.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
 
.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 35091
   :PG.Title: The Invisible Censor
   :PG.Released: 2010-01-27
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Roger Frank
   :PG.Producer: the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net
   :DC.Creator: Francis Hackett
   :DC.Title: The Invisible Censor
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1921
   
=========================================================
                  The Invisible Censor
=========================================================

.. _pg-header:

.. container::

   .. style:: paragraph
      :class: noindent

   This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
   almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
   re-use it under the terms of the `Project Gutenberg License`_
   included with this eBook or online at
   http://www.gutenberg.org/license.

   

   .. vspace:: 1

   .. _pg-machine-header:

   .. container::

      Title: The Invisible Censor
      
      Author: Francis Hackett
      
      Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #35091]
      
      Language: English
      
      Character set encoding: UTF-8

      .. vspace:: 1

      .. _pg-start-line:

      \*\*\* START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR \*\*\*

   .. vspace:: 4

   .. _pg-produced-by:

   .. container::

      Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net.

      .. vspace:: 1

      


.. role:: chap
   :class: center larger
   
.. class:: center larger bold

   | THE INVISIBLE CENSOR
   
.. class:: center   
   
   | By

.. class:: center larger
   
   | FRANCIS HACKETT
   |

.. image:: images/illus-emb.png
   :align: center

.. class:: center

   |
   | New York
   | \B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
   | MCMXXI
   |
   |
   |
   |
   | Copyright, 1921,
   | by B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
   | Printed in U. S. A.
   |
   |
   |
   |
   | TO MY WIFE
   | SIGNE TOKSVIG
   |
   | WHOSE LACK OF INTEREST IN THIS BOOK
   | HAS BEEN MY CONSTANT DESPERATION
   |
   |
   |

  These sketches and articles appeared in the
  *New Republic* and I am indebted to the other
  editors for being allowed to reprint them.


.. contents:: Contents
   :backlinks: none
   :depth: 1
   

THE INVISIBLE CENSOR
====================

Not long ago I met a writer who happened to apply 
the word “cheap” to Mr. Strachey’s Eminent
Victorians. It astonished me, because this was an
erudite, cultivated woman, a distinguished woman,
and she meant what she said.

A “cheap” effect, I assume, is commonly one that
builds itself on a false foundation. It may promise
beautifully, but it never lives up to its promise.
Whether it is a house or a human character, a binding 
or a book, it proves itself gimcrack and shoddy.
It hasn’t the goods. And of Eminent Victorians, as
I remembered it (having read it to review it), this
was the last thing to be said. The book began by
fitting exquisitely, but it went on fitting exquisitely.
It never pulled or strained. And the memory of it
wears like a glove.

Now why, after all, did I like this book so thoroughly, 
which my distinguished friend thought so
cheap? For many minor reasons of course, as one
likes anything—contributory reasons—but principally, 
as I laboriously analyzed it, because in Eminent 
Victorians the invisible censor was so perfectly
understood. What seemed cheap to her ladyship
was, I do not doubt, the very thing that made Eminent 
Victorians seem so precious to me—the deft
disregard of appearances, the refusal to let decorum
stand in the way of our possessing the facts. This
to my critic was a proof that Mr. Strachey was imperceptive and vulgar—“common” the ugly word
is. To me it simply proved that he knew his game.
What he definitely disregarded, as so many felt, was
not any decorum dear and worth having. It was
simply that decorum which to obey is to produce
falsification. The impeccable craft of Mr. Strachey
was shown in his evaluation, not his acceptance, of
decorum. He did not take his characters at their
face value, while he did not do the other vulgar
thing, go through their careers with a muck-rake.
In vivisecting them (the awful thing to do, presumably), 
he never let them die on him. He opened
them out, but not cruelly or brutally. He did it as
Mr. William Johnston plays tennis or as Dr. Blake
is said to operate or as Dr. Muck conducts an orchestra 
or as Miss Kellerman dives. He did it for
the best result under the circumstances and with a
form that comes of a real command of the medium—genuine 
“good form.”

The essential achievement of Eminent Victorians
is worth dwelling on because in every book of social
character the question of the invisible censor is unavoidably 
present. By the censor I do not mean
that poor blinkered government official who decides
on the facts that are worthy of popular acquaintance. 
I mean a still more secret creature of still
more acute solicitude, who feels that social facts
must be manicured and pedicured before they are fit
to be seen. He is not concerned with the facts
themselves but with their social currency. He is
the supervisor of what we say we do, the watchman
over our version and our theoretical estimate of
ourselves. His object, as I suppose, is to keep up
the good old institutions, to set their example before the world, to govern the imitative monkey in
us. And to fulfill that object he continually revises
and blue-pencils the human legend. He is constantly 
at the elbow of every man or woman who
writes. An invisible, scarcely suspected of existing,
he is much more active, much more solidly intrenched, 
than the legal censor whom liberals detest.

Every one is now more or less familiar with the
Freudian censor, the domesticated tribal agent
whose function it seems to be to enforce the tribal
scruples and superstitions—to keep personal impulse 
where the tribe thinks it belongs. This part of
the ego—to give it a spatial name—came in for a
good deal of excited remonstrance in the early days
of popular Freudian talk. To-day, I think, the censor 
is seldom so severely interpreted. In many cases
there is clearly a savagery or a stupidity which brings
about “the balked disposition,” but it is being admitted 
that the part which is regulated by the censor,
the “disposition” end of the ego, may not always be
socially tolerable; and as for the “balking,” there
is a difference between blunt repressiveness and enlightened 
regulation. Still, with all this acceptance
of ethics, the nature of the censorship has to be recognized—the 
true character of the censor is so
often not taste or conscience in any clear condition,
but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional 
bully. In the censor as he appears in
psycho-analytic literature there is something of the
archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic—all just
as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is
the thing in us which is against license and anarchy.

In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor
of whom Eminent Victorians is so subversive, there
are particularly these irrational and ritualistic characteristics, 
these remnants of outgrown institutions,
these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed.
Most biography, especially official biography, is written 
with such a censor in mind, under his very eye.
Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and
stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him
in mind. Hovering behind Eminent Victorians we
see agonized official biography, with its finger on
its lips, and the contrast is perhaps the chief delight
that Mr. Strachey affords. When Cardinal Manning’s 
pre-clerical marriage, for example, came to be
considered by Mr. Strachey, he did not obey the conventional 
impulse, did not subordinate that fact of
marriage as the Catholic Church would wish it to be
subordinated (as a matter of “good taste,” of
course). He gave to that extremely relevant episode 
its due importance. And so Manning, for
the first time for most people, took on the look not so
much of the saintly cardinal of official biography as
of a complex living man.

What does the censor care for this æsthetic
result? Very little. What the censor is chiefly interested 
in is, let us say, edification. He aims by
no means to give us access to the facts. He aims
not at all to let us judge for ourselves. With all
his might he strives to relate the facts under his
supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever 
it may be. And so, when facts come to light
which do not chime in with his prepossession, he does
his best either to discredit them or to set them down
as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. And
the policy that he is serving is not æsthetic.

A theory of the æsthetic is now beside the point,
but I am sure it would move in a relation to human
impulses very different from the relation of the censor. 
The censor is thinking, presumably, of immediate 
law and order, with its attendant conventions 
and respectabilities. The æsthetic could not
be similarly bound. It is not reckless of conduct,
but surely enormously reckless of decorum, with its
conventions and respectabilities clustering around the
status quo. Hence the apparent “revolt” of
modernism, the insurrection of impulse against edification.

But there is more in Eminent Victorians than an
amusing, impish refusal to edify. There is the instructive 
contrast between the “censored celebrity” 
and the uncensored celebrity disinterestedly observed. 
Disinterestedly observed, for one thing, we
get something in these celebrities besides patriotism
and mother-love and chastity and heroism. We get
hot impulses and cold calculations, brandy and
treachery, the imperious and the supine, glorious religiousness 
and silly family prayers. And these
things, though very unlike the products of official
photography, are closely related to impulses as we
know them in ourselves. To find them established
for Mr. Strachey’s “eminent” Victorians is to enjoy 
a constant dry humor, since the invisible censor,
the apostle of that expediency known as edification,
stood at the very heart of Victorianism.

This is possibly why Samuel Butler, in his autobiographical 
way, is so remarkable as a Victorian.
In the midst of innumerable edifying figures, he declined 
to edify. When people said to him, “Honor
thy father and thy mother,” he answered in effect
that his father was a pinhead theologian who had
wanted to cripple his mentality, and his mother was,
to use his own phrase, full of the seven deadly
virtues. This was not decorous but it had the merit
of being true. And all the people whose unbidden
censors had been forcing good round impulses into
stubborn parental polygons immediately felt the relief 
of this revelation. Not all of them confess it.
When they have occasion to speak or write about
“mothers”—as if the biological act of parturition 
brings with it an unquestionable “mother”
psyche—most of them still allow the invisible censor 
to govern them and represent them as having
feelings not really their own. But even this persistence 
of the censor could not deprive Samuel
Butler of his effectiveness. He has spoken out, regardless 
of edification, and that sort of work cannot
be undone.

A similar work is performed by such highly personal 
confessants as Marie Bashkirtseff and W. N.
P. Barbellion, and even by Mary MacLane. The
account that these impulsive human beings give of
themselves is sensational simply because it clashes
with the strict preconception that we are taught to
establish. But only a man who remembers nothing
or admits nothing of his own impulses can deny the
validity of theirs. The thing that takes away from
their interest, as one grows older, is the unimportance 
of the censorship that agonizes them. Their
documentary value being their great value, they lose
importance as more specific and dramatic documents
become familiar. And with psycho-analysis there
has been a huge increase in the evidence of hidden
life. It is the Montaignes who remain, the confessants 
who offer something besides a psychological
document—a transcendence which is not incoherent
with pain.

But these various confessions are significant.
They indicate the existence and the vitality of the
censor. They show that in the simplest matters we
have not yet attained freedom of speech. Why?
Because, I imagine, the world is chock-full of assumptions 
as to conduct which, while irrational and ritualistic 
and primitive, have all sorts of sanctions
thrown around them and must take a whole new art
of education to correct. Until this art it established
and these assumptions are automatically rectified, it
will be impossible to exercise free speech comfortably. 
An attempt may be made, of course, and indeed 
must be made, but to succeed too well will for
many years mean either being exterminated or being
ostracized.

It is not hard to show how each of us in turn becomes 
an agent of the invisible censorship. You,
for instance, may have a perfectly free mind on the
subject of suffrage, but you may have extremely
strong views on the subject of sex. (Miss Alice
Stone Blackwell, to be specific, thinks that Fielding
is nothing but a “smutty” author.) Or you may
think yourself quite emancipated on the subject of
sex-desires and be hopelessly intolerant on the subject 
of the Bolsheviki. The French Rights of Man
held out, after all, for the sacred rights of property—and 
the day before that, it was considered pretty
advanced to believe in the divine right of kings. It
is not humanly possible, considering how relative
liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even convince 
oneself of the necessity of examining them,
and in every case we are sure to be tempted to oppose 
certain novel ideas in the name of inertia, respectability 
and decorum. To dissemble awkward
facts, in such cases, is much easier than to account
for them—which is where the censor comes in.

I do not say that it is possible to do away with
every discipline, even the rule-of-thumb of decorum.
As a subservient middle-class citizen, I believe in
the regulation of impulse. But as an intellectual
fact, the use of the blue pencil in the interests of
decorum is exceedingly inept. Human impulses are
much too lively to be extinguished by the denial of
expression. And if sane expression is denied to
them, they’ll find expression of another kind.

Decorum has its uses, especially on the plane of
social intercourse. I admit this all the more
eagerly because I have seen much of one brilliant
human being who has practically no sense of opposition. 
If he sees something that he wants, he helps
himself. It may be the milk on the lunch-table that
was intended for Uncle George. It may be the new
volume from England that it took nine weeks to
bring across. It may be the company of some sensitive 
gentlewoman or the busy hour of the mayor of
Chicago. The object makes no visible difference to
my friend. If he wants it, he sticks out his hand
and takes it. And if it comes loose, he holds on.

Associated with this aggressiveness there is a good
deal of purpose not self-regarding. The man is by
no means all greedy maw. But the thing that distinguishes 
him is the quickness and frankness with
which he obeys his impulse. Between having an impulse and acting on it there lies for him a miraculously 
short time.

In dealing with such a man, most people begin
hilariously. Not all of them keep up with him in
the same heroic spirit. At first it is extraordinarily
stimulating to find a person who is so “creative,”
who sweeps so freely ahead. Soon the dull obligations, 
the tedious details, begin to accumulate, and
the man with the happy impulsiveness leaves all these
dull obligations to his struggling friends. His lack
of decorum in these respects is a source of hardship
and misunderstanding, especially where persons of
less energy or more circumspection are attendant.
In his case, I admit, I see the raw problem of impulse, 
and I am glad to see his impulse squelched.

But even this barbarian is preferable to the
apathetic repressed human beings by whom he is
surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is
invaluable because “creative.” And he should
never be blocked in: he should at most be canalled.

The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illustrated 
in his rational subordination of impulse, but
in those subordinations that violate human and social
freedom. And the worst of them are the filmy, the
vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the
opportunity of truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently
difficult picture-puzzle, but what chance have we if
the turnip-headed censor confiscates some particularly
indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike?
On reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to
escape from those wax effigies that we once believed 
to be statesmen—the kind of effigies of which
text-books and correct histories and correct biographies 
are full! How we rejoice to escape from
them, wondering that they had ever imposed on us,
wondering that teachers and pious families and loyal
historians ever lent themselves to this conspiracy
against truth! But the horrible fact is, Mr.
Strachey is one in a million. He has only poked his
finger through the great spider-web of so-called
“vital lies.”

Meanwhile, in the decorous and respectable biographies, 
the same old “vital lies” are being told.
The insiders, the initiated, the disillusioned, are
aware of them. They no longer subsist on them.
They read between the lines. And yet when the
insiders see in print the true facts—say, about Robert 
Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or
John Jones—these very insiders rush forward with
a Mother Hubbard to fling around the naked truth.
We must not speak the truth. We must edify. We
must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced
world.

It means that we need a revolution in education,
nothing less. It means that the truth must be taken
out of the hands of the censor. We must be prepared 
to shed oceans of ink.

WHISKY
======

It was a wet, gusty night and I had a lonely walk
home. By taking the river road, though I hated it,
I saved two miles, so I sloshed ahead trying not to
think at all. Through the barbed wire fence I
could see the racing river. Its black swollen body
writhed along with extraordinary swiftness, breathlessly 
silent, only occasionally making a swishing
ripple. I did not enjoy looking at it. I was somehow
afraid.

And there, at the end of the river road where I
swerved off, a figure stood waiting for me, motionless 
and enigmatic. I had to meet it or turn back.

It was a quite young girl, unknown to me, with
a hood over her head, and with large unhappy eyes.

“My father is very ill,” she said without a word
of introduction. “The nurse is frightened. Could
you come in and help?” 

There was a gaunt house set back from the road,
on a little slope. I could see a wan light upstairs.

“The nurse is not scared,” the girl corrected,
“but she is nervous. I wish you could come.”

“Of course,” and on my very word she turned
and led the way in.

The hall was empty. It had nothing in it except a
discouraged oil lamp on a dirty kitchen table. The
shadowy stairs were bare. On my left on the
ground floor a woman with gray hair and rusty face
and red-rimmed eyes shuffled back into the shadows
at my entry, a sort of ignoble Niobe.

