  to  every  novel  idea  and  point  of  view. 
All  these  ways  of  thinking  are  the  marks  of  the 
peasant — more,  of  the  peasant  long  ground  into  the 
mud  of  his  wallow,  and  determined  at  last  to  stay 
there — the  peasant  who  has  definitely  renounced 


26  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

any  lewd  desire  he  may  have  ever  had  to  gape  at 
the  stars.  The  habits  of  mind  of  this  dull,  sempi 
ternal  fellah — the  oldest  man  in  Christendom — are, 
with  a  few  modifications,  the  habits  of  mind  of  the 
American  people.  The  peasant  has  a  great  practical 
cunning,  but  he  is  unable  to  see  any  further  than 
the  next  farm.  He  likes  money  and  knows  how  to 
amass  property,  but  his  cultural  development  is  but 
little  above  that  of  the  domestic  animals.  He  is 
intensely  and  cocksurely  moral,  but  his  morality 
and  his  self-interest  are  crudely  identical.  He  is 
emotional  and  easy  to  scare,  but  his  imagination 
cannot  grasp  an  abstraction.  He  is  a  violent  nation 
alist  and  patriot,  but  he  admires  rogues  in  office  and 
always  beats  the  tax-collector  if  he  can.  He  has 
immovable  opinions  about  all  the  great  affairs  of 
state,  but  nine-tenths  of  them  are  sheer  imbecilities. 
He  is  violently  jealous  of  what  he  conceives  to  be 
his  rights,  but  brutally  disregardful  of  the  other 
fellow's.  He  is  religious,  but  his  religion  is  wholly 
devoid  of  beauty  and  dignity.  This  man,  whether 
city  or  country  bred,  is  the  normal  Americano — the 
100  per  cent.  Methodist,  Odd  Fellow.  Ku  Kluxer, 
and  Know  Nothing.  He  exists  in  all  countries,  but 
here  alone  he  rules — here  alone  his  anthropoid  fears 
and  rages  are  accepted  gravely  as  logical  ideas,  and 
dissent  from  them  is  punished  as  a  sort  of  public 
offense.  Around  every  one  of  his  principal 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  27 

delusions — of  the  sacredness  of  democracy,  of  the 
feasibility  of  sumptuary  law,  of  the  incurable  sin- 
fulness  of  all  other  peoples,  of  the  menace  of  ideas, 
of  the  corruption  lying  in  all  the  arts — there  is  thrown 
a  barrier  of  taboos,  and  woe  to  the  anarchist  who 
seeks  to  break  it  down! 

The  multiplication  of  such  taboos  is  obviously 
not  characteristic  of  a  culture  that  is  moving  from 
a  lower  plane  to  a  higher — that  is,  of  a  culture  still 
in  the  full  glow7  of  its  youth.  It  is  a  sign,  rather, 
of  a  culture  that  is  slipping  downhill — one  that  is 
reverting  to  the  most  primitive  standards  and  ways 
of  thought.  The  taboo,  indeed,  is  the  trade-mark 
of  the  savage,  and  wherever  it  exists  it  is  a  relentless 
and  effective  enemy  of  civilized  enlightenment.  The 
savage  is  the  most  meticulously  moral  of  men;  there 
is  scarcely  an  act  of  his  daily  life  that  is  not  con 
ditioned  by  unyielding  prohibitions  and  obligations, 
most  of  them  logically  unintelligible.  The  mob- 
man,  a  savage  set  amid  civilization,  cherishes  a  code 
of  the  same  draconian  kind.  He  believes  firmly  that 
right  and  wrong  are  immovable  things — that  they 
have  an  actual  and  unchangeable  existence,  and  that 
any  challenge  of  them,  by  word  or  act,  is  a  crime 
against  society.  And  with  the  concept  of  wrongness, 
of  course,  he  always  confuses  the  concept  of  mere 
differentness — to  him  the  two  are  indistinguishable. 
Anything  strange  is  to  be  combatted;  it  is  of  the 


28  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

Devil.  The  mob-man  cannot  grasp  ideas  in  their 
native  nakedness.  They  must  be  dramatized  and 
personalized  for  him,  and  provided  with  either  white 
wings  or  forked  tails.  All  discussion  of  them,  to 
interest  him,  must  take  the  form  of  a  pursuit  and 
scotching  of  demons.  He  cannot  think  of  a  heresy 
without  thinking  of  a  heretic  to  be  caught,  con 
demned,  and  burned.  / 

The  Fathers  of  the  Republic,  I  am  convinced,  had 
a  great  deal  more  prevision  than  even  their  most 
romantic  worshipers  give  them  credit  for.  They 
not  only  sought  to  create  a  governmental  machine 
that  would  be  safe  from  attack  without;  they  also 
sought  to  create  one  that  would  be  safe  from 
attack  within.  They  invented  very  ingenious  devices 
for  holding  the  mob  in  check,  for  protecting  the 
national  polity  against  its  transient  and  illogical 
rages,  for  securing  the  determination  of  all  the  larger 
matters  of  state  to  a  concealed  but  none  the  less  real 
aristocracy.  Nothing  could  have  been  further  from 
the  intent  of  Washington,  Hamilton  and  even  Jeffer 
son  than  that  the  official  doctrines  of  the  nation,  in 
the  year  1922,  should  be  identical  with  the  nonsense 
heard  in  the  chautauqua,  from  the  evangelical  pulpit, 
and  on  the  stump.  But  Jackson  and  his  merry  men 
broke  through  the  barbed  wires  thus  so  carefully 
strung,  and  ever  since  1825  vox  populi  has  been  the 
true  voice  of  the  nation.  To-day  there  is  no  longer 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  29 

any  question  of  statesmanship,  in  any  real  sense, 
in  our  politics.  The  only  way  to  success  in  American 
public  life  lies  in  flattering  and  kowtowing  to  the 
mob.  A  candidate  for  office,  even  the  'highest,  must 
either  adopt  its  current  manias  en  bloc,  or  convince 
it  hypocritically  that  he  has  done  so,  while  cherish 
ing  reservations  injjetto.  The  result  is  that  only 
two  sorts  of  men  stand  any  chance  whatever  of  get 
ting  into  actual  control  of  affairs — first,  glorified 
mob-men  who  genuinely  believe  what  the  mob  be 
lieves,  and  secondly,  shrewd  fellows  who  are  willing 
to  make  any  sacrifice  of  conviction  and  self-respect  in 
order  to  hold  their  jobs.  One  finds  perfect  examples 
of  the  first  class  in  Jackson  and  Bryan.  One  finds 
hundreds  of  specimens  of  the  second  among  the  pol 
iticians  who  got  themselves  so  affectingly  converted 
to  Prohibition,  and  who  voted  and  blubbered  for  it 
with  flasks  in  their  pockets.  Even  on  the  highest 
planes  our  politics  seems  to  be  incurable  mounte- 
bankish.  The  same  Senators  who  raised  such 
raucous  alarms  against  the  League  of  Nations  voted 
for  the  Disarmament  Treaty — a  far  more  obvious 
surrender  to  English  hegemony.  And  the  same  Sen 
ators  who  pleaded  for  the  League  on  the  ground  that 
its  failure  would  break  the  heart  of  the  world  were 
eloquently  against  the  treaty.  The  few  men  who 
maintained  a  consistent  course  in  both  cases,  voting 
either  for  or  against  both  League  and  treaty,  were 


30  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

denounced  by  the  newspapers  as  deliberate  marplots, 
and  found  their  constituents  rising  against  them.  To 
such  an  extent  had  the  public  become  accustomed  to 
buncombe  that  simple  honesty  was  incomprehensible 
to  it,  and  hence  abhorrent! 

As  I  have  pointed  out  in  a  previous  work,  this 
dominance  of  mob  ways  of  thinking,  this  pollution  of 
the  whole  intellectual  life  of  the  country  by  the  pre 
judices  and  emotions  of  the  rabble,  goes  unchal 
lenged  because  the  old  landed  aristocracy  of  the 
colonial  era  has  been  engulfed  and  almost  obliterated 
by  the  rise  of  the  industrial  system,  and  no  new 
aristocracy  has  arisen  to  take  its  place,  and  discharge 
its  highly  necessary  functions.  An  upper  class,  of 
course,  exists,  and  of  late  it  has  tended  to  increase 
in  power,  but  it  is  culturally  almost  indistinguishable 
from  the  mob:  it  lacks  absolutely  anything  even 
remotely  resembling  an  aristocratic  point  of  view. 
One  searches  in  vain  for  any  sign  of  the  true  Junker 
spirit  in  the  Vanderbilts,  Astors,  Morgans,  Garys, 
and  other  such  earls  and  dukes  of  the  plutocracy; 
their  culture,  like  their  aspiration,  remains  that  of 
the  pawnshop.  One  searches  in  vain,  too  for  the 
aloof  air  of  the  d9n  in  the  official  intelligentsia  of  the 
American  universities;  they  are  timorous  and  ortho 
dox,  and  constitute  a  reptile  Congregatio  de  Propa 
ganda  Fide  to  match  Bismarck's  Reptilienpresse. 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  31 

Everywhere  else  on  earth,  despite  the  rise  of  democ 
racy,  an  organized  minority  of  aristocrats  survives 
from  a  more  spacious  day,  and  if  its  personnel  has  de 
generated  and  its  legal  powers  have  decayed  it  has  at 
least  maintained  some  vestige  of  its  old  independence 
of  spirit,  and  jealously  guarded  its  old  right  to  be 
heard  without  risk  of  penalty.  Even  in  England, 
where  the  peerage  has  been  debauched  to  the  level  of 
a  political  baptismal  fount  for  Jewish  money-lenders 
and  Wesleyan  soap-boilers,  there  is  sanctuary  for  the 
old  order  in  the  two  ancient  universities,  and  a  linger 
ing  respect  for  it  in  the  peasantry.  But  in  the  United 
States  it  was  paralyzed  by  Jackson  and  got  its  death 
blow  from  Grant,  and  since  then  no  successor  to  it  has 
been  evolved.  Thus  there  is  no  organized  force  to 
oppose  the  irrational  vagaries  of  the  mob.  The 
legislative  and  executive  arms  of  the  government 
yield  to  them  without  resistance;  the  judicial  arm 
has  begun  to  yield  almost  as  supinely,  particularly 
when  they  take  the  form  of  witch-hunts;  outside  the 
official  circle  there  is  no  opposition  that  is  even  de 
pendably  articulate.  The  worst  excesses  go  almost 
without  challenge.  Discussion,  when  it  is  heard  at 
all,  is  feeble  and  superficial,  and  girt  about  by  the 
taboos  that  I  have  mentioned.  The  clatter  about  the 
so-called  Ku  Klux  Klan,  two  or  three  years  ago,  was 
typical.  The  astounding  program  of  this  organiza- 


32  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

tion  was  discussed  in  the  newspapers  for  months  on 
end,  and  a  committee  of  Congress  sat  in  solemn 
state  to  investigate  it,  and  yet  not  a  single  newspaper 
or  Congressman,  so  far  as  I  am  aware,  so  much  as 
mentioned  the  most  patent  and  important  fact  about 
it,  to  wit,  that  the  Ku  Klux  was,  to  all  intents  and  pur 
poses,  simply  the  secular  arm  of  the  Methodist 
Church,  and  that  its  methods  were  no  more  than  phys 
ical  projections  of  the  familiar  extravagances  of  the 
Anti-Saloon  League.  The  intimate  relations  between 
church  and  Klan,  amounting  almost  to  identity,  must 
have  been  plain  to  every  intelligent  American,  and 
yet  the  taboo  upon  the  realistic  consideration  of  ec 
clesiastical  matters  was  sufficient  to  make  every 
public  soothsayer  disregard  it  completely. 

I  often  wonder,  indeed,  if  there  would  be  any 
intellectual  life  at  all  in  the  United  States  if  it  were 
not  for  the  steady  importation  in  bulk  of  ideas  from 
abroad,  and  particularly,  in  late  years,  from  Eng 
land.  What  would  become  of  the  average  American 
scholar  if  he  could  not  borrow  wholesale  from  Eng 
lish  scholars?  How  could  an  inquisitive  youth  get 
beneath  the  surface  of  our  politics  if  it  were  not  for 
such  anatomists  as  Bryce?  Who  would  show  our 
statesmen  the  dotted  lines  for  their  signatures  if  there 
were  no  Balfours  and  Lloyd-Georges?  How  could 
our  young  professors  formulate  aesthetic  judgments, 
especially  in  the  field  of  letters,  if  it  were  not  for  such 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  33 

gifted  English  mentors  as  Robertson  Nicoll,  Squire 
and  Glutton-Brock?  By  what  process,  finally,  would 
the  true  style  of  a  visiting  card  be  determined,  and 
the  hoflich  manner  of  eating  artichokes,  if  there  were 
no  reports  from  Mayfair?  On  certain  levels  this 
naive  subservience  must  needs  irritate  everv  self- 
respecting  American,  and  even  dismay  him./  When 
he  recalls  the  amazing  feats  of  the  English  war  prop 
agandists  between  1914  and  1917 — and  their  even 
more  amazing  confessions  of  method  since — he  is 
apt  to  ask  himself  quite  gravely  if  he  belongs  to  a 
free  nation  or  to  a  crown  colony.  The  thing  was 
done  openly,  shamelessly,  contemptuously,  cynically, 
and  yet  it  was  a  gigantic  success.  The  office  of  the 
American  Secretary  of  State,  from  the  end  of  Bryan's 
grotesque  incumbency  to  the  end  of  the  Wilson  ad 
ministration,  was  little  more  than  an  antechamber  of 
the  British  Foreign  Office.  Dr.  Wilson  himself,  in 
the  conduct  of  his  policy,  differed  only  legally  from 
such  colonial  premiers  as  Hughes  and  Smuts.  Even 
after  the  United  States  got  into  the  war  it  was  more 
swagger  for  a  Young  American  blood  to  wear  the 
British  uniform  than  the  American  uniform.  No 
American  ever  seriously  questions  an  Englishman 
or  Englishwoman  of  official  or  even  merely  fashion 
able  position  at  home.  Lord  Birkenhead  was  ac 
cepted  as  a  gentleman  everywhere  in  the  United 
States;  Mrs.  Asquith's  almost  unbelievable  imbecili- 


34  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

ties  were  heard  with  hushed  fascination;  even  Lady 
Astor,  an  American  married  to  an  expatriate  Ger 
man-American  turned  English  viscount,  was  greeted 
with  solemn  effusiveness.  During  the  latter  part  of 
1917,  when  New  York  swarmed  with  British  military 
missions,  I  observed  in  Town  Topics  a  polite  protest 
against  a  very  significant  habit  of  certain  of  their  gal 
lant  members:  that  of  going  to  dances  wearing  spurs, 
and  so  macerating  the  frocks  and  heels  of  the  fawn 
ing  fair.  The  protest,  it  appears,  was  not  voiced 
by  the  hosts  and  hostesses  of  these  singular  officers: 
they  would  have  welcomed  their  guests  in  trench 
boots.  It  was  left  to  a  dubious  weekly,  and  it  was 
made  very  gingerly. 

The  spectacle,  as  I  say,  has  a  way  of  irking  the 
American  touched  by  nationalistic  weakness.  Ever 
since  the  day  of  Lowell — even  since  the  day  of 
Cooper  and  Irving — there  have  been  denunciations 
of  it.  But  however  unpleasant  it  may  be,  there  is  no 
denying  that  a  chain  of  logical  causes  lies  behind  it, 
and  that  they  are  not  to  be  disposed  of  by  objecting  to 
them.  The  average  American  of  the  Anglo-Saxon 
majority,  in  truth,  is  simply  a  second-rate  English 
man,  and  so  it  is  no  wonder  that  he  is  spontaneously 
servile,  despite  all  his  democratic  denial  of  superior 
ities,  to  what  he  conceives  to  be  first-rate  Englishmen. 
He  corresponds,  roughly,  to  an  English  Noncon 
formist  of  the  better-fed  variety,  and  he  shows  all  the 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  35 

familiar  characters  of  the  breed.  He  is  truculent 
and  cocksure,  and  yet  he  knows  how  to  take  off  his 
hat  when  a  bishop  of  the  Establishment  passes.  He 
is  hot  against  the  dukes,  and  yet  the  notice  of  a  con 
crete  duke  is  a  singing  in  his  heart.  It  seems  to  me 
that  this  inferior  Anglo-Saxon  is  losing  his  old  domi 
nance  in  the  United  States — -that  is,  biologically 
But  he  will  keep  his  cultural  primacy  for  a  long,  long 
while,  in  spite  of  the  overwhelming  inrush  of  men  of 
other  races,  if  only  because  those  newcomers  are  even 
more  clearly  inferior  than  he  is.  Nine-tenths  of  the 
Italians,  for  example,  who  have  come  to  these  shores 
in  late  years  have  brought  no  more  of  the  essential 
culture  of  Italy  with  them  than  so  many  horned  cat 
tle  would  have  brought.  If  they  become  civilized  at 
all,  settling  here,  it  is  the  civilization  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  majority  that  they  acquire,  which  is  to  say, 
the  civilization  of  the  English  second  table.  So  with 
the  Germans,  the  Scandinavians,  and  even  the  JewTs 
and  Irish.  The  Germans,  taking  one  with  another, 
are  on  the  cultural  level  of  green-grocers.  I  have 
come  into  contact  \vith  a  great  many  of  them  since 
1914,  some  of  them  of  considerable  wealth  and  even 
of  fashionable  pretensions.  In  the  whole  lot  I  can 
think  of  but  a  score  or  two  who  could  name  offhand 
the  principal  works  of  Thomas  Mann,  Otto  Julius 
Bierbaum,  Ludwig  Thoma  or  Hugo  von  Hofmanns- 
thal.  They  know  much  more  about  Mutt  and  Jeff 


36  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

than  they  know  about  Goethe.  The  Scandinavians 
are  even  worse.  The  majority  of  them  are  mere 
clods,  and  they  are  sucked  into  the  Knights  of 
Pythias,  the  chautauqua  and  the  Methodist  Church 
almost  as  soon  as  they  land ;  it  is  -by  no  means  a  mere 
accident  that  the  national  Prohibition  Enforcement 
Act  bears  the  name  of  a  man  theoretically  of  the 
blood  of  Gustavus  Vasa,  Svend  of  the  Forked  Beard, 
and  Eric  the  Red.  The  Irish  in  the  United  States 
are  scarcely  touched  by  the  revival  of  Irish  culture, 
despite  their  melodramatic  concern  with  Irish  poli 
tics.  During  the  war  they  supplied  diligent  and  de 
pendable  agents  to  the  Anglo-Saxon  White  Terror, 
and  at  all  times  they  are  very  susceptible  to  political 
and  social  bribery.  As  for  the  Jews,  they  change 
their  names  to  Burton,  Thompson  and  Cecil  in  order 
to  qualify  as  true  Americans,  and  when  they  are  ac 
cepted  and  rewarded  in  the  national  coin  they  re 
nounce  Moses  altogether  and  get  themselves  baptized 
in  St.  Bartholomew's  Church.  / 

Whenever  ideas  enter  the  United  States  from 
without  they  come  by  way  of  England.  What  the 
London  Times  says  to-day,  about  Ukranian  politics, 
the  revolt  in  India,  a  change  of  ministry  in  Italy,  the 
character  of  the  King  of  Norway,  the  oil  situation  in 
Mesopotamia,  will  be  said  week  after  next  by  the 
Times  of  New  York,  and  a  month  or  two  later  by  all 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  37 

the  other  American  newspapers.  The  extent  of  this 
control  of  American  opinion  by  English  news  mon 
gers  is  but  little  appreciated  in  the  United  States, 
even  by  professional  journalists.  Fully  four-fifths 
of  all  the  foreign  news  that  comes  to  the  American 
newspapers  comes  through  London,  and  most  of  the 
rest  is  supplied  either  by  Englishmen  or  by  Jews 
(often  American-born)  who  maintain  close  relations 
with  the  English.  During  the  years  1914-1917  so 
many  English  agents  got  into  Germany  in  the  guise 
of  American  correspondents — sometimes  with  the 
full  knowledge  of  their  Anglomaniac  American  em 
ployers — that  the  Germans,  just  before  the  United 
States  entered  the  war,  were  considering  barring 
American  correspondents  from  their  country  alto 
gether.  I  was  in  Copenhagen  and  Basel  in  1917, 
and  found  both  towns — each  an  important  source  of 
war  news — full  of  Jews  representing  American 
journals  as  a  side-line  to  more  delicate  and  con 
fidential  work  for  the  English  department  of  press 
propaganda.  Even  to-day  a  very  considerable  pro 
portion  of  the  American  correspondents  in  Europe 
are  strongly  under  English  influences,  and  in  the 
Far  East  the  proportion  is  probably  still  larger.  But 
these  men  seldom  handle  really  important  news. 
All  that  is  handled  from  London,  and  by  trustworthy 
Britons.  Such  of  it  as  is  not  cabled  directly  to  the 


38  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

American  newspapers  and  press  associations  is  later 
clipped  from  English  newspapers,  and  printed  as 
bogus  letters  or  cablegrams. 

The  American  papers  accept  such  very  dubious 
stuff,  not  chiefly  because  they  are  hopelessly  stupid 
or  Anglomaniac,  but  because  they  find  it  impossible 
to  engage  competent  American  correspondents.  If 
the  native  journalists  who  discuss  our  domestic 
politics  avoid  the  fundamentals  timorously,  then 
those  who  venture  to  discuss  foreign  politics  are 
scarcely  aware  of  the  fundamentals  at  all.  We  have 
simply  developed  no  class  of  experts  in  such  matters. 
No  man  comparable,  say  to  Dr.  Dillon,  Wickham 
Steed,  Count  zu  Reventlow  or  Wilfrid  Scawen  Blunt 
exists  in  the  United  States.  When,  in  the  Summer 
of  1920,  the  editors  of  the  Baltimore  Sun  undertook 
plans  to  cover  the  approaching  Disarmament  Con 
ference  at  Washington  in  a  comprehensive  and  intel 
ligent  manner,  they  were  forced,  willy-nilly,  into 
employing  Englishmen  to  do  the  work.  Such  men  as 
Brailsford  and  By  water,  writing  from  London,  three 
thousand  miles  away,  were  actually  better  able  to  in 
terpret  the  work  of  the  conference  than  American 
correspondents  on  the  spot,  few  of  whom  were  capa 
ble  of  anything  beyond  the  most  trivial  gossip. 
During  the  whole  period  of  the  conference  not  a  pro 
fessional  Washington  correspondent — the  flower  of 
American  political  journalism — wrote  a  single 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  39 

article  upon  the  proceedings  that  got  further  than 
their  surface  aspects.  Before  the  end  of  the  sessions 
this  enforced  dependence  upon  English  opinion  had 
an  unexpected  and  significant  result.  Facing  the 
English  and  the  Japs  in  an  unyielding  alliance,  the 
French  turned  to  the  American  delegation  for  assist 
ance.  The  issue  specifically  before  the  conference 
was  one  on  which  American  self-interest  was  obvi 
ously  identical  with  French  self-interest.  Never 
theless,  the  English  had  such  firm  grip  upon  the 
machinery  of  news  distribution  that  they  were  able, 
in  less  than  a  week,  to  turn  American  public  opinion 
against  the  French,  and  even  to  set  up  an  active 
Francophobia.  No  American,  not  even  any  of  the 
American  delegates,  was  able  to  cope  with  their  prop 
aganda.  They  not  only  dominated  the  conference 
and  pushed  through  a  set  of  treaties  that  were  extrav 
agantly  favorable  to  England;  they  even  established 
the  doctrine  that  all  opposition  to  those  treaties  was 
immoral! 

When  Continental  ideas,  whether  in  politics,  in 
metaphysics  or  in  the  fine  arts,  penetrate  to  the 
United  States  they  nearly  always  travel  by  way  of 
England.  Emerson  did  not  read  Goethe;  he  read 
Carlyle.  The  American  people,  from  the  end  of 
1914  to  the  end  of  1918,  did  not  read  first-handed 
statements  of  the  German  case;  they  read  English 
interpretations  of  those  statements.  In  London  is 


40  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

the  clearing  house  and  transformer  station.  There 
the  latest  notions  from  the  mainland  are  sifted  out, 
carefully  diluted  with  English  water,  and  put  into 
neat  packages  for  the  Yankee  trade.  The  English 
not  only  get  a  chance  to  ameliorate  or  embellish; 
they  also  determine  very  largely  what  ideas  Ameri 
cans  are  to  hear  of  at  all.  Whatever  fails  to  interest 
them,  or  is  in  any  way  obnoxious  to  them,  is  not 
likely  to  cross  the  ocean.  This  explains  why  it  is 
that  most  literate  Americans  are  so  densely  ignorant 
of  many  Continentals  who  have  been  celebrated  at 
home  for  years,  for  example,  Huysmans,  Hartleben, 
VaiMnger,  Merezhkovsky,  Keyserling,  Snoilsky, 
Mauthner,  Altenberg,  Heidenstam,  Alfred  Kerr.  It 
also  explains  why  they  so  grossly  overestimate 
various  third-raters,  laughed  at  at  home,  for  ex 
ample,  Brieux.  These  fellows  simply  happen  to  in 
terest  the  English  intelligentsia,  and  are  thus  palmed 
off  upon  the  gaping  colonists  of  Yankeedom.  In  the 
case  of  Brieux  the  hocus-pocus  was  achieved  by  one 
man,  George  Bernard  Shaw,  a. Scotch  blue-nose  dis 
guised  as  an  Irish  patriot  and  English  soothsayer. 
Shaw,  at  bottom,  has  the  ideas  of  a  Presbyterian 
elder,  and  so  the  moral  frenzy  of  Brieux  enchanted 
him.  Whereupon  he  retired  to  his  chamber,  wrote 
a  flaming  Brieuxiad  for  the  American  trade,  and 
founded  the  late  vogue  of  the  French  Dr.  Sylvanus 
Stall  on  this  side  of  the  ocean. 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  41 

This  wholesale  import  and  export  business  in  Con 
tinental  fancies  is  of  no  little  benefit,  of  course,  to 
the  generality  of  Americans.  If  it  did  not  exist 
they  would  probably  never  hear  of  many  of  the  sa 
lient  Continentals  at  all,  for  the  obvious  incompetence 
of  most  of  the  native  and  resident  introducers  of  in 
tellectual  ambassadors  makes  them  suspicious  even 
of  those  who,  like  Boyd  and  Nathan,  are  thoroughly 
competent.  To  this  day  there  is  no  American  trans 
lation  of  the  plays  of  Ibsen;  we  use  the  William 
Archer  Scotch-English  translations,  most  of  them 
atrociously  bad,  but  still  better  than  nothing.  So 
with  the  works  of  Nietzsche,  Anatole  France,  Georg 
Brandes,  Turgeniev,  Dostoyevsky,  Tolstoi^  and  other 
moderns  after  their  kind.  I  can  think  of  but  one 
important  exception:  the  work  of  Gerhart  Haupt- 
mann,  done  into  English  by  and  under  the  super 
vision  of  Ludwig  Lewisohn.  But  even  here  Lewis- 
ohn  used  a  number  of  English  translations  of  single 
plays:  the  English  were  still  ahead  of  him,  though 
they  stopped  half  way.  He  is,  in  any  case,  a  very 
extraordinary  American,  and  the  Department  of  Jus 
tice  kept  an  eye  on  him  during  the  war.  The  aver 
age  American  professor  is  far  too  dull  a  fellow  to 
undertake  so  difficult  an  enterprise.  Even  when  he 
sports  a  German  Ph.D.  one  usually  finds  on  exam 
ination  that  all  he  knows  about  modern  German 
literature  is  that  a  Mass  of  Hofbrau  in  Munich  used 


42  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

to  cost  27  Pfennig  downstairs  and  32  Pfennig  up 
stairs.  The  German  universities  were  formerly  very 
tolerant  of  foreigners.  Many  an  American,  in  prep 
aration  for  professing  at  Harvard,  spent  a  couple  of 
years  roaming  from  one  to  the  other  of  them  with 
out  picking  up  enough  German  to  read  the  Berliner 
Tageblatt.  Such  frauds  swarm  in  all  our  lesser 
universities,  and  many  of  them,  during  the  war, 
became  eminent  authorities  upon  the  crimes  of 
Nietzsche  and  the  errors  of  Treitschke, 


In  rainy  weather,  when  my  old  wounds  ache  and 
the  four  humors  do  battle  in  my  spleen,  I  often  find 
myself  speculating  sourly  as  to  the  future  of  the 
Republic.  Native  opinion,  of  course,  is  to  the  effect 
that  it  will  be  secure  and  glorious;  the  superstition 
that  progress  must  always  be  upward  and  onward 
will  not  down ;  in  virulence  and  popularity  it  matches 
the  superstition  that  money  can  accomplish  anything. 
But  this  view  is  not  shared  by  most  reflective  for 
eigners,  as  any  one  may  find  out  by  looking  into 
such  a  book  as  Ferdinand  Kurnberger's  "Der  Ameri- 
•kamude,"  Sholom  Asch's  "America,"  Ernest  von 
Wolzogen's  "Ein  Dichter  in  Dollarica,"  W.  L. 
George's  "Hail,  Columbia!",  Annalise  Schmidt's 
"Der  Amerikanische  Mensch"  or  Sienkiewicz's 
"After  Bread,"  or  by  hearkening  unto  the  confi 
dences,  if  obtainable,  of  such  returned  immigrants 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  43 

as  Georges  Clemenceau,  Knut  Hamsun,  George  San- 
tayana,  Clemens  von  Pirquet,  John  Masefield  and 
Maxim  Gorky,  and,  via  the  ouija  board,  Antonin 
Dvorak,  Frank  Wedekind  and  Edwin  Klebs.  The 
American  Republic,  as  nations  go,  has  led  a  safe 
and  easy  life,  with  no  serious  enemies  to  menace 
it,  either  within  or  without,  and  no  grim  struggle 
with  want.  Getting  a  living  here  has  always  been 
easier  than  anywhere  else  in  Christendom;  getting  a 
secure  foothold  has  been  possible  to  whole  classes 
of  men  who  would  have  remained  submerged  in 
Europe,  as  the  character-  of  our  plutocracy,  and  no 
less  of  our  intelligentsia  so  brilliantly  shows.  The 
American  people  have  never  had  to  face  such  titanic 
assults  as  those  suffered  by  the  people  of  Holland, 
Poland  and  half  a  dozen  other  little  countries;  they 
have  not  lived  with  a  ring  of  powerful  and  unconscion 
able  enemies  about  them,  as  the  Germans  have  lived 
since  the  Middle  Ages;  they  have  not  been  torn  by 
class  wars,  as  the  French,  the  Spaniards  and  the  Rus 
sians  have  been  torn;  they  have  not  thrown  their 
strength  into  far-flung  and  exhausting  colonial  enter 
prises,  like  the  English.  All  their  foreign  wars  have 
been  fought  with  foes  either  too  weak  to  resist  them  or 
too  heavily  engaged  elsewhere  to  make  more  than  a 
half-hearted  attempt.  The  combats  with  Mexico  and 
Spain  were  not  wars;  they  were  simply  lynchings. 


44  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

Even  the  Civil  War,  compared  to  the  larger  European 
conflicts  since  the  invention  of  gunpowder,  was  trivia] 
in  its  character  and  transient  in  its  effects.  The  pop 
ulation  of  the  United  States,  when  it  began,  was  about 
31,500,000 — say  10  per  cent,  under  the  population 
of  France  in  1914.  But  after  four  years  of  struggle, 
the  number  of  men  killed  in  action  or  dead  of  wounds, 
in  the  two  armies,  came  but  200,000 — probably  little 
more  than  a  sixth  of  the  total  losses  of  France  be 
tween  1914  and  1918.  Nor  was  there  any  very  ex 
tensive  destruction  of  property.  In  all  save  a  small 
area  in  the  North  there  was  none  at  all,  and  even  in 
the  South  only  a  few  towns  of  any  importance  were 
destroyed.  The  average  Northerner  passed  through 
the  four  years  scarcely  aware,  save  by  report,  that  a 
war  was  going  on.  In  the  South  the  breath  of  Mars 
blew  more  hotly,  but  even  there  large  numbers  of 
men  escaped  service,  and  the  general  hardship 
everywhere  fell  a  great  deal  short  of  the  hardships 
suffered  by  the  Belgians,  the  French  of  the  North, 
the  Germans  of  East  Prussia,  and  the  Serbians  and 
Rumanians  in  the  World  War.  The  agonies  of  the 
South  have  been  much  exaggerated  in  popular  ro 
mance;  they  were  probably  more  severe  during  Recon 
struction,  when  they  were  chiefly  psychical,  than  they 
were  during  the  actual  war.  Certainly  General  Rob 
ert  E.  Lee  was  in  a  favorable  position  to  estimate  the 
military  achievement  of  the  Confederacy.  Well, 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  45 

Lee  was  of  the  opinion  that  his  army  was  very  badly 
supported  by  the  civil  population,  and  that  its  final 
disaster  was  largely  due  to  that  ineffective  support. 
Coming  down  to  the  time  of  the  World  War,  one 
finds  precious  few  signs  that  the  American  people, 
facing  an  antagonist  of  equal  strength  and  with  both 
hands  free,  could  be  relied  upon  to  give  a  creditable 
account  of  themselves.  The  American  share  in  that 
great  struggle,  in  fact,  was  marked  by  poltroonery 
almost  as  conspicuously  as  it  was  marked  by  knavery. 
Let  us  consider  briefly  what  the  nation  did.  For  a 
few  months  it  viewed  the  struggle  idly  and  unintel- 
ligently,  as  a  yokel  might  stare  at  a  sword-swallower 
at  a  county  fair.  Then,  seeing  a  chance  to  profit, 
it  undertook  with  sudden  alacrity  the  ghoulish  office 
of  Kriegslieferant.  One  of  the  contestants  being  de 
barred,  by  the  chances  of  war,  from  buying,  it  de 
voted  its  whole  energies,  for  two  years,  to  purveying 
to  the  other.  Meanwhile,  it  made  every  effort  to 
aid  its  customer  by  lending  him  the  cloak  of  its 
neutrality — that  is,  by  demanding  all  the  privileges 
of  a  neutral  and  yet  carrying  on  a  stupendous  whole 
sale  effort  to  promote  the  war.  On  the  official 
side,  this  neutrality  was  fraudulent  from  the  start, 
as  the  revelations  of  Mr.  Tumulty  have  since  demon 
strated;  popularly  it  became  more  and  more  fraudu 
lent  as  the  debts  of  the  customer  contestant  piled  up, 
and  it  became  more  and  more  apparent — a  fact  dili- 


46  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

gently  made  known  by  his  partisans — that  they 
would  be  worthless  if  he  failed  to  win.  Then,  in  the 
end,  covert  aid  was  transformed  into  overt  aid.  And 
under  what  gallant  conditions !  In  brief,  there  stood 
a  nation  of  65,000,000  people,  which,  without  effec 
tive  allies,  had  just  closed  two  and  a  half  years  of 
homeric  conflict  by  completely  defeating  an  enemy 
state  of  135,000,000  and  two  lesser  ones  of  more 
than  10,000,000  together,  and  now  stood  at  bay  be 
fore  a  combination  of  at  least  140,000,000.  Upon 
this  battle-scarred  and  war-weary  foe  the  Republic 
of  100,000,000  freemen  now  flung  itself,  so  lifting 
the  odds  to  4  to  1.  And  after  a  year  and  a  half  more 
of  struggle  it  emerged  triumphant — a  knightly  victor 
surely! 

There  is  no  need  to  rehearse  the  astounding  and  un 
precedented  swinishness  that  accompanied  this  glo 
rious  business — the  colossal  waste  of  public  money, 
the  savage  persecution  of  all  opponents  and  critics  of 
the  war,  the  open  bribery  of  labor,  the  half -insane 
reviling  of  the  enemy,  the  manufacture  of  false  news, 
the  knavish  robbery  of  enemy  civilians,  the  inces 
sant  spy  hunts,  the  floating  of  public  loans  by  a  proc 
ess  of  blackmail,  the  degradation  of  the  Red  Cross 
to  partisan  uses,  the  complete  abandonment  of  all 
decency,  decorum  and  self-respect.  The  facts  must 
be  remembered  with  shame  by  every  civilized  Amer 
ican;  lest  they  be  forgotten  by  the  generations  of  the 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  47 

future  I  am  even  now  engaged  with  collaborators 
upon  an  exhaustive  record  of  them,  in  twenty  vol 
umes  folio.  More  important  to  the  present  purpose 
are  two  things  that  are  apt  to  be  overlooked,  the  first 
of  which  is  the  capital  fact  that  the  war  was  "sold" 
to  the  American  people,  as  the  phrase  has  it,  not  by 
appealing  to  their  courage,  but  by  appealing  to  their 
cowardice — in  brief,  by  adopting  the  assumption 
that  they  were  not  warlike  at  all,  and  certainly  not 
gallant  and  chivalrous,  but  merely  craven  and  fear 
ful.  The  first  selling  point  of  the  proponents  of 
American  participation  was  the  contention  that  the 
Germans,  with  gigantic  wars  still  raging  on  both 
fronts,  were  preparing  to  invade  the  United  States, 
burn  down  all  the  towns,  murder  all  the  men,  and 
carry  off  all  the  women — that  their  victory  would 
bring  staggering  and  irresistible  reprisals  for  the 
American  violation  of  the  duties  of  a  neutral.  The 
second  selling  point  was  that  the  entrance  of  the 
United  States  would  end  the  war  almost  instantly — 
that  the  Germans  would  be  so  overwhelmingly  out 
numbered,  in  men  and  guns,  that  it  would  be  impos 
sible  for  them  to  make  any  effective  defense — above 
all,  that  it  would  be  impossible  for  them  to  inflict 
any  serious  damage  upon  their  new  foes.  Neither 
argument,  it  must  be  plain,  showed  the  slightest  be 
lief  in  the  warlike  skill  and  courage  of  the  American 
people.  Both  were  grounded  upon  the  frank  theory 


48  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

that  the  only  way  to  make  the  mob  fight  was  to  scare 
it  half  to  death,  and  then  show  it  a  way  to  fight  with 
out  risk,  to  stab  a  helpless  antagonist  in  the  back. 
And  both  were  mellowed  and  reenforced  by  the 
hint  that  such  a  noble  assault,  beside  being  safe, 
would  also  be  extremely  profitable — that  it  would 
convert  very  dubious  debts  into  very  good  debts,  and 
dispose  forever  of  a  diligent  and  dangerous  com 
petitor  for  trade,  especially  in  Latin  America.  All 
the  idealist  nonsense  emitted  by  Dr.  Wilson  and  com 
pany  was  simply  icing  on  the  cake.  Most  of  it  was 
abandoned  as  soon  as  the  bullets  began  to  fly,  and 
the  rest  consisted  simply  of  meaningless  words — the 
idiotic  babbling  of  a  Presbyterian  evangelist  turned 
prophet  and  seer. 

The  other  thing  that  needs  to  be  remembered  is 
the  permanent  effect  of  so  dishonest  and  cowardly  a 
business  upon  the  national  character,  already  far 
too  much  inclined  toward  easy  ventures  and  long 
odds.  Somewhere  in  his  diaries  Wilfrid  Scawen 
Blunt  speaks  of  the  marked  debasement  that  showed 
itself  in  the  English  spirit  after  the  brutal  robbery 
and  assassination  of  the  South  African  Republics. 
The  heroes  that  the  mob  followed  after  Mafeking 
Day  were  far  inferior  to  the  heroes  that  it  had 
followed  in  the  days  before  the  war.  The  Eng 
lish  gentleman  began  to  disappear  from  public  life, 
and  in  his  place  appeared  a  rabble-rousing  bounder 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  49 

obviously  almost  identical  with  the  American  pro 
fessional  politician — the  Lloyd-George,  Chamber 
lain,  F.  E.  Smith,  Isaacs-Reading,  Churchill,  Bottom- 
ley,  Northcliffe  type.  Worse,  old  ideals  went  with 
old  heroes.  Personal  freedom  and  strict  legality, 
says  Blunt,  vanished  from  the  English  tables  of  the 
law,  and  there  was  a  shift  of  the  social  and  political 
center  of  gravity  to  a  lower  plane.  Precisely  the 
same  effect  is  now  visible  in  the  United  States.  The 
overwhelming  majority  of  conscripts  went  into  the 
army  unwillingly,  and  once  there  they  were  de 
bauched  by  the  twin  forces  of  the  official  propaganda 
that  I  have  mentioned  and  a  harsh,  unintelligent  dis 
cipline.  The  first  made  them  almost  incapable  of 
soldierly  thought  and  conduct;  the  second  converted 
them  into  cringing  goose-steppers.  The  consequences 
display  themselves  in  the  amazing  activities  of  the 
American  Legion,  and  in  the  rise  of  such  correlative 
organizations  as  the  Ku  Klux  Klan.  It  is  impossible 
to  fit  any  reasonable  concept  of  the  soldierly  into  the 
familiar  proceedings  of  the  Legion.  Its  members 
conduct  themselves  like  a  gang  of  Methodist  vice- 
crusaders  on  the  loose,  or  a  Southern  lynching  party. 
They  are  forever  discovering  preposterous  burglars 
under  the  national  bed,  and  they  advance  to  the 
attack,  not  gallantly  and  at  fair  odds,  but  cravenly 
and  in  overwhelming  force.  Some  of  their  enter 
prises,  to  be  set  forth  at  length  in  the  record  I 


50  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

have  mentioned,  have  been  of  almost  unbelievable 
baseness — the  mobbing  of  harmless  Socialists,  the 
prohibition  of  concerts  by  musicians  of  enemy  na 
tionality,  the  mutilation  of  cows  designed  for  ship 
ment  abroad  to  feed  starving  children,  the  roughing 
of  women,  service  as  strike-breakers,  the  persecution 
of  helpless  foreigners,  regardless  of  nationality. 

During  the  last  few  months  of  the  war,  when 
stories  of  the  tyrannical  ill-usage  of  conscripts  began 
to  filter  back  to  the  United  States,  it  was  predicted 
that  they  would  demand  the  punishment  of  the  guilty 
when  they  got  home,  and  that  if  it  was  not  promptly 
forthcoming  they  would  take  it  into  their  own  hands. 
It  was  predicted,  too,  that  they  would  array  them 
selves  against  the  excesses  of  Palmer,  Burleson  and 
company,  and  insist  upon  a  restoration  of  that  dem 
ocratic  freedom  for  which  they  had  theoretically 
fought.  But  they  actually  did  none  of  these  things. 
So  far  as  I  know,  not  a  single  martinet  of  a  lieuten 
ant  or  captain  has  been  manhandled  by  his  late  vic 
tims;  the  most  they  have  done  has  been  to  appeal  to 
Congress  for  revenge  and  damages.  Nor  have  they 
thrown  their  influence  against  the  mediaeval  des 
potism  which  grew  up  at  home  during  the  war;  on 
the  contrary,  they  have  supported  it  actively,  and  if  it 
has  lessened  since  1919  the  change  has  been  wrought 
without  their  aid  and  in  spite  of  their  opposition. 
In  sum,  they  show  all  the  stigmata  of  inferior  men 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  51 

•whose  natural  inferiority  has  been  made  worse  by 
oppression.  Their  chief  organization  is  dominated 
by  shrewd  ex-officers  who  operate  it  to  their  own 
ends — politicians  in  search  of  jobs,  Chamber  of 
Commerce  witch-hunters,  and  other  such  vermin.  It 
seems  to  be  wholly  devoid  of  patriotism,  courage,  or 
sense.  Nothing  quite  resembling  it  existed  in  the 
country  before  the  war,  not  even  in  the  South.  There 
is  nothing  like  it  anywhere  else  on  earth.  It  is  a 
typical  product  of  two  years  of  heroic  effort  to  arouse 
and  capitalize  the  worst  instincts  of  the  mob,  and  it 
symbolizes  very  dramatically  the  ill  effects  of  that 
effort  upon  the  general  American  character. 

Would  men  so  degraded  in  gallantry  and  honor,  so 
completely  purged  of  all  the  military  virtues,  so 
submerged  in  baseness  of  spirit — would  such  pitiful 
caricatures  of  soldiers  offer  the  necessary  resistance 
to  a  public  enemy  who  was  equal,  or  perhaps 
superior  in  men  and  resources,  and  who  came  on  with 
confidence,  daring  and  resolution — say  England  sup 
ported  by  Germany  as  Kriegslieferant  and  with  her 
inevitable  swarms  of  Continental  allies,  or  Japan 
with  the  Asiatic  hordes  behind  her?  Against  the 
best  opinion  of  the  chatauquas,  of  Congress  and  of 
the  patriotic  press  I  presume  to  doubt  it.  It  seems 
to  me  quite  certain,  indeed,  that  an  American  army 
fairly  representing  the  American  people,  if  it  ever 
meets  another  army  of  anything  remotely  resembling 


52  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

like  strength,  will  be  defeated,  and  that  defeat  will 
be  indistinguishable  from  rout.  I  believe  that,  at 
any  odds  less  than  two  to  one,  even  the  exhausted 
German  army  of  1918  would  have  defeated  it,  and 
in  this  view,  I  think,  I  am  joined  by  many  men  whose 
military  judgment  is  far  better  than  mine — particu 
larly  by  many  French  officers. /The  changes  in  the 
American  character  since  the  Civil  War,  due  partly 
to  the  wearing  out  of  the  old  Anglo-Saxon  stock,  in 
ferior  to  begin  with,  and  partly  to  the  infusion  of 
the  worst  elements  of  other  stocks,  have  surely  not 
made  for  the  fostering  of  the  military  virtues.  The 
old  cool  head  is  gone,  and  the  old  dogged  way  with 
difficulties.  The  typical  American  of  to-day  has  lost 
all  the  love  of  liberty  that  his  forefathers  had,  and 
all  their  distrust  of  emotion,  and  pride  in  self-reli 
ance.  He  is  led  no  longer  by  Davy  Crocketts ;  he  is 
led  by  cheer  leaders,  press  agents,  word-mongers,  up- 
lifters.  I  do  not  believe  that  such  a  faint-hearted 
and  inflammatory  fellow,  shoved  into  a  war  demand 
ing  every  resource  of  courage,  ingenuity  and  perti 
nacity,  would  give  a  good  account  of  himself.  He 
is  fit  for  lynching-bees  and  heretic-hunts,  but  he  is 
not  fit  for  tight  corners  and  desperate  odds. 

Nevertheless,  his  docility  and  pusillanimity  may 
be  overestimated,  and  sometimes  I  think  that  they  are 
overestimated  by  his  present  masters.  They  assume 
that  there  is  absolutely  no  limit  to  his  capacity  for  be- 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  53 

ing  put  on  and  knocked  about — that  he  will  submit 
to  any  invasion  of  his  freedom  and  dignity,  however 
outrageous,  so  long  as  it  is  depicted  in  melodious 
terms.  He  permitted  the  late  war  to  be  "sold" 
to  him  by  the  methods  of  the  grind-shop  auctioneer. 
He  submitted  to  conscription  without  any  of  the  resist 
ance  shown  by  his  brother  democrats  of  Canada  and 
Australia.  He  got  no  further  than  academic  pro 
tests  against  the  brutal  usage  he  had  to  face  in  the 
army.  He  came  home  and  found  Prohibition  foisted 
on  him,  and  contented  himself  with  a  few  feeble  ob 
jurgations.  He  is  a  pliant  slave  of  capitalism,  and 
ever  ready  to  help  it  put  down  fellow-slaves  who 
venture  to  revolt.  But  this  very  weakness,  this  very 
credulity  and  poverty  of  spirit,  on  some  easily  con 
ceivable  to-morrow,  may  convert  him  into  a  rebel  of 
a  peculiarly  insane  kind,  and  so  beset  the  Republic 
from  within  with  difficulties  quite  as  formidable  as 
those  which  threaten  to  afflict  it  from  without.  What 
Mr.  James  N.  Wood  calls  the  corsair  of  democracy 
— that  is,  the  professional  mob-master,  the  merchant 
of  delusions,  the  pumper-up  of  popular  fears  and 
rages — is  still  content  to  work  for  capitalism,  and  cap 
italism  knows  how  to  reward  him  to  his  taste.  He 
is  the  eloquent  statesman,  the  patriotic  editor,  the 
fount  of  inspiration,  the  prancing  milch-cow  of  op 
timism.  He  becomes  public  leader,  Governor,  Sen 
ator,  President.  He  is  Billy  Sunday,  Cyrus  K.  Cur- 


54  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

tis,  Dr.  Frank  Crane,  Charles  E.  Hughes,  Taft,  Wil 
son,  Cal  Coolidge,  General  Wood,  Harding.  His, 
perhaps,  is  the  best  of  trades  under  democracy — but 
it  has  its  temptations !  Let  us  try  to  picture  a  master 
corsair,  thoroughly  adept  at  pulling  the  mob  nose, 
who  suddenly  bethought  himself  of  that  Pepin  the 
Short  who  found  himself  mayor  of  the  palace  and 
made  himself  King  of  the  Franks.  There  were  light 
nings  along  that  horizon  in  the  days  of  Roosevelt; 
there  were  thunder  growls  when  Bryan  emerged  from 
the  Nebraska  steppes.  On  some  great  day  of  fate,  as 
yet  unrevealed  by  the  gods,  such  a  professor  of  the 
central  democratic  science  may  throw  off  his  em 
ployers  and  set  up  a  business  for  himself.  When 
that  day  comes  there  will  be  plenty  of  excuse  for 
black  type  on  the.  front  pages  of  the  newspapers. 

I  incline  to  think  that  military  disaster  will  give 
him  his  inspiration  and  his  opportunity — that  he  will 
take  the  form,  so  dear  to  democracies,  of  a  man  on 
horseback.  The  chances  are  bad  to-day  simply  be 
cause  the  mob  is  relatively  comfortable — because 
capitalism  has  been  able  to  give  it  relative  ease  and 
plenty  of  food  in  return  for  its  docility.  Genuine 
poverty  is  very  rare  in  the  United  States,  and  actual 
hardship  is  almost  unknown.  There  are  times  when 
the  proletariat  is  short  of  phonograph  records,  silk 
shirts  and  movie  tickets,  but  there  are  very  few  times 
when  it  is  short  of  nourishment.  Even  during  the 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  55 

most  severe  business  depression,  with  hundreds  of 
thousands  out  of  work,  most  of  these  apparent 
sufferers,  if  they  are  willing,  are  able  to  get  livings 
outside  their  trades.  The  cities  may  be  choked  with 
idle  men,  but  the  country  is  nearly  always  short  of 
labor.  And  if  all  other  resources  fail,  there  are 
always  public  agencies  to  feed  the  hungry:  capital 
ism  is  careful  to  keep  them  from  despair.  No  Amer 
ican  knows  what  it  means  to  live  as  millions  of 
Europeans  lived  during  the  war  and  have  lived,  in 
some  places,  since:  with  the  loaves  of  the  baker  re 
duced  to  half  size  and  no  meat  at  all  in  the  meatshop. 
But  the  time  may  come  and  it  may  not  be 
far  off.  A  national  military  disaster  would  dis 
organize  all  industry  in  the  United  States,  already 
sufficiently  wasteful  and  chaotic,  and  introduce  the 
American  people,  for  the  first  time  in  their  history, 
to  genuine  want — and  capital  would  be  unable  to 
relieve  them.  The  day  of  such  disaster  will  bring 
the  savior  foreordained.  The  slaves  will  follow  him, 
their  eyes  fixed  ecstatically  upon  the  newest  New 
Jerusalem.  Men  bred  to  respond  automatically  to 
shibboleths  will  respond  to  this  worst  and  most  in 
sane  one.  Bolshevism,  said  General  Foch,  is  a 
disease  of  defeated  nations. 

But  do  not  misunderstand  me:  I  predict  no  revolu 
tion  in  the  grand  manner,  no  melodramatic  collapse  of 
capitalism,  no  repetition  of  what  has  gone  on  in 


56  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

Russia.  The  American  proletarian  is  not  brave  and 
romantic  enough  for  that;  to  do  him  simple  justice, 
he  is  not  silly  enough.  Capitalism,  in  the  long  run, 
will  win  in  the  United  States,  if  only  for  the  reason 
that  every  American  hopes  to  be  a  capitalist  before 
he  dies.  Its  roots  go  down  to  the  deepest,  darkest 
levels  of  the  national  soil;  in  all  its  characters,  and 
particularly  in  its  antipathy  to  the  dreams  of  man,  it 
is  thoroughly  American.  To-day  it  seems  to  be  im 
movably  secure,  given  continued  peace  and  plenty, 
and  not  all  the  demagogues  in  the  land,  consecrating 
themselves  desperately  to  the  one  holy  purpose, 
could  shake  it.  Only  a  cataclysm  will  ever  do  that. 
But  is  a  cataclysm  conceivable?  Isn't  the  United 
States  the  richest  nation  ever  heard  of  in  history, 
and  isn't  it  a  fact  that  modern  wars  are  won  by 
money?  It  is  not  a  fact.  Wars  are  won  to-day,  as 
in  Napoleon's  day,  by  the  largest  battalions,  and  the 
largest  battalions,  in  the  next  great  struggle,  may 
not  be  on  the  side  of  the  Republic.  The  usuri 
ous  profits  it  wrung  from  the  last  war  are  as  tempt 
ing  as  negotiable  securities  hung  on  the  wash-line,  as 
pre-Prohibition  Scotch  stored  in  open  cellars.  Its 
knavish  ways  with  friends  and  foes  alike  have  left  it 
only  foes.  It  is  plunging  ill-equipped  into  a  com 
petition  for  a  living  in  the  world  that  will  be  to  the 
death.  And  the  late  Disarmament  Conference  left  it 
almost  ham-strung.  Before  the  conference  it  had 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  57 

the  Pacific  in  its  grip,  and  with  the  Pacific  in  its  grip 
it  might  have  parleyed  for  a  fair  half  of  the  Atlantic. 
But  when  the  Japs  and  the  English  had  finished  their 
operations  upon  the  Feather  Duster,  Popinjay  Lodge, 
Master-Mind  Root,  Vacuum  Underwood,  young  Teddy 
Roosevelt  and  the  rest  of  their  so-*willing  dupes  there 
was  apparent  a  baleful  change.  The  Republic  is  ex 
tremely  insecure  to-day  on  both  fronts,  and  it  will 
be  more  insecure  to-morrow.  And  it  has  no  friends. 
However,  as  I  say,  I  do  not  fear  for  capitalism. 
It  will  weather  the  storm,  and  no  doubt  it  will  be 
the  stronger  for  it  afterward.  The  inferior  man 
hates  it,  but  there  is  too  much  envy  mixed  with  his 
hatred,  in  the  land  of  the  theoretically  free,  for  him 
to  want  to  destroy  it  utterly,  or  even  to  wound  it  in 
curably.  He  struggles  against  it  now,  but  always 
wistfully,  always  with  a  sneaking  respect.  On  the 
day  of  Armageddon  he  may  attempt  a  more  violent 
onslaught.  But  in  'the  long  run  he  will  be  beaten. 
In  the  long  run  the  corsairs  will  sell  him  out,  and  hand 
him  over  to  his  enemy.  Perhaps — who  knows? — 
the  combat  may  raise  that  enemy  to  genuine  strength 
and  dignity.  Out  of  it  may  come  the  superman. 


All  the  while  I  have  been  forgetting  the  third  of 
my  reasons  for  remaining  so  faithful  a  citizen  of  the 
Federation,  despite  all  the  lascivious  inducements 


58  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

from  expatriates  to  follow  them  beyond  the  seas, 
and  all  the  surly  suggestions  from  patriots  that  I 
succumb.  It  is  the  reason  which  grows  out  of  my 
mediaeval  but  unashamed  taste  for  the  bizarre  and 
indelicate,  my  congenital  weakness  for  comedy  of 
the  grosser  varieties.  The  United  States,  to  my  eye, 
is  incomparably  the  greatest  show  on  earth.  It  is 
a  show  which  avoids  diligently  all  the  kinds  of  clown 
ing  which  tire  me  most  quidkly — for  example,  royal 
ceremonials,  the  tedious  hocus-pocus  of  haut  poll- 
tique,  the  taking  of  politics  seriously — and  lays 
chief  stress  upon  the  kinds  which  delight  me  un 
ceasingly — for  example,  the  ribald  combats  of 
demagogues,  the  exquisitely  ingenious  operations  of 
master  rogues,  the  pursuit  of  witches  and  heretics, 
the  desperate  struggles  of  inferior  men  to  claw  their 
way  into  Heaven.  We  have  clowns  in  constant 
practice  among  us  who  are.  as  far  above  the  clowns 
of  any  other  great  state  as  a  Jack  Dempsey  is  above 
a  paralytic — and  not  a  few  dozen  or  score  of  them, 
but  whole  droves  and  herds.  Human  enterprises 
which,  in  all  other  Christian  countries,  are  resigned 
despairingly  to  an  incurable  dullness — things  that 
seem  devoid  of  exhilarating  amusement  by  their  very 
nature — are  here  lifted  to  such  vast  heights  of 
buffoonery  that  contemplating  them  strains  the  mid 
riff  almost  to  breaking.  I  cite  an  example:  the  wor 
ship  of  God.  Everywhere  else  on  earth  it  is  car- 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  59 

ried  on  in  a  solemn  and  dispiriting  manner;  in  Eng 
land,  of  course,  the  bishops  are  obscene,  but  the 
average  man  seldom  gets  a  fair  chance  to  laugh  at 
them  and  enjoy  them.  Now  come  home.  Here  we 
not  only  have  bishops  who  are  enormously  more 
obscene  than  even  the  most  gifted  of  the  English 
bishops;  we  have  also  a  huge  force  of  lesser  spe 
cialists  in  ecclesiastical  mountebankery — tin-horn 
Loyolas,  Savonarolas  and  Xaviers  of  a  hundred  fan 
tastic  rites,  each  performing  untiringly  and  each 
full  of  a  grotesque  and  illimitable  whimsicality. 
Every  American  town,  however  small,  has  one  of  its 
own:  a  holy  clerk  with  so  fine  a  talent  for  introduc 
ing  the  arts  of  jazz  into  the  salvation  of  the  damned 
that  his  performance  takes  on  all  the  gaudiness  of 
a  four-ring  circus,  and  the  bald  announcement  that 
he  will  raid  Hell  on  such  and  such  a  night  is  enough 
to  empty  all  the  town  blind-pigs  and  bordellos  and 
pack  his  sanctuary  to  the  doors.  And  to  aid  him  and 
inspire  him  there  are  traveling  experts  to  whom  he 
stands  in  the  relation  of  a  wart  to  the  Matterhorn — 
stupendous  masters  of  theological  imbecility,  con 
trivers  of  doctrines  utterly  preposterous,  heirs  to  the 
Joseph  Smith,  Mother  Eddy  and  John  Alexander 
Dowie  tradition — Bryan,  Sunday,  and  their  like. 
These  are  the  eminences  of  the  American  Sacred 
College.  I  delight  in  them.  Their  proceedings 
make  me  a  happier  American. 


60  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

Turn,  now,  to  politics.  Consider,  for  example,  a 
campaign  for  the  Presidency.  Would  it  be  possible 
to  imagine  anything  more  uproariously  idiotic — a 
deafening,  nerve-wracking  battle  to  the  death  between 
Tweedledum  and  Tweedledee,  Harlequin  and  Sgan- 
arelle,  Gobbo  and  Dr.  Cook — the  unspeakable,  with 
fearful  snorts,  gradually  swallowing  the  inconceiv 
able?  I  defy  any  one  to  match  it  elsewhere  on  this 
earth.  In  other  lands,  at  worst,  there  are  at  least  in 
telligible  issues,  coherent  ideas,  salient  personalities. 
Somebody  says  something,  and  somebody  replies. 
But  what  did  Harding  say  in  1920,  and  what  did  Cox 
reply?  Who  was  Harding,  anyhow,  and  who  was 
Cox?  Here,  having  perfected  democracy,  we  lift  the 
whole  •combat  to  symbolism,  to  transcendentalism,  to 
metaphysics.  Here  we  load  a  pair  of  palpably  tin 
cannon  with  blank  cartridges  charged  with  talcum 
powder,  and  so  let  fly.  Here  one  may  howl  over  the 
show  without  any  uneasy  reminder  that  it  is  serious, 
and  that  some  one  may  be  hurt.  I  hold  that  this  ele 
vation  of  politics  to  the  plane  of  undiluted  comedy  is 
peculiarly  American,  that  nowhere  else  on  this  dis 
reputable  ball  has  the  art  of  the  sham-battle  been 
developed  to  such  fineness.  Two  experiences  are  in 
point.  During  the  Harding-Cox  combat  of  bladders 
an  article  of  mine,  dealing  with  some  of  its  more 
melodramatic  phases,  was  translated  into  German  and 
reprinted  by  a  Berlin  paper.  At  the  head  of  it  the 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  61 

editor  was  careful  to  insert  a  preface  explaining  to 
his  readers,  but  recently  delivered  to  democracy,  that 
such  contests  were  not  taken  seriously  by  intelligent 
Americans,  and  warning  them  solemnly  against  get 
ting  into  sweats  over  politics.  At  about  the  same 
time  I  had  dinner  with  an  Englishman.  From  cock 
tails  to  bromo  seltzer  he  bewailed  the  political  lassi 
tude  of  the  English  populace — its  growing  indiffer 
ence  to  the  whole  partisan  harliquinade.  Here  were 
two  typical  foreign  attitudes:  the  Germans  were  in 
danger  of  making  politics  too  harsh  and  implacable, 
and  the  English  were  in  danger  of  forgetting  politics 
altogether.  Both  attitudes,  it  must  be  plain,  make 
for  bad  shows.  Observing  a  German  campaign, 
one  is  uncomfortably  harassed  and  stirred  up;  ob 
serving  an  English  campaign  (at  least  in  times  of 
peace),  one  falls  asleep.  In  the  United  States  the 
thing  is  done  better.  Here  politics  is  purged  of  all 
menace,  all  sinister  quality,  all  genuine  significance, 
and  stuffed  with  such  gorgeous  humors,  such  inordi 
nate  farce  that  one  comes  to  the  end  of  a  campaign 
with  one's  ribs  loose,  and  ready  for  "King  Lear,"  or 
a  hanging,  or  a  course  of  medical  journals. 

But  feeling  better  for  the  laugh.  Ridi  si  sapis, 
said  Martial.  Mirth  is  necessary  to  wisdom,  to  com 
fort,  above  all,  to  happiness.  Well,  here  is  the  land 
of  mirth,  as  Germany  is  the  land  of  metaphysics  and 
France  is  the  land  of  fornication.  Here  the  buffoon- 


62  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

ery  never  stops.  What  could  be  more  delightful 
than  the  endless  struggle  of  the  Puritan  to  make  the 
joy  of  the  minority  unlawful  and  impossible?  The 
effort  is  itself  a  greater  joy  to  one  standing  on  the 
side-lines  that  any  or  all  of  the  carnal  joys  that  it 
combats.  Always,  when  I  contemplate  an  uplift er 
at  his  hopeless  business,  I  recall  a  scene  in  an  old- 
time  burlesque  show,  witnessed  for  hire,  in  my  days 
as  a  dramatic  critic.  A  chorus  girl  executed  a  fall 
upon  the  stage,  and  Rudolph  Krausemeyer,  the  Swiss 
comedian,  rushed  to  her  aid.  As  he  stooped  pain 
fully  to  succor  her,  Irving  Rabinovitz,  the  Zionist 
comedian,  fetched  him  a  fearful  clout  across  the 
cofferdam  with  a  slap-stick.  So  the  uplifter,  the 
soul-saver,  the  Americanizer,  striving  to  make  the  Re 
public  fit  for  Y.  M.  C.  A.  secretaries.  He  is  the 
eternal  American,  ever  moved  by  the  best  of  inten 
tions,  ever  running  a  la  Krausemeyer  to  the  rescue 
of  virtue,  and  ever  getting  his  pantaloons  fanned  by 
the  Devil.  I  am  naturally  sinful,  and  such  spec 
tacles  caress  me.  If  the  slap-stick  were  a  sash-weight 
the  show  would  be  cruel,  and  I'd  probably  complain 
to  the  Polizei.  As  it  is,  I  know  that  the  uplifter  is 
not  really  hurt,  but  simply  shocked.  The  blow,  in 
fact,  does  him  good,  for  it  helps  to  get  him  into 
Heaven,  as  exegetes  prove  from  Matthew  v,  11: 
Heureux  serez-vous,  lorsquon  vous  outragera,  quon 
vous  persecute™,  and  so  on.  As  for  me,  it  makes  me 


ON  BEING  AN  AMERICAN  63 

a  more  contented  man,  and  hence  a  better  citizen. 
One  man  prefers  the  Republic  because  it  pays  better 
wages  than  Bulgaria.  Another  because  it  has  laws 
to  keep  him  sober  and  his  daughter  chaste.  Another 
because  the  Woolworth  Building  is  higher  than  the 
cathedral  at  Chartres.  Another  because,  living  here, 
he  can  read  the  New  York  Evening  Journal.  Another 
because  there  is  a  warrant  out  for  him  somewhere 
else.  Me,  I  like  it  because  it  amuses  me  to  my  taste. 
I  never  get  tired  of  the  show.  It  is  worth  every  cent 
it  costs. 