“That’s my mother,” the grave child explained.
And to the retreating slatternly figure the child
called, “This man has come to help, Mother,” as if
men dropped from the sky.

She went up into the shadows and I followed.
A flight of stairs, a long creaking landing. Another 
flight of stairs. Stumbles. Another landing.
A stale aroma of cat. And a general sense that,
although the staircase was well made and the landings 
wide, there was not one stick of furniture in
the house.

As we approached the top floor we met fresher
air and the pallid emanation of a night-light. A
figure stood waiting at the head of the stairs.

This was a stout little nun, her face framed in
creaking linen, and a great rustle of robes and rosary
beads whenever she moved. She began a sharp
whisper the minute we climbed to the landing.

“He’s awake. He’s out of his head. I’m glad
you’ve come. Now, child, be off to bed with you,
like a good girl. This way, if you please.”

The child’s vast eyes accepted me. “I’ll go to
Mother,” she said, and she receded downstairs.
The nun entered an open door to the right, and
again I meekly followed.

It was a room out of the fables. There was a
tall fireplace facing the door, with a slat of packing-case 
burning in it as well as the wind would permit,
and a solitary candle glimmering in a bottle, set on
the table at the head of the bed. Its uncertain
light fell on the tousled hair of a once kempt human
being, now evidently a semi-maniac staring at presences in the room. Down the chimney the wind
came bluffing at intervals, and the one high window
querulously rattled. The center of the room was
the sick man’s burning eyes.

I walked through his view and he did not see
me. The nun and myself stood watching him from
the head of the bed.

“Oh, he’s awful bad, you have no idea how bad
he is; I’m afraid for him; I am indeed. What am
I to call you, Mister? Here, take this chair.”

Before I answered her she continued, in a whisper 
that slid along from one *s* to the next. “They
said the doctor would be here at seven and it’s
nearly twelve as it is. He’s not coming. I wish
he was here.”

The sick man seemed to see us. “That’s right
now,” he said, whistling his breath. “Bring me
my clothes, I want to go home.”

The nun laid her arm on him. “Lean back now,
dear, and it’ll be all right, I’m telling you.” And
she gently but ineffectually tried to press him down.

The sick man turned his face on her, into the
candlelight. He was long unshaved, but the two
things that struck me most, after the crop of gray
bristle, were the dry cavern of his mouth and the
scalding intensity of his eyes. I was terrified lest
those eyes should alight on me, and yet I gazed
hard at him. His lips were flaked with yellow
scales, and dry mucus was in strings at the corners
of his mouth. His night-shirt gaped open, showing 
a very hairy black chest. He seemed a shrunken
man, not a very tall man, but his shoulders were
broad and his chin very square. To support his
chin seemed the great effort of his jaws. It fell
open on him, giving him a vacant foolish expression,
with his teeth so black and irregular, and he tried
his best to clamp his teeth tight. The working
of his jaws, however, scarcely interfered with his
whistling breath or his gasping words.

“They will be at the back door, I say. God!” 
a feeble scream and whimper. “Bring me my
clothes. You’re hiding them on me. Oh, why are
you hiding them on me? Can’t you give me my
clothes?”

“You’re home now, dear. You’re home now,”
the nurse assured him. “Isn’t that your own clock
on the mantel? Lie down now and I’ll make you
a comfortable drink and put you to sleep.”

“Boy, fetch me my coat.”

“Don’t mind him,” the nun turned to me, “but
do you cover his feet.”

His feet had lost the gray blanket. They stared
blankly up from the end of the bed. I covered
them snugly, glad to have something to do.

“It’s all the whisky in him,” the nun whispered
when at last he went limp and lay down. “It’s got
to his brain. I thought he was over the pneumonia,
but that whisky has him saturated. The poor
thing! The poor thing!”

“Well, I must be going now,” the sick man ejaculated, 
and with one twist of his body he was out of
bed.

“Oh, keep yourself covered, for the love of
God!” The poor nun ran after him with the
blanket as his old flannel night shirt fluttered up
his legs.

He staggered up to me fiercely, and his eyes
razed my face.

“Fiddle your grandmother,” he muttered, “I’m
off home, I tell you.”

“You can’t leave the room; it’s better for you to
go back to bed,” and I held him round with my arms.

“See here, you,” his yellow cheeks reddened with
his passionate effort, “you can’t hold me a prisoner
any longer. Oh, Barrett, Barrett, what are you doing 
to me to destroy me?” 

I knew no Barrett, but the poor creature was
shivering with anguish and cold. I put my arms
around him and tried to move him out of the
draught of the door. His thin arms closed on me
at the first hint of force, and he clenched with feverish 
vigor. I could feel his frail bones against me,
his bare ribs, his wild thumping heart.

“You can’t, you can’t. You can’t keep me
prisoner....”

He struggled, his heart thumping me. Then in
one instant he went slack.

We lifted him to the bed, and I felt under his
shirt for the flutter of his heart. His mouth had
dropped open, his eyes were like a dead bird’s.

The little nun began, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,”
and other holy words, while I groped helplessly
over this fragile burned-out frame. Then I remembered 
and I stumbled wild-minded to find that woman
downstairs.

I went headlong through the darkness. At my
knock the door opened, as if by an unseen hand,
and I saw, completely dressed, the pale little girl,
with her grave eyes.

“Your mother?” I asked.

The child stopped me sharply, “Is Father
worse?”

“He’s worse,” I answered feebly. “You’d
better—”

The child was brushed aside by her mother, who
had stumbled forward from inside. She looked at
me vaguely.

The girl turned on her mother. “I’m going up
to Father. Go inside.”

The woman’s will flickered and then expired.
She pulled the door back upon herself, shutting us
into the hall. The child led and I followed back
upstairs.

BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN
======================

I
-

Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia
I had formed a conception of him from the newspapers. 
First of all, he was a baseball player become 
revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting,
screaming vulgarian, a mob orator who lashed himself 
and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap religious 
fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were
fables in slang. I thought of him as vividly, torrentially 
abusive, and I thought of his revival as an
orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming 
in full view to the public mourners’ bench.
With the penitents I associated the broken humanity
of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her
knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding 
over a meeting that was tossed like trees in
a storm.

However this preconception was formed, it at
least had the merit of consistency. It was, that is
to say, consistently inaccurate in every particular.

Consider, in the first place, the orderliness of his
specially constructed Tabernacle. Built like a giant
greenhouse in a single story, it covers an immense
area and seats fifteen thousand human beings.
Lighted at night by electricity as if by sunshine, the
floor is a vast garden of human faces, all turned
to the small platform on which the sloping tiers
from behind converge. Around this auditorium,
with its forest of light wooden pillars and braces,
runs a glass-inclosed alley, and standing outside in
the alley throng the spectators for whom there are
no seats. Except for the quiet ushers, the silent
sawdust aisles are kept free. Through police-guarded 
doors a thin trickle fills up the last available 
seats, and this business is dispatched with little
commotion. Fully as many people wait to hear
this single diminutive speaker as attend a national
political convention. In many ways the crowd suggests 
a national convention; but both men and women
are hatless, and their attentiveness is exemplary.

It is, if the phrase is permitted, conspicuously
a middle-class crowd. It is the crowd that wears
Cluett-Peabody collars, that reads the Ladies’ Home
Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. It is the
crowd for whom the nickel was especially coined,
the nickel that pays carfare, that fits in a telephone
slot, that buys a cup of coffee or a piece of pie,
that purchases a shoeshine, that pays for a soda,
that gets a stick of Hershey’s chocolate, that made
Woolworth a millionaire, that is spent for chewing-gum 
or for a glass of beer. In that crowd are men
and women from every sect and every political party,
ranging in color from the pink of the factory superintendent’s 
bald head to the ebony of the discreetly
dressed negro laundress. A small proportion of
professional men and a small proportion of ragged
labor is to be discerned, but the general tone is
simple, common-sense, practical, domestic America.
Numbers of young girls who might equally well be
at the movies are to be seen, raw-boned boys not
long from the country, angular home-keeping virgins
of the sort that belong to sewing circles, neat young
men who suggest the Y. M. C. A., iron-gray mothers
who recall the numbered side-streets in Harlem or
Brooklyn or Chicago West Side and who bring to
mind asthma and the price of eggs, self-conscious
young clerks who are half curious and partly starved
for emotion, men over forty with prominent Adam’s
apple and the thin, strained look of lives fairly care-worn 
and dutiful, citizens of the kind that with all
their heterogeneousness give to a jury its oddly
characteristic effect, fattish men who might be small
shopkeepers with a single employee, the single employee 
himself, the pretty girl who thinks the Rev.
Mr. Rhodeheaver so handsome, the prosaic girl
whose chief perception is that Mr. Sunday is so
hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won’t
be swayed, the sedentary “providers” who cannot
open their ears without dropping their jaws. A
collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one may
crudely say “average” mortals, some of them
destined to catch religion, more of them destined
to catch an impression, and a few of them, sitting
near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a
cold.

Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr.
Sunday’s small platform is a bower of lovely
bouquets, and the first business is the acknowledgment 
of these offerings. As a means of predisposing 
the audience in Mr. Sunday’s favor nothing
could be more genial. In the body of the hall are
seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute
is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver’s powerful,
commonplace voice invites them to recognition:
“Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company here?”
All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren.
“Fine, fine. We’re glad to see yeh here. We’re
glad to welcome yeh. And what hymn would *you* 
like to have?” In loud concert the Pittsburgh
Plate Glass Co. delegation shout: “Number forty-nine!”
Mr. Rhodeheaver humorously parodies the
shout: “Number forty-nine! It’s a good ’un too.
Thank yeh, we’re glad to have yeh here.” Not only
immense bouquets, but gold pieces, boxes of handkerchiefs, 
long mirrors, all sorts of presents, mainly
from big corporations or their employees, are on
the tight platform. One present came from a mill,
a box of towels, and with it not only a warm, manly
letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept “the product
of our industry,” but a little poetic tribute, expressing 
the hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr.
Sunday might have a good bath and take comfort
in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and
liked it, and gazed amiably at the towels.

The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thousand 
people had really joined in them the effect
would have been stupendous. As it was, they were
thrilling, but not completely. The audience was
not half abandoned enough.

Then, after a collection had been taken up for a
local charity, Mr. Sunday began with a prayer. A
compact figure in an ordinary black business suit,
it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice
that, for all his athleticism, he was tired to the
bone. He is fifty-three years old and for nine
weeks he had been delivering about fifteen extremely
intense sermons a week. His opening was almost
adramatic. It had the conservatism of fatigue,
and it was only his evident self-possession that canceled 
the fear he would fizzle.

The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me
at first were Elbert Hubbard and George M. Cohan.
In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism
of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in
his physical attitude there was nothing of that
greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and
swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman
of his particular line of wares.

Accompanying one of the presents there had been
a letter referring to Billy Sunday’s great work, “the
moral uplift so essential to the business and commercial 
supremacy of this city and this country.”
As he developed his homely moral sermon for his
attentive middle-class congregation, this gave the
clew to his appeal. It did not seem to me that he
had one touch of divine poetry. He humored and
argued and smote for Christ as a commodity that
would satisfy an enormous acknowledged gap in his
auditors’ lives. He was “putting over” Christ.
In awakening all the early memories of maternal admonition 
and counsel, the consciousness of unfulfilled 
desires, of neglected ideals, the ache for sympathy 
and understanding, he seemed like an insurance 
agent making a text of “over the hill to the
poorhouse.” He had at his finger tips all the selling 
points of Christ. He gave to sin and salvation
a practical connotation. But while his words and
actions apparently fascinated his audience, while
they laughed eagerly when he scored, and clapped
him warmly very often, to me he appealed no more
than an ingenious electric advertisement, a bottle
picked out against the darkness pouring out a foaming 
glass of beer.

And yet his heart seemed to be in it, as a salesman’s 
heart has to be in it. Speaking the language
of business enterprise, the language with which the
great majority were familiar, using his physical
antics merely as a device for clinching the story
home, he gave to religion a great human pertinence,
and he made the affirmation of faith seem creditable
and easy. And he defined his own object so that
a child could understand. He was a recruiting
officer, not a drill sergeant. He spoke for faith
in Christ; he left the rest to the clergy. And to the
clergy he said: “If you are too lazy to take care
of the baby after it is born, don’t blame the doctor.”

It was in his platform manners that Sunday recalled 
George M. Cohan. When you hear that he
goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations of
baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is
not wild. Needing to arrest the attention of an
incredibly large number of people, he adopts various
evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It
is a physical language with which the vast majority
have friendly heroic associations, and for them,
spoken so featly and gracefully, it works. Grasping 
the edge of the platform table as if about to
spring like a tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives
to his words a drive that makes you tense in your
seat. Whipping like a flash from one side of the
table to the other, he makes your mind keep unison
with his body. He keys you to the pitch that the
star baseball player keys you, and although you
stiffen when he flings out the name of Christ as if
he were sending a spitball right into your teeth, you
realize it is only an odd, apt, popular conventionalization 
of the ordinary rhetorical gesture. Call it
his bag of tricks, deem it incongruous and stagey,
but if Our Lady’s Juggler is romantic in grand opera,
he is not a whit more romantic than this athlete who
has adapted beautiful movements to an emphasis of
convictions to which the audience nods assent.

The dissuading devil was conjured by Sunday in
his peroration, and then he ended by thanking God
for sending him his great opportunity, his vast audience, 
his bouquets and his towels. When he finished, 
several hundred persons trailed forward to
shake hands and confess their faith—bringing the
total of “penitents” up to 35,135.

Bending with a smile to these men and women
who intend to live in the faith of Christ, Billy
Sunday gives a last impression of kindliness, sincerity, 
tired zeal. And various factory superintendents 
and employers mingle benignly around,
glad of a religion that puts on an aching social
system such a hot mustard plaster.

II
--

Oyster soup is a standard item in the money-making 
church supper. The orphan oyster searching 
vainly for a playmate in an ocean of church
soup is a favorite object of Billy Sunday’s pity. He
loves to caricature the struggling church, with its
time-serving, societyfied, tea-drinking, smirking
preachers. “The more oyster soup it takes to run
a church,” he shouts sarcastically, “the faster it
runs to the devil.”

An attitude so scornful as this may seem highly
unconventional to the outsider. It leads him to
think that Billy Sunday is a radical. The agility
with which the Rev. Billy climbs to the top of his
pulpit and then pops to the platform on all fours
suggests a corresponding mental agility. He must
be a dangerous element in the church, the outsider
imagines; he must be a religious revolutionary.
And then the outsider beholds John Wanamaker or
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the platform alongside 
the revivalist—pillars of society, prosperous
and respectable gentlemen who instinctively know
their business.

Fond as his friends are of comparing Billy Sunday 
to Martin Luther or John the Baptist, none
of them pushes the comparison on the lines of radicalism, 
and Sunday himself waives the claim to being
considered revolutionary. “I drive the same kind
of nails all orthodox preachers do,” he says in one of
his sermons. “The only difference is that they use
a tack hammer and I use a sledge.” No one supposes 
that Martin Luther could have said this.
Sledge-hammer orthodoxy was not exactly the distinguishing
characteristic of Martin Luther. The
conservatism of Billy Sunday’s message is the first
fact about him. Where he differs from the orthodox 
preacher is not in his soul but in his resolution.
He has the mind of Martin Tupper rather than of
Martin Luther, but it is combined with that competent 
American aggressiveness which one finds in a
large way in George M. Cohan, Theodore Roosevelt, 
even Ty Cobb. Theology does not interest
Billy Sunday. He compares it to ping-pong and
compares himself to a jack-rabbit and says he knows
as little about theology as a jack-rabbit knows about
ping-pong. What he cares about is religious revival. 
He knows the church is in bitter need of revival. 
He is out to administer digitalis, in his own
phrase, instead of oyster soup.