That  cost,  it  seems  to  me  is  very  moderate.  Taxes 
in  the  United  States  are  not  actually  high.  I  figure, 
for  example,  that  my  private  share  of  the  expense  of 
maintaining  the  Hon.  Mr.  Harding  in  ihe  White 
House  this  year  will  work  out  to  less  than  80  cents. 
Try  to  think  of  better  sport  for  the  money:  in  New 
York  it  has  been  estimated  that  it  costs  $3  to  get 
comfortably  tight,  and  $17.50,  on  an  average,  to 
pinch  a  girl's  arm.  The  United  States  Senate  will 
cost  me  perhaps  $11  for  the  year,  but  against  that 
expense  set  the  subscription  price  of  the  Congressional 
Record,  about  $15,  which,  as  a  journalist,  I  receive 
for  nothing.  For  $4  less  than  nothing  I  am  thus  en 
tertained  as  Solomon  never  was  by  his  hooch 
dancers.  Col.  George  Brinton  McClellan  Harvey 
costs  me  but  25  cents  a  year;  I  get  Nicholas  Murray 
Butler  free.  Finally,  there  is  young  Teddy  Roose- 


64  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

velt,  the  naval  expert.  Teddy  costs  me,  as  I  work  it 
out,  about  11  cents  a  year,  or  less  than  a  cent  a 
month.  More,  he  entertains  me  doubly  for  the 
money,  first  as  naval  expert,  and  secondly  as  a  -walk 
ing  attentat  upon  democracy,  a  devastating  proof 
that  there  is  nothing,  after  all,  in  that  superstition. 
We  Americans  subscribe  to  the  doctrine  of  human 
equality — and  the  Rooseveltii  reduce  it  to  an  ab 
surdity  as  brilliantly  as  the  sons  of  Veit  Bach. 
Where  is  your  equal  opportunity  now?  Here  in 
this  Eden  of  clowns,  with  the  highest  rewards  of 
clowning  theoretically  open  to  every  poor  boy — here 
in  the  very  citadel  of  democracy  we  found  and  cherish 
a  clown  dynasty! 


II.    HUNEKER:     A    MEMORY 

THERE  was  a  stimulating  aliveness  about  him 
always,  an  air  of  living  eagerly  and  a  bit 
recklessly,  a  sort  of  defiant  resiliency.  In 
his  very  frame  and  form  something  provocative 
showed  itself — an  insolent  singularity,  obvious  to 
even  the  most  careless  glance.  That  Caligukm  pro 
file  of  his  was  more  than  simply  unusual  in  a  free 
republic,  consecrated  to  good  works;  to  a  respectable 
American,  encountering  it  in  the  lobby  of  the  Metro 
politan  or  in  the  smoke-room  of  a  Doppelschrauben- 
schnellpostdampfer,  it  must  have  suggested  inevitably 
the  dark  enterprises  and  illicit  metaphysics  of  a 
Heliogabalus.  More,  there  was  always  something 
rakish  and  defiant  about  his  hat — it  was  too  white,  or 
it  curled  in  the  wrong  way,  or  a  feather  peeped  from 
the  band — ,  and  a  hint  of  antinomianism  in  his  cravat. 
Yet  more,  he  ran  to  exotic  tastes  in  eating  and  drink 
ing,  preferring  occult  goulashes  and  risi-bisis  to  hon 
est  American  steaks,  and  great  floods  of  Pilsner  to  the 
harsh  beverages  of  God-fearing  men.  Finally,  there 
was  his  talk,  that  cataract  of  sublime  trivialities :  gos 
sip  lifted  to  the  plane  of  the  gods,  the  unmentionable 

65 


66  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

bedizened  with  an  astounding  importance,  and  even 
profundity. 

In  his  early  days,  when  he  performed  the  tonal  and 
carnal  prodigies  that  he  liked  to  talk  of  afterward,  I 
was  at  nurse,  and  too  young  to  have  any  traffic  with 
him.  When  I  encountered  him  at  last  he  was  in  the 
high  flush  of  the  middle  years,  and  had  already  be 
come  a  tradition  in  the  little  world  that  critics  in 
habit.  We  sat  down  to  luncheon  at  one  o'clock;  I 
think  it  must  have  been  at  Luchow's,  his  favorite 
refuge  and  rostrum  to  the  end.  At  six,  when  I  had 
to  go,  the  waiter  was  hauling  in  his  tenth  (or  was  it 
twentieth?)  Seidel  of  Pilsner,  and  he  was  bringing  to 
a  close  prestissimo  the  most  amazing  monologue  that 
these  ears  (up  to  that  time)  had  ever  funnelled  into 
this  consciousness.  What  a  stew,  indeed!  Berlioz 
and  the  question  of  the  clang-tint  of  the  viola,  the 
psychopathological  causes  of  the  suicide  of  Tschai- 
kowsky,  why  .Nietzsche  had  to  leave  Sils  Maria  be 
tween  days  in  1887,  the  echoes  of  Flaubert  in  Joseph 
Conrad  (then  but  newly  dawned),  the  precise  topog 
raphy  of  the  warts  of  Liszt,  George  Bernard  Shaw's 
heroic  but  vain  struggles  to  throw  off  Presbyterianism, 
how  Frau  Cosima  saved  Wagner  from  the  libidinous 
Swedish  baroness,  what  to  drink  when  playing 
Chopin,  what  Cezanne  thought  of  his  disciples,  the 
defects  in  the  structure  of  "Sister  Carrie,"  Anton 
Seidl  and  the  musical  union,  the  complex  love  affairs 


HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY  67 

of  Gounod,  the  early  days  of  David  Belasco,  the 
varying  talents  and  idiosyncrasies  of  Lillian  Russell's 
earlier  husbands,  whether  a  girl  educated  at  Vassar 
could  ever  really  learn  to  love,  the  exact  composition 
of  chicken  paprika,  the  correct  tempo  of  the  Vienna 
waltz,  the  style  of  William  Dean  Howells,  what 
George  Moore  said  about  German  bathrooms,  the 
true  inwardness  of  the  affair  between  D'Annunzio 
and  Duse,  the  origin  of  the  theory  that  all  oboe 
players  are  crazy,  why  Lowenbrau  survived  expor 
tation  better  than  Hofbrau,  Ibsen's  loathing  of  Nor 
wegians,  the  best  remedy  for  Rhine  wine  Kotzenjam- 
mer,  how  to  play  Brahms,  the  degeneration  of  the  Bal 
Bullier,  the  sheer  physical  impossibility  of  getting 
Dvorak  drunk,  the  genuine  last  words  of  Walt  Whit 
man.  .  .  . 

I  left  in  a  sort  of  fever,  and  it  was  a  couple  of 
days  later  before  I  began  to  sort  out  my  impressions, 
and  formulate  a  coherent  image.  Was  the  man  al 
lusive  in  his  books — so  allusive  that  popular  report 
credited  him  with  the  actual  manufacture  of  author 
ities?  Then  he  was  ten  times  as  allusive  in  his  dis 
course — a  veritable  geyser  of  unfamiliar  names, 
shocking  epigrams  in  strange  tongues,  unearthly  phi 
losophies  out  of  the  backwaters  of  Scandinavia, 
Transylvania,  Bulgaria,  the  Basque  country,  the 
Ukraine.  And  did  he,  in  his  criticism,  pass  facilely 
from  the  author  to  die  man,  and  from  the  man  to  his 


68  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

wife,  and  to  the  wives  of  his  friends?  Then  at  the 
Biertisch  he  began  long  beyond  the  point  where  the 
last  honest  wife  gives  up  the  ghost,  and  so,  full  tilt, 
ran  into  such  complexities  of  adultery  that  a  plain 
sinner  could  scarcely  follow  him.  I  try  to  give  you, 
ineptly  and  grotesquely,  some  notion  of  the  talk  of 
the  man,  but  I  must  fail  inevitably.  It  was,  in  brief, 
chaos,  and  chaos  cannot  be  described.  But  it  was 
chaos  made  to  gleam  and  corruscate  with  every  de 
vice  of  the  seven  arts — chaos  drenched  in  all  the 
colors  imaginable,  chaos  scored  for  an  orchestra 
which  made  the  great  band  of  Berlioz  seem  like  a  fife 
and  drum  corps.  One  night  a  few  months  before  the 
war,  I  sat  in  the  Paris  Opera  House  listening  to  the 
first  performance  of  Richard  Strauss's  "Josef's  Leg 
end,"  with  Strauss  himself  conducting.  On  the  stage 
there  was  a  riot  of  hues  that  swung  the  eyes  'round 
and  'round  in  a  crazy  mazurka ;  in  the  orchestra  there 
were  such  volleys  and  explosions  of  tone  that  the 
ears  (I  fall  into  a  Hunekeran  trope)  began  to  go  pale 
and  clammy  with  surgical  shock.  Suddenly,  above 
all  the  uproar,  a  piccolo  launched  into  a  new  and 
saucy  tune — in  an  unrelated  key!  .  .  .  Instantly 
and  quite  naturally,  I  thought  of  the  incomparable 
James.  When  he  gave  a  show  at  Liichow's  he  never 
forgot  that  anarchistic  passage  for  the  piccolo. 

I  observe  a  tendency  since  his  death  to  estimate 
him  in  terms  of  the  content  of  his  books.    Even  Frank 


HVNEKER:  A  MEMORY  69 

Harris,  who  certainly  should  know  better,  goes  there 
for  the  facts  about  him.  Nothing  could  do  him 
worse  injustice.  In  those  books,  of  course,  there  is 
a  great  deal  of  perfectly  sound  stuff;  the  wonder  is, 
in  truth,  that  so  much  of  it  holds  up  so  well  to-day — 
for  example,  the  essays  on  Strauss,  on  Brahms  and 
on  Nietzsche,  and  the  whole  volume  on  Chopin.  But 
the  real  Huneker  never  got  himself  formally  between 
covers,  if  one  forgets  "Old  Fogy"  and  parts  of 
"Painted  Veils."  The  volumes  of  his  regular  canon 
are  made  up,  in  the  main,  of  articles  written  for  the 
more  intellectual  magazines  and  newspapers  of  their 
era,  and  they  are  full  of  a  conscious  striving  to  qual 
ify  for  respectable  company.  Huneker,  always  cu 
riously  modest,  never  got  over  the  notion  that  it  was  a 
singular  honor  for  a  man  such  as  he — a  mere  diurnal 
scribbler,  innocent  of  academic  robes — to  be  pub 
lished  by  so  austere  a  publisher  as  Scribner.  More 
than  once,  anchored  at  the  beer-table,  we  discussed 
the  matter  at  length,  I  always  arguing  that  all  the 
honor  was  enjoyed  by  Scribner.  But  Huneker,  I 
believe  in  all  sincerity,  would  not  have  it  so,  any 
more  than  he  would  have  it  that  he  was  a  better  music 
critic  than  his  two  colleagues,  the  pedantic  Krehbiel 
and  the  nonsensical  Finck.  This  illogical  modesty, 
of  course,  had  its  limits;  it  made  him  cautious  about 
expressing  himself,  but  it  seldom  led  him  into  down 
right  assumptions  of  false  personality.  Nowhere  in 


70  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

all  his  books  will  you  find  him  doing  the  things  that 
every  right-thinking  Anglo-Saxon  critic  is  supposed  to 
do — the  Middleton  Murry,  Paul  Elmer  More,  Glutton- 
Brock  sort  of  puerility — solemn  essays  on  Coleridge 
and  Addison,  abysmal  discussions  of  the  relative 
merits  of  Schumann  and  Mendelssohn,  horrible 
treatises  upon  the  relations  of  Goethe  to  the  Romantic 
Movement,  dull  scratchings  in  a  hundred  such  ex 
hausted  and  sterile  fields.  Such  enterprises  were 
not  for  Huneker;  he  kept  himself  out  of  that  black 
coat.  But  I  am  convinced  that  he  always  had  his  own 
raiment  pressed  carefully  before  he  left  Liichow's  for 
the  temple  of  Athene — and  maybe  changed  cravats, 
and  put  on  a  boiled  shirt,  and  took  the  feather  out  of 
his  hat.  The  simon-pure  Huneker,  the  Huneker  who 
was  the  true  essence  and  prime  motor  of  the  more 
courtly  Huneker — remained  behind.  This  real  Hun 
eker  survives  in  conversations  that  still  haunt  the 
rafters  of  the  beer-halls  of  two  continents,  and  in  a 
vast  mass  of  newspaper  impromptus,  thrown  off  too 
hastily  to  be  reduced  to  complete  decorum,  and  in  two 
books  that  stand  outside  the  official  canon,  and  yet 
contain  the  man  himself  as  not  even  "Iconoclasts"  or 
the  Chopin  book  contains  him,  to  wit,  the  "Old  Fogy" 
aforesaid  and  the  "Painted  Veils"  of  his  last  year. 
Both  were  published,  so  to  speak,  out  of  the  back 
door — the  former  by  a  music  publisher  in  Philadel 
phia  and  the  latter  in  a  small  and  expensive  edition 


HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY  71 

for  the  admittedly  damned.  There  is  a  chapter  in 
"Painted  Veils"  that  is  Huneker  to  every  last  hitch 
of  the  shoulders  and  twinkle  of  the  eye — the  chapter 
in  which  the  hero  soliloquizes  on  art,  life,  immor 
tality,  and  women — especially  women.  And  there 
are  half  a  dozen  chapters  in  "Old  Fogy" — superfici 
ally  buffoonery,  but  how  penetrating!  how  gor 
geously  flavored!  how  learned! — that  come  com 
pletely  up  to  the  same  high  specification.  If  I  had 
to  choose  one  Huneker  book  and  give  up  all  the  others, 
I'd  choose  "Old  Fogy"  instantly.  In  it  Huneker 
is  utterly  himself.  In  it  the  last  trace  of  the 
pedagogue  vanishes.  Art  is  no  longer,  even  by 
implication,  a  device  for  improving  the  mind.  It  is 
wholly  a  magnificent  adventure. 

That  notion  of  it  is  what  Huneker  brought  into 
American  criticism,  and  it  is  for  that  bringing  that 
he  will  be  remembered.  No  other  critic  of  his  gen 
eration  had  a  tenth  of  his  influence.  Almost  single- 
handed  he  overthrew  the  aesthetic  theory  that  had 
flourished  in  the  United  States  since  the  death  of  Poe, 
and  set  up  an  utterly  contrary  aesthetic  theory  in 
its  place.  If  the  younger  men  of  to-day  have 
emancipated  themselves  from  the  Puritan  aesthetic, 
if  the  schoolmaster  is  now  palpably  on  the  defensive, 
and  no  longer  the  unchallenged  assassin  of  the  fine 
arts  that  he  once  was,  if  he  has  already  begun  to 
compromise  somewhat  absurdly  with  new  and 


72  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

sounder  ideas,  and  even  to  lift  his  voice  in  artificial 
hosannahs,  then  Huneker  certainly  deserves  all  the 
credit  for  the  change.  What  he  brought  back  from 
Paris  was  precisely  the  thing  that  was  most  suspected 
in  the  America  of  those  days:  the  capacity  for  gusto. 
Huneker  had  that  capacity  in  a  degree  unmatched 
by  any  other  critic.  When  his  soul  went  adventuring 
among  masterpieces  it  did  not  go  in  Sunday  broad 
cloth;  it  went  with  vine  leaves  in  its  hair.  The  rest 
of  the  appraisers  and  criers-up — even  Howells,  with 
all  his  humor — could  never  quite  rid  themselves  of 
the  professorial  manner.  When  they  praised  it  was 
always  with  some  hint  of  ethical,  or,  at  all  events, 
of  cultural  purpose;  when  tkey  condemned  that 
purpose  was  even  plainer.  The  arts,  to  them,  con 
stituted  a  sort  of  school  for  the  psyche ;  their  aim  was 
to  discipline  and  mellow  the  spirit.  But  to  Huneker 
their  one  aim  was  always  to  make  the  spirit  glad — 
to  set  it,  in  Nietzsche's  phrase,  to  dancing  with  arms 
and  legs.  He  had  absolutely  no  feeling  for  extra- 
aesthetic  valuations.  If  a  work  of  art  that  stood 
before  him  was  honest,  if  it  was  original,  if  it  was. 
beautiful  and  thoroughly  alive,  then  he  was  for  it 
to  his  last  corpuscle.  What  if  it  violated  all  the 
accepted  canons?  Then  let  the  accepted  canons  go 
hang!  What  if  it  lacked  all  purpose  to  improve  and 
lift  up?  Then  so  much  the  better!  What  if  it 
shocked  all  right-feeling  men,  and  made  them  blush 


HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY  73 

and  tremble?     Then  damn  all  men  of  right  feeling 
forevermore. 

With  this  ethical  atheism,  so  strange  in  the 
United  States  -and  so  abhorrent  to  most  Americans, 
there  went  something  that  was  probably  also  part 
of  the  loot  of  Paris:  an  insatiable  curiosity  about 
the  artist  as  man.  This  curiosity  was  responsible 
for  two  of  Huneker's  salient  characters:  his  habit  of 
mixing  even  the  most  serious  criticism  with  cynical 
and  often  scandalous  gossip,  and  his  pervasive 
foreignness.  I  believe  that  it  is  almost  literally 
true  to  say  that  he  could  never  quite  make 
up  his  mind  about  a  new  symphony  until  he  had  seen 
the  composer's  mistress,  or  at  all  events  a  good 
photograph  of  her.  He  thought  of  Wagner,  not 
alone  in  terms  of  melody  and  harmony,  but  also  in 
terms  of  the  Tribschen  idyl  and  the  Bayreuth  tragi 
comedy.  Go  through  his  books  and  you  will  see 
how  often  he  was  fascinated  by  mere  eccentricity  of 
personality.  I  doubt  that  even  Huysmans,  had  he 
been  a  respectable  French  Huguenot,  would  have  in 
terested  him;  certainly  his  enthusiasm  for  Verlaine, 
Villiers  de  1'Isle  Adam  and  other  such  fantastic  fish 
was  centered  upon  the  men  quite  as  much  as  upon  the 
artists.  His  foreignness,  so  often  urged  against  him 
by  defenders  of  the  national  tradition,  was  grounded 
largely  on  the  fact  that  such  eccentric  personalities 
were  rare  in  the  Republic — rare,  and  well  watched 


74  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

by  the  PolizeL  When  one  bobbed  up,  he  was  alert 
at  once — even  though  the  newcomer  was  only  a 
Roosevelt.  The  rest  of  the  American  people  he  dis 
missed  as  a  horde  of  slaves,  goose-steppers,  cads, 
Methodists;  he  could  not  imagine  one  of  them  be-  % 
coming  a  first-rate  artist,  save  by  a  miracle.  Even 
the  American  executant  was  under  his  suspicion,  for 
he  knew  very  well  that  playing  the  fiddle  was  a  great 
deal  more  than  scraping  four  strings  of  copper  and 
catgut  with  a  switch  from  a  horse's  tail.  What  he 
asked  himself  was  how  a  man  could  play  Bach 
decently,  and  then,  after  playing,  go  from  the  hall  to 
a  soda-fountain,  or  a  political  meeting,  or  a  lecture 
at  the  Harvard  Club.  Overseas  there  was  a  better 
air  for  artists,  and  overseas  Huneker  looked  for 
them. 

These  fundamental  theories  of  his,  of  course,  had 
their  defects.  They  were  a  bit  too  simple,  and  often 
very  much  too  hospitable.  Huneker,  clinging  to 
them,  certainly  did  his  share  of  whooping  for  the 
sort  of  revolutionist  who  is  here  to-day  and  gone 
tomorrow;  he  was  fugleman,  in  his  time,  for  more 
than  one  cause  that  was  lost  almost  as  soon  as  it  was 
stated.  More,  his  prejudices  made  him  somewhat 
anaesthetic,  at  times,  to  the  new  men  who  were  not 
brilliant  in  color  but  respectably  drab,  and  who  tried 
to  do  their  work  within  the  law.  Particularly  in 
his  later  years,  when  the  old  gusto  began  to  die  out 


HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY  75 

and  all  that  remained  of  it  was  habit,  he  was  apt  to 
go  chasing  after  strange  birds  and  so  miss  seeing  the 
elephants  go  by.  I  could  put  together  a  very  pretty 
list  of  frauds  that  he  praised.  I  could  concoct 
another  list  of  genuine  arrives  that  he  overlooked. 
But  all  that  is  merely  saying  that  there  were  human 
limits  to  him;  the  professors,  on  their  side,  have 
sinned  far  worse,  and  in  both  directions.  Looking 
back  over  the  whole  of  his  work,  one  must  needs  be 
amazed  by  the  general  soundness  of  his  judgments. 
He  discerned,  in  the  main,  what  was  good  and  he 
described  it  in  terms  that  were  seldom  bettered  after 
ward.  His  successive  heroes,  always  under  fire  when 
he  first  championed  them,  almost  invariably  moved 
to  secure  ground  and  became  solid  men,  challenged 
by  no  one  save  fools — Ibsen,  Nietzsche,  Brahms, 
Strauss,  -Cezanne,  Stirner,  Synge,  the  Russian  com 
posers,  the  Russian  novelists.  He  did  for  this  West 
ern  world  what  Georg  Brandes  was  doing  for 
Continental  Europe — sorting  out  the  new  comers  with 
sharp  eyes,  and  giving  mighty  lifts  to  those  who 
deserved  it.  Brandes  did  it  in  terms  of  the  old 
academic  bombast;  he  was  never  more  the  professor 
than  when  he  was  arguing  for  some  hobgoblin 
of  the  professors.  But  Huneker  did  it  with  verve 
and  grace;  he  made  it,  not  schoolmastering,  but 
a  glorious  deliverance  from  schoolmastering.  As 
I  say,  his  influence  was  enormous.  The  fine  arts, 


76  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

at  his  touch,  shed  all  their  Anglo-American  lugu- 
briousness,  and  became  provocative  and  joyous. 
The  spirit  of  senility  got  out  of  them  and  the  spirit  of 
youth  got  into  them.  His  criticism,  for  all  its  French 
basis,  was  thoroughly  American — vastly  more 
American,  in  fact,  than  the  New  England  ponder 
osity  that  it  displaced.  Though  he  was  an  East 
erner  and  a  cockney  of  the  cockneys,  he  picked  up 
some  of  the  Western  spaciousness  that  showed  itself 
in  Mark  Twain.  And  all  the  young  men  followed 
him. 

A  good  many  of  them,  I  daresay,  followed  him 
so  ardently  that  they  got  a  good  distance  ahead  of 
him,  and  often,  perhaps,  embarrassed  him  by  taking 
his  name  in  vain.  For  all  his  enterprise  and  icono- 
clasm,  indeed,  there  was  not  much  of  the  Berserker 
in  him,  and  his  floutings  of  the  national  aesthetic 
tradition  seldom  took  the  form  of  forthright  chal 
lenges.  Here  the  strange  modesty  that  I  have  men 
tioned  always  stayed  him  as  a  like  weakness  stayed 
Mark  Twain.  He  could  never  quite  rid  himself  of 
the  feeling  that  he  was  no  more  than  an  amateur 
among  the  gaudy  doctors  who  roared  in  the  reviews, 
and  that  it  would  be  unseemly  for  him  to  forget  their 
authority.  I  have  a  notion  that  this  feeling  was 
born  in  the  days  when  he  stood  almost  alone,  with 
the  whole  faculty  grouped  in  a  pained  circle  around 
him.  He  was  then  too  miserable  a  worm  to  be 


HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY  77 

noticed  at  all.    Later  on,  gaining  importance,  he  was 
lectured  somewhat  severely  for  his  violation  of  de 
corum;   in  England  even  Max  Beerbohm  made  an 
idiotic  assault  upon  him.     It  was  the  Germans  and 
the  French,   in  fact,  who  first  praised  him  intelli 
gently — and  these  friends  were  too  far  away  to  help 
a  timorous  man  in  a  row  at  home.     This  sensation 
of  isolation  and  littleness,  I  suppose,  explains  his 
fidelity  to  the  newspapers,  and  the  otherwise  inex 
plicable  joy  that  he  always  took  in  his  forgotten  work 
for  the  Musical  Courier,  in  his  day  a  very  dubious 
journal.     In  such  waters  he  felt  at  ease.     There  he 
could  disport  without  thought  of  the  dignity  of  pub 
lishers   and   the   eagle   eyes   of   campus   reviewers. 
Some  of  the  connections  that  he  formed  were  full  of 
an  ironical  inappropriateness.     His  discomforts  in 
his  Puck  days  showed  themselves  in  the  feebleness 
of  his  work ;  when  he  served  the  Times  he  was  as  well 
placed  as  a  Cabell  at  a  colored  ball.     Perhaps  the 
Sun,  in  the  years  before  it  was  munseyized,  offered 
him  the  best  berth  that  he  ever  had,  save  it  were  his 
old  one  on  Mile.  New  York.     But  whatever  the  flag, 
he  served  it  loyally,  and  got  a  lot  of  fun  out  of  the 
business.     He  liked  the  pressure  of  newspaper  work; 
he  liked  the  associations  that  it  involved,  the  gabble- 
in  the  press-room  of  the  Opera  House,  the  exchanges 
of  news  and  gossip;  above  all,  he  liked  the  relative 
ease  of  the  intellectual  harness.     In  a  newspaper 


78  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

article  he  could  say  whatever  happened  to  pop  into 
his  mind,  and  if  it  looked  thin  the  next  day,  then 
there  was,  after  all,  no  harm  done.  But  when  he  sat 
down  to  write  a  book — or  rather  to  compile  it,  for 
all  of  his  volumes  were  reworked  magazine  (and 
sometimes  newspaper)  articles — he  became  self- 
conscious,  and  so  knew  uneasiness.  The  tightness 
of  his  style,  its  one  salient  defect,  was  probably  the 
result  of  this  weakness.  The  corrected  clippings 
that  constituted  most  of  his  manuscripts  are  so  be- 
laden  with  revisions  and  rerevisions  that  they  are 
almost  indecipherable. 

Thus  the  growth  of  Huneker's  celebrity  in  his  later 
years  filled  him  with  wonder,  and  never  quite  con 
vinced  him.  He  was  certainly  wholly  free  from  any 
desire  to  gather  disciples  about  him  and  found  a 
school.  There  was,  of  course,  some  pride  of  author 
ship  in  him,  and  he  liked  to  know  that  his  books  were 
read  and  admired;  in  particular,  he  was  pleased  by 
their  translation  into  German  and  Czech.  But  it 
seemed  to  me  that  he  shrank  from  the  bellicosity  that 
so  often  got  into  praise  of  them — that  he  disliked 
being  set  up  as  the  opponent  and  superior  of  the 
professors  whom  he  always  vaguely  respected  and 
the  rival  newspaper  critics  whose  friendship  he  es 
teemed  far  above  their  professional  admiration,  or 
even  respect.  I  could  never  draw  him  into  a  dis 
cussion  of  these  rivals,  save  perhaps  a  discussion  of 


HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY  79 

their  historic  feats  at  beer-guzzling.  He  wrote  vastly 
better  than  any  of  them  and  knew  far  more  about  the 
arts  than  most  of  them,  and  he  was  undoubtedly  aware 
of  it  in  his  heart,  but  it  embarrassed  him  to  hear  this 
superiority  put  into  plain  terms.  His  intense 
gregariousness  probably  accounted  for  part  of 
this  reluctance  to  pit  himself  against  them;  he  could 
not  imagine  a  world  without  a  great  deal  of  easy 
comradeship  in  it,  and  much  casual  slapping  of 
backs.  But  under  it  all  was  the  chronic  underes 
timation  of  himself  that  I  have  discussed — his  fear 
that  he  had  spread  himself  over  too  many  arts,  and 
that  his  equipment  was  thus  defective  in  every  one 
of  them.  "Steeplejack"  is  full  of  this  apologetic 
timidity.  In  its  very  title,  as  he  explains  it,  there 
is  a  confession  of  inferiority  that  is  almost  maudlin: 
"Life  has  been  the  Barmecide's  feast  to  me,"  and 
so  on.  In  the  book  itself  he  constantly  takes  refuge 
in  triviality  from  the  harsh  challenges  of  critical  par 
ties,  and  as  constantly  avoids  facts  that  would  shock 
the  Philistines.  One  might  reasonably  assume, 
reading  it  from  end  to  end,  that  his  early  days  in 
Paris  were  spent  in  the  fashion  of  a  Y.  M.  C.  A. 
secretary.  A  few  drinking  bouts,  of  course,  and  a 
love  affair  in  the  manner  of  Dnbuque,  Iowa — but 
where  are  the  wenches? 

More  than  once,  indeed,  the  book  sinks  to  down 
right  equivocation — for  example,  in  the  Roosevelt 


80  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

episodes.  Certainly  no  one  who  knew  Huneker  in 
life  will  ever  argue  seriously  that  he  was  deceived  by 
the  Roosevelt  buncombe,  or  that  his  view  of  life  was 
at  all  comparable  to  that  of  the  great  demagogue. 
He  stood,  in  fact,  at  the  opposite  pole.  He  saw  the 
world,  not  as  a  moral  show,  but  as  a  sort  of  glorified 
Follies.  He  was  absolutely  devoid  of  that  obsession 
with  the  problem  of  conduct  which  was  Roosevelt's 
main  virtue  in  the  eyes  of  a  stupid  and  superstitious 
people.  More,  he  was  wholly  against  Roosevelt  on 
many  concrete  issues — the  race  suicide  banality,  the 
Panama  swindle,  the  war.  He  was  far  too  much  the 
realist  to  believe  in  the  American  case,  either  before 
or  after  1917,  and  the  manner  in  which  it  was  urged, 
by  Roosevelt  and  others,  violated  his  notions  of  truth, 
honor  and  decency.  I  assume  nothing  here;  I 
simply  record  what  he  told  me  himself.  Never 
theless,  the  sheer  notoriety  of  the  Rough  Rider — his 
picturesque  personality  and  talent  as  a  mounte 
bank — had  its  effect  on  Huneker,  and  so  he  was  a  bit 
flattered  when  he  was  summoned  to  Oyster  Bay,  and 
there  accepted  gravely  the  nonsense  that  was  poured 
into  his  ear,  and  even  repeated  some  of  it  without  a 
cackle  in  his  book.  To  say  that  he  actually  believed 
in  it  would  be  to  libel  him.  It  was  precisely  such 
hollow  tosh  that  he  stood  against  in  his  role  of  critic 
of  art  and  life;  it  was  by  exposing  its  hollowness 
that  he  lifted  himself  above  the  general.  The  same 


HUNEKER:  'A  MEMORY  81 

weakness  induced  him  to  accept  membership  in  the 
National  Institute  of  Arts  and  Letters.  The  offer  of 
it  to  a  man  of  his  age  and  attainments,  after  he  had 
been  passed  over  year  after  year  in  favor  of  all  sorts 
of  cheapjack  novelists  and  tenth-rate  compilers  of 
college  textbooks,  was  intrinsically  insulting;  it  was 
almost  as  if  the  Musical  Union  had  offered  to  admit 
a  Brahms.  Bu*  with  the  insult  went  a  certain  gage 
of  respectability,  a  certain  formal  forgiveness  for 
old  frivolities,  a  certain  abatement  of  old  doubts  and 
self -questionings  and  so  Huneker  accepted.  Later 
on,  reviewing  the  episode  in  his  own  mind,  he  found 
it  the  spring  of  doubts  that  were  even  more  uncom 
fortable.  His  last  letter  to  me  was  devoted  to  the 
matter.  He  was  by  then  eager  to  maintain  that  he 
had  got  in  by  a  process  only  partly  under  his  control, 
and  that,  being  in,  he  could  discover  no  decorous  way 
of  getting  out. 

But  perhaps  I  devote  too  much  space  to  the  elements 
in  the  man  that  worked  against  his  own  free  de 
velopment.  They  were,  after  all,  grounded  upon 
qualities  that  are  certainly  not  to  be  deprecated — 
modesty,  good-will  to  his  fellow-men,  a  fine  sense 
of  team-work,  a  distaste  for  acrimonious  and  useless 
strife.  These  qualities  gave  him  great  charm.  He 
was  not  only  humorous;  he  was  also  good-humored; 
even  when  the  crushing  discomforts  of  his  last  ill 
ness  were  upon  him  his  amiability  never  faltered. 


82  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

And  in  addition  to  humor  there  was  wit,  a  far  rarer 
thing.  His  most  casual  talk  was  full  of  this  wit,  and 
it  bathed  everything  that  he  discussed  in  a  new  and 
brilliant  light.  I  have  never  encountered  a  man 
who  was  further  removed  from  dullness;  it  seemed  a 
literal  impossibility  for  him  to  open  his  mouth  with 
out  discharging  some  word  or  phrase  that  arrested  the 
attention  and  stuck  in  the  memory.  And  under  it 
all,  giving  an  extraordinary  quality  to  the  verbal  fire 
works,  there  was  a  solid  and  apparently  illimitable 
learning.  The  man  knew  as  much  as  forty  average 
men,  and  his  knowledge  was  well-ordered  and  in 
stantly  available.  He  had  read  everything  and  had 
seen  everything  and  heard  everything,  and  nothing 
that  he  had  ever  read  or  seen  or  heard  quite  passed 
out  of  his  mind. 

Here,  in  three  words,  was  the  main  virtue  of  his 
criticism — its  gigantic  richness.  It  had  the  dazzling 
charm  of  an  ornate  and  intricate  design,  a  blazing 
fabric  of  fine  silks.  It  was  no  mere  pontifical  state 
ment  of  one  man's  reactions  to  a  set  of  ideas ;  it  was  a 
sort  of  essence  of  the  reactions  of  many  men — of  all 
the  men,  in  fact,  worth  hearing.  Huneker  discarded 
their  scaffolding,  their  ifs  and  whereases,  and  pre 
sented  only  what  was  important  and  arresting  in 
their  conclusions.  It  was  never  a  mere  pastiche:  the 
selection  was  made  delicately,  discreetly,  with  almost 
unerring  taste  and  judgment.  And  in  the  summing 


HUNEKER:  A  MEMORY  83 

up  there  was  always  the  clearest  possible  statement 
of  the  whole  matter.  What  finally  emerged  was  a 
body  of  doctrine  that  came,  I  believe,  very  close 
to  the  truth.  Into  an  assembly  of  national  critics 
who  had  long  wallowed  in  dogmatic  puerilities,  Hun- 
eker  entered  with  a  taste  infinitely  surer  and  more 
civilized,  a  learning  infinitely  greater,  and  an  ad 
dress  infinitely  more  engaging.  No  man  was  less  the 
reformer  by  inclination,  and  yet  he  became  a  re 
former  beyond  compare.  He  emancipated  criticism 
in  America  from  its  old  slavery  to  stupidity,  and 
with  it  he  emancipated  all  the  arts  themselves. 


III.    FOOTNOTE   ON   CRITICISM 

NEARLY  all  the  discussions  of  criticism  that  I 
am  acquainted  with  start  off  with  a  false 
assumption,  to  wit,  that  the  primary  mo 
tive  of  the  critic,  the  impulse  which  makes  a  critic  of 
him  instead  of,  say,  a  politician,  or  a  stockbroker,  is 
pedagogical — that  he  writes  because  he  is  possessed 
by  a  passion  to  advance  the  enlightenment,  to  put 
down  error  and  wrong,  to  disseminate  some  specific 
doctrine:  psychological,  epistemological,  historical, 
or  aesthetic.  This  is  true,  it  seems  to  me,  only  of 
bad  critics,  and  its  degree  of  truth  increases  in  direct 
ratio  to  their  badness.  The  motive  of  the  critic 
who  is  really  worth  reading — the  only  critic  of 
whom,  indeed,  it  may  be  said  truthfully  that  it  is 
at  all  possible  to  read  him,  save  as  an  act  of  mental 
discipline — is  something  quite  different.  That 
motive  is  not  the  motive  of  the  pedagogue,  but  the 
motive  of  the  artist.  It  is  no  more  and  no  less  than 
the  simple  desire  to  function  freely  and  beautifully, 
to  give  outward  and  objective  form  to  ideas  that 
bubble  inwardly  and  have  a  fascinating  lure  in  them, 
to  get  rid  of  them  dramatically  and  make  an  articu- 

84 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  85 

late  noise  in  the  world.  It  was  for  this  reason  that 
Plato  wrote  the  "Republic,"  and  for  this  reason  that 
Beethoven  wrote  the  Ninth  Symphony,  and  it  is  for 
this  reason,  to  drop  a  million  miles,  that  I  am  writ 
ing  the  present  essay.  Everything  else  is  after 
thought,  mock-modesty,  messianic  delusion — in  brief, 
affectation  and  folly.  Is  the  contrary  conception  of 
criticism  widely  cherished?  Is  it  almost  universally 
held  that  the  thing  is  a  brother  to  jurisprudence,  ad 
vertising,  laparotomy,  chautauqua  lecturing  and  the 
art  of  the  schoolmarm?  Then  certainly  the  fact  that 
it  is  so  held  should  be  sufficient  to  set  up  an  over 
whelming  probability  of  its  lack  of  truth  and  sense. 
If  I  speak  with  some  heat,  it  is  as  one  who  has 
suffered.  When,  years  ago,  I  devoted  myself  dili 
gently  to  critical  pieces  upon  the  writings  of  Theo 
dore  Dreiser,  I  found  that  practically  every  one  who 
took  any  notice  of  my  proceedings  at  all  fell  into 
either  one  of  two  assumptions  about  my  underlying 
purpose:  (a)  that  I  had  a  fanatical  devotion  for  Mr. 
Dreiser's  ideas  and  desired  to  propagate  them,  or  (6) 
that  I  was  an  ardent  patriot,  and  yearned  to  lift  up 
American  literature.  Both  assumptions  were  false. 
I  had  then,  and  I  have  now,  very  little  interest  in 
many  of  Mr.  Dreiser's  main  ideas;  when  we  meet, 
in  fact,  we  usually  quarrel  about  them.  And  I  am 
wholly  devoid  of  public  spirit,  and  haven't  the  least 
lust  to  improve  American  literature;  if  it  ever  came 


86  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

to  what  I  regard  as  perfection  my  job  would  be  gone. 
What,  then,  was  my  motive  in  writing  about  Mr. 
Dreiser  so  copiously?  My  motive,  well  known  to 
Mr.  Dreiser  himself  and  to  every  one  else  who  knew, 
me  as  intimately  as  he  did,  was  simply  and  solely  • 
to  sort  out  and  give  coherence  to  the  ideas  of  Mr. 
Mencken,  and  to  put  them  into  suave  and  ingratiat 
ing  terms,  and  to  discharge  them  with  a  flourish, 
and  maybe  with  a  phrase  of  pretty  song,  into  the 
dense  fog  that  blanketed  the  Republic. 

The  critic's  choice  of  criticism  rather  than  of  what 
is  called  creative  writing  is  chiefly  a  matter  of  tem 
perament — perhaps,  more  accurately  of  hormones — 
with  accidents  of  education  and  environment  to  help. 
The  feelings  that  happen  to  be  dominant  in  him  at 
the  moment  the  scribbling  frenzy  seizes  him  are  feel 
ings  inspired,  not  directly  by  life  itself,  but  by  books, 
pictures,  music,  sculpture,  architecture,  religion, 
philosophy — in  brief,  by  some  other  man's  feelings 
about  life.  They  are  thus,  in  a  sense,  secondhand, 
and  it  is  no  wonder  that  creative  artists  so  easily 
fall  into  the  theory  that  they  are  also  second-rate. 
Perhaps  they  usually  are.  If,  indeed,  the  critic  con 
tinues  on  this  plane — if  he  lacks  the  intellectual  agil 
ity  and  enterprise  needed  to  make  the  leap  from  the 
work  of  art  to  the  vast  and  mysterious  complex  of 
phenomena  behind  it — then  they  always  are,  and  he 
remains  no  more  than  a  fugelman  or  policeman  to 


FOOTNOTE  0.\  CRITICISM  87 

his  betters.  But  if  a  genuine  artist  is  concealed 
within  him — if  his  feelings  are  in  any  sense  pro 
found  and  original,  and  his  capacity  for  self-ex 
pression  is  above  the  average  of  educated  men — then 
he  moves  inevitably  from  the  work  of  art  to  life  it 
self,  and  begins  to  take  on  a  dignity  that  he  formerly 
lacked.  It  is  impossible  to  think  of  a  man  of  any 
actual  force  and  originality,  universally  recognized 
as  having  those  qualities,  who  spent  his  whole  life 
appraising  and  describing  the  work  of  other  men. 
Did  Goethe,  or  Carlyle,  or  Matthew  Arnold,  or 
Sainte-Beuve,  or  Macaulay,  or  even,  to  come  down 
a  few  pegs,  Lewes,  or  Lowell,  or  Hazlitt?  Cer 
tainly  not.  The  thing  that  becomes  most  obvious 
about  the  writings  of  all  such  men,  once  they  are  ex 
amined  carefully,  is  that  the  critic  is  always  being 
swallowed  up  by  the  creative  artist — that  what  starts 
out  as  the  review  of  a  book,  or  a  play,  or  other  work 
of  art,  usually  develops  very  quickly  into  an  inde 
pendent  essay  «pon  the  theme  of  that  work  of  art,  or 
upon  some  theme  that  it  suggests — in  a  word,  that 
it  becomes  a  fresh  work  of  art,  and  only  indirectly 
related  to  the  one  that  suggested  it  This  fact,  in 
deed,  is  so  plain  that  it  scarcely  needs  statement 
What  the  pedagogues  always  object  to  in,  for  ex 
ample,  the  Quarterly  reviewers  is  that  they  forgot 
the  books  they  were  supposed  to  review,  and  wrote 
long  papers — often,  in  fact,  small  books — expound- 


88  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

ing  ideas  suggested  (or  not  suggested)  by  the  books 
under  review.  Every  critic  who  is  worth  reading 
falls  inevitably  into  the  same  habit.  He  cannot  stick 
to  his  task:  what  is  before  him  is  always  infinitely 
less  interesting  to  him  than  what  is  within  him.  If 
he  is  genuinely  first-rate — if  what  is  within  him 
stands  the  test  of  type,  and  wins  an  audience,  and 
produces  the  reactions  that  every  artist  craves — then 
he  usually  ends  by  abandoning  the  criticism  of  spe 
cific  works  of  art  altogether,  and  setting  up  shop  as 
a  general  merchant  in  general  ideas,  i.  e.,  as  an  art 
ist  working  in  the  materials  of  life  itself. 

Mere  reviewing,  however  conscientiously  and  com 
petently  it  is  done,  is  plainly  a  much  inferior  busi 
ness.  Like  writing  poetry,  it  is  chiefly  a  function  of 
intellectual  immaturity.  The  young  literatus  just  out 
of  the  university,  having  as  yet  no  capacity  for  grap 
pling  with  the  fundamental  mysteries  of  existence,  is 
put  to  writing  reviews  of  books,  or  plays,  or  music, 
or  painting.  Very  often  he  does  it  extremely  well; 
it  is,  in  fact,  not  hard  to  do  well,  for  even  decayed 
pedagogues  often  do  it,  as  such  graves  of  the  intel 
lect  as  the  New  York  Times  bear  witness.  But  if 
he  continues  to  do  it,  whether  well  or  ill,  it  is  a 
sign  to  all  the  world  that  his  growth  ceased  when 
they  made  him  Artium  JBaccalaureus.  Gradually 
he  becomes,  whether  in  or  out  of  the  academic  grove, 
a  professor,  which  is  to  say,  a  man  devoted  to  dilut- 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  89 

ing  and  retailing  the  ideas  of  his  superiors — not  an 
artist,  not  even  a  bad  artist,  hut  almost  the  antith 
esis  of  an  artist.  He  is  learned,  he  is  sober,  he  is 
painstaking  and  accurate — but  he  is  as  hollow  as  a 
jug.  Nothing  is  in  him  save  the  ghostly  echoes  of 
other  men's  thoughts  and  feelings.  If  he  were  a 
genuine  artist  he  would  have  thoughts  and  feelings 
of  his  own,  and  the  impulse  to  give  them  objective 
form  would  be  irresistible.  An  artist  can  no  more 
withstand  that  impulse  than  a  politician  can  with 
stand  the  temptations  of  a  job.  There  are  no  mute, 
inglorious  Miltons,  save  in  the  hallucinations  of 
poets.  The  one  sound  test  of  a  Milton  is  that  he 
functions  as  a  Milton.  His  difference  from  other 
men  lies  precisely  in  the  superior  vigor  of  his  im 
pulse  to  self-expression,  not  in  the  superior  beauty 
and  loftiness  of  his  ideas.  Other  men,  in  point  of 
fact,  often  have  the  same  ideas,  or  perhaps  even  lof 
tier  ones,  but  they  are  able  to  suppress  them,  usually 
on  grounds  of  decorum,  and  so  they  escape  being  art 
ists,  and  are  respected  by  right-thinking  persons, 
and  die  with  money  in  the  bank,  and  are  forgotten 
in  two  weeks. 

Obviously,  the  critic  whose  performance  we  are 
commonly  called  upon  to  investigate  is  a  man  stand 
ing  somewhere  along  the  path  leading  from  the  begin 
ning  that  I  have  described  to  the  goal.  He  has  got 
beyond  being  a  mere  cataloguer  and  valuer  of  other 


90  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

men's  ideas,  but  he  has  not  yet  become  an  autono 
mous  artist — he  is  not  yet  ready  to  challenge  atten 
tion  with  his  own  ideas  alone.  But  it  is  plain  that 
his  motion,  in  so  far  as  he  is  moving  at  all,  must  be 
in  the  direction  of  that  autonomy — that  is,  unless 
one  imagines  him  sliding  backward  into  senile  infan 
tilism:  a  spectacle  not  unknown  to  literary  pathol 
ogy,  but  too  pathetic  to  be  discussed  here.  Bear 
this  motion  in  mind,  and  the  true  nature  of  his  aims 
and  purposes  becomes  clear;  more,  the  incurable  fal 
sity  of  the  aims  and  purposes  usually  credited  to  him 
becomes  equally  clear.  He  is  not  actually  trying  to 
perform  an  impossible  act  of  arctic  justice  upon  the 
artist  whose  work  gives  him  a  text.  He  is  not  trying 
with  mathematical  passion  to  find  out  exactly  what 
was  in  that  artist's  mind  at  the  moment  of  creation, 
and  to  display  it  precisely  and  in  an  ecstasy  of  appre 
ciation.  He  is  not  trying  to  bring  the  work  discussed 
into  accord  with  some  transient  theory  of  aesthetics,  or 
ethics,  or  truth,  or  to  determine  its  degree  of  depar 
ture  from  that  theory.  He  is  not  trying  to  lift  up 
the  fine  arts,  or  to  defend  democracy  against  sense, 
or  to  promote  happiness  at  the  domestic  hearth,  or 
to  convert  sophomores  into  right-thinkers,  or  to  serve 
God.  He  is  not  trying  to  fit  a  group  of  novel  phe 
nomena  into  the  orderly  process  of  history.  He  is  not 
even  trying  to  discharge  the  catalytic  office  that  I 
myself,  in  a  romantic  moment,  once  sought  to  force 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  91 

upon  him.  He  is,  first  and  last,  simply  trying  to 
express  himself.  He  is  trying  to  arrest  and  chal 
lenge  a  sufficient  body  of  readers,  to  make  them  pay 
attention  to  him,  to  impress  them  with  the  charm 
and  novelty  of  his  ideas,  to  provoke  them  into  an 
agreeable  (or  shocked)  awareness  of  him,  and  he  is 
trying  to  achieve  thereby  for  his  own  inner  ego  the 
grateful  feeling  of  a  function  performed,  a  tension 
relieved,  a  katharsis  attained  which  Wagner  achieved 
when  he  wrote  "Die  Walkiire,"  and  a  hen  achieves 
every  time  she  lays  an  egg. 

Joseph  Conrad  is  moved  by  that  necessity  to  write 
romances;  Bach  was  moved  to  write  music;  poets 
are  moved  to  write  poetry;  critics  are  moved  to  write 
criticism.  The  form  is  nothing ;  the  only  important 
thing  is  the  motive  power,  and  it  is  the  same  in  all 
cases.  It  is  the  pressing  yearning  of  every  man 
who  has  ideas  in  him  to  empty  them  upon  the  world, 
to  hammer  them  into  plausible  and  ingratiating 
shapes,  to  compel  the  attention  and  respect  of  his 
equals,  to  lord  it  over  his  inferiors.  So  seen,  the 
critic  becomes  a  far  more  transparent  and  agreeable 
fellow  than  ever  he  was  in  the  discourses  of  the  psy 
chologists  who  sought  to  make  him  a  mere  appraiser 
in  an  intellectual  customs  house,  a  gauger  in  a 
distillery  of  the  spirit,  a  just  and  infallible  judge 
upon  the  cosmic  bench.  Such  offices,  in  point  of 
fact,  never  fit  him.  He  always  bulges  over  their  con- 


92  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

fines.  So  labelled  and  estimated,  it  inevitably  turns 
out  that  the  specific  critic  under  examination  is  a 
very  bad  one,  or  no  critic  at  all.  But  when  he  ii 
thought  of,  not  as  pedagogue,  but  as  artist,  then  he 
begins  to  take  on  reality,  and,  what  is  more,  dignity. 
Carlyle  was  surely  no  just  and  infallible  judge;  on 
the  contrary,  he  was  full  of  prejudices,  biles, 
naivetes,  humors.  Yet  he  is  read,  consulted,  at 
tended  to.  Macaulay  was  unfair,  inaccurate,  fanci 
ful,  lyrical — yet  his  essays  live.  Arnold  had  his 
faults  too,  and  so  did  Sainte-Beauve,  and  so  did 
Goethe,  and  so  did  many  another  of  that  line — and 
yet  they  are  remembered  to-day,  and  all  the  learned 
and  conscientious  critics  of  their  time,  laboriously 
concerned  with  the  precise  intent  of  the  artists  under 
review,  and  passionately  determined  to  set  it  forth 
with  god-like  care  and  to  relate  it  exactly  to  this  or 
that  great  stream  of  ideas — all  these  pedants  are 
forgotten.  What  saved  Carlyle,  Macaulay  and  com 
pany  is  as  plain  as  day.  They  were  first-rate  art 
ists.  They  could  make  the  thing  charming,  and 
that  is  always  a  million  times  more  important  than 
making  it  true. 

Truth,  indeed,  is  something  that  is  believed  in 
completely  only  by  persons  who  have  never  tried 
personally  to  pursue  it  to  its  fastnesses  and  grab 
it  by  the  tail.  It  is  the  adoration  of  second-rate  men 
— men  who  always  receive  it  at  second-hand.  Peda- 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  93 

gogues  believe  in  immutable  truths  and  spend  their 
lives  trying  to  determine  them  and  propagate  them; 
the  intellectual  progress  of  man  consists  largely  of  a 
concerted  effort  to  block  and  destroy  their  enterprise. 
Nine  times  out  of  ten,  in  the  arts  as  in  life,  there  is 
actually  no  truth  to  be  discovered ;  there  is  only  error 
to  be  exposed.  In  whole  departments  of  human  in 
quiry  it  seems  to  me  quite  unlikely  that  the  truth 
ever  will  be  discovered.  Nevertheless,  the  rubber- 
stamp  thinking  of  the  world  always  makes  the  assump 
tion  that  the  exposure  of  an  error  is  identical  with 
the  discovery  of  the  truth — that  error  and  truth 
are  simple  opposites.  They  are  nothing  of  the  sort. 
What  the  world  turns  to,  when  it  has  been  cured  of 
one  error,  is  usually  simply  another  error,  and  maybe 
one  worse  than  the  first  one.  This  is  the  whole  his 
tory  of  the  intellect  in  brief.  The  average  man  of 
to-day  does  not  believe  in  precisely  the  same  imbe 
cilities  that  the  Greek  of  the  fourth  century  before 
Christ  believed  in,  but  the  things  that  he  does  be 
lieve  in  are  often  quite  as  idiotic.  Perhaps  this 
statement  is  a  bit  too  sweeping.  There  is,  year  by 
year,  a  gradual  accumulation  of  what  may  be  called, 
provisionally,  truths — there  is  a  slow  accretion  of 
ideas  that  somehow  manage  to  meet  all  practicable 
human  tests,  and  so  survive.  But  even  so,  it  is  risky 
to  call  them  absolute  truths*  All  that  one  may  safely 
say  of  them  is  that  no  one,  as  yet,  has  demonstrated 


94  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

that  they  are  errors.  Soon  or  late,  if  experience 
teaches  us  anything,  they  are  likely  to  succumb  too. 
The  profoundest  truths  of  the  Middle  Ages  are  now 
laughed  at  by  schoolboys.  The  profoundest  truths 
of  democracy  will  be  laughed  at,  a  few  centuries 
hence,  even  by  school-teachers. 

In  the  department  of  aesthetics,  wherein  critics 
mainly  disport  themselves,  it  is  almost  impossible  to 
think  of  a  so-called  truth  that  shows  any  sign  of  be 
ing  permanently  true.  The  most  profound  of  prin 
ciples  begins  to  fade  and  quiver  almost  as  soon  as 
it  is  stated.  But  the  work  of  art,  as  opposed  to  the 
theory  behind  it,  has  a  longer  life,  particularly  if 
that  theory  be  obscure  and  questionable,  and  so  can 
not  be  determined  accurately.  "Hamlet,"  the  Mona 
Lisa,  "Faust,"  "Dixie,"  "Parsifal,"  "Mother  Goose," 
"Annabel  Lee,"  "Huckleberry  Finn" — these  things, 
so  baffling  to  pedagogy,  so  contumacious  to  the  cate 
gories,  so  mysterious  in  purpose  and  utility — these 
things  live.  And  why?  Because  there  is  in  them 
the  flavor  of  salient,  novel  and  attractive  personal 
ity,  because  the  quality  that  shines  from  them  is  not 
that  of  correct  demeanor  but  that  of  creative  passion, 
because  they  pulse  and  breathe  and  speak,  because 
they  are  genuine  works  of  art.  So  with  criticism. 
Let  us  forget  all  the  heavy  effort  to  make  a  science  of 
it;  it  is  a  fine  art,  or  nothing.  If  the  critic,  retir 
ing  to  his  cell  to  concoct  his  treatise  upon  a  book  or 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  95 

play  or  what-not,  produces  a  piece  of  writing  that 
shows  sound  structure,  and  brilliant  color,  and  the 
flash  of  new  and  persuasive  ideas,  and  civilized  man 
ners,  and  the  charm  of  an  uncommon  personality  in 
free  function,  then  he  has  given  something  to  the 
world  that  is  worth  having,  and  sufficiently  justified 
his  existence.  Is  Carlyle's  "Frederick"  true?  Who 
cares?  As  well  ask  if  the  Parthenon  is  true,  or  the 
G  Minor  Symphony,  or  "Wiener  Blur."  Let  the 
critic  who  is  an  artist  leave  such  necropsies  to  pro 
fessors  of  aesthetics,  who  can  no  more  determine  the 
truth  than  he  can,  and  will  infallibly  make  it  un 
pleasant  and  a  bore. 

It  is,  of  course,  not  easy  to  practice  this  absten 
tion.  Two  forces,  one  within  and  one  without,  tend 
to  bring  even  a  Hazlitt  or  a  Huneker  under  the  cam 
pus  pump.  One  is  the  almost  universal  human  sus 
ceptibility  to  messianic  delusions — the  irresistible 
tendency  of  practically  every  man,  once  he  finds 
a  crowd  in  front  of  him,  to  strut  and  roll  his  eyes. 
The  other  is  the  public  demand,  born  of  such  long 
familiarity  with  pedagogical  criticism  that  no  other 
kind  is  readily  conceivable,  that  the  critic  teach 
something  as  well  as  say  something — in  the  popular 
phrase,  that  he  be  constructive.  '  Both  operate  pow 
erfully  against  his  free  functioning,  and  especially 
the  former.  He  finds  it  hard  to  resist  the  flattery  of 
his  customers,  however  little  he  may  actually  esteem 


96  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

it.  If  he  knows  anything  at  all,  he  knows  that  his 
following,  like  that  of  every  other  artist  in  ideas, 
is  chiefly  made  up  of  the  congenitally  subaltern  type 
of  man  and  woman — natural  converts,  lodge  joiners, 
me-toos,  stragglers  after  circus  parades.  It  is  pre 
cious  seldom  that  he  ever  gets  a  positive  idea  out  of 
them;  what  he  usually  gets  is  mere  unintelligent  ratifi 
cation.  But  this  troop,  despite  its  obvious  failings, 
corrupts  him  in  various  ways.  For  one  thing,  it 
enormously  reenforces  his  belief  in  his  own  i' 
and  so  tends  to  make  him  stiff  and  dogmatic—in 
brief,  precisely  everything  that  he  ought  not  to  be. 
And  for  another  thing,  it  tends  to  make  him  (by  a  cu 
rious  contradiction)  a  bit  pliant  and  politk:  he  be 
gins  to  estimate  new  ideas,  not  in  proportion  as  they 
are  amusing  or  beautiful,  but  in  proportion  as  they 
are  likely  to  please.  So  beset,  front  and  rear,  he 
sometimes  sinks  supinely  to  the  level  of  a  professor, 
and  his  subsequent  proceedings  are  interesting  no 
more.  The  true  aim  of  a  critic  is  certainly  not  to 
make  converts.  He  must  know  that  very  few  of  the 
persons  who  are  susceptible  to  conversion  are 
worth  converting.  Their  minds  are  intrinsically 
flabby  and  parasitical,  and  it  is  certainly  not  sound 
sport  to  agitate  minds  of  that  sort.  Moreover,  the 
critic  must  always  harbor  a  grave  doubt  about  most 
of  the  ideas  that  they  lap  up  so  greedily — it  must  oc 
cur  to  him  not  infrequently,  in  the  silent  watches  of 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  97 

the  night,  that  much  that  he  writes  is  sheer  buncombe. 
A*  I  have  said,  I  can't  imagine  any  idea — that  is,  in 
the  domain  of  aesthetics — that  is  palpably  and  incon- 
trovertibly  sound.  All  that  I  am  familiar  with,  and 
in  particular  all  that  I  announce  most  vociferously, 
•66P1  to  me  to  contain  a  core  of  quite  obvious  non 
sense.  I  thus  try  to  avoid  cherishing  them  too  lov 
ingly,  and  it  always  gives  me  a  shiver  to  see  any  one 
else  gobble  them  at  one  gulp.  Criticism,  at  bottom, 
is  indistinguishable  from  skepticism.  Both  launch 
themselves,  the  one  by  aesthetic  presentations  and  the 
other  by  logical  presentations,  at  the  common  human 
tendency  to  accept  whatever  is  approved,  to  take  in 
ideas  ready-made,  to  be  responsive  to  mere  rhetoric 
and  gesticulation.  A  critic  who  believes  in  anything 
absolutely  is  bound  to  that  something  quite  as  help 
lessly  as  a  Christian  is  bound  to  the  Freudian  gar 
bage  in  the  Book  of  Revelation.  To  that  extent,  at 
all  events,  he  is  unfree  and  unintelligent,  and  hence 
a  bad  critic. 

The  demand  for  "constructive"  criticism  is  based 
upon  the  same  false  assumption  that  immutable 
truths  exist  in  the  arts,  and  that  the  artist  will  be 
improved  by  being  made  aware  of  them.  This 
notion,  whatever  the  form  it  takes,  is  always  absurd 
— as  much  so,  indeed,  as  its  brother  delusion  that 
the  critic,  to  be  competent,  must  be  a  practitioner  of 
the  specific  art  he  ventures  to  deal  with,  i.  e.,  that 


98  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

a  doctor,  to  cure  a  belly-ache,  must  have  a  belly-ache. 
As  practically  encountered,  it  is  disingenuous  as  well 
as  absurd,  for  it  comes  chiefly  from  bad  artists  who 
tire  of  serving  as  performing  monkeys,  and  crave 
the  greater  ease  and  safety  of  sophomores  in  class. 
They  demand  to  be  taught  in  order  to  avoid  being 
knocked  about.  In  their  demand  is  the  theory  that 
instruction,  if  they  could  get  it,  would  profit  them — 
that  they  are  capable  of  doing  better  work  than  they 
do.  As  a  practical  matter,  I  doubt  that  this  is  ever 
true.  Bad  poets  never  actually  grow  any  better; 
they  invariably  grow  worse  and  worse.  In  all  his 
tory  there  has  never  been,  to  my  knowledge,  a  single 
practitioner  of  any  art  who,  as  a  result  of  "construc 
tive"  criticism,  improved  his  work.  The  curse  of 
all  the  arts,  indeed,  is  the  fact  that  they  are  constantly 
invaded  by  persons  who  are  not  artists  at  all — per 
sons  whose  yearning  to  express  their  ideas  and  feel 
ings  is  unaccompanied  by  the  slightest  capacity  for 
charming  expression — in  brief,  persons  with  abso 
lutely  nothing  to  say.  This  is  particularly  true  of 
the  art  of  letters,  which  interposes  very  few  techni 
cal  obstacles  to  the  vanity  and  garrulity  of  such  in 
vaders.  Any  effort  to  teach  them  to  write  better 
is  an  effort  wasted,  as  every  editor  discovers  for  him 
self;  they  are  as  incapable  of  it  as  they  are  of  jump 
ing  over  the  moon.  The  only  sort  of  criticism  that 
can  deal  with  them  to  any  profit  is  the  sort  that  em- 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  99 

ploys  them  frankly  as  laboratory  animals.  It  can 
not  cure  them,  but  it  can  at  least  make  an  amusing 
and  perhaps  edifying  show  of  them.  It  is  idle  to 
argue  that  the  good  in  them  is  thus  destroyed  with  the 
bad.  The  simple  answer  is  that  there  is  no  good  in 
them.  Suppose  Poe  had  wasted  his  time  trying  to 
dredge  good  work  out  of  Rufus  Dawes,  author  of 
"Geraldine."  He  would  have  failed  miserably — 
and  spoiled  a  capital  essay,  still  diverting  after  three- 
quarters  of  a  century.  Suppose  Beethoven,  dealing 
with  Gottfried  Weber,  had  tried  laboriously  to  make 
an  intelligent  music  critic  of  him.  How  much  more 
apt,  useful  and  durable  the  simple  note:  "Arch-ass! 
Double-barrelled  ass!"  Here  was  absolutely  sound 
criticism.  Here  was  a  judgment  wholly  beyond  chal 
lenge.  Moreover,  here  was  a  small  but  perfect 
work  of  art. 

Upon  the  low  practical  value  of  so-called  con 
structive  criticism  I  can  offer  testimony  out  of  my 
own  experience.  My  books  are  commonly  reviewed 
at  great  length,  and  many  critics  devote  themselves 
to  pointing  out  what  they  conceive  to  be  my  errors, 
both  of  fact  and  of  taste.  Well,  I  cannot  recall  a 
case  in  which  any  suggestion  offered  by  a  construc 
tive  critic  has  helped  me  in  the  slightest,  or  even  ac 
tively  interested  me.  Every  such  wet-nurse  of  letters 
has  sought  fatuously  to  make  me  write  in  a  way  dif 
fering  from  that  in  which  the  Lord  God  Almighty, 


100  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
in  His  infinite  wisdom,  impels  me  to  write — that  is, 
to  make  me  write  stuff  which,  coming  from  me,  would 
'be  as  false  as  an  appearance  of  decency  in  a  Con 
gressman.  All  the  benefits  I  have  ever  got  from  the 
critics  of  my  work  have  come  from  the  destructive 
variety.  A  hearty  slating  always  does  me  good, 
particularly  if  it  be  well  written.  It  begins  by  enlist 
ing  my  professional  respect;  it  ends  by  making  me 
examine  my  ideas  coldly  in  the  privacy  of  my 
chamber.  Not,  of  course,  that  I  usually  revise  them, 
but  I  at  least  examine  them.  If  I  decide  to  hold 
fast  to  them,  they  are  all  the  dearer  to  me  thereafter, 
and  I  expound  them  with  a  new  passion  and  plau 
sibility.  If,  on  the  contrary,  I  discern  holes  in  them, 
I  shelve  them  in  a  pianissimo  manner,  and  set  about 
hatching  new  ones  to  take  their  place.  But  construc 
tive  criticism  irritates  me.  I  do  not  object  to  being 
denounced,  but  I  can't  abide  being  school-mastered, 
especially  by  men  I  regard  as  imbeciles. 

I  find,  as  a  practicing  critic,  that  very  few  men 
who  write  books  are  even  as  tolerant  as  I  am — that 
most  of  them,  soon  or  late,  show  signs  of  extreme 
discomfort  under  criticism,  however  polite  its  terms. 
Perhaps  this  is  why  enduring  friendships  between 
authors  and  critics  are  so  rare.  All  artists,  of 
course,  dislike  one  another  more  or  less,  but  that 
dislike  seldom  rises  to  implacable  enmity,  save 
between  opera  singer  and  opera  singer,  and  creative 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRIf^KM:        "101 

author  and  critic.  Even  when  the  latter  two  keep  up 
an  outward  show  of  good-will,  there  is  always  bitter 
antagonism  under  the  surface.  Part  of  it,  I  daresay, 
arises  out  of  the  impossible  demands  of  the  critic, 
particularly  if  he  be  tinged  with  the  constructive 
madness.  Having  favored  an  author  with  his  good 
opinion,  he  expects  the  poor  fellow  to  live  up  to  that 
good  opinion  without  the  slightest  compromise  or 
faltering,  and  this  is  commonly  beyond  human 
power.  He  feels  that  any  let-down  compromises 
him — that  his  hero  is  stabbing  him  in  the  back,  and 
making  him  ridiculous — and  this  feeling  rasps  his 
vanity.  The  most  bitter  of  all  literary  quarrels 
are  those  between  critics  and  creative  artists,  and 
most  of  them  arise  in  just  this  way.  As  for  the 
creative  artist,  he  on  his  part  naturally  resents  the 
critic's  air  of  pedagogical  superiority  and  he  resents 
it  especially  when  he  has  an  uneasy  feeling  that  he 
has  fallen  short  of  his  best  work,  and  that  the  dis 
content  of  the  critic  is  thus  justified.  Injustice  is 
relatively  easy  to  bear;  what  stings  is  justice. 
Under  it  all,  of  course,  lurks  the  fact  that  I  began 
with:  the  fact  that  the  critic  is  himself  an  artist,  and 
that  his  creative  impulse,  soon  or  late,  is  bound  to 
make  him  neglect  the  punctilio.  When  he  sits  down 
to  compose  his  criticism,  his  artist  ceases  to  be  a 
friend,  and  becomes  mere  raw  material  for  his  work 
of  art.  It  is  my  experience  that  artists  invariably 


P'RPJt/DICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

resent  this  cavalier  use  of  them.  They  are  pleased 
so  long  as  the  critic  confines  himself  to  the  modest 
business  of  interpreting  them — preferably  in  terms 
of  their  own  estimate  of  themselves — but  the  moment 
he  proceeds  to  adorn  their  theme  with  variations 
of  his  own,  the  moment  he  brings  new  ideas  to  the 
enterprise  and  begins  contrasting  them  with  their 
ideas,  that  moment  they  grow  restive.  It  is  pre 
cisely  at  this  point,  of  course,  that  criticism  becomes 
genuine  criticism;  before  that  it  was  mere  reviewing. 
When  a  critic  passes  it  he  loses  his  friends.  By 
becoming  an  artist,  he  becomes  the  foe  of  all  other 
artists. 

But  the  transformation,  I  believe,  has  good  effects 
upon  him:  it  makes  him  a  better  critic.  Too  much 
Gemiltlichkeit  is  as  fatal  to  criticism  as  it  would  be 
to  surgery  or  politics.  When  it  rages  unimpeded 
it  leads  inevitably  either  to  a  dull  professorial  stick 
ing  on  of  meaningless  labels  or  to  log-rolling,  and 
often  it  leads  to  both.  One  of  the  most  hopeful 
symptoms  of  the  new  Aufklarung  in  the  Republic  is 
the  revival  of  acrimony  in  criticism — the  renaissance 
of  the  doctrine  that  aesthetic  matters  are  important, 
and  that  it  is  worth  the  while  of  a  healthy  male  to 
take  them  seriously,  as  he  takes  business,  sport  and 
amour.  In  the  days  when  American  literature  was 
showing  its  first  vigorous  growth,  the  native  criticism 
was  extraordinarily  violent  and  even  vicious;  in  the 


FOOTNOTE  ON  CRITICISM  103 

days  when  American  literature  swooned  upon  the 
tomb  of  the  Puritan  Kultur  it  became  flaccid  and 
childish.  The  typical  critic  of  the  first  era  was 
Poe,  as  the  typical  critic  of  the  second  was  Howells. 
Poe  carried  on  his  critical  jehads  with  such  ferocity 
that  he  often  got  into  law-suits,  and  sometimes  ran 
no  little  risk  of  having  his  head  cracked.  He  re 
garded  literary  questions  as  exigent  and  momentous. 
The  lofty  aloofness  of  the  don  was  simply  not  in 
him.  When  he  encountered  a  book  that  seemed  to 
him  to  be  bad,  he  attacked  it  almost  as  sharply  as 
a  Chamber  of  Commerce  would  attack  a  fanatic 
preaching  free  speech,  or  the  corporation  of  Trinity 
Church  would  attack  Christ.  His  opponents  replied 
in  the  same  Berserker  manner.  Much  of  Poe's 
surviving  ill-fame,  as  a  drunkard  and  dead-beat, 
is  due  to  their  inordinate  denunciations  of  him. 
They  were  not  content  to  refute  him;  they  constantly 
tried  to  dispose  of  him  altogether.  The  very  fero 
city  of  that  ancient  row  shows  that  the  native  litera 
ture,  in  those  days,  was  in  a  healthy  state.  Books 
of  genuine  value  were  produced.  Literature  always" 
thrives  best,  in  fact,  in  an  atmosphere  of  hearty 
strife.  Poe,  surrounded  by  admiring  professors, 
never  challenged,  never  aroused  to  the  emotions  of 
revolt,  would  probably  have  written  poetry  indis 
tinguishable  from  the  hollow  stuff  of,  say,  Prof. 
Dr.  George  E.  Woodberry.  It  took  the  persistent 


104         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
(and  often  grossly  unfair  and  dishonorable)  oppo 
sition  of  Griswold  et  al  to  stimulate  him  to  his  high 
est  endeavors.     He  needed  friends,  true  enough,  but 
he  also  needed  enemies. 

To-day,  for  the  first  time  in  years,  there  is  strife  in 
American  criticism,  and  the  Paul  Elmer  Mores  and 
Hamilton  Wright  Mabies  are  no  longer  able  to  purr 
in  peace.  The  instant  they  fall  into  stiff  professorial 
attitudes  they  are  challenged,  and  often  with  anything 
but  urbanity.  The  ex  cathedra  manner  thus  passes 
out,  and  free  discussion  comes  in.  Heretics  lay  on 
boldly,  and  the  professors  are  forced  to  make  some 
defense.  Often,  going  further,  they  attempt  counter 
attacks.  Ears  are  bitten  off.  Noses  are  bloodied. 
There  are  wallops  both  above  and  below  the  belt. 
I  am,  I  need  not  say,  no  believer  in  any  magical 
merit  in  debate,  no  matter  how  free  it  may  be.  It 
certainly  does  not  necessarily  establish  the  truth; 
both  sides,  in  fact,  may  be  wrong,  and  they  often 
are.  But  it  at  least  accomplishes  two  important 
effects.  On  the  one  hand,  it  exposes  all  the  cruder 
fallacies  to  hostile  examination,  and  so  disposes  of 
many  of  them.  And  on  the  other  hand,  it  melodrama- 
tizes  the  business  of  the  critic,  and  so  convinces 
thousands  of  bystanders,  otherwise  quite  inert,  that 
criticism  is  an  amusing  and  instructive  art,  and  that 
the  problems  it  deals  with  are  important.  What  men 
will  fight  for  seems  to  be  worth  looking  into. 


IV.   DAS   KAPITAL 


AFTER  a  hearty  dinner  of  potage  Creole, 
planked  Chesapeake  shad,  Guinea  hen 
en  casserole  and  some  respectable  salad, 
with  two  or  three  cocktails  made  of  two-thirds  gin, 
one-third  Martini-Rossi  vermouth  and  a  dash  of  ab 
sinthe  as  Vorspiel  and  a  bottle  of  Ruhlander  1903  to 
wash  it  down,  the  following  thought  often  bubbles  up 
from  my  subconscious:  that  many  of  the  acknowl 
edged  evils  of  capitalism,  now  so  horribly  visible  in 
the  world,  are  not  due  primarily  to  capitalism  itself 
but  rather  to  democracy,  that  universal  murrain  of 
Christendom. 

What  I  mean,  in  brief,  is  that  capitalism,  under 
democracy,  is  constantly  unde'r  hostile  pressure  and 
often  has  its  back  to  the  wall,  and  that  its  barbaric 
manners  and  morals,  at  least  in  large  part,  are  due 
to  that  fact — that  they  are,  in  essence,  precisely  the 
same  manners  and  morals  that  are  displayed  by  any 
other  creature  or  institution  so  beset.  Necessity  is 
not  only  the  mother  of  invention;  it  is  also  the  mother 

106 


106  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
of  every  imaginable  excess  and  infamy.  A  woman 
defending  her  child  is  notoriously  willing  to  go  to 
lengths  that  even  a  Turk  or  an  agent  of  the  Depart 
ment  of  Justice  would  regard  as  inordinate,  and  so 
is  a  Presbyterian  defending  his  hell,  or  a  soldier 
defending  his  fatherland,  or  a  banker  defending  his 
gold.  It  is  only  when  there  is  no  danger  that  the 
average  human  being  is  honorable,  just  as  it  is  only 
when  there  £5  danger  that  he  is  virtuous.  He  would 
commit  adultery  every  day  if  it  were  safe,  and  he 
would  commit  murder  every  day  if  it  were  necessary. 
The  essential  thing  about  democracy,  as  every  one 
must  know,  is  that  it  is  a  device  for  strengthening  and 
heartening  the  have-nots  in  their  eternal  war  upon 
the  haves.  That  war,  as  every  one  knows  again,  has 
its  psychological  springs  in  envy  pure  and  simple — 
envy  of  the  more  fortunate  man's  greater  wealth,  the 
superior  pulchritude  of  his  wife  or  wives,  his  larger 
mobility  and  freedom,  his  more  protean  capacity 
for  and  command  of  happiness — in  brief,  his  better 
chance  to  lead  a  bearable  life  in  this  worst  of  pos 
sible  worlds.  It  follows  that  under  democracy, 
which  gives  a  false  power  and  importance  to  the 
have-nots  by  counting  every  one  of  them  as  the  legal 
equal  of  George  Washington  or  Beethoven,  the  process 
of  government  consists  largely,  and  sometimes  almost 
exclusively,  of  efforts  to  spoil  that  advantage  ar 
tificially.  Trust-busting,  free  silver,  direct  elections, 


DAS  KAP1TAL  107 

Prohibition,  government  ownership  and  all  the  other 
varieties  of  American  political  quackery  are  but 
symptoms  of  the  same  general  rage.  It  is  the  rage 
of  the  have-not  against  the  have,  of  the  farmer  who 
must  drink  hard  cider  and  forty-rod  against  the  city 
man  who  may  drink  Burgundy  and  Scotch,  of  the 
poor  fellow  who  must  stay  at  home  looking  at  a  wife 
who  regards  the  lip-stick  as  lewd  and  lascivious 
against  the  lucky  fellow  who  may  go  to  Atlantic  City 
or  Palm  Beach  and  ride  up  and  down  in  a  wheel 
chair  with  a  girl  who  knows  how  to  make  up  and  has 
put  away  the  fear  of  God. 

The  ignobler  sort  of  men,  of  course,  are  too  stupid 
to  understand  various  rare  and  exhilarating  sorts 
of  superiority,  and  so  they  do  not  envy  the  happiness 
that  goes  with  them.  If  they  could  enter  into  the 
mind  of  a  Wagner  or  a  Brahms  and  begin  to  com 
prehend  the  stupendous  joy  that  such  a  man  gets  out 
of  the  practice  of  his  art,  they  would  pass  laws 
against  it  and  make  a  criminal  of  him,  as  they  have 
already  made  criminals,  in  the  United  States,  of  the 
man  with  a  civilized  taste  for  wines,  the  man  so  at 
tractive  to  women  that  he  can  get  all  the  wives  he 
wants  without  having  to  marry  them,  and  the  man 
who  can  make  pictures  like  Felicien  Rops,  or  books 
like  Flaubert,  Zola,  Dreiser,  Cabell  or  Rabelais. 
Wagner  and  Brahms  escape,  and  their  arts  with  them, 
because  the  great  masses  of  men  cannot  understand 


108         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

the  sort  of  thing  they  try  to  do,  and  hence  do  not  envy 
the  man  who  does  it  well,  and  gets  joy  out  of  it.  It 
is  much  different  with,  say,  Rops.  Every  American 
Congressman,  as  a  small  boy,  covered  the  fence  of 
the  Sunday-School  yard  with  pictures  in  the  manner 
of  Rops.  What  he  now  remembers  of  the  business 
is  that  the  pictures  were  denounced  by  the  super 
intendent,  and  that  he  was  cowhided  for  making 
them;  what  he  hears  about  Rops,  when  he  hears  at 
all,  is  that  the  fellow  is  vastly  esteemed,  and  hence 
probably  full  of  a  smug  aesthetic  satisfaction.  In 
consequence,  it  is  unlawful  in  the  United  States  to 
transmit  the  principal  pictures  of  Rops  by  mail,  or, 
indeed,  "to  have  and  possess"  them.  The  man  who 
owns  them  must  conceal  them  from  the  okhrdna  of 
the  Department  of  Justice  just  as  carefully  as  he 
conceals  the  wines  and  whiskeys  in  his  cellar,  or  the 
poor  working  girl  he  transports  from  the  heat  and 
noise  of  New  York  to  the  salubrious  calm  of  the 
Jersey  coast,  or  his  hand-tooled  library  set  of  the 
"Contes  Drolatiques,"  or  his  precious  first  edition  of 
"Jurgen." 

But,  as  I  say,  the  democratic  pressure  in  such 
directions  is  relatively  feeble,  for  there  are  whole 
categories  of  more  or  less  aesthetic  superiority  and 
happiness  that  the  democrat  cannot  understand  at 
all,  and  is  in  consequence  virtually  unaware  of.  It 
is  far  different  with  the  varieties  of  superiority  and 


DAS  KAP1TAL  109 

happiness  that  are  the  functions  of  mere  money. 
Here  the  democrat  is  extraordinarily  alert  and 
appreciative.  He  can  not  only  imagine  hundreds 
of  ways  of  getting  happiness  out  of  money;  he 
devotes  almost  die  whole  of  his  intellectual  activity, 
such  as  it  is,  to  imagining  them,  and  he  seldom  if  ever 
imagines  anything  else.  Even  his  sexual  fancies 
translate  themselves  instantly  into  concepts  of  dollars 
and  cents;  the  thing  that  confines  him  so  miserably 
to  one  wife,  and  to  one,  alas,  so  unappetizing  and 
depressing,  is  simply  his  lack  of  money;  if  he 
only  had  the  wealth  of  Diamond  Jim  Brady  he 
too  would  be  the  glittering  Don  Giovanni  that  Jim 
was.  All  the  known  species  of  democratic  political 
theory  are  grounded  firmly  upon  this  doctrine  that 
money,  and  money  only,  makes  the  mare  go — that 
all  the  conceivable  varieties  of  happiness  are 
possible  to  the  man  who  has  it.  Even  the  Socialists, 
who  profess  to  scorn  money,  really  worship  it. 
Socialism,  indeed,  is  simply  the  degenerate  cap 
italism  of  bankrupt  capitalists.  Its  one  genuine 
object  is  to  get  more  money  for  its  professors;  all 
its  other  grandiloquent  objects  are  afterthoughts,  and 
most  of  them  are  bogus.  The  democrats  of  other 
schools  pursue  the  same  single  aim — and  adorn  it 
with  false  pretenses  even  more  transparent.  In  the 
United  States  the  average  democrat,  I  suppose,  would 
say  that  the  establishment  and  safeguarding  of  liberty 


110          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

was  the  chief  purpose  of  democracy.  The  theory  is 
mere  wind.  The  average  American  democrat  really 
cares  nothing  whatever  for  liberty,  and  is  always 
willing  to  sell  it  for  money.  What  he  actually 
wants,  and  strives  to  get  by  his  politics,  is  more 
money.  His  fundamental  political  ideas  nearly 
all  contemplate  restraints  and  raids  upon  capital, 
even  when  they  appear  superficially  to  be  quite 
free  from  economic  flavor,  and  most  of  the  political 
banshees  and  bugaboos  that  alternately  freeze  and 
boil  his  blood  have  dollar  marks  written  all  over 
them.  There  is  no  need  to  marshal  a  long  catalogue 
of  examples  from  English  and  American  political 
history:  I  simply  defy  any  critic  of  my  doctrine  to 
find  a  single  issue  of  genuine  appeal  to  the  populace, 
at  any  time  during  the  past  century,  that  did  not  in 
volve  a  more  or  less  obvious  scheme  for  looting  a 
minority — the  slave-owners,  Wall  Street,  the  rail 
roads,  the  dukes,  or  some  other  group  representing 
capital.  Even  the  most  affecting  idealism  of  the 
plain  people  has  a  thrifty  basis.  In  the  United 
States,  during  the  early  part  of  the  late  war,  they 
were  very  cynical  about  the  Allied  cause;  it  was  not 
until  the  war  orders  of  the  Allies  raised  their  wages 
that  they  began  to  believe  in  the  noble  righteousness 
of  Lloyd-George  and  company.  And  after  Dr. 
Wilson  had  jockeyed  the  United  States  itself  into  the 
war,  and  the  cost  of  living  began  to  increase  faster 


DAS  KAPITAL  111 

than  wages,  he  faced  a  hostile  country  until  he 
restored  altruism  by  his  wholesale  bribery  of  la 
bor. 

It  is  my  contention  that  the  constant  exposure 
of  capitalism  to  such  primitive  lusts  and  forays  is 
what  makes  it  so  lamentably  extortionate  and  uncon 
scionable  in  democratic  countries,  and  particularly 
in  the  United  States.  The  capitalist,  warned  by  ex 
perience,  collars  all  he  can  while  the  getting  is  good, 
regardless  of  the  commonest  honesty  and  decorum, 
because  he  is  haunted  by  an  uneasy  feeling  that  his 
season  will  not  be  long.  His  dominating  passion  is 
to  pile  up  the  largest  amount  of  capital  possible,  by 
fair  means  or  foul,  so  that  he  will  have  ample  reserves 
when  the  next  raid  comes,  and  he  has  to  use  part  of  it 
to  bribe  one  part  of  the  proletariat  against  the  other. 
In  the  long  run,  of  course,  he  always  wins,  for  this 
bribery  is  invariably  feasible;  in  the  United  States, 
indeed,  every  fresh  struggle  leaves  capital 
more  secure  than  it  was  before.  But  though  the 
capitalist  thus  has  no  reason  to  fear  actual  defeat 
and  disaster,  he  is  well  aware  that  victory  is 
always  expensive,  and  his  natural  prudence  causes 
him  to  discount  the  cost  in  advance,  even  when  he  has 
planned  to  shift  it  to  other  shoulders.  I  point,  in 
example,  to  the  manner  in  which  capital  dealt  with 
the  discharged  American  soldiers  after  the 
war.  Its  first  effort  was  to  cajole  them  into  its  ser- 


112         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

vice,  as  they  had  been  cajoled  by  the  politicians 
after  the  Civil  War.  To  this  end,  it  borrowed  the 
machine  erected  by  Dr.  Wilson  and  his  agents  for 
debauching  the  booboisie  during  the  actual  war,  and 
by  the  skillful  use  of  that  machine  it  quickly  organ 
ized  the  late  conscripts  into  the  American  Legion, 
alarmed  them  with  lies  about  a  Bolshevist  scheme  to 
make  slaves  of  them  (i.  e.,  to  cut  off  forever  their 
hope  of  getting  money),  and  put  them  to  clubbing 
and  butchering  their  fellow  proletarians.  The  bus 
iness  done,  the  conscripts  found  themselves 
out  of  jobs:  their  gallant  war  upon  Bolshe 
vism  had  brought  down  wages,  and  paralysed  or 
ganized  labor.  They  now  demanded  pay  for  their 
work,  and  capital  had  to  meet  the  demand.  It  did  so 
by  promising  them  a  bonus — d.  e.,  loot — out  of  the 
public  treasury,  and  by  straightway  inventing  a 
scheme  whereby  the  ultimate  cost  would  fall  chiefly 
upon  poor  folk. 

Throughout  the  war,  indeed,  capital  exhibited  an 
inordinately  extortionate  spirit,  and  thereby  re 
vealed  its  underlying  dread.  First  it  robbed  the 
Allies  in  the  manner  of  bootleggers  looting  a  country 
distillery,  then  it  swindled  the  plain  people  at  home 
by  first  bribing  them  with  huge  wages  and  then 
taking  away  all  their  profits  and  therewith  all  their 
savings,  and  then  it  seized  and  made  away  with  the 
impounded  property  of  enemy  nationals — property 


DAS  KAPITAL  113 

theoretically  held  in  trust  for  them,  and  the  booty,  if 
it  was  booty  at  all,  of  the  whole  American  people. 
This  triple  burglary  was  excessive,  to  be  sure,  but 
who  will  say  that  it  was  not  prudent?  The  capitalists 
of  the  Republic  are  efficient,  and  have  foresight. 
They  saw  some  lean  and  hazardous  years  ahead,  with 
all  sorts  of  raids  threatening.  They  took  measures 
to  fortify  their  position.  To-day  their  prevision  is 
their  salvation.  They  are  losing  some  of  their  ac 
cumulation,  of  course,  but  they  still  have  enough 
left  to  finance  an  effective  defense  of  the  remainder. 
There  was  never  any  time  in  the  history  of  any 
country,  indeed,  when  capital  was  so  securely  in 
trenched  as  it  is  to-day  in  the  United  States.  It  has 
divided  the  proletariat  into  two  bitterly  hostile 
halves,  it  has  battered  and  crippled  unionism  almost 
beyond  recognition,  it  has  a  firm  grip  upon  all  three 
arms  of  the  government,  and  it  controls  practically 
every  agency  for  the  influencing  of  public  opinion, 
from  the  press  to  the  church.  Had  it  been  less  pru 
dent  when  times  were  good,  and  put  its  trust  in  God 
alone,  the  I.  W.  W.  would  have  rushed  it  at  the  end 
of  the  war. 

As  I  say,  I  often  entertain  the  thought  that  it 
would  be  better,  in  the  long  run,  to  make  terms  with 
a  power  so  hard  to  resist,  and  thereby  purge  it  of  its 
present  compulsory  criminality.  I  doubt  that  cap 
italists,  as  a  class,  are  naturally  vicious;  certainly 


114          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

they  are  no  more  vicious  than,  say,  lawyers  and  poli 
ticians — upon  whom  the  plain  people  commonly 
rely,  in  their  innocence,  to  save  them.  I  have  known 
a  good  many  men  of  great  wealth  in  my  time,  and 
most  of  them  have  been  men  showing  all  the  custom 
ary  decencies.  They  deplore  the  harsh  necessities 
of  their  profession  quite  as  honestly  as  a  judge  de 
plores  the  harsh  necessities  of  his.  You  will  never 
convince  me  that  the  average  American  banker, 
during  the  war,  got  anything  properly  describable  as 
professional  satisfaction  out  of  selling  Liberty  bonds 
at  100  to  poor  stenographers,  and  then  buying  them 
back  at  83.  He  knew  that  he'd  need  his  usurious 
profit  against  the  blue  day  when  the  boys  came  home, 
and  so  he  took  it,  but  it  would  have  given  him  ten 
times  as  much  pleasure  if  it  had  come  from  the  re 
luctant  gizzard  of  some  other  banker.  In  brief, 
there  is  a  pride  of  workmanship  in  capitalists,  just 
as  there  is  in  all  other  men  above  the  general.  They 
get  the  same  spiritual  lift  out  of  their  sordid  swin 
dles  that  Swinburne  got  out  of  composing  his  boozy 
dithyrambs,  and  I  often  incline  to  think  that  it  is 
quite  as  worthy  of  respect.  In  a  democratic  society, 
with  the  arts  adjourned  and  the  sciences  mere  concu 
bines  of  money,  it  is  chiefly  the  capitalists,  in  fact, 
who  keep  pride  of  workmanship  alive.  In  their 
principal  enemies,  the  trades-unionists,  it  is  almost 
Lextinet.  Unionism  seldom,  if  ever,  uses  such  power 


DAS  KAPITAL  115 

as  it  has  to  insure  better  work;  almost  always  it  de 
votes  a  large  part  of  that  power  to  safeguarding  bad 
work.  A  union  man  who,  moved  by  professional 
pride,  put  any  extra  effort  into  his  job  would  prob 
ably  be  punished  by  his  union  as  a  sort  of  scab.  But 
a  capitalist  is  still  able  to  cherish  some  of  the  old 
spirit  of  die  guildsman.  If  he  invents  a  new  device 
for  corralling  the  money  of  those  who  have  earned  it, 
or  operates  an  old  device  in  some  new  and  brilliant 
way,  he  is  honored  and  envied  by  his  colleagues. 
The  late  J.  Pierpont  Morgan  was  thus  honored  and 
envied,  not  because  he  made  more  actual  money  than 
any  other  capitalist  of  his  time — in  point  of  fact,  he 
made  a  good  deal  less  than  some,  and  his  own  son-,  a 
much  inferior  man,  has  made  more  since  his  death 
than  he  did  during  his  whole  life — but  because  his 
operations  showed  originality,  daring,  coolness,  and 
imagination — in  brief,  because  he  was  a  great  vir 
tuoso  in  the  art  he  practiced. 

What  I  contend  is  that  the  democratic  system  of 
government  would  be  saner  and  more  effective  in  its 
dealings  with  capital  if  it  ceased  to  regard  all  capi 
talists  as  criminals  ipso  facto,  and  thereby  ceased  to 
make  their  armed  pursuit  the  chief  end  of  practical 
politics — if  it  gave  over  this  vain  effort  to  put  them 
down  by  force,  and  tried  to  bring  them  to  decency  by 
giving  greater  play  and  confidence  to  the  pride  of 
workmanship  that  I  have  described.  They  would  be 


116  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
less  ferocious  and  immoderate,  I  think,  if  they  were 
treated  with  less  hostility,  and  put  more  upon  their 
conscience  and  honor.  No  doubt  the  average  demo 
crat,  brought  up  upon  the  prevailing  superstitions  and 
prejudices  of  his  faith,  will  deny  at  once  that  they 
are  actually  capable  of  conscience  or  honor,  or  that 
they  have  any  recognizable  pride  of  workmanship. 
Well,  let  him  deny  it.  He  will  make  precisely  the 
same  denial  with  respect  to  kings.  Nevertheless,  it 
must  be  plain  to  every  one  who  has  read  history  at 
tentively  that  the  majority  of  the  kings  of  the  past, 
even  when  no  criticism  could  reach  them,  showed  a 
very  great  pride  of  workmanship — that  they  tried  to 
be  good  kings  even  when  it  was  easier  to  be  bad  ones. 
The  same  thing  is  true  of  the  majority  of  capitalists 
— the  kings  of  to-day.  They  are  criminals  by  our 
democratic  law,  but  their  criminality  is  chiefly  arti 
ficial  and  theoretical,  like  that  of  a  bootlegger.  If 
it  were  abolished  by  repealing  the  laws  which  create 
it — if  it  became  legally  just  as  virtuous  to  organize 
and  operate  a  great  industrial  corporation,  or  to  com 
bine  and  rehabilitate  railroads,  or  to  finance  any 
other  such  transactions  as  it  is  to  organize  a  trades- 
union,  a  Bauverein,  or  a  lodge  of  Odd  Fellows — then 
I  believe  that  capitalists  would  forthwith  abandon  a 
great  deal  of  the  scoundrelism  which  now  marks 
their  proceedings,  that  they  could  be  trusted  to  police 
their  order  at  least  as  vigilantly  as  physicians  or 


DAS  KAPITAL  117 

lawyers  police  theirs,  and  that  the  activities  of  those 
members  of  it  who  showed  no  pride  of  workmanship 
at  all  would  be  effectively  curbed. 

The  legal  war  upon  them  under  democracy  is 
grounded  upon  the  false  assumption  that  it  would  be 
possible,  given  laws  enough,  to  get  rid  of  them  alto 
gether.  The  Ur- Americanos,  who  set  the  tone  of  our 
legislation  and  provided  examples  for  the  legislation 
of  every  other  democratic  country,  were  chiefly  what 
would  be  called  Bolsheviki  to-day.  They  dreamed 
of  a  republic  wholly  purged  of  capitalism — and  taxes. 
They  were  have-nots  of  the  most  romantic  and  ambi 
tious  variety,  and  saw  Utopia  before  them.  Every 
man  of  their  time  who  thought  capitalistically — that 
is,  who  believed  that  things  consumed  had  to  be  paid 
for — was  a  target  for  their  revilings:  for  example, 
Alexander  Hamilton.  But  they  were  wrong,  and 
their  modern  heirs  and  assigns  are  wrong  just  as 
surely.  That  wrongness  of  theirs,  in  truth,  has 
grown  enormously  since  it  was  launched,  for  the  early 
Americans  were  a  pastoral  people,  and  could  get 
along  with  very  little  capital,  whereas  the  Americans 
of  to-day  lead  a  very  complex  life,  and  need  the  aid 
of  capitalism  at  almost  every  breath  they  draw. 
Most  of  their  primary  necessities — the  railroad,  the 
steamship  lines,  the  trolley  car,  the  telephone,  re 
frigerated  meats,  machine-made  clothes,  phonograph 
records,  moving-picture  shows,  and  so  on — are 


118  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
wholly  unthinkable  save  as  the  products  of  capital  in 
large  aggregations.  No  man  of  to-day  can  imagine 
doing  without  them,  or  getting  them  without  the  aid 
of  such  aggregations.  The  most  even  the  wildest 
Socialist  can  think  of  is  to  take  the  capital  away  from 
the  capitalists  who  now  have  it  and  hand  it  over  to 
the  state — in  other  words,  to  politicians.  A  century 
ago  there  were  still  plenty  of  men  who,  like  Thoreau, 
proposed  to  abolish  it  altogether.  But  now  even  the 
radicals  of  the  extreme  left  assume  as  a  matter  of 
course  that  capital  is  indispensible,  and  that  abolish 
ing  it  or  dispersing  it  would  cause  a  collapse  of  civili 
zation. 

What  ails  democracy,  in  the  economic  department, 
is  that  it  proceeds  upon  the  assumption  that  the  con 
trary  is  true — that  it  seeks  to  bring  capitalism  to  a 
state  of  innocuous  virtue  by  grossly  exaggerating  its 
viciousness — that  it  penalizes  ignorantly  what  is,  at 
bottom,  a  perfectly  natural  and  legitimate  aspiration, 
and  one  necessary  to  society.  Such  penalizings,  I 
need  not  argue,  never  destroy  the  impulse  itself; 
surely  the  American  experience  with  Prohibition 
should  make  even  a  democrat  aware  of  that.  What 
they  do  is  simply  to  make  it  evasive,  intemperate,  and 
relentless.  If  it  were  legally  as  hazardous  in  the 
United  States  to  play  a  string  quartette  as  it  is  to 
build  up  a  great  bank  or  industrial  enterprise — if 
the  performers,  struggling  with  their  parts,  had  to 


DAS  KAPITAL  119 

watch  the  windows  in  constant  fear  that  a  Bryan,  a 
Roosevelt,  a  Lloyd-George  or  some  other  such  preda 
tory  mountebank  would  break  in,  armed  with  a  club 
and  followed  by  a  rabble — then  string  quartette 
players  would  become  as  devious  and  anti-social  in 
their  ways  as  the  average  American  capitalist  is  to 
day,  and  when,  by  a  process  of  setting  one  part  of 
the  mob  against  the  rest,  they  managed  to  get  a  chance 
to  play  quartettes  in  temporary  peace,  despite  the 
general  mob  hatred  of  them,  they  would  forget  the 
lovely  music  of  Haydn  and  Mozart  altogether,  and 
devote  their  whole  time  to  a  fortissimo  playing  of  the 
worst  musical  felonies  of  Schonberg,  Ravel  and 
Strawinsky. 


V.     AD    IMAGINEM    DEI    CREAVIT 
ILLUM 


The  Life  of  Man 

THE  old  anthropomorphic  notion  that  the  life 
of  the  whole  universe  centers  in  the  life  of 
man — that  human  existence  is  the  supreme 
expression  of  the  cosmic  process — this  notion  seems  to 
be  on  its  way  toward  the  Sheol  of  exploded  delusions. 
The  fact  is  that  the  life  of  man,  as  it  is  more  and  more 
studied  in  the  light  of  general  biology,  appears  to  be 
more  and  more  empty  of  significance.  Once  appar 
ently  the  chief  concern  and  masterpiece  of  the  gods, 
the  human  race  now  begins  to  bear  the  aspect  of 
an  accidental  by-product  of  their  vast,  inscrutable 
and  probably  nonsensical  operations.  A  blacksmith 
making  a  horse-shoe  produces  something  almost  as 
brilliant  and  mysterious — the  shower  of  sparks.  But 
his  eye  and  thought,  as  we  know,  are  not  on  the 
sparks,  but  on  the  horse-shoe.  The  sparks,  indeed, 

constitute  a  sort  of  disease  of  the  horse-shoe;  their 

120 


AD  IMAGINEM  DEI  CREAVIT  ILLUM  121 
existence  depends  upon  a  wasting  of  its  tissue.  In  the 
same  way,  perhaps,  man  is  a  local  disease  of  the  cos 
mos — a  kind  of  pestiferous  eczema  or  urethritis. 
There  are,  of  course,  different  grades  of  eczema,  and 
so  are  there  different  grades  of  men.  No  d&ubt  a 
cosmos  afflicted  with  nothing  worse  than  an  infection 
of  Beethovens  would  not  think  it  worth  while  to  send 
for  the  doctor.  But  a  cosmos  infested  by  prohi 
bitionists,  Socialists,  Scotsmen  and  stockbrokers  must 
suffer  damnably.  No  wonder  the  sun  is  so  hot  and 
the  moon  is  so  diabetically  green! 


The  Anthropomorphic  Delusion 

As  I  say,  the  anthropomorphic  theory  of  the 
world  is  made  absurd  by  modern  biology — but 
that  is  not  saying,  of  course,  that  it  will  ever  be 
abandoned  by  the  generality  of  men.  To  the  con 
trary,  they  will  cherish  it  in  proportion  as  it  becomes 
more  and  more  dubious.  To-day,  indeed,  it  is  cher 
ished  as  it  was  never  cherished  in  the  Ages  of  Faith, 
when  the  doctrine  that  man  was  god-like  was  at  least 
ameliorated  by  the  doctrine  that  woman  was  vile. 
What  else  is  behind  charity,  philanthropy,  pacifism, 
Socialism,  the  uplift,  all  the  rest  of  the  current 
sentimentalities?  One  and  all,  these  sentimen 
talities  are  based  upon  the  notion  that  man  is  a 


122          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

glorious  and  ineffable  animal,  and  that  his  continued 
existence  in  the  world  ought  to  be  facilitated  and  in 
sured.  But  this  notion  is  obviously  full  of  fatuity. 
As  animals  go,  even  in  so  limited  a  space  as  our 
world,  man  is  botched  and  ridiculous.  Few  other 
brutes  are  so  stupid  or  so  cowardly.  The  common 
est  yellow  dog  has  far  sharper  senses  and  is  infinitely 
more  courageous,  not  to  say  more  honest  and  depend 
able.  The  ants  and  the  bees  are,  in  many  ways,  far 
more  intelligent  and  ingenious;  they  manage  their 
government  with  vastly  less  quarreling,  wastefulness 
and  imbecility.  The  lion  is  more  beautiful,  more 
dignified,  more  majestic.  The  antelope  is  swifter 
and  more  graceful.  The  ordinary  house-cat  is 
cleaner.  The  horse,  foamed  by  labor,  has  a  better 
smell.  The  gorilla  is  kinder  to  his  children  and 
more  faithful  to  his  wife.  The  ox  and  the  ass  are 
more  industrious  and  serene.  But  most  of  all,  man 
is  deficient  in  courage,  perhaps  the  noblest  quality 
of  them  all.  He  is  not  only  mortally  afraid  of  all 
other  animals  of  his  own  weight  or  half  his  weight — 
save  a  few  that  he  has  debased  by  artificial  inbreed 
ing — ;  he  is  even  mortally  afraid  of  his  own  kind — 
and  not  only  of  their  fists  and  hooves,  but  even  of 
their  sniggers. 

No  other  animal  is  so  defectively  adapted  to  its 
environment.  The  human  infant,  as  it  comes  into 
the  world,  is  so  puny  that  if  it  were  neglected  for 


AD  1M  AGIN  EM  DEI  CREAV1T  ILLUM     123 

two  days  running  it  would  infallibly  perish,  and  this 
congenital  infirmity,  though  more  or  less  concealed 
later  on,  persists  until  death.  Man  is  ill  far  more 
than  any  other  animal,  both  in  his  savage  state  and 
under  civilization.  He  has  more  different  diseases 
and  he  suffers  from  them  oftener.  He  is  easier 
exhausted  and  injured.  He  dies  more  horribly  and 
usually  sooner.  Practically  all  the  other  higher 
vertebrates,  at  least  in  their  wild  state,  live  longer 
and  retain  their  faculties  to  a  greater  age.  Here 
even  the  anthropoid  apes  are  far  beyond  their  human 
cousins.  An  orang-outang  marries  at  the  age  of 
seven  or  eight,  raises  a  family  of  seventy  or  eighty 
children,  and  is  still  as  hale  and  hearty  at  eighty  as 
a  European  at  forty-five. 

All  the  errors  and  incompetencies  of  the  Creator 
reach  their  climax  in  man.  As  a  piece  of  mechanism 
he  is  the  worst  of  them  all;  put  beside  him,  even  a 
salmon  or  a  staphylococcus  is  a  sound  and  efficient 
machine.  He  has  the  worst  kidneys  known  to  com 
parative  zoology,  and  the  worst  lungs,  and  the  worst 
heart.  His  eye,  considering  the  work  it  is  called 
upon  to  do,  is  less  efficient  than  the  eye  of  an  earth 
worm;  an  optical  instrument  maker  who  made  an 
instrument  so  clumsy  would  be  mobbed  by  his 
customers.  Alone  of  all  animals,  terrestrial,  celes 
tial  or  marine,  man  is  unfit  by  nature  to  go  abroad  in 
the  world  he  inhabits.  He  must  clothe  himself,  pro- 


124  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
tect  himself,  swathe  himself,  armor  himself.  He  is 
eternally  in  the  position  of  a  turtle  born  without  a 
shell,  a  dog  without  hair,  a  fish  without  fins.  Lack 
ing  his  heavy  and  cumbersome  trappings,  he  is  de 
fenseless  even  against  flies.  As  God  made  him  he 
hasn't  even  a  tail  to  switch  them  off. 

I  now  come  to  man's  one  point  of  unquestionable 
natural  superiority:  he  has  a  soul.  This  is  what 
sets  him  off  from  all  other  animals,  and  makes  him, 
in  a  way,  their  master.  The  exact  nature  of  that 
soul  has  been  in  dispute  for  thousands  of  years,  but 
regarding  its  function  it  is  possible  to  speak  with 
some  authority.  That  function  is  to  bring  man  into 
direct  contact  with  God,  to  make  him  aware  of  God, 
above  all,  to  make  him  resemble  God.  Well,  con 
sider  the  colossal  failure  of  the  device!  If  we  as 
sume  thatjnan  actually  does  resemble  God,  then  we 
are  forced  into  the  impossible  theory  that  God  is  a 
coward,  an  idiot  and  a  bounder.  And  if  we  assume 
that  man,  after  all  these  years,  does  not  resemble 
God,  then  it  appears  at  once  that  the  human  soul  is 
as  inefficient  a  machine  as  the  human  liver  or  tonsil, 
and  that  man  would  probably  be  better  off,  as  the 
chimpanzee  undoubtedly  is  better  off,  without  it. 

Such,  indeed,  is  the  case.  The  only  practical 
effect  of  having  a  soul  is  that  it  fills  man  with  an 
thropomorphic  and  anthropocentric  vanities — in 
brief  with  cocky  and  preposterous  superstitions. 


AD  1M  AGIN  EM  DEI  CREAVIT  ILLUM  125 
He  struts  and  plumes  himself  because  he  has  this 
soul — and  overlooks  the  fact  that  it  doesn't  work. 
Thus  he  is  the  supreme  clown  of  creation,  the 
reductio  ad  absurdum  of  animated  nature.  He  is 
like  a  cow  who  believed  that  she  could  jump  over 
the  moon,  and  ordered  her  whole  life  upon  that 
theory.  He  is  like  a  bullfrog  boasting  eternally  of 
fighting  lions,  of  flying  over  the  Matterhorn,  and 
of  swimming  the  Hellespont.  And  yet  this  is  the 
poor  brute  we  are  asked  to  venerate  as  a  gem  in  the 
forehead  of  the  cosmos!  This  is  the  worm  we  are 
asked  to  defend  as  God's  favorite  on  earth,  with  all 
its  millions  of  braver,  nobler,  decenter  quadrupeds — 
its  superb  lions,  its  lithe  and  gallant  leopards,  its 
imperial  elephants,  its  honest  dogs,  its  courageous 
rats!  This  is  the  insect  wre  are  besought,  at  infinite 
trouble,  labor  and  expense,  to  reproduce! 


Meditation  on  Meditation. 

Man's  capacity  for  abstract  thought,  which  most 
other  mammals  seem  to  lack,  has  undoubtedly  given 
him  his  present  mastery  of  the  land  surface  of  the 
earth — a  mastery  disputed  only  by  several  hundred 
species  of  microscopic  organisms.  It  is  responsible 
for  his  feeling  of  superiority,  and  under  that  feeling 
there  is  undoubtedly  a  certain  measure  of  reality,  at 


126          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

least  within  narrow  limits.  But  what  is  too  often 
overlooked  is  that  the  capacity  to  perform  an  act  is  by 
no  means  synonymous  with  its  salubrious  exercise. 
The  simple  fact  is  that  most  of  man's  thinking  is 
stupid,  pointless,  and  injurious  to  him.  Of  all 
animals,  indeed,  he  seems  the  least  capable  of  arriv 
ing  at  accurate  judgments  in  the  matters  that  most 
desperately  affect  his  welfare.  Try  to  imagine  a  rat, 
in  the  realm  of  rat  ideas,  arriving  at  a  notion  as  vio 
lently  in  contempt  of  plausibility  as  the  notion,  say, 
of  Swedenborgianism,  or  that  of  homeopathy,  or  that 
of  infant  damnation,  or  that  of  mental  telepathy. 
Try  to  think  of  a  congregation  of  educated  rats 
gravely  listening  to  such  disgusting  intellectual  rub 
bish  as  was  in  the  public  bulls  of  Dr.  Woodrow 
Wilson.  Man's  natural  instinct,  in  fact,  is  never 
toward  what  is  sound  and  true;  it  is  toward  what  is 
specious  and  false.  Let  any  great  nation  of  modern 
times  be  confronted  by  two  conflicting  propositions, 
the  one  grounded  upon  the  utmost  probability  and 
reasonableness  and  the  other  upon  the  most  glaring 
error,  and  it  will  almost  invariably  embrace  the 
latter.  It  is  so  in  politics,  which  consists  wholly  of 
a  succession  of  unintelligent  crazes,  many  of  them 
so  idiotic  that  they  exist  only  as  battle-cries  and 
shibboleths  and  are  not  reducible  to  logical  statement 
at  all.  It  is  so  in  religion,  which,  like  poetry,  is 
simply  a  concerted  effort  to  deny  the  most  obvious 


• 

— - 1 ,,  -— —      _^Hr 

*/<* 


AD  1MAGINEM  DEI  CREAVIT  ILLUM  127 
realities.  It  is  so  in  nearly  every  field  of  thought. 
The  ideas  that  conquer  the  race  most  rapidly  and 
arouse  the  wildest  enthusiasm  and  are  held  most 
tenaciously  are  precisely  the  ideas  that  are  most  in 
sane.  This  has  been  true  since  the  first  "advanced" 
gorilla  put  on  underwear,  cultivated  a  frown  and 
began  his  first  lecture  tour  in  the  first  chautauqua, 
and  it  will  be  so  until  the  high  gods,  tired  of  the 
farce  at  last,  obliterate  the  race  with  one  great,  final 
blast  of  fire,  mustard  gas  and  streptococci. 

No  doubt  the  imagination  of  man  is  to  blame  for 
this  singular  weakness.  That  imagination,  I  dare 
say,  is  what  gave  him  his  first  lift  above  his  fellow 
primates.  It  enabled  him  to  visualize  a  condition  of 
existence  better  than  that  he  wras  experiencing,  and 
bit  by  bit  he  was  able  to  give  the  picture  a  certain 
crude  reality.  Even  to-day  he  keeps  on  going  ahead 
in  the  same  manner.  That  is,  he  thinks  of  some 
thing  that  he  would  like  to  be  or  to  get,  something 
appreciably  better  than  what  he  is  or  has,  and  then, 
by  the  laborious,  costly  method  of  trial  and  error,  he 
gradually  moves  toward  it.  In  the  process  he  is 
often  severely  punished  for  his  discontent  with  God's 
ordinances.  He  mashes  his  thumb,  he  skins  his  shin; 
he  stumbles  and  falls;  the  prize  he  reaches  out  for 
blows  up  in  his  hands.  But  bit  by  bit  he  moves  on, 
or,  at  all  events,  his  heirs  and  assigns  move  on.  Bit 
by  bit  he  smooths  the  path  beneath  his  remaining 


128          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

leg,  and  achieves  pretty  toys  for  his  remaining  hand 
to  play  with,  and  accumulates  delights  for  his  remain 
ing  ear  and  eye. 

Alas,  he  is  not  content  with  this  slow  and  san 
guinary  progress!  Always  he  looks  further  and 
further  ahead.  Always  he  imagines  things  just  over 
the  sky-line.  This  body  of  imaginings  constitutes 
his  stock  of  sweet  beliefs,  his  corpus  of  high  faiths 
and  confidences — in  brief,  his  burden  of  errors. 
And  that  burden  of  errors  is  what  distinguishes  man, 
even  above  his  capacity  for  tears,  his  talents  as  a  liar, 
his  excessive  hypocrisy  and  poltroonery,  from  all 
the  other  orders  of  mammalia.  Man  is  the  yokel 
par  excellence,  the  booby  unmatchable,  the  king  dupe 
of  the  cosmos.  He  is  chronically  and  unescapably 
deceived,  not  only  by  the  other  animals  and  by  the 
delusive  face  of  nature  herself,  but  also  and  more 
particularly  by  himself — by  his  incomparable  talent 
for  searching  out  and  embracing  what  is  false,  and 
for  overlooking  and  denying  what  is  true. 

The  capacity  for  discerning  the  essential  truth,  in 
fact,  is  as  rare  among  men  as  it  is  common  among 
crows,  bullfrogs  and  mackerel.  The  man  who  shows 
it  is  a  man  of  quite  extraordinary  quality — perhaps 
even  a  man  downright  diseased.  Exhibit  a  new  truth 
of  any  natural  plausibilty  before  the  great  masses 
of  men,  and  not  one  in  ten  thousand  will  suspect  its 
existence,  and  not  one  in  a  hundred  thousand  will 


AD  IM  AGIN  EM  DEI  CREAV1T  ILLUM  129 
embrace  it  without  a  ferocious  resistance.  All  the 
durable  truths  that  have  come  into  the  world  within 
historic  times  have  been  opposed  as  bitterly  as  if  they 
were  so  many  waves  of  smallpox,  and  every  individ 
ual  who  has  welcomed  and  advocated  them,  abso 
lutely  without  exception,  has  been  denounced  and 
punished  as  an  enemy  of  the  race.  Perhaps  "abso 
lutely  without  exception"  goes  too  far.  I  substitute 
"with  five  or  six  exceptions."  But  who  were  the  five 
or  six  exceptions?  I  leave  you  to  think  of  them; 
myself,  I  can't.  .  .  .  But  I  think  at  once  of  Charles 
Darwin  and  his  associates,  and  of  how  they  were 
reviled  in  their  time.  This  reviling,  of  course,  is 
less  vociferous  than  it  used  to  be,  chiefly  because 
later  victims  are  in  the  arena,  but  the  underlying 
hostility  remains.  Within  the  past  two  years  the 
principal  Great  Thinker  of  Britain,  George  Bernard 
Shaw,  has  denounced  the  hypothesis  of  natural  selec 
tion  to  great  applause,  and  a  three-times  candidate 
for  the  American  Presidency,  William  Jennings 
Bryan,  has  publicly  advocated  prohibiting  the  teach 
ing  of  it  by  law.  The  great  majority  of  Christian 
ecclesiastics  in  both  English-speaking  countries,  and 
with  them  the  great  majority  of  their  catachumens, 
are  still  committed  to  the  doctrine  that  Darwin  was  a 
scoundrel,  and  Herbert  Spencer  another,  and  Huxley 
a  third — and  that  Nietzsche  is  to  the  three  of  them 
what  Beelzebub  himself  is  to  a  trio  of  bad  boys. 


130  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
This  is  the  reaction  of  the  main  body  of  respectable 
folk  in  two  puissant  and  idealistic  Christian  nations  to 
the  men  who  will  live  in  history  as  the  intellectual 
leaders  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  This  is  the  imme 
morial  attitude  of  men  in  the  mass,  and  of  their 
chosen  prophets,  to  whatever  is  honest,  and  important, 
and  most  probably  true. 

But  if  truth  thus  has  hard  sledding,  error  is  given 
a  loving  welcome.  The  man  who  invents  a  new 
imbecility  is  hailed  gladly,  and  bidden  to  make  him 
self  at  home;  he  is,  to  the  great  masses  of  men,  the 
beau  ideal  of  mankind.  Go  back  through  the  history 
of  the  past  thousand  years  and  you  will  find  that  nine- 
tenths  of  the  popular  idols  of  the  world — not  the 
heroes  of  small  sects,  but  the  heroes  of  mankind  in 
the  mass — have  been  merchants  of  palpable  nonsense. 
It  has  been  so  in  politics,  it  has  been  so  in  religion, 
and  it  has  been  so  in  every  other  department  of  human 
thought.  Every  such  hawker  of  the  not-true  has  been 
opposed,  in  his  time,  by  critics  who  denounced  and 
refuted  him;  his  contention  has  been  disposed  of 
immediately  it  was  uttered.  But  on  the  side  of  every 
one  there  has  been  the  titanic  force  of  human  cre 
dulity,  and  it  has  sufficed  in  every  case  to  destroy  his 
foes  and  establish  his  immortality. 


AD  IM  AGIN  EM  DEI  CREAVIT  ILLUM     131 


Man  and  His  Soul 

Of  all  the  unsound  ideas  thus  preached  by  great 
heroes  and  accepted  by  hundreds  of  millions  of  their 
eager  dupes,  probably  the  most  patently  unsound  is 
the  one  that  is  most  widely  held,  to  wit,  the  idea  that 
man  has  an  immortal  soul — that  there  is  a  part  of  him 
too  ethereal  and  too  exquisite  to  die.  Absolutely  the 
only  evidence  supporting  this  astounding  notion  lies 
in  the  hope  that  it  is  true — which  is  precisely  the 
evidence  underlying  the  late  theory  that  the  Great 
War  would  put  an  end  to  war,  and  bring  in  an  era  of 
democracy,  freedom,  and  peace.  But  even  arch 
bishops,  of  course,  are  too  intelligent  to  be  satisfied 
permanently  by  evidence  so  unescapably  dubious; 
in  consequence,  there  have  been  efforts  in  all  ages  to 
give  it  logical  and  evidential  support.  Well,  all  I 
ask  is  that  you  give  some  of  that  corroboration  your 
careful  scrutiny.  Examine,  for  example,  the  proofs 
amassed  by  five  typical  witnesses  in  five  wridely 
separated  ages:  St.  John,  St.  Augustine,  Martin 
Luther,  Emanuel  Swedenborg  and  Sir  Oliver  Lodge. 
Approach  these  proofs  prayerfully,  and  study  them 
well.  Weigh  them  in  the  light  of  the  probabilities, 
the  ordinary  intellectual  decencies.  And  then  ask 


132          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
yourself  if  you  could  imagine  a  mud-turtle  accepting 
them  gravely. 

5 

Coda 

To  sum  up: 

1.  The   cosmos    is   a   gigantic   fly-wheel   making 
10,000  revolutions  a  minute. 

2.  Man  is  a  sick  fly  taking  a  dizzy  ride  on  it. 

3.  Religion  is  the  theory  that  the  wheel  was  de 
signed  and  set  spinning  to  give  him  the  ride. 


i 


VI.    STAR-SPANGLED    MEN 

OPEN  the  memoirs  of  General  Grant,  Volume 
II,  at  the  place  where  he  is  describing  the  sur 
render  of  General  Lee,  and  find  the  following: 


I  was  without  a  sword,  as  I  usually  was  when  on  horse 
back  on  (sic)  the  field,  and  wore  a  soldier's  blouse  for  a 
coat,  with  the  shoulder  straps  of  my  rank  to  indicate  to  the 
army  who  I  was. 

Anno  1865.  I  look  out  of  my  window  and 
observe  an  officer  of  the  United  States  Army  passing 
down  the  street.  Anno  1922.  Like  General  Grant, 
he  is  without  a  sword.  Like  General  Grant,  he  wears 
a  sort  of  soldier's  blouse  for  a  coat.  Like  General 
Grant,  he  employs  shoulder  straps  to  indicate  to  the 
army  who  he  is.  But  there  is  something  more.  On 
the  left  breast  of  this  officer,  apparently  a  major, 
there  blazes  so  brilliant  a  mass  of  color  that,  as  the 
sun  strikes  it  and  the  flash  bangs  my  eyes,  I  wink, 
catch  my  breath  and  sneeze.  There  are  two  long 
strips,  each  starting  at  the  sternum  and  disap 
pearing  into  the  shadows  of  the  axillia — every  hue  in 
the  rainbow,  the  spectroscope,  the  kaleidoscope — 

133 


134  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
imperial  purples,  sforzando  reds,  wild  Irish  greens, 
romantic  blues,  loud  yellows  and  oranges, 
rich  maroons,  sentimental  pinks,  all  the  half-tones 
from  ultra-violet  to  infra-red,  all  the  vibrations  from 
the  impalpable  to  the  unendurable.  A  gallant  Soldat, 
indeed!  How  he  would  shame  a  circus  ticketwagon 
if  he  wore  all  the  medals  and  badges,  the  stars  and 
crosses,  the  pendants  and  lavallieres,  that  go  with, 
those  ribbons!  ...  I  glance  at  his  sleeves.  A 
simple  golden  stripe  on  the  one — six  months  beyond 
the  raging  main.  None  on  the  other — the  Kaiser's 
cannon  missed  him. 

Just  what  all  these  ribbons  signify  I  am  sure  I 
don't  know;  probably  they  belong  to  campaign  medals 
and  tell  the  tale  of  butcheries  in  foreign  and  domestic 
parts — mountains  of  dead  Filipinos,  Mexicans, 
Haitians,  Dominicans,  West  Virginia  miners,  per 
haps  even  Prussians.  But  in  addition  to  campaign 
medals  and  the  Distinguished  Service  Medal  there 
are  now  certainly  enough  foreign  orders  in  the  United 
States  to  give  a  distinct  brilliance  to  the  national 
scene,  viewed,  say,  from  Mars.  The  Frederician 
tradition,  borrowed  by  the  ragged  Continentals  and 
embodied  in  Article  I,  Section  9,  of  the  Constitution, 
lasted  until  1918,  and  then  suddenly  blew  up;  to 
mention  it  to-day  is  a  sort  of  indecorum,  and  to-mor 
row,  no  doubt,  will  be  a  species  of  treason.  Down 
with  Frederick;  up  with  John  Philip  Sousa!  Im- 


STAR-SPANGLED  MEN  135 

agine  what  General  Pershing  would  look  like  at  a 
state  banquet  of  his  favorite  American  order,  the 
Benevolent  and  Protective  one  of  Elks,  in  all  the 
Byzantine  splendor  of  his  casket  of  ribbons,  badges, 
stars,  garters,  sunbursts  and  cockades — the  lordly 
Bath  of  the  grateful  motherland,  with  its  somewhat 
disconcerting  "Ich  dien";  the  gorgeous  tricolor  bal 
drics,  sashes  and  festoons  of  the  Legion  d'Honneur; 
the  grand  cross  of  SS.  Maurizio  e  Lazzaro  of  Italy;  the 
sinister  Danilo  of  Montenegro,  with  its  cabalistic 
monogram  of  Danilo  I  and  its  sinister  hieroglyphics; 
the  breastplate  of  the  Paulownia  of  Japan,  with  its 
rising  sun  of  thirty-two  white  rays,  its  blood-red  heart,  * 
its  background  of  green  leaves  and  its  white  ribbon 
edged  with  red;  the  mystical  St.  Saviour  of  Greece, 
with  its  Greek  motto  and  its  brilliantly  enameled 
figure  of  Christ;  above  all,  the  Croix  de  Guerre  of 
Czecho-Slovakia,  a  new  one  and  hence  not  listed  in  the 
books,  but  surely  no  shrinking  violet!  Alas,  Per 
shing  was  on  the  wrong  side — that  is,  for  one  with  a 
fancy  for  gauds  of  that  sort.  The  most  blinding 
of  all  known  orders  is  the  Medijie  of  Turkey,  which 
not  only  entitles  the  holder  to  four  wives,  but  also 
absolutely  requires  him  to  wear  a  red  fez  and  a  frozen 
star  covering  his  whole  fagade.  I  was  offered  this 
order  by  Turkish  spies  during  the  war,  and  it  wab 
bled  me  a  good  deal.  The  Alexander  of  Bulgaria  is 
almost  as  seductive.  The  badge  consists  of  an  eight- 


136  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
pointed  white  cross,  with  crossed  swords  between  the 
arms  and  a  red  Bulgarian  lion  over  the  swords.  The 
motto  is  "Za  Chrabrost!"  Then  there  are  the  Prus 
sian  orders — the  Red  and  Black  Eagles,  the  Pour  le 
Merite,  the  Prussian  Crown,  the  Hohenzollern  and  the 
rest.  And  the  Golden  Fleece  of  Austria — the  noblest 
of  them  all.  Think  of  the  Golden  Fleece  on  a  man 
born  in  Linn  County,  Missouri!  ...  I  begin  to 
doubt  that  the  General  would  have  got  it,  even  sup 
posing  him  to  have  taken  the  other  side.  The  Japs, 
I  note,  gave  him  only  the  grand  cordon  of  the  Paul- 
ownia,  and  the  Belgians  and  Montenegrins  were  sim 
ilarly  cautious.  There  are  higher  classes.  The 
highest  of  the  Paulownia  is  only  for  princes,  which  is 
to  say,  only  for  non-Missourians. 

Pershing  is  the  champion,  with  General  March  a 
bad  second.  March  is  a  K.  C.  M.  G.,  and  entitled  to 
wear  a  large  cross  of  white  enamel  bearing  a  litho 
graph  of  the  Archangel  Michael  and  the  motto, 
"Auspicium  Melioris  Aevi,"  but  he  is  not  a  K.  C.  B. 
Admirals  Benson  and  Sims  are  also  grand  crosses  of 
Michael  and  George,  and  like  most  other  respectable 
Americans,  members  of  the  Legion  of  Honor,  but 
they  seem  to  have  been  forgotten  by  the  Greeks,  the 
Montenegrins,  the  Italians  and  the  Belgians.  The 
British-born  and  extremely  Anglomaniacal  Sims 
refused  the  Distinguished  Service  Medal  of  his 
adopted  country,  but  is  careful  to  mention  in  "Who's 


STAR-SPANGLED  MEN  137 

Who  in  America"  that  his  grand  cross  of  Michael  and 
George  was  conferred  upon  him,  not  by  some  servile 
gold-stick,  hut  by  "King  George  of  England";  Benson 
omits  mention  of  His  Majesty,  as  do  Pershing  and 
March.  It  would  be  hard  to  think  of  any  other 
American  officer,  real  or  bogus,  who  would  refuse 
the  D.  S.  M.,  or,  failing  it,  the  grand  decoration  of 
chivalry  of  the  Independent  Order  of  Odd  Fellows. 
I  once  saw  the  latter  hung,  with  ceremonies  of  the 
utmost  magnificence,  upon  a  bald-headed  tinner  who 
had  served  the  fraternity  long  and  faithfully;  as  he 
marched  down  the  hall  toward  the  throne  of  the 
Supreme  Exalted  Pishposh  a  score  of  little  girls,  the 
issue  of  other  tinners,  strewed  his  pathway  with 
roses,  and  around  the  stem  of  each  rose  was  a  piece 
of  glittering  tinfoil.  The  band  meanwhile  played 
"The  Rosary,"  and,  at  the  conclusion  of  the  spectacle, 
as  fried  oysters  were  served,  "Wien  Bleibt  Wien." 
It  was,  I  suspect,  by  way  of  the  Odd  Fellows  and 
other  such  gaudy  heirs  to  the  Deutsche  Ritter  and 
Rosicrucians  that  the  lust  to  gleam  and  jingle  got 
into  the  arteries  of  the  American  people.  For  years 
the  austere  tradition  of  Washington's  day  served  to 
keep  the  military  bosom  bare  of  spangles,  but  all  the 
while  a  weakness  for  them  was  growing  in  the  civil 
population.  Rank  by  rank,  they  became  Knights  of 
Pythias,  Odd  Fellows,  Red  Men,  Nobles  of  the 
Mystic  Shrine,  Knights  Templar,  Patriarchs  Militant, 


138         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

Elks,  Moose,  Woodmen  of  the  World,  Foresters,  Hoo- 
Hoos,  Ku  Kluxers — and  in  every  new  order  there 
were  thirty-two  degrees,  and  for  every  degree  there 
was  a  badge,  -and  for  every  badge  there  was  a  yard  of 
ribbon.  The  Nobles  of  the  Mystic  Shrine,  chiefly 
paunchy  wholesalers  of  the  Rotary  Club  species,  are 
not  content  with  swords,  baldrics,  stars,  garters  and 
jewels;  they  also  wear  red  fezes.  The  Elks  run  to 
rubies.  The  Red  Men  array  themselves  like  Sitting 
Bull.  The  patriotic  ice-wagon  drivers  and  Meth 
odist  deacons  of  the  Ku  Klux  Klan  carry  crosses  set 
with  incandescent  lights.  An  American  who  is 
forced  by  his  profession  to  belong  to  many  such 
orders — say  a  life  insurance  solicitor,  a  bootlegger  or 
a  dealer  in  Oklahoma  oil  stock — accumulates  a  trunk 
full  of  decorations,  many  of  them  weighing  a  pound. 
There  is  an  undertaker  in  Hagerstown,  Md.,  who  has 
been  initiated  eighteen  times.  When  he  robes  him 
self  to  plant  a  fellow  joiner  he  weighs  three 
hundred  pounds  and  sparkles  and  flashes  like  the 
mouth  of  hell  itself.  He  is  entitled  to  bear  seven 
swords,  all  jeweled,  and  to  hang  his  watch  chain 
with  the  golden  busts  of  nine  wild  animals,  all  with 
precious  stones  for  eyes.  Put  beside  this  lowly 
washer  of  the  dead,  Pershing  newly  polished  would 
seem  almost  like  a  Trappist. 