For many years the church has been waning, and
Billy Sunday scorns the effeminate, lily-handed efforts 
at resuscitation that the churchmen have employed. 
To put pepperino into a religious campaign, 
to make Christianity hum, requires more
than cushioned pews, extra music, coffee and
macaroons. Had Billy Sunday been in the regular
theatrical business he would not have fussed with
a little independent theatre. He would have conducted 
a Hippodrome. To rival the profane
world’s attractions he sees no reason for rejecting
the profane world’s methods. So tremendous an
object as curing an institution’s pernicious anæmia
justifies the most violent, outrageous experiment.

If Jesus Christ were a new automobile or an encyclopædia 
or a biscuit, Billy Sunday would have
varied the method he has employed in putting Him
over, but he would not have varied the spirit of
his revival-enterprise in any essential particular.
His object, as he sees it, is to sell Christ. It is an
old story that from its economic organization society 
takes its complexion. The Sunday revival
takes its complexion from business enterprise without 
a single serious change. There is one great
argument running all through Billy Sunday’s sermons—the 
argument that salvation will prove a
profitable investment—but much more clearly derived 
from business than the ethics preached by
Billy Sunday is the method he has devised for promoting Jesus Christ. Even the quarrel between
“Ma” Sunday and the man who has lost the post-card 
concession is an illustration of the far-reaching 
efficiency of the system. The point is not that
money is being made out of the system. “An effort
to corrupt Billy Sunday,” to use a paraphrase,
“would be a work of supererogation, besides being
immoral.” If Billy Sunday has a large income,
$75,000 or $100,000 a year, it is not because he
is mercenary. It is only because a large income is
part of the natural fruits of his promoting ability.
Left to himself, it is quite unlikely that Billy Sunday
would care a straw about his income, beyond enough
to live well and to satisfy his vanity about clothes.
It is Mrs. Sunday who sees to it that her promoter-husband 
is not left penniless by those Christian
business men who so delightedly utilize his services.

The backbone of Billy Sunday’s success is organization. 
When organization has delivered the
crowd, Billy is ready to sweat for it and spit for it
and war-whoop for it and dive for base before the
devil can reach him. He is ready to have “Rody” 
come on the programme with his slide-trombone and
to have any volunteer who wishes to do it hit the
sawdust-trail. But he does not let his success depend 
on any programme. His audiences are, in
great measure, contracted for in advance. It is in
grasping the necessity for this kind of preparedness, 
in taking from the business world its lessons
as to canvassing and advertising and standardizing
the goods, that Billy can afford to jeer at oyster
soup. As his authorized biographer complacently
says, “John the Baptist was only a voice: but Billy
Sunday is a voice, plus a bewildering array of committees and assistants and organized machinery. He
has committees galore to coöperate in his work: a
drilled Army of the Lord. In the list of Scranton
workers that is before me I see tabulated an executive 
committee, the directors, a prayer-meeting committee, 
an entertainment committee, an usher committee, 
a dinner committee, a business women’s
committee, a building committee, a nursery committee, 
a personal worker’s committee, a decorating
committee, a shop-meetings committee—and then
a whole list of churches and religious organizations
in the city as ex officio workers!” In New York
on April 9th there was a private meeting of 7,000
personal workers, “another step in the direction of
greasing the campaign.”

Unless Billy Sunday had some skill as a performer 
he naturally could not hold his place as a
revivalist. His success consists largely, however,
in the legendary character that has been given him
by all the agencies that seek to promote this desperate 
revival of orthodox religion. His acrobatic
stunts on the platform are sufficiently shocking to
make good publicity. His much-advertised slang,
repeated over and over, has a similar sensational
value. But the main point about him is the dramatization 
of his own personality. His virility is perhaps 
his chief stock-in-trade. No one, not Mr.
Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much on his personal 
militant masculinity. Although well over
fifty, his youthful prowess as a baseball-player is
still a headline-item in his story, and every sermon
he preaches gives him a chance to prove he is
physically fit. In addition to this heroic characteristic 
there is his fame as a self-made man. He is
a plain man of the people, as he never fails to
insist. He carries “the malodors of the barnyard” 
with him. But he has succeeded. The cost of his
special tabernacle is one of his big distinctions.
The size of his collections is another. His personal
fortune, in spite of all criticism, is a third. Besides
these heroic attributes of strength and wealth there
is his melodramatic simplicity of mind. All of his
sermons are “canned” and a great deal of the
material in them is borrowed, but he manages to
deliver his message straight from the shoulder, as
if it were his own. There can be no doubt that his
shouting, his slang, his familiarity with Jesus, his
buttonholing old God, his slang-version of the Bible,
do offend large numbers of people. They arrest
attention so successfully, even in these cases, that
they turn out to be well advised. There is nothing
spontaneous about these antics. They are switched
on at the beginning of a revival and switched off as
it succeeds. They are Sunday’s native way of lighting 
up the strait and narrow path with wriggling
electric signs.

Billy Sunday has too much energy to stick completely 
fast in the mud of conservatism. He is
capable of advocating sex instruction for the young,
for example, and he permits himself the wild radicalism 
of woman suffrage. But as regards vested
interests and patriotism and war he is a conservative, 
practically a troglodyte. What he attacks
with fervor are the delinquents in ordinary conduct,
especially the people who lack self-control.
“Booze-hoisters” and card-players and tango-dancers 
and cigarette-smokers are his pet abominations—genuine 
abominations. Profanity, strange
to say, is another evil that he fights with fire.
Honesty, sobriety, chastity—these are virtues that
he exalts, illustrating the horror of failing in them
by means of innumerable chromatic anecdotes.
The devil he constantly attacks, though never with
real solemnity. “The devil has been practicing for
six thousand years and he has never had appendicitis,
rheumatism or tonsillitis. If you get to playing tag
with the devil he will beat you every chip.” It is
more for spice and snap that he introduces the devil
than to terrify his public. The Bible is his serious
theme, and he feels about it almost the way Martin
Tupper did:

  | The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion volume,
  | The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our Rights ...
  | It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare
  | A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible!
  | —The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark,
  | And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning,
  | And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions,
  | In spite of learned unbelief,—we hold it all plain truth:
  | Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study;
  | Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and Colenso ...
  | The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian nation ...
  | The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square,
  | The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws ...
  | Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salvation.

One of Billy Sunday’s boasts is that the liquor
interests hate him. “That dirty, stinking bunch of
moral assassins hires men to sit in the audience to
hear me, to write down what I say and then try
to find some author who said something like it, and
accuse me of having stolen my ideas. I know that
$30,000 was offered a man in New York City to
write a series of articles attacking me. All right;
if you know anything about me that you want to
publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is
a dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole
thing is a frame-up from A to Izzard. I’ll fight
them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a pair
of skates. By the grace of God, I’ve helped to
make Colorado and Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan 
and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice on
the dirty gang that I’ll help to make the whole
nation dry.” (New York Times, April 19th,
1917.)

Assuming these points to be well taken, there is
still great room to doubt the deep religious effect
of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like William Allen
White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf
in Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many
hundred human beings for moral stimulus in a time
of need. In spite of the thousands who have hit the
sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that
more than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously 
affected by him. The great majority of
those who hit the trail are people who merely want
to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of
seriousness or “conversion.” The atmosphere of
the tabernacle, bright with electric light and friendly
with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and
in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is
seldom a contagious note. His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a remarkable
public entertainer, and much that he says has keen
humor and verbal art and horse sense. But for all
his militancy, for all his pugnacious vociferation, he
leaves an impression of being at once violent and
incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but
not a guide or a friend.

Still, as between Billy Sunday’s gymnastics and
the average oyster soup, Messrs. Wanamaker and
Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday.
Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of carpets 
and socks, Socony and Nujol, and if Christ
could have been put over in the same way, by live-wire 
salesmanship, Billy was the man.

FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
====================================

I
-

“Though you do not know it, I have a soul.
Behold, across the way, my library. When the
night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees
shake out their greenery against the white stonework, 
do you not catch a suggestion of atmosphere,
something of a mood? And the black cliffs around,
with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the
width of them, are they not monuments? I cleave
brilliantly, up and down this dormant city. It is
for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plodding 
milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speeding 
her lover’s motor. Heed my long silences, my
slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed.
My buildings come about me to muse and to commune. 
Receive, for once on Fifth Avenue, the soul
that is imprisoned in my stone and steel.”

It is not for the respectable, this polite communication. 
Theatre and club and restaurant have
long since disgorged these. New York has masticated 
their money. They have done as they should
and are restored uptown. Even the old newswoman, 
she who had spent starving months in the
Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war,
she has tottered from her stand down by the station.
The Hungarian waiter in Childs’ is still there, still
assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat
cakes, but that is off the avenue. It is three, the
avenue is nearly empty. It is ready to disclose its
soul.

But before this subtle performance there is a preliminary. 
It is a very self-respecting avenue and
at three on a pleasant morning, when no one is
around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath.
Perhaps a few motors go by—a taxi rolling north,
heavy with night thoughts, a tired white face framed
in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking
loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its
suburban chores. The Italian acolytes are impartial. 
They spray the wheels of a touring car with
gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a powerful 
stream under the hubs of a Nassau News
wagon trundling to a train. The avenue must be
refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nodding 
approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must
be prepared for the sun, under bold lamps and
timid stars.

A fine young morning, the watchman promises.
A bit of wind whiffles the water that is shot out from
the white-wing’s hose, but it is clearing up above
and looks well for the day. The hour beckons
memories for the watchman—fine young mornings
he used to have long ago, in Ireland, a boy on his
first adventure and he driving with the barley to
Ross.

It is an empty street. The hose is wheeled away
over the glistening asphalt. The watchman disappears—he 
has a cozy nook beyond the ken of
time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pillow, 
to hide a diminished head. With man accounted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to
the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion,
the buildings have their moment. Each tower
stretches his proud height to the morning. The
stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed.

II
--

Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it cannot 
hold the virgin morning forever. Its windows
may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind the
walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” A saintly
venerable horse seems to know the injunction.
Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it
usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord.

And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the
prayer about clams, but some one in Mount Vernon
is destined to have them quickly. Out of the mysterious 
south, racing against time, a little motor flits
onward with gaping barrels of clams. At a decent
interval comes a heavier load of fish. Great express
wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest
uses of Fifth Avenue begin.

Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies.
The grocer and the greengrocer are early on their
rounds. But an empty American News truck confesses 
that eternal vigilance is the price of circulation. 
Its gait is swifter than the gait of milkman
or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and dew are on
the florist’s wheels: he has come whistling by the
swamps of Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs
lightly past the juggernauts that crush down.

Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His
trucks hurl from Grand Central to make the substations. 
But his is not the pride of place. Nor
is it coal or farmers’ feed that appropriates the
middle of the street. The noblest wagons, a long
parade of them, announce the greater glory of beer.
The temperance advocate may shudder at the desecration 
of the morning. He may observe “Hell
Gate Brewery” and nod his sickly nod. But there
is something about this large preparedness for thirst
that stills the carping worm of conscience. It is
good to see what solid, ample caravans are required 
to replenish man with beer. It is not the
single glass that is glorious. It is not even the
single car-load. It is the steady, deliberate, ponderous 
procession that streams through the early hours.
Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy
of beer-wagons. It satisfied the faith that there
was Design in creation, but the Percheron is not
needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness 
about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer.

III
---

“Number, please?” She is anonymous, that
inquirer. But behind her anonymity there is humanity. 
Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street
caught a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M.

She was up at five in the morning. She had a
pang as she put on her check suit, slightly darker
than her check coat lined with pink. Her little hat,
however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked
breakfast while she set the table. Then she walked
to the Third Avenue “L” with her friend. They
got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to
Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked
along Forty-second Street in time for them to do a
brief window-shopping as they passed the shirtwaists 
at Forsythe’s. Her friend’s bronze shoes she
envied as they crossed the little park back of the
Library. On Sixth Avenue they inspected the window 
at Bernstein’s. A slight argument engrossed
them. They hovered over the window, chirping not
unlike the sparrows in Bryant Park. Then, in a
flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone
company to begin their “Number, please.”

An hour earlier laborers with dinner-pails had
crossed Fifth Avenue, and hatless Polish girls on
their way to scrub. By seven o’clock the negro
porters and laborers were giving way to white-collar
strap-hangers on the elevateds and in the subway.
It was getting to be the hour of salesmen and salesgirls 
and office-boys and shop-subordinates and
clerks. The girls back of the scenes at the milliner’s, 
they go up Fifth Avenue at seven, to take
one side-street or another. The girl who sells you
a toothbrush in the drug-store hurries by the shop
windows, herself as neat as a model. Is it early?
Myriads of men are pouring down already. Besides, 
“’S use of kickin’? If you don’t like it, you
can walk out!” 

The night-watchman is going home, and an old attendant 
from the Grand Central. “Tired, Pop?”
“Yeh, p’tty tired.” “What right’ve you to git
tired workin’ for a big corporation?” The oppressed 
wage-slave bellows, “Ha, ha.”

IV
--

Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in
the afternoon. The diastole of travelers had
spread all morning from Grand Central; the systole
is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in
the afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the
suburbs, tearing their way through the weaker
streams that are drawn up by the neighboring shops
and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and
Sherry’s and Delmonico’s and the Manhattan and
the Belmont are no longer columnar monuments,
holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human 
floods which they suck in and spray out. The
street itself is lost to memory and vision. A swollen
stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are
permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless 
bosom the freight of curiosity and pride and
favor. One might fancy, to gaze on this mad
throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered 
the universe, worshipers of a machine.

It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles, 
the feminine hour. A little later there will be
more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from
work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to
believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, 
parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous, 
composed of many styles and many types.
The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second 
Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification 
distinguishes those who turn up and down the
Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them,
or money, but their sense that there is romance in
the appearance of money and leisure. Many of the
white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are
not white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth
Avenue. One may pretend the world is gay.

They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds
on Fifth Avenue. They move as by personal will.
But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common 
attractions govern them. There is a rhythm
in these human tides.

V
-

For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. 
He stayed with his friend the spider the
round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider,
is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the
scene-shifter and the detective. Some day we should
pitch a metropolitan observatory at the corner of
Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,—some day,
if we can find the time.

AS AN ALIEN FEELS
=================

Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that
the United States existed. My first dream of it
came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay
flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green.
It was a Wild West Show, and for years I associated 
America with the intoxication of the circus
and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges.
“Two a penny, two a penny, large penny oranges!
Buy away an’ ate away, large penny oranges!”
They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor
of them and the fumes of circus excitement gave me
a first gay ribald sense of the United States.

The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag 
uncle. He had sought his fortune in America—sought 
it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a
horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd
and delicious oaths. “Gosh hell hang it” was his
chief touch of American culture. He was a
“Yank” in local parlance, a frequently drunken
Yank. His fine drooping mustache too often
drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I
steadied him home under the October stars and absorbed 
a long alcoholic reverie on the Horseshoe
Falls. As we slept together that night in the rat-pattering 
loft, and as he absently appropriated all
the horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver
over the wonderments of the Horseshoe Falls.

This, with an instilled idea that America and
America alone could offer “work,” foreshadowed
the American landscape. It is the bald hope of
work that finally magnetizes us hither. But every
dream and every loyalty was with the unhappy land
from which I came.