But  even  so  the  civil  arm  is  robbed  of  its  just  dues 
in  the  department  of  gauds   and  radioactivity,  no 


STAR-SPANGLED  MEN  139 

doubt  by  the  direct  operation  of  military  vanity  and 
jealousy.  Despite  a  million  proofs  (and  perhaps  a 
billion  eloquent  arguments)  to  the  contrary,  it  is  still 
the  theory  at  the  official  ribbon  counter  that  the  only 
man  who  serves  in  a  war  is  the  man  who  serves  in 
uniform.  This  is  soft  for  the  Bevo  officer,  who  at^ 
least  has  his  service  stripes  and  the  spurs  that  gnawed 
into  his  desk,  but  it  is  hard  upon  his  brother  Irving, 
the  dollar-a-year  man,  who  worked  twenty  hours  a 
day  for  fourteen  months  buying  soap-powder,  canned 
asparagus  and  raincoats  for  the  army  of  God. 
Irving  not  only  labored  with  inconceivable  diligence ; 
he  also  faced  hazards  of  no  mean  order,  for  on  the 
one  hand  was  his  natural  prejudice  in  favor  of  a  very 
liberal  rewarding  of  commercial  enterprise,  and  on 
the  other  hand  were  his  patriotism  and  his  fear  of 
Atlanta  Penitentiary.  I  daresay  that  many  and 
many  a  time,  after  working  his  twenty  hours,  he 
found  it  difficult  to  sleep  the  remaining  four  hours. 
I  know,  in  fact,  survivors  of  that  obscure  service  who 
are  far  worse  wrecks  to-day  than  Pershing  is.  Their 
reward  is — what?  Winks,  sniffs,  innuendos.  If 
they  would  indulge  themselves  in  the  now  almost 
universal  American  yearning  to  go  adorned,  they 
must  join  the  Knights  of  Pythias.  Even  the  Amer 
ican  Legion  fails  them,  for  though  it  certainly  does 
not  bar  non-combatants,  it  insists  that  they  shall  have 
done  their  non-combatting  in  uniform. 


140          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

What  I  propose  is  a  variety  of  the  Distinguished 
Service  Medal  for  civilians, — perhaps,  better  still, 
a  distinct  order  for  civilians,  closed  to  the  military 
and  with  badges  of  different  colors  and  areas,  to  mark 
off  varying  services  to  democracy.  Let  it  run,  like 
the  Japanese  Paulownia,  from  high  to  low — the 
lowest  class  for  the  patriot  who  sacrificed  only  time, 
money  and  a  few  nights'  sleep;  the  highest  for  the 
great  martyr  who  hung  his  country's  altar  with  his 
dignity,  his  decency  and  his  sacred  honor.  For 
Irving  and  his  nervous  insomnia,  a  simple  rosette, 
with  an  iron  badge  bearing  the  national  motto, 
"Safety  First" ;  for  the  university  president  who  pro 
hibited  the  teaching  of  the  enemy  language  in  his 
learned  grove,  heaved  the  works  of  Goethe  out  of  the 
university  library,  cashiered  every  professor  unwill 
ing  to  support  Woodrow  for  the  first  vacancy  in  the 
Trinity,  took  to  the  stump  for  the  National  Security 
League,  and  made  two  hundred  speeches  in  moving 
picture  theaters — for  this  giant  of  loyal  endeavor 
let  no  100  per  cent.  American  speak  of  anything  less 
than  the  grand  cross  of  the  order,  with  a  gold  badge 
in  polychrome  enamel  and  stained  glass,  a  baldric  of 
the  national  colors,  a  violet  plug  hat  with  a  sunburst 
on  the  side,  the  privilege  of  the  floor  of  Congress,  and 
a  pension  of  $10,000  a  year.  After  all,  the  cost 
would  not  be  excessive;  there  are  not  many  of  them. 
Such  prodigies  of  patriotism  are  possible  only  to 


STAR-SPANGLED  MEN  141 

rare_and^ifted  meiu.  For  the  grand  cordons  of  the 
order,  e.  g.,  college  professors  who  spied  upon  and 
reported  the  seditions  of  their  associates,  state  presi 
dents  of  the  American  Protective  League,  alien 
property  custodians,  judges  whose  sentences  of  con 
scientious  objectors  mounted  to  more  than  50,000 
years,  members  of  Dr.  Creel's  herd  of  2,000  Amer 
ican  historians,  the  authors  of  the  Sisson  documents, 
etc. — pensions  of  $10  a  day  would  be  enough,  with 
silver  badges  and  no  plug  hats.  For  the  lower  ranks, 
bronze  badges  and  the  legal  right  to  the  title  of  "the 
Hon.,"  already  every  true  American's  by  courtesy. 
Not,  of  course,  that  I  am  insensitive  to  the  services 
of  the  gentlemen  of  those  lower  ranks,  but  in  such 
matters  one  must  go  by  rarity  rather  than  by  intrinsic 
value.  If  the  grand  cordon  or  even  the  nickel- 
plated  eagle  of  the  third  class  were  given  to  every 
patriot  who  bored  a  hole  through  the  floor  of  his  flat 
to  get  evidence  against  his  neighbors,  the  Kraus- 
meyers,  and  to  every  one  who  visited  the  Hof- 
brauhaus  nightly,  denounced  the  Kaiser  in  searing 
terms,  and  demanded  assent  from  Emil  and  Otto,  the 
waiters,  and  to  every  one  who  notified  the  catchpolls 
of  the  Department  of  Justice  when  the  wireless  plant 
was  open  in  the  garret  of  the  Arion  Liedertafel,  and 
to  all  who  took  a  brave  and  forward  part  in  slacker 
raids,  and  to  all  who  lent  their  stenographers  funds 
at  6  per  cent,  to  buy  Liberty  bonds  at  41/4  per  cent., 


142  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
and  to  all  who  sold  out  at  99  and  then  bought  in«again 
at  83.56  and  to  all  who  served  as  jurors  or  perjurers 
in  cases  against  members  and  ex-members  of  the 
I.  W.  W.,  and  to  the  German-American  members  of 
the  League  for  German  Democracy,  and  to  all  the 
Irish  who  snitched  upon  the  Irish — if  decorations 
were  thrown  about  with  any  such  lavishness,  then  there 
Would  be  no  nickel  left  for  our  bathrooms.  On  the 
civilian  side  as  on  the  military  side  the  great  rewards 
of  war  go,  not  to  mere  dogged  industry  and  fidelity, 
but  to  originality — to  the  unprecedented,  the  arrest 
ing,  the  bizarre.  The  New  York  Tribune  liar  who  in 
vented  the  story  about  the  German  plant  for  convert 
ing  the  corpses  of  the  slain  into  soap  did  more  for 
democracy  and  the  Wilsonian  idealism,  and  hence  de 
serves  a  more  brilliant  recognition,  than  a  thousand 
uninspired  hawkers  of  atrocity  stories  supplied  by 
Viscount  Bryce  and  his  associates.  For  that  great  ser 
vant  of  righteousness  the  grand  cordon,  with  two 
silver  badges  and  the  chair  of  history  at  Columbia, 
would  be  scarcely  enough;  for  the  ordinary  hawkers 
any  precious  metal  would  be  too  much. 

Whether  or  not  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  has  decorated  its 
chocolate  pedlars  and  soul-snatchers  I  do  not  know; 
since  the  chief  Y.  M.  C.  A.  lamassary  in  my  town  of 
Baltimore  became  the  scene  of  a  homo-sexual  scandal 
I  have  ceased  to  frequent  evangelical  society.  If 
not,  then  there  should  be  some  governmental  recog- 


STAR-SPANGLED  MEN  143 

nition  of  those  highly  characteristic  heroes  of  the  war 
for  democracy.  The  veterans  of  the  line,  true 
enough,  dislike  them  excessively,  and  have  a  habit  of 
denouncing  them  obscenely  when  the  corn-juice  flows. 
They  charged  too  much  for  cigarettes;  they  tried  to 
discourage  the  amiability  of  the  ladies  of  France; 
they  had  a  habit  of  being  absent  when  the  shells  burst 
in  air.  Well,  some  say  this  and  some  say  that.  A 
few,  at  least,  of  the  pale  and  oleaginous  brethren  must 
have  gone  into  the  Master's  work  because  they  thirsted 
to  save  souls,  and  not  simply  because  they  desired 
to  escape  the  trenches.  And  a  few,  I  am  told,  were 
anything  but  unpleasantly  righteous,  as  a  round  of 
Wassermanns  would  show.  If,  as  may  be  plausibly 
argued,  these  Soldiers  of  the  Double  Cross  deserve 
to  live  at  all,  then  they  surely  deserve  to  be  hung  with 
white  enameled  stars  of  the  third  class,  with  gilt 
dollar  marks  superimposed.  Motto :  "Glory,  glory, 
hallelujah!" 

But  what  of  the  vaudeville  actors,  the  cheer  leaders, 
the  doughnut  fryers,  the  camp  librarians,  the  press 
agents?  I  am  not  forgetting  them.  Let  them  be 
distributed  among  all  the  classes  from  the  seventh  to 
the  eighth,  according  to  their  sufferings  for  the  holy 
cause.  And  the  agitators  against  Beethoven,  Bach, 
Brahms,  Wagner,  Richard  Strauss,  all  the  rest  of  the 
cacophonous  Huns?  And  the  specialists  in  the 
crimes  of  the  German  professors?  And  the  collec- 


144  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
tors  for  the  Belgians,  with  their  generous  renuncia 
tion  of  all  commissions  above  80  per  cent.?  And  the 
pathologists  who  denounced  Johannes  Muller  as  a 
fraud,  Karl  Ludwig  as  an  imbecile,  and  Ehrlich  as 
a  thief?  And  the  patriotic  chemists  who  discovered 
arsenic  in  dill  pickles,  ground  glass  in  pumpernickel, 
bichloride  tablets  in  Bismarck  herring,  pathogenic 
organisms  in  aniline  dyes?  And  the  inspired  editor 
ial  writers  of  the  New  York  Times  and  Tribune,  the 
Boston  Transcript,  the  Philadelphia  Ledger,  the  Mo 
bile  Register,  the  Jones  Corners  Eagle?  And  the 
headline  writers?  And  the  Columbia,  Yale  and 
Princeton  professors?  And  the  authors  of  books  des 
cribing  how  the  Kaiser  told  them  the  whole  plot  in 
1913,  while  they  were  pulling  his  teeth  or  shining 
his  shoes?  And  the  ex-ambassadors?  And  the 
Nietzsche fresser?  And  the  chautauqua  orators? 
And  the  four-minute  men?  And  the  Methodist  pul 
pit  pornographers  who  switched  so  f acilely  from  vice- 
crusading  to  German  atrocities?  And  Dr.  Newell 
Dwight  Hillis?  And  Dr.  Henry  van  Dyke?  And  the 
master  minds  of  the  New  Republic?  And  Tumulty? 
And  the  Vigilantes?  Let  no  grateful  heart  forget 
them! 

Palmer  and  Burleson  I  leave  for  special  legisla 
tion.  If  mere  university  presidents,  such  as  Nich 
olas  Murray  Butler,  are  to  have  the  grand  cross,  then 
Palmer  deserves  to  be  rolled  in  malleable  gold  from 


STAR-SPANGLED  MEN  145 

head  to  foot,  and  polished  until  he  blinds  the  cosmos 
— then  Burleson  must  be  hung  with  diamonds  like 
Mrs.  Warren  and  bathed  in  spotlights  like  Gaby 
Deslys.  .  .  .  Finally,  I  reserve  a  special  decoration, 
to  be  conferred  in  camera  and  worn  only  in  secret 
chapter,  for  husbands  who  took  chances  and  refused 
to  read  anonymous  letters  from  Paris:  the  somber 
badge  of  the  Ordre  de  la  Cuculus  Canorus,  first  and 
only  class. 


VII.    THE     POET    AND     HIS    ART 


A 


44  A  GOOD  P^se  style,"  says  Prof.  Dr.  Otto 
Jerpersen  in  his  great  work,  "Growth  and 
Structure  of  the  English  Language,"  "is 
everywhere  a  late  acquirement,  and  the  work  of  whole 
generations  of  good  authors  is  needed  to  bring  about 
the  easy  flow  of  written  prose."  The  learned 
Sprachwissenschaftler  is  here  speaking  of  Old  Eng 
lish,  or,  as  it  used  to  be  called  when  you  and  I  were  at 
the  breast  of  enlightenment,  Anglo-Saxon.  An  inch  or 
so  lower  down  the  page  he  points  out  that  what  he  says 
of  prose  is  by  no  means  true  of  verse — that  poetry 
of  very  respectable  quality  is  often  written  by  peo 
ples  and  individuals  whose  prose  is  quite  as  crude 
and  graceless  as  that,  say  of  the  Hon.  Warren  Gam 
aliel  Harding — that  even  the  so-called  Anglo-Saxons 
of  Beowulf's  time,  a  race  as  barbarous  as  the  modern 
Jugo-Slavs  or  Mississippians,  were  yet  capable,  on 
occasion,  of  writing  dithyrambs  of  an  indubitable 
sweet  gaudiness. 

The  point  needs  no  laboring.     A  glance  at  the  his 
tory   of   any    literature   will   prove    its   soundness. 

146 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  147 

Moreover,  it  is  supported  by  what  we  see  around  us 
every  day — that  is,  if  we  look  in  literary  directions. 
Some  of  the  best  verse  in  the  modern  movement,  at 
home  and  abroad,  has  been  written  by  intellectual 
adolescents  who  could  no  more  write  a  first-rate  para 
graph  in  prose  then  they  could  leap  the  Matterhorn 
— girls  just  out  of  Vassar  and  Newnham,  young 
army  officers,  chautauqua  orators,  New  England  old 
maids,  obscure  lawyers  and  doctors,  newspaper  re 
porters,  all  sorts  of  hollow  dilettanti,  male  and  fe 
male.  Nine-tenths  of  the  best  poetry  of  the  world 
has  been  written  by  poets  less  than  thirty  years  old; 
a  great  deal  more  than  half  of  it  has  been  written  by 
poets  under  twenty-five.  One  always  associates 
poetry  with  youth,  for  it  deals  chiefly  writh  the  ideas 
that  are  peculiar  to  youth,  and  its  terminology  is 
quite  as  youthful  as  its  content.  When  one  hears  of 
a  poet  past  thirty-five,  he  seems  somehow  unnatural 
and  even  a  trifle  obscene;  it  is  as  if  one  encountered 
a  graying  man  who  still  played  the  Chopin  waltzes 
and  believed  in  elective  affinities.  But  prose,  obvi 
ously,  is  a  sterner  and  more  elderly  matter.  All  the 
great  masters  of  prose  (and  especially  of  English 
prose,  for  its  very  resilience  and  brilliance  make  it 
extraordinarily  hard  to  write)  have  had  to  labor  for 
years  before  attaining  to  their  mastery  of  it.  The 
early  prose  of  Abraham  Lincoln  was  remarkable  only 
for  its  badness ;  it  was  rhetorical  and  bombastic,  and 


148  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
full  of  supernumerary  words;  in  brief,  it  was  a 
kind  of  poetry.  It  took  years  and  years  of  hard 
striving  for  Abe  to  develop  the  simple  and  exquisite 
prose  of  his  last  half-decade.  So  with  Thomas 
Henry  Huxley,  perhaps  the  greatest  virtuoso  of  plain 
English  who  has  ever  lived.  His  first  writings  were ' 
competent  but  undistinguished;  he  was  almost  a 
grandfather  before  he  perfected  his  superb  style. 
And  so  with  Anatole  France,  and  Addison,  and  T.  B. 
Macaulay,  and  George  Moore,  and  James  Branch 
Cabell,  and  1E.9  and  Lord  Dunsany,  and  Nietzsche, 
and  to  go  back  to  antiquity,  Marcus  Tullius  Cicero. 
I  have  been  told  that  the  average  age  of  the  men  who 
made  the  Authorized  Version  of  the  Bible  was  beyond 
sixty  years.  Had  they  been  under  thirty  they  would 
have  made  it  lyrical;  as  it  was,  they  made  it  colossal. 
The  reason  for  all  this  is  not  far  to  seek.  Prose, 
however  powerful  its  appeal  to  the  emotions,  is  al 
ways  based  primarily  upon  logic,  and  is  thus  scien 
tific  ;  poetry,  whatever  its  so-called  intellectual  content 
is  always  based  upon  mere  sensation  and  emotion,  and 
is  thus  loose  and  disorderly.  A  man  must  have  ac 
quired  discipline  over  his  feelings  before  he  can  write 
sound  prose;  he  must  have  learned  how  to  subordi 
nate  his  transient  ideas  to  more  general  and  perma 
nent  ideas;  above  all,  he  must  have  acquired  a  good 
head  for  words,  which  is  to  say,  a  capacity  for  resist 
ing  their  mere  lascivious  lure.  But  to  write  accept- 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  149 

able  poetry,  or  even  good  poetry,  he  needs  none  of 
these  things.  If  his  hand  runs  away  with  his  head  it  is 
actually  a  merit.  If  he  writes  what  every  one  knows 
to  be  untrue,  in  terms  that  no  sane  adult  would  ever 
venture  to  use  in  real  life,  it  is  proof  of  his  divine 
afflation.  If  he  slops  over  and  heaves  around  in  a 
manner  never  hitherto  observed  on  land  or  sea,  the 
fact  proves  his  originality.  The  so-called  forms  of 
verse  and  the  rules  of  rhyme  and  rhythm  do  not  offer 
him  difficulties;  they  offer  him  refuges.  Their  pur 
pose  is  not  to  keep  him  in  order,  but  simply  to  give 
him  countenance  by  providing  him  with  a  formal 
orderliness  when  he  is  most  out  of  order.  Using 
them  is  like  swimming  with  bladders.  The  first  lit 
erary  composition  of  a  quick-minded  child  is  always 
some  sort  of  jingle.  It  starts  out  with  an  inane  idea 
— half  an  idea.  Sticking  to  prose,  it  could  go  no 
further.  But  to  its  primary  imbecility  it  now  adds 
a  meaningless  phrase  which,  while  logically  unre 
lated,  provides  an  agreeable  concord  in  mere  sound 
— and  the  result  is  the  primordial  tadpole  of  a  son 
net.  All  the  sonnets  of  the  world,  save  a  few  of  mir 
aculous  (and  perhaps  accidental)  quality,  partake  of 
this  fundamental  nonsensicality.  In  all  of  them  there 
are  ideas  that  would  sound  idiotic  in  prose,  and 
phrases  that  would  sound  clumsy  and  uncouth  in 
prose.  But  the  rhyme  scheme  conceals  this  nonsen 
sicality.  As  a  substitute  for  the  missing  logical 


150  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
plausibility  it  provides  a  sensuous  harmony.  Read 
ing  the  thing,  one  gets  a  vague  effect  of  agreeable 
sound,  and  so  the  logical  feebleness  is  overlooked. 
It  is,  in  a  sense,  like  observing  a  pretty  girl,  compe 
tently  dressed  and  made  up,  across  the  footlights. 
But  translating  the  poem  into  prose  is  like  meeting 
and  marrying  her. 

II 

Much  of  the  current  discussion  of  poetry — and 
what,  save  Prohibition,  is  more  discussed  in  America? 
— is  corrupted  by  a  fundamental  error.  That  error 
consists  in  regarding  the  thing  itself  as  a  simple  entity, 
to  be  described  conveniently  in  a  picturesque  phrase. 
"Poetry,"  says  one  critic,  "is  the  statement  of  over 
whelming  emotional  values."  "Poetry,"  says  an 
other,  "is  an  attempt  to  purge  language  of  everything 
except  its  music  and  its  pictures."  "Poetry,"  says  a 
third,  "is  the  entering  of  delicately  imaginative  pla 
teaus."  "Poetry,"  says  a  fourth,  "is  truth  carried 
alive  into  the  heart  by  a  passion."  "Poetry,"  says  a 
fifth,  "is  compacted  of  what  seems,  not  of  what  is." 
"Poetry,"  says  a  sixth,  "is  the  expression  of  thought 
in  musical  language."  "Poetry,"  says  a  seventh,  "is 
the  language  of  a  state  of  crisis."  And  so  on,  and  so 
on.  Quod  est  poetica?  They  all  answer,  and  yet 
they  all  fail  to  answer.  Poetry,  in  fact,  is  two  quite 
distinct  things.  It  may  be  either  or  both.  One  is  a 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  151 

series  of  words  that  are  intrinsically  musical,  in  clang- 
tint  and  rhythm,  as  the  single  word  cellar-door  is  mu 
sical.  The  other  is  a  series  of  ideas,  false  in  them 
selves,  that  offer  a  means  of  emotional  and  imagi 
native  escape  from  the  harsh  realities  of  everyday. 
In  brief,  (I  succumb,  like  all  the  rest,  to  phrase- 
making),  poetry  is  a  comforting  piece  of  fiction  set 
to  more  or  less  lascivious  music — a  slap  on  the  back 
in  waltz  time — a  grand  release  of  longings  and  re 
pressions  to  the  tune  of  flutes,  harps,  sackbuts,  psal 
teries  and  the  usual  strings. 

As  I  say,  poetry  may  be  either  the  one  thing  or  the 
other — caressing  music  or  caressing  assurance.  It 
need  not  necessarily  be  both.  Consider  a  familiar 
example  from  "Othello": 

Not  poppy,  nor  mandragora, 
Nor  all  the  drowsy  syrups  of  the  world 
Shall  ever  medicine  thee  to  that  sweet  sleep 
Which  thou  owed'st  yesterday. 

Here  the  sense,  at  best,  is  surely  very  vague.  Prob 
ably  not  one  auditor  in  a  hundred,  hearing  an  actor 
recite  those  glorious  lines,  attaches  any  intelligible 
meaning  to  the  archaic  word  owed'st,  the  cornerstone 
of  the  whole  sentence.  Nevertheless,  the  effect  is 
stupendous.  The  passage  assaults  and  benumbs  the 
faculties  like  Schubert's  "Standchen"  or  the  slow 
movement  of  Schumann's  Rhenish  symphony;  hear- 


152  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
ing  it  is  a  sensuous  debauch;  the  man  anaesthe 
tic  to  it  could  stand  unmoved  before  Rheims 
cathedral  or  the  Hofbrauhaus  at  Munich.  One 
easily  recalls  many  other  such  bursts  of  pure 
music,  almost  meaningless  but  infinitely  delight 
ful — in  Poe,  in  Swinburne,  in  Marlowe,  even  in 
Joaquin  Miller.  Two-thirds  of  the  charm  of  reading 
Chaucer  (setting  aside  the  Rabelaisian  comedy) 
comes  out  of  the  mere  burble  of  the  words ;  the  mean 
ing,  to  a  modern,  is  often  extremely  obscure,  and 
sometimes  downright  undecipherable.  The  whole 
fame  of  Poe,  as  a  poet,  is  based  upon  five  short  poems. 
Of  them,  three  are  almost  pure  music.  Their  intel 
lectual  content  is  of  the  vaguest.  No  one  would  ven 
ture  to  reduce  them  to  plain  English.  Even  Poe  him 
self  always  thought  of  them,  not  as  statements  of 
poetic  ideas,  but  as  simple  utterances  of  poetic  (i.e., 
musical)  sounds. 

It  was  Sidney  Lanier,  himself  a  competent  poet, 
who  first  showed  the  dependence  of  poetry  upon 
music.  He  had  little  to  say,  unfortunately,  about  the 
clang-tint  of  words;  what  concerned  him  almost  ex 
clusively  was  rhythm.  In  "The  Science  of  English 
Verse,"  he  showed  that  the  charm  of  this  rhythm 
could  be  explained  in  the  technical  terms  of  music — 
that  all  the  old  gabble  about  dactyls  and  spondees  was 
no  more  than  a  dog  Latin  invented  by  men  who  were 
fundamentally  ignorant  of  the  thing  they  discussed. 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  153 

Lanier's  book  was  the  first  intelligent  work  ever  pub 
lished  upon  the  nature  and  structure  of  the  sensuous 
content  of  English  poetry.  He  struck  out  into  such 
new  and  far  paths  that  the  .professors  of  prosody  still 
lag  behind  him  after  forty  years,  quite  unable  to 
understand  a  poet  who  was  also  a  shrewd  critic  and 
a  first-rate  musician.  But  if,  so  deeply  concerned 
with  rhythm,  he  marred  his  treatise  by  forgetting 
clang-tint,  he  marred  it  still  more  by  forgetting  con 
tent.  Poetry  that  is  all  music  is  obviously  relatively 
rare,  for  only  a  poet  who  is  also  a  natural  musician 
can  write  it,  and  natural  musicians  are  much  rarer  in 
the  world  than  poets.  Ordinary  poetry,  average 
poetry,  thus  depends  in  part  upon  its  ideational  mate 
rial,  and  perhaps  even  chiefly.  It  is  the  idea  ex 
pressed  in  a  poem,  and  not  the  mellifluousness  of  the 
words  used  to  express  it,  that  arrests  and  enchants  the 
average  connoisseur.  Often,  indeed,  he  disdains  this 
mellifluousness,  and  argues  that  the  idea  ought  to  be 
set  forth  without  the  customary  pretty  jingling,  or, 
at  most,  with  only  the  scant  jingling  that  lies  in 
rhythm — in  brief,  he  wants  his  ideas  in  the  alto 
gether,  and  so  advocates  v ers  libre. 

It  was  another  American,  this  time  Prof.  Dr.  F.  C. 
Prescott,  of  Cornell  University,  who  first  gave  scien 
tific  attention  to  the  intellectual  content  of  poetry. 
His  book  is  called  "Poetry  and  Dreams."  Its  virtue 
lies  in  the  fact  that  it  rejects  all  the  customary  mysti- 


154  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
cal  and  romantic  definitions  of  poetry,  and  seeks  to 
account  for  the  thing  in  straightforward  psychological 
terms.  Poetry,  says  Fresco tt,  is  simply  the  verbal 
materialization  of  a  day-dream,  the  statement  of  a 
Freudian  wish,  an  attempt  to  satisfy  a  subconscious 
longing  by  saying  that  it  is  satisfied.  In  brief,  poetry 
represents  imagination's  bold  effort  to  escape  from 
the  cold  and  clammy  facts  that  hedge  us  in — *o  soothe 
the  wrinkled  and  fevered  brow  with  beautiful  balder 
dash.  On  the  precise  nature  of  this  beautiful  bal 
derdash  you  can  get  all  in  the  information  you  need 
by  opening  at  random  the  nearest  book  of  verse.  The 
ideas  you  will  find  in  it  may  be  divided  into  two  main 
divisions.  The  first  consists  of  denials  of  objective 
facts;  the  second  of  denials  of  subjective  facts. 
Specimen  of  the  first  sort: 

God's  in  His  heaven, 
All's  well  with  the  world. 

Specimen  of  the  second : 

I  am  the  master  of  my  fate; 
I  am  the  captain  of  my  soul. 

It  is  my  contention  that  all  poetry  (forgetting,  for 
the  moment,  its  possible  merit  as  mere  sound)  may 
be  resolved  into  either  the  one  or  the  other  of  these 
frightful  imbecilities — that  its  essential  character  lies 
in  its  bold  flouting  of  what  every  reflective  adult 
knows  to  be  the  truth.  The  poet,  imagining  him  to  be 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  155 

sincere,  is  simply  one  who  disposes  of  all  the  horrors 
of  life  on  this  earth,  and  of  all  the  difficulties  pre 
sented  by  his  own  inner  weaknesses  no  less,  by  the 
childish  device  of  denying  them.  Is  it  a  well-known 
fact  that  love  is  an  emotion  that  is  almost  as  perish 
able  as  eggs — that  it  is  biologically  impossible  for  a 
given  male  to  yearn  for  a  given  female  more  than  a 
few  brief  years?  Then  the  poet  disposes  of  it  by 
assuring  his  girl  that  he  will  nevertheless  love  her 
forever — more,  by  pledging  his  word  of  honor  that 
he  believes  that  she  wrill  love  him  forever.  Is  it 
equally  notorious  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  justice 
in  the  wrorld — that  the  good  are  tortured  insanely  and 
the  evil  go  free  and  prosper?  Then  the  poet  com 
poses  a  piece  crediting  God  with  a  mysterious  and  un 
intelligible  theory  of  jurisprudence,  whereby  the  tor 
ture  of  the  good  is  a  sort  of  favor  conferred  upon 
them  for  their  goodness.  Is  it  of  almost  equally 
widespread  report  that  no  healthy  man  likes  to  con 
template  his  own  inevitable  death — that  even  in  time 
of  war,  with  a  vast  pumping  up  of  emotion  to  conceal 
the  fact,  every  soldier  hopes  and  believes  that  he, 
personally,  will  escape?  Then  the  poet,  first  care 
fully  introducing  himself  into  a  bomb-proof,  achieves 
strophes  declaring  that  he  is  free  from  all  such  weak 
ness — that  he  will  deliberately  seek  a  rendezvous 
with  death,  and  laugh  ha-ha  when  the  bullet  finds 
him. 


156         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

The  precise  nature  of  the  imbecility  thus  solemnly 
set  forth  depends,  very  largely,  of  course,  upon  the 
private  prejudices  and  yearnings  of  the  poet,  and  the 
reception  that  is  given  it  depends,  by  the  same  token, 
upon  the  private  prejudices  and  yearnings  of  the 
reader.  That  is  why  it  is  often  so  difficult  to  get  any 
agreement  upon  the  merits  of  a  definite  poem,  i.  e., 
to  get  any  agreement  upon  its  capacity  to  soothe. 
There  is  the  man  who  craves  only  the  animal  de 
lights  of  a  sort  of  Moslem-Methodist  paradise:  to  him 
"The  Frost  is  on  the  Pumpkin"  is  a  noble  poem. 
There  is  the  man  who  yearns  to  get  out  of  the  visible 
universe  altogether  and  tread  the  fields  of  asphodel: 
for  him  there  is  delight  only  in  the  mystical  stuff  of 
Crashaw,  Thompson,  Yeats  and  company.  There  is 
the  man  who  revolts  against  the  sordid  Christian 
notion  of  immortality — an  eternity  to  be  spent  flap 
ping  wings  with  pious  greengrocers  and  oleaginous 
Anglican  bishops;  he  finds  his  escape  in  the  gorgeous 
blasphemies  of  Swinburne.  There  is,  to  make  an 
end  of  examples,  the  man  who,  with  an  inferiority 
complex  eating  out  his  heart,  is  moved  by  a  great 
desire  to  stalk  the  world  in  heroic  guise:  he  may  go 
to  the  sonorous  swanking  of  Kipling,  or  he  may  go  to 
something  more  subtle,  to  some  poem  in  which  the 
boasting  is  more  artfully  concealed,  say  Christina 
Rosetti's  "When  I  am  Dead."  Many  men,  many 
complexes,  many  secret  yearnings!  They  collect,  of 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  157 

course,  in  groups;  if  the  group  happens  to  be  large 
enough  the  poet  it  is  devoted  to  becomes  famous. 
Kipling's  great  fame  is  thus  easily  explained.  He 
appeals  to  the  commonest  of  all  types  of  men,  next  to 
the  sentimental  type — which  is  to  say,  he  appeals  to 
the  bully  and  braggart  type,  the  chest-slapping  type, 
the  patriot  type.  Less  harshly  described,  to  the  boy 
type.  All  of  us  have  been  Kiplingomaniacs  at 
some  time  or  other.  I  was  myself  a  very  ardent 
one  at  17,  and  wrote  many  grandiloquent  sets  of 
verse  in  the  manner  of  "Tommy  Atkins"  and  "Fuzzy- 
Wuzzy."  But  if  the  gifts  of  observation  and  reflec 
tion  have  been  given  to  us,  we  get  over  it.  There 
comes  a  time  wrhen  we  no  longer  yearn  to  be  heroes, 
but  seek  only  peace — maybe  even  hope  for  quick 
extinction.  Then  we  turn  to  Swinburne  and  "The 
Garden  of  Proserpine" — more  false  assurances, 
more  mellifluous  play-acting,  another  tinkling  make- 
believe — but  how  sweet  on  blue  days! 

Ill 

One  of  the  things  to  remember  here  (too  often  it 
is  forgotten,  and  Dr.  Prescott  deserves  favorable 
mention  for  stressing  it)  is  that  a  man's  conscious 
desires  are  not  always  identical  with  his  subcon 
scious  longings;  in  fact,  the  two  are  often  directly 
antithetical.  No  doubt  the  real  man  lies  in  the 
depths  of  the  subconscious,  like  a  carp  lurking  in 


158  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
mud.  His  conscious  personality  is  largely  a  product 
of  his  environment — the  reaction  of  his  subconscious 
to  the  prevailing  notions  of  what  is  meet  and  seemly. 
Here,  of  course,  I  wander  into  platitude,  for  the  news 
that  all  men  are  frauds  was  already  stale  in  the  days 
of  Hammurabi.  The  ingenious  Freud  simply  trans 
lated  the  fact  into  pathological  terms,  added  a  bed 
room  scene,  and  so  laid  the  foundations  for  his 
psychoanalysis.  Incidentally,  it  has  always  seemed 
to  me  that  Freud  made  a  curious  mistake  when  he 
brought  sex  into  the  foreground  of  his  new  magic. 
He  was,  of  course,  quite  right  when  he  set  up  the  doc 
trine  that,  in  civilized  societies,  sex  impulses  were 
more  apt  to  be  suppressed  than  any  other  natural 
impulses,  and  that  the  subconscious  thus  tended  to 
be  crowded  with  their  ghosts.  But  in  considering 
sex  impulses,  he  forgot  sex  imaginings.  Digging 
out,  by  painful  cross-examination  in  a  darkened  room, 
some  startling  tale  of  carnality  in  his  patient's  past, 
he  committed  the  incredible  folly  of  assuming  it 
to  be  literally  true.  More  often  than  not,  I  believe, 
it  was  a  mere  piece  of  boasting,  a  materialization  of 
desire — in  brief,  a  poem.  It  is  astonishing  that 
this  possibility  never  occurred  to  the  venerable  pro 
fessor;  it  is  more  astonishing  that  it  has  never  oc- 
cured  to  any  of  his  disciples.  He  should  have  psy 
choanalyzed  a  few  poets  instead  of  wasting  all  his 
time  upon  psychopathic  women  with  sclerotic  hus- 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  159 

bands.  He  would  have  dredged  amazing  things  out 
of  their  subconsciouses,  heroic  as  well  as  amorous. 
Imagine  the  billions  of  Boers,  Germans,  Irishmen 
and  Hindus  that  Kipling  would  have  confessed  to 
killing! 

But  here  I  get  into  morbid  anatomy,  and  had 
better  haul  up.  What  I  started  out  to  say  was  that 
a  man's  preferences  in  poetry  constitute  an  excellent 
means  of  estimating  his  inner  cravings  and  creduli 
ties.  The  music  disarms  his  critical  sense,  and  he 
confesses  to  chershing  ideas  that  he  would 
repudiate  with  indignation  if  they  were  put 
into  plain  words.  I  say  he  cherishes  those  ideas. 
Maybe  he  simply  tolerates  them  unwillingly;  maybe 
they  are  no  more  than  inescapable  heritages  from  his 
barbarous  ancestors,  like  his  vermiform  appendix. 
Think  of  the  poems  you  like,  and  you  will  come  upon 
many  such  intellectual  fossils — ideas  that  you  by  no 
means  subscribe  to  openly,  but  that  nevertheless 
give  you  a  strange  joy.  I  put  myself  on  the  block 
as  Exhibit  A.  There  is  my  delight  in  Lizette  Wood- 
worth  Reese's  sonnet,  "Tears."  Nothing  could  do 
more  violence  to  my  conscious  beliefs.  Put  into 
prose,  the  doctrine  in  the  poem  would  exasperate 
and  even  enrage  me.  There  is  no  man  in  Christen 
dom  who  is  less  a  Christian  than  I  am.  But  here 
the  dead  hand  grabs  me  by  the  ear.  My  ancestors 
were  converted  to  Christianity  in  the  year  1535,  and 


160         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

remained  of  that  faith  until  near  the  middle  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  Observe,  now,  the  load  I 
carry;  more  than  two  hundred  years  of  Christianity, 
and  perhaps  a  thousand  years  (maybe  even  two,  or 
three  thousand  years)  of  worship  of  heathen  gods 
before  that — at  least  twelve  hundred  years  of  unin 
terrupted  belief  in  the  immortality  of  the  soul.  Is 
it  any  wonder  that,  betrayed  by  the  incomparable 
music  of  Miss  Reese's  Anglo-Saxon  monosyllables, 
my  conscious  faith  is  lulled  to  sleep,  thus  giving  my 
subconscious  a  chance  to  wallow  in  its  immemorial 
superstition? 

Even  so,  my  vulnerability  to  such  superstitions  is 
very  low,  and  it  tends  to  grow  less  as  I  increase  in 
years  and  sorrows.  As  I  have  said,  I  once  throbbed 
to  the  drum-beat  of  Kipling;  later  on,  I  was  respon 
sive  to  the  mellow  romanticism  of  Tennyson;  now 
it  takes  one  of  the  genuinely  fundamental  delusions 
of  the  human  race  to  move  me.  But  progress  is  not 
continuous;  it  has  interludes.  There  are  days  when 
every  one  of  us  experiences  a  sort  of  ontogenetic 
back-firing,  and  returns  to  an  earlier  stage  of  develop 
ment.  It  is  on  such  days  that  grown  men  break  down 
and  cry  like  children ;  it  is  then  that  they  play  games, 
or  cheer  the  flag,  or  fall  in  love.  And  it  is  then  that 
tKey  are  in  the  mood  for  poetry,  and  get  comfort  out 
of  its  asseverations  of  the  obviously  not  true.  A  truly 
civilized  man,  when  he  is  wholly  himself,  derives  no 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  161 

pleasure  from  hearing  a  poet  state,  as  Browning 
stated,  that  this  world  is  perfect.  Such  tosh  not  only 
does  not  please  him;  it  definitely  offends  him,  as  he  is 
offended  by  an  idiotic  article  in  a  newspaper;  it  roils 
him  to  encounter  so  much  stupidity  in  Christendom. 
But  he  may  like  it  when  he  is  drunk,  or  suffering 
from  some  low  toxemia,  or  staggering  beneath  some 
great  disaster.  Then,  as  I  say,  the  ontogenetic  proc 
ess  reverses  itself,  and  he  slides  back  into  infancy. 
Then  he  goes  to  poets,  just  as  he  goes  to  women, 
"glad"  books,  and  dogmatic  theology.  The  very 
highest  orders  of  men,  perhaps,  never  suffer  from 
such  malaises  of  the  spirit,  or,  if  they  suffer  from 
them,  never  succumb  to  them.  These  ar6  men  who 
are  so  thoroughly  civilized  that  even  the  most  se 
vere  attack  upon  the  emotions  is  not  sufficient  to  de 
throne  their  reason.  Charles  Darwin  was  such  a  man. 
There  was  never  a  moment  in  his  life  when  he  sought 
religious  consolation,  and  there  was  never  a  moment 
when  he  turned  to  poetry;  in  fact,  he  regarded  all 
poetry  as  silly.  Other  first-rate  men,  more  sen 
sitive  to  the  possible  music  in  it,  regard  it  with  less 
positive  aversion,  but  I  have  never -heard  of  a  truly 
first-rate  man  who  got  any  permanent  satisfaction  out 
of  its  content.  The  Browning  Societies  of  the  latter 
part  of  the  nineteenth  century  (and  I  choose  the 
Browning  Societies  because  Browning's  poetry  was 
often  more  or  less  logical  in  content,  and  thus  above 


162          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

the  ordinary  intellectually)  were  not  composed  of 
such  men  as  Huxley,  Spencer,  Lecky,  Buckle  and 
Travelyn,  but  of  third-rate  school-masters,  moony 
old  maids,  candidates  for  theosophy,  literary  vicars, 
collectors  of  Rogers  groups,  and  other  such  Philis 
tines.  The  chief  propagandist  for  Browning  in  the 
United  States  was  not  Henry  Adams,  or  William 
Summer,  or  Daniel  C.  Gilman,  but  an  obscure 
professor  of  English  who  was  also  an  ardent 
spook-chaser.  And  what  is  thus  true  ontogen- 
etically  is  also  true  phylogenetically.  That  is 
to  say,  poetry  is  chiefly  produced  and  esteemed  by 
peoples  that  have  not  yet  come  to  maturity.  The 
Romans  had  a  dozen  poets  of  the  first  talent  before 
they  had  a  single  prose  writer  of  any  s'kill  whatsoever. 
So  did  the  English.  So  did  the  Germans.  In  our 
own  day  we  see  the  negroes  of  the  South  producing 
religious  and  secular  verse  of  such  quality  that  it  is 
taken  over  by  the  whites,  and  yet  the  number  of 
negroes  who  show  a  decent  prose  style  is  still  very 
small,  and  there  is  no  sign  of  it  increasing.  Simi 
larly,  the  white  authors  of  America,  during  the  past 
ten  or  fifteen  years,  have  produced  a  great  mass  of 
very  creditable  poetry,  and  yet  the  quality  of  our 
prose  remains  very  low,  and  the  Americans  with 
prose  styles  of  any  distinction  could  be  counted  on 
the  fingers  of  two  hands. 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  163 

IV 

So  far  I  have  spoken  chiefly  of  the  content  of 
poetry.  In  its  character  as  a  sort  of  music  it  is 
plainly  a  good  deal  more  respectable,  and  makes  an 
appeal  to  a  far  higher  variety  of  reader,  or,  at  all 
events,  to  a  reader  in  a  state  of  greater  mental  clar 
ity.  A  capacity  for  music — by  which  I  mean  mel 
ody,  harmony  and  clang-tint — comes  late  in  the  his 
tory  of  every  race.  The  savage  can  apprehend 
rhythm,  but  he  is  quite  incapable  of  carrying  a  tune 
in  any  intelligible  scale.  The  negro  roustabouts 
of  our  own  South,  who  are  commonly  regarded  as 
very  musical,  are  actually  only  rhythmical;  they 
never  invent  melodies,  but  only  rhythms.  And  the 
whites  to  whom  their  barbarous  dance-tunes  chiefly 
appeal  are  in  their  own  stage  of  culture.  When 
one  observes  a  room  full  of  well-dressed  men  and 
women  swaying  and  wriggling  to  the  tune  of 
some  villainous  mazurka  from  the  Mississippi  levees, 
one  may  assume  very  soundly  that  they  are  all 
the  sort  of  folk  who  play  golf  and  bridge,  and 
prefer  "The  Sheik"  to  "Heart  of  Darkness"  and 
believe  in  the  League  of  Nations.  A  great  deal  of 
superficial  culture  is  compatible  with  that  pathetic 
barbarism,  and  even  a  high  degree  of  aesthetic 
sophistication  in  other  directions.  The  Greeks  who 


164  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
built  the  Parthenon  knew  no  more  about  music 
than  a  hog  knows  of  predestination;  they  were 
almost  as  ignorant  in  that  department  as  the  modern 
lowans  or  New  Yorkers.  It  was  not,  indeed,  until 
the  Renaissance  that  music  as  we  know  it  appeared  in 
the  world,  and  it  was  not  until  less  than  two  centuries 
ago  that  it  reached  a  high  development.  In  Shake 
speare's  day  music  was  just  getting  upon  its  legs  in 
England;  in  Goethe's  day  it  was  just  coming  to  full 
flower  in  Germany;  in  France  and  America  it  is  still 
in  the  savage  state.  It  is  thus  the  youngest  of  the 
arts,  and  the  most  difficult,  and  hence  the  noblest. 
Any  sane  young  man  of  twenty-two  can  write  an 
acceptable  sonnet,  or  design  a  habitable  house  or 
draw  a  horse  that  will  not  be  mistaken  for  an  auto 
mobile,  but  before  he  may  write  even  a  bad  string 
quartet  he  must  go  through  a  long  and  arduous  train 
ing,  just  as  he  must  strive  for  years  before  he  may 
write  prose  that  is  instantly  recognizable  as  prose,  and 
not  as  a  string  of  mere  words. 

The  virtue  of  such  great  poets  as  Shakespeare  does 
not  lie  in  the  content  of  their  poetry,  but  in  its  music. 
The  content  of  the  Shakespearean  plays,  in  fact,  is 
often  puerile,  and  sometimes  quite  incomprehen 
sible.  No  scornful  essays  by  George  Bernard  Shaw 
and  Frank  Harris  were  needed  to  demonstrate  the 
fact;  it  lies  plainly  in  the  text.  One  snickers  sourly 
over  the  spectacle  of  generations  of  pedants  debating 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  165 

the  question  of  Hamlet's  mental  processes;  the  simple 
fact  is  that  Shakespeare  gave  him  no  more  mental 
processes  than  a  Fifth  avenue  rector  has,  but  merely 
employed  him  as  a  convenient  spout  for  some  of  the 
finest  music  ever  got  into  words.  Assume  that  he 
has  all  the  hellish  sagacity  of  a  Nietzsche,  and  that 
music  remains  unchanged;  assume  that  he  is  as  idiotic 
as  a  Grand  Worthy  Flubdub  of  the  Freemasons,  and 
it  still  remains  unchanged.  As  it  is  intoned  on  the 
stage  by  actors,  the  poetry  of  Shakespeare  commonly 
loses  content  altogether.  One  cannot  make  out  what 
the  cabotin  is  saying;  one  can  only  observe  that  it  is 
beautiful.  There  are  whole  speeches  in  the  Shake 
spearean  plays  whose  meaning  is  unknown  ever  to 
scholars — and  yet  they  remain  favorites,  and  well 
deserve  to.  Who  knows,  again,  what  the  sonnets  are 
about?  Is  the  bard  talking  about  the  inn-keeper's 
wife  at  Oxford,  or  about  a  love  affair  of  a  path 
ological,  Y.  M.  C.  A.  character?  Some  say  one 
thing,  and  some  say  the  other.  But  all  who  have 
ears  must  agree  that  the  sonnets  are  extremely  beauti 
ful  stuff — that  the  English  language  reaches  in  them. 
the  topmost  heights  of  conceivable  beauty.  Shake 
speare  thus  ought  to  be  ranked  among  the  musicians, 
along  with  Beethoven.  As  a  philosopher  he  was  a 
ninth-rater — but  so  was  old  Ludwig.  I  wonder  what 
he  would  have  done  with  prose?  I  can't  make  up  my 
mind  about  it.  One  day  I  believe  that  he  would 


166         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

have  written  prose  as  good  as  Dryden's,  and  the  next 
day  I  begin  to  fear  that  he  would  have  produced 
something  as  bad  as  Swinburne's.  He  had  the  ear, 
but  he  lacked  the  logical  sense.  Poetry  has  done 
enough  when  it  charms,  but  prose  must  also  convince. 
I  do  not  forget,  of  course,  that  there  is  a  border 
land  in  which  it  is  hard  to  say,  of  this  or  that  com 
position,  whether  it  is  prose  or  poetry.  Lincoln's 
Gettysburg  speech  is  commonly  reckoned  as  prose, 
and  yet  I  am  convinced  that  it  is  quite  as  much 
poetry  as  the  Queen  Mab  speech  or  Marlowe's  mighty 
elegy  on  Helen  of  Troy.  More,  it  is  so  read  and  ad 
mired  by  the  great  masses  of  the  American  people. 
It  is  an  almost  perfect  specimen  of  a  comforting  but 
unsound  asseveration  put  into  rippling  and  hypnotiz 
ing  words;  done  into  plain  English,  the  statements  of 
fact  in  it  would  make  even  a  writer  of  school  history- 
books  laugh.  So  with  parts  of  the  Declaration  of 
Independence.  No  one  believes  seriously  that  they 
are  true,  but  nearly  everyone  agrees  that  it  would  be 
a  nice  thing  if  they  were  true — and  meanwhile  Jef 
ferson's  eighteenth  century  rhetoric,  by  Johnson  out 
of  John  Lyly's  "Euphues,"  completes  the  enchant 
ment.  In  the  main,  the  test  is  to  be  found  in  the 
audience  rather  than  in  the  poet.  If  it  is  naturally 
intelligent  and  in  a  sober  and  critical  mood,  demand 
ing  sense  and  proofs,  then  nearly  all  poetry  becomes 
prose;  if,  on  the  contrary,  it  is  congenitally  maudlin, 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  167 

er  has  a  few  drinks  aboard,  or  is  in  love,  or  is  other 
wise  in  a  soft  and  believing  mood,  then  even  the  worst 
of  prose,  if  it  has  a  touch  of  soothing  sing-song  in  it, 
becomes  moving  poetry — for  example,  the  diplo 
matic  and  political  gospel-hymns  of  the  late  Dr. 
Wilson,  a  man  constitutionally  unable  to  reason 
clearly  or  honestly,  but  nevertheless  one  full  of  the 
burbling  that  caresses  the  ears  of  simple  men.  Most 
of  his  speeches,  during  the  days  of  his  divine  appoint 
ment,  translated  into  intelligible  English,  would  have 
sounded  as  idiotic  as  a  prose  version  of  "The  Blessed 
Damozel."  Read  by  his  opponents,  they  sounded 
so  without  the  translation. 

But  at  the  extremes,  of  course,  there  are  indubi 
table  poetry  and  incurable  prose,  and  the  difference  is 
not  hard  to  distinguish.  Prose  is  simply  a  form  of 
writing  in  which  the  author  intends  that  his  state 
ments  shall  be  accepted  as  conceivably  true,  even 
when  they  are  about  imaginary  persons  and  events; 
its  appeal  is  to  the  fully  conscious  and  alertly  reason 
ing  man.  Poetry  is  a  form  of  writing  in  which  the 
author  attempts  to  disarm  reason  and  evoke  emotion, 
partly  by  presenting  images  that  awaken  a  powerful 
response  in  the  subconscious  and  partly  by  the  mere 
sough  and  blubber  of  words.  Poetry  is  not  dis 
tinguished  from  prose,  as  Prof.  Dr.  Lowes  says  in  his 
"Convention  and  Revolt  in  Poetry,"  by  an  exclusive 
phraseology,  tut  by  a  peculiar  attitude  of  mind — an 


168         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

attitude  of  self -delusion,  of  fact-denying,  of  saying 
what  isn't  true.  It  is  essentially  an  effort  to  elude  the 
bitter  facts  of  life,  whereas  prose  is  essentially  a 
means  of  unearthing  and  exhibiting  them.  The  gap 
is  bridged  by  sentimental  prose,  which  is  half  prose 
and  half  poetry — Lincoln's  Gettysburg  speech,  the 
average  sermon,  the  prose  of  an  erotic  novelette. 
Immediately  the  thing  acquires  a  literal  meaning  it 
ceases  to  be  poetry;  immediately  it  becomes  capable 
of  convincing  an  adult  and  perfectly  sober  man 
during  the  hours  between  breakfast  and  luncheon  it 
is  indisputably  prose. 

This  quality  of  untruthfulness  pervades  all  poetry, 
good  and  bad.  You  will  find  it  in  the  very  best 
poetry  that  the  world  has  so  far  produced,  to  wit,  in 
the  sonorous  poems  of  the  Jewish  Scriptures.  The 
ancient  Jews  were  stupendous  poets.  Moreover,  they 
were  shrewd  psychologists,  and  so  knew  the  capacity 
of  poetry,  given  the  believing  mind,  to  convince  and 
enchant — in  other  words,  its  capacity  to  drug  the 
auditor  in  such  a  manner  that  he  accepts  it  literally, 
as  he  might  accept  the  baldest  prose.  This  danger 
in  poetry,  given  auditors  impressionable  enough,  is 
too  little  estimated  and  understood.  It  is  largely 
responsible  for  the  persistence  of  sentimentality  in  a 
world  apparently  designed  for  the  one  purpose  of 
manufacturing  cynics.  It  is  probably  chiefly  re 
sponsible  for  the  survival  of  Christianity,  despite  the 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  ART  169 

hard  competition  that  it  has  met  with  from  other 
religions.  The  theology  of  Christianity — i.  e.,  its 
prose — is  certainly  no  more  convincing  than  that  of 
half  a  dozen  other  religions  that  might  be  named;  it 
is,  in  fact,  a  great  deal  less  convincing  than  the  the 
ology  of,  say,  Buddhism.  But  the  poetry  of 
Christianity  is  infinitely  more  lush  and  beautiful  than 
that  of  any  other  religion  ever  heard  of.  There  is 
more  lovely  poetry  in  one  of  the  Psalms  than  in  all 
of  the  Non-Christian  scriptures  of  the  world  taken  to 
gether.  More,  this  poetry  is  in  both  Testaments,  the 
New  as  well  as  the  Old.  Who  could  imagine  a  more 
charming  poem  than  that  of  the  Child  in  the  manger? 
It  has  enchanted  the  world  for  nearly  two  thousand 
years.  It  is  simple,  exquisite  and  overwhelming. 
Its  power  to  -arouse  emotion  is  so  great  that  even  in 
our  age  it  is  at  the  bottom  of  fully  a  half  of  the 
kindliness,  romanticism  and  humane  sentimentality 
that  survive  in  Christendom.  It  is  worth  a  million 
syllogisms. 

Once,  after  plowing  through  sixty  or  seventy  vol 
umes  of  bad  verse,  I  described  myself  as  a  poetry- 
hater.  The  epithet  was  and  is  absurd.  The  truth 
is  that  I  enjoy  poetry  as  much  as  the  next  man — when 
the  mood  is  on  me.  But  what  mood?  The  mood, 
in  a  few  words,  of  intellectual  and  spiritual  fatigue, 
the  mood  df  revolt  against  the  insoluble  riddle  of 
existence,  the  mood  of  disgust  and  despair.  Poetry, 


170  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
then,  is  a  capital  medicine.  First  its  sweet  music 
lulls,  and  then  its  artful  presentation  of  the  beau 
tifully  improbable  soothes  and  gives  surcease.  It 
is  an  escape  from  life,  like  religion,  like  enthusiasm, 
like  glimpsing  a  pretty  girl.  And  to  the  mere  sen 
suous  joy  in  it,  to  the  mere  low  delight  in  getting 
away  from  the  world  for  a  bit,  there  is  added,  if  the 
poetry  be  good,  something  vastly  better,  something 
reaching  out  into  the  realm  of  the  intelligent,  to  wit, 
appreciation  of  good  workmanship.  A  sound  sonnet 
is  almost  as  pleasing  an  object  as  a  well- written 
fugue.  A  pretty  lyric,  deftly  done,  has  all  the  tech 
nical  charm  of  a  fine  carving.  I  think  it  is  crafts 
manship  that  I  admire  most  in  the  world.  Brahms 
enchants  me  because  he  knew  his  trade  perfectly.  I 
like  Richard  Strauss  because  he  is  full  of  technical 
ingenuities,  because  he  is  a  master-workman.  Well, 
who  ever  heard  of  a  finer  craftsman  than  William 
Shakespeare?  His  music  was  magnificent,  he  played 
superbly  upon  all  the  common  emotions — and  he  did 
it  magnificently,  he  did  it  with  an  air.  No,  I  am  no 
poetry-hater.  But  even  Shakespeare  I  most  enjoy, 
not  on  brisk  mornings  when  I  feel  fit  for  any  deviltry, 
but  on  dreary  evenings  when  my  old  wounds  are 
troubling  me,  and  some  fickle  one  has  just  sent  back 
the  autographed  set  of  my  first  editions,  and  bills 
are  piled  up  on  my  desk,  and  I  am  too  sad  to  work. 
Then  I  mix  a  stiff  dram — and  read  poetry. 


VIII.    FIVE   MEN   AT   RANDOM 


Abraham   Lincoln 

THE  backwardness  of  the  art  of  biography  in 
These  States  is  made  shiningly  visible  by  the 
fact  that  we  have  yet  to  see  a  first-rate  life  of 
either  Lincoln  or  Whitman.  Of  Lincolniana,  of 
course,  there  is  no  end,  nor  is  there  any  end  to 
the  hospitality  of  those  who  collect  it.  Some 
time  ago  a  publisher  told  me  that  there  are  four 
kinds  of  books  that  never,  under  any  circumstances, 
lose  money  in  the  United  States — first,  detective 
stories;  secondly,  novels  in  which  the  heroine  is  for 
cibly  debauched  by  the  hero;  thirdly,  volumes  on 
spiritualism,  occultism  and  other  such  claptrap,  and 
fourthly,  books  on  Lincoln.  But  despite  all  the  vast 
mass  of  Lincolniana  and  the  constant  discussion  of 
old  Abe  in  other  ways,  even  so  elemental  a  problem 
as  that  of  his  religious  faith — surely  an  important 
matter  in  any  competent  biography — is  yet  but  half 
solved.  Here,  for  example,  is  the  Rev.  William  E. 

in 


172  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
Barton,  grappling  with  it  for  more  than  four  hundred 
large  pages  in  "The  Soul  of  Abraham  Lincoln."  It 
is  a  lengthy  inquiry — the  rev.  pastor,  in  truth,  shows 
a  good  deal  of  the  habitual  garrulity  of  his  order — 
but  it  is  never  tedious.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  curious 
and  amusing,  and  I  have  read  it  with  steady  interest, 
including  even  the  appendices.  Unluckily,  the 
author,  like  his  predecessors,  fails  to  finish 
the  business  before  him.  Was  Lincoln  a  Christian? 
Did  he  believe  in  the  Divinity  of  Christ?  I  am  left 
in  doubt.  He  was  very  polite  about  it,  and  very 
cautious,  as  befitted  a  politician  in  need  of  Christian 
votes,  but  how  much  genuine  conviction  was  in  that 
politeness?  And  if  his  occasional  references  to 
Christ  were  thus  open  to  question,  what  of  his  rather 
vague  avowals  of  belief  in  a  personal  God  and  in  the 
immortality  of  the  soul?  Herndon  and  some  of 
his  other  close  friends  always  maintained  that  he 
was  an  atheist,  but  Dr.  Barton  argues  that  this  atheism 
was  simply  disbelief  in  the  idiotic  Methodist  and 
Baptist  dogmas  of  his  time — that  nine  Christian 
churches  out  of  ten,  if  he  were  alive  to-day,  would 
admit  him  to  their  high  privileges  and  prerogatives 
without  anything  worse  than  a  few  warning  coughs. 
As  for  me,  I  still  wonder. 

The  growth  of  the  Lincoln  legend  is  truly  amazing. 
He  becomes  the  American  solar  myth,  the  chief  butt 
of  American  credulity  and  sentimentality.  Wash- 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  173 

ington,  of  late  years,  has  been  perceptibly  human 
ized;  every  schoolboy  now  knows  that  he  used  to 
swear  a  good  deal,  and  was  a  sharp  trader,  and  had 
a  quick  eye  for  a  pretty  ankle.  But  meanwhile  the 
varnishers  and  veneerers  have  been  busily  convert 
ing  Abe  into  a  plaster  saint,  thus  making  him  fit  for 
adoration  in  the  chautauquas  and  Y.  M.  C.  A.'s. 
All  the  popular  pictures  of  him  show  him  in  his 
robes  of  state,  and  wearing  an  expression  fit  for 
a  man  about  to  be  hanged.  There  is,  so  far  as  I 
know,  not  a  single  portrait  of  him  showing  him  smil 
ing — and  yet  he  must  have  cackled  a  good  deal,  first 
and  last:  who  ever  heard  of  a  storyteller  who  didn't? 
Worse,  there  is  an  obvious  effort  to  pump  all  his 
human  weaknesses  out  of  him,  and  so  leave  him  a 
mere  moral  apparition,  a  sort  of  amalgam  of  John 
Wesley  and  the  Holy  Ghost.  What  could  be  more 
absurd?  Lincoln,  in  point  of  fact,  was  a  practical 
politician  of  long  experience  and  high  talents,  and 
by  no  means  cursed  with  inconvenient  ideals.  On 
the  contrary,  his  career  in  the  Illinois  Legislature 
was  that  of  a  good  organization  man,  and  he  was  more 
than  once  denounced  by  reformers.  Even  his  han 
dling  of  the  slavery  question  was  that  of  a  poli 
tician,  not  that  of  a  fanatic.  Nothing  alarmed  him 
more  than  the  suspicion  that  he  was  an  Abolitionist. 
Barton  tells  of  an  occasion  when  he  actually  fled 
town  to  avoid  meeting  the  issue  squarely.  A  genuine 


174  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
Abolitionist  would  have  published  the  Emancipation 
Proclamation  the  day  after  the  first  battle  of  Bull 
Run.  But  Lincoln  waited  until  the  time  was  more 
favorable — until  Lee  had  been  hurled  out  of  Penn 
sylvania,  and,  more  important  still,  until  the  political 
currents  were  safely  running  his  way.  Always  he 
was  a  wary  fellow,  both  in  his  dealings  with  meas 
ures  and  in  his  dealings  with  men.  He  knew  how  to 
keep  his  mouth  shut. 

Nevertheless,  it  was  his  eloquence  that  probably 
brought  him  to  his  great  estate.  Like  William 
Jennings  Bryan,  he  was  a  dark  horse  made  suddenly 
formidable  by  fortunate  rhetoric.  The  Douglas 
debate  launched  him,  and  the  Cooper  Union  speech 
got  him  the  presidency.  This  talent  for  emotional 
utterance,  this  gift  for  making  phrases  that  en 
chanted  the  plain  people,  was  an  accomplishment 
of  late  growth.  His  early  speeches  were  mere 
empty  fireworks — the  childish  rhodomontades  of 
the  era.  But  in  middle  life  he  purged  his  style 
of  ornament  and  it  became  almost  baldly  simple — 
and  it  is  for  that  simplicity  that  he  is  remembered 
to-day.  The  Gettysburg  speech  is  at  once  the 
shortest  and  the  most  famous  oration  in  American 
history.  Put  beside  it,  all  the  whoopings  of  the 
Websters,  Sumners  and  Everetts  seem  gaudy  and 
silly.  It  is  eloquence  brought  to  a  pellucid  and 
almost  child-like  perfection — the  highest  emotion 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  175 

reduced  to  one  graceful  and  irresistible  gesture. 
Nothing  else  precisely  like  it  is  to  be  found  in 
the  whole  range  of  oratory.  Lincoln  himself  never 
even  remotely  approached  it.  It  is  genuinely  stupen 
dous. 

But  let  us  not  forget  that  it  is  oratory,  not  logic; 
beauty,  not  sense.  Think  of  the  argument  in  it!  Put 
it  into  the  cold  words  of  everyday!  The  doctrine  is 
simply  this:  that  the  Union  soldiers  who  died  at 
Gettysburg  sacrificed  their  lives  to  the  cause  of  self- 
determination — "that  government  of  the  people,  by 
the  people,  for  the  people,"  should  not  perish  from 
the  earth.  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  anything  more 
untrue.  The  Union  soldiers  in  that  battle  actually 
fought  against  self-determination;  it  was  the  Confed 
erates  who  fought  for  the  right  of  their  people  to  gov 
ern  themselves.  What  was  the  practical  effect  of  the 
battle  of  Gettysburg?  What  else  than  the  destruc 
tion  of  the  old  sovereignty  of  the  States,  i.  e.9  of  the 
people  of  the  States?  The  Confederates  went  into 
battle  an  absolutely  free  people;  they  came  out  with 
their  freedom  subject  to  the  supervision  and  vote  of 
the  rest  of  the  country — and  for  nearly  twenty  years 
that  vote  was  so  effective  that  they  enjoyed  scarcely 
any  freedom  at  all.  Am  I  the  first  American  to  note 
the  fundamental  nonsensicality  of  the  Gettysburg 
address?  If  so,  I  plead  my  aesthetic  joy  in  it  in 
amelioration  of  the  sacrilege. 


176         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 


Paul  Elmer  More 

Nothing  new  is  to  be  found  in  the  latest  volume  of 
Paul  Elmer  More's  Shelburne  Essays.  The  learned 
author,  undismayed  by  the  winds  of  anarchic  doctrine 
that  blow  down  his  Princeton  stovepipe,  continues  to 
hold  fast  to  the  notions  of  his  earliest  devotion.  He 
is  still  the  gallant  champion  sent  against  the  Roman 
tic  Movement  by  the  forces  of  discipline  and  deco 
rum.  He  is  still  the  eloquent  fugleman  of  the  Pur 
itan  ethic  and  aesthetic.  In  so  massive  a  certainty, 
so  resolute  an  immovability  there  is  something  almost 
magnificent.  These  are  somewhat  sad  days  for  the 
exponents  of  that  ancient  correctness.  The  Goths 
and  the  Huns  are  at  the  gate,  and  as  they  batter  wildly 
they  throw  dead  cats,  perfumed  lingerie,  tracts 
against  predestination,  and  the  bound  files  of  the 
Nation,  the  Freeman  and  the  New  Republic  over  the 
fence.  But  the  din  does  not  flabbergast  Dr.  More. 
High  above  the  blood-bathed  battlements  there  is 
a  tower,  of  ivory  within  and  solid  f  erro-concrete  with 
out,  and  in  its  austere  upper  chamber  he  sits  un 
daunted,  solemnly  composing  an  elegy  upon  Jonathan 
Edwards,  "the  greatest  theologian  and  philosopher 
yet  produced  in  this  country." 

Magnificent,    indeed — and    somehow    charming. 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RANDOM  111 

On  days  when  I  have  no  nobler  business  I  sometimes 
join  the  barbarians  and  help  them  to  launch  their 
abominable  bombs  against  the  embattled  blue-nose& 
It  is,  in  the  main,  fighting  that  is  too  easy,  too  Anglo- 
Saxon  to  be  amusing.  Think  of  the  decayed  profes 
sors  assembled  by  Dr.  Franklin  for  the  Profiteers' 
Review;  who  could  get  any  genuine  thrill  out  of 
dropping  them?  They  come  out  on  crutches,  and 
are  as  much  afraid  of  what  is  behind  them  as  they 
are  of  what  is  in  front  of  them.  Facing  all  the  hor 
rible  artillery  of  Nineveh  and  Tyre,  they  arm  them 
selves  with  nothing  worse  than  the  pedagogical  birch. 
The  janissaries  of  Adolph  Ochs,  the  Anglo-Saxon  su 
preme  archon,  are  even  easier.  One  has  but  to  blow 
a  shofar,  and  down  they  go.  Even  Prof.  Dr.  Stuart 
P.  Sherman  is  no  antagonist  to  delight  a  hard-boiled 
heretic.  Sherman  is  at  least  honestly  American, 
of  course,  but  the  trouble  with  him  is  that  he  is  too 
American.  The  Iowa  hayseed  remains  in  his  hair; 
he  can't  get  rid  of  the  smell  of  the  chautauqua;  one 
inevitably  sees  in  him  a  sort  of  reductio  ad  absurdum 
of  his  fundamental  theory — to  wit,  the  theory  that  the 
test  of  an  artist  is  whether  he  hated  the  Kaiser  in 
1917,  and  plays  his  honorable  part  in  Christian 
Endeavor,  and  prefers  Coca-Cola  to  Scharlachberger 
1911,  and  has  taken  to  heart  the  great  lessons  of  sex 
hygiene.  Sherman  is  game,  but  he  doesn't  offer 
sport  in  the  grand  manner.  Moreover,  he  has  been 


178          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

showing  sad  signs  of  late  of  a  despairing  heart:  he 
tries  to  be  ingratiating,  and  begins  to  hug  in  the 
clinches. 

The  really  tempting  quarry  is  More.  To  rout 
him  out  of  his  armored  tower,  to  get  him  out  upon  the 
glacis  for  a  duel  before  both  armies,  to  bring  him 
finally  to  the  wager  of  battle — this  would  be  an  enter 
prise  to  bemuse  the  most  audacious  and  give  pause 
to  the  most  talented.  More  has  a  solid  stock  of 
learning  in  his  lockers;  he  is  armed  and  outfitted  aa 
none  of  the  pollyannas  who  trail  after  him  is  armed 
and  outfitted;  he  is,  perhaps,  the  nearest  approach  to 
a  genuine  scholar  that  we  have  in  America,  God  save 
us  all!  But  there  is  simply  no  truculence  in  him, 
no  flair  for  debate,  no  lust  to  do  execution  upon  his 
foes.  His  method  is  wholly  ex  pane.  Year  after 
year  he  simply  iterates  and  reiterates  his  misty 
protests,  seldom  changing  so  much  as  a  word. 
Between  his  first  volume  and  his  last  there  is  not  the 
difference  between  Gog  and  Magog.  Steadily, 
ploddingly,  vaguely,  he  continues  to  preach  the 
gloomy  gospel  of  tightness  and  restraint.  He  was 
against  "the  electric  thrill  of  freer  feeling"  when  he 
began,  and  he  will  be  against  it  on  that  last  gray  day 
— I  hope  it  long  post-dates  my  own  hanging — when 
the  ultimate  embalmer  sneaks  upon  him  with  velvet 
tread,  and  they  haul  down  the  flag  to  half-staff  at 
Princeton,  and  the  readers  of  the  New  York  Evening 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  179 

Journal  note  that  an  obscure  somebody  named  Paul 
E.  More  is  dead. 


Madison  Cawein 

A  vast  and  hefty  tome  celebrates  this  dead  poet, 
solemnly  issued  by  his  mourning  friends  in  Louis 
ville.  The  editor  is  Otto  A.  Rothert,  who  confesses 
that  he  knew  Cawein  but  a  year  or  two,  and  never 
read  his  poetry  until  after  his  death.  The  contrib 
utors  include  such  local  literati  as  Reuben  Post  Hal- 
leek,  Leigh  Gordon  Giltner,  Anna  Blanche  McGill  and 
Elvira  S.  Miller  Slaughter.  Most  of  the  ladies  gush 
over  the  departed  in  the  manner  of  high-school  teach 
ers  paying  tribute  to  Plato,  Montaigne  or  Dante 
Alighieri.  His  young  son,  seventeen  years  old, 
contributes  by  far  the  most  vivid  and  intelligent 
account  of  him;  it  is,  indeed,  very  well  written,  as, 
in  a  different  way,  is  the  contribution  of  Charles 
Hamilton  Musgrove,  an  old  newspaper  friend.  The 
ladies,  as  I  hint,  simply  swoon  and  grow  lyrical. 
But  it  is  a  fascinating  volume,  all  the  same,  and  well 
worth  the  room  it  takes  on  the  shelf.  Mr.  Rothert 
starts  off  with  what  he  calls  a  "picturography"  of 
Cawein — the  poet's  father  and  mother  in  the  raiment 
of  1865,  the  coat-of-arms  of  his  mother's  great-grand- 
father'a  uncle,  the  house  which  now  stands  on 


180  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
the  site  of  the  house  in  which  he  was  bom,  the 
rock  spring  from  which  he  used  to  drink  as  a  boy, 
a  group  showing  him  with  his  three  brothers,  another 
showing  him  with  one  brother  and  their  cousin  Fred, 
Cawein  himself  with  sideboards,  the  houses  he  lived 
in,  the  place  where  he  worked,  the  walks  he  liked 
around  Louisville,  his  wife  and  baby,  the  hideous 
bust  of  him  in  the  Louisville  Public  Library,  the 
church  from  which  he  was  buried,  his  modest  grave 
in  Cave  Hill  Cemetery — in  brief,  all  the  photographs 
that  collect  about  a  man  as  he  staggers  through  life, 
and  entertain  his  ribald  grandchildren  after  he  is 
gone.  Then  comes  a  treatise  on  the  ancestry  and 
youth  of  the  poet,  then  a  collection  of  newspaper 
clippings  about  him,  then  a  gruesomely  particular 
account  of  his  death,  then  a  fragment  of  auto 
biography,  then  a  selection  from  his  singularly  dull 
letters,  then  some  prose  pieces  from  his  pen,  then  the 
aforesaid  tributes  of  his  neighbors,  and  finally  a 
bibliography  of  his  works,  and  an  index  to  them. 

As  I  say,  a  volume  of  fearful  bulk  and  beam,  but 
nevertheless  full  of  curious  and  interesting  things. 
Cawein,  of  course,  was  not  a  poet  of  the  first  rank, 
nor  is  it  certain  that  he  has  any  secure  place  in  the 
second  rank,  but  in  the  midst  of  a  great  deal  of  ob 
vious  and  feeble  stuff  he  undoubtedly  wrote  some 
nature  lyrics  of  excellent  quality.  The  woods  and 
the  fields  were  his  delight.  He  loved  to  roam  through 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  181 

them,  observing  the  flowers,  the  birds,  the  tall  trees, 
the  shining  sky  overhead,  the  green  of  Spring,  the 
reds  and  browns  of  Autumn,  the  still  whites  of 
Winter.  There  were  times  when  he  got  his  ecstasy 
into  words — when  he  wrote  poems  that  were  sound 
and  beautiful.  These  poems  will  not  be  forgotten; 
there  will  be  no  history  of  American  literature  written 
for  a  hundred  years  that  does  not  mention  Madison 
Cawein.  But  what  will  the  literary  historians  make 
of  the  man  himself?  How  will  they  explain  his  pos 
session,  however  fitfully,  of  the  divine  gift — his  gen 
uine  kinship  with  Wordsworth  and  Shelly?  Cer 
tainly  no  more  unlikely  candidate  for  the  bays  ever 
shinned  up  Parnassus.  His  father  was  a  quack  doc 
tor;  his  mother  was  a  professional  spiritualist;  he 
himself,  for  years  and  years,  made  a  living  as  cash 
ier  in  a  gambling-house!  Could  anything  be  more 
grotesque?  Is  it  possible  to  imagine  a  more  improb 
able  setting  for  a  poet?  Yet  the  facts  are  the  facts, 
and  Mr.  Rothert  makes  no  attempt  whatever  to  con 
ceal  them.  Add  a  final  touch  of  the  bizarre:  Cawein 
fell  over  one  morning  while  shaving  in  his  bathroom, 
and  cracked  his  head  on  the  bathtub,  and  after  his 
death  there  was  a  row  over  his  life  insurance.  Mr. 
Rothert  presents  all  of  the  documents.  The  autopsy 
is  described;  the  death  certificate  is  quoted.  ...  A 
strange,  strange  tale,  indeed ! 


182         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

4 

Frank  Harris 

Though,  so  far  as  I  know,  this  Harris  is  a  per 
fectly  reputable  man,  fearing  God  and  obeying  the 
laws,  it  is  not  to  be  gainsaid  that  a  certain  flavor  of 
the  sinister  hangs  about  his  aspect.  The  first  time 
I  ever  enjoyed  the  honor  of  witnessing  him,  there 
bobbed  up  in  my  mind  (instantly  put  away  as  un 
worthy  and  unseemly)  a  memory  of  the  handsome 
dogs  who  used  to  chain  shrieking  virgins  to  railway 
tracks  in  the  innocent,  pre-Ibsenish  dramas  of  my 
youth,  the  while  a  couple  of  stage  hands  imitated 
the  rumble  of  the  Empire  State  Express  in  the  wings. 
There  was  the  same  elegance  of  turn-out,  the  same 
black  mustachios,  the  same  erect  figure  and  lordly 
air,  the  same  agate  glitter  in  the  eyes,  the  same  aloof 
and  superior  smile.  A  sightly  fellow,  by  all  the 
gods,  and  one  who  obviously  knew  how  to  sneer. 
That  afternoon,  in  fact,  we  had  a  sneering  match,  and 
before  it  was  over  most  of  the  great  names  in  the 
letters  and  politics  of  the  time,  circa  1914,  had  been 
reduced  to  faint  hisses  and  ha-has.  .  .  .  Well,  a 
sneerer  has  his  good  days  and  his  bad  days.  There 
are  times  when  his  gift  gives  him  such  comfort  that 
it  can  be  matched  only  by  God's  grace,  and  there  are 
times  when  it  launches  upon  him  such  showers  of 
darts  that  he  is  bound  to  feel  a  few  stings.  Harris 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  183 

got  the  darts  first,  for  the  year  that  he  came  back  to 
his  native  land,  after  a  generation  of  exile,  was  the 
year  in  which  Anglomania  rose  to  the  dignity  of  a  na 
tional  religion — and  what  he  had  to  say  about  the 
English,  among  whom  he  had  lived  since  the  early 
80's,  was  chiefly  of  a  very  waspish  and  disconcerting 
character.  Worse,  he  not  only  said  it,  twirling  his 
mustache  defiantly;  he  also  wrote  it  down,  and  pub 
lished  it  in  a  book.  This  book  was  full  of  shocks  for 
the  rapt  worshippers  of  the  Motherland,  and  particu 
larly  for  the  literary  Kanonendelicatessen  who  fol 
lowed  the  pious  leadership  of  Woodrow  and  Ochs, 
Putnam  and  Roosevelt,  Wister  and  Cyrus  Curtis, 
young  Reid  and  Mrs.  Jay.  So  they  called  a  special 
meeting  of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and 
Letters,  sang  "God  Save  the  King,"  kissed  the  Union 
Jack,  and  put  Harris  into  Coventry.  And  there  he 
remained  for  five  or  six  long  years.  The  literary 
reviews  never  mentioned  him.  His  books  were  ex 
punged  from  the  minutes.  When  he  was  heard  of 
at  all,  it  was  only  in  whispers,  and  the  general  bur 
den  of  those  whispers  was  that  he  was  in  the  pay  of 
the  Kaiser,  and  plotting  to  garrot  the  Rev.  Dr.  Wil 
liam  T.  Manning.  .  .  . 

So  down  to  1921.  Then  the  English,  with  charac 
teristic  lack  of  delicacy,  played  a  ghastly  trick  upon 
all  those  dutiful  and  well-meaning  colonists.  That 
is  to  say,  they  suddenly  forgave  Harris  his  criminal 


184  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
refusal  to  take  their  war  buncombe  seriously,  ex 
humed  him  from  his  long  solitude  among  the  Anglo- 
Ashkenazim,  and  began  praising  him  in  rich,  hearty 
terms  as  a  literary  gentleman  of  the  first  water,  and 
even  as  the  chief  adornment  of  American  letters! 
The  English  notices  of  his  "Contemporary  Portraits: 
Second  Series"  were  really  quite  amazing.  The  Lon 
don  Times  gave  him  two  solid  columns,  and  where 
the  Times  led,  all  the  other  great  organs  of  English 
literary  opinion  followed.  The  book  itself  was  de 
scribed  as  something  extraordinary,  a  piece  of  criti 
cism  full  of  shrewdness  and  originality,  and  the 
author  was  treated  with  the  utmost  politeness.  .  .  . 
One  imagines  the  painful  sensation  in  the  New  York 
Times  office,  the  dismayed  groups  around  far-flung 
campus  pumps,  the  special  meetings  of  the  Princeton, 
N.  J.,  and  Urbana,  111.,  American  Legions,  the  secret 
conference  between  the  National  Institute  of  Arts  and 
Letters  and  the  Ku  Klux  Klan.  But  though  there 
was  tall  talk  by  hot  heads,  nothing  could  be  done. 
Say  "Wo!"  and  the  dutiful  jackass  turns  to  the  right; 
say  "Gee!"  and  he  turns  to  the  left.  It  is  too  much, 
of  course,  to  ask  him  to  cheer  as  well  as  turn — bujt 
he  nevertheless  turns.  Since  1921  I  have  heard  no 
more  whispers  against  Harris  from  professors  and 
Vigilantes.  But  on  two  or  three  occasions,  the  sub 
ject  coming  up,  I  have  heard  him  sneer  his  master 
sneer,  and  each  time  my  blood  has  run  cold. 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  185 

Well,  what  is  in  him?  My  belief,  frequently  ex 
pressed,  is  that  there  is  a  great  deal.  His  "Oscar 
Wilde"  is,  by  long  odds,  the  best  literary  biography 
ever  written  by  an  American — an  astonishingly  frank, 
searching  and  vivid  reconstruction  of  character — a 
piece  of  criticism  that  makes  all  ordinary  criticism 
seem  professorial  and  lifeless.  The  Comstocks,  I 
need  not  say,  tried  to  suppress  it;  a  brilliant  light  is 
thrown  upon  Harris  by  the  fact  that  they  failed  ig- 
nominiously.  All  the  odds  were  in  favor  of  the  Com 
stocks  ;  they  had  patriotism  on  their  side  and  the  help 
of  all  the  swine  who  flourished  in  those  days;  never 
theless,  Harris  gave  them  a  severe  beating,  and  scared 
them  half  to  death.  In  brief,  a  man  of  the  most 
extreme  bellicosity,  enterprise  and  courage — a  fellow 
whose  ideas  are  expressed  absolutely  regardless  of 
tender  feelings,  whether  genuine  or  bogus.  In  "The 
Man  Shakespeare"  and  "The  Women  of  Shake 
speare"  he  tackled  the  whole  body  of  academic  Eng 
lish  critics  en  masse — and  routed  them  en  masse. 
The  two  books,  marred  perhaps  by  a  too  bombastic 
spirit,  yet  contain  some  of  the  soundest,  shrewdest 
and  most  convincing  criticism  of  Shakespeare  that  has 
ever  been  written.  All  the  old  hocus-pocus  is  thrown 
overboard.  There  is  an  entirely  new  examination 
of  the  materials,  and  to  the  business  is  brought  a 
knowledge  of  the  plays  so  ready  and  so  vast  that  that 
of  even  the  most  learned  don  begins  to  seem  a  mere 


186  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
smattering.  The  same  great  grasp  of  facts  and  evi 
dences  is  visible  in  the  sketches  which  make  up  the 
three  volumes  of  "Contemporary  Portraits."  What 
one  always  gets  out  of  them  is  a  feeling  that  the  man 
knows  the  men  he  is  writing  about — that  he  not  only 
knows  what  he  sets  down,  but  a  great  deal  more. 
There  is  here  nothing  of  the  cold  correctness  of  the 
usual  literary  "estimate."  Warts  are  not  forgotten, 
whether  of  the  nose  or  of  the  immortal  soul.  The 
subject,  beginning  as  a  political  shibboleth  or  a  row 
of  books,  gradually  takes  on  all  the  colors  of  life, 
and  then  begins  to  move,  naturally  and  freely.  I 
know  of  no  more  brilliant  evocations  of  personality 
in  any  literature — and  most  of  them  are  personalities 
of  sharp  flavor,  for  Harris,  in  his  day,  seems  to  have 
known  almost  everybody  worth  knowing,  and  whoever 
he  knew  went  into  his  laboratory  for  vivisection. 

The  man  is  thus  a  first  rate  critic  of  his  time,  and 
what  he  has  written  about  his  contemporaries  is  cer 
tain  to  condition  the  view  of  them  held  in  the  future. 
What  gives  him  his  value  in  this  difficult  field  is,  first 
of  all  and  perhaps  most  important  of  all,  his  cynical 
detachment — his  capacity  for  viewing  men  and  ideas 
objectively.  In  his  life,  of  course,  there  have  been 
friendships  and  some  of  them  have  been  strong  and 
long-continued,  but  when  he  writes  it  is  with  a  sort  of 
surgical  remoteness;  as  if  the  business  in  hand  were 
vastly  more  important  than  the  man.  He  was  lately 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  187 

protesting  violently  that  he  was  and  is  quite  devoid  of 
malice.  Granted.  But  so  is  a  surgeon.  To  write 
of  George  Moore  as  he  has  written  may  be  writing 
devoid  of  malice,  but  nevertheless  the  effect  is  pre 
cisely  that  which  would  follow  if  some  malicious 
enemy  were  to  drag  poor  George  out  of  his  celibate 
couch  in  the  dead  of  night,  and  chase  him  naked  down 
Shaftsbury  avenue.  The  thing  is  appallingly  revel 
atory — and  I  believe  that  it  is  true.  The  Moore  that 
he  depicts  may  not  be  absolutely  the  real  Moore,  but 
he  is  unquestionably  far  nearer  to  the  real  Moore 
than  the  Moore  of  the  Moore  books.  The  method, 
of  course,  has  its  defects.  Harris  is  far  more 
interested,  fundamentally,  in  men  than  in  their 
ideas:  the  catholic  sweep  of  his  "Contemporary 
Portraits"  proves  it.  In  consequence  his  judgments 
of  books  are  often  colored  by  his  opinions  of  their 
authors.  He  dislikes  Mark  Twain  as  his  own  antith 
esis:  a  trimmer  and  poltroon.  Ergo,  "A  Connec 
ticut  Yankee"  is  drivel,  which  leads  us,  as  Euclid 
hath  it,  to  absurdity.  He  once  had  a  row  with 
Dreiser.  Ergo,  "The  Titan"  is  nonsense,  which  is 
itself  nonsense.  But  I  know  of  no  critic  who  is 
wholly  free  from  that  quite  human  weakness.  In 
the  academic  bunkophagi  it  is  everything;  they  are 
willing  to  swallow  anything  so  long  as  the  author  is 
sound  upon  the  League  of  Nations.  It  seems  to  me 
that  such  aberrations  are  rarer  in  Harris  than  in 


188         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

most.     He  may  have  violent  prejudices,  but  it  is 

seldom  that  they  play  upon  a  man  who  is  honest. 

I  judge  from  his  frequent  discussions  of  him 
self — he  is  happily  free  from  the  vanity  of 
modesty — that  the  pets  of  his  secret  heart  are  his 
ventures  into  fiction,  and  especially,  "The  Bomb" 
and  "Monies  the  Matador."  The  latter  has  been 
greatly  praised  by  Arnold  Bennett,  who  has  also 
praised  Leonard  Merrick.  I  have  read  it  four  or 
five  times,  and  always  with  enjoyment.  It  is  a 
powerful  and  adept  tale;  well  constructed  and 
beautifully  written;  it  recalls  some  of  the  best  of 
the  shorter  stories  of  Thomas  Hardy.  Alongside 
it  one  might  range  half  a  dozen  other  Harris 
stories — all  of  them  carefully  put  together,  every  one 
the  work  of  a  very  skillful  journeyman.  But  despite 
Harris,  the  authentic  Harris  is  not  the  story -writer: 
he  has  talents,  of  course,  but  it  would  be  absurd  to 
put  "Monies  the  Matador"  beside  "Heart  of  Dark 
ness."  In  "Love  in  Youth"  he  descends  to  unmis 
takable  fluff  and  feebleness.  The  real  Harris  is  the 
author  of  the  Wilde  volumes,  of  the  two  books  about 
Shakespeare,  of  the  three  volumes  of  "Contemporary 
Portraits."  Here  there  is  stuff  that  lifts  itself  clearly 
and  brilliantly  above  the  general — criticism  that  has 
a  terrific  vividness  and  plausibility,  and  all  the  gusto 
that  the  professors  can  never  pump  up.  Harris 
makes  his  opinions  not  only  interesting,  but  impor- 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RAN  DOM  189 

tant.  What  he  has  to  say  always  seems  novel,  in 
genious,  and  true.  Here  is  the  chief  lifework  of  an 
American  who,  when  all  values  are  reckoned  up,  will 
be  found  to  have  been  a  sound  artist  and  an  extremely 
intelligent,  courageous  and  original  man — and  in 
finitely  the  superior  of  the  poor  dolts  who  once  tried 
so  childishly  to  dispose  of  him. 


Havelock  Ellis 

If  the  test  of  the  personal  culture  of  a  man 
be  the  degree  of  his  freedom  from  the  banal  ideas 
and  childish  emotions  which  move  the  great  masses 
of  men,  then  Havelock  Ellis  is  undoubtedly  the  most 
civilized  Englishman  of  his  generation.  He  is  a  man 
of  the  soundest  and  widest  learning,  but  it  is  not  his 
positive  learning  that  gives  him  distinction;  it  is  his 
profound  and  implacable  skepticism,  his  penetrating 
eye  for  the  transient,  the  disingenuous,  and  the 
shoddy.  So  unconditioned  a  skepticism,  it  must  be 
plain,  is  not  an  English  habit.  The  average  English 
man  of  science,  though  he  may  challenge  the  Contin 
entals  within  his  speciality,  is  only  too  apt  to  sink  to 
the  level  of  a  politician,  a  green  grocer,  or  a  suburban 
clergyman  outside  it.  The  examples  of  Wallace, 
Crookes,  and  Lodge  are  anything  but  isolated. 
Scratch  an  English  naturalist  and  you  are  likely  to 


190  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
discover  a  spiritualist;  take  an  English  metaphysician 
to  where  the  band  is  playing,  and  if  he  begins  to  snuffle 
patriotically  you  need  not  be  surprised.  The  late 
war  uncovered  this  weakness  in  a  wholesale  manner. 
The  English  Gelehrten,  as  a  class,  not  only  stood  by 
their  country;  they  also  stood  by  the  Hon.  David 
Lloyd  George,  the  Daily  Mail,  and  the  mob  in  Trafal 
gar  Square.  Unluckily,  the  asinine  manifestations 
ensuing — for  instance,  the  "proofs"  of  the  eminent 
Oxford  philologist  that  the  Germans  had  never  con 
tributed  anything  to  philology — are  not  to  be  de 
scribed  with  good  grace  by  an  American,  for  they 
were  far  surpassed  on  this  side  of  the  water.  Eng 
land  at  least  had  Ellis,  with  Bertrand  Russell,  Wilfrid 
Scawen  Blunt,  and  a  few  others  in  the  background. 
We  had,  on  that  plane,  no  one. 

Ellis,  it  seems  to  me,  stood  above  all  the  rest,  and 
precisely  because  his  dissent  from  the  prevailing  im 
becilities  was  quite  devoid  of  emotion  and  had  noth 
ing  in  it  of  brummagen  moral  purpose.  Too  many 
of  the  heretics  of  the  time  were  simply  orthodox 
witch-hunters  off  on  an  unaccustomed  tangent.  In 
their  disorderly  indignation  they  matched  the  regular 
professors;  it  was  only  in  the  objects  of  their  ranting 
that  they  differed.  But  Ellis  kept  his  head  through 
out.  An  Englishman  of  the  oldest  native  stock,  an 
unapologetic  lover  of  English  scenes  and  English 
ways,  an  unshaken  believer  in  the  essential  sound- 


FIVE  MEN  AT  RANDOM  191 

ness  and  high  historical  destiny  of  his  people,  he 
simply  stood  aside  from  the  current  clown-show  and 
waited  in  patience  for  sense  and  decency  to  be  re 
stored.  His  "Impressions  and  Comments,"  the  rec 
ord  of  his  war-time  reflections,  is  not  without  its  note 
of  melancholy;  it  was  hard  to  look  on  without  de 
pression.  But  for  the  man  of  genuine  culture  there 
were  at  least  some  resources  remaining  within  him 
self,  and  what  gives  this  volume  its  chief  value  is 
its  picture  of  how  such  a  man  made  use  of  them. 
Ellis,  facing  the  mob  unleashed,  turned  to  concerns 
and  ideas  beyond  its  comprehension — to  the  human 
ism  that  stands  above  all  such  sordid  conflicts.  There 
is  something  almost  of  Renaissance  dignity  in  his 
chronicle  of  his  speculations.  The  man  that  emerges 
is  not  a  mere  scholar  immured  in  a  cell,  but  a  man  of 
the  world  superior  to  his  race  and  his  time — a  phi 
losopher  viewing  the  childish  passion  of  lesser  men 
disdainfully  and  yet  not  too  remote  to  understand  it. 
and  even  to  see  in  it  a  certain  cosmic  use.  A  fine  air 
blows  through  the  book.  It  takes  the  reader  into  the 
company  of  one  whose  mind  is  a  rich  library  and 
whose  manner  is  that  of  a  gentleman.  He  is  the 
complete  anti-Kipling.  In  him  the  Huxleian  tradi 
tion  comes  to  full  flower. 

His  discourse  ranges  from  Beethoven  to  Com- 
stockery  and  from  Spanish  architecture  to  the  charm 
of  the  English  village.  The  extent  of  the  man's 


192          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

knowledge  is  really  quite  appalling.  His  primary 
work  in  the  world  has  been  that  of  a  psychologist, 
and  in  particular  he  has  brought  a  great  erudition  and 
an  extraordinarily  sound  judgment  to  the  vexatious 
problems  of  the  psychology  of  sex,  but  that  profes 
sional  concern,  extending  over  so  many  years,  has 
not  prevented  him  from  entering  a  dozen  other  do 
mains  of  speculation,  nor  has  it  dulled  his  sensitive 
ness  to  beauty  nor  his  capacity  to  evoke  it.  His  writ 
ing  was  never  better  than  in  this  volume.  His  style, 
especially  towards  the  end,  takes  on  a  sort  of  glowing 
clarity.  It  is  English  that  is  as  transparent  as  a 
crystal,  and  yet  it  is  English  that  is  full  of  fine  colors 
and  cadences.  There  could  be  no  better  investiture 
for  the  questionings  and  conclusions  of  so  original, 
so  curious,  so  learned,  and,  above  all,  so  sound  and 
hearty  a  man. 


IX.    THE    NATURE    OF    LIBERTY 

EVERY  time  an  officer  of  the  constabulary, 
in  the  execution  of  his  just  and  awful 
powers  under  American  law,  produces  a 
compound  fracture  of  the  occiput  of  some  citizen  in 
his  custody,  with  hemorrhage,  shock,  coma  and 
death,  there  comes  a  feeble,  falsetto  protest  from 
specialists  in  human  liberty.  Is  it  a  fact  without  sig 
nificance  that  this  protest  is  never  supported  by  the 
great  body  of  American  freemen,  setting  aside  the 
actual  heirs  and  creditors  of  the  victim?  I  think 
not.  Here,  as  usual,  public  opinion  is  very  realistic. 
It  does  not  rise  against  the  policeman  for  the  plain 
and  simple  reason  that  it  does  not  question  his  right 
to  do  what  he  has  done.  Policemen  are  not  given 
night-sticks  for  ornament.  They  are  given  them  for 
the  purpose  of  cracking  the  skulls  of  the  recalcitrant 
plain  people,  Democrats  and  Republicans  alike. 
When  they  execute  that  high  duty  they  are  palpably 
within  their  rights. 

The  specialists  aforesaid  are  the  same  fanatics  who 
shake  the  air  with  sobs  every  time  the  Postmaster- 
General  of  the  United  States  bars  a  periodical  from 

193 


194          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

the  mails  because  its  ideas  do  not  please  him,  and 
every  time  some  poor  Russian  is  deported  for  reading 
Karl  Marx,  and  every  time  a  Prohibition  enforcement 
officer  murders  a  bootlegger  who  resists  his  levies, 
and  every  time  agents  of  the  Department  of  Justice 
throw  an  Italian  out  of  the  window,  and  every  time 
the  Ku  Klux  Klan  or  the  American  Legion  tars  and 
feathers  a  Socialist  evangelist.  In  brief,  they  are 
Radicals,  and  to  scratch  one  with  a  pitchfork  is  to 
expose  a  Bolshevik.  They  are  men  standing  in  con 
tempt  of  American  institutions  and  in  enmity  to 
American  idealism.  And  their  evil  principles  are  no 
less  offensive  to  right-thinking  and  red-blooded  Amer 
icans  when  they  are  United  States  Senators  or  edi 
tors  of  wealthy  newspapers  than  wThen  they  are  de 
graded  I.  W.  W.'s  throwing  dead  cats  and  infernal 
machines  into  meetings  of  the  Rotary  Club. 

What  ails  them  primarily  is  the  ignorant  and  uncrit 
ical  monomania  that  afflicts  every  sort  of  fanatic, 
at  all  times  and  everywhere.  Having  mastered  with 
their  limited  faculties  the  theoretical  principles  set 
forth  in  the  Bill  of  Rights,  they  work  themselves  into 
a  passionate  conviction  that  those  principles  are  iden 
tical  with  the  rules  of  law  and  justice,  and  ought  to  be 
enforced  literally,  and  without  the  slightest  regard 
for  circumstance  and  expediency.  It  is  precisely  as 
if  a  High  Church  rector,  accidentally  looking  into  the 
Book  of  Chronicles,  and  especially  Chapter  II,  should 


THE  NATURE  OF  LIBERTY  195 

suddenly  issue  a  mandate  from  his  pulpit  ordering 
his  parishioners,  on  penalty  of  excommunication  and 
the  fires  of  hell,  to  follow  exactly  the  example  set 
forth,  to  wit:  "And  Jesse  begat  his  first  born  Eliab, 
and  Abinadab  the  second,  and  Shknma  the  third, 
Netheneel  the  fourth,  Raddai  the  fifth,  Ozen  the  sixth, 
David  the  seventh,"  and  so  on.  It  might  be  very 
sound  theoretical  theology,  but  it  would  surely  be 
out  of  harmony  with  modern  ideas,  and  the  rev. 
gentleman  would  be  extremely  lucky  if  the  bishop  did 
not  give  him  10  days  in  the  diocesan  hoosegow. 

So  with  the  Bill  of  Rights.  As  adopted  by  the 
Fathers  of  the  Republic,  it  was  gross,  crude,  inelastic, 
a  bit  fanciful  and  transcendental.  It  specified  the 
rights  of  a  citizen,  but  it  said  nothing  whatever  about 
his  duties.  Since  then,  by  the  orderly  processes  of 
legislative  science  and  by  the  even  more  subtle  and 
beautiful  devices  of  juridic  art,  it  has  been  kneaded 
and  mellowed  into  a  far  greater  pliability  and  reason 
ableness.  On  the  one  hand,  the  citizen  still  retains 
the  great  privilege  of  membership  in  the  most  superb 
free  nation  ever  witnessed  on  this  earth.  On  the 
other  hand,  as  a  result  of  countless  shrewd  enact 
ments  and  sagacious  decisions,  his  natural  lusls.  and 
appetites  are  held  in  laudable  check,  and  he  is  t/>us> 
kept  in  order  and  decorum.  No  artificial  impedi 
ment  stands  in  the  way  of  his  highest  aspiration.  He 
may  become  anything,  including  even  a  policeman. 


196  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
But  once  a  policeman,  he  is  protected  by  the  legis 
lative  and  judicial  arms  in  the  peculiar  rights  and 
prerogatives  that  go  with  his  high  office,  including 
especially  the  right  to  jug  the  laity  at  his  will,  to  sweat 
and  mug  them,  to  subject  them  to  the  third  degree, 
and  to  subdue  their  resistance  by  beating  out  their 
brains.  Those  who  are  unaware  of  this  are  simply 
ignorant  of  th'e  basic  principles  of  American  juris 
prudence,  as  they  have  been  exposed  times  without 
number  by  the  courts  of  first  instance  and  ratified 
in  lofty  terms  by  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States.  The  one  aim  of  the  controlling  decisions, 
magnificently  attained,  is  to  safeguard  public  order 
and  the  public  security,  and  to  substitute  a  judicial 
process  for  the  inchoate  and  dangerous  interaction  of 
discordant  egos. 

Let  us  imagine  an  example.  You  are,  say,  a  peace 
able  citizen  on  your  way  home  from  your  place  of 
employment.  A  police  sergeant,  detecting  you  in  the 
crowd,  approaches  you,  lays  his  hand  on  your 
collar,  and  informs  you  that  you  are  under  arrest  for 
killing  a  trolley  conductor  in  Altoona,  Pa.,  in  1917. 
Amazed  by  the  accusation,  you  decide  hastily  that  the 
officer  has  lost  his  wits,  and  take  to  your  heels.  He 
pursues  you.  You  continue  to  run.  He  draws  his 
revolver  and  fires  at  you.  He  misses  you.  He  fires 
again  and  fetches  you  in  the  leg.  You  fall  and  he 
is  upon  you.  You  prepare  to  resist  his  apparently 


THE  NATURE  OF  LIBERTY  197 

maniacal  assault.  He  beats  you  into  insensibility 
with  his  espantoon,  and  drags  you  to  the  patrol  box. 

Arrived  at  the  watch  house  you  are  locked  in  a 
room  with  five  detectives,  and  for  six  hours  they 
question  you  with  subtle  art.  You  grow  angry — per 
haps  robbed  of  your  customary  politeness  by  the 
throbbing  in  your  head  and  leg — and  answer  tartly. 
They  knock  you  down.  Having  failed  to  wring  a 
confession  from  you,  they  lock  you  in  a  cell,  and  leave 
you  there  all  night.  The  next  day  you  are  taken  to 
police  headquarters,  your  photograph  is  made  for  the 
Rogues'  Gallery,  and  a  print  is  duly  deposited  in  the 
section  labeled  "Murderers."  You  are  then  carted 
to  jail  and  locked  up  again.  There  you  remain  until 
the  trolley  conductor's  wife  comes  down  from  Altoona 
to  identify  you.  She  astonishes  the  police  by  say 
ing  that  you  are  not  the  man.  The  actual  murderer, 
it  appears,  was  an  Italian.  After  holding  you  a  day 
or  two  longer,  to  search  your  house  for  stills,  audit 
your  income  tax  returns,  and  investigate  the  pre 
marital  chastity  of  your  wife,  they  let  you  go. 

You  are  naturally  somewhat  irritated  by  your  ex 
perience  and  perhaps  your  wife  urges  you  to  seek 
redress.  Well,  what  are  your  remedies?  If  you 
are  a  firebrand,  you  reach  out  absurdly  for  those  of 
a  preposterous  nature:  the  instant  jailing  of  the  ser 
geant,  the  dismissal  of  the  Police  Commissioner,  the 
release  of  Mooney,  a  fair  trial  for  Sacco  and  Vanzetti, 


198  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
free  trade  with  Russia,  One  Big  Union.  But  if  you 
are  a  100  per  cent.  American  and  respect  the  laws 
and  institutions  of  your  country,  you  send  for  your 
solicitor — and  at  once  he  shows  you  just  how  far  your 
rights  go,  and  where  they  end.  You  cannot  cause  the 
arrest  of  the  sergeant,  for  you  resisted  him  when  he 
attempted  to  arrest  you,  and  when  you  resisted  him 
he  acquired  an  instant  right  to  take  you  by  force. 
You  cannot  proceed  against  him  for  accusing  you 
falsely,  for  he  has  a  right  to  make  summary  arrests 
for  felony,  and  the  courts  have  many  times  decided 
that  a  public  officer,  so  long  as  he  cannot  be  charged 
with  corruption  or  malice,  is  not  liable  for  errors  of 
judgment  made  in  the  execution  of  his  sworn  duty. 
You  cannot  get  the  detectives  on  the  mat,  for  when 
they  questioned  you  you  were  a  prisoner  accused  of 
murder,  and  it  was  their  duty  and  their  right  to  do  so. 
You  cannot  sue  the  turnkey  at  the  watch  house  or  the 
warden  at  the  jail  for  locking  you  up,  for  they  re 
ceived  your  body,  as  the  law  says,  in  a  lawful  and 
regular  manner,  and  would  have  been  liable  to  pen 
alty  if  they  had  turned  you  loose. 

But  have  you  no  redress  whatever,  no  rights  at  all? 
Certainly  you  have  a  right,  and  the  courts  have  jeal 
ously  guarded  it.  You  have  a  clear  right,  guaranteed 
to  you  under  the  Constitution,  to  go  into  a  court  of 
equity  and  apply  for  a  mandamus  requiring  the  Pol- 
izei  to  cease  forthwith  to  expose  your  portrait  in  the 


THE  NATURE  OF  LIBERTY  199 

Rogues'  Gallery  among  the  murderers.  This  is  your 
inalienable  right,  and  no  man  or  men  on  earth  can 
take  it  away  from  you.  You  cannot  prevent  them 
cherishing  your  portrait  in  their  secret  files,  but  you 
can  get  an  order  commanding  them  to  refrain  for 
ever  from  exposing  it  to  the  gaze  of  idle  visitors,  and 
if  you  can  introduce  yourself  unseen  into  their  studio 
and  prove  that  they  disregard  that  order,  you  can 
have  them  haled  into  court  for  contempt  and  fined  by 
the  learned  judge. 

Thus  the  law,  statute,  common  and  case,  protects 
the  free  American  against  injustice.  It  is  ignorance 
of  that  subtle  and  perfect  process  and  not  any  special 
love  of  liberty  per  se  that  causes  radicals  of  anti- 
American  kidney  to  rage  every  time  an  officer  of  the 
gendarmerie,  in  the  simple  execution  of  his  duty, 
knocks  a  citizen  in  the  head.  The  gendarme  plainly 
has  an  inherent  and  inalienable  right  to  knock  him  in 
the  head:  it  is  an  essential  part  of  his  general  pre 
rogative  as  a  sworn  officer  of  the  public  peace  and  a 
representative  of  the  sovereign  power  of  the  state. 
He  may,  true  enough,  exercise  that  prerogative  in  a 
manner  liable  to  challenge  on  the  ground  that  it  is 
imprudent  and  lacking  in  sound  judgment.  On  such 
questions  reasonable  men  may  differ.  But  it  must 
be  obvious  that  the  sane  and  decorous  way  to  settle 
differences  of  opinion  of  that  sort  is  not  by  public 
outcry  and  florid  appeals  to  sentimentality,  not  by  ill- 


200  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
disguised  playing  to  class  consciousness  and  anti 
social  prejudice,  but  by  an  orderly  resort  to  the  checks 
and  remedies  superimposed  upon  the  Bill  of  Rights  by 
the  calm  deliberation  and  austere  logic  of  the  courts 
of  equity. 

The  law  protects  the  citizen.  But  to  get  its  pro 
tection  he  must  show  due  respect  for  its  wise  and  del 
icate  processes. 


X.    THE    NOVEL 

AN  unmistakable  flavor  of  effeminacy  hangs  , 
about  the  novel,  however  heroic  its  con-  ' 
tent.  Even  in  the  gaudy  tales  of  a  Rex 
Beach,  with  their  bold  projections  of  the  Freudian 
dreams  of  go-getters,  ioe-wagon  drivers,  Ku  Kluxers, 
Rotary  Club  presidents  and  other  such  carnivora, 
there  is  a  subtle  something  that  suggests  water-color 
painting,  lip-sticks  and  bon-bons.  Well,  why  not? 
When  the  novel,  in  the  form  that  we  know  to-day, 
arose  in  Spain  toward  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  cen 
tury,  it  was  aimed  very  frankly  at  the  emerging 
Ivomen  of  the  Castilian  seraglios — women  who  were 
gradually  emancipating  themselves  from  the  Kuche- 
Kinder-Kirche  darkness  of  the  later  Middle  Ages,  but 
had  not  yet  come  to  anything  even  remotely  approach 
ing  the  worldly  experience  and  intellectual  curiosity 
of  men.  They  could  now  read  and  they  liked  to  prac 
tice  the  art,  but  the  grand  literature  of  the  time  was 
too  profound  for  them,  and  too  somber.  So 
literary  confectioners  undertook  stuff  that  would 
be  more  to  their  taste,  and  the  modern  novel  was 

born.     A  single  plot  served  most  of  these  confec- 

201 


202  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
tioners;  it  became  and  remains  one  of  the  conventions 
of  the  form.  Man  and  maid  meet,  love,  and  proceed 
to  kiss — but  the  rest  must  wait.  The  buss  remains 
chaste  through  long  and  harrowing  chapters;  not 
until  the  very  last  scene  do  fate  and  Holy  Church 
license  anything  more.  This  plot,  as  I  say,  still 
serves,  and  Arnold  Bennett  is  authority  for  the  doc 
trine  that  it  is  the  safest  known.  Its  appeal  is 
patently  to  the  feminine  fancy,  not  to  the  masculine. 
Women  like  to  be  wooed  endlessly  before  they 
loose  their  girdles  and  are  wooed  no  more. 
But  a  man,  when  he  finds  a  damsel  to  his  taste,  is 
eager  to  get  through  the  preliminary  hocus-pocus  as 
soon  as  possible. 

That  women  are  still  the  chief  readers  of  novels  is 
jfs  known  to  every  book  clerk:  Joseph  Hergesheimer, 
a  little  while  back,  was  bemoaning  the  fact  as  a  curse 
to  his  craft.  What  is  less  often  noted  is  that  women 
themselves,  as  they  have  gradually  become  fully  lit 
erate,  have  forced  their  way  to  the  front  as  makers  of 
,the  stuff  they  feed  on,  and  that  they  show  signs  of  oust 
ing  the  men,  soon  or  late,  from  the  business.  Save  in 
the  department  of  lyrical  verse,  which  demands  no 
organization  of  ideas  but  only  fluency  of  feeling,  they 
have  nowhere  else  done  serious  work  in  literature. 
There  is  no  epic  poem  of  any  solid  value  by  a  woman, 
dead  or  alive;  and  no  drama,  whether  comedy  or 
tragedy;  and  no  work  of  metaphysical  speculation; 


THE  NOVEL  203 

and  no  history;  and  no  basic  document  in  any  other 
realm  of  thought.  In  criticism,  whether  of  works  of 
art  or  of  the  ideas  underlying  them,  few  women  have 
ever  got  beyond  the  Schwdrmerei  of  Madame  de 
StaeTs  "L'Allemagne."  In  the  essay,  the  most  com 
petent  woman  barely  surpasses  the  average  Fleet 
Street  causerie  hack  or  Harvard  professor.  But  in 
the  novel  the  ladies  have  stood  on  a  level  with  even 
the  most  accomplished  men  since  the  day  of  Jane 
Austen,  and  not  only  in  Anglo-Saxondom,  but  also 
everywhere  else — save  perhaps  in  Russia.  To-day 
it  would  be  difficult  to  think  of  a  contemporary  Ger 
man  novelist  of  sounder  dignity  than  Clara  Viebig, 
Helene  Bohlau  or  Ricarda  Huch,  or  a  Scandinavian 
novelist  clearly  above  Selma  Lagerlof,  or  an  Italian 
above  Mathilda  Serao,  or,  for  that  matter,  more  than 
two  or  three  living  Englishmen  above  May  Sinclair, 
or  more  than  two  Americans  equal  to  Willa  Gather. 
Not  only  are  women  writing  novels  quite  as  good  as 
those  written  by  men — setting  aside,  of  course,  a  few 
miraculous  pieces  by  such  fellows  as  Joseph  Conrad: 
most  of  them  not  really  novels  at  all,  but  meta 
physical  sonatas  disguised  as  romances — ;  they  are 
actually  surpassing  men  in  their  experimental  de 
velopment  of  the  novel  form.  I  do  not  believe  that 
either  Evelyn  Scott's  "The  Narrow  House"  or  May 
Sinclair's  "Life  and  Death  of  Harriet  Frean"  has  the 
depth  and  beam  of,  say,  Dreiser's  "Jennie  Gerhardt" 


204  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
or  Arnold  Bennett's  "Old  Wives'  Tale,"  but 
it  is  certainly  to  be  argued  plausibly  that  both  books 
show  a  far  greater  venturesomeness  and  a  far  finer 
virtuosity  in  the  novel  form — that  both  seek  to  free 
that  form  from  artificialities  which  Dreiser  and  Ben 
nett  seem  to  be  almost  unaware  of.  When  men  ex 
hibit  any  discontent  with  those  artificialities  it  usually 
takes  the  shape  of  a  vain  and  uncouth  revolt  against 
the  whole  inner  spirit  of  the  novel — that  is,  against 
the  characteristics  which  make  it  what  it  is,  Their 
lusher  imagination  tempts  them  to  try  to  convert  it 
into  something  that  it  isn't — for  example,  an  epic,  a 
political  document,  or  a  philosophical  work.  This 
fact  explains,  in  one  direction,  such  dialectical  para 
bles  as  Dreiser's  "The  'Genius,'  "  H.  G.  Wells'  "Joan 
and  Peter"  and  Upton  Sinclair's  "King  Coal,"  and, 
in  a  quite  different  direction,  such  rhapsodies  as 
Cabell's  "Jurgen,"  Meredith's  "The  Shaving  of  Shag- 
pat"  and  Jacob  Wassermann's  "The  World's  Illu 
sion."  These  things  are  novels  only  in  the  very 
limited  sense  that  Beethoven's  "Vittoria"  and  Gold- 
marck's  "Landliche  Hochzeit"  are  symphonies. 
Their  chief  purpose  is  not  that  of  prose  fiction;  it  is 
either  that  of  argumentation  or  that  of  poetry.  The 
women  novelists,  with  very  few  exceptions,  are  far 
more  careful  to  remain  within  the  legitimate  bounds 
of  the  form ;  they  do  not  often  abandon  representation 
to  exhort  r>r  exult.  Miss  Gather's  "My  Antonia" 


THE  NOVEL  205 

shows  a  great  deal  of  originality  in  its  method;  the 
story  it  tells  is  certainly  not  a  conventional  one, 
nor  is  it  told  in  a  conventional  way.  But  it  remains 
a  novel  none  the  less,  and  as  clearly  so,  in  fact,  as 
"The  Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel"  or  "Robinson 
Crusoe." 

Much  exertion  of  the  laryngeal  and  respiratory 
muscles  is  wasted  upon  a  discussion  of  the  differences 
between  realistic  novels  and  romantic  novels.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  every  authentic  novel  is  realistic  in  its 
method,  however  fantastic  it  may  be  in  its  fable. 
The  primary  aim  of  the  novel,  at  all  times  and  every- 
"jxwhere,  is  the  representation  of  human  beings  at  their 
follies  and  villainies,  and  no  other  art  form  clings  to 
that  aim  so  faithfully.  It  sets  forth,  not  wrhat  might 
be  true,  or  what  ought  to  be  true,  but  what  actually 
is  true.  This  is  obviously  not  the  case  with  poetry. 
Poetry  is  the  product  of  an  effort  to  invent  a  world 
appreciably  better  than  the  one  we  live  in;  its  essence 
is  not  the  representation  of  the  facts,  but  the  de 
liberate  concealment  and  denial  of  the  facts.  As  for 
the  drama,  it  vacillates,  and  if  it  touches  the  novel 
on  one  side  it  also  touches  the  epic  on  the  other.  But 
the  novel  is  concerned  solely  with  human  nature  as 
it  is  practically  revealed  and  with  human  experience 
as  men  actually  know  it.  If  it  departs  from  that 
representational  fidelity  ever  so  slightly,  it  becomes 
to  that  extent  a  bad  novel;  if  it  departs  violently  it 


206  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
ceases  to  be  a  novel  at  all.  Cabell,  who  shows  all 
the  critical  deficiencies  of  a  sound  artist,  is  one  who 
has  spent  a  good  deal  of  time  questioning  the  uses  of 
realism.  Yet  it  is  a  plain  fact  that  his  own  stature  as 
an  artist  depends  almost  wholly  upon  his  capacity 
for  accurate  observation  and  realistic  representation. 
The  stories  in  "The  Line  of  Love,"  though  they  may 
appear  superficially  to  be  excessively  romantic, 
really  owe  all  of  their  charm  to  their  pungent  realism. 
The  pleasure  they  give  is  the  pleasure  of  recognition; 
one  somehow  delights  in  seeing  a  mediaeval  baron  act 
ing  precisely  like  a  New  York  stockbroker.  As  for 
"Jurgen,"  it  is  as  realistic  in  manner  as  Zola's  "La 
Terre,"  despite  its  grotesque  fable  and  its  burden  of 
political,  theological  and  epistemological  ideas.  No 
one  not  an  idiot  would  mistake  the  dialogue  between 
Jurgen  and  Queen  Guinevere's  father  for  romantic, 
in  the  sense  that  Kipling's  "Mandalay"  is  romantic; 
it  is  actually  as  mordantly  realistic  as  the  dialogue 
between  Nora  and  Helmer  in  the  last  act  of  "A  Doll's 
House." 

It  is  my  contention  that  women  succeed  in  the 
v  novel — and  that  they  will  succeed  even  more  strik 
ingly  as  they  gradually  throw  off  the  inhibitions  that 
have  hitherto  cobwebbed  their  minds — simply  be 
cause  they  are  better  fitted  for  this  realistic  repre 
sentation  than  men — because  they  see  the  facts  of 
life  more  sharply,  and  are  less  distracted  by  mooney 


THE  NOVEL  207 

dreams.  Women  seldom  have  the  pathological 
faculty  vaguely  called  imagination.  One  doesn't 
often  hear  of  them  groaning  over  colossal  bones  in 
their  sleep,  as  dogs  do,  or  constructing  heavenly 
hierarchies  or  political  Utopias,  as  men  do.  Their 
concern  is  always  with  things  of  more  objective  sub 
stance — roofs,  meals,  rent,  clothes,  the  birth  and  up 
bringing  of  children.  They  are,  I  believe,  generally 
happier  than  men,  if  only  because  the  demands  they 
make  of  life  are  more  moderate  and  less  romantic. 
The  chief  pain  that  a  man  normally  suffers  in  his 
progress  through  this  vale  is  that  of  disillusionment; 
the  chief  pain  that  a  woman  suffers  is  that  of  par 
turition.  There  is  enormous  significance  in  the 
difference.  The  first  is  artificial  and  self-inflicted; 
the  second  is  natural  and  unescapable.  The  psycho 
logical  history  of  the  differentiation  I  need  not  go  into 
here:  its  springs  lie  obviously  in  the  greater  physical 
strength  of  man  and  his  freedom  from  child-bearing, 
and  in  the  larger  mobility  and  capacity  for  adventure 
that  go  therewith.  A  man  dreams  of  Utopias  simply 
because  he  feels  himself  free  to  construct  them;  a 
woman  must  keep  house.  In  late  years,  to  be  sure, 
she  has  toyed  with  the  idea  of  escaping  that  necessity, 
but  I  shall  not  bore  you  with  arguments  showing  that 
she  never  will.  So  long  as  children  are  brought  into 
i  the  world  and  made  ready  for  the  trenches,  the  sweat- 
i  shops  and  the  gallows  by  the  laborious  method  or- 


208         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

dained  of  God  she  will  never  be  quite  as  free  to  roam 
and  dream  as  man  is.  It  is  only  a  small  minority  of 
her  sex  who  cherish  a  contrary  expectation,  and  this 
minority,  though  anatomically  female,  is  spiritually 
male.  Show  me  a  woman  who  has  visions  compara 
ble,  say,  to  those  of  Swedenborg,  Woodrow  Wilson, 
Strindberg  or  Dr.  Ghandi,  and  I'll  show  you  a  woman 
who  is  a  very  powerful  anaphrodisiac. 

Thus  women,  by  their  enforced  preoccupation  with 
the  harsh  facts  of  life,  are  extremely  well  fitted  to 
write  novels,  which  must  deal  with  the  facts  or 
nothing.  What  they  need  for  the  practical  business, 
in  addition,  falls  under  two  heads.  First,  they  need 
enough  sense  of  social  security  to  make  them  free  to 
set  down  what  they  see.  Secondly,  they  need  the 
modest  technical  skill,  the  formal  mastery  of  words 
and  ideas,  necessary  to  do  it.  The  latter,  I  believe, 
they  have  had  ever  since  they  learned  to  read  and 
write,  say  three  hundred  years  ago;  it  comes  to  them 
more  readily  than  to  men,  and  is  exercised  with 
greater  ease.  The  former  they  are  fast  acquiring. 
In  the  days  of  Aphra  Behn  and  Ann  Radcliffe  it  was 
almost  as  scandalous  for  a  woman  to  put  her  obser 
vations  and  notions  into  print  as  it  was  for  her  to 
show  her  legs;  even  in  the  days  of  Jane  Austen  and 
Charlotte  Bronte  the  thing  was  regarded  as  decidedly 
unladylike.  But  now,  within  certain  limits,  she  is 
free  to  print  whatever  she  pleases,  and  before  long 


THE  NOVEL  209 

even  those  surviving  limits  will  be  obliterated.  If  I 
live  to  the  year  1950  I  expect  to  see  a  novel  by  a 
women  that  will  describe  a  typical  marriage  under 
Christianity,  from  the  woman's  standpoint,  as  real 
istically  as  it  is  treated  from  the  man's  standpoint  in 
Upton  Sinclair's  "Love's  Pilgrimage."  That  novel,  I 
venture  to  predict,  will  be  a  cuckoo.  At  one  stroke  it 
will  demolish  superstitions  that  have  prevailed  in  the 
Western  World  since  the  fall  of  the  Roman  Empire. 
It  will  seem  harsh,  but  it  will  be  true.  And,  being 
true,  it  will  be  a  good  novel.  There  can  be  no  good 
one  that  is  not  true. 

What  ailed  the  women  novelists,  until  very 
recently,  was  a  lingering  ladyism — a  childish  pru 
dery  inherited  from  their  mothers.  I  believe  that  it 
is  being  rapidly  thrown  off;  indeed,  one  often  sees 
a  concrete  wroman  novelist  shedding  it.  I  give  you 
two  obvious  examples:  Zona  Gale  and  Willa  Gather. 
Miss  Gale  started  out  by  trying  to  put  into  novels  the 
conventional  prettiness  that  is  esteemed  along  the 
Main  Streets  of  her  native  Wisconsin.  She  had 
skill  and  did  it  well,  and  so  she  won  a  good  deal  of 
popular  success.  But  her  work  was  intrinsically  as 
worthless  as  a  treatise  on  international  politics  by  the 
Hon.  Warren  Gamaliel  Harding  or  a  tract  on  the 
duties  of  a  soldier  and  a  gentleman  by  a  state  pres 
ident  of  the  American  Legion.  Then,  of  a  sudden, 
for  some  reason  quite  unknown  to  the  deponent,  she 


210  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
threw  off  all  that  flabby  artificiality,  and  began  de 
scribing  the  people  about  her  as  they  really  were. 
The  result  was  a  second  success  even  more  pro 
nounced  than  her  first,  and  on  a  palpably  higher 
level.  The  career  of  Miss  Gather  has  covered  less 
ground,  for  she  began  far  above  Main  Street.  What 
she  tried  to  do  at  the  start  was  to  imitate  the  super 
ficial  sophistication  of  Edith  Wharton  and  Henry 
James — a  deceptive  thing,  apparently  realistic  in 
essence,  but  actually  as  conventional  as  table  man 
ners  or  the  professional  buffooneries  of  a  fashion 
able  rector.  Miss  Gather  had  extraordinary  skill 
as  a  writer,  and  so  her  imitation  was  scarcely  to  be 
distinguished  from  the  original,  but  in  the  course  of 
time  she  began  to  be  aware  of  its  hollowness.  Then 
she  turned  to  first-hand  representation — to  pictures 
of  the  people  she  actually  knew.  There  ensued  a 
series  of  novels  that  rose  step  by  step  to  the  very 
distinguished  quality  of  "My  Antonia."  That  fine 
piece  is  a  great  deal  more  than  simply  a  good  novel. 
It  is  a  document  in  the  history  of  American  literature. 
It  proves,  once  and  for  all  time,  that  accurate  repre 
sentation  is  not,  as  the  campus  critics  of  Dreiser  seem 
to  think,  inimical  to  beauty.  It  proves,  on  the  con 
trary,  that  the  most  careful  and  penetrating  repre 
sentation  is  itself  the  source  of  a  rare  and  wonderful 
beauty.  No  romantic  novel  ever  written  in  America, 


THE  NOVEL  211 

by  man  or  woman,  is  one-half  so  beautiful  as  "My 
Antonia." 

As  I  have  said,  the  novel,  in  the  United  States  as 
elsewhere,  still  radiates  an  aroma  of  effeminacy, 
in  the  conventional  sense.  Specifically,  it  deals 
too  monotonously  with  the  varieties  of  human  trans 
actions  which  chiefly  interest  the  unintelligent  women 
jwho  are  its  chief  patrons  and  the  scarcely  less  intel 
ligent  women  who,  until  recently,  were  among  its 
chief  commercial  manufacturers,  to  wit,  the  trans 
actions  that  revolve  around  the  ensnarement  of  men 
by  women — the  puerile  tricks  and  conflicts  of  what 
is  absurdly  called  romantic  love.  But  I  believe 
that  the  women  novelists,  as  they  emerge  into  the 
fullness  of  skill,  will  throw  overboard  all  that  old 
baggage,  and  leave  its  toting  to  such  male  artisans 
as  Chambers,  Beach,  Coningsby  Dawson  and  Emer 
son  Hough,  as  they  have  already  left  the  whole 
flag-waving  and  "red-blooded"  buncombe.  True 
enough,  the  snaring  of  men  will  remain  the  principal 
business  of  women  in  this  world  for  many  genera 
tions,  but  it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  intelligent 
women,  even  to-day,  view  it  romantically — that  is, 
as  it  is  viewed  by  bad  novelists.  They  see  it  realis 
tically,  and  they  see  it,  not  as  an  end  in  itself,  but 
as  a  means  to  other  ends.  It  is,  speaking  generally, 
after  she  has  got  her  man  that  a  woman  begins  to 


212  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
live.  The  novel  of  the  future,  I  believe,  will  show 
her  thus  living.  It  will  depict  the  intricate  complex 
of  forces  that  conditions  her  life  and  generates  her 
ideas,  and  it  will  show,  against  a  background  of 
actuality,  her  conduct  in  the  eternal  struggle  between 
her  aspiration  and  her  destiny.  Women,  as  I  have 
argued,  are  not  normally  harassed  by  the  grandiose 
and  otiose  visions  that  inflame  the  gizzards  of  men, 
but  they  too  discover  inevitably  that  life  is  a  con 
flict,  and  that  it  is  the  harsh  fate  of  Homo  sapiens 
to  get  the  worst  of  it.  I  should  like  to  read  a  "Main 
Street"  by  an  articulate  Carol  Kennicott,  or  a  "Ti 
tan"  by  one  of  Cowperwood's  mistresses,  or  a 
"Cytherea"  by  a  Fanny  Randon — or  a  Savina  Grove! 
It  would  be  sweet  stuff,  indeed.  .  .  .  And  it  will 
come. 


XI.    THE  FORWARD. LOOKER 

WHEN  the  history  of  the  late  years  in 
America  is  written,  I  suspect  that  their 
grandest,  gaudiest  gifts  to  Kultur  will 
be  found  in  the  incomparable  twins:  the  right- 
thinker  and  the  forward-looker.  No  other  nation  can 
match  them,  at  any  weight.  The  right-thinker  is 
privy  to  all  God's  wishes,  and  even  whims;  the  for 
ward-looker  is  the  heir  to  all  His  promises  to  the 
righteous.  The  former  is  never  wrong;  the  latter 
is  never  despairing.  Sometimes  the  two  are  amal 
gamated  into  one  man,  and  we  have  a  Bryan,  a  Wil 
son,  a  Dr.  Frank  Crane.  But  more  often  there  is  a 
division:  the  forward-looker  thinks  wrong,  and  the 
right-thinker  looks  backward.  I  give  you  Upton  Sin 
clair  and  Nicholas  Murray  Butler  as  examples. 
Butler  is  an  absolute  masterpiece  of  correct  thought; 
in  his  whole  life,  so  far  as  human  records  show,  he 
has  not  cherished  a  single  fancy  that  might  not  have 
been  voiced  by  a  Fifth  Avenue  rector  or  spread  upon 
the  editorial  page  of  the  New  York  Times.  But  he 
has  no  vision,  alas,  alas!  All  the  revolutionary  in 
ventions  for  lifting  up  humanity  leave  him  cold.  He 

213 


214          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

is  against  them  all,  from  the  initiative  and  referendum 
to  birth  control,  and  from  Fletcherism  to  osteopathy. 
Now  turn  to  Sinclair.  He  believes  in  every  one  of 
them,  however  daring  and  fantoddish;  he  grasps  and 
gobbles  all  the  new  ones  the  instant  they  are  an 
nounced.  But  the  man  simply  cannot  think  right. 
He  is  wrong  on  politics,  on  economics,  and  on 
theology.  He  glories  in  and  is  intensely  vain  of 
his  wrongness.  Let  but  a  new  article  of  correct 
American  thought  get  itself  stated  by  the  constituted 
ecclesiastical  and  secular  authorities — by  Bishop 
Manning,  or  Judge  Gary,  or  Butler,  or  Adolph  Ochs, 
or  Dr.  Fabian  Franklin,  or  Otto  Kahn,  or  Dr.  Ste 
phen  S.  Wise,  or  Roger  W.  Babson,  or  any  other  such 
inspired  omphalist — and  he  is  against  it  almost  be 
fore  it  is  stated. 