For many months the music of New York harbor
spoke only of home. Every outgoing steamer that
opened its throat made me homesick. America was
New York, and New York was down town, and
down town was a vortex of new duties. There I
learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning
a living, and the art of eating at Childs’. At night
the hall-bedroom near Broadway, and the resourceless 
promenade up and down Broadway for amusement. 
The only women to say “dear,” the women
who say it on the street.

In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United
States. The word “settlement” gave me my first
puzzled intimation that there was somewhere a clew
to this grim struggle down town. I had looked
for it in boarding-houses. I had looked for it in
stenographic night-schools. I had sought it in the
blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long
jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among
the street-walkers, the first to proffer intimacy.
And of course, not being clever enough, I had overlooked 
it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at
home.

America dawned for me in a social settlement.
It dawned for me as a civilization and a faith. In
all my first experiences of my employers I got not
one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was
the language of smartness, alertness, brightness, success, 
efficiency, and I tried to learn it, but it was a
difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were lawyers, 
but they were interested in penmanship and
ability to clean ink-bottles. Some of them were
business men, but they were interested in ability to
typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not
their fault. Ours was not an affair of the heart.
But if it had not been for the social settlement, I
should still be an alien to the bone.

Till I knew a social settlement the American flag
was still a flag on a circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap.
The cheapness of the United States was the message 
of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville 
and Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper,
of the promenade on Broadway. In the social settlement 
I came on something entirely different.
Here on the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of
something besides success. The house was saturated
in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet.
A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make
it musical. It was thronged with Jews and Greeks
and Italians and soulful visitors, to make it restful.
It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it
easy. But it was the first place in all America
where there came to me a sense of the intention of
democracy, the first place where I found a flame
by which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer
words about it. The men, I learned, were mollycoddles, 
and the women were sexually unemployed.
The ruling class spoke of “unsettlement workers” 
with animosity, the socialists of a mealy-mouthed
compromise. Yet in that strange haven of clear
humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I
had been seeking—the knowledge that America had
a soul.

How one discovers these things it is hard to put
honestly. It is like trying to recall the first fair
wind of spring. But I know that slowly and unconsciously 
the atmosphere of the settlement thawed
out the asperity of alienism. There were Americans 
of many kinds in residence, from Illinois, from
Michigan, from New York, English-Americans,
Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, 
men who had gone to Princeton and
Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn
Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the
Americanism was of a kind that opened to the least
pressure from without, and never shall I forget the
way these residents with their “North Side” friends
had managed so graciously to domesticate the annual 
festival of my own nationality. That, strange
though it may seem, is the more real sort of Americanization 
Day.

From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing 
alien breathes in American air, but I doubt if I
should have ever known the meaning of Walt Whitman 
had I not lived in that initiating home. It was
easy in later years to see new meanings in the American 
flag, to stand with Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,
but it was in the settlement I found the sources from
which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement,
one was not expected to believe that man’s proper
place is on a Procrustean bed of profiteering. A
different tradition of America lived there, one in
which the earlier faiths had come through, in which
the way to heaven was not necessarily up a skyscraper. 
In New England, later, I found many
ideas of which the settlement was symptomatic, but
as I imbibed them they were “America” for me.

What it means to come at last into possession
of Lincoln, whose spirit is so precious to the social
settlement, is probably unintelligible to Lincoln’s
normal inheritors. To understand this, however,
is to understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries 
from which we come there have been men of
such humane ideals, but they have almost without
exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of
the peoples of Europe have not been the governors
of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of the
governed. But here among America’s governors
and statesmen was a simple authenticator of humane
ideals. To inherit him becomes for the European
not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary
of them in a new. In the microcosm of the settlement 
perhaps Lincolnism is too simple. Many of
one’s promptest acquiescences are revised as one
meets and eats with the ruling class later on. But
the salt of this American soil is Lincoln. When
one finds that, one is naturalized.

It is curious how the progress of naturalization
becomes revealed to one. I still recollect with a
thrill the first time I attended a national political
convention and listened to the roll-call of the States.
“Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!” Empty names
for many years, at last they were filled with one
clear concept, the concept of the democratic experiment. 
“As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning
walk”—the living appeal to each state by name
recalled Whitman’s generous amusing scope. “Far
breath’d land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez’d!
The diverse! The compact! The Pennsylvanian!
The Virginian! The double Carolinian!” The
orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke
votes for Taft and Sherman. But even these men
were parts of the democratic experiment. And the
vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as
the empurpled Penrose did not answer. It was they
who were the leaves of our grass.

In Whitman, as William James has shown, there
is an arrant mysticism which his own Democratic
Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this credulity
as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an
alien is likely to enter if his first intimacy with America 
came in the aliens’ crêche. A settlement is a
crêche for the step-children of Europe, and it is
hard not to credit America at large with some of
the impulses which make the settlement. Such, at
any rate, is the tendency I experienced myself.

With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United
States? I think of Lincoln and his effected mysticism 
by Union, union for the experiment, and I feel
alive within me a complete identification with this
land. The keenest realization of the nation reached
me, as I recall, the first time I saw the capitol in
Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up the
hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets
gleaming after a warm shower. The plaza in front
of the capitol was deserted. A few high sentinel
lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and
scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the
dome. Standing apart completely by myself, I felt
as never before the union of which this strength and
simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the
night, the scent of April pervading it, gave to the
lonely building a dignity such as I had seldom felt
before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and
achieved determination, for a purpose maintained,
for a quiet faith in the peoples and states that lay
away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, I thought,
had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night
in April, and felt the same promise of spring.

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
=====================

One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the
pursuit of the secret of life. That secret, however,
is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible to me, somewhere 
in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten,
it taunts my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making 
a lunge after it. But tied to the ball there
seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye
fixes the secret of life but it escapes my paw.

During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had
it. It involved a great deal of stern discipline.
Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston garters
and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice,
hot baths followed by rolling in the snow and jiu
jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu hinted at the very secret
itself. Here was the crude West seeking to slug its
way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had
only to lay hold of life by the little finger to reduce it
to squealing submission. The sinister power of jiu
jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn it
we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme
of effortless subtlety. A people with such an art,
combined with ennobling vegetarianism, must necessarily 
be a superior people. I privately believed
that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the
Russian fleet.

Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my
soul and supplanted it with a colossal contempt
for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already
protested. No nation could hope to take the field
that subsisted on heavy foods—such unclean things
as sausages and beer. The secret of world mastery
was a diet of rice. “We all eat too much” became
a fixed conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a
greater conviction—we all sleep too much as well.
This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett. 
Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit.
We sleep ourselves stupid. Who could not afford
to lose a minute’s sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute
a day—who would miss it? And in 500 days you
would have got down to the classical forty winks.
Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He
modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its
successful practicability. To cut down sleep and cut
down food was the only way to function like a superman.

Once started on this question of habits I spent a
life of increasing turmoil. From Plato I heard the
word moderation, but from William Blake I learned
that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” 
From Benjamin Franklin I gathered the
importance of good habits, but William James gleefully 
told me to avoid all habits, even good ones.
And then came Scientific Management.

The concept of scientific management practically
wrecked my life. I discovered that there was a
right way of doing everything and that I was doing
everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that
we were all astray about the simplest things. We
did not know how to breathe properly. We did
not know how to sit properly. We did not know
how to walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was
making us bald. We wore pointed shoes: it was unfair 
to our little toe. But scientific management did
not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly
pointed out that “waste motions” were the chief
characteristic of our lives.

One of the most fantastic persons in the world is
the public official who, before he can write a postal
order or a tax receipt, has to make preliminary curls
of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific
eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our
effective motions could be registered on a visual target, 
our record would be found to resemble that of
savages who use ammunition without a sight on their
guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier’s marksmanship 
is wasteful, we may well look to ourselves.
Our life is peppered with motions that fly wide and
wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms—waste 
motion! We ought to utilize that gesture 
for polishing our shoes. We rub our eyes—more 
foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday 
for the rest of the week. But it is in processes
like shaving that scientific management is really
needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave
with the minimum of gesture. They believe that
they complete the operation under five minutes.
But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that
under the inspection of the scientific manager their
performance would look as jagged as their razorblade 
under the microscope? The day will probably
arrive when a superman will shave with one superb
motion, as delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of
an orange-skin in one long unbroken peel.

In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the
haphazard, unscrutinized conduct of his morn. We
pick up our paper without any suspicion that we are
about to commit intellectual felony. We do not
know that the news editor is in a conspiracy to play
on our minds. If men gyrate too much physically,
they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start
to look over the news. It is not so much that they
begin the day with devouring the details of a murder 
or lull themselves with some excuse for not reading 
a British note on the blockade. It is the fact
that they are led by a ring running through their instincts 
to obey the particular editors they read.

Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand 
how the human race has survived. Even
conceding that I was normal, it is so much the worse
for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous
breed. There is not one important layman’s practice 
that we have organized with regard to discipline
and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying 
bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting 
one’s hat and the circumvolutions in putting links
in one’s cuffs? How about the impulsive child who
wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a
hug? The discovery seemed chilly that everything
could be scientifically managed, everything could be
perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at
the center of one’s life. But a fear of being chilly
is a mark of inferiority. It ill becomes a human
machine.

Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours
a day, with vague longings to eat very little and
sleep very little and master jiu jitsu and breathe deep
and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and
give up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically 
and save waste motions in putting on my
shirt, I happened to come across two European
thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling 
Shakespeare’s knowledge of dead languages
by my own knowledge of live ones, I could not read
these masters in the original to determine whether
they blended like oil and vinegar or fought like water
and oil. But in the eagerness of philosophic
poverty I grasped just two delightful words from
them, “instinct” and “repression.” The metaphysician’s 
secret of life, apparently, was to drop
using one’s so-called intelligence so frantically, to become 
more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena
and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put
the Ten Commandments in their place. To tell the
truth, his detection of “repression” gave me no
tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the
evolutionist turned my thoughts away from the early
worries of discipline. This is the latest ball in the
air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of
any tantalizing invisible string.

THE NEXT NEW YORK
=================

You’d get awfully tired if I told you everything
about my visit to New York in A. D. 1991. Some
things are too complicated even to refer to, many
things I’ve already forgotten, and a number of things
I didn’t understand. But as I had to return to my
work as prison doctor in 1919 after a week of 1991
I grasped a few top impressions that may interest
you. I hope I can give them to you straight.

The people on the street took my eye the minute
I arrived in town. They looked so pleasing and
they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at
present, with the long indoor working day and the
mixture of embalmed and storage and badly cooked
food, the number of pasty-faced and emaciated men
and women is very high. I exempt the hearty
sweating classes like the structural iron workers and
teamsters and porters and even policemen. You
could recruit a fine-looking club from the building
trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue
and size up the condition of the passers-by. You
see shopgirls in thin cotton who are under-weight,
under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized.
You see pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You
see weary, fish-eyed mothers who look as if every
day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged 
people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic.
A little earlier in the afternoon it’s almost impossible
to share the sidewalk with the squat factory hands
who overflow at the lunch hour. They’re hard to
kill, these poor fellows, but they’re a puny, stinking, 
stunted, ill-favored horde. But the greater
cleanliness of the people later on, and their better
clothes, doesn’t put them in a very different class.
You hear a good deal about the queens you see, but,
really, the city streets of New York in 1919, streaming 
with people who have dun clothes to match dun
faces, make you wonder what’s the use.

These people in 1991 were good to look at! The
three-hour working day had a lot to do with it, of
course, and the basic economic changes. But what
leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge
responsibility that had gone to hygienists. I mean
educational and administrative. In 1991, I found,
people were really acting on the theory that you
can’t have civilization without sound bodies. The
idea itself was as old as an old joke, a platitude
in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city was
working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this
meant a total revision of ordinary conduct.

Building the Panama Canal was a simple little
job compared to making New York hygienic.
Thirty years must have been spent in getting the
folks to realize that no man and woman had any
hygienic excuse for breeding children within the city
limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before it was
official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At
first mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were
confiscated, but in the end they came to see justice in
the human version of the slogan, “an acre and a
cow.” It got rid of the good old city-bred medical
formula that the best way to handle pregnancy is to
handle it as a pathological condition. Of course this
prohibition movement made all sorts of people mad.
A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long
time on the score of personal liberty. Women had
private city babies where the inspectors couldn’t get
at them. You know, just like private whisky. But
in the end the prohibitionists won, and it had an
enormous effect on cleaning up Manhattan. It cut
out all but the detached and the transient residents,
and with the breathing space rules, these were far
less than you’d suppose. Even with the great area
of garden-roofs, the fixed residents were not much
more than 100,000.

This demobilization wasn’t special to New York.
In other places there were much more rigid “units.”
Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit size of cities
in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous 
city gave place to the “modern” unit,
permanent residences within the city never being
open to families that had children under fourteen.
For the heads of such families, however, the transportation 
problem was beautifully solved. Every
unit city came to be so constructed that within half
an hour of the “fresh air and exercise” homes, men
and women could reach factories and warehouses
in one direction, and offices and courts and banks and
exchanges in another. This was after they realized
the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, 
swift, freight train took the place of most
trucks, and of course the remaining trucks shot up
and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another 
thing that interested me was the plexus of all
the things that are to be exhibited. This involved a
great problem for New York before factories were
deported and the moving “H. G. Wells” sidewalks
introduced. How to economize time and space, and
yet not produce too close a homogeneity, too protein
an intellectual and æsthetic and social diet, became
a fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell’s 
Island to summer and winter art and music,
with all the other islands utilized for permanent exhibitions 
gave the city directors a certain leeway.
The islands were made charming. I was quite
struck over there, I think, on a new island in Flushing 
Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing,
where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on
an endless belt, that stopped when you wanted it to—the 
kind that art exhibitions adopted for certain
purposes. You see, the old department stores had
passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and
display advertising and the non-preventive physician.
And the old game of “seasons” and fashions was
abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Condé
Nast for the undermining of the taste of shopgirls.
The job of the purchasing consumer was steadily
simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly early
in life what they could and what they couldn’t do
personally in the use of color. No one thought of
copying another’s color or design in dress any more
than of copying another’s oculist prescription. And
with the guild consultants always ready to help out
the troubled buyer, the business of shopping for
clothes became as exciting and intelligent as the pastime 
of visiting a private exhibition. In this way,
backed up by the guilds, a daring employment of
color became generally favored. But a big item in
this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe 
any costumes for people who needed medical
care first. It was useless, the guilds said, to decorate 
a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed.

So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound
body. In the hygienic riots of 1936 some horrible
lynchings took place. An expert from the Chicago
stockyards was then running the New York subways.
He devised the upper-berth system by which the
space between people’s heads and the roof of the
car could be used on express trains for hanging up
passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a
few thousand citizens had failed to respond to the
pulmotor which was kept at every station to revive
weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to
decent transportation became a real public issue.
The hygienists made the great popular mistake of
trying to save the stockyards man. They knew he
had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing 
him and showing he had always wanted to
skin cats alive, they could put the traction question
on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of
that era took up the issue on the so-called popular
side. He denounced the hygienists as heartless experts 
and showed how science was really a conspiracy
in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted 
in a miserable set-back to the compulsory
psycho-analysis of all criminals, but the bloody assassination 
of the leading hygienist of the day brought
about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge
was allowed to serve who wasn’t an expert in psychic
work and hygiene. This decision was greatly aided
by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation 
of criminal verdicts to the established neuroses
of city magistrates. The promise that this work
would be extended and published as a supplement to
the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting 
the Bar. The old pretensions of the Bar
went rapidly to pieces when political use was made of
important psychological and physiological facts.
The hygienists spoke of “the mighty stream of morbid 
compulsion broadening down to more morbid
compulsion.” By 1950 no man with an Œdipus
complex could even get on the Real Estate ticket, and
the utter collapse of militarism came about with the
magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent 
armament advocates in the evil era.