On  the  whole,  as  a  neutral  in  such  matters,  I  pre 
fer  the  forward-looker  to  the  right-thinker,  if  only 
because  he  shows  more  courage  and  originality.  It 
takes  nothing  save  lack  of  humor  to  believe  what 
Butler,  or  Ochs,  or  Bishop  Manning  believes,  but  it 
tak<es  long  practice  and  a  considerable  natural  gift 
to  get  down  the  beliefs  of  Sinclair.  I  remember 
with  great  joy  the  magazine  that  he  used  to  issue 
during  the  war.  In  the  very  first  issue  he  advocated 
Socialism,  the  single  tax,  birth  control,  communism, 
the  League  of  Nations,  the  conscription  of  wealth, 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  215 

government  ownership  of  coal  mines,  sex  hygiene 
and  free  trade.  In  the  next  issue  he  added  the  recall 
of  judges,  Fletcherism,  the  Gary  system,  the  Montes- 
sori  method,  paper-bag  cookery,  war  gardens  and  the 
budget  system.  In  the  third  he  came  out  for  sex 
hygiene,  one  big  union,  the  initiative  and  referendum, 
the  city  manager  plan,  chiropractic  and  Esperanto. 
In  the  fourth  he  went  to  the  direct  primary,  fasting, 
the  Third  International,  a  federal  divorce  law,  free 
motherhood,  hot  lunches  for  school  children,  Pro 
hibition,  the  vice  crusade,  Expressionismus,  the  gov 
ernment  control  of  newspapers,  deep  breathing,  inter 
national  courts,  the  Fourteen  Points,  freedom  for  the 
Armenians,  the  limitation  of  campaign  expendi 
tures,  the  merit  system,  the  abolition  of  the  New  York 
Stock  Exchange,  psychoanalysis,  crystal-gazing,  the 
Little  Theater  movement,  the  recognition  of  Mexico, 
v ers  libre,  old  age  pensions,  unemployment  insurance, 
cooperative  stores,  the  endowment  of  motherhood, 
the  Americanization  of  the  immigrant,  mental  telep 
athy,  the  abolition  of  grade  crossings,  federal  labor 
exchanges,  profit-sharing  in  industry,  a  prohibitive 
tax  on  Poms,  the  clean-up-paint-up  campaign,  relief 
for  the  Jews,  osteopathy,  mental  mastery,  and  the 
twilight  sleep.  And  so  on,  and  so  on.  Once  I  had 
got  into  the  swing  of  the  Sinclair  monthly  I  found 
that  I  could  dispense  with  at  least  twenty  other  jour- 


216          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
nals  of  the  uplift.     When  he  abandoned  it  I  had  to 
subscribe  for  them  anew,  and  the  gravel  has  stuck 
in  my  craw  ever  since. 

In  the  first  volume  of  his  personal  philosophy, 
"The  Book  of  Life:  Mind  and  Body,"  he  is  estopped 
from  displaying  whole  categories  of  his  ideas,  for  his 
subject  is  not  man  the  political  and  economic  ma 
chine,  but  man  and  mammal.  Nevertheless,  his  char 
acteristic  hospitality  to  new  revelations  is  abundantly 
visible.  What  does  the  mind  suggest?  The  mind  sug 
gests  its  dark  and  fascinating  functions  and  powers, 
some  of  them  very  recent.  There  is,  for  example, 
psychoanalysis.  There  is  mental  telepathy.  There 
is  crystal-gazing.  There  is  double  personality. 
Out  of  each  springs  a  scheme  for  the  uplift  of  the 
race — in  each  there  is  something  for  a  forward- 
looker  to  get  his  teeth  into.  And  if  mind,  then  why 
not  also  spirit?  Here  even  a  forward-looker  may 
hesitate;  here,  in  fact,  Sinclair  himself  hesitates. 
The  whole  field  of  spiritism  is  barred  to  him  by  his 
theological  heterodoxy;  if  he  admits  that  man  has  an 
immortal  soul,  he  may  also  have  to  admit  that  the 
soul  can  suffer  in  hell.  Thus  even  forward-looking 
may  turn  upon  and  devour  itself.  But  if  the  meadow 
wherein  spooks  and  poltergeists  disport  is  closed, 
it  is  at  least  possible  to  peep  over  the  fence.  Sin 
clair  sees  materializations  in  dark  rooms,  under  red, 
satanic  lights.  He  is,  perhaps,  not  yet  convinced, 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  217 

but  he  is  looking  pretty  hard.  Let  a  ghostly  hand 
reach  out  and  grab  him,  and  he  will  be  over  the 
fence!  The  body  is  easier.  The  new  inventions  for 
dealing  with  it  are  innumerable  and  irresistible;  no 
forward-looker  can  fail  to  succumb  to  at  least  some 
of  them.  Sinclair  teeters  dizzily.  On  the  one  hand 
he  stoutly  defends  surgery — that  is,  provided  the 
patient  is  allowed  to  make  his  own  diagnosis! — on 
the  other  hand  he  is  hot  for  fasting,  teetotalism,  and 
the  avoidance  of  drugs,  coffee  and  tobacco,  and  he 
begins  to  flirt  with  osteopathy  and  chiropractic. 
More,  he  has  discovered  a  new  revelation  in  San 
Francisco — a  system  of  diagnosis  and  therapeutics, 
still  hooted  at  by  the  Medical  Trust,  whereby  the  exact 
location  of  a  cancer  may  be  determined  by  examining 
a  few  drops  of  the  patient's  blood,  and  syphilis  may 
be  cured  by  vibrations,  and  whereby,  most  curious  of 
all,  it  can  be  established  that  odd  numbers,  written  on 
a  sheet  of  paper,  are  full  of  negative  electricity,  and 
even  numbers  are  full  of  positive  electricity. 

The  book  is  written  with  great  confidence  and  ad- 
dress,  and  has  a  good  deal  of  shrewdness  mixed  with 
its  credulities;  few  licensed  medical  practitioners 
could  give  you  better  advice.  But  it  is  less  interest 
ing  than  its  author,  or,  indeed,  than  forward-lookers 
in  general.  Of  all  the  known  orders  of  men  they 
fascinate  me  the  most.  I  spend  whole  days  reading 
their  pronunciamentos,  and  am  an  expert  in  the  ebb 


218  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
and  flow  of  their  singularly  bizarre  ideas.  As  I 
have  said,  I  have  never  encountered  one  who  believed 
in  but  one  sure  cure  for  all  the  sorrows  of  the  world, 
and  let  it  go  at  that.  Nay,  even  the  most  timorous 
of  them  gives  his  full  faith  and  credit  to  at  least  two. 
Turn,  for  example,  to  the  official  list  of  eminent 
single  taxers  issued  by  the  Joseph  Fels  Fund.  I 
defy  you  to  find  one  solitary  man  on  it  who  stops  with 
the  single  tax.  There  is  David  Starr  Jordan:  he  is 
also  one  of  the  great  whales  of  pacifism.  There  is 
B.  0.  Flower:  he  is  the  emperor  of  anti-vaccination- 
ists.  There  is  Carrie  Chapman  Catt:  she  is  hot  for 
every  peruna  that  the  suffragettes  brew.  There  is 
W.  S.  U'Ren:  he  is  in  general  practise  as  a  messiah. 
There  is  Hamlin  Garland:  he  also  chases  spooks. 
There  is  Jane  Addams:  vice  crusader,  pacifist,  suf 
fragist,  settlement  worker.  There  is  Prof.  Dr.  Scott 
Nearing:  Socialist  and  martyr.  There  is  Newt 
Baker:  heir  of  the  Wilsonian  idealism.  There  is 
Gifford  Pinchot:  conservationist,  Prohibitionist,  Bull 
Moose,  and  professional  Good  Citizen.  There  is 
Judge  Ben  B.  Lindsey:  forward-looking's  Jack  Hor- 
ner,  forever  sticking  his  thumb  into  new  pies.  I 
could  run  the  list  to  columns,  but  no  need.  You 
know  the  type  as  well  as  I  do.  Give  the  forward- 
looker  the  direct  primary,  and  he  demands  the  short 
ballot.  Give  him  the  initiative  and  referendum,  and 
he  bawls  for  the  recall  of  judges.  Give  him  Chris- 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  219 

tian  Science,  and  he  proceeds  to  the  swamis  and 
yogis.  Give  him  the  Mann  Act,  and  he  wants  laws 
providing  for  the  castration  of  fornicators.  Give 
him  Prohibition,  and  he  launches  a  new  crusade 
against  cigarettes,  coffee,  jazz,  and  custard  pies. 

I  have  a  wide  acquaintance  among  such  sad,  mad, 
glad  folks,  and  know  some  of  them  very  well.  It  is 
my  belief  that  the  majority  or  them  are  absolutely 
honest — that  they  believe  as  fully  in  their  baroque 
gospels  as  I  believe  in  the  dishonesty  of  politicians — 
that  their  myriad  and  amazing  faiths  sit  upon  them 
as  heavily  as  the  fear  of  hell  sits  upon  a  Methodist 
deacon  who  has  degraded  the  vestry-room  to  carnal 
uses.  All  that  may  be  justly  said  against  them  is 
that  they  are  chronically  full  of  hope,  and  hence 
chronically  uneasy  and  indignant — that  they  belong  to 
the  less  sinful  and  comfortable  of  the  two  grand 
divisions  of  the  human  race.  Call  them  the  tender- 
minded,  as  the  late  William  James  used  to  do,  and 
you  have  pretty  well  described  them.  They  are,  on 
the  one  hand,  pathologically  sensitive  to  the  sorrows 
of  the  world,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  pathologically 
susceptible  to  the  eloquence  of  quacks.  What  seems 
to  lie  in  all  of  them  is  the  doctrine  that  evils  so  vast 
as  those  they  see  about  them  must  and  will  be  laid — 
that  it  would  be  an  insult  to  a  just  God  to  think  of 
them  as  permanent  and  irremediable.  This  notion, 
I  believe,  is  at  the  bottom  of  much  of  the  current 


220          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

pathetic  faith  in  Prohibition.  The  thing  itself  is 
obviously  a  colossal  failure — that  is,  when  viewed 
calmly  and  realistically.  It  has  not  only  not  cured 
the  rum  evil  in  the  United  States;  it  has  plainly 
made  that  evil  five  times  as  bad  as  it  ever  was  before. 
But  to  confess  that  bald  fact  would  be  to  break  the 
forward-looking  heart:  it  simply  refuses  to  harbor 
the  concept  of  the  incurable.  And  so,  being  de 
barred  by  the  legal  machinery  that  supports  Prohibi 
tion  from  going  back  to  any  more  feasible  scheme 
of  relief,  it  cherishes  the  sorry  faith  that  somehow, 
in  some  vague  and  incomprehensible  way,  Prohibition 
will  yet  work.  When  the  truth  becomes  so  horribly 
evident  that  even  forward-lookers  are  daunted,  then 
some  new  quack  will  arise  to  fool  them  again,  with 
some  new  and  worse  scheme  of  super-Prohibition. 
It  is  their  destiny  to  wobble  thus  endlessly  between 
quack  and  quack.  One  pulls  them  by  the  right  arm 
and  one  by  the  left  arm.  A  third  is  at  their  coat-tail 
pockets,  and  a  fourth  beckons  them  over  the  hill. 

The  rest  of  us  are  less  tender-minded,  and,  in 
consequence,  much  happier.  We  observe  quite 
clearly  that  the  world,  as  it  stands,  is  anything  but 
perfect — that  injustice  exists,  and  turmoil,  and  trag 
edy,  and  bitter  suffering  of  ten  thousand  kinds — that 
human  life  at  its  best,  is  anything  but  a  grand, 
sweet  song.  But  instead  of  ranting  absurdly  against 
the  fact,  or  weeping  over  it  maudlinly,  or  trying 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  221 

to  remedy  it  with  inadequate  means,  we  simply  put 
the  thought  of  it  out  of  our  minds,  just  as  a  wise 
man  puts  away  the  thought  that  alcohol  is  probably 
bad  for  his  liver,  or  that  his  wife  is  a  shade  too  fat. 
Instead  of  mulling  over  it  and  suffering  from  it,  we 
seek  contentment  by  pursuing  the  delights  that  are  so 
strangely  mixed  with  the  horrors — by  seeking  out  the 
soft  spots  and  endeavoring  to  avoid  the  hard  spots. 
Such  is  the  intelligent  habit  of  practical  and  sinful 
men,  and  under  it  lies  a  sound  philosophy.  After 
all,  the  world  is  not  our  handiwork,  and  we  are  not 
responsible  for  what  goes  on  in  it,  save  within  very 
narrow  limits.  Going  outside  them  with  our  protests 
and  advice  tends  to  become  contumacy  to  the  celes 
tial  hierarchy.  Do  the  poor  suffer  in  the  midst  of 
plenty?  Then  let  us  thank  God  politely  that  we  are 
not  that  poor.  Are  rogues  in  offices?  Well,  go  call 
a  policeman,  thus  setting  rogue  upon  rogue.  Are 
taxes  onerous,  wasteful,  unjust?  Then  let  us  dodge  as 
large  a  part  of  them  as  we  can.  Are  whole  regiments 
and  army  corps  of  our  fellow  creatures  doomed  to 
hell?  Then  let  them  complain  to  the  archangels, 
and,  if  the  archangels  are  too  busy  to  hear  them,  to 
the  nearest  archbishop. 

Unluckily  for  the  man  of  tender  mind,  he  is  quite 
incapable  of  any  such  easy  dismissal  of  the  great 
plagues  and  conundrums  of  existence.  It  is  of  the 
essence  of  his  character  that  he  is  too  sensitive  and 


222  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
sentimental  to  put  them  ruthlessly  out  of  his  mind: 
he  cannot  view  even  the  crunching  of  a  cockroach 
without  feeling  the  snapping  of  his  own  ribs.  And 
it  is  of  the  essence  of  his  character  that  he  is  unable 
to  escape  the  delusion  of  duty — that  he  can't  rid 
himself  of  the  notion  that,  whenever  he  observes  any 
thing  in  the  world  that  might  conceivably  be  im 
proved,  he  is  commanded  by  God  to  make  every  ef 
fort  to  improve  it.  In  brief,  he  is  a  public-spirited 
man,  and  the  ideal  citizen  of  democratic  states.  But 
Nature,  it  must  be  obvious,  is  opposed  to  democracy 
— and  whoso  goes  counter  to  nature  must  expect  to 
pay  the  penalty.  The  tender-minded  man  pays  it  by 
hanging  forever  upon  the  cruel  hooks  of  hope,  and 
by  fermenting  inwardly  in  incessant  indignation. 
All  this,  perhaps,  explains  the  notorious  ill-humor 
of  uplifters — the  wowser  touch  that  is  in  even  the 
best  of  them.  They  dwell  so  much  upon  the  imper 
fections  of  the  universe  and  the  weaknesses  of  man 
that  they  end  by  believing  that  the  universe  is  alto 
gether  out  of  joint  and  that  every  man  is  a  scoundrel 
and  every  woman  a  vampire.  Years  ago  I  had  a  com 
bat  with  certain  eminent  reformers  of  the  sex  hy 
giene  and  vice  crusading  species,  and  got  out  of  it 
a  memorable  illumination  of  their  private  minds. 
The  reform  these  strange  creatures  were  then  advo 
cating  was  directed  against  sins  of  the  seventh  cate 
gory,  and  they  proposed  to  put  them  down  by  forcing 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  223 

through  legislation  of  a  very  harsh  and  fantastic  kind 
— statutes  forbidding  any  woman,  however  forbid 
ding,  to  entertain  a  man  in  her  apartment  without  the 
presence  of  a  third  party,  statutes  providing  for  the 
garish  lighting  of  all  dark  places  in  the  public  parks, 
and  so  on.  In  the  course  of  my  debates  with  them 
I  gradually  jockeyed  them  into  abandoning  all  of  the 
arguments  they  started  with,  and  so  brought  them 
down  to  their  fundamental  doctrine,  to  wit,  that  no 
woman,  without  the  aid  of  the  police,  could  be  trusted 
to  protect  her  virtue.  I  pass  as  a  cynic  in  Christian 
circles,  but  this  notion  certainly  gave  me  pause. 
And  it  was  voiced  by  men  who  were  the  fathers  of 
grown  and  unmarried  daughters! 

It  is  no  wonder  that  men  who  cherish  such  ideas 
are  so  ready  to  accept  any  remedy  for  the  underlying 
evils,  no  matter  how  grotesque.  A  man  suffering 
from  hay-fever,  as  every  one  knows,  will  take  any 
medicine  that  is  offered  to  him,  even  though  he  knows 
the  compounder  to  be  a  quack;  the  infinitesimal 
chance  that  the  quack  may  have  the  impossible  cure 
gives  him  a  certain  hope,  and  so  makes  the  disease 
itself  more  bearable.  In  precisely  the  same  way  a 
man  suffering  from  the  conviction  that  the  whole  uni 
verse  is  hell-bent  for  destruction — that  the  govern 
ment  he  lives  under  is  intolerably  evil,  that  the  rich 
are  growing  richer  and  the  poor  poorer,  that  no  man's 
word  can  be  trusted  and  no  woman's  chastity,  that 


224          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

another  and  worse  war  is  hatching,  that  the  very 
regulation  of  the  weather  has  fallen  into  the  hands  of 
rogues — such  a  man  will  grab  at  anything,  even  birth 
control,  osteopathy  or  the  Fourteen  Points,  rather 
than  let  the  foul  villainy  go  on.  The  apparent  ne 
cessity  of  finding  a  remedy  without  delay  transforms 
itself,  by  an  easy  psychological  process,  into  a 
belief  that  the  remedy  has  been  found;  it  is  almost 
impossible  for  most  men,  and  particularly  for  tender- 
minded  men,  to  take  in  the  concept  of  the  insoluble. 
Every  problem  that  remains  unsolved,  including  even 
the  problem  of  evil,  is  in  that  state  simply  because 
men  of  strict  virtue  and  passionate  altruism  have  not 
combined  to  solve  it — because  the  business  has  been 
neglected  by  human  laziness  and  rascality.  All  that 
is  needed  to  dispatch  it  is  the  united  effort  of  enough 
pure  hearts:  the  accursed  nature  of  things  will  yield 
inevitably  to  a  sufficiently  desperate  battle;  mind 
(usually  written  Mind)  will  triumph  over  matter 
(usually  written  Matter— or  maybe  Money  Power,  or 
Land  Monopoly,  or  Beef  Trust,  or  Conspiracy  of 
Silence,  or  Commercialized  Vice,  or  Wall  Street,  or 
the  Dukes,  or  the  Kaiser),  and  the  Kingdom  of  God 
will  be  at  hand.  So,  with  the  will  to  believe  in  full 
function,  the  rest  is  easy.  The  eager  forward-looker 
is  exactly  like  the  man  with  hay-fever,  or  arthritis,  or 
nervous  dyspepsia,  or  diabetes.  It  takes  time  to  try 
each  successive  remedy — to  search  it  out,  to  take  it,  to 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  225 

observe  its  effects,  to  hope,  to  doubt,  to  shelve  it. 
Before  the  process  is  completed  another  is  offered; 
new  ones  are  always  waiting  before  their  predeces 
sors  have  been  discarded.  Here,  perhaps,  we  get  a 
glimpse  of  the  causes  behind  the  protean  appetite  of 
the  true  forward-looker — his  virtuosity  in  credulity. 
He  is  in  all  stages  simultaneously — just  getting  over 
the  initiative  and  referendum,  beginning  to  have 
doubts  about  the  short  ballot,  making  ready  for  a 
horse  doctor's  dose  of  the  single  tax,  and  contemplat 
ing  an  experimental  draught  of  Socialism  to 
morrow. 

What  is  to  be  done  for  him?  How  is  he  to  be 
cured  of  his  great  thirst  for  sure-cures  that  do  not 
cure,  and  converted  into  a  contented  and  careless 
backward-looker,  peacefully  snoozing  beneath  his  fig 
tree  while  the  oppressed  bawl  for  succor  in  forty 
abandoned  lands,  and  injustice  stalks  the  world,  and 
taxes  mount  higher  and  higher,  and  poor  working- 
girls  are  sold  into  white  slavery,  and  Prohibition  fails 
to  prohibit,  and  cocaine  is  hawked  openly,  and  jazz 
drags  millions  down  the  primrose  way,  and  the  trusts 
own  the  legislatures  of  all  Christendom,  and  judges 
go  to  dinner  with  millionaires,  and  Europe  prepares 
for  another  war,  and  children  of  four  and  five  years 
work  as  stevedores  and  locomotive  firemen,  and  guinea 
pigs  and  dogs  are  vivisected,  and  Polish  immigrant 
women  have  more  children  every  year,  and  divorces 


226         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

multiply,  and  materialism  rages,  and  the  devil  runs  the 
cosmos  ?  What  is  to  be  done  to  save  the  forward-looker 
from  his  torturing  indignations,  and  set  him  in  paths 
of  happy  dalliance?  Answer:  nothing.  He  was  born 
that  way,  as  men  are  born  with  hare  lips  or  bad  livers, 
and  he  will  remain  that  way  until  the  angels  summon 
him  to  eternal  rest.  Destiny  has  laid  upon  him  the 
burden  of  seeing  unescapably  what  had  better  not  be 
looked  at,  of  believing  what  isn't  so.  There  is  no 
way  to  help  him.  He  must  suffer  vicariously  for  the 
carnal  ease  of  the  rest  of  us.  He  must  die  daily  that 
we  may  live  in  peace,  corrupt  and  contented, 

As  I  have  said,  I  believe  fully  that  this  child  of 
sorrow  is  honest — that  his  twinges  and  malaises  are 
just  as  real  to  him  as  those  that  rack  the  man  with 
arthritis,  and  that  his  trusting  faith  in  quacks  is  just 
as  natural.  But  this,  of  course,  is  not  saying  that 
the  quacks  themselves  are  honest.  On  the  contrary, 
their  utter  dishonesty  must  be  quite  as  obvious  as  the 
simplicity  of  their  dupes.  Trade  is  good  for  them  in 
the:  United  States,  where  hope  is  a  sort  of  national 
vice,  and  so  they  flourish  here  more  luxuriously  than 
anywhere  else  on  earth.  Some  one  told  me  lately 
that  there  are  now  no  less  than  25,000  national  or 
ganizations  in  the  United  States  for  the  uplift  of  the 
plain  people  and  the  snaring  and  shaking  down  of 
forward-lookers — societies  for  the  Americanization  of 
immigrants,  for  protecting  poor  working-girls  against 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  227 

Jews  and  Italians,  for  putting  Bibles  into  the  bed 
rooms  of  week-end  hotels,  for  teaching  Polish  women 
how  to  wash  their  babies,  for  instructing  school-chil 
dren  in  ring-around-a-rosy,  for  crusading  against  the 
cigarette,  for  preventing  accidents  in  rolling-mills, 
for  making  street-car  conductors  more  polite,  for 
testing  the  mentality  of  Czecho-Slovaks,  for  teaching 
folk-songs,  for  restoring  the  United  States  to  Great 
Britain,  for  building  day-nurseries  in  the  devastated 
regions  of  France,  for  training  deaconesses,  for  fight 
ing  the  house-fly,  for  preventing  cruelty  to  mules 
and  Tom-cats,  for  forcing  householders  to  clean  their 
backyards,  for  planting  trees,  for  saving  the  Indian, 
for  sending  colored  boys  to  Harvard,  for  opposing 
Sunday  movies,  for  censoring  magazines,  for  God 
knows  what  else.  In  every  large  American  city  such 
organizations  swarm,  and  every  one  of  them  has  an 
executive  secretary  who  tries  incessantly  to  cadge 
space  in  the  newspapers.  Their  agents  penetrate  to 
the  remotest  hamlets  in  the  land,  and  their  circulars, 
pamphlets  and  other  fulminations  swamp  the  mails. 
In  Washington  and  at  every  state  capital  they  have 
their  lobbyists,  and  every  American  legislator  is 
driven  half  frantic  by  their  innumerable  and  pre 
posterous  demands.  Each  of  them  wants  a  law 
passed  to  make  its  crusade  official  and  compulsory; 
each  is  forever  hunting  for  forward-lookers  with 
money. 


228          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

One  of  the  latest  of  these  uplifting  vereins  to  score 
a  ten-strike  is  the  one  that  sponsored  the  so-called 
Maternity  Bill.  That  measure  is  now  a  law,  and  the 
over-burdened  American  taxpayer,  at  a  cost  of  $3,- 
000,000  a  year,  is  supporting  yet  one  more  posse  of 
perambulating  gabblers  and  snouters.  The  influ 
ences  behind  the  bill  were  exposed  in  the  Senate  by 
Senator  Reed,  of  Missouri,  -but  to  no  effect:  a  ma 
jority  of  the  other  Senators,  in  order  to  get  rid  of  the 
propagandists  in  charge  of  it,  had  already  promised 
to  vote  for  it.  Its  one  intelligible  aim,  as  Senator 
Reed  showed,  is  to  give  government  jobs  at  good 
salaries  to  a  gang  of  nosey  old  maids.  These  virgins 
now  traverse  the  country  teaching  married  women 
how  to  have  babies  in  a  ship-shape  and  graceful 
manner,  and  how  to  keep  them  alive  after  having 
them.  Only  one  member  of  the  corps  has  ever  been 
married  herself;  nevertheless,  the  old  gals  are  author 
ized  to  go  out  among  the  Italian  and  Yiddish  women, 
each  with  ten  or  twelve  head  of  kids  to  her  credit,  and 
tell  them  all  about  it.  According  to  Senator  Reed, 
the  ultimate  aim  of  the  forward-lookers  who  spon 
sored  the  scheme  is  to  provide  for  the  official  registra 
tion  of  expectant  mothers,  that  they  may  be  warned 
what  to  eat,  what  movies  to  see,  and  what  midwives  to 
send  for  when  the  time  comes.  Imagine  a  young 
bride  going  down  to  the  County  Clerk's  office  to  report 
herself!  And  imagine  an  elderly  and  anthropopa- 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  229 

gous  spinster  coming  around  next  day  to  advise  her! 
Or  a  boozy  political  doctor! 

All  these  crazes,  of  course,  are  primarily  arti 
ficial.  They  are  set  going,  not  by  the  plain  people 
spontaneously,  nor  even  by  the  forward-lookers  who 
eventually  support  them,  but  by  professionals.  The 
Anti-Saloon  League  is  their  archetype.  It  is  owned 
and  operated  by  gentlemen  who  make  excellent  livings 
stirring  up  the  tender-minded;  if  their  salaries  were 
cut  off  to-morrow,  all  their  moral  passion  would  ooze 
out,  and  Prohibition  would  be  dead  in  two  weeks. 
So  with  the  rest  of  the  uplifting  camorras.  Their 
present  enormous  prosperity,  I  believe,  is  due  in 
large  part  to  a  fact  that  is  never  thought  of,  to  wit, 
the  fact  that  the  women's  colleges  of  the  country,  for 
a  dozen  years  past,  have  been  turning  out  far  more 
graduates  than  could  be  utilized  as  teachers.  These 
supernumerary  lady  Ph.D's  almost  unanimously 
turn  to  the  uplift — and  the  uplift  saves  them.  In 
the  early  days  of  higher  education  for  women  in  the 
United  States,  practically  all  the  graduates  thrown 
upon  the  world  got  jobs  as  teachers,  but  now  a  good 
many  are  left  over.  Moreover,  it  has  been  dis 
covered  that  the  uplift  is  easier  than  teaching,  and  that 
it  pays  a  great  deal  better.  It  is  a  rare  woman  pro 
fessor  who  gets  more  than  $5,000  a  year,  but  there 
are  plenty  of  uplifting  jobs  at  $8,000  and  $10,000 
a  year,  and  in  the  future  there  will  be  some  prizes  at 


230         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

twice  as  much.     No  wonder  the  learned  girls  fall 
upon  them  so  eagerly! 

The  annual  production  of  male  Ph.D's  is  also  far 
beyond  the  legitimate  needs  of  the  nation,  -but  here 
the  congestion  is  relieved  by  the  greater  and  more 
varied  demand  for  masculine  labor.  If  a  young  man 
emerging  from  Columbia  or  Ohio  Wesleyan  as 
Philosophies  Doctor  finds  it  impossible  to  get  a  job 
teaching  he  can  always  go  on  the  road  as  a  salesman  of 
dental  supplies,  or  enlist  in  the  marines,  or  study  law, 
or  enter  the  ministry,  or  go  to  work  in  a  coal-mine,  or 
a  slaughter-house,  or  a  bucket-shop,  or  begin  selling 
Oklahoma  mine-stock  to  widows  and  retired  clergy 
men.  The  women  graduate  faces  far  fewer  oppor 
tunities.  She  is  commonly  too  old  and  too  worn  by 
meditation  to  go  upon  the  stage  in  anything  above  the 
grade  of  a  patent-medicine  show,  she  has  been  so 
poisoned  by  instruction  in  sex  hygiene  that  she  shies 
at  marriage,  and  most  of  the  standard  professions  and 
grafts  of  the  world  are  closed  to  her.  The  invention 
of  the  uplift  came  as  a  godsend  to  her.  Had  not  some 
mute,  inglorious  Edison  devised  it  at  the  right  time, 
humanity  would  be  disgraced  to-day  by  the  spectacle 
of  hordes  of  Lady  Ph.D's  going  to  work  in  steam- 
laundries,  hooch  shows  and  chewing-gum  factories. 
As  it  is,  they  are  all  taken  care  of  by  the  innumer 
able  societies  for  making  the  whole  world  virtuous 
and  happy.  One  may  laugh  at  the  aims  and  methods 


THE  FORWARD-LOOKER  231 

of  many  such  societies — for  example,  at  the  absurd 
vereins  for  Americanizing  immigrants,  i.  e.9  degrad 
ing  them  to  the  level  of  the  native  peasantry.  But 
one  thing,  at  least,  they  accomplish:  they  provide 
comfortable  and  permanent  jobs  for  hundreds  and 
thousands  of  deserving  women,  most  of  whom  are  far 
more  profitably  employed  trying  to  make  Methodists 
out  of  Sicilians  than  they  would  be  if  they  were  try 
ing  to  make  husbands  out  of  bachelors.  It  is  for 
this  high  purpose  also  that  the  forward-looker 
suffers. 


XII.   MEMORIAL   SERVICE 

WHERE  is  the  grave-yard  of  dead  gods? 
What  lingering  mourner  waters  their 
mounds?  There  was  a  day  when  Jupi 
ter  was  the  king  of  the  gods,  and  any  man  who  doubted 
his  puissance  was  ipso  facto  a  barbarian  and  an 
ignoramus.  But  where  in  all  the  world  is  there  a 
man  who  worships  Jupiter  to-day?  And  what  of 
Huitzilopochtli?  In  one  year — and  it  is  no  more 
than  five  hundred  years  ago — 50,000  youths  and 
maidens  were  slain  in  sacrifice  to  him.  To-day,  if  he 
is  remembered  at  all,  it  is  only  by  some  vagrant 
savage  in  the  depths  of  the  Mexican  forest.  Huit 
zilopochtli,  like  many  other  gods,  had  no  human 
father;  his  mother  was  a  virtuous  widow;  he  was  born 
of  an  apparently  innocent  flirtation  that  she  carried 
on  with  the  sun.  When  he  frowned,  his  father,  the 
sun,  stood  still.  When  he  roared  with  rage,  earth 
quakes  engulfed  whole  cities.  When  he  thirsted 
he  was  watered  with  10,000  gallons  of  human  blood. 
But  to-day  Huitzilopochtli  is  as  magnificently  forgot 
ten  as  Allen  G.  Thurman.  Once  the  peer  of  Allah, 

Buddha  and  Wotan,  he  is  now  the  peer  of  General 

232 


MEMORIAL  SERVICE  233 

Coxey,  Richmond  P.  Hobson,  Nan  Patterson,  Alton 
B.  Parker,  Adelina  Patti,  General  Weyler  and  Tom 
Sharkey. 

Speaking  of  Huitzilopochtli  recalls  his  brother, 
Tezcatilpoca.  Tezcatilpoca  was  almost  as  powerful: 
he  consumed  25,000  virgins  a  year.  Lead  me  to 
his  tomb:  I  would  weep,  and  hang  a  couronne  des 
perles.  But  who  knows  where  it  is?  Or  where  the 
grave  of  Quitzalcoatl  is?  Or  Tialoc?  Or  Chal- 
chihuitlicue?  Or  Xiehtecutli?  Or  Centeotl,  that 
sweet  one?  Or  Tlazolteotl,  the  goddess  of  love? 
Or  Mictlan?  Or  Ixtlilton?  Or  Omacatl?  Or 
Yacatecutli?  Or  Mixcoatl?  Or  Xipe?  Or  all  the 
host  of  Tzitzimitles?  Where  are  their  bones? 
Where  is  the  willow  on  which  they  hung  their  harps? 
In  what  forlorn  and  unheard-of  hell  do  they  await 
the  resurrection  morn?  Who  enjoys  their  residuary 
estates?  Or  that  of  Dis,  whom  Caesar  found  to  be 
the  chief  god  of  the  Celts?  Or  that  of  Tarves,  the 
bull?  Or  that  of  Moccos,  the  pig?  Or  that  of 
Epona,  the  mare?  Or  that  of  Mullo,  the  celestial 
jack-ass?  There  was  a  time  when  the  Irish  revered 
all  these  gods  as  violently  as  they  now  hate  the  Eng 
lish.  But  to-day  even  the  drunkest  Irishman  laughs 
at  them. 

But  they  have  company  in  oblivion:  the  hell  of 
dead  gods  is  as  crowded  as  the  Presbyterian  hell 
for  babies.  Damona  is  there,  and  Esus,  and  Drune- 


234  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
meton,  and  Silvana,  and  Dervones,  and  Adsalluta, 
and  Deva,  and  Belisama,  and  Axona,  and  Vintios, 
and  Taranuous,  and  Sulis,  and  Cocidius,  and  Ads- 
merius,  and  Dumiatis,  and  Caletos,  and  Moccus,  and 
Ollovidius,  and  Albiorix,  and  Leucitius,  and  Vitu- 
cadrus,  and  Ogmios,  and  Uxellimus,  and  Borvo,  and 
Grannos,  and  Mogons.  All  mighty  gods  in  their 
day,  worshiped  by  millions,  full  of  demands  and 
impositions,  able  to  bind  and  loose — all  gods  of  the 
first  class,  not  dilettanti.  Men  labored  for  genera 
tions  to  build  vast  temples  to  them — temples  with 
stones  as  large  as  hay-wagons.  The  business  of 
interpreting  their  whims  occupied  thousands  of 
priests,  wizards,  archdeacons,  evangelists,  haruspices, 
bishops,  archbishops.  To  doubt  them  was  to  die, 
usually  at  the  stake.  Armies  took  to  the  field  to 
defend  them  against  infidels:  villages  were  burned, 
women  and  children  were  butchered,  cattle  were 
driven  off.  Yet  in  the  end  they  all  withered  and 
died,  and  to-day  there  is  none  so  poor  to  do  them 
reverence.  Worse,  the  very  tombs  in  which  they  lie 
are  lost,  and  so  even  a  respectful  stranger  is  debarred 
from  paying  them  the  slightest  and  politest  homage. 
What  has  become  of  Sutekh,  once  the  high  god  of 
the  whole  Nile  Valley?  What  has  become  of: 

Resheph  Baal 

Anath  Astarte 

Ashtoreth  Hadad 


MEMORIAL  SERVICE  235 

El  Addu 

Nergal  Shalera 

Nebo  Dagon 

Ninib  Sharrab 

Melek  Yau 

Ahijah  Amon-Re 

Isis  Osiris 

Ptah  Sebek 

Anubis  Molech? 

All  these  were  once  gods  of  the  highest  eminence. 
Many  of  them  are  mentioned  with  fear  and  trem 
bling  in  the  Old  Testament.  They  ranked,  five  or 
six  thousand  years  ago,  with  Jahveh  himself;  the 
worst  of  them  stood  far  higher  than  Thor.  Yet  they 
have  all  gone  down  the  chute,  and  with  them  the 
following: 

Bile  Gwydion 

Ler  Manawyddan 

Arianrod  Nuada  Argetlam 

Morrigu  Tagd 

Govannon  Goibniu 

Gunfled  Odin 

Sokk-mimi  Llaw  Gyffeg 

Memetona  Lleu 


Ogma 
Kerridwen  Mider 

Pw>'n  Rigantona 

°S>TVan  Marzin 

Dea  Dia  Mars 


236 


PREJUDICES: 

THIRD  SERIES 

Ceros 

Jupiter 

Vaticanus 

Cunina 

Edulia 

Potina 

Adeona 

Statilinus 

luno  Lucina 

Diana  of  Ephesus 

Saturn 

Robigus 

Furrina 

Pluto 

Vediovis 

Ops 

Census 

Meditrina 

Cronos 

Vesta 

Enki 

Tilmun 

Engurra 

Zer-panitu 

Belus 

Merodach 

Dimmer 

U-ki 

Mu-ul-lil 

Dauke 

Ubargisi 

Gasan-abzu 

Ubilulu 

Elum 

Gasan-lil 

U-Tin-dirki 

U-dimmer-an-kia 

Marduk 

Enurestu 

Nin-lil-la 

U-sab-sib 

Nin 

U-Mersi 

Persephone 

Tammuz 

Istar 

Venus 

Lagas 

Bau 

U-urugal 

Mulu-hursang 

Sirtumu 

Anu 

Ea 

Beltis 

Nirig 

Nusku 

Nebo 

Ni-zu 

Samas 

Sahi 

Ma-banba-anna 

Aa 

En-Mersi 

Allatu 

Amurru 

MEMORIAL  SERVICE  237 

Sin  Assur 

AbilAddu  Aku 

Apsu  Beltu 

Dagan  Dumu-zi-abzu 

Elali  Kuski-banda 

Isum  Kaawanu 

Mami  Nin-azu 

Nin-man  Lugal-Amarada 

Zaraqu  Qarradu 

Suqamunu  Ura-gala 

Zagaga  Ueras 

You  may  think  I  spoof.  That  I  invent  the  names. 
I  do  not.  Ask  the  rector  to  lend  you  any  good  trea 
tise  on  comparative  religion:  you  will  find  them  all 
listed.  They  were  gods  of  the  highest  standing  and 
dignity — gods  of  civilized  peoples — worshipped  and 
believed  in  by  millions.  All  were  theoretically 
omnipotent,  omniscient  and  immortal.  And  all  are 
dead. 


XIII.   EDUCATION 


NEXT  to  the  clerk  in  holy  orders,  the  fellow 
with  the  worst  job  in  the  world  is  the  school 
master.  Both  are  underpaid,  both  fall 
steadily  in  authority  and  dignity,  and  both  wear  out 
their  hearts  trying  to  perform  the  impossible.  How 
much  the  world  asks  of  them,  and  how  little  they  can 
actually  deliver!  The  clergyman's  business  is  to 
save  the  human  race  from  hell:  if  he  saves  one- 
eighth  of  one  per  cent.,  even  within  the  limits  of  his 
narrow  flock,  he  does  magnificently.  The  school 
master's  is  to  spread  the  enlightenment,  to  make  the 
great  masses  of  the  plain  people  intelligent — and 
intelligence  is  precisely  the  thing  that  the  great 
masses  of  the  plain  people  are  congenitally  and 
eternally  incapable  of. 

Is  it  any  wonder  that  the  poor  birchman,  facing 
this  labor  that  would  have  staggered  Sisyphus  s£o- 
lusohn,  seeks  refuge  from  its  essential  impossibility* 
in  a  Chinese  maze  of  empty  technic?  The  ghost  of 
Pestalozzi,  once  bearing  a  torch  and  beckoning 

238 


EDUCATION  239 

toward  the  heights,  now  leads  down  stairways  into 
black  and  forbidding  dungeons.  Especially  in 
America,  where  all  that  is  bombastic  and  mystical  is 
most  esteemed,  the  art  of  pedagogics  becomes  a  sort 
of  puerile  magic,  a  thing  of  preposterous  secrets,  a 
grotesque  compound  of  false  premises  and  illogical 
conclusions.  Every  year  sees  a  craze  for  some  new 
solution  of  the  teaching  enigma,  at  once  simple  and 
infallible — manual  training,  playground  work,  song 
and  doggerel  lessons,  the  Montessori  method,  the 
Gary  system — an  endless  series  of  flamboyant 
arcanums.  The  worst  extravagances  of  privot  dozent 
experimental  psychology  are  gravely  seized  upon; 
the  uplift  pours  in  its  ineffable  principles  and  dis 
coveries;  mathematical  formulae  are  worked  out  for 
every  emergency ;  there  is  no  sure-cure  so  idiotic  that 
some  superintendent  of  schools  will  not  swallow  it. 

A  couple  of  days  spent  examining  the  literature  of 
the  New  Thought  in  pedagogy  are  enough  to  make  the 
judicious  weep.  Its  aim  seems  to  be  to  reduce 
the  whole  teaching  process  to  a  sort  of  automatic  re 
action,  to  discover  some  master  formula  that  will  not 
only  take  the  place  of  competence  and  resourceful 
ness  in  the  teacher  but  that  will  also  create  an  arti 
ficial  receptivity  in  the  child.  The  merciless  appli 
cation  of  this  formula  (which  changes  every  four 
days)  now  seems  to  be  the  chief  end  and  aim  of  peda 
gogy.  Teaching  becomes  a  thing  in  itself,  separable 


240         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

from  and  superior  to  the  thing  taught.  Its  mastery 
is  a  special  business,  a  transcendental  art  and  mys 
tery,  to  be  acquired  in  the  laboratory.  A  teacher  well 
grounded  in  this  mystery,  and  hence  privy  to  every 
detail  of  the  new  technic  (which  changes,  of  course, 
with  the  formula),  can  teach  anything  to  any  child, 
just  as  a  sound  dentist  can  pull  any  tooth  out  of  any 
jaw. 

All  this,  I  need  not  point  out,  is  in  sharp  contrast 
to  the  old  theory  of  teaching.  By  that  theory  mere 
technic  was  simplified  and  subordinated.  All  that  it 
demanded  of  the  teacher  told  off  to  teach,  say,  geog 
raphy,  was  that  he  master  the  facts  in  the  geography 
book  and  provide  himself  with  a  stout  rattan.  Thus 
equipped,  he  was  ready  for  a  test  of  his  natural  peda 
gogical  genius.  First  he  exposed  the  facts  in  the 
book,  then  he  gilded  them  with  whatever  appearance 
of  interest  and  importance  he  could  conjure  up,  and 
then  he  tested  the  extent  of  their  transference  to  the 
minds  of  his  pupils.  Those  pupils  who  had  ingested 
them  got  apples;  those  who  had  failed  got  fanned 
with  the  rattan.  Followed  the  second  round,  and  the 
same  test  again,  with  a  second  noting  of  results. 
And  then  the  third,  and  fourth,  and  the  fifth,  and  so 
on  until  the  last  and  least  pupil  had  been  stuffed  to 
his  subnormal  and  perhaps  moronic  brim. 

I  was  myself  grounded  in  the  underlying  de 
lusions  of  what  is  called  knowledge  by  this  austere 


EDUCATION  241 

process,  and  despite  the  eloquence  of  those  who  sup 
port  newer  ideas,  I  lean  heavily  in  favor  of  it,  and 
regret  to  hear  that  it  is  no  more.  It  was  crude,  it  was 
rough,  and  it  was  often  not  a  little  cruel,  but  it  at 
least  had  two  capital  advantages  over  all  the  systems 
that  have  succeeded  it.  In  the  first  place,  its 
machinery  was  simple ;  even  the  stupidest  child  could 
understand  it;  it  hooked  up  cause  and  effect  with  the 
utmost  clarity.  And  in  the  second  place,  it  tested  the 
teacher  as  and  how  he  ought  to  be  tested — that  is,  for 
his  actual  capacity  to  teach,  not  for  his  mere  technical 
virtuosity.  There  was,  in  fact,  no  technic  for  him  to 
master,  and  hence  none  for  him  to  hide  behind.  He 
could  not  conceal  a  hopeless  inability  to  impart 
knowledge  beneath  a  correct  professional  method. 

That  ability  to  impart  knowledge,  it  seems  to  me, 
has  very  little  to  do  with  technical  method.  It  may 
operate  at  full  function  without  any  technical  method 
at  all,  and  contrariwise,  the  most  elaborate  of  tech 
nical  methods,  whether  out  of  Switzerland,  Italy  or 
Gary,  Ind.,  cannot  make  it  operate  when  it  is  not 
actually  present.  And  what  does  it  consist  of?  It 
consists,  first,  of  a  natural  talent  for  dealing  with 
children,  for  getting  into  their  minds,  for  putting 
things  in  a  way  that  they  can  comprehend.  And  it 
consists,  secondly,  of  a  deep  belief  in  the  interest  and 
importance  of  the  thing  taught,  a  concern  about  it 
amounting  to  a  sort  of  passion.  A  man  who  knows 


242  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
a  subject  thoroughly,  a  man  so  soaked  in  it  that  he 
eats  it,  sleeps  it  and  dreams  it — this  man  can  always 
teach  it  with  success,  no  matter  how  little  he  knows 
of  technical  pedagogy.  That  is  because  there  is  en 
thusiasm  in  him,  and  because  enthusiasm  is  almost 
as  contagious  as  fear  or  the  barber's  itch.  An  en 
thusiast  is  willing  to  go  to  any  trouble  to  impart  the 
glad  news  bubbling  within  him.  He  thinks  that  it 
is  important  and  valuable  for  to  know;  given  the 
slightest  glow  of  interest  in  a  pupil  to  start  with,  he 
will  fan  that  glow  to  a  flame.  No  hollow  formalism 
cripples  him  and  slows  him  down.  He  drags  his 
best  pupils  along  as  fast  as  they  can  go,  and  he  is  so 
full  of  the  thing  that  he  never  tires  of  expounding  its 
elements  to  the  dullest. 

This  passion,  so  unordered  and  yet  so  potent,  ex 
plains  the  capacity  for  teaching  that  one  frequently 
observes  in  scientific  men  of  high  attainments  in  their 
specialties — for  example,  Huxley,  Ostwald,  Karl 
Ludwig,  Virchow,  Billroth,  Jowett,  William  G. 
Sumner,  Halsted  and  Osier — men  who  knew  nothing 
whatever  about  the  so-called  science  of  pedagogy, 
and  would  have  derided  its  alleged  principles  if  they 
had  heard  them  stated.  It  explains,  too,  the  failure 
of  the  general  run  of  high-school  and  college  teachers 
— men  who  are  undoubtedly  competent,  by  the  profes 
sional  standards  of  pedagogy,  but  who  nevertheless 
contrive  only  to  make  intolerable  bores  of  the  things 


EDUCATION  243 

they  presume  to  teach.  No  intelligent  student  ever 
learns  much  from  the  average  drover  of  undergrad 
uates  ;  what  he  actually  carries  away  has  come  out  of 
his  textbooks,  or  is  the  fruit  of  his  own  reading  and 
inquiry.  But  when  he  passes  to  the  graduate  school, 
and  comes  among  men  who  really  understand  the  sub 
jects  they  teach,  and,  what  is  more,  who  really  love 
them,  his  store  of  knowledge  increases  rapidly,  and 
in  a  very  short  while,  if  he  has  any  intelligence  at  all, 
he  learns  to  think  in  terms  of  the  thing  he  is  studying. 
So  far,  so  good.  But  an  objection  still  remains, 
the  which  may  be  couched  in  the  following  terms :  that 
in  the  average  college  or  high  school,  and  especially 
in  the  elementary  school,  most  of  the  subjects  taught 
are  so  bald  and  uninspiring  that  it  is  difficult  to  imag 
ine  them  arousing  the  passion  I  have  been  describing 
— in  brief,  that  only  an  ass  could  be  enthusiastic  about 
them.  In  witness,  think  of  the  four  elementals: 
reading,  penmanship,  arithmetic  and  spelling.  This 
objection,  at  first  blush,  seems  salient  and  dismaying, 
but  only  a  brief  inspection  is  needed  to  show  that  it 
is  really  of  very  small  validity.  It  is  made  up  of  a 
false  assumption  and  a  false  inference.  The  false 
inference  is  that  there  is  any  sound  reason  for  pro 
hibiting  teaching  by  asses,  if  only  the  asses  know  how 
to  do  it,  and  do  it  well.  The  false  assumption  is 
that  there  are  no  asses  in  our  schools  and  colleges 
to-day.  The  facts  stand  in  almost  complete  antith- 


244  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
esis  to  these  notions.  The  truth  is  that  the  average 
schoolmaster,  on  all  the  lower  levels,  is  and  always 
must  be  essentially  an  ass,  for  how  can  one  imagine 
an  intelligent  man  engaging  in  so  puerile  an  avo 
cation?  And,  the  truth  is  that  it  is  precisely  his 
inherent  asininity,  and  not  his  technical  equipment  as 
a  pedagogue,  that  is  responsible  for  whatever  modest 
success  he  now  shows. 

I  here  attempt  no  heavy  jocosity,  but  mean  exactly 
what  I  say.  Consider,  for  example,  penmanship.  A 
decent  handwriting,  it  must  be  obvious,  is  useful  to 
all  men,  and  particularly  to  the  lower  orders  of  men. 
It  is  one  of  the  few  things  capable  of  acquirement  in 
school  that  actually  helps  them  to  make  a  living. 
Well,  how  is  it  taught  to-day?  It  is  taught,  in  the 
main,  by  schoolmarms  so  enmeshed  in  a  complex  and 
unintelligible  technic  that,  even  supposing  them  able 
to  write  clearly  themselves,  they  find  it  quite  impos 
sible  to  teach  their  pupils.  Every  few  years  sees  a 
radical  overhauling  of  the  whole  business.  First  the 
vertical  hand  is  to  make  it  easy;  then  certain  curves 
are  the  favorite  magic;  then  there  is  a  return  to 
slants  and  shadings.  No  department  of  pedagogy 
sees  a  more  hideous  cavorting  of  quacks.  In  none 
is  the  natural  talent  and  enthusiasm  of  the  teacher 
more  depressingly  crippled.  And  the  result?  The 
result  is  that  our  American  school  children  write 
abominably — that  a  clerk  or  stenographer  with  a 


EDUCATION  245 

simple,  legible  hand  becomes  almost  as  scarce  as  one 
with  Greek. 

Go  back,  now,  to  the  old  days.  Penmanship  was 
then  taught,  not  mechanically  and  ineffectively,  by 
unsound  and  shifting  formulae,  but  by  passionate 
penmen  with  curly  patent-leather  hair  and  far-away 
eyes — in  brief,  by  the  unforgettable  professors  of  our 
youth,  with  their  flourishes,  their  heavy  down-strokes 
and  their  lovely  birds-with-letters-in-their-bills.  You 
remember  them,  of  course.  Asses  all!  Prepos 
terous  popinjays  and  numskulls!  Pathetic  idiots! 
But  they  loved  penmanship,  they  believed  in  the 
glory  and  beauty  of  penmanship,  they  were  fanatics, 
devotees,  almost  martyrs  of  penmanship — and  so 
they  got  some  touch  of  that  passion  into  their  pupils. 
Not  enough,  perhaps,  to  make  more  flourishers  and 
bird-blazoners,  but  enough  to  make  sound  penmen. 
Look  at  your  old  writing  book;  observe  the  excellent 
legibility,  the  clear  strokes  of  your  "Time  is  money." 
Then  look  at  your  child's. 

Such  idiots,  despite  the  rise  of  "scientific"  peda 
gogy,  have  not  died  out  in  the  world.  I  believe  that 
our  schools  are  full  of  them,  both  in  pantaloons  and 
in  skirts.  There  are  fanatics  who  love  and  venerate 
spelling  as  a  tom-cat  loves  and  venerates  catnip. 
There  are  grammatomaniacs;  schoolmanns  who 
would  rather  parse  than  eat;  specialists  in  an  ob 
jective  case  that  doesn't  exist  in  English;  strange 


246  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
beings,  otherwise  sane  and  even  intelligent  and 
comely,  who  suffer  under  a  split  infinitive  as  you  or 
I  would  suffer  under  gastro- enteritis.  There  are 
geography  cranks,  able  to  bound  Mesopotamia  and 
Beluchistan.  There  are  zealots  for  long  division, 
experts  in  the  multiplication  table,  lunatic  worshipers 
of  the  binomial  theorem.  But  the  system  has  them  in 
its  grip.  It  combats  their  natural  enthusiam  dili 
gently  and  mercilessly.  It  tries  to  convert  them  into 
mere  technicians,  clumsy  machines.  It  orders  them 
to  teach,  not  by  the  process  of  emotional  osmosis 
which  worked  in  the  days  gone  by,  but  by  formulae 
that  are  as  baffling  to  the  pupil  as  they  are  paralyzing 
to  the  teacher.  Imagine  what  would  happen  to  one 
of  them  who  stepped  to  the  blackboard,  seized  a  piece 
of  chalk,  and  engrossed  a  bird  that  held  the  class 
spell-bound — a  bird  with  a  thousand  flowing 
feathers,  wings  bursting  with  parabolas  and  epicy 
cloids,  and  long  ribbons  streaming  from  its  bill! 
Imagine  the  fate  of  one  who  began  "Honesty  is  the 
best  policy"  with  an  H  as  florid  and — to  a  child — as 
beautiful  as  the  initial  of  a  mediaeval  manuscript! 
Such  a  teacher  would  be  cashiered  and  handed  over 
to  the  secular  arm;  the  very  enchantment  of  the  as 
sembled  infantry  would  be  held  as  damning  proof 
against  him.  And  yet  it  is  just  such  teachers  that 
we  should  try  to  discover  and  develop.  Pedagogy 
needs  their  enthusiasm,  their  na'ive  belief  in  their 


EDUCATION  247 

own  grotesque  talents,  their  capacity  for  communi 
cating  their  childish  passion  to  the  childish. 

But  this  would  mean  exposing  the  children  of  the 
Republic  to  contact  with  monomaniacs,  half-wits, 
defectives?  Well,  what  of  it?  The  vast  majority 
of  them  are  already  exposed  to  contact  with  half-wits 
in  their  own  homes;  they  are  taught  the  word  of  God 
by  half-wits  on  Sundays;  they  will  grow  up  into 
Knights  of  Pythias,  Odd  Fellows,  Red  Men  and  other 
such  half-wits  in  the  days  to  come.  Moreover,  as  I 
have  hinted,  they  are  already  face  to  face  with  half 
wits  in  the  actual  schools,  at  least  in  three  cases  out  of 
four.  The  problem  before  us  is  not  to  dispose  of 
this  fact,  but  to  utilize  it.  We  cannot  hope  to  fill 
the  schools  with  persons  of  high  intelligence,  for 
persons  of  high  intelligence  simply  refuse  to  spend 
their  lives  teaching  such  banal  things  as  spelling  and 
arithmetic.  Among  the  teachers  male  we  may  safely 
assume  that  95  per  cent,  are  of  low  mentality,  else 
they  would  depart  for  more  appetizing  pastures.  And 
even  among  the  teachers  female  the  best  are  inevi 
tably  weeded  out  by  marriage,  and  only  the  worst 
(with  a  few  romantic  exceptions)  survive.  The 
task  before  us,  as  I  say,  is  not  to  make  a  vain  denial 
of  this  cerebral  inferiority  of  the  pedagogue,  nor  to 
try  to  combat  and  disguise  it  by  concocting  a  mass  of 
technical  hocus-pocus,  but  to  search  out  and  put  to 
use  the  value  lying  concealed  in  it.  For  even  stu- 


248  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
pidity,  it  must  be  plain,  has  its  uses  in  the  world,  and 
some  of  them  are  uses  that  intelligence  cannot  meet. 
One  would  not  tell  off  a  Galileo  or  a  Pasteur  to 
drive  an  ash-cart  or  an  Ignatius  Loyola  to  be  a  stock 
broker,  or  a  Brahms  to  lead  the  orchestra  in  a  Broad 
way  cabaret.  By  the  same  token,  one  would  not  ask 
a  Herbert  Spencer  or  a  Duns  Scotus  to  instruct  suck 
lings.  Such  men  would  not  only  be  wasted  at  the 
job;  they  would  also  be  incompetent.  The  business 
j  of  dealing  with  children,  in  fact,  demands  a  certain 
;  childishness  of  mind.  The  best  teacher,  until  one 
comes  to  adult  pupils,  is  not  the  one  who  knows  most, 
but  the  one  who  is  most  capable  of  reducing 
knowledge  to  that  simple  compound  of  the  obvious 
and  the  wonderful  which  slips  easiest  into  the  in 
fantile  comprehension.  A  man  of  high  intelligence, 
perhaps,  may  accomplish  the  thing  by  a  conscious 
intellectual  feat.  But  it  is  vastly  easier  to  the  man 
(or  woman)  whose  habits  of  mind  are  naturally  on 
the  plane  of  a  child's.  The  best  teacher  of  children, 
in  brief,  is  one  who  is  essentially  childlike. 

I  go  so  far  with  this  notion  that  I  view  the  movement 
to  introduce  female  bachelors  of  arts  into  the  pri 
mary  schools  with  the  utmost  alarm.  A  knowledge 
of  Bergsonism,  the  Greek  aorist,  sex  hygiene  and  the 
dramas  of  Percy  MacKaye  is  not  only  no  help  to  the 
teaching  of  spelling,  it  is  a  positive  handicap  to  the 
teaching  of  spelling,  for  it  corrupts  and  blows  up  that 


EDUCATION  249 

na'ive  belief  in  the  glory  and  portentousness  of  spell 
ing  which  is  at  the  bottom  of  all  successful  teaching 
of  it.  If  I  had  my  way,  indeed,  I  should  expose  all 
candidates  for  berths  in  the  infant  grades  to  the 
Binet-Simon  test,  and  reject  all  those  who  revealed  the 
mentality  of  more  than  fifteen  years.  Plenty  would 
still  pass.  Moreover,  they  would  be  secure  against 
contamination  by  the  new  technic  of  pedagogy.  Its 
vast  wave  of  pseudo-psychology  would  curl  and  break 
against  the  hard  barrier  of  their  innocent  and  passion 
ate  intellects — as  it  probably  does,  in  fact,  even 
now.  They  would  know  nothing  of  cognition,  per 
ception,  attention,  the  sub-conscious  and  all  the  other 
half-fabulous  fowl  of  the  pedagogic  aviary.  But 
they  would  see  in  reading,  writing  and  arithmetic  the 
gaudy  charms  of  profound  and  esoteric  knowledge, 
and  they  would  teach  these  ancient  branches,  now  so 
abominably  in  decay,  with  passionate  gusto,  and  ir 
resistible  effectiveness,  and  a  gigantic  success. 

II 

Two  great  follies  corrupt  the  present  pedagogy, 
once  it  gets  beyond  the  elementals.  One  is  the  folly 
of  overestimating  the  receptivity  of  the  pupil;  the 
other  is  the  folly  of  overestimating  the  possible  effi 
ciency  of  the  teacher.  Both  rest  upon  that  tendency  to 
put  too  high  a  value  upon  mere  schooling  which  char 
acterizes  democratic  and  upstart  societies — a  tendency 


250  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
born  of  the  theory  that  a  young  man  who  has  been 
"educated,"  who  has  "gone  through  college,"  is  in 
some  subtle  way  more  capable  of  making  money  than 
one  who  hasn't.  The  nature  of  the  schooling  on  tap 
in  colleges  is  but  defectively  grasped  by  the  adherents 
of  the  theory.  They  view  it,  I  believe,  as  a  sort  of 
extension  of  the  schooling  offered  in  elementary 
schools — that  is,  as  an  indefinite  multiplication  of 
training  in  such  obviously  valuable  and  necessary 
arts  as  reading,  writing  and  arithmetic.  It  is,  of 
course,  nothing  of  the  sort.  If  the  pupil,  as  he 
climbs  the  educational  ladder,  is  fortunate  enough  to 
come  into  contact  with  a  few  Huxleys  or  Ludwigs,  he 
may  acquire  a  great  deal  of  extremely  sound  knowl 
edge,  and  even  learn  how  to  think  for  himself.  But 
in  the  great  majority  of  cases  he  is  debarred  by  two 
things :  the  limitations  of  his  congenital  capacity  and 
the  limitations  of  the  teachers  he  actually  encounters. 
The  latter  is  usually  even  more  brilliantly  patent 
than  the  former.  Very  few  professional  teachers,  it 
seems  to  me,  really  know  anything  worth  knowing, 
even  about  the  subjects  they  essay  to  teach.  If  you 
doubt  it,  simply  examine  their  contributions  to  exist 
ing  knowledge.  Several  years  ago,  while  engaged 
upon  my  book,  "The  American  Language,"  I  had  a 
good  chance  to  test  the  matter  in  one  typical  depart 
ment,  that  of  philology.  I  found  a  truly  appalling 
condition  of  affairs.  I  found  that  in  the  whole 


EDUCATION  251 

United  States  there  were  not  two  dozen  teachers  of 
English  philology — in  which  class  I  also  include  the 
innumerable  teachers  of  plain  grammar — who  had 
ever  written  ten  lines  upon  the  subject  worth  reading. 
It  was  not  that  they  were  indolent  or  illiterate:  in 
truth,  they  turned  out  to  be  enormously  diligent. 
But  as  I  plowed  through  pyramid  after  pyramid  of 
their  doctrines  and  speculations,  day  after  day  and 
week  after  week,  I  discovered  little  save  a  vast  labor 
ing  of  the  obvious,  with  now  and  then  a  bold  flight 
into  the  nonsensical.  A  few  genuinely  original  philol- 
ogians  revealed  themselves — pedagogues  capable  of 
observing  accurately  and  reasoning  clearly.  The 
rest  simply  wasted  time  and  paper.  Whole  sections 
of  the  field  were  unexplored,  and  some  of  them  ap 
peared  to  be  even  unsuspected.  The  entire  life-work 
of  many  an  industrious  professor,  boiled  down, 
scarcely  made  a  footnote  in  my  book,  itself  a  very 
modest  work. 