I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance 
of prisons. Though I hate to confess
it, I was a little amazed when I found that the old
penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology 
of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did
possess models of prisons like Sing Sing and Trenton 
and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances 
in the latter prisons were thought amusing.
But the deformity of the human minds and the social
systems that permitted such prisons as ours was a
matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere,
even in casual unspecialized groups. This general
intelligence made it clear to me that social hygiene
was never understood up to the middle of the
twentieth century. The very name, after all, was
appropriated by men afraid to specify the sex diseases 
they were then cleaning up. Puritanism, serviceable 
as it was in its time, had kept men from obtaining 
and examining the evidence necessary to right
conclusions about conduct. “Think,” said one delightful 
youth to me, on my first day in 1991, “think
of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological
laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical well-being by the preposterous road of
universal military service. Think of electing Congressmen 
in the old days without applying even the
Binet test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing
about ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ fair as that object
is, and yet we should no more stand for such indiscriminateness 
than we’d allow a day to go by without 
swimming.”

The youth, I should specify, was a female youth,
what we call a girl. I had nothing to say to her.
But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was so
soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire’s device 
I had once seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement 
of a great factory building there was a small
electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was
a gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on
which was strapped an ordinary leather saddle. In
front of the saddle there rose two thin steel sticks,
and out of them came thin leather reins. By means
of a clever arrangement of springs down below that
responded to an electric current, the whole mechanism 
was able to move up and down and backward
and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed 
to stir up your gizzard in practically the same
way as the motion of a horse. This was, in fact,
a synthetic horse, bearing the same æsthetic relation
to a real horse that a phonograph song does to a
real song that is poured out, so to speak, in the sun.
And here, in the bald basement cell with its two
barred basement windows (closed), the constipated
millionaires take their turns, whenever they can bear
it, going through the canned motions of a ride, staring 
with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front
of them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of
Hygeia carried the helot-captains of industry. And
from that basement, from that heathen symbol of
perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary
acceptance of the human body and a primary law
that its necessities be everywhere observed. Not
such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy
years. And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they
had to have for the happiness they long for.

CHICAGO [1]_
============

A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality 
of towns. What most people enjoy about
a town is familiarity, not personality, and they can
give no penetrating account of their affection.
“What is the finest town in the world?” the New
York reporters recently asked a young recruit, eager
for him to eulogize New York. “Why,” he answered, 
“San Malo, France. I was born there.”
That is the usual reason, perhaps the best reason,
why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is
autobiographical.

But towns do have personality. Contrast London 
and New York, or Portland and Norfolk, or
Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has
a personality, and it would be obscurantism of the
most modern kind to pretend that there was no
“soul” in Chicago either to like or to dislike. People 
who have never lived in Chicago are usually content 
with disliking it, and those who have seen it
superficially, or smelled it in passing when the stockyard 
factories were making glue, can seldom understand 
why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors,
of course, profess to admire it, with the eagerness of
anxious missionaries seeking to make good with cannibals. 
But except for men who knew Bursley or
Belfast, and slipped into Chicago as into old slippers—men 
like Arnold Bennett and George Bermingham—there 
are few outsiders who really feel
at home. Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant 
journey across the plains, pondering that
one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to
restore the city after the fire should be compelled
to pay for his own ham and eggs. He thought
Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from
it like a sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G.
Wells thought it amazing, but chiefly amazing as a
lapse from civilization. All of these leave little
doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact,
dirty, unruly and mean. It has size without spaciousness, 
opportunity without imaginativeness, action 
without climax, wealth without distinction. A
sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though
far from gracious where most characteristic; but for
the most part it is shoddy, dingy and vulgar, making
more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining 
smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from
heaven. It is not for its beaux yeux that the outsider 
begins to love the town.

But a great town is like the elephant of the fable;
one must see it altogether before one can define it;
one can believe almost anything monstrous from a
partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is supremely
necessary—about three years as a minimum. 
Then its goodness passeth all pre-matrimonial 
understanding; its essence is disclosed.

Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far
as time is concerned, to speak of Chicago, and I
think it would be churlish not to agree that from
the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city
proud. All old Chicagoans will recognize at once
why Mr. Taylor should go back to the beginning,
and they will be delighted at the clarity with which
the early history is expounded, as well as the era before 
the Civil War. They will also understand and
rejoice over the repetition of grand old names—Gordon 
S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien,
Uranus H. Crosby, Sherman of the Sherman hotel,
General Hart L. Stewart and Long John Wentworth. 
In every town in the world there is, of
course, a Long John or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans
will savor this reference to their own familiar, and
will delight in the snug feeling that they too “knew
Chicago when.” Mr. Taylor is also dear to his
townsmen when he harks back to days before the
Fire. In those days the West-siders were a little
superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral
of Saints Peter and Paul, and the church-going folk
could hear the “fast young men” speeding trotting
horses past the church doors. Such performances
seemed fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor
himself drive his high-steppers to the races at Washington 
Park, and did he not woo the heart of the
city where gilded youth cherished a “nod of recognition 
from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John
A. Rice.” The dinners of antelope steak and roast
buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago antedating 
the World’s Fair that left strong traces into
the twentieth century, a Chicago that is commemorated 
with grace and kindliness in the fair pages of
this book.

But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor’s heart
lingers among the “marble-fronts” of his youth,
this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better
basis for loving Chicago must be offered than the
evidence that one teethed on it, battered darling that
it is. Mr. Taylor’s better explanation, as I read it,
is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully
and eagerly with the New Englanders who made the
town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters and speculators, 
war widows and politicians and anarchists and
aliens—all these go into his perspective, as do the
emergencies of the Fire and the splendors of the
Fair. But the marrow of his pride in Chicago is
his community with its origins in “men, like myself,
of New England blood, whose fathers felled our
forests and tilled our prairie land.” Since the time
he was born, he tells us, more than two million people 
have been added to the population of Chicago.
Only a fifth of the Great West Side are now American-born, 
and the Lake Shore Drive was still a cemetery 
when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified
West Side. This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning 
of things. Hence he likes to insist in his
kindly spirit that Chicago’s puritan “aristocracy” 
is the source of Chicago altruism, that “the society
of Chicago [is] more puritanical than that of any
great city in the world,” and that “back of Chicago’s
strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her
founders holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim 
Fathers being still a potent factor in her life....
She possesses a New England conscience to
leaven her diverse character and make her truly—the 
pulse of America.”

Every bird takes what he finds to build his own
spiritual nest. Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and
wild and rude, but I prefer to see it as an impuritan.
Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed
a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished
Chicago’s big little men. The triumvirate
that Mr. Taylor mentions had no statesmanship
in them. One was an admirable huckster, another
an inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine
who carved a destiny in ham. But these men gave
themselves and their city to business enterprise in
its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its
remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality
of that enterprise is a main characteristic of the city,
a characteristic barely suggested by Mr. Taylor, not
clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his graceful
drawings, so beautifully reproduced.

One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor’s
pleasant picture, some leaves from Upton Sinclair’s
Jungle, Jack London’s Iron Heel, Frank Norris’s
Pit, H. K. Webster’s Great Adventure, the fiction of
Edith Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick
and Will Paine and Weber Linn and Sherwood
Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and
Carl Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one
who looked at the City Council ten years ago, for
example, can forget the brutality of that institution
of collective life.

They called the old-time aldermen the “gray
wolves.” They looked like wolves, cold-eyed,
grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side,
West side, North side, making the shaky tenements
and black brothels and sprawling immigrant-filled industries
pay tribute in twenty ways. One night,
curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went
to a place that was glibly described as “the wickedest
place in the world.” It was a saloon under the West
side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At
first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its
runty negro at the raucous piano. But at last the
regular customers collected; the sots, the dead-beats,
the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a
fat pallor, the woman without a nose.... They
surrounded us, piled against us, clawed us. And
that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead’s Satanic vision
of it revealed.

But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago
is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from
caste and cant which is so much an essential of democracy,
the cordiality which comes with fraternity,
the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago
is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and
passionate creator struggling with hucksters and
hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the
assassins of genius, a frontier against the Europe
that meant an established order, an order of succession
and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all
its philistinism, there is the condition of hope that is
half the spiritual battle, whatever stockades the puritans
try to build. It is that that makes one lament
the silence in Mr. Taylor’s pleasant book. But the
puritanical tradition requires silence. Polite and refined,
self-centered and private-minded, attached to
property and content within limitations, it made
visible Chicago what it is.

.. [1] *Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G. Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.*

THE CLOUDS OF KERRY
===================

It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes
Kerry so wet. All the reservoir of the Atlantic,
at any rate, lies to the west and south, and the prevailing 
winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry
lifts its mountains to those impinging winds—mountains 
that in the sunlight are a living colorful
presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the
constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly
from the sea, soft voluminous clouds gathered in
their arms, and as they pass they sweep their drooping 
veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy 
land.

In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted 
at great intervals on those lonely hillsides, but
for the most part the habitations are in the cooms
or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel
hills. The soil on the mountains is washed away.
The vestiture that remains is a watery sedge, and it
is only by garnering every handful of earth that the
tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms.
Their fields, often held in common, are so small as
to be laughable, and deep drainage trenches are
dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting
sunlight between showers a light-green patch will
loom magically in the distance, witness to man’s indefatigable 
effort to achieve a holding amid the rocks.
An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and
if one goes there one may find a typical tall spare
countryman, bright of eye and sharp of feature,
housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood
of children. To build with his own hands a watertight 
house is the ambition for which this man is
slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready
there near the pit which he himself has dug for
foundation. A yellowish wife will perhaps be nursing 
the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed hovel,
and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible,
and admirable in more ways than he can ever dream
of, one elf after another will come out, bare-legged,
sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from far off at
the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside 
man, but his starvelings go down the boreen
to the bare cold schoolhouse, to be taught whatever
the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their
minds of an education designed for civil service
clerks. The children may be seen down there if one
passes at their playtime, kicking a rag football with
their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds.

There was a time when the iron was deep in these
farmers’ souls. Eking the marrow from the
bones of the land, they were so poor that they had
nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their
own tiny cattle, the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle
that alone can pick a living from that ground. Until 
twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the
hillside men had never bought a pound of tea in
their lives, or known what it was to spend money for
clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored
homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine
sturdy middle-aged farmers with a cut to their homemade 
clothes that reminds one of the Bretons. It
was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting
nature for grim life, that landlords took their rackrents—one 
of them, the Earl of Kenmare, erecting
a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of Americans 
have admired. The fight against landlordism
was bitter in Kerry. I met one countryman who was
evicted three times, but finally, despite the remorseless 
protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in
a lean-to against the wall of the church. There
were persecutions and murders, the mailed hand of
the law and the stealthy hand of the assassin. Even
to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure
of me he would not have spoken his mind. But
when he was sure, he confided with a winning smile
that at last he had something to live for and work
for, a strip of land that was an “economic holding,”
determined by an Estates Commission which has
shouldered the landlord to one side and estimated
with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive
possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog.

Why do they stay? But most of them have not
stayed. Kerry has not one-third the people to-day
that it had seventy years ago. The storekeeper in
a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little
father of the people if there ever was one, yet had
acted the dubious rôle of emigration agent, and had
passed thousands of his countrymen on to America.
A few go to England. “For nine years,” one hard-working 
occupier mentioned to me, “I lived in the
shadow of London Bridge.” But for Kerry, the
next country to America, America is the land of
golden promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue,
“hollow of the dock leaves,” I stopped to ask of a
bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking
me the way to America. It is west they turn, away
from the Empire that “always foul-played us in the
past, and I am afeard will foul-play us again.”

“The next time you come, please God you’ll bring
us Home Rule.” That is the way they speak to you,
if they trust you. They want government where it
cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of
old.

I went with a government inspector on one mission 
in Kerry. At the foot of the forbidding western 
hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off
by two mountain streams. At times these streams
were low enough to ford with ease, but after a heavy
rain the water would rise four or five feet in a few
hours and the streams would become impassable torrents. 
For the sake of a widow whose hovel stood
on this island the Commission consented to build a
little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at
either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons
in weight, had only just been planted when a rain
came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy block of
cement had toppled over in the stream. This little
catastrophe was the first news conveyed by the
paternal storekeeper to the inspector on our arrival
in town, and we walked out to see what could be
done.

Standing by the stream, we were visible to the
expectant woman on the hill. In the soft mournful
light of the September afternoon I could see her
outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to
learn her fate. She came bare of head and bare of
foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to her bosom with
one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body
as she leaned on her own pier and bent her deep
eyes on us across the stream. As she told in the
slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of
the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those
eyes to the inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged 
in the water, as if to contemn it for lying
there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited
or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression
bespoke the sternness and gravity of her fight for
existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant fighter.
She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have
ever beheld.

If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the
anxieties of the winter. She seemed to look into
them through the grayness of the failing light. She
foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race
for her children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying 
them across on her back. And she clung to her
children.

“You have had trouble, my poor woman?” the
inspector said, knowing that her husband two years
before had been drowned in the torrent.

“Aye, indeed, your honor, ’tis I am the pity of the
world. One year ago my child was lost to me. It
was in the night-time, he was taken with a hemorrhage, 
with respects to your honor. I woke the
children to have them go for to bring the doctor,
but it was too late an they returned. He quenched
in my arms, at the dead hour of night.”

“The pity of the world” she was in truth. The
inspector could do nothing until the ground was
firm enough to support horses and tackle in the
spring. We walked back through the somber bog,
the mountains seeming to creep after us, and we
speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To
the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there
we came on another aspect of that plaintive acquiescence 
so strong in the woman. Yes, the storekeeper 
admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector 
was right: Foley had failed about the bridge.
“I’ll haul him over,” he said, full of sympathy for
the woman. And he would haul him over. And
the pier would lie there all winter.

If the people could feel that this solicitude of the
Estates Commission were national, it would bind
them to the government. But most of the inspectors
are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees,
well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between 
the lines. And so Kerry remains with the
old tradition of the government, suspicious of its
intentions, crediting what genuine services there are
to the race of native officials who alone have the
intuition of Kerry’s kind.

They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend
the Empire; that Empire which meant landlords and
land agents and rackrents for so many blind and
crushing years. They want those straight and stalwart 
and manly fellows in the trenches. But Kerry
knows what the trenches of Empire are already. It
has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs
between sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years
it can remember. It is no wonder Kerry cannot
grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so
readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted
a lease to live.

HENRY ADAMS [2]_
================

Henry Adams was born with his name on the
waiting list of Olympus, and he lived up to it. He
lived up to it part of the time in London, as secretary 
to his father at the Embassy; part of the time
at Harvard, teaching history; most of the time in
Washington, in La Fayette Square. Shortly before
he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the
United States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and
Olympus were confused. But not so long after 1838
the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to
control the country through the railroads there was
an inevitable shift in political gravity, and the center
of power became Ohio. It was Henry Adams’s fate
to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in
power; and Ohio did not comprehend Adams’s credentials. 
Those credentials, accordingly, were the
subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor.
They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history,
and Henry Adams gave a dozen years to Jefferson
and Madison. It was his humor afterwards to say
he had but three serious readers—Abram Hewitt,
Wayne MacVeagh and John Hay. His composure
in the face of this coolness was, however, a strange
blending of serenities derived equally from the cosmos 
and from La Fayette Square. He was not
above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even his
autobiography, a true title to Olympus, was issued
to a bare hundred readers before his death, and was
then deemed too incomplete to be made public. It
is made public now nominally for “students” but
really for the world that didn’t know an Adams when
it saw one.

For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry
Adams had the advantage of full years and happy
faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of both.
He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality
which is a bad tradition in English recollections.
He saved himself from mere recollections by taking
the world as an educator and himself as an experiment 
in education. His two big books were contrasted 
as *Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study
of Thirteenth-Century Unity*, and *The Education of
Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity*.
The stress on multiplicity was all the more
important because he considered himself eighteenth
century to start with, and had, in fact, the unity of
simple Americanism at the beginning.

Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of
basil in this always expanding tale of a development.
There are points about the development, about its
acceptance of a “supersensual multiverse”, which
only a Karl Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satisfactorily 
discuss or criticize. A reader like myself
gazes through the glass bottom of Adams’s style into
unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths
are clear and crisp. They deserve to be investigated. 
But a “dynamic theory of history” is no
proper inhabitant of autobiography, and “the larger
synthesis” is not yet so domesticated as the plebeian
idea of God. That Adams should conduct his study
to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent culmination. 
A theory of life is the fit answer to the supersensual 
riddle of living. But when the theory must
be technical and even professional, an autobiography
has no climax in a theory. It is better to revert, as
Adams does, to the classic features of human drama:
“Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should
be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and
infinite in wealth and depth of tone—but never
hustled.” It is enough to have the knowledge that
along certain lines the prime conceptions were shattered 
and the new conceptions pushed forward, the
tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in the twentieth
century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of
acceleration.

Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams
embraced the modernity that gradually dawned on
him and gave him his new view of life. Take his
fresh enthusiasm for world’s fairs as a solitary example. 
One might expect him to be bored by them,
but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford White and
Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of
America, and Henry Adams soared over their obviousness 
to a perception of their “acutely interesting” 
exhibits. He was after—something. If the
Virgin Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or
St. Louis could give it to him among the Jugo-Slavs
and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done.
No vulgar prejudices held him back. He who could
interpret the fight for free silver without a sniff of
impatience, who could study Grant without the least
filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his
nose at unfashionable faiths or to espouse fashionable heresies. He was after education and any century 
back or forward was grist to his mill. And
his faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in
it. “All one’s life,” as he confesses grimly, “one
had struggled for unity, and unity had always won,”
yet “the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased,
was increasing, and threatened to increase beyond
reason.” Beyond reason, then, it was reasonable to
proceed, and the son of Ambassador Adams moved
from the sanctity of Union with his feet feeling
what way they must, and his eye on the star of
truth.

So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how
keen it is. But there is no single dullness, as I remember, 
in 505 large pages, and there are portraits
like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or
the Adamses, which have the economy and fidelity
of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not, nor is he
a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct
expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and
he can load a sentence with a world of meaning.
Take, for instance, the phrase in which he denies
unity to London society. “One wandered about in
it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab,
to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time.” He says
of St. Gaudens that “he never laid down the law,
or affected the despot, or became brutalized like
Whistler by the brutalities of his world.” In a
masterly chapter on woman, he summed up, “The
woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation,
and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and
the family. The idea that she was weak revolted
all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that
even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed
at; but it was surely true that, if force were to be
diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and
the family must pay for it.... She must, like the
man, marry machinery.” In Cambridge “the liveliest 
and most agreeable of men—James Russell
Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son
Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and
a dozen others, who would have made the joy of
London or Paris—tried their best to break out and
be like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but
society called them professors, and professors they
had to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy
for companionship, all were famished for want of it.
Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The
elements were there; but society cannot be made up
of elements—people who are expected to be silent
unless they have observations to make—and all the
elements are bound to remain apart if required to
make observations.”

Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact,
that Henry Adams himself felt the necessity of making 
observations. He approached autobiography
buttoned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human
beings he had a real impulse to release himself, and
to release himself in an autobiography if nowhere
else; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he could no
more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day
than he could dance like Nijinski. In so far as the
Adamses were institutional he could talk of them
openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence
Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge
and St. Gaudens as any liberated host might reveal
himself in the warm hour after dinner. But this is
not the Dionysiac tone of autobiography and Henry
Adams was not Dionysiac. He was not limitedly
Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was receptive, he
was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the
mere mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the preface 
of this autobiography raises doubts as to Henry
Adams’s evasive principle, “the object of study is
the garment, not the figure.” The figure, Henry
Adams’s, had nagging interest for Henry Adams, but
something racial required him to veil it. He could
not, like a Rousseau or “like a whore, unpack his
heart with words.”

The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on
the word “education.” Although he was nearly
seventy when he laid the book aside and although
education means nothing if it means everything, the
whole seventy years were deliberately taken as devotion 
to a process, that process being visualized much
more as the interminable repetition of the educational 
escalator itself than as the progress of the person 
who moves forward with it. Moves forward
to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams’s
detachment that no escalator could move him forward 
anywhere because he was not bound anywhere
in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak
of his life as perpetually educational. One reason,
of course, was his economic security. There was no
wolf to devour him if his education proved incomplete. 
Faculty *qua* faculty could remain a permanent 
quandary to him, so long as he were not forced
to be vocational, so long as he could speculate on “a
world that sensitive and timid natures could regard
without a shudder.”

The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, however, 
is one of the principal fascinations of this altogether fascinating book. What was it that kept
Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay?
What was it that sent him from Boston to Mont-Saint-Michel 
and Chartres? The man was a capable 
and ambitious man, if ever there was one. He
was not merely erudite and reflective and emancipatingly 
skeptical: he was also a man of the largest
inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man
of the nicest temper and the sanest style. How
could such justesse go begging, even in the United
States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry
Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen
he sat waiting for a clientage that never came, while
through a hole he could see a steady crowd go pouring 
into the gilded doors across the way. The
modest screen was himself. He could not detach
it. But the United States did not see beyond the
screen. A light behind a large globule of colored
water could at any moment distract it. And in
England, for that matter, only the Monckton Milneses 
kept the Delanes from brushing Adams away,
like a fly.

The question is, on what terms did Adams want
life? It is characteristic of him that he does not
specify. But one gathers from his very reticence
that he had least use of all for an existence which required 
moral multiplicity. Where he seems gravest
and least self-superintending is in those criticisms
of his friends that indicate the sacrifice of integrity.
He was no prig. Not one bleat of priggishness
is heard in all his intricate censure of the eminent
British statesmen who sapped the Union. But there
is a fund of significance in his criticism of Senator
Lodge’s career, pages 418 and on, in which “the
larger study was lost in the division of interests and
the ambitions of fifth-rate men.” It is in a less
concerned tone that the New Yorker Roosevelt
is discussed. “Power when wielded by abnormal
energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt’s 
friends know that his restless and combative
energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more
than any other man living within the range of notoriety, 
showed the singular primitive quality that belongs 
to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval 
theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”
Pure act Henry Adams was not. If Roosevelt exhibited 
“the effect of unlimited power on limited
mind,” he himself exhibited the contrary effect of
limited power on unlimited mind. Why his power
remained so limited was the mystery. Was he a
watched kettle that could not boil? Or had he no
fire in his belly? Or did the fire fail to meet the
kettle? Almost any problem of inhibition would
be simpler, but one could scarcely help ascribing
something to that refrigeration of enthusiasm which
is the Bostonian’s revenge on wanton life force. Except 
for his opaline ethics, never glaring yet never
dulled, he is manifestly toned down to suit the most
neurasthenic exaction. Or, to put it more crudely,
he is emotion Fletcherized to the point of inanition.

Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the
autobiography is a refutation of anæmia. There
was, indeed, something meager about Henry
Adams’s soul, as there is something meager about a
butterfly. But the lack of sanguine or exuberant
feeling, the lack of buoyancy and enthusiasm, is
merely a hint that one must classify, not a command
that one condemn. For all this book’s parsimony,
for all its psychological silences and timidities, it is
an original contribution, transcending caste and class,
combining true mind and matter. Compare its comment 
on education to the comment of Joan and Peter—Henry 
Adams is to H. G. Wells as triangulation
to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations
which goes by the name of understanding was part
of his very nature. Unlike H. G. Wells, he was incapable 
of cant. He had no demagoguery, no mob-oratory, 
no rhetoric. This enclosed him in himself
to a dangerous degree, bordered him on priggishness 
and on egoism. But he had too much quality
to succumb to these diseases of the sedentary soul.
He survives, and with greatness.

.. [2] *The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.*

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
====================

Sweet and wild, if you like, the first airs of
spring, sweeter than anything in later days; but
when we make an analogy between spring and
youth and believe that the enchantment of one is
the enchantment of the other, are we not dreaming
a dream?

Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not
a poet. Just because it is formative and fugitive
it evokes imagination; it has a bloom too momentary
to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it
is seen. In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses
itself. It is a delicacy as tender as the first green
leaf, an innocence like the shimmering dawn,
“brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle
of falling water and singing birds.” People feel
this when they accept youth as immaculate and heed
its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at
twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think
that youth has the air of spring about it, that spring
is the morning of the gods. Youth is so often
handsome and straight and fearless; it has its mysterious
silences—its beings are beings of clear fire
in high spaces, kin with the naked stars. Yet there
is in it something not less fiery which is far more
human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers
on board.

As one grows older one is less impatient of the
supposition that innocence actually exists. It exists, 
even though mothers may not properly interpret
it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism
which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth
is neither innocence nor experience. It is a duel
between innocence and experience, with the attainments 
of experience guarded from older gaze. Human 
beings take their contemporaries for granted,
no one else: and neither teachers nor superiors nor
even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that
innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw
around youth.

If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its
own innocence, the coming of experience is all the
more painful. The process of change is seldom
serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality.
The impressionable and histrionic youth has incessant 
disappointment in trying misfit spiritual garments. 
The undisciplined faculty of make-believe,
which is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to
torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been
earned and self-acceptance begun.

Do mature people try to help this? Do they
remember their own uncertainty and frustration?
One of the high points in Mr. Trotter’s keen psychological 
study, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and
War, indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr.
Trotter goes beyond Samuel Butler and Edmund
Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful experience. 
He shows the forces at work behind the
patronizing and victimizing of the young.

    The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge
    and experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man
    and to surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or
    taste....

    Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the
    ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of
    age and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history,
    proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence
    and enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immemorial 
    wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling
    of senile decay.

The day will come when our present barbaric attitude 
toward youth will be altered. Before it can
be altered, however, we must completely revise our
conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly 
innocent than it is certainly happy, and the
conspiracy of silence that surrounds youth is not
to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness. 
Innocence, besides, can last too long.
Every one has pitied stale innocence. If a New York
child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may quite
easily be shocking to older people. Already, without 
any particular viciousness or precocity, he has
accumulated a huge number of undesirable impressions, 
and shoved them under the surface of his
mind. What, then, to do? The air of spring that
is about him need not mislead his guardians. They
may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a
naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only
one agent of innocence, and not the most successful.
Certainly not the most successful for domesticating
youth in the sphere that men and women consider
fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain
innocent long after it recognizes the example and
feels the impulses of its elders, the invitation will go
unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or
see the moving pictures without realizing a discrepancy 
between conduct and precept, which is one
hint to precept to take off its bib.

This knowingness is not quite what it seems to
be. Youth is never so young as when experienced.
But those who must deal with it cannot lose by making 
it more articulate, by saving it from the silly
adult exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this
jealousy and pride continually operates against
youth in the name of dignity and discipline. And
so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction
that portrays youth as the spring time of the spirit;
that pipes a song about a lamb, and leads the lamb
to slaughter.

THE IRISH REVOLT
================

    “It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it
    is altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven.”

    —G. K. Chesterton in *The Crimes of England*, 1916.

When a rebellion has failed men say it was
wicked or foolish. It is, on the contrary, wickedness
and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise
against authority the measure of their act cannot
be loyalty or prudence. It is the character of the
authority against which men revolt that must shape
one’s mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on
his life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction
on authority. Is it just authority, representative,
tolerable? The only revolt that is wicked or foolish
is the revolt against reasonable or tolerable authority. 
If authority is not livable, revolt is a thousand 
times justified.

The Irish rebellion was not prudent. Its imprudence 
did not weigh with the men who took to
arms. Had hope inspired them, they would have
been utterly insane. But hope did not inspire them.
They longed for success; they risked and expected
death. The only consequence to us, wrote Padraic
Pearse before action, is that some of us may be
launched into eternity. “But who are we, that we
should hesitate to die for Ireland? Are not the
claims of Ireland greater on us than any personal
ones? Is it fear that deters us from such an enterprise? 
Away with such fears. Cowards die many
times, the brave only die once.” To strike a decisive 
blow was the aspiration of the Irish rebels.
But decisive or not, they made up their minds to
take action before the government succeeded in attaching 
all their arms.

In this rebellion there was no chance of material
victory. Pearse, MacDonagh, Connolly, Clark,
Plunkett, O’Rahilly, O’Hanrahan, Daly, Hobson,
Casement, could only hope against hope. But their
essential objective was not a soldiery. It was an
idea, the idea of unprotested English authority in
Ireland. It was to protest against the Irish nation’s
remaining a Crown Colony of the British Empire
that these men raised their republican standard and
under it shed their blood. In the first process of that
revolt few of them were immediately sacrificed.
Their fight was well planned. They made the most
of their brief hour. But when they were captured
the authority they had opposed fulfilled their expectations 
to the utmost. Before three army officers,
without a legal defender, each of the leaders was
condemned by court-martial. Their rebellion had
been open. Their guilt was known and granted.
They met, as they expected to meet, death.

The insurrection in Ireland is ended. A cold
tribunal has finished by piecework the task that the
soldiers began. The British Empire is still dominant
in Dublin. But ruthless and remorseless behavior
sharpens the issue between authority and rebellion.
Even men who naturally condemn disorder feel impelled 
to scrutinize the authority which could deliberately 
dispense such doom. If that authority deserved respect in Ireland, if it stood for justice and
the maintenance of right, its exaction of the pound
of flesh cannot be questioned. It does not represent
“frightfulness.” It represents stern justice. Its
hand should be universally upheld. But if, on the
other hand, English authority did not deserve respect 
in Ireland, if it had forfeited its claims on these
Irishmen, then there is something to be made known
and said about the way in which this Empire can
abuse its power.

Between the Irish people and English authority,
as every one knows, there has been an interminable
struggle. A tolerable solution of this contest has
only recently seemed in sight. The military necessity 
of England has of itself precluded one solution,
the complete independence of Ireland. The desire
for self-government in Ireland has opposed another
solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Between 
these two goals the struggle has raged bitterly. 
But human beings cannot live forever in
profitless conflict. After many years the majority
of the English people took up and ratified the Irish
claims to self-government. In spite of the conservative 
element in England and the British element in
Ireland, the *modus vivendi* of home rule was arranged. 
It is the fate of this *modus vivendi*, accepted 
by the majority of Irishmen as a reasonable
commutation of their claims, that explains the recent
insurrection. These men who are dead were once
for the most part Home Rulers. Their rebellion
came about as a sequel to the unjust and dishonest
handling of home rule.