This  tendency  to  treat  the  superior  pedagogue  too 
seriously — to  view  him  as,  ipso  facto,  a  learned  man, 
and  one  thus  capable  of  conveying  learning  to  others 
— is  supported  by  the  circumstance  that  he  so  views 
himself,  and  is,  in  fact,  very  pretentious  and  even 
bombastic.  Nearly  all  discussions  of  the  educational 
problem,  at  least  in  the  United  States,  are  carried 
on  by  schoolmasters  or  ex-schoolmasters — for  ex 
ample,  college  presidents,  deans,  and  other  such  mag- 


252  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
nificoes — and  so  they  assume  it  to  be  axiomatic  that 
such  fellows  are  genuine  bearers  of  the  enlighten 
ment,  and  hence  capable  of  transmitting  it  to  others. 
This  is  true  sometimes,  as  I  have  said,  but  certainly 
not  usually.  The  average  high-school  or  college 
pedagogue  is  not  one  who  has  been  selected  because 
of  his  uncommon  knowledge;  he  is  simply  one  who 
has  been  stuffed  with  formal  ideas  and  taught  to  do 
a  few  conventional  intellectual  tricks.  Contact  with 
him,  far  from  being  inspiring  to  any  youth  of  alert 
mentality,  is  really  quite  depressing;  his  point  of 
view  is  commonplace  and  timorous;  his  best  thought 
is  no  better  than  that  of  any  other  fourth-rate  pro 
fessional  man,  say  a  dentist  or  an  advertisement 
writer.  Thus  it  is  idle  to  talk  of  him  as  if  he  were 
a  Socrates,  an  Aristotle,  or  even  a  Leschetizky.  He 
is  actually  much  more  nearly  related  to  a  barber  or 
a  lieutenant  of  marines.  A  worthy  man,  industrious 
and  respectable — but  don't  expect  too  much  of  him. 
To  ask  him  to  struggle  out  of  his  puddle  of  safe  plati 
tudes  and  plunge  into  the  whirlpool  of  surmise  and 
speculation  that  carries  on  the  fragile  shallop  of 
human  progress — to  do  this  is  as  absurd  as  to  ask 
a  neighborhood  doctor  to  undertake  major  surgery. 

In  the  United  States  his  low  intellectual  status 
is  kept  low,  not  only  by  the  meager  rewards  of  his 
trade  in  a  country  where  money  is  greatly  sought  and 
esteemed,  but  also  by  the  democratic  theory  of  edu- 


EDUCATION  253 

cation — that  is,  by  the  theory  that  mere  education  can 
convert  a  peasant  into  an  intellectual  aristocrat,  with 
all  of  the  peculiar  superiorities  of  an  aristocrat — in 
brief,  that  it  is  possible  to  make  purses  out  of  sow's 
ears.  The  intellectual  collapse  of  the  American 
Gelehrten  during  the  late  war — a  collapse  so  nearly 
unanimous  that  those  who  did  not  share  it  attained 
to  a  sort  of  immortality  overnight — was  perhaps 
largely  due  to  this  error.  Who  were  these  bawling 
professors,  so  pathetically  poltroonish  and  idiotic? 
In  an  enormous  number  of  cases  they  were  simply 
peasants  in  frock-  coats — oafs  from  the  farms  and 
villages  of  Iowa,  Kansas,  Vermont,  Alabama,  the 
Dakotas  and  other  such  backward  states,  horribly 
stuffed  with  standardized  learning  in  some  fresh 
water  university,  and  then  set  to  teaching.  To  look 
for  a  civilized  attitude  of  mind  in  such  Strassburg 
geese  is  to  look  for  honor  in  a  valet;  to  confuse  them 
with  scholars  is  to  confuse  the  Knights  of  Pythias 
with  the  Knights  Hospitaller.  In  brief,  the  trouble 
with  them  was  that  they  had  no  sound  tradition  be 
hind  them,  that  they  had  not  learned  to  think  clearly 
and  decently,  that  they  were  not  gentlemen.  The 
youth  with  a  better  background  behind  him,  passing 
through  an  American  university,  seldom  acquires  any 
yearning  to  linger  as  a  teacher.  The  air  is  too  thick 
for  him;  the  rewards  are  too  trivial;  the  intrigues  are 
too  old-maidish  and  degrading.  Thus  the  chairs,  even 


254  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
in  the  larger  universities,  tend  to  be  filled  more  and 
more  by  yokels  who  have  got  themselves  what  is  called 
an  education  only  by  dint  of  herculean  effort.  Ex 
hausted  by  the  cruel  process,  they  are  old  men  at  26 
or  28,  and  so,  hugging  their  Ph.D's,  they  sink  into 
convenient  instructorships,  and  end  at  60  as  ardent- 
liche  Professoren.  The  social  status  of  the  Ameri 
can  pedagogue  helps  along  the  process.  Unlike  in 
Europe,  where  he  has  a  secure  and  honorable  posi 
tion,  he  ranks,  in  the  United  States,  somewhere  be 
tween  a  Methodist  preacher  and  a  prosperous  brick 
yard  owner — certainly  clearly  below  the  latter. 
Thus  the  youth  of  civilized  upbringings  feels  that  it 
would  be  stooping  a  bit  to  take  up  the  rattan.  But  the 
plow-hand  obviously  makes  a  step  upward,  and  is 
hence  eager  for  the  black  gown.  Thereby  a  vicious 
circle  is  formed.  The  plow-hand,  by  entering  the 
ancient  guild,  drags  it  down  still  further,  and  so 
makes  it  increasingly  difficult  to  snare  apprentices 
from  superior  castes. 

A  glance  at  "Who's  Who  in  America"  offers  a 
good  deal  of  support  for  all  this  theorizing.  There 
was  a  time  when  the  typical  American  professor  came 
from  a  small  area  in  New  England — for  generations 
the  seat  of  a  high  literacy,  and  even  of  a  certain 
austere  civilization.  But  to-day  he  comes  from  the 
region  of  silos,  revivals,  and  saleratus.  Behind 
him  there  is  absolutely  no  tradition  of  aristocratic 


EDUCATION  255 

aloofness  and  urbanity,  or  even  of  mere  civilized 
decency.  He  is  a  hind  by  birth,  and  he  carries  the 
smell  of  the  dunghill  into  the  academic  grove — and 
not  only  the  smell,  but  also  some  of  the  dung  itself. 
What  one  looks  for  in  such  men  is  dullness,  super 
ficiality,  a  great  credulity,  an  incapacity  for  learning 
anything  save  a  few  fly-blown  rudiments,  a  passion 
ate  yielding  to  all  popular  crazes,  a  malignant  dis 
trust  of  genuine  superiority,  a  huge  megalomania. 
These  are  precisely  the  things  that  one  finds  in  the 
typical  American  pedagogue  of  the  ne\v  dispensa 
tion.  He  is  not  only  a  numskull;  he  is  also  a  boor. 
In  the  university  president  he  reaches  his  heights. 
Here  we  have  a  so-called  learned  man  who  spends 
his  time  making  speeches  before  chautauquas,  cham 
bers  of  commerce  and  Rotary  Clubs,  and  flattering 
trustees  who  run  both  universities  and  street-railways, 
and  cadging  money  from  such  men  as  Rockefeller 
and  Carnegie. 

Ill 

^ 

The  same  educational  fallacy  which  fills  the  groves 
of  learning  with  such  dunces  causes  a  huge  waste 
of  energy  and  money  on  lower  levels — those,  to  wit, 
of  the  secondary  schools.  The  theory  behind  the 
lavish  multiplication  of  such  schools  is  that  they  out 
fit  the  children  of  the  mob  with  the  materials  of 
reasoning,  and  inculcate  in  them  a  habit  of  indulg- 


256  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
ing  in  it.  I  have  never  been  able  to  discover  any 
evidence  in  support  of  that  theory.  The  common 
people  of  America — at  least  the  white  portion  of 
them — are  rather  above  the  world's  average  in  liter 
acy,  but  there  is  no  sign  that  they  have  acquired 
thereby  any  capacity  for  weighing  facts  or  compar 
ing  ideas.  The  school  statistics  show  that  the  aver 
age  member  of  the  American  Legion  can  read  and 
write  after  a  fashion,  and  is  able  to  multiply  eight 
by  seven  after  four  trials,  but  they  tell  us  nothing 
about  his  actual  intelligence.  The  returns  of  the 
Army  itself,  indeed,  indicate  that  he  is  stupid  almost 
beyond  belief — that  there  is  at  least  an  even  chance 
that  he  is  a  moron.  Is  such  a  fellow  appreciably 
superior  to  the  villein  of  the  Middle  Ages?  Some 
times  I  am  tempted  to  doubt  it.  I  suspect,  for  ex 
ample,  that  the  belief  in  witchcraft  is  still  almost  as 
widespread  amon^  the  plain  people  of  the  United 
States,  at  least  outside  the  large  cities,  as  it  was  in 
Europe  in  the  year  1500.  In  my  own  state  of  Mary 
land  all  of  the  negroes  and  mulattoes  believe  abso 
lutely  in  witches,  and  so  do  most  of  the  whites. 
The  belief  in  ghosts  penetrates  to  quite  high  levels. 
I  know  very  few  native-born  Americans,  indeed,  who 
reject  it  without  reservation.  One  constantly  comes 
upon  grave  defenses  of  spiritism  in  some  form  or 
other  by  men  theoretically  of  learning;  in  the  two 
houses  of  Congress  it  would  be  difficult  to  muster 


EDUCATION  257 

fifty  men  willing  to  denounce  the  thing  publicly.  It 
would  not  only  be  politically  dangerous  for  them  to 
do  so;  it  would  also  go  against  their  consciences. 

What  is  always  forgotten  is  that  the  capacity  for 
knowledge  of  the  great  masses  of  human  blanks  is 
very  low — that,  no  matter  how  adroitly  pedagogy 
tackles  them  with  its  technical  sorceries,  it  remains 
a  practical  impossibility  to  teach  them  anything  be 
yond  reading  and  writing,  and  the  most  elementary 
arithmetic.  Worse,  it  is  impossible  to  make  any  ap 
preciable  improvement  in  their  congenitally  ignoble 
tastes,  and  so  they  devote  even  the  paltry  learning 
that  they  acquire  to  degrading  uses.  If  the  average 
American  read  only  the  newspapers,  as  is  frequently 
alleged,  it  would  be  bad  enough,  but  the  truth  is  that 
he  reads  only  the  most  imbecile  parts  of  the  news 
papers.  Nine-tenths  of  the  matter  in  a  daily  paper 
of  the  better  sort  is  almost  as  unintelligible  to  him  as 
the  theory  of  least  squares.  The  words  lie  outside 
his  vocabulary;  the  ideas  are  beyond  the  farthest  leap 
of  his  intellect.  It  is,  indeed,  a  sober  fact  that  even 
an  editorial  in  the  New  York  Times  is  probably  in 
comprehensible  to  all  Americans  save  a  small  mi 
nority — and  not,  remember,  on  the  ground  that  it 
is  too  nonsensical  but  on  the  ground  that  it  is  too 
subtle.  The  same  sort  of  mind  that  regards  Rubin 
stein's  Melody  in  F  as  too  "classical"  to  be  agreeable 
is  also  stumped  by  the  most  transparent  English. 


258          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

Like  most  other  professional  writers  I  get  a  good 
many  letters  from  my  customers.  Complaints, 
naturally,  are  more  numerous  than  compliments;  it 
is  only  indignation  that  can  induce  the  average  man 
to  brave  the  ardors  of  pen  and  ink.  Well,  the  com 
plaint  that  I  hear  most  often  is  that  my  English  is 
unintelligible — that  it  is  too  full  of  "hard"  words. 
I  can  imagine  nothing  more  astounding.  My  Eng- 
ish  is  actually  almost  as  bald  and  simple  as  the  Eng 
lish  of  a  college  yell.  My  sentences  are  short  and 
plainly  constructed:  I  resolutely  cultivate  the  most 
direct  manner  of  statement;  my  vocabulary  is  de 
liberately  composed  of  the  words  of  everyday. 
Nevertheless,  a  great  many  of  my  readers  in  my  own 
country  find  reading  me  an  uncomfortably  severe 
burden  upon  their  linguistic  and  intellectual  re 
sources.  These  readers  are  certainly  not  below  the 
American  average  in  intelligence;  on  the  contrary, 
they  must  be  a  good  deal  above  the  average,  for  they 
have  at  least  got  to  the  point  where  they  are  willing 
to  put  out  of  the  safe  harbor  of  the  obvious  and  re 
spectable,  and  to  brave  the  seas  where  more  or  less 
novel  ideas  rage  and  roar.  Think  of  what  the  ordi 
nary  newspaper  reader  would  make  of  my  composi 
tions!  There  is,  in  fact,  no  need  to  think;  I  have 
tried  them  on  him.  His  customary  response,  when, 
by  mountebankish  devices,  I  forced  him  to  read — 
or,  at  all  events,  to  try  to  read — ,  was  to  demand  reso- 


EDUCATION  259 

lutely  that  the  guilty  newspaper  cease  printing  me, 
and  to  threaten  to  bring  the  matter  to  the  attention 
of  the  Polizei.  I  do  not  exaggerate  in  the  slightest; 
I  tell  the  literal  truth. 

It  is  such  idiots  that  the  little  red  schoolhouse 
operates  upon,  in  the  hope  of  unearthing  an  occa 
sional  first-rate  man.  Is  that  hope  ever  fulfilled? 
Despite  much  testimony  to  the  effect  that  it  is,  I  am 
convinced  that  it  really  isn't.  First-rate  men  are 
never  begotten  by  Knights  of  Pythias;  the  notion  that 
they  sometimes  are  is  due  to  an  optical  delusion. 
When  they  appear  in  obscure  and  ignoble  circles  it  is 
no  more  than  a  proof  that  only  an  extremely  wise 
sire  knows  his  own  son.  Adultery,  in  brief,  is  one 
of  nature's  devices  for  keeping  the  lowest  orders  of 
men  from  sinking  to  the  level  of  downright  simians: 
sometimes  for  a  few  brief  years  in  youth,  their  wives 
and  daughters  are  comely — and  now  and  then  the 
baron  drinks  more  than  he  ought  to.  But  it  is 
foolish  to  argue  that  the  gigantic  machine  of  popular 
education  is  needed  to  rescue  such  hybrids  from 
their  environment.  The  truth  is  that  all  the  educa 
tion  rammed  into  the  average  pupil  in  the*  average 
American  public  school  could  be  acquired  by  the  v 
larva  of  any  reasonably  intelligent  man  in  no  more 
than  six  weeks  of  ordinary  application,  and  that 
where  schools  are  unknown  it  actually  is  so  acquired. 
A  bright  child,  in  fact,  can  learn  to  read  and  write 


260  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
without  any  save  the  most  casual  aid  a  great  deal 
faster  than  it  can  learn  to  read  and  write  in  a  class 
room,  where  the  difficulties  of  the  stupid  retard  it 
enormously  and  it  is  further  burdened  by  the  crazy 
formulae  invented  by  pedagogues.  And  once  it  can 
read  and  write,  it  is  just  as  well  equipped  to  acquire 
further  knowledge  as  nine-tenths  of  the  teachers  it 
will  subsequently  encounter  in  school  or  college. 

IV 

I  know  a  good  many  men  of  great  learning — that 
is,  men  born  with  an  extraordinary  eagerness  and 
capacity  to  acquire  knowledge.  One  and  all,  they 
tell  me  that  they  can't  recall  learning  anything  of 
any  value  in  school.  All  that  schoolmasters  man 
aged  to  accomplish  with  them  was  to  test  and  de 
termine  the  amount  of  knowledge  that  they  had  al 
ready  acquired  independently — and  not  infrequently 
the  determination  was  made  clumsily  and  inaccur 
ately.  In  my  own  nonage  I  had  a  great  desire  to 
acquire  knowledge  in  certain  limited  directions,  to 
wit,  those  of  the  physical  sciences.  Before  I  was 
ever  permitted,  by  the  regulations  of  the  secondary 
seminary  I  was  penned  in,  to  open  a  chemistry  book 
I  had  learned  a  great  deal  of  chemistry  by  the  simple 
process  of  reading  the  texts  and  then  going  through 
the  processes  described.  When,  at  last,  I  was  intro 
duced  to  chemistry  officially,  I  found  the  teaching  of 


EDUCATION  261 

it  appalling.  The  one  aim  of  that  teaching,  in  fact, 
seemed  to  be  to  first  purge  me  of  what  I  already  knew 
and  then  refill  me  with  the  same  stuff  in  a  formal, 
doltish,  unintelligible  form.  My  experience  with 
physics  was  even  worse.  I  knew  nothing  about  it 
when  I  undertook  its  study  in  class,  for  that  was  be 
fore  the  days  when  physics  swallowed  chemistry. 
Well,  it  was  taught  so  abominably  that  it  immediately 
became  incomprehensible  to  me,  and  hence  extremely 
distasteful,  and  to  this  day  I  know  nothing  about  it. 
Worse,  it  remains  unpleasant  to  me,  and  so  I  am  shut 
off  from  the  interesting  and  useful  knowledge  that  I 
might  otherwise  acquire  by  reading. 

One  extraordinary  teacher  I  remember  wTho  taught 
me  something:  a  teacher  of  mathematics.  I  had  a 
dislike  for  that  science,  and  knew  little  about  it. 
Finally,  my  neglect  of  it  brought  me  to  bay:  in  trans 
ferring  from  one  school  to  another  I  found  that  I 
was  hopelessly  short  in  algebra.  What  was  needed, 
of  course,  was  not  an  actual  knowledge  of  algebra, 
but  simply  the  superficial  smattering  needed  to  pass 
an  examination.  The  teacher  that  I  mention,  ob 
serving  my  distress,  generously  offered  to  fill  me  with 
that  smattering  after  school  hours.  He  got  the  whole 
year's  course  into  me  in  exactly  six  lessons  of  half 
an  hour  each.  And  how?  More  accurately,  why? 
Simply  because  he  was  an  algebra  fanatic — because 
he  believed  that  algebra  was  not  only  a  science  of  the 


262  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
utmost  importance,  but  also  one  of  the  greatest  fasci 
nation.  He  was  the  penmanship  professor  of  years 
ago,  lifted  to  a  higher  level.  A  likable  and  plaus 
ible  man,  he  convinced  me  in  twenty  minutes  that  ig 
norance  of  algebra  was  as  calamitous,  socially  and 
intellectually,  as  ignorance  of  table  manners — that 
acquiring  its  elements  was  as  necessary  as  washing 
behind  the  ears.  So  I  fell  upon  the  book  and  gulped 
it  voraciously,  greatly  to  the  astonishment  of  my 
father,  whose  earlier  mathematical  teaching  had 
failed  to  set  me  off  because  it  was  too  pressing — be 
cause  it  bombarded  me,  not  when  I  was  penned  in  a 
school  and  so  inclined  to  make  the  best  of  it,  but 
when  I  had  got  through  a  day's  schooling,  and  felt 
inclined  to  play.  To  this  day  I  comprehend  the  bi 
nomial  theorem,  a  very  rare  accomplishment  in  an 
author.  For  many  years,  indeed,  I  was  probably 
the  only  American  newspaper  editor  who  knew  what 
it  was. 

Two  other  teachers  of  that  school  I  remember 
pleasantly  as  fellows  whose  pedagogy  pro  fitted  me — 
both,  it  happens,  were  drunken  and  disreputable  men. 
One  taught  me  to  chew  tobacco,  an  art  that  has  done 
more  to  give  me  an  evil  name,  perhaps,  than  even 
my  Socinianism.  The  other  introduced  me  to  Shake* 
speare,  Congreve,  Wycherly,  Marlowe  and  Sheri 
dan,  and  so  rilled  me  with  that  taste  for  coarseness 
which  now  offends  so  many  of  my  customers,  lay  and 


EDUCATION  263 

clerical.  Neither  ever  came  to  a  dignified  position 
in  academic  circles.  One  abandoned  pedagogy  for 
the  law,  became  involved  in  causes  of  a  dubious  na 
ture,  and  finally  disappeared  into  the  shades  which 
engulf  third-rate  attorneys.  The  other  went  upon  a 
fearful  drunk  one  Christmastide,  got  himself  shang 
haied  on  the  water-front  and  is  supposed  to  have 
fallen  overboard  from  a  British  tramp,  bound  east 
for  Cardiff.  At  all  events,  he  has  never  been  heard 
from  since.  Two  evil  fello\vs,  and  yet  I  hold  their 
memories  in  affection,  and  believe  that  they  were  the 
best  teachers  I  ever  had.  For  in  both  there  was  some 
thing  a  good  deal  more  valuable  than  mere  peda 
gogical  skill  and  diligence,  and  even  more  valuable 
than  correct  demeanor,  and  that  was  a  passionate  love 
of  sound  literature.  This  love,  given  reasonably  re 
ceptive  soil,  they  knew  how  to  communicate,  as  a  man 
can  nearly  always  communicate  whatever  moves  him 
profoundly.  Neither  ever  made  the  slightest  effort 
to  "teach"  literature,  as  the  business  is  carried  on  by 
the  usual  idiot  schoolmaster.  Both  had  a  vast  con 
tempt  for  the  text-books  that  were  official  in  their 
rchool,  and  used  to  entertain  the  boys  by  pointing 
out  the  nonsense  in  them.  Both  were  full  of  deris 
ory  objections  to  the  principal  heroes  of  such  books 
in  those  days:  Scott,  Irving,  Pope,  Jane  Austen, 
Dickens,  Trollope,  Tennyson.  But  both,  discoursing 
in  their  disorderly  way  upon  heroes  of  their  own, 


264  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
were  magnificently  eloquent  and  persuasive.  The 
boy  who  could  listen  to  one  of  them  intoning  Whit 
man  and  stand  unmoved  was  a  dull  fellow  indeed. 
The  boy  who  could  resist  the  other's  enthusiasm  for 
the  old  essayists  was  intellectually  deaf,  dumb  and 
blind. 

I  often  wonder  if  their  expoundings  of  their  pas 
sions  and  prejudices  would  have  been  half  so  charm 
ing  if  they  had  been  wholly  respectable  men,  like  their 
colleagues  of  the  school  faculty.  It  is  not  likely. 
A  healthy  boy  is  in  constant  revolt  against  the  sort  of 
men  who  surround  him  at  school.  Their  puerile 
pedantries,  their  Christian  Endeavor  respectability, 
their  sedentery  pallor,  their  curious  preference  for 
the  dull  and  uninteresting,  their  general  air  of  so 
many  Y.  M.  C.  A.  secretaries — these  things  infallibly 
repel  the  youth  who  is  above  milksoppery.  In  every 
boys'  school  the  favorite  teacher  is  one  who  occasion 
ally  swears  like  a  cavalryman,  or  is  reputed  to  keep 
a  jug  in  his  room,  or  is  known  to  receive  a  scented 
note  every  morning.  Boys  are  good  judges  of  men, 
as  girls  are  good  judges  of  women.  It  is  not  by  ac 
cident  that  most  of  them,  at  some  time  or  other,  long 
to  be  cowboys  or  ice-wagon  drivers,  and  that  none  of 
them,  not  obviously  diseased  in  mind,  ever  longs  to  be 
a  Sunday-school  superintendent.  Put  that  judgment 
to  a  simple  test.  What  would  become  of  a  nation  in 
which  all  of  the  men  were,  at  heart,  Sunday-school 


EDUCATION  265 

superintendents — or  Y.  M.  C.  A.  secretaries,  or  peda 
gogues?  Imagine  it  in  conflict  with  a  nation  of  cow 
boys  and  ice-wagon  drivers.  Which  wrould  be  the 
stronger,  and  which  would  be  the  more  intelligent,  re 
sourceful,  enterprising  and  courageous? 


XIV.    TYPES  OF  MEN 


The  Romantic 

THERE  is  a  variety  of  man  whose  eye  inevita 
bly  exaggerates,  whose  ear  inevitably  hears 
more  than  the  band  plays,  whose  irtfagi- 
nation  inevitably  doubles  and  triples  the  news 
brought  in  by  his  five  senses.  He  is  the  enthusiast, 
the  believer,  the  romantic.  He  is  the  sort  of  fellow 
who,  if  he  were  a  bacteriologist,  would  report  the 
streptoccocus  pyogenes  to  be  as  large  as  a  St. 
Bernard  dog,  as  intelligent  as  Socrates,  as  beautiful 
as  Beauvais  Cathedral  and  as  respectable  as  a  Yale 
professor. 

2       -,"/;; '     I 

The  Skeptic 

No  man  ever  quite  believes  in  any  other  man. 
One  may  believe  in  an  idea  absolutely,  but  not  in  a 
man.  In  the  highest  confidence  there  is  always  a 

266 


TYPES  OF  MEN  267 

flavor  of  doubt — a  feeling,  half  instinctive  and  half 
logical,  that,  after  all,  the  scoundrel  may  have  some 
thing  up  his  sleeve.  This  doubt,  it  must  be  obvious, 
is  always  more  than  justified,  for  no  man  is  worthy 
of  unlimited  reliance — his  treason,  at  best,  only  waits 
for  sufficient  temptation.  The  trouble  with  the  world 
is  not  that  men  are  too  suspicious  in  this  direction, 
but  that  they  tend  to  be  too  confiding — that  they  still 
trust  themselves  too  far  to  other  men,  even  after 
bitter  experience.  Women,  I  believe,  are  measurably 
less  sentimental,  in  this  as  in  other  things.  No 
married  woman  ever  trusts  her  husband  absolutely, 
nor  does  she  ever  act  as  if  she  did  trust  him.  Her 
utmost  confidence  is  as  wary  as  an  American  pick 
pocket's  confidence  that  the  policeman  on  the  beat 
will  stay  bought. 


The  Believer 

Faith  may  be  defined  briefly  as  an  illogical  belief 
in  the  occurrence  of  the  improbable.  Or,  psychoana- 
lytically,  as  a  wish  neurose.  There  is  thus  a  flavor 
of  the  pathological  in  it;  it  goes  beyond  the  normal 
intellectual  process  and  passes  into  the  murky  domain 
of  transcendental  metaphysics.  A  man  full  of  faith 
is  simply  one  who  has  lost  (or  never  had)  the  capac 
ity  for  clear  and  realistic  thought.  He  is  not  a  mere 


268         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

ass:  he  is  actually  ill.  Worse,  he  is  incurable,  for 
disappointment,  being  essentially  an  objective  phe 
nomenon,  cannot  permanently  affect  his  subjective  in 
firmity.  His  faith  takes  on  the  virulence  of  a  chronic 
infection.  What  he  usually  says,  in  substance,  is 
this:  "Let  us  trust  in  God,  who  has  always  fooled  us 
in  the  past." 


The  Worker 

All  democratic  theories,  whether  Socialistic  or 
bourgeois,  necessarily  take  in  some  concept  of  the 
dignity  of  labor.  If  the  have-not  were  deprived  of 
this  delusion  that  his  sufferings  in  the  sweat-shop  are 
somehow  laudable  and  agreeable  to  God,  there  would 
be  little  left  in  his  ego  save  a  belly-ache.  Neverthe 
less,  a  delusion  is  a  delusion,  and  this  is  one  of  the 
worst.  It  arises  out  of  confusing  the  pride  of  work 
manship  of  the  artist  with  the  dogged,  painful  docil- 
ky  of  the  machine.  The  difference  is  important  and 
enormous.  If  he  got  no  reward  whatever,  the  artist 
would  go  on  working  just  the  same ;  his  actual  reward, 
in  fact,  is  often  so  little  that  he  almost  starves.  But 
suppose  a  garment-worker  got  nothing  for  his  labor: 
would  he  go  on  working  just  the  same?  Can  one 
imagine  him  submitting  voluntarily  to  hardship  and 


TYPES  OF  MEN  269 

sore  want  that  he  might  express  his  soul  in  200  more 
pairs  of  pantaloons? 


The  Physician 

Hygiene  is  the  corruption  of  medicine  by  morality. 
It  is  impossible  to  find  a  hygienist  who  does  not  de 
base  his  theory  of  the  healthful  with  a  theory  of  the 
virtuous.  The  whole  hygienic  art,  indeed,  resolves 
itself  into  an  ethical  exhortation,  and,  in  the  sub-de 
partment  of  sex,  into  a  puerile  and  belated  advocacy 
of  asceticism.  This  brings  it,  at  the  end,  into  dia 
metrical  conflict  with  medicine  proper.  The  aim  of 
medicine  is  surely  not  to  make  men  virtuous;  it  is 
to  safeguard  and  rescue  them  from  the  consequences 
of  their  vices.  The  true  physician  does  not  preach 
repentance;  he  offers  absolution. 

6 

The  Scientist 

The  value  the  world  sets  upon  motives  is  often 
grossly  unjust  and  inaccurate.  Consider,  for  ex 
ample,  two  of  them:  mere  insatiable  curiosity  and 
the  desire  to  do  good.  The  latter  is  put  high  above 
the  former,  and  yet  it  is  the  former  that  moves  some 


270          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

of  the  greatest  men  the  human  race  has  yet  produced: 
the  scientific  investigators.  What  animates  a  great 
pathologist?  Is  it  the  desire  to  cure  disease,  to  save 
life?  Surely  not,  save  perhaps  as  an  afterthought. 
He  is  too  intelligent,  deep  down  in  his  soul,  to  see 
anything  praiseworthy  in  such  a  desire.  He  knows 
by  life-long  observation  that  his  discoveries  will  do 
quite  as  much  harm  as  good,  that  a  thousand  scoun 
drels  will  profit  to  every  honest  man,  that  the  folks 
who  most  deserve  to  be  saved  will  probably  be  the 
last  to  be  saved.  No  man  of  self-respect  could  de 
vote  himself  to  pathology  on  such  terms.  What 
actually  moves  him  is  his  unquenchable  curiosity — 
his  boundless,  almost  pathological  thirst  to  penetrate 
the  unknown,  to  uncover  the  secret,  to  find  out  what 
has  not  been  found  out  before.  His  prototype  is  not 
the  liberator  releasing  slaves,  the  good  Samaritan 
lifting  up  the  fallen,  but  the  dog  sniffing  tremendously 
at  an  infinite  series  of  rat-holes.  And  yet  'he  is  one 
of  the  greatest  and  noblest  of  men.  And  yet  he 
stands  in  the  very  front  rank  of  the  race. 


The  Business  Man 

It  is,  after  all,  a  sound  instinct  which  puts  busi 
ness  below  the  professions,  and  burdens  the  business 
man  with  a  social  inferiority  that  he  can  never  quite 


TYPES  OF  MEN  271 

shake  off,  even  in  America.  The  business  man,  in 
fact,  acquiesces  in  this  assumption  of  his  inferiority, 
even  when  he  protests  against  it.  He  is  the  only  man 
who  is  forever  apologizing  for  his  occupation.  He  is 
the  only  one  who  always  seeks  to  make  it  appear, 
when  he  attains  the  object  of  his  labors,  i.  e.,  the 
making  of  a  great  deal  of  money,  that  it  was  not  the 
object  of  his  labors. 

8 

The  King 

Perhaps  the  most  valuable  asset  that  any  man  can 
have  in  this  world  is  a  naturally  superior  air,  a 
talent  for  sniffishness  and  reserve.  The  generality 
of  men  are  always  greatly  impressed  by  it,  and  ac 
cept  it  freely  as  a  proof  of  genuine  merit.  One 
need  but  disdain  them  to  gain  their  respect.  Their 
congenital  stupidity  and  timorousness  make  them 
turn  to  any  leader  who  offers,  and  the  sign  of  leader 
ship  that  they  recognize  most  readily  is  that  which 
shows  itself'in  external  manner.  This  is  the  true  ex 
planation  of  the  survival  of  monarchism,  which  in 
variably  lives  through  its  perennial  deaths.  It  is  the 
popular  theory,  at  least  in  America,  that  monarchism 
is  a  curse  fastened  upon  the  common  people  from 
above — that  the  monarch  saddles  it  upon  them  with 
out  their  consent  and  against  their  will.  The  theory 


272         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

is  without  support  in  the  facts.     Kings  are  created, 

not  by  kings,  but  by  the  people.     They  visualize  one 

of  the  ineradicable  needs  of  all  third-rate  men,  which 

means  of  nine  men  out  of  ten,  and  that  is  the  need  of 

something  to  venerate,  to  bow  down  to,  to  follow  and 

obey. 

The  king  business  begins  to  grow  precarious,  not 
when  kings  reach  out  for  greater  powers,  but  when 
they  begin  to  resign  and  renounce  their  powers.  The 
czars  of  Russia  were  quite  secure  upon  the  throne 
so  long  as  they  ran  Russia  like  a  reformatory,  but 
the  moment  they  began  to  yield  to  liberal  ideas,  i.  e., 
by  emancipating  the  serfs  and  setting  up  constitu 
tionalism,  their  doom  was  sounded.  The  people  saw 
this  yielding  as  a  sign  of  weakness;  they  began  to 
suspect  that  the  czars,  after  all,  were  not  actually 
superior  to  other  men.  And  so  they  turned  to  other 
and  antagonistic  leaders,  all  as  cock-sure  as  the  czars 
had  once  been,  and  in  the  course  of  time  they  were 
stimulated  to  rebellion.  These  leaders,  or,  at  all 
events,  the  two  or  three  most  resolute  and  daring 
of  them,  then  undertook  to  run  the  country  in  the 
precise  way  that  it  had  been  run  in  the  palmy  days 
of  the  monarchy.  That  is  to  say,  they  seized  and 
exerted  irresistible  power  and  laid  claim  to  infal 
lible  wisdom.  History  will  date  their  downfall  from 
the  day  they  began  to  ease  their  pretensions.  Once 
they  confessed,  even  by  implication,  that  they  were 


TYPES  OF  MEN  273 

merely  human,  the  common  people  began  to  turn 
against  them. 


The  Average  Man 

It  is  often  urged  against  the  so-called  scientific 
Socialists,  with  their  materialistic  conception  of  his 
tory,  that  they  overlook  certain  spiritual  qualities 
that  are  independent  of  wage  scales  and  metabolism. 
These  qualities,  it  is  argued,  color  the  aspirations 
and  activities  of  civilized  man  quite  as  much  as  they 
are  colored  by  his  material  condition,  and  so  make 
it  impossible  to  consider  him  simply  as  an  economic 
machine.  As  examples,  the  anti-Marxians  cite 
patriotism,  pity,  the  aesthetic  sense  and  the  yearning 
to  know  God.  Unluckily,  the  examples  are  ill-chosen. 
Millions  of  men  are  quite  devoid  of  patriotism,  pity 
and  the  aesthetic  sense,  and  have  no  very  active  desire 
to  know  God.  Why  don't  the  anti-Marxians  cite  a 
spiritual  quality  that  is  genuinely  .universal?  There 
is  one  readily  to  hand.  I  allude  to  cowardice.  It 
is,  in  one  form  or  other,  visible  in  every  human  being; 
it  almost  serves  to  mark  off  the  human  race  from  all 
the  other  higher  animals.  Cowardice,  I  believe,  is 
at  the  bottom  of  the  whole  caste  system,  the  foun 
dation  of  every  organized  society,  including  the  most 
democratic.  In  order  to  escape  going  to  war  him- 


274  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
self,  the  peasant  was  willing  to  give  the  warrior  cer 
tain  privileges — and  out  of  those  privileges  has  grown 
the  whole  structure  of  civilization.  Go  back  still 
further.  Property  arose  out  of  the  fact  that 
a  few  relatively  courageous  men  were  able  to  accu 
mulate  more  possessions  than  whole  hordes  of  cow 
ardly  men,  and,  what  is  more,  to  retain  them  after 
accumulating  them. 

10 

The  Truth-Seeker 

The  man  who  boasts  that  he  habitually  tells  the 
truth  is  simply  a  man  with  no  respect  for  it.  It  is 
not  a  thing  to  be  thrown  about  loosely,  like  small 
change;  it  is  something  to  be  cherished  and  hoarded, 
and  disbursed  only  when  absolutely  necessary.  The 
smallest  atom  of  truth  represents  some  man's  bitter 
toil  and  agony;  for  every  ponderable  chunk  of  it 
there  is  a  brave  truth-seeker's  grave  upon  some  lonely 
ash-dump  and  a  soul  roasting  in  hell. 

11 

The  Pacifist 

Nietzsche,  in  altering  Schopenhauer's  will-to-live 
to  will-to-power,  probably  fell  into  a  capital  error. 
The  truth  is  that  the  thing  the  average  man  seeks  in 


TYPES  OF  MEN  275 

life  is  not  primarily  power,  but  peace;  all  his  struggle 
is  toward  a  state  of  tranquillity  and  equilibrium;  what 
he  always  dreams  of  is  a  state  in  which  he  will  have 
to  do  battle  no  longer.  This  dream  plainly  enters 
into  his  conception  of  Heaven;  he  thinks  of  himself, 
post  mortem,  browsing  about  the  celestial  meadows 
like  a  cow  in  a  safe  pasture.  A  few  extraordinary 
men  enjoy  combat  at  all  times,  and  all  men  are 
inclined  toward  it  at  orgiastic  moments,  but  the  race 
as  a  race  craves  peace,  and  man  belongs  among  the 
more  timorous,  docile  and  unimaginative  animals, 
along  with  the  deer,  the  horse  and  the  sheep.  This 
craving  for  peace  is  vividly  displayed  in  the  ages-long 
conflict  of  the  sexes.  Every  normal  woman  wants  to 
be  married,  for  the  plain  reason  that  marriage  offers 
her  security.  And  every  normal  man  avoids  mar 
riage  as  long  as  possible,  for  the  equally  plain  reason 
that  marriage  invades  and  threatens  his  security. 

12 

The  Relative 

The  normal  man's  antipathy  to  his  relatives,  par 
ticularly  of  the  second  degree,  is  explained  by 
psychologists  in  various  tortured  and  improbable 
ways.  The  true  explanation,  I  venture,  is  a  good 
deal  simpler.  It  lies  in  the  plain  fact  that  every  man 
sees  in  his  relatives,  and  especially  in  his  cousins,  a 


276  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
series  of  grotesque  caricatures  of  himself.  They 
exhibit  his  qualities  in  disconcerting  augmentation 
or  diminution;  they  fill  him  with  a  disquieting  feel 
ing  that  this,  perhaps,  is  the  way  he  appears  to  the 
world  and  so  they  wound  his  amour  propre  and  give 
him  intense  discomfort.  To  admire  his  relatives 
whole-heartedly  a  man  must  be  lacking  in  the  finer 
sort  of  self-respect. 

13 

The  Friend 

One  of  the  most  mawkish  of  human  delusions  is 
the  notion  that  friendship  should  be  eternal,  or,  at 
all  events,  life-long,  and  that  any  act  which  puts  a 
term  to  it  is  somehow  discreditable.  The  fact  is  that 
a  man  of  active  and  resilient  mind  outwears  his 
friendships  just  as  certainly  as  he  outwears  his  love 
affairs,  his  politics  and  his  epistemology.  They 
become  threadbare,  shabby,  pumped-up,  irritating, 
depressing.  They  convert  themselves  from  living 
realities  into  moribund  artificialities,  and  stand  in 
sinister  opposition  to  freedom,  self-respect  and  truth. 
It  is  as  corrupting  to  preserve  them  after  they  have 
grown  fly-blown  and  hollow  as  it  is  to  keep  up  the 
forms  of  passion  after  passion  itself  is  a  corpse. 
Every  act  and  attitude  that  they  involve  thus  become* 
an  act  of  hypocrisy,  an  attitude  of  dishonesty.  .  .  . 


TYPES  OF  MEN  277 

A  prudent  man,  remembering  that  life  is  short,  gives 
an  hour  or  two,  now  and  then,  to  a  critical  examina 
tion  of  his  friendships.  He  weighs  them,  edits  them, 
tests  the  metal  of  them.  A  few  he  retains,  perhaps 
with  radical  changes  in  their  terms.  But  the  ma 
jority  he  expunges  from  his  minutes  and  tries  to  for 
get,  as  he  tries  to  forget  the  cold  and  clammy  loves 
of  year  before  last. 


XV.    THE    DISMAL    SCIENCE 

EVERY  man,  as  the  Psalmist  says,  to  his  own 
poison,  or  poisons,  as  the  case  may  be. 
One  of  mine,  following  hard  after  theol 
ogy,  is  political  economy.  What!  Political  econ 
omy,  that  dismal  science?  Well,  why  not?  Its 
dismalness  is  largely  a  delusion,  due  to  the  fact  that 
its  chief  ornaments,  at  least  in  our  own  day,  are  uni 
versity  professors.  The  professor  must  be  an  obscur 
antist  or  he  is  nothing;  he  has  a  special  and  unmatch- 
able  talent  for  dullness;  his  central  aim  is  not  to 
expose  the  truth  clearly,  but  to  exhibit  his  profundity, 
his  esotericity — in  brief,  to  stagger  sophomores  and 
other  professors.  The  notion  that  German  is  a 
gnarled  and  unintelligible  language  arises  out  of  the 
circumstance  that  it  is  so  much  written  by  professors. 
It  took  a  rebel  member  of  the  clan,  swinging  to  the 
antipodes  in  his  unearthly  treason,  to  prove  its 
explicitness,  its  resiliency,  it  downright  beauty.  But 
Nietzsches  are  few,  and  so  German  remains  soggy, 
and  political  economy  continues  to  be  swathed  in 
dullness.  As  I  say,  however,  that  dullness  is  only 

superficial.     There  is  no  more  engrossing  book  in 

278 


THE  DISMAL  SCIENCE  279 

the  English  language  than  Adam  Smith's  "The  Wealth 
of  Nations";  surely  the  eighteenth  century  produced 
nothing  that  can  be  read  with  greater  ease  to-day. 
Nor  is  there  any  inherent  reason  why  even  the  most 
technical  divisions  of  its  subject  should  have  gathered 
cobwebs  with  the  passing  of  the  years.  Taxation, 
for  example,  is  eternally  lively;  it  concerns  nine- 
tenths  of  us  more  directly  than  either  smallpox  or 
golf,  and  has  just  as  much  drama  in  it;  moreover, 
it  has  been  mellowed  and  made  gay  by  as  many 
gaudy,  preposterous  theories.  As  for  foreign  ex 
change,  it  is  almost  as  romantic  as  young  love,  and 
quite  as  resistent  to  formulae.  Do  the  professors 
make  an  autopsy  of  it?  Then  read  the  occasional 
treatises  of  some  professor  of  it  who  is  not  a  pro 
fessor,  say,  Caret  Garrett  or  John  Moody. 

Unluckily,  Garretts  and  Moodys  are  almost  as  rare 
as  Nietzsches,  and  so  the  amateur  of  such  things  must 
be  content  to  wrestle  with  the  professors,  seeking  the 
violet  of  human  interest  beneath  the  avalanche  of 
their  graceless  parts  of  speech.  A  hard  business,  I 
daresay,  to  one  not  practiced,  and  to  its  hardness 
there  is  added  the  disquiet  of  a  doubt.  That  doubt 
does  not  concern  itself  with  the  doctrine  preached,  at 
least  not  directly.  There  may  be  in  it  nothing  in 
trinsically  dubious;  on  the  contrary,  it  may  appear 
as  sound  as  the  binomial  theorem,  as  well  supported 
as  the  dogma  of  infant  damnation.  But  all  the  time 


280  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
a  troubling  question  keeps  afloat  in  the  air,  and  that 
is  briefly  this:  What  would  happen  to  the  learned 
professors  if  they  took  the  other  side?  In  other 
words,  to  what  extent  is  political  economy,  as  pro 
fessors  expound  and  practice  it,  a  free  science,  in  the 
sense  that  mathematics  and  physiology  are  free 
sciences?  At  what  place,  if  any,  is  speculation 
pulled  up  by  a  rule  that  beyond  lies  treason,  anarchy 
and  disaster?  These  questions,  I  hope  I  need  not 
add,  are  not  inspired  by  any  heterodoxy  in  my  own 
black  heart.  I  am,  in  many  fields,  a  flouter  of  the 
accepted  revelation  and  hence  immoral,  but  the 
field  of  economics  is  not  one  of  them.  Here,  indeed, 
I  know  of  no  man  who  is  more  orthodox  than  I  am. 
I  believe  that  the  present  organization  of  society,  as 
bad  as  it  is,  is  better  than  any  other  that  has  ever 
been  proposed.  I  reject  all  the  sure  cures  in  current 
agitation,  from  government  ownership  to  the  single 
tax.  I  am  in  favor  of  free  competition  in  all  human 
enterprises,  and  to  the  utmost  limit.  I  admire  suc 
cessful  scoundrels,  and  shrink  from  Socialists  as  I 
shrink  from  Methodists.  But  all  the  same,  the  afore 
said  doubt  pursues  me  when  I  plow  through  the 
solemn  disproofs  and  expositions  of  the  learned  pro 
fessors  of  economics,  and  that  doubt  will  not  down. 
It  is  not  logical  or  evidential,  but  purely  psycho 
logical.  And  what  it  is  grounded  on  is  an  unshakable 
belief  that  no  man's  opinion  is  worth  a  hoot,  however 


THE  DISMAL  SCIENCE  281 

well  supported  and  maintained,  so  long  as  he  is  not 
absolutely  free,  if  the  spirit  moves  him,  to  support 
and  maintain  the  exactly  contrary  opinion.  In  brief, 
human  reason  is  a  weak  and  paltry  thing  so  long  as  it 
is  not  wholly  free  reason.  The  fact  lies  in  its  very 
nature,  and  is  revealed  by  its  entire  history.  A  man 
may  be  perfectly  honest  in  a  contention,  and  he  may 
be  astute  and  persuasive  in  maintaining  it,  but  the 
moment  the  slightest  compulsion  to  maintain  it  is 
laid  upon  him,  the  moment  the  slightest  external  re 
ward  goes  with  his  partisanship  or  the  slightest 
penalty  with  its  abandonment,  then  there  appears  a 
defect  in  his  ratiocination  that  is  more  deep-seated 
than  any  error  in  fact  and  more  destructive  than  any 
conscious  and  deliberate  bias.  He  may  seek  the  truth 
and  the  truth  only,  and  bring  up  his  highest  talents 
and  diligence  to  the  business,  but  always  there  is  a 
specter  behind  his  chair,  a  warning  in  his  ear.  Always 
it  is  safer  and  more  hygienic  for  him  to  think  one  way 
than  to  think  another  way,  and  in  that  bald  fact  there 
is  excuse  enough  to  hold  his  whole  chain  of  syllo 
gisms  in  suspicion.  He  may  be  earnest,  he  may  be 
honest,  but  he  is  not  free,  and  if  he  is  not  free,  he  is 
not  anything. 

Well,  are  the  reverend  professors  of  economics 
free?  With  the  highest  respect,  I  presume  to 
question  it.  Their  colleagues  of  archeology  may  be 
reasonably  called  free,  and  their  colleagues  of  bac- 


282          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
teriology,  and  those  of  Latin  grammar  and  sidereal 
astronomy,  and  those  of  many  another  science  and 
mystery,    but   when    one    comes   to    the    faculty   of 
political  economy  one  finds  that  freedom  as  plainly 
conditioned,  though  perhaps  not  as  openly,  as  in  the 
faculty    of    theology.     And    for    a    plain    reason. 
Political  economy,  so  to  speak,  hits  the  employers  of 
the  professors  where  they  live.     It  deals,  not  with 
ideas  that  affect  those  employers  only  occasionally 
or  only  indirectly  or  only  as  ideas,  but  with  ideas 
that  have  an  imminent  and  continuous  influence  upon 
their  personal  welfare  and  security,  and  that  affect 
profoundly  the  very  foundations  of  that  social  and 
economic  structure  upon  which  their  whole  existence 
is  based.     It  is,  in  brief,  the  science  of  the  ways  and 
means  whereby  they  have  come  to  such  estate,  and 
maintain  themselves   in   such   estate,   that  they  are 
able  to  hire  and  boss  professors.     It  is  the  boat  in 
which   they   sail   down   perilous   waters — and   they 
must  needs  yell,  or  be  more  or  less  than  human,  when 
it  is  rocked.     Now  and  then  that  yell  duly  resounds 
in   the   groves    of   learning.     One    remembers,    for 
example,  the  trial,  condemnation  and  execution  of 
Prof.  Dr.  Scott  Nearing  at  the  University  of  Pennsyl 
vania,  a  seminary  that  is  highly  typical,  both  in  its 
staff  and  in  its  control.     Nearing,  I  have  no  doubt, 
was  wrong  in   his  notions — honestly,  perhaps,  but 
still  wrong.     In  so  far  as  I  heard  them  stated  at  the 


THE  DISMAL  SCIENCE  283 

time,  they  seemed  to  me  to  be  hollow  and  of  no  va 
lidity.  He  has  since  discharged  them  from  the  chau- 
tauquan  stump,  and  at  the  usual  hinds.  They  have 
been  chiefly  accepted  and  celebrated  by  men  I  regard 
as  asses.  But  Nearing  was  not  thrown  out  of  the 
University  of  Pennsylvania,  angrily  and  ignomini- 
ously,  because  he  was  honestly  wrong,  or  because 
his  errors  made  him  incompetent  to  prepare  sopho 
mores  for  their  examinations;  he  was  thrown  out 
because  his  efforts  to  get  at  the  truth  disturbed  the  se 
curity  and  equanimity  of  the  rich  ignoranti  who  hap 
pened  to  control  the  university,  and  because  the 
academic  slaves  and  satellites  of  these  shopmen 
were  restive  under  his  competition  for  the  attention 
of  the  student-body.  In  three  words,  he  was  thrown 
out  because  he  was  not  safe  and  sane  and  orthodox. 
Had  his  aberration  gone  in  the  other  direction,  had 
he  defended  child  labor  as  ardently  as  he  denounced 
it  and  denounced  the  minimum  wage  as  ardently  as 
he  defended  it,  then  he  would  have  been  quite  as 
secure  in  his  post,  for  all  his  cavorting  in  the  news 
papers,  as  Chancellor  Day  was  at  Syracuse. 

Now  consider  the  case  of  the  professors  of  eco 
nomics,  near  and  far,  who  have  not  been  thrown  out. 
Who  will  say  that  the  lesson  of  the  Nearing  debacle 
has  been  lost  upon  them?  Who  will  say  that  the  po 
tency  of  the  wealthy  men  who  command  our  uni 
versities — or  most  of  them — has  not  stuck  in  their 


284         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

minds?  And  who  will  say  that,  with  this  sticking 
remembered,  their  arguments  against  Nearing's  so- 
called  ideas  are  as  worthy  of  confidence  and  respect 
as  they  would  be  if  they  were  quite  free  to  go  over 
to  Nearing's  side  without  damage?  Who,  indeed, 
will  give  them  full  credit,  even  when  they  are  right, 
so  long  as  they  are  hamstrung,  nose-ringed  and  tied 
up  in  gilded  pens?  It  seems  to  me  that  these  con 
siderations  are  enough  to  cast  a  glow  of  suspicion 
over  the  whole  of  American  political  economy,  at 
least  in  so  far  as  it  comes  from  college  economists. 
And,  in  the  main,  it  has  that  source,  for,  barring  a 
few  brilliant  journalists,  all  our  economists  of  any 
repute  are  professors.  Many  of  them  are  able  men, 
and  most  of  them  are  undoubtedly  honest  men,  as 
honesty  goes  in  the  world,  but  over  practically  every 
one  of  them  there  stands  a  board  of  trustees  with  its 
legs  in  the  stock-market  and  its  eyes  on  the  established 
order,  and  that  board  is  ever  alert  for  heresy  in  the 
science  of  its  being,  and  has  ready  means  of  punish 
ing  it,  and  a  hearty  enthusiasm  for  the  business. 
Not  every  professor,  perhaps,  may  be  sent  straight  to 
the  block,  as  Nearing  was,  but  there  are  plenty  of 
pillories  and  guardhouses  on  the  way,  and  every 
last  pedagogue  must  be  well  aware  of  it. 

Political  economy,  in  so  far  as  it  is  a  science  at  all, 
was  not  pumped  up  and  embellished  by  any  such 
academic  clients  and  ticket-of -leave  men.  It  was  put 


THE  DISMAL  SCIENCE  285 

on  its  legs  by  inquirers  who  were  not  only  safe  from 
all  dousing  in  the  campus  pump,  but  who  were  also 
free  from  the  mental  timorousness  and  conformity 
which  go  inevitably  with  school-teaching — in  brief, 
by  men  of  the  world,  accustomed  to  its  free  air,  its 
hospitality  to  originality  and  plain  speaking.  Adam 
Smith,  true  enough,  was  once  a  professor,  but  he 
threw  up  his  chair  to  go  to  Paris,  and  there  he  met, 
not  more  professors,  but  all  the  current  enemies  of 
professors — the  Nearings  and  Henry  Georges  and 
Karl  Marxes  of  the  time.  And  the  book  that  he 
wrote  was  not  orthodox,  but  revolutionary.  Con 
sider  the  others  of  that  bulk  and  beam:  Bentham, 
Ricardo,  Mill  and  their  like.  Bentham  held  no  post 
at  the  mercy  of  bankers  and  tripesellers;  he  was  a 
man  of  independent  means,  a  lawyer  and  politician, 
and  a  heretic  in  general  practice.  It  is  impossible 
to  imagine  such  a  man  occupying  a  chair  at  Harvard 
or  Princeton.  He  had  a  hand  in  too  many  pies:  he 
was  too  rebellious  and  contumacious:  he  had  too  lit 
tle  respect  for  authority,  either  academic  or  worldly. 
Moreover,  his  mind  was  too  wide  for  a  professor;  he 
could  never  remain  safely  in  a  groove;  the  whole 
field  of  social  organization  invited  his  inquiries  and 
experiments.  Ricardo?  Another  man  of  easy  means 
and  great  worldly  experience — by  academic 
standards,  not  even  educated.  To-day,  I  daresay, 
such  meager  diplomas  as  he  could  show  would  not 


286  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
suffice  to  get  him  an  instructor's  berth  in  a  fresh 
water  seminary  in  Iowa.  As  for  Mill,  he  was  so 
well  grounded  by  his  father  that  he  knew  more,  at 
eighteen,  than  any  of  the  universities  could  teach 
him,  and  his  life  thereafter  was  the  exact  antithesis 
of  that  of  a  cloistered  pedagogue.  Moreover,  he 
was  a  heretic  in  religion  and  probably  violated  the 
Mann  act  of  those  days — an  offense  almost  as 
heinous,  in  a  college  professor  of  economics,  as 
giving  three  cheers  for  Prince  Kropotkin. 

I  might  lengthen  the  list,  but  humanely  refrain. 
The  point  is  that  these  early  English  economists  were 
all  perfectly  free  men,  with  complete  liberty  to  tell 
the  truth  as  they  saw  it,  regardless  of  its  orthodoxy 
or  lack  of  orthodoxy.  I  do  not  say  that  the  typical 
American  economist  of  to-day  is  not  as  honest,  nor 
even  that  he  is  not  as  diligent  and  competent,  but  I 
do  say  that  he  is  not  as  free — that  penalties  would 
come  upon  him  for  stating  ideas  that  Smith  or 
Ricardo  or  Bentham  or  Mill,  had  he  so  desired,  would 
have  been  free  to  state  without  damage.  And  in 
that  menace  there  is  an  ineradicable  criticism  of  the 
ideas  that  he  does  state,  and  it  lingers  even  when  they 
are  plausible  and  are  accepted.  In  France  and  Ger 
many,  where  the  universities  and  colleges  are  con 
trolled  by  the  state,  the  practical  effect  of  such  pres 
sure  has  been  frequently  demonstrated.  In  the 
former  country  the  violent  debate  over  social  and 


THE  DISMAL  SCIENCE  287 

economic  problems  during  the  quarter  century  before 
the  war  produced  a  long  list  of  professors  cashiered 
for  heterodoxy,  headed  by  the  names  of  Jean  Jaures 
and  Gustave  Herve.  In  Germany  it  needed  no  Nietzs 
che  to  point  out  the  deadening  produced  by  this 
state  control.  Germany,  in  fact,  got  out  of  it  an  en 
tirely  new  species  of  economist — the  state  Socialist 
who  flirted  with  radicalism  with  one  eye  and  kept  the 
other  upon  his  chair,  his  salary  and  his  pension. 

The  Nearing  case  and  the  rebellions  of  various 
pedagogues  elsewhere  show  that  we  in  America 
stand  within  the  shadow  of  a  somewhat  similar 
danger.  In  economics,  as  in  the  other  sciences,  we 
are  probably  producing  men  who  are  as  good  as  those 
on  view  in  any  other  country.  They  are  not  to  be 
surpassed  for  learning  and  originality,  and  there  is 
no  reason  to  believe  that  they  lack  honesty  and 
courage.  But  honesty  and  courage,  as  men  go  in  the 
world,  are  after  all  merely  relative  values.  There 
comes  a  point  at  which  even  the  most  honest  man  con 
siders  consequences,  and  even  the  most  courageous 
looks  before  he  leaps.  The  difficulty  lies  in 
establishing  the  position  of  that  point.  So  long  as  it 
is  in  doubt,  there  will  remain,  too,  the  other  doubt 
that  I  have  described.  I  rise  in  meeting,  I  repeat, 
not  as  a  radical,  but  as  one  of  the  most  hunkerous  of 
the  orthodox.  I  can  imagine  nothing  more  dubious 
in  fact  and  wrobbly  in  logic  than  some  of  the  doctrines 


288  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
that  amateur  economists,  chiefly  Socialists,  have  set 
afloat  in  this  country  during  the  past  dozen  years.  I 
have  even  gone  to  the  trouble  of  writing  a  book 
against  them;  my  convictions  and  instincts  are  all  on 
the  other  side.  But  I  should  be  a  great  deal  more 
comfortable  in  those  convictions  and  instincts  if  I 
were  convinced  that  the  learned  professors  were 
really  in  full  and  absolute  possession  of  academic 
freedom — if  I  could  imagine  them  taking  the  other 
tack  now  and  then  without  damnation  to  their  jobs, 
their  lecture  dates,  their  book  sales  and  their  hides. 


XVI.    MATTERS     OF    STATE 


Le  Control  Social 

ALL  government,  in  its  essence,  is  a  conspiracy 
against  the  superior  man:  its  one  perma 
nent  object  is  to  police  him  and  cripple 
him.  If  it  be  aristocratic  in  organization,  then  it 
seeks  to  protect  the  man  who  is  superior  only  in  law 
against  the  man  who  is  superior  in  fact;  if  it  be 
democratic,  then  it  seeks  to  protect  the  man  who  is 
inferior  in  every  way  against  both.  Thus  one  of  its 
primary  functions  is  to  regiment  men  by  force,  to 
make  them  as  much  alike  as  possible  and  as  de 
pendent  upon  one  another  as  possible,  to  search  out 
and  combat  originality  among  them.  All  it  can  see 
in  an  original  idea  is  potential  change,  and  hence  an 
invasion  of  its  prerogatives.  The  most  dangerous 
man,  to  any  government,  is  the  man  who  is  able  to 
think  things  out  for  himself,  without  regard  to  the 
prevailing  superstitions  and  taboos.  Almost  inevi 
tably  he  comes  to  the  conclusion  that  the  government 
he  lives  under  is  dishonest,  insane  and  intolerable, 


290         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

and  so,  if  he  is  romantic,  he  tries  to  change  it.  And 
even  if  he  is  not  romantic  personally  he  is  very  apt 
to  spread  discontent  among  those  who  are.  Ludwig 
van  Beethoven  was  certainly  no  politician.  Nor  was 
he  a  patriot.  Nor  had  he  any  democratic  illusions 
in  him:  he  held  the  Viennese  in  even  more  contempt 
than  he  held  the  Hapsburgs.  Nevertheless,  I  am  con 
vinced  that  the  sharp  criticism  of  the  Hapsburg  gov 
ernment  that  he  used  to  loose  in  the  cafes  of  Vienna 
had  its  effects — that  some  of  his  ideas  of  1818,  after 
a  century  of  germination,  got  themselves  translated 
into  acts  in  1918.  Beethoven,  like  all  other  first-rate 
men,  greatly  disliked  the  government  he  lived  under. 
I  add  the  names  of  Goethe,  Heine,  Wagner  and  Nietzs 
che,  to  keep  among  Germans.  That  of  Bismarck 
might  follow:  he  admired  the  Hohenzollern  idea,  as 
Carlyle  did,  not  the  German  people  or  the  German 
administration.  In  his  "Errinerungen,"  whenever  he 
discusses  the  government  that  he  was  a  part  of,  he  has 
difficulty  keeping  his  contempt  within  the  bounds  of 
decorum. 

Nine  times  out  of  ten,  it  seems  to  me,  the  man  who 
proposes  a  change  in  the  government  he  lives  under, 
no  matter  how  defective  it  may  be,  is  romantic  to  the 
verge  of  sentimentality.  There  is  seldom,  if  ever, 
any  evidence  that  the  kind  of  government  he  is  unlaw 
fully  inclined  to  would  be  any  better  than  the  govern 
ment  he  proposes  to  supplant.  Political  revolutions, 


MATTERS  OF  STATE  291 

in  truth,  do  not  often  accomplish  anything  of  genuine 
value;  their  one  undoubted  effect  is  simply  to  throw 
out  one  gang  of  thieves  and  put  in  another.  After 
a  revolution,  of  course,  the  successful  revolutionists 
always  try  to  convince  doubters  that  they  have 
achieved  great  things,  and  usually  they  hang  any  man 
who  denies  it.  But  that  surely  doesn't  prove  their 
case.  In  Russia,  for  many  years,  the  plain  people 
were  taught  that  getting  rid  of  the  Czar  would  make 
them  all  rich  and  happy,  but  now  that  they  have  got 
rid  of  him  they  are  poorer  and  unhappier  than  ever 
before.  The  Germans,  with  the  Kaiser  in  exile,  have 
discovered  that  a  shoemaker  turned  statesman  is  ten 
times  as  bad  as  a  Hohenzollern.  The  Alsatians,  hav 
ing  become  Frenchmen  again  after  48  years  anxious 
wait,  have  responded  to  the  boon  by  becoming  ex 
travagant  Germanomaniacs.  The  Tyrolese,  though 
they  hated  the  Austrians,  now  hate  the  Italians  enor 
mously  more.  The  Irish,  having  rid  themselves  of 
the  English  after  700  years  of  struggle,  instantly 
discovered  that  government  by  Englishmen,  compared 
to  government  by  Irishmen,  was  almost  paradisiacal. 
Even  the  American  colonies  gained  little  by  their  re 
volt  in  1776.  For  twenty -five  years  after  the  Revolu 
tion  they  were  in  far  worse  condition  as  free  states 
than  they  would  have  been  as  colonies.  Their  govern 
ment  was  more  expensive,  more,  inefficient,  more  dis 
honest,  and  more  tyrannical.  It  was  only  the  gradual 


292  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
material  progress  of  the  country  that  saved  them  from 
starvation  and  collapse,  and  that  material  progress 
was  due,  not  to  the  virtues  of  their  new  government, 
but  to  the  lavishness  of  nature.  Under  the  British 
hoof  they  would  have  got  on  just  as  well,  and  prob 
ably  a  great  deal  better. 

The  ideal  government  of  all  reflective  men,  from 
Aristotle  to  Herbert  Spencer,  is  one  which  lets  the 
individual  alone — one  which  barely  escapes  being  no 
government  at  all.  This  ideal,  I  believe,  will  be 
realized  in  the  world  twenty  or  thirty  centuries  after 
I  have  passed  from  these  scenes  and  taken  up  my 
home  in  Hell. 