For thirty-five years home rule has been an issue
in Great Britain. The majority of the British people supported Gladstone during many home rule
sessions. The lower house of Parliament repeatedly
passed the measure. The House of Lords, however,
turned a face of stone to Ireland. It icily rejected
Ireland’s offer to compound her claims. This irreconcilable 
attitude proved in the end so monstrous
that English Liberalism revolted. It threw its
weight against the rigid body that denied it. It compelled 
the House of Lords to accept the Parliament
act, its scheme for circumventing the peers’ veto.
Then, three times in succession, it passed the home
rule bill.

Every one knows what happened. During the
probation of the bill the forces that could no longer
avoid it constitutionally made up their minds that
they would defeat it unconstitutionally. Men left
the House of Lords and the House of Commons to
raise troops in eastern Ulster. These, not the Irish,
were Germany’s primary allies in the British Isles.
Cannon, machine guns, and rifles were shipped to
Ireland. Every possible descendant of the implanted 
settlers of Ireland was rallied. Large numbers 
were openly recruited and armed. The Ulster
leaders pleaded they were loyal, but they insisted
that the Liberals of England did not and could not
speak for the Empire. The only English authority
they recognized was an authority like-minded to
themselves. Lord Northcliffe joined with Lord
Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and Lord Willoughby 
de Broke and Lord Roberts and Sir Edward 
Carson and Bonar Law to advise and stimulate 
rebellion. Some of the best British generals in
the army, to the delight of Germany, were definitely
available as leaders. A provisional government,
with Carson as its premier, was arranged for in
1911. The Unionist and Orange organizations
pledged themselves that under no conditions would
they acknowledge a home rule government or obey its
decrees. In 1912 the Solemn Covenanters pledged
themselves “to refuse to recognize its authority.”
During this period the government negotiated, but
took no action. There were no Nationalists under
arms.

If free men have a right to rebel, how can any
one gainsay Ulster? It was the Ulster contention
that home rule would be unreasonable, intolerable,
and unjust. This was a prophecy, perhaps a natural
and credible prophecy. But it is not necessary to
debate the Ulster rebellion. It was a hard heritage
of England’s crime against Ireland. It is enough
to say that English authority refused to abandon
the home rule measure and in April, 1914, Mr. Asquith 
promised to vindicate the law.

The British League for the support of Ulster had
sent out “war calls.” The Ulster Unionist Council
had appropriated $5,000,000 for volunteer widows
and orphans. Arms had been landed from America 
and, it was said, from Germany. Carson had
refused to “negotiate” any further. His mobilization 
in 1914 became ominous. The government
started in moving troops to Ulster. The King intervened. 
Mr. Balfour inveighed against the proposal
to use troops. The army consulted with Carson.
Generals French and Ewart resigned.

About this period, with Asquith and Birrell failing 
to put England’s pledges to the proof, the National 
Volunteers at last were being organized. Mr.
Asquith temporized further. At his behest John
Redmond peremptorily assumed control of the
Volunteers. Their selected leader was Professor
MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the non-political
Gaelic revival. There was formal harmony until
the European war was declared, when Mr. Redmond 
sought to utilize the National Volunteers for
recruiting. This move made definite the purely national 
dedication of the Irish Volunteers.

Four events occurred in rapid succession to destroy 
the Irish Volunteers’ confidence in English authority. 
These were decisive events, and yet events
over which the Irish Volunteers could have no control.

On July 10th, 1914, armed Ulster Volunteers
marched through Belfast, and Sir Edward Carson
held the first meeting of his provisional government.

On July 26th, 1914, the British troops killed three
persons and wounded thirty-two persons because
rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, subsequent 
to their futile attempt to intercept Irish
Volunteer arms.

On Sept. 19th, 1914, the home rule bill was signed,
but its operation indefinitely suspended.

In May, 1915, Sir Edward Carson became a member 
of the British Cabinet.

These events were endured by John Redmond.
He had early accepted a Fabian policy and put his
trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the price
of maintaining the law they decreed. The more
radical men in Dublin were not so trusting. They
had heard Asquith promise that no permanent division 
of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned
he had bargained for it. They had heard him
promise he would vindicate the law, and they saw
him sanction the defiant military leader as commander-in-chief 
and the defiant civil leader as a minister 
of the crown. With the vivid memory of British 
troops killing Irish citizens on the streets of
Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English
honor. They had no impulse to recruit for the defense 
on the Continent of an Empire thus honorable. 
They looked back on the evil history they had
been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and
to die.

Irishmen like myself who believed in home rule
and disbelieved in revolution did not agree with this
spirit. We thought southern Ireland might persuade 
Ulster. We thought English authority was
possibly weak and shifty, but benign. We did not
wish to see Ireland, in the words of Professor MacNeill, 
go fornicating with Germany. When our
brothers went to the European war we took England’s 
gratitude as heartfelt and her repentance as
deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest,
torture, rape, enforced subservience, ignorance,
poverty, famine. But we listened to G. K. Chesterton 
about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous
Ireland: “It was to doubt whether we were worthy
to kiss the hem of her garment.”

All the deeper, then, the shock we received from
the execution of our men of finest mettle. They
were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so was De
Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a
calculation based on the greater military strength
of the Dutch. A government which had negotiated
with rebels in the North, which had allowed the
retention of arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in
the Cabinet, could not mark an eternal bias in its
judgment of brave men whose legitimate constitutional 
prospects it had raised high and then intolerably 
suspended. But this English government,
often cringing and supine, was brave enough to slay
one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in
the name of “justice,” the judges in this rebellion
being officers of an army that had refused to stand
against rebellion in Ulster.

It is not in vain, however, that these poets and
Gaelic scholars and Republicans have stood blindfolded 
to be shot by English soldiers. Their verdict 
on English authority was scarcely in fault.
They estimated with just contemptuousness the temper 
of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland has long
been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone
from Ireland, by the fulfillment of England’s bond,
the memory of this rebellion must flourish. It testifies 
sadly but heroically that there are still Irishmen 
who cannot be sold over the counter, Irishmen 
who set no ultimate sanction on a dishonest
authority, Irishmen who set no ultimate value on
their merely mortal lives.

A LIMB OF THE LAW
=================

“Look here,” said the policeman, tapping me
on the chest, “Mrs. Trotsky used to live up here
above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And
then see what happens—she turns up in Stockholm
with two million roubles.”

“Oh, I don’t blame her. But ain’t we all human—Socialists, 
Democrats, Republicans? All
we need is a chance.”

“I admit, Socialism has beautiful ideas. But are
they practical? That’s what I ask. Now, pardon
me, just a minute! Just one minute, please!
Socialism is a fine theory, but look at Emma Goldman. 
That woman had seven lovers. Free love.
Yes, many a time I’ve heard them, preaching the
children belonged to the state. Here’s their argument, 
see, they say that a man and a woman wants
to get married but the man figures, have I enough
to support her? and the woman figures, how much
has he got? and the only thing for them to do in
that case is to turn the children over to the state.
Now, I ask you, is that human?”

“You say, a lot of these women in limousines
practice free love without preaching it. Oh, I don’t
deny it. And, look’t here, I’m surprised there isn’t
more bombs at that. Right here on the Avenue you
see the cars in one long procession all day, like every
one was a millionaire, and three blocks over you see
people who haven’t the means of livelihood, without
a shirt to their backs. I’m a public officer, as you
might say, and maybe it sounds queer what I’m going 
to say, but I’m afraid to have my own children
on the steps of the apartment house. I takes the
night-stick to them and I says, ‘Beat it out of here,
don’t let the landlord see you, or he’ll raise the rent
again.’”

“You said it, something’s rotten somewhere.
What do you think of the government holding back
all that meat, just because the packers want it fixed
that way, and plenty of people on the Lower East
Side there willing to buy it all up—and at good
prices too? But, no, it has to be held back to suit
the packers. And then they lower the price a little.
Because why? The government lets them have all
that meat for what they like.”

“It’s the same way with the ice. Did you see
what they done? The mayor gets them all together,
to prevent them boosting the price on it, and it’s
fixed; they can’t raise the price this summer to more
than five fifty a ton. They wait two days at the old
price, and then they put it at five fifty. Two days
they wait, that’s all.”

“Of course this is the best government in the
world. I’ll tell you what proves it—all these foreigners 
coming over here. Look at that soda-fountain 
man there. You heard him talk up for the
Bolsheviki, didn’t you? Well, he hasn’t much gray
matter in here, but just the same that fellow makes
as much in three months as I get for a whole lousy
year. Three months, and he hasn’t been here ten
years. And my people been here two hundred.
But these immigrants come over ignorant and uneducated, and only down in Kentucky and Tennessee
are our people not able to read and write. I hear
down there they are regular tribes, fighting each
other and all that. Of course that soda-fountain
man, he couldn’t associate with lots of the people I
go with. If he walked in, they’d look at him as
much as to say, ‘Who have we here?’ But he
rolls up the coin just the same.”

“But the trouble with the Russian people, I’ll
tell you. Why, eighty per cent of them can’t read
or write. Now I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s
like this: the Russian people is like a dog was tied
up in the back-yard, see, and then he was let loose
and he run wild with joy all over the place, and
then it depended who was the first to whistle to him,
whee-whee, and Lenin and Trotsky they whistled,
whee-whee, and the Russian people came right to
them. Of course I don’t think it’ll work. They
want to do away with money over there. You know,
you want to buy a shoeshine and you give a man a
head of cabbage. That’s impractical. And then
again the government can’t own everything. It’s
all right for public utilities, but you take and try
to control everything and what’ll happen? It can’t
be done. What I say is, let a man earn a million
or so, and then say to him, anything over and above
that million we take away, see? And when he has
his million he doesn’t go on trying to monopolize
everything. But now, you have all these uneducated 
people around here, and the more money they
earn the worse they are.”

“I’ll tell you. Right across the hall from where
my wife and me live there’s a lovely woman, a Jewess, 
one of the nicest people you could want to meet,
and I’m in her house and she’s in mine all the time,
until her husband comes home. But he’s one of
that kind, you know! The other night he comes
home with three friends and he says to me, ‘Say,
Charlie, come on down to Long Island with us in
the car for a week. I’ll pay all your expenses!’ 
‘You will, eh,’ I says. ‘Now I’ll tell you something.
That sort of thing don’t go with me. In
the first place, you know I can’t get leave to be away
from the police department for a week; in the second
place, you know I can’t leave my wife here; in the
third place, you know damn well I can’t afford
to go with you. I know your kind! You have
your three friends here and you want them to see
what a great guy you are. Well, I’ll tell you what
you are,’ and I told him. Now he’ll be the same
if he has a million. And I’ll tell you another kind
that hasn’t respectability. No, I mean decency.
She was a big fat woman and her baby was crying
here the other day, and she opened her dress right
there and leaned down to feed the child. You
know, just like that statue, I forget the name. And
all the little boys rubbering around. That’s the
class of people you have to contend with around
here in this place, with the air full of fish guts they
throw out of the windows, and everything.”

“But the German ones are different. Not that
I want to praise the Germans or the like of that,
but they’re self-respectful, you know. It’s the lack
of education with them others—those others.”

“But you put the Socialists in power and what
difference will it make? I’m—I’m not against
Socialism, I want you to understand. But there’s
human nature!”

A PERSONAL PANTHEON
===================

Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine,
Clarence Day shied a cocoanut at old Henri Fabre.
Personally I had nothing against Henri. I rather
liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence 
said publicly, “that old bird-artist, you don’t
have to admire him any longer.” Without waiting
for further encouragement I bounced Henri off the
steps of my Pantheon.

Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I
admit, but nothing is so important as to keep it from
getting crowded with half-gods. For many months
my own Pantheon has been seriously congested.
Most of the ancient deities are still around—George 
Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom
Hardy and Sam Butler—and there is a long waiting 
list suggested by my friends. Joseph Conrad
has been sitting in the lobby for several years, hungering 
for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated 
applications from such varied persons as
Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, Anatole
France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P.
Shelley, John Muir, George Washington and Mary
Wollstonecraft. But with so many occupants already 
installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed
in, it has been impossible to open the doors to newcomers. 
My gods are like the office-holders—few
die and none resign. And when a happy accident
occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel
as one feels when some third person is good enough
to smash the jardinière.

I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while.
Two or three years ago he swept into the Pantheon
on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse
for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest
gods I had ever encountered. His smile, his long
jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a Tussaud
figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and
William Blakes. I stood him in the corner when he
first arrived, debating where to put him, but at no
time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young
Teddy Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did
Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did Mr. Wadsworth
and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all,
had kept Mr. Wilson from being a Republican?
How did he differ intrinsically from a Henry Stimson, 
a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton?
The pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had
not the heart to enthrone him; and never shall I
enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the
flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and
commonplace humanity. He is President, as was
Taft. So is he impressive. But the expectation I
had blown up for him is punctured. He would have
been a god, despite all my prejudice against his styles,
if at any time he had proved himself to be the resolute 
democrat. But the resolute democrat he was
not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating 
his chest as well as he could, and he has to
get out of my Pantheon.

This eviction of the President relieves my feelings
like a good spring cleaning. To be con-structive
gives me pleasure, but not half so much pleasure as
to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former
mental and spiritual habitations. A great many
people are catholic. They have hearts in which
Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East
Lynne. I envy these people and their receptive
natures, but my own chief joy is to asphyxiate my
young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage 
of loyalty.

There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I
was unjust to Upton Sinclair that I almost subscribed
to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel, Jimmie
Higgins, I actually read it.

“My best book,” Mr. Sinclair assures the world.
If that is really the case, as I hope, I am happily
emancipated from him forever. He is something of
an artist. He converts into his own kind of music
the muck-rake element in contemporary journalism.
He is always a propagandist, and out of religious
finance or the war or high society or the stockyards
or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that
nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on
such stimulants, one ought to choose them carefully,
and I’d much rather go straight to Billy Sunday than
take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on
reading his well-known health books, I nearly fasted
nine days under his influence. That is to say, I
fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which
I dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced
me that I was perhaps a coarser organism than Mr.
Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an ordinary diet.
But until I had a good reason for expelling this
uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always 
in danger of taking him seriously. Now, I am
glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am
safe.

Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom
Upton Sinclair is nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion 
of Nietzsche was also required. When we
used to read the *New Age* ten years ago, with Oscar
Levy’s steady derision of everything and anything
not Nietzschean, I had a horrible sense of inadequacy, 
and I started out to read the Master’s works.
It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and
worm as I was, I found Nietzsche upsetting all the
other fellows in the Pantheon. He and William
Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity. 
Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny
stories. He was sulky with George Meredith and
frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss
Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but
I voted him away.

This Olympian problem does not seem to bother
men like William Marion Reedy. Mr. Reedy is
the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee
Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism, 
Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile
salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops
and publishers, and he is genuinely himself with all
of them. He finds the common denominator in
machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and
without turning a hair he moves from tropical to
arctic conversation. He is at home with Celtic fairies 
and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance and
St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe
he has, it must be a good deal like a Union depot,
with gods coming in and departing on every train
and he himself holding a glorious reception at the
information booth. I am sure he can still see the
silver lining to W. J. Bryan and the presidential
timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun
of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a
good word for Freud. He has nothing against
Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity 
puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies 
is called upon to slave in their service, to rush
here and there like a general practitioner, to sleep
with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at
his head. How does he find the energy to do it!
I admire it. I marvel at men who understand all
and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore
Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt
Whitman. Think of those who have a good word
to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am
sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a
lot of much-needed vitality. Give me a temple on
a high hill, with a long drop down from the exit.

NIGHT LODGING
=============

It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim
Gorki’s Night Lodging of “gloom.” Gloomy
plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one
of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a
play like She Walked in Her Sleep? That defunct 
comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle
race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies
that. But to believe that a somber play must
necessarily be a “gloomy” play is like believing that
Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply
isn’t true, and to suppose it is mentally inelastic.

But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We
say, Ah yes, Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen,
the man who bites on granite; or Gorki, the Big
Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are
simply human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions 
of the fifth grade. This is itself an old
story in criticism. Only the story has to be re-told
every time the New York newspaper critics are called
upon to characterize a serious drama. With a regularity 
as unfailing as the moon, the New York critics
reaffirm their conviction that a play concerning derelict 
human beings must of course be squalid, sodden,
high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to
believe and assert such things, yet their belief and
assertion are endemic in the New York newspapers,
like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps.

Mr. Arthur Hopkins’s presentation of Night
Lodging at the Plymouth Theatre may or may not
be better than the presentation some time ago at the
German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the
performance at the German theatre and I am inclined 
to distrust the persons to whom the German
theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick
with which to whack the American theatre. But,
better or worse than the German performance, Mr.
Hopkins’s is to the good. It is a strong, firm, spacious, 
capable performance, resting not so much on
a few pinnacles as on a general level of excellence.
It is presented bravely. Making no attempt to
sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics,
it allows the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate
every word and action of the performance. The
result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every actor
in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness.
But the result is viable, Russian or not. A sense of
human incident and human presence is quickly secured, 
and after that there comes a stream of events
which never loses its reality either in force or direction. 
The impact is tremendous. Gorki inundates
one’s consciousness with these human fortunes and
misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while
occasional accents slip awry in the tumult of his
creation, the substance of his story finds one a corroborator—in 
a way that one simply never corroborates 
depression or gloom.

The men and women, who come together in this
night lodging of a Russian city, are of the emancipated 
kind that one sees on the benches in Madison
Square. They are recruited from the casual worker
and the non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the criminals and the broken
and the déclassé. On the first evening when one
hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, 
one realizes that their anarchism is bitter.
They grate on one another, sneer at one another,
bawl at one another, tell one another to go to hell.
They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled
them. They do not understand or accept their fate.
They are full of self-pity. They are, in a word,
one’s tired and naked self. But this relaxed and
wanton selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps
for his people the freshness of childhood—a freshness 
charming in some cases, horrible in others, but
always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal 
themselves in this nudity of common poverty!
A woman in the corner is coughing, coughing. She
wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His
patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies
a man half recovered from a drunken brawl. He
aches loudly with stale liquor and stale wounds. In
the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the
wife of the lodging-house keeper—a mistress from
whom he pines to escape. The “baron” sits in the
shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary
sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor 
repeats the medical verdict that his organism is
poisoned with alcohol. “You mean ‘organon,’” 
shouts another. “No, organism. My organism....” 
And so, these lives sweep round and
round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the sport of
the winds of heaven.

Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical
patriarchal wanderer. Quite simply he fits into this
life of the basement, but unlike the rest he is no
longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect
in his anarchism. And gradually the lives of the
night lodging group around him. He sits by the dying 
woman. He talks of women to the young thief,
and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning 
to the young. He stands like an untroubled
oak in the gales that toss the others hither and
thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets
them all with compassion, a man among children.

He goes. His presence has not prevented the
lodging-house keeper’s wife from driving the young
man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented that
flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the
young man really loves. But though the old man
departs he leaves after him a rent of blue in the
clouds that choke these people’s lives. One after
another the night lodgers question life afresh under
the wanderer’s influence. The tartar’s arm is still
smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is
still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The
actor is still alcoholic. But there is aroused in the
night lodging the imperishable dream of happiness,
and no one is ready to quench it.

Why is the grave and beautiful play *not* gloomy?
It is not enough to say that the really gloomy play
gives a naturalistic version of life which the spectator
rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the
falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows
or in its discords but in its absence of the vitamin
of beauty. Many plays are denied truth because
their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied
beauty simply because their beauty is a stranger.
Yet we know that truth or beauty may be as sable
as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the
child of ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, 
conventional ugliness. It is the people who
think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see
Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail
in beholding life. It is not poor in sympathy.

YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC
=====================

In 1912, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the
public how Mr. Taft had bitten the hand that fed
him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft’s rejoinder but it
was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further observations
from the colonel. Those were the days.
Nothing but peace on earth and good will among
Republicans.

About that time I happened to have lunch with a
most attractive young man, one of the first American
aviators. He was such a clear-cut young man, with
trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said
he to me, “But how can these things be true? I
can’t understand it. If any one else said these things
you’d pay no attention to them, but both of these men
are fine men; they’ve both been president; and if
these things they say *are* true, then neither of them
can be such fine gentlemen. I can’t make it out, honestly.”
And he looked at me with a profundity of
pained inquiry.

What could I say? What can you say when you
meet with such simple faith? It took years of
primary school and Fourth of July and American
history to build up this conception of the American
presidents, and now the worst efforts of a president
and an ex-president had only barely shaken the top-structure.
What was the good of forcing this youth
to unlearn everything he had learned? If I took
away his faith in the divine office of president, perhaps
he might begin to lose his patriotism and his
willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps
he might go on and lose faith in the jury
system, the institution of marriage, the right of free
speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance
of Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment.
If I unhinged this lad’s faith, perhaps he
would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther,
Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma
Goldman—the “Goldman Woman” as the Ochs
man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed
man call her in their outbursts of American chivalry.
I wanted no such arid and lonely career for this
splendid young man. I hated to think of his wearing
an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his
fresh bloom to be a subversive idealist like Eugene
Debs. Much better, said I to myself, that he should
hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than that he
should repulse him and face life without him. So I
gave the lad soothing words and earnest though insincere
glances, and he went his way puzzled but
greatly reassured.

Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say
that simple faith is all very well, but a man ought to
live in the real world and know his way around.
Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing
situation. He is compelled to evade uncomfortable
facts. Very true. Quite right. Exactly so. But
is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of
being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a
simpleton and yet a wholesome man of action, a man
of will and character and pep? What is the good
of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalatable facts, if it confuses you and upsets you and
undermines everything you’ve been brought up to believe?
What’s the use? Voltaire may be all right
in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we
all be Voltaires?

If I stick up for good faith in the character of
presidents, I know that there will be a bad comeback.
I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even
if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I
therefore to give in to them? I refuse to admit
that there is nothing else than to destroy a beautiful
faith in the good that is everywhere.

What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old
argument of the war. They say: Yes, your fine
brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical product
of patriotism. And where were the prime examples
of patriotism to be found? In Germany.
He happens, in your instance, to believe in the divine
office of the presidents. But it is much more characteristic
of him to be on his knees to the Kaiser.
Yet consider how one-sided you are. When he declares
himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the
joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his
reverence over the Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of
Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when it comes
to an American you say, “Oh, don’t let’s destroy
this beautiful faith! How precious it is, how noble,
how commendable! Hands off, please.” And you
act in the same way toward the Constitution or the
Supreme Court. It’s magnificent when the Germans
come ahead with a perfectly good new constitution,
model 1920. But we must stick to the brand of
1789, with the cow-catcher added in 1910. Hail to
Our Iron Constitution! And hail to the Old Man’s
Home down in Washington where they hand out the
uncontaminated economics that they themselves
lisped at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country.
Straight from the source, these old men got their
inspiration, and they are a credit to the early nineteenth 
century. You think we exaggerate your
loyalty? You agree that the simple faith of young
Germans and young Turks can be highly dangerous,
but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young
Americans?

That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way;
but hardly likely to fool the intelligent, law-abiding,
God-fearing citizen. Because no good American
could admit for one instant that the cases are on all
fours. America, after all, is a democracy. And
when a young man starts out having faith in a democracy 
he is in an altogether different position from
Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet
Russians and people like that. A democracy, whatever 
its faults, is founded in the interests of all the
people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple
faith in it is equivalent to simple faith in a first
principle; and you cannot go behind first principles.

That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic.
He thinks it is very clever to question the things
that are of the light in just the same spirit that he
questions things that are of the darkness. And of
course he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who
cuts away the sound flesh rather than the diseased
flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive
not con-structive.

And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion
my fine young aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning 
him, who can tell what the consequences
might have been? We know that during the war
there were grim duties to be performed by our young
men—towns to be bombed where it took excessive
skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the
women and the children. If I had sapped this boy’s
faith even one pulsation, perhaps he would have
failed in his duty.

You cannot be too careful how you lead people to
rationalize. In this world there is rationalism and
plenty of it. But is there not also a super-rationalism? 
And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism 
when we *know* we possess the true faith?

THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID [3]_
======================================================

The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so
he had to pick his steps with care. But at last
he came to a French window, which he opened, and
sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was
a poet, and that is what young poets do.

He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men
go. Unformed, of course—perhaps twenty minutes 
late and the hall only two-thirds full. But he
was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the
gas. He was from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho,
but he had long resided with an aunt in Nebraska
and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts
and a lemon tie. At Harvard—he went to
Harvard—he had opened his bean with considerable 
difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of
temperament. So that he could never stop himself
when he beheld a passing star.

The motion was full, with significant curves. It
made him a little air-sick at first, but he preferred
air-sickness. He made no compromise with the
public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days
that quickly ceased to be solar, he was rewarded.
He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of Venus on the
main line.

In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick
their heels toward Mercury, and utter startling
cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the menagerie, 
and they feed mathematical instructors through
a hole in the wall. This new participant had too
much of the stern blood of the Puritan in his rustproof 
veins to kick more than one heel at a time,
but when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of
seventy years he felt a little wishful, and permitted
himself a trifling ululation. The local cheer-leader
heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard
Acutist, and there was joy in Asphodelia.

A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping 
in the branches of the cocoanut tree, and the
river of green ink wearied him. So when the next
star swung around he slipped away from his pink
duenna and crept into the lattice-work to steal his
passage home.

Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He
hung there lonely, in his Reis underwear, aching in
the void.

He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he
trans-shipped to New York in ordinary ways, he
prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue
course on Front Street.

“My boy,” said his uncle, “what do you want
me to do for you? Speak the word. You have
been gone so long, and you were given up for lost.”

“Only one thing do I want,” confessed the former 
Acutist.

“And what might that be?” the uncle more circumspectly 
inquired.

“Take me at once to the great simple embrace
of wholesome Coney Island.”

So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit,
the young poet stepped from Acutism on to the
Iron Boat.

And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... 
But must we not leave something to waft in
the spaces of uncertainty?

.. [3] Inscribed to the *Little Review*

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
====================

I am sorry now not to have treasured every word
that came from my poet. At the moment I disliked
to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my dignity.
But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook 
are not ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. 
Why should I have hesitated to take notes
of William Butler Yeats?

In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his
host agreed, and I intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. 
I say intruded: his forehead wrinkled in
tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I
was welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he
was not unwilling to speak. His dark eyes, oblique
and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and
remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a
secret. He opened them for utterance almost as in
a dream. As if he were spokesman of some sacred
book spread in front of him but raptly remembered,
he pronounced his opinions seriously, occasionally
raising his hands to fend his words. He was, I
think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was
indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished
conversation. Or, rather, monologue—for 
when I talked he suspended his animation, like
a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.

It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked
him if he’d write for it, and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action and that
nothing except the last stage of exasperation could
make him want to write for a journal as he had
written about Blanco Posnet or The Playboy. The
word “journalism” he uttered as a nun might utter
“vaudeville.” He was reminded, he said, of an
offer that was made to Oscar Wilde of the editorship 
of a fashion paper, to include court gossip.
Wouldn’t it interest Wilde? “Ah, yes,” responded 
Wilde, “I am deeply interested in a court
scandal at present.” The journalist (devourer of
carrion, of course) was immediately eager.
“Yes,” said Wilde, “the scandal of the Persian
court in the year 400 B. C.”

It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. 
I could not forget, however, pillars of the
*Ladies’ World* edited by Oscar Wilde which I used
to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended
in the end.

Yeats’s mind was bemused by his recollection of his
fellow-Irishman. Once he completed his lectures he
would go home, and a “fury of preoccupation” 
would keep him from being caught in those activities
that lead to occasional writing. His lectures would
not go into essays but into dialogues, “of a man
wandering through the antique city of Fez.” In the
cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there
was a mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of
the moment, the gaze of a stranger to fashion who
might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond
space and time.

“And humanitarian writing,” he concluded, with
a weary limp motion of his hand, “the writing of
reformers, ‘uplifters,’ with a narrow view of democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And
truistic.”

I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel’s narrow antidemocracy 
and belief in the non-existence of progress, 
such as he had argued in Virginia during the
Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate
nature. The progress he denied was a progress
wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the early Victorians. 
It was founded on “truisms” not really
true. Whether Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to
repudiate these ideas he didn’t know: possibly Mitchel
was.

Yeats’s one political interest at that time, before
the war, was the Irish question. He believed in
home rule. He believed the British democracy was
then definitely making the question its own, and
“this is fortunate.” I spoke of Jung’s belief in
England’s national complex. He was greatly interested. 
Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted.
“The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration,”
he said, “and Carson has stimulated this.
His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so there
cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with
Redmond that Carson has gone ahead on a military
conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for a party
reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think
Asquith is a better man than Lloyd George—less
inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed up with big
phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it
arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other
people’s sins his business, and forgets his chief business,
his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, that is different.”

His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a
good deal of audiences. In his own audiences he
found no one more eager, no one who knows more,
than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He
was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find
prosperity go hand in hand with culture in this country.
In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely
to be a poor audience. Where it is good, the audience
is good. In his own country the happiest woman he
could name was a woman living in a Dublin slum
whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies.
Is poverty an evil? We should desire a
condition of life which would satisfy the need for
food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in imagination.
The merchant builds himself a palace
only for auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as
rich as the merchant. I said yes, but that a brute or
a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination.
He agreed. “Life is the warring of forces and these
forces seem to be irreconcilable.”

It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty.
I spoke of the deadness of so much of the work done
by William Sharp and Grant Allen. He said it was
Allen’s own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too
many thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up
their children on the same scale as their friends’
children! And he kindled at this folly. “A
woman who marries an artist,” he said with much
animation, “is either a goose, or mad, or a hero.
If she’s a goose, she drives him to earn money. If
she’s mad she drives him mad. If she’s a hero, they
suffer together, and they come out all right.”

Phrases like this were not alone. There was the
keen observation that the Pennsylvania station is
“free from the vulgarity of advertisement”; the
admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry
except in The Dark Rosaleen and Hussey’s Ode; a
generalization on Chicago to the effect that “courts
love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art.” Not
for a moment did this mind cease to move over the
face of realities and read their legend and interpret
its meaning. Meeting him was not like Hazlitt’s
meeting Coleridge. I could not say, “my heart,
shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has
never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak
to; but that my understanding also did not remain
dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to
express itself, I owe to Coleridge.” But the Yeats
I met did not meet me. I remained on the periphery.
Yet from what I learned there I can believe in
the sesame of poets. I hope that some one to-day,
nearer to him than a journalist, is wise enough to
treasure his words.

“WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE”
=========================

Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of
bombardment. A great detonation tore the silence;
an answering explosion shook it; then came a series
of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look
out on a rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip
of sky to the south. In the ache of something not
unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as quickly
as I could what was happening. No result from the
explosions was to be seen. The skyscrapers were
gaunt and black, with a square of lost light in a room
or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the
stars unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered,
insanely active, beyond the blank buildings,
under the serene sky.

I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it
be on the river? Could it be gun practice, or was
there really an interchange of gun-fire? A U-boat?
An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained
and my mind was singularly