On  Minorities 

It  is  a  commonplace  of  historical  science  that  the 
forgotten  worthies  who  framed  the  Constitution  of 
the  United  States  had  no  belief  in  democracy.  Prof. 
Dr.  Beard,  in  a  slim,  sad  book,  has  laboriously 
proved  that  most  obvious  of  obviousities.  Two 
prime  objects  are  visible  in  the  Constitution,  beauti 
fully  enshrouded  in  disarming  words:  to  protect 
property  and  to  safeguard  minorities — in  brief,  to 
I  hold  the  superior  few  harmless  against  the  inferior 
imany.  The  first  object  is  still  carried  out,  despite 
the  effort  of  democratic  law  to  make  capital  an  out- 


MATTERS  OF  STATE  293 

law.  The  second,  alas,  has  been  defeated  completely. 
What  is  worse,  it  has  been  defeated  in  the  very  holy 
of  holies  of  those  who  sought  to  attain  it,  which  is  to 
say,  in  the  funereal  chamber  of  the  Supreme  Court  of 
the  United  States.  Bit  by  bit  this  great  bench  of 
master  minds  has  gradually  established  the  doctrine 
that  a  minority  in  the  Republic  has  no  rights  what 
ever.  If  they  still  exist  theoretically,  as  fossils  sur 
viving  from  better  days,  there  is  certainly  no  machin 
ery  left  for  protecting  and  enforcing  them.  The 
current  majority,  if  it  so  desired  to-morrow,  could 
add  an  amendment  to  the  Constitution  prohibiting  the 
ancient  Confederate  vice  of  chewing  the  compressed 
leaves  of  the  tobacco  plant  (Nicotiana  tabacum) ;  the 
Supreme  Court,  which  has  long  since  forgotten  the 
Bill  of  Rights,  would  promptly  issue  a  writ  of  nihil 
obstat,  with  a  series  of  moral  reflections  as  lagniappe. 
More,  the  Supreme  Court  would  as  promptly  uphold 
a  law  prohibiting  the  chewing  of  gum  (Achras  sapota) 
— on  the  ground  that  any  unnecessary  chewing,  how 
ever  harmless  in  itself,  might  tempt  great  hordes  of 
morons  to  chew  tobacco.  This  is  not  a  mere  torturing 
of  sardonic  theory:  the  thing  has  been  actually  done 
in  the  case  of  Prohibition.  The  Eighteenth  Amend 
ment  prohibits  the  sale  of  intoxkating  beverages;  the 
Supreme  Court  has  decided  plainly  that,  in  order  to 
enforce  it,  Congress  also  has  the  right  to  prohibit  the 
sale  of  beverages  that  are  admittedly  not  intoxicating. 


294         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
It  could,  indeed,  specifically  prohibit  near-beer  to 
morrow,  or  any  drink  containing  malt  or  hops,  how 
ever  low  in  alcohol;  the  more  extreme  Prohibitionists 
actually  demand  that  it  do  so  forthwith. 

Worse,  a  minority  not  only  has  no  more  inalienable 
rights  in  the  United  States;  it  is  not  even  lawfully 
entitled  to  be  heard.  This  was  well  established  by 
the  case  of  the  Socialists  elected  to  the  New  York 
Assembly.  What  the  voters  who  elected  these  So 
cialists  asked  for  was  simply  the  privilege  of  choosing 
spokesmen  to  voice  their  doctrines  in  a  perfectly  law 
ful  and  peaceable  manner, — nothing  more.  This 
privilege  was  denied  them.  In  precisely  the  same 
way,  the  present  national  House  of  Representatives, 
which  happens  to  be  Republican  in  complexion, 
might  expel  all  of  its  Democratic  members.  The 
voters  who  elected  them  would  have  no  redress.  If 
the  same  men  were  elected  again,  or  other  men  of 
the  same  views,  they  might  be  expelled  again.  More, 
it  would  apparently  be  perfectly  constitutional  for 
the  majority  in  Congress  to  pass  a  statute  denying  the 
use  of  the  mails  to  the  minority — that  is,  for  the  Re 
publicans  to  bar  all  Democratic  papers  from  the 
mails.  I  do  not  toy  with  mere  theories.  The  thing 
has  actually  been  done  in  the  case  of  the  Socialists. 
Under  the  present  law,  indeed — upheld  by  the  Su 
preme  Court — the  Postmaster-General,  without  any 
further  authority  from  Congress,  might  deny  the 


MATTERS  OF  STATE  295 

mails  to  all  Democrats.     Or  to  all  Catholics.     Or  to 
all  single- taxers.     Or  to  all  violoncellists. 

Yet  more,  a  citizen  who  happens  to  belong  to  a 
minority  is  not  even  safe  in  his  person:  he  may  be 
put  into  prison,  and  for  very  long  periods,  for  the 
simple  offense  of  differing  from  the  majority.  This 
happened,  it  will  be  recalled,  in  the  case  of  Debs. 
Debs  by  no  means  advised  citizens  subject  to  military 
duty,  in  time  of  war,  to  evade  that  duty,  as  the  news 
papers  of  the  time  alleged.  On  the  contrary,  he  ad 
vised  them  to  meet  and  discharge  that  duty.  All  he 
did  was  to  say  that,  even  in  time  of  war,  he  was 
against  war — that  he  regarded  it  as  a  barbarous 
method  of  settling  disputes  between  nations.  For 
thus  differing  from  the  majority  on  a  question  of  mere 
theory  he  was  sentenced  to  ten  years  in  prison.  The 
case  of  the  three  young  Russians  arrested  in  New 
York  was  even  more  curious.  These  poor  idiots  were 
jailed  for  the  almost  incredible  crime  of  circulating 
purely  academic  protests  against  making  war  upon  a 
country  with  which  the  United  States  was  legally  at 
peace,  to  wit,  Russia.  For  this  preposterous  offense 
two  of  them  were  sent  to  prison  for  fifteen  years,  and 
one,  a  girl,  for  ten  years,  and  the  Supreme  Court  up 
held  their  convictions.  Here  was  a  plain  case  of 
proscription  and  punishment  for  a  mere  opinion. 
There  was  absolutely  no  contention  that  the  protest 
of  the  three  prisoners  could  have  any  practical  result 


296         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

— that  it  might,  for  example,  destroy  the  morale  of 
American  soldiers  6,000  miles  away,  and  cut  off 
from  all  communication  with  the  United  States.  The 
three  victims  were  ordered  to  be  punished  in  that 
appalling  manner  simply  because  they  ventured  to 
criticise  an  executive  usurpation  which  happened,  at 
the  moment,  to  have  the  support  of  public  opinion, 
and  particularly  of  the  then  President  of  the  United 
States  and  of  the  holders  of  Russian  government  se 
curities. 

It  must  be  obvious,  viewing  such  leading  cases 
critically — and  hundreds  like  them  might  be  cited — 
that  the  old  rights  of  the  free  American,  so  care 
fully  laid  down  by  the  Bill  of  Rights,  are  now  worth 
nothing.  Bit  by  bit,  Congress  and  the  State  Legisla 
tures  have  invaded  and  nullified  them,  and  to-day  they 
are  so  flimsy  that  no  lawyer  not  insane  would  attempt 
to  defend  his  client  by  bringing  them  up.  Imagine 
trying  to  defend  a  man  denied  the  use  of  the  mails 
by  the  Postmaster-General,  without  hearing  or  even 
formal  notice,  on  the  ground  that  the  Constitution 
guarantees  the  right  of  free  speech!  The  very  catch 
polls  in  the  courtroom  would  snicker.  I  say  that  the 
legislative  arm  is  primarily  responsible  for  this  grad 
ual  enslavement  of  the  Americano;  the  truth  is,  of 
course,  that  the  executive  and  judicial  arms  are  re 
sponsible  to  a  scarcely  less  degree.  Our  law  has  not 
kept  pace  with  the  development  of  our  bureaucracy; 


MATTERS  OF  STATE  297 

there  is  no  machinery  provided  for  curbing  its  ex 
cesses.  In  Prussia,  in  the  old  days,  there  were 
special  courts  for  the  purpose,  and  a  citizen  oppressed 
by  the  police  or  by  any  other  public  official  could 
get  relief  and  redress.  The  guilty  functionary  could 
be  fined,  mulcted  in  damages,  demoted,  cashiered,  or 
even  jailed.  But  in  the  United  States  to-day  there 
are  no  such  tribunals.  A  citizen  attacked  by  the  Post 
master-General  simply  has  no  redress  whatever;  the 
courts  have  refused,  over  and  over  again,  to  inter 
fere  save  in  cases  of  obvious  fraud.  Nor  is  there,  it 
would  seem,  any  remedy  for  the  unconstitutional  acts 
of  Prohibition  agents.  Some  time  ago,  when  Sena 
tor  Stanley,  of  Kentucky,  tried  to  have  a  law  passed 
forbidding  them  to  break  into  a  citizen's  house  in 
violation  of  the  Bill  of  Rights,  the  Prohibitionists 
mustered  up  their  serfs  in  the  Senate  against  him,  and 
he  was  voted  down. 

The  Supreme  Court,  had  it  been  so  disposed,  might 
have  put  a  stop  to  all  this  sinister  buffoonery  long 
ago.  There  was  a  time,  indeed,  when  it  was  alert 
to  do  so.  That  was  during  the  Civil  War.  But  since 
then  thfe  court  has  gradually  succumbed  to  the  pre 
vailing  doctrine  that  the  minority  has  no  rights  that 
the  majority  is  bound  to  respect.  As  it  is  at  present 
constituted,  it  shows  little  disposition  to  go  to  the 
rescue  of  the  harassed  freeman.  When  property  is 
menaced  it  displays  a  laudable  diligence,  but  when  it 


298  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
comes  to  the  mere  rights  of  the  citizen  it  seems  hope 
lessly  inclined  to  give  the  prosecution  the  benefit  of 
every  doubt.  Two  justices  commonly  dissent — two 
out  of  nine.  They  hold  the  last  switch-trench  of  the 
old  constitutional  line.  When  they  depart  to  realms 
of  bliss  the  Bill  of  Rights  will  be  buried  with  them. 


XVII.   REFLECTIONS   ON   THE 
D  R  A  M  A 

THE  drama  is  the  most  democratic  of  the  art 
forms,  and  perhaps  the  only  one  that  may 
legitimately  bear  the  label.  Painting,  sculp 
ture,  music  and  literature,  so  far  as  they  show  any 
genuine  aesthetic  or  intellectual  content  at  all,  are  not 
for  crowds,  but  for  selected  individuals,  mostly  with 
bad  kidneys  and  worse  morals,  and  three  of  the  four 
are  almost  always  enjoyed  in  actual  solitude.  Even 
architecture  and  religious  ritual,  though  they  are  pub 
licly  displayed,  make  their  chief  appeal  to  man  as 
individual,  not  to  man  as  mass  animal.  One  goes 
into  a  church  as  part  of  a  crowd,  true  enough,  but  if 
it  be  a  church  that  has  risen  above  mere  theological 
disputation  to  the  beauty  of  ceremonial,  one  is,  even 
in  theory,  alone  with  the  Lord  God  Jehovah.  And  if, 
passing  up  Fifth  Avenue  in  the  5  o'clock  throng,  one 
pauses  before  St.  Thomas's  to  drink  in  the  beauty  of 
that  archaic  facade,  one's  drinking  is  almost  sure  to 
be  done  a  cappella;  of  the  other  passers-by,  not  one 
in  a  thousand  so  much  as  glances  at  it. 

But  the  drama,  as  representation,  is  inconceivable 

299 


300  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
save  as  a  show  for  the  mob,  and  so  it  has  to  take  on 
protective  coloration  to  survive.  It  must  make  its 
appeal,  not  to  individuals  as  such,  nor  even  to  indi 
viduals  as  units  in  the  mob,  but  to  the  mob  as  mob — 
a  quite  different  thing,  as  Gustav  Le  Bon  long  ago 
demonstrated  in  his  "Psychologic  des  Foules."  Thus 
its  intellectual  content,  like  its  aesthetic  form,  must 
be  within  the  mental  grasp  of  the  mob,  and  what  is 
more  important,  within  the  scope  of  its  prejudices. 
Per  corollary,  anything  even  remotely  approaching 
an  original  idea,  or  an  unpopular  idea,  is  foreign  to 
it,  and  if  it  would  make  any  impression  at  all,  ab 
horrent  to  it.  The  best  a  dramatist  can  hope  to  do 
is  to  give  poignant  and  arresting  expression  to  an 
idea  so  simple  that  the  average  man  will  grasp  it  at 
once,  and  so  banal  that  he  will  approve  it  in  the  next 
instant.  The  phrase  "drama  of  ideas"  thus  becomes 
a  mere  phrase.  What  is  actually  meant  by  it  is 
"drama  of  platitudes." 

So  much  for  the  theory.  An  appeal  to  the  facts 
quickly  substantiates  it.  The  more  one  looks  into  the 
so-called  drama  of  ideas  of  the  last  age— that  is, 
into  the  acting  drama — the  more  one  is  astounded  by 
the  vacuity  of  its  content.  The  younger  Dumas'  "La 
Dame  aux  Camelias,"  the  first  of  all  the  propaganda 
plays  (it  raised  a  stupendous  pother  in  1852,  the  ech 
oes  of  which  yet  roll),  is  based  upon  the  sophomorie 


REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  DRAMA       301 

thesis  that  a  prostitute  is  a  human  being  like  you  and 
me,  and  suffers  the  slings  and  arrows  of  the  same  sor 
rows,  and  may  be  potentially  quite  as  worthy  of 
heaven.  Augier's  "La  Mariage  d'Olympe"  (1854), 
another  sensation-making  pioneer,  is  even  hollower; 
its  four  acts  are  devoted  to  rubbing  in  the  revolution 
ary  discovery  that  it  is  unwise  for  a  young  man  of 
good  family  to  marry  an  elderly  cocotte.  Proceed 
now  to  Ibsen.  Here  one  finds  the  same  tasteless 
platitudes — that  it  is  unpleasant  for  a  wife  to  be 
treated  as  a  doll;  that  professional  patriots  and  town 
boomers  are  frauds;  that  success  in  business  is  often 
grounded  upon  a  mere  willingness  to  do  what  a  man 
of  honor  is  incapable  of;  that  a  woman  who  continues 
to  live  with  a  debauched  husband  may  expect  to  have 
unhealthy  children;  that  a  joint  sorrow  tends  to  bring 
husband  and  wife  together;  that  a  neurotic  woman  is 
apt  to  prefer  death  to  maternity;  that  a  man  of  55  is 
an  ass  to  fall  in  love  with  a  flapper  of  17.  Do  I 
burlesque?  If  you  think  so,  turn  to  Ibsen's  "Nach- 
gelassene  Schriften"  and  read  his  own  statements 
of  the  ideas  in  his  social  dramas — read  his  own  suc 
cinct  summaries  of  their  theses.  You  will  imagine 
yourself,  on  more  than  one  page,  in  the  latest  volume 
of  mush  by  Orison  Swett  Marden.  Such  "ideas"  are 
what  one  finds  in  newspaper  editorials,  speeches  be 
fore  Congress,  sermons  by  evangelical  divines — in 


302          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
brief,  in  the  literature  expressly  addressed  to  those 
persons  whose  distinguishing  mark  is  that  ideas  never 
enter  their  heads. 

Ibsen  himself,  an  excellent  poet  and  a  reflective 
man,  was  under  no  delusions  about  his  "dramas  of 
ideas."  It  astounded  him  greatly  when  the  senti 
mental  German  middle-classes  hailed  "Em  Puppen- 
heim"  as  a  revolutionary  document;  he  protested 
often  and  bitterly  against  being  mistaken  for  a 
prophet  of  feminism.  His  own  interest  in  this  play 
and  in  those  that  followed  it  was  chiefly  technical; 
he  was  trying  to  displace  the  well-made  play  of  Scribe 
and  company  with  something  simpler,  more  elastic 
and  more  hospitable  to  character.  He  wrote  "Ghosts" 
to  raise  a  laugh  against  the  fools  who  had  seen  some 
thing  novel  and  horrible  in  the  idea  of  "A  Doll's 
House";  he  wanted  to  prove  to  them  that  that  idea 
was  no  more  than  a  platitude.  Soon  afterward  he 
became  thoroughly  disgusted  with  the  whole  "drama 
of  ideas."  In  "The  Wild  Duck"  he  cruelly  bur 
lesqued  it,  and  made  a  low-comedy  Ibsenist  his  chief 
butt.  In  "Hedda  Gabler"  he  played  a  joke  on  the 
Ibsen  fanatics  by  fashioning  a  first-rate  drama  out  of 
the  oldest,  shoddiest  materials  of  Sardou,  Feuillet, 
and  even  Meilhac  and  Halevy.  And  beginning  with 
"Little  Eyolf"  he  threw  the  "drama  of  ideas"  over 
board  forever,  and  took  to  mysticism.  What  could 
be  more  comical  than  the  efforts  of  critical  talmudists 


REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  DRAMA  303 
to  read  a  thesis  into  "When  We  Dead  Awaken"?  I 
have  put  in  many  a  gay  hour  perusing  their  commen 
taries.  Ibsen,  had  he  lived,  would  have  roared  over 
them — as  he  roared  over  the  effort  to  inject  portentous 
meanings  into  "The  Master  Builder,"  at  bottom  no 
more  than  a  sentimental  epitaph  to  a  love  affair  that 
he  himself  had  suffered  at  60. 

Gerhart  Hauptmann,  another  dramatist  of  the  first 
rank,  has  gone  much  the  same  road.  As  a  very 
young  man  he  succumbed  to  the  "drama  of  ideas" 
gabble,  and  his  first  plays  showed  an  effort  to  preach 
this  or  that  in  awful  tones.  But  he  soon  discovered 
that  the  only  ideas  that  wTould  go  down,  so  to  speak, 
on  the  stage  were  ideas  of  such  an  austere  platitudi- 
nousness  that  it  was  beneath  his  artistic  dignity  to 
merchant  them,  and  so  he  gave  over  propaganda  al 
together.  In  other  words,  his  genius  burst  through 
the  narrow  bounds  of  mob  ratiocination,  and  he  be 
gan  appealing  to  the  universal  emotions — pity,  re 
ligious  sentiment,  patriotism,  amorousness.  Even 
in  his  first  play,  "Vor  Sonnenaufgang,"  his  instinct 
got  the  better  of  his  mistaken  purpose,  and  reading 
it  to-day  one  finds  that  the  sheer  horror  of  it  is  of 
vastly  more  effect  than  its  nebulous  and  unimportant 
ideas.  It  really  says  nothing;  it  merely  makes  us 
dislike  some  very  unpleasant  people. 

Turn  now  to  Shaw.  At  once  one  finds  that  the  only 
plays  from  his  pen  which  contain  actual  ideas  have 


304         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

failed  dismally  on  the  stage.  These  are  the  so- 
called  "discussions" — e.  g.,  "Getting  Married."  The 
successful  plays  contain  no  ideas;  they  contain  only 
platitudes,  balderdash,  buncombe  that  even  a  suffra 
gette  might  think  of.  Of  such  sort  are  "Man  and 
Superman,"  "Arms  and  the  Man,"  "Candida,"  "An- 
drocles  and  the  Lion,"  and  their  like.  Shaw  has 
given  all  of  these  pieces  a  specious  air  of  profundity 
by  publishing  them  hooked  to  long  and  garrulous 
prefaces  and  by  filling  them  with  stage  directions 
which  describe  and  discuss  the  characters  at  great 
length.  But  as  stage  plays  they  are  almost  as  empty 
as  "Hedda  Gabler."  One  searches  them  vainly  for 
even  the  slightest  novel  contribution  to  the  current 
theories  of  life,  joy  and  crime.  Shaw's  prefaces,  of 
course,  have  vastly  more  ideational  force  and  re 
spectability  than  his  plays.  If  he  fails  to  get  any 
ideas  of  genuine  savor  into  them  it  is  not  because  the 
preface  form  bars  them  out  but  because  he  hasn't  any 
to  get  in.  By  attaching  them  to  his  plays  he  con 
verts  the  latter  into  colorable  imitations  of  novels, 
and  so  opens  the  way  for  that  superior  reflectiveness 
which  lifts  the  novel  above  the  play,  and  makes  it, 
as  Arnold  Bennett  has  convincingly  shown,  much 
harder  to  write.  A  stage  play  in  the  modern  real 
istic  manner — that  is,  without  soliloquies  and  asides 
— can  seldom  rise  above  the  mere  representation  of 
some  infinitesimal  episode,  whereas  even  the  worst 


REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  DRAMA       305 

novel  may  be,  in  some  sense,  an  interpretation  as 
well.  Obviously,  such  episodes  as  may  be  exposed 
in  20,000  words — the  extreme  limit  of  the  average 
play — are  seldom  significant,  and  not  often  clearly 
intelligible.  The  author  has  a  hard  enough  job  mak 
ing  his  characters  recognizable  as  human  beings;  he 
hasn't  time  to  go  behind  their  acts  to  their  motives,  or 
to  deduce  any  conclusions  worth  hearing  from  their 
doings.  One  often  leaves  a  "social  drama,"  indeed, 
wondering  what  the  deuce  it  is  all  about;  the  discus 
sion  of  its  meaning  offers  endless  opportunities  for 
theorists  and  fanatics.  The  Ibsen  symbolists  come 
to  mind  again.  They  read  meanings  into  such  plays 
as  "Rosmersholm"  and  "The  Wild  Duck"  that 
aroused  Ibsen,  a  peaceful  man,  to  positive  fury.  In 
the  same  way  the  suffragettes  collared,  "A  Doll's 
House."  Even  "Peer  Gynt"  did  not  escape.  There 
is  actually  an  edition  of  it  edited  by  a  theosophist,  in 
the  preface  to  which  it  is  hymned  as  a  theosophical 
document.  Luckily  for  Ibsen,  he  died  before  this 
edition  was  printed.  But  one  may  well  imagine  how 
it  would  have  made  him  swear. 

The  notion  that  there  are  ideas  in  the  "drama  of 
ideas,"  in  truth,  is  confined  to  a  special  class  of 
illuminati,  whose  chief  visible  character  is  their  ca 
pacity  for  ingesting  nonsense — Maeterlinckians,  up- 
lifters,  women's  clubbers,  believers  in  all  the  sure 
cures  for  all  the  sorrows  of  the  world.  To-day  the 


306  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
Drama  League  carries  on  the  tradition.  It  is  com 
posed  of  the  eternally  young — unsuccessful  drama 
tists  who  yet  live  in  hope,  young  college  professors, 
psychopathic  old  maids,  middle-aged  ladies  of  an 
incurable  jejuneness,  the  innumerable  caravan  of  the 
ingenuous  and  sentimental.  Out  of  the  same  intel 
lectual  Landsturm  comes  the  following  of  Bergson, 
the  parlor  metaphysician ;  and  of  the  third-rate  novel 
ists  praised  by  the  newspapers ;  and  of  such  composers 
as  Wolf-Ferrari  and  Massenet.  These  are  the  fair 
ones,  male  and  female,  who  were  ecstatically  shocked 
by  the  platitudes  of  "Damaged  Goods,"  and  who  re 
gard  Augustus  Thomas  as  a  great  dramatist,  and 
what  is  more,  as  a  great  thinker.  Their  hero,  during 
a  season  or  two,  was  the  Swedish  John  the  Baptist, 
August  Strindberg — a  lunatic  with  a  gift  for  turn 
ing  the  preposterous  into  the  shocking.  A  glance  at 
Strindberg's  innumerable  volumes  of  autobiography 
reveals  the  true  horse-power  of  his  so-called  ideas. 
He  believed  in  everything  that  was  idiotic,  from  trans 
cendentalism  to  witchcraft.  He  believed  that  his  en 
emies  were  seeking  to  destroy  him  by  magic;  he 
spent  a  whole  winter  trying  to  find  the  philosopher's 
stone.  Even  among  the  clergy,  it  would  be  difficult 
to  find  a  more  astounding  ass  than  Strindberg.  But 
he  had,  for  all  his  folly,  a  considerable  native  skill 
at  devising  effective  stage-plays — a  talent  that  some 
men  seem  to  be  born  with — and  under  cover  of  it  he 


REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  DRAMA       307 

acquired  his  reputation  as  a  thinker.  Here  he  was 
met  half-way  hy  the  defective  powers  of  observation 
and  reflection  of  his  followers,  the  half-wits  afore 
said;  they  mistook  their  enjoyment  of  his  adept  tech 
nical  trickery  for  an  appreciation  of  ideas.  Turn 
to  the  best  of  his  plays,  "The  Father."  Here  the 
idea — that  domestic  nagging  can  cause  insanity — 
is  an  almost  perfect  platitude,  for  on  the  one  hand 
it  is  universally  admitted  and  on  the  other  hand  it  is 
not  true.  But  as  a  stage  play  pure  and  simple,  the 
piece  is  superb — a  simple  and  yet  enormously  effec 
tive  mechanism.  So  with  "Countess  Julie."  The 
idea  here  is  so  vague  and  incomprehensible  that  no 
two  commentators  agree  in  stating  it,  and  yet  the  play 
is  so  cleverly  written,  and  appeals  with  such  a  sure 
touch  to  the  universal  human  weakness  for  the  ob 
scene,  that  it  never  fails  to  enchant  an  audience. 
The  case  of  "Hedda  Gabler"  is  parallel.  If  the 
actresses  playing  Hedda  in  this  country  made  up  for 
the  part  in  the  scandalous  way  their  sisters  do  in 
Germany  (that  is,  by  wearing  bustles  in  front),  it 
would  be  as  great  a  success  here  as  it  is  over  there. 
Its  general  failure  among  us  is  due  to  the  fact  that 
it  is  not  made  indelicate  enough.  This  also  ex 
plains  the  comparative  failure  of  the  rest  of  the  Ibsen 
plays.  The  crowd  has  been  subtly  made  to  believe 
that  they  are  magnificently  indecent — and  is  always 
dashed  and  displeased  when  it  finds  nothing  to  lift 


308  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
the  diaphragm.  I  well  remember  the  first  produc 
tion  of  "Ghosts"  in  America — a  business  in  which  I 
had  a  hand.  So  eager  was  the  audience  for  the 
promised  indecencies  that  it  actually  read  them  into 
the  play,  and  there  were  protests  against  it  on  the 
ground  that  Mrs.  Alving  was  represented  as  trying 
to  seduce  her  own  son!  Here  comstockery  often  heljJ>s 
the  "drama  of  ideas."  If  no  other  idea  is  visible, 
it  can  always  conjure  up,  out  of  its  native  swinish 
ness,  some  idea  that  is  offensively  sexual,  and  hence 
pleasing  to  the  mob. 

That  mob  rules  in  the  theater,  and  so  the  theater 
remains  infantile  and  trivial-r-a  scene,  not  of  the 
exposure  of  ideas,  nor  even  of  the  exhibition  of 
beauty,  but  one  merely  of  the  parading  of  mental 
and  physical  prettiness  and  vulgarity.  It  is  at  its 
worst  when  its  dramatists  seek  to  corrupt  this  func 
tion  by  adding  a  moral  or  intellectual  purpose.  It 
is  at  its  best  when  it  confines  itself  to  the  unrealities 
that  are  its  essence,  and  swings  amiably  from  the  ro 
mance  that  never  was  on  land  or  sea  to  the  buffoonery 
that  is  at  the  bottom  of  all  we  actually  know  of  human 
life.  Shakespeare  was  its  greatest  craftsman:  he 
wasted  no  tortured  ratiocination  upon  his  plays.  In 
stead,  he  filled  them  with  the  gaudy  heroes  that  all 
of  us  see  ourselves  becoming  on  some  bright  to 
morrow,  and  the  lowly  frauds  and  clowns  we  are 
to-day.  No  psychopathic  problems  engaged  him;  he 


REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  DRAMA       309 

took  love  and  ambition  and  revenge  and  braggadocio 
as  he  found  them.  He  held  no  clinics  in  dingy  Nor 
wegian  apartment-houses:  his  field  was  Bohemia, 
glorious  Rome,  the  Egypt  of  the  scene-painter,  Ar- 
cady.  .  .  .  But  even  Shakespeare,  for  all  the  vast 
potency  of  his  incomparable,  his  stupefying  poetry, 
could  not  long  hold  the  talmudists  out  in  front  from 
their  search  for  invisible  significances.  Think  of 
all  the  tomes  that  have  been  written  upon  the  pro 
found  and  revolutionary  "ideas"  in  the  moony  mus 
ings  of  the  diabetic  sophomore,  Hamlet  von  Dane- 
mark! 


XVIII.   ADVICE   TO   YOUNG   MEN 


To  Him  that  Hath 

THE  most  valuable  of  all  human  possessions, 
"next  to  a  superior  and  disdainful  air,  is  the 
reputation  of  being  well  to  do.  Nothing 
else  so  neatly  eases  one's  way  through  life,  especially 
in  democratic  countries.  There  is  in  ninety-nine  per 
cent,  of  all  democrats  an  irresistible  impulse  to 
crook  the  knee  to  wealth,  to  defer  humbly  to  the  power 
that  goes  with  it,  to  see  all  sorts  of  high  merits  in 
the  man  who  has  it,  or  is  said  to  have  it.  True 
enough,  envy  goes  with  the  pliant  neck,  but  it  is  envy 
somehow  purged  of  all  menace:  the  inferior  man  is 
afraid  to  do  evil  to  the  man  with  money  in  eight 
banks ;  he  is  even  afraid  to  think  evil  of  him — that  is, 
in  any  patent  and  offensive  way.  Against  capital 
as  an  abstraction  he  rants  incessantly,  and  all  of  the 
laws  that  he  favors  treat  it  as  if  it  were  criminal. 
But  in  the  presence  of  the  concrete  capitalist  he  is 
singularly  fawning.  What  makes  him  so  is  easy  to 
discern.  He  yearns  with  a  great  yearning  for  a 

310 


ADVICE  TO  YOUNG  MEN  311 

chance  to  tap  the  capitalist's  purse,  and  he  knows 
very  well,  deep  down  in  his  heart,  that  he  is  too  cra 
ven  and  stupid  to  do  it  by  force  of  arms.  So  he  turns 
to  politeness,  and  tries  to  cajole.  Give  out  the  news 
that  one  has  just  made  a  killing  in  the  stock  market, 
or  robbed  some  confiding  widow  of  her  dower,  or 
swindled  the  government  in  some  patriotic  enter 
prise,  and  at  once  one  will  discover  that  one's  shabbi- 
ness  is  a  charming  eccentricity,  and  one's  judgment 
of  wines  worth  hearing,  and  one's  politics  worthy  of 
attention  and  respect.  The  man  who  is  thought  to  be 
poor  never  gets  a  fair  chance.  No  one  wants  to  listen 
to  him.  No  one  gives  a  damn  what  he  thinks  or 
knows  or  feels.  No  one  has  any  active  desire  for 
his  good  opinion. 

I  discovered  this  principle  early  in  life,  and  have 
put  it  to  use  ever  since.  I  have  got  a  great  deal  more 
out  of  men  (and  women)  by  having  the  name  of 
being  a  well-heeled  fellow  than  I  have  ever  got  by 
being  decent  to  them,  or  by  dazzling  them  with  my 
sagacity,  or  by  hard  industry,  or  by  a  personal  beauty 
that  is  singular  and  ineffable. 

2 

The  Venerable  Examined 

The  older  I  grow  the  more  I  distrust  the  familiar 
doctrine  that  age  brings  wisdom.  It  is  my  honest 


312  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
belief  that  I  am  no  wiser  to-day  than  I  was  five  or 
ten  years  ago;  in  fact,  I  often  suspect  that  I  am 
appreciable  less  wise.  Women  can  prevail  over  me 
to-day  by  devices  that  would  have  made  me  hoof  them 
out  of  my  studio  when  I  was  thirty-five.  I  am  also 
an  easier  mark  for  male  swindlers  than  I  used  to  be; 
at  fifty  I'll  probably  be  joining  clubs  and  buying 
Mexican  mine  stock.  The  truth  is  that  every  man 
goes  up-hill  in  sagacity  to  a  certain  point,  and  then 
begins  sliding  down  again.  Nearly  all  the  old 
fellows  that  I  know  are  more  or  less  balmy.  Theo 
retically,  they  should  be  much  wiser  than  younger 
men,  if  only  because  of  their  greater  experience,  but 
actually  they  seem  to  take  on  folly  faster  than  they 
take  on  wisdom.  A  man  of  thirty-five  or  thirty-eight 
is  almost  woman-proof.  For  a  woman  to  marry  him  - 
is  a  herculean  feat.  But  by  the  time  he  is  fifty  he  is 
quite  as  easy  as  a  Yale  sophomore.  On  other  planes 
the  same  decay  of  the  intelligence  is  visible.  Cer 
tainly  it  would  be  difficult  to  imagine  any  committee 
of  relatively  young  men,  of  thirty  or  thirty-five,  show 
ing  the  unbroken  childishness,  ignorance  and  lack  of 
humor  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States. 
The  average  age  of  the  learned  justices  must  be  well 
beyond  sixty,  and  all  of  them  are  supposed  to  be  of 
finished  and  mellowed  sagacity.  Yet  their  knowl 
edge  of  the  most  ordinary  principles  of  justice  often 
turns  out  to  be  extremely  meager,  and  when  they 


ADVICE  TO  YOUNG  MEN  313 

spread  themselves  grandly  upon  a  great  case  their 
reasoning  powers  are  usually  found  to  be  precisely 
equal  to  those  of  a  respectable  Pullman  conduc 
tor. 


Duty 

Some  of  the  loosest  thinking  in  ethics  has  duty  for 
its  theme.  Practically  all  writers  on  the  subject 
agree  that  the  individual  owes  certain  unescapable 
duties  to  the  race — for  example,  the  duty  of  engaging 
in  productive  labor,  and  that  of  marrying  and  beget 
ting  offspring.  In  support  of  this  position  it  is 
almost  always  argued  that  if  all  men  neglected  such 
duties  the  race  would  perish.  The  logic  is  hollow 
enough  to  be  worthy  of  the  college  professors  who 
are  guilty  of  it.  It  simply  confuses  the  convention 
ality,  the  pusillanimity,  the  lack  of  imagination  of 
the  majority  of  men  with  the  duty  of  all  men.  There 
is  not  the  slightest  ground  .for  assuming,  even  as  a 
matter  of  mere  argumentation,  that  all  men  will  ever 
neglect  these  alleged  duties.  There  will  always 
remain  a  safe  majority  that  is  willing  to  do  whatever 
is  ordained — that  accepts  docilely  the  government  it 
is  born  under,  obeys  its  laws,  and  supports  its  theory. 
But  that  majority  does  not  comprise  the  men  who 
render  the  highest  and  most  intelligent  services  to  the 


314          PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 

race;   it  comprises  those  who  render  nothing  save 

their  obedience. 

For  the  man  who  differs  from  this  inert  and  well- 
regimented  mass,  however  slightly,  there  are  no 
duties  per.se.  What  he  is  spontaneously  inclined  to 
do  is  of  vastly  more  value  to  all  of  us  than  what  the 
majority  is  willing  to  do.  There  is,  indeed,  no  such 
thing  as  duty-in-itself ;  it  is  a  mere  chimera  of 
ethical  theorists.  Human  progress  is  furthered,  not 
by  conformity,  but'by  aberration.  The  very  concept 
of  duty  is  thus  a  function  of  inferiority;  it  belongs 
naturally  only  to  timorous  and  incompetent  men. 
Even  on  such  levels  it  remains  largely  a  self-delu 
sion,  a  soothing  apparition,  a  euphemism  for  neces 
sity.  When  a  man  succiimbs  to  duty  he  merely 
succumbs  to  the  habit  and  inclination  of  other  men. 
Their  collective  interests  invariably  pull  against  his 
individual  interests.  Some  of  us  can  resist  a  pretty 
strong  pull — the  pull,  perhaps,  of  thousands.  But  it 
is  only  the  miraculous  man  who  can  withstand  the 
pull  of  a  whole  nation. 


Martyrs 

"History,"  says  Henry  Ford,  "is  bunk."  I  inscribe 
myself  among  those  who  dissent  from  this  doctrine; 
nevertheless,  I  am  often  hauled  up,  in  reading  history, 


ADVICE  TO  YOUNG  MEN  315 

by  a  feeling  that  I  am  among  unrealities.  In  par 
ticular,  that  feeling  comes  over  me  when  I  read 
about  the  religious  wars  of  the  past — wars  in  which 
thousands  of  men,  women  and  children  were  butch 
ered  on  account  of  puerile  and  unintelligible  disputes 
over  transubstantiation,  the  atonement,  and  other  such 
metaphysical  banshees.  It  does  not  surprise  me  that 
the  majority  murdered  the  minority;  the  majority, 
even  to-day,  does  it  whenever  i£  is  possible.  What  I 
can't  understand  is  that  the  minority  went  voluntarily 
to  the  slaughter.  Even  in  the  worst  persecutions 
known  to  history — say,  for  example,  those  of  the  Jews 
of  Spain — it  was  always  possible  for  a  given  member 
of  the  minority  to  save  his  hide  by  giving  public 
assent  to  the  religious  notions  of  the  majority.  A 
Jew  who  was  willing  to  be  baptized,  in  the  reign  of 
Ferdinand  and  Isabella,  was  practically  unmolested; 
his  descendants  today  are  100%  Spaniards.  Well, 
then,  why  did  so  many  Jews  refuse?  Why  did  so 
many  prefer  to  be  robbed,  exiled,  and  sometimes 
murdered? 

The  answer  given  by  philosophical  historians  is 
that  they  were  a  noble  people,  and  preferred  death 
to  heresy.  But  this  merely  begs  the  question.  Is 
it  actually  noble  to  cling  to  a  religious  idea  so  tena 
ciously?  Certainly  it  doesn't  seem  so  to  me.  After 
all,  no  human  being  really  knows  anything  about  the 
exalted  matters  with  which  all  religions  deal.  The 


316  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
most  he  can  do  is  to  match  his  private  guess  against 
the  guesses  of  his  fellowmen.  For  any  man  to  say 
absolutely,  in-  such  a  field,  that  this  or  that  is  wholly 
and  irrefragably  true  and  this  or  that  is  utterly  false 
is  simply  to  talk  nonsense.  Personally,  I  have  never 
encountered  a  religious  idea — and  I  do  not  except 
even  the  idea  of  the  existence  of  God — that  was 
instantly  and  unchallengeably  convincing,  as,  say, 
the  Copernican  astronomy  is  instantly  and  unchal 
lengeably  convincing.  But  neither  have  I  ever  en 
countered  a  religious  idea  that  could  be  dismissed  off 
hand  as  palpably  and  indubitably  false.  In  even  the 
worst  nonsense  of  such  theological  mountebanks  as 
the  Rev.  Dr.  Billy  Sunday,  Brigham  Young  and  Mrs. 
Eddy  there  is  always  enough  lingering  plausibility, 
or,  at  all  events,  possibility,  to  give  the  judicious 
£ause.  Whatever  the  weight  of  the  probabilities, 
against  it,  it  nevertheless  may  be  true  that  man,  on  his 
decease,  turns  into  a  gaseous  vertebrate,  and  that  this 
vertebrate,  if  its  human  larva  has  engaged  in  em 
bezzlement,  bootlegging,  profanity  or  adultery  on  this 
earth,  will  be  boiled  for  a  million  years  in  a  cauldron 
of  pitch.  My  private  inclination,  due  to  my  defective 
upbringing,  is  to  doubt  it,  and  to  set  down  any  one 
who  believes  it  as  an  ass,  but  it  must  be  plain  that  I 
have  no  means  of  disproving  it. 

In  view  of  this  uncertainty  it  seems  to  me  sheer 
vanity  for  any  man  to  hold  his  religious  views  too 


ADVICE  TO  YOUNG  MEN  317 

firmly,  or  to  submit  to  any  inconvenience  on  account 
of  them.  It  is  far  better,  if  they  happen  to  offend, 
to  conceal  them  discreetly,  or  to  change  them  amiably 
as  the  delusions  of  the  majority  change.  My  own 
views  in  this  department,  being  wholly  skeptical  and 
tolerant,  are  obnoxious  to  the  subscribers  to  practi 
cally  all  other  views;  even  atheists  sometimes 
denounce  me.  At  the  moment,  by  an  accident  of 
American  political  history,  these  dissenters  from  my 
theology  are  forbidden  to  punish  me  for  not  agreeing 
with  them.  But  at  any  succeeding  moment  some 
group  or  other  among  them  may  seize  such  power 
and  proceed  against  me  in  the  immemorial  manner. 
If  it  ever  happens,  I  give  notice  here  and  now  that 
I  shall  get  converted  to  their  nonsense  instantly,  and 
so  retire  to  safety  with  my  right  thumb  laid  against 
my  nose  and  my  fingers  waving  like  wheat  in  the 
wind.  I'd  do  it  even  to-day,  if  there  were  any  prac 
tical  advantage  in  it.  Offer  me  a  case  of  Rauen- 
thaler  1903,  and  I  engage  to  submit  to  baptism  by 
any  rite  ever  heard  of,  provided  it  does  not  expose 
my  gothic  nakedness.  Make  it  ten  cases,  and  I'll 
agree  to  be  both  baptized  and  confirmed.  In  such 
matters  I  am  broad-minded.  What,  after  all,  is  one 
more  lie? 


318         PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 


The  Disabled  Veteran 

The  science  of  psychological  pathology  is  still  in 
its  infancy.  In  all  its  literature  in  three  languages, 
I  can't  find  a  line  about  the  permanent  ill  effects  of 
acute  emotional  diseases — say,  for  exarriple,  love 
affairs.  The  common  assumption  of  the  world  is 
that  when  a  love  affair  is  over  it  is  over — that  nothing 
remains  behind.  This  is  probably  grossly  untrue. 
It  is  my  belief  that  every  such  experience  leaves  scars 
upon  my  psyche,  and  that  they  are  quite  as  plain  and 
quite  as  dangerous  as  the  scars  left  on  the  neck  by 
a  carbuncle.  A  man  who  has  passed  through  a  love 
affair,  even  though  he  may  eventually  forget  the 
lady's  very  name,  is  never  quite  the  same  thereafter. 
His  scars  may  be  small,  but  they  are  permanent. 
The  sentimentalist,  exposed  incessantly,  ends  as  a 
psychic  cripple;  he  is  as  badly  off  as  the  man  who 
has  come  home  from  the  wars  with  shell-shock.  The 
precise  nature  of  the  scars  remains  to  be  determined. 
My  own  notion  is  that  they  take  the  form  of  large 
yellow  patches  upon  the  self-esteem.  Whenever  a 
man  thinks  of  one  of  his  dead  love  affairs,  and  in 
particular  whenever  he  allows  his  memory  to  dredge 
up  an  image  of  the  woman  he  loved,  he  shivers  like 
one  taken  in  some  unmanly  and  discreditable  act. 


ADVICE  TO  YOUNG  MEN  319 

Such  shivers,  repeated  often  enough,  must  inevitably 
shake  his  inner  integrity  off  its  base.  No  man  can 
love,  and  yet  remain  truly  proud.  It  is  a  disarming 
and  humiliating  experience. 


Patriotism 

Patriotism  is  conceivable  to  a  civilized  man  in 
times  of  stress  and  storm,  when  his  country  is  wob 
bling  and  sore  beset.  His  country  then  appeals  to 
him  as  any  victim  of  misfortune  appeals  to  him — 
say,  a  street-walker  pursued  by  the  police.  But  when 
it  is  safe,  happy  and  prosperous  it  can  only  excite 
his  loathing.  The  things  that  make  countries  safe, 
happy  and  prosperous — a  secure  peace,  an  active 
trade,  political  serenity  at  home — are  all  intrinsi 
cally  corrupting  and  disgusting.  It  is  as  impossible 
for  a  civilized  man  to  love  his  country  in  good  times 
as  it  would  be  for  him  to  respect  a  politician. 


XIX.   SUITE   AMERICANE 


Aspiration 

POLICE  sergeants  praying  humbly  to  God 
that  Jews  will  start  poker-rooms  on  their 
posts,  and  so  enable  them  to  educate  their 
eldest  sons  for  holy  orders.  .  .  .  Newspaper  re 
porters  resolving  firmly  to  work  hard,  keep  sober 
and  be  polite  to  the  city  editor,  and  so  be  rewarded 
with  jobs  as  copy-readers.  .  .  .  College  professors 
in  one-building  universities  on  the  prairie,  still  hop 
ing,  at  the  age  of  sixty,  to  get  their  whimsical  essays 
into  the  Atlantic  Monthly.  .  .  .  Car-conductors  on 
lonely  suburban  lines,  trying  desperately  to  save  up 
$500  and  start  a  Ford  garage.  .  .  .  Pastors  of  one- 
horse  little  churches  in  decadent  villages,  who,  when 
ever  they  drink  two  cups  of  coffee  at  supper,  dream 
all  night  that  they  have  been  elected  bishops.  .  .  . 
Movie  actors  who  hope  against  hope  that  the  next  fan 
letter  will  be  from  Bar  Harbor.  .  .  .  Delicatessen 
dealers  who  spend  their  whole  lives  searching  for  a 
cheap  substitute  for  the  embalmed  veal  used  in  chick- 

320 


SUITE  AMERICANS  321 

en-salad.  .  .  .  Italians  who  wish  that  they  were 
Irish.  .  .  .  Mulatto  girls  in  Georgia  and  Alabama 
who  send  away  greasy  dollar  bills  for  bottles  of  Mme. 
Celestine's  Infallible  Hair-Straightener.  .  .  .  Ash 
men  who  pull  wires  to  be  appointed  superintendents 
of  city  dumps,  j  .  .  Mothers  who  dream  that  the 
babies  in  their  cradles  will  reach,  in  the  mysterious 
after  years,  the  highest  chairs  in  the  Red  Men 
and  the  Maccabees.  .  .  .  Farmers  who  figure  that, 
with  good  luck,  they  will  be  able  to  pay  off  their  mort 
gages  by  1943.  .  .  .  Contestants  for  the  standing 
broad-jump  championship  of  the  Altoona,  Pa.,  Y.  M. 
C.  A.  .  .  .  Editorial  writers  who  essay  to  prove 
mathematically  that  a  war  between  England  and  the 
United  States  is  unthinkable. 


Virtue 

Pale  druggists  in  remote  towns  of  the  Epworth 
League  and  flannel  nightgown  belts,  endlessly  wrap 
ping  up  bottles  of  Peruna.  .  .  .  Women  hidden  away 
in  the  damp  kitchens  of  unpainted  houses  along  the 
railroad  tracks,  frying  tough  beefsteaks.  .  .  .  Lime 
and  cement  dealers  being  initiated  into  the  Knights  of 
Pythias,  the  Red  Men  or  the  Woodmen  of  the  World. 
.  .  .  Watchmen  at  lonely  railroad  crossings  in 
Iowa,  hoping  that  they'll  be  able  to  get  off  to  hear 


322  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
the  United  Brethren  evangelist  preach.  .  .  .  Ticket- 
choppers  in  the  subway,  breathing  sweat  in  its  gas 
eous  form.  .  .  .  Family  doctors  in  poor  neighbor 
hoods,  faithfully  relying  upon  the  therapeutics  taught 
in  their  Eclectic  Medical  College  in  1884.  .  .  .  Farm 
ers  plowing  sterile  fields  behind  sad  meditative 
horses,  both  suffering  from  the  bites  of  insects.  .  .  . 
Greeks  tending  all-night  coffee-joints  in  the  suburban 
wildernesses  where  the  trolley-cars  stop.  .  .  .  Groc 
ery-clerks  stealing  prunes  and  ginger-snaps,  and  try 
ing  to  make  assignations  with  soapy  servant-girls.  .  . . 
Women  confined  for  the  ninth  or  tenth  time,  wonder 
ing  helplessly  what  it  is  all  about.  .  .  .  Methodist 
preachers  retired  after  forty  years  of  service  in  the 
trenches  of  God,  upon  pensions  of  $600  a  year.  .  .  . 
Wives  and  daughters  of  Middle  Western  country 
bankers,  marooned  in  Los  Angeles,  going  trem 
blingly  to  swami  seances  in  dark,  smelly  rooms.  .  .  . 
Chauffeurs  in  huge  fur  coats  waiting  outside  theaters 
filled  with  folks  applauding  Robert  Edeson  and  Jane 
Cowl.  .  .  .  Decayed  and  hopeless  men  writing 
editorials  at  midnight  for  leading  papers  in  Mis 
sissippi,  Arkansas  and  Alabama.  .  .  .  Owners  of  the 
principal  candy-stores  in  Green  River,  Neb.,  and 
Tyrone,  Pa.  .  .  .  Presidents  of  one-building  univer 
sities  in  the  rural  fastnesses  of  Kentucky  and  Ten 
nessee.  .  .  .  Women  with  babies  in  their  arms  weep 
ing  over  moving-pictures  in  the  Elks'  Hall  at  Schmidts- 


SUITE  AMERICANS  323 

ville,  Mo.  .  .  .  Babies  just  born  to  the  wives  of 
milk-wagon  drivers.  .  .  .  Judges  on  the  benches 
of  petty  county  courts  in  Virginia,  Vermont  and 
Idaho.  .  .  .  Conductors  of  accommodation  trains 
running  between  Kokomo,  Ind..  and  Logansport.  .  .  . 


Eminence 

The  leading  Methodist  layman  of  Pottawattamie 
county,  Iowa.  .  .  .  The  man  who  won  the  limerick 
contest  conducted  by  the  Toomsboro,  Ga.,  Banner. 
.  .  .  The  secretary  of  the  Little  Rock,  Ark.,  Kiwanis 
Club.  .  .  .  The  president  of  the  Johann  Sebastian 
Bach  Bauverein  of  Highlandtown,  Md.  .  .  .  The  girl 
who  sold  the  most  Liberty  Bonds  in  Duquesne, 
Pa.  .  .  .  The  captain  of  the  champion  basket-ball 
team  at  the  Gary,  Ind.,  Y.  M.  C.  A.  .  .  .  The  man 
who  owns  the  best  bull  in  Coosa  county,  Ala.  .  .  . 
The  tallest  man  in  Covington,  Ky.  .  .  .  The  oldest 
subscriber  to  the  Raleigh,  N.  C.,  News  and  Ob 
server.  .  .  .  The  most  fashionable  milliner  in 
Bucyrus,  0.  ...  The  business  agent  of  the  Plas 
terers'  Union  of  Somerville,  Mass.  .  .  .  The  author 
of  the  ode  read  at  the  unveiling  of  the  monument  to 
General  Robert  E.  Lee  at  Valdosta,  Ga.  .  .  .  The 
original  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  man.  .  .  .  The  owner 
of  the  champion  Airedale  of  Buffalo,  N,  Y,  .  .  .  The 


324  PREJUDICES:  THIRD  SERIES 
first  child  named  after  the  Hon.  Warren  Gamaliel 
Harding.  .  .  .  The  old  lady  in  Wahoo,  Neb.,  who 
has  read  the  Bible  38  times.  .  .  .  The  boss  who  con 
trols  the  Italian,  Czecho-Slovak  and  Polish  votes  in 
Youngstown,  0.  ...  The  professor  of  chemistry, 
Greek,  rhetoric  and  piano  at  the  Texas  Christian 
University,  Fort  Worth,  Tex.  .  .  .  The  boy  who  sells 
225  copies  of  the  Saturday  Evening  Post  every  week 
in  Cheyenne,  Wyo.  .  .  .  The  youngest  murderer 
awaiting  hanging  in  Chicago.  .  .  .  The  leading 
dramatic  critic  of  Pittsburgh.  .  .  .  The  night  watch 
man  in  Penn  Yan,  N.  Y.,  who  once  shook  hands  with 
Chester  A.  Arthur.  .  .  .  The  Lithuanian  woman  in 
Bluefield,  W.  Va.,  who  has  had  five  sets  of  trip 
lets.  .  .  .  The  actor  who  has  played  in  "Lightning" 
1,600  times.  .  .  .  The  best  horsedoctor  in  Okla 
homa.  .  .  .  The  highest-paid  church-choir  soprano 
in  Knoxville,  Tenn.  .  .  .  The  most  eligible  bachelor 
in  Cheyenne,  Wyo.  .  .  .  The  engineer  of  the  loco 
motive  which  pulled  the  train  which  carried  the  Hon. 
A.  Mitchell  Palmer  to  the  San  Francisco  Conven 
tion.  .  .  .  The  girl  who  got  the  most  votes  in  the 
popularity  contest  at  Egg  Harbor,  N.  J.  .  .  . 


INDEX 


Adam,  Villiers  de  ride,  73 
Adams,  Henry,  162 
Addams,  Jane,  218 
Addison,   Joseph,    148 


Blunt,   Wilfrid   Scawen,  38,  48, 

49 

Bohlau,  Helene,  203 
Bolshevism,   55,    112,   194 


American    Legion,    18,    49,    194,      Boston  Transcript,  144 


256 


Bottomley,   Horace,  48 


American  Protective  League,  141      Boyd,  Ernest  A.,  41 


Annabel  Lee,  94 


Brady,  Diamond  Jim,   109 


Anti-Saloon   League,   11,   18,  32,      Brahms,  Johannes,  17,  67,  69,  75, 


229 

Arnold,   Matthew,  87,  92 
Asch,  Sholom,  42 
Asquith,  Mrs.,   33 
Astor,   Lady,   34 
Atlantic  Monthly,   320 
Augier,   Emile,   301 


Bach,  J.  S.,  91,  143 
Baker,   Newton   D,   218 
Balfour,  A.  J.,  21,  32 
Baltimore  Sun,  38 
Balzac,  H.,  17 
Barton,   William   E.,   171 
Beerbohm,    Max,    77 


81,   107,  143,  248 
Brandes,   Georg,  41,   75 
Brieux,  Eugene,  40,  306 
Browning,  Robert,  154,  161 
Bryan,  William  Jennings,  20,  29, 

54,  59,  119,  129,  174,  213 
Bryce,   James,   32,    142 
Burleson,  A.  S.,   144 
Butler,  Nicholas  Murray,  63,  213 


Cabell,  James  Branch,  107,  148, 

204,  206 
Capitalism,  56 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  39,  87,  92,  95, 

290 

Beethoven,   Ludwig   van,   17,  85,      Gather,  Willa,  203,  204,  209 
95,  99,  121,  143,  165,  191,  204,      Catt,   Carrie  Chapman,  218 
290 

Belasco,  David,  67 
Bennett,   Arnold,   188,   202,  204 
Benson,    Admiral,    136,    137 
Bentham,  Jeremy,  285 
Berliner   Tageblatt,  42 
Berlioz,  Hector,  66 


Cawein,    Madison,    179   ff. 
Cezanne,  Paul,  66,  75 
Chamberlain,  Joseph,  48 
Chopin,  F.,  66,  69 
Churchill,   Winston,  48 
Cicero,    148 
Civil   War,   43,   52,   112 

Bible,  62,  97,  131,  148,  168,  194      Clemenceau,  Georges,  42 

Bierbaum,  Otto  Julius,  35 

Birkenhead,   Lord,   33,   48 

Bismarck,  Otto  von,  30,  290 


325 


Clemens,  Samuel  L.,  76,  94,  187 
Glutton-Brock,   A.,    33,   70 
Congress,  20,  32,  140 


326  INDEX 

Congressional  Record,  63 
Conrad,  Joseph,   17,  91,  203 
Constitution,  U.  S.,  134,  292 
Coolidge,  Calvin,  53 
Cooper,  J.  Fenirnore,  34 
Cox,  James  M.,  60 
Crane,   Frank,  53,  213 
Creel,  George,  141 
Criticism,  84  ff. 
Curtis,  Cyrus  K.,  53,  183 

D'Annunzio,    Gabrielle,  67 

Darwin,  Charles,   19,   129,  161 

Dawes,  Rufus,  99 

Debs,   Eugene,  24 

Declaration  of  Independence,  166 

Dempsey,  Jack,  24,  58 

Dillon,  Dr.,  38 

Disarmament   Treaty,   29,   56 

Dixie,   94 

Dreiser,    Theodore,    66,    85,    86, 

107,  187,  203,  204,  210 
Dryden,  John,  166 
Dumas,  Alexandre  fils,  300 
Dunsany,  Lord,   148 
Duse,  Eleanors,  67 
Dvorak,  Antonin,  43,  67 

Edwards,  Jonathan,  176 

Ehrlich,  Paul,  144 

Ellis,   Havelock,   189  ff. 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  39 

Faust,  94 

Finck,  Henry  T.,  69 

Flower,  B.  O.,  218 

Foch,  Ferdinand,  55 

Ford,  Henry,  314 

France,  Anatole,  17,  41,  148 

Franklin^  Fabian,  177,  214 

Freud,  Sigmund,   158 

Gale,  Zona,  209 
Galileo,  19 

Garland,  Hamlin,  218 
Garrett,  Garet,  279 
George,  W.  L.,  42 
Gilman,  Daniel,  C.,  162 


Goethe,   J.   W.,    17,   35,   39,   87, 

92,  94,  140,  290 
Goldmarck,   Karl,   204 
Gorky,  Maxim,  43 
Gounod,  Charles,  67 
Gourmont,  Remy  de,  19 
Grant,  U.  S.,  31,  133 
Greenwich  Village,  12,  17 

Hamilton,  Alexander,  28,  117 

Hamlet,  94 

Hamsun,  Knut,  42 

Harding,  W.  G.,  11,  53,  60,  63, 

146 

Harris,  Frank,  69,  164,  182  ff. 
Hartleben,  O.  E.,  40 
Harvey,  George  B.,  63 
Hauptmann,   Gerhart,  41,  303 
Hazlitt,  William,  87,  95 
Heart   of  Darkness,   163,   188 
Hergesheimer,  Joseph,  202 
Hillis,  Newell  Dwight,  144 
Hofmannsthal,  Hugo  von,  35 
Howells,  William   Dean,  67,  72 
Huch,   Ricarda,  203 
Huckleberry  Finn,  94 
Hughes,  Charles  E.,  53,  57 
Huneker,  James  G.,  65  ff, 
Huxley,  T.  H.,  129,  148,  162,  191, 

242 
Huysmans,  J.  K.,  40,  73 

Ibsen,   Henrik,  41,  67,  75,   206, 

301  ff. 

Iconoclasts,  70 
Intellectuals,  Young,  9,   10 
Irving,  Washington,  34 

Jackson,  Andrew,  28,  29,  31 
James,  Henry,  12,'  20 
Jefferson,  Thomas,  28,  166 
Jespersen,  Otto,   146 
Jordan,  David  Starr,  218 
Josef's  Legend,  68 

Kerr,  Alfred,  40 


INDEX 

Kipling,  Rudyard,  156,  157,  191,     Mobile  Register,  144 


327 


206 
Klebs,  Edwin,  43 


Moody,  John,  279 

Moore,  George,  67,  14S,  187 


Knights  of  Pythias,  36,  137,  247,      More,   Paul   Elmer,  21,  70,   104, 


253,  259,   321 
Know  Nothings,  26 
Krehbiel,  Henry,  69 


176  ff. 

Morgan,  J.  Pierpont,  20,  30,  115 
Miiiier,  Johannes,   144 


Ku   Klux   Klan,    11,    18,   26,   32,      Murray,   Gilbert.   190 


49,  138,  184,  194,  201 
•Kiirnberger,  Ferdinand,  42 

Lagerlof,  Selma,  203 

Lanier,  Sidney,  152 

Lee,  Robert  E.,  20,  44 

Lewes,  George  Henry,  87 

Lewisohn.  Ludwig,  41 

Lincoln,  Abraham,   20,   166,   171 

ff. 

Lindsey,  Ben  B.,  218 
Liszt,  Franz.  66 
Lloyd-George,  David,  32,  45,  110, 

119,  190 

Lodge,  Henry  Cabot,  57,  323 
Lodge,  Oliver,  131,   189 
London  Times,  36.  184 
Lowell,  James  Russell,  34,  87 
Lowes,  J.  L.,  167 
Ludwig,  Karl,  144,  242 
Luther,  Martin,  131 
Lyly,  John,  166 

Mabie,  Hamilton  Wright,  104 
Macaulay,  T.  B.,  87,  92,  148 
Mann,  Thomas,  35 
March,   General,   136,    137 
Marden,   Orison   Swett,  301 
Marlowe,    Christopher,    152 
Martial,  61 
Masefield.   John,   42 
Mendelssohn,   Felix,   17 
Meredith,  George,  204 
Methodists,   25,    26,    32,    36,    74, 

172,  280 
Mill,  J.  S,  285 
Miller,  Joaquin.   152 
Milton,   John,  89 
Mile.  New  York,  77 


Murry,  Middleton,  70 
Musical  Courier,  77 

Nathan,  George  Jean,  41 
National    Institute    of    Arts    and 

Letters,  81,  184 
National  Security  League,  140 
Nearing,  Scott,  218,  282,  287 
New  Republic,  144,  176 
New  York  Evening  Journal,  63, 

178 

New  York  Sun,  77 
New    York    Times,    36,    77,    88, 

144,  184,  213,  257 
New  York  Tribune,  142,  144 
Nicoll,  Robertson,  33 
Nietzsche,  F.  W.,  41,  66,  69,  72, 

75,  129,  148,  278,  287,  290 
Northcliffe,   Lord,  49 

Ochs,  Adolph  S.,  177,  183,  214 
Odd  Fellows,  26,   137,  247 
Old  Fogy,  69,  70,  71 
Othello,  151 

Painted  Veils,  69,  70,  71 
Palmer,  A.   Mitchell,   144,  324 
Parsifal,  94 
Pershing,   John   J.,   21,   24,    135, 

138 

Philadelphia  Ledger,  144 
Pinchot,  Gifford,  218 
Pirquet,   Clemens  von,  42 
Plato.  85 
Poe,    Edgar    Allan,    71,    94,    99, 

103.  152 

Poetry,  146  ff.,  205 
Pound.  Ezra,  12 
Prescott,  F.  C,  153 


328  INDEX 


Puck,  77 

Reading,  Lord,   21,  48 

Red   Cross,   American,  46 

Reed,  James  A.,  228 

Reese,    Lizette    Woodworth,    159 

Reventlow,  Count  zu,  38 

Ricardo,    David,    285 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  54,  80,  119, 

183 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  Jr.,  57,  63 
Root,  Elihu,   57 
Rops,  Felicien,  107 
Rosetti,    Christina,    156 
Rotary   Club,   11,   194,  201,  255 
Rothert,  Otto  A.,   179 
Russell,    Bertrand,    190 
Russell,  Lillian,  67 

St.  Augustine,  131 
Sainte-Beuve,    C.    A.,   87,   92 
St.   John,    131 
Santanyana,   George,   42 
Saturday  Evening  Post,  19 
Schmidt,  Annalise,  42 
Schubert,  Franz,   151 
Schumann,   Robert,    17,   151 
Schwab,  Charles  M.,  19 
Scott,  Evelyn,  203 
Scribner's,  Charles,  Sons,  69 
Seidl,  Anton,  66 
Senate,   U.   S.,   63 
Serao,   Mathilda,   203 
Shakespeare,     William,     17,    94, 

164,   165,   170,  185,  262 
Shaw,   George,   Bernard,   40,  66, 

129,  164,  303  ff. 
Sheik,  The,  163 
Sherman,  S.  P.,   177 
Sienkiewicz,  Henryk,  42 
Sims,  Admiral,  136,  137 
Sinclair,   May,  203 
Sinclair  Upton,  204,  209,  213  ff. 
Smith,  Adam,  279 
Sousa,  J.  P.,  134 
Spencer,  Herbert,  129,  162,  248, 

292 
Stael,  Mme.  de,  203 


Stearns,   Harold,   12 

Steed,   Wickham,   38 

Steeplejack,  79 

Strauss,  Richard,  17,  68,  69,  75, 

143,  170 

Strindberg,   August,   306 
Sumner,  William  G.,   162,  242 
Sunday,  William  A.,  53,  59,  316 
Supreme    Court    of    the    United 

States,  10,  11,  295,  297  ff. 
Swedenborg,  Emanuel,  131 
Swinburne,  A.  C.,  114,  152,  156, 

157,  166 

Taft,  William  H.,  53 
Thoma,  Ludwig,  35 
Thompson,  Francis,  156 
Thoreau,  H.  D.,  118 
Town  Topics,  34 
Tumulty,  J.  P.,  45 

Underwood,  Oscar,  57 
U'Ren,  W.  S.,  218 

Van  Dyke,  Henry,  144 
Verlaine,  Paul,  73 
Viebig,  Clara,  203 
Vigilantes,  144,  184 
Volstead,  Andrew,  24 

Wagner,  Cosima,  66 

Wagner,  Richard.  17,  66,  73,  91, 

107,    143,   290 
Washington,   George,  28 
Wassermann,    Jacob,    204 
Weber,   Gottfried,   99 
Wedekind,  Frank,  43 
Wells,  H.  G.,  204 
Wesley,   John,    173 
Whitman,  Walt,  67,  171 
Wilson,  Woodrow,  20,  21,  33,  48, 

53,  110,  126,  140,  183,  208,  213 
Wolsogen,    Ernst   von,   42 
Wood,  James  N.,  53 
Wood,  Leonard  A.,  53 
Woodberry,  George  E.,  103 

Yeats,  W.  B.,  156 


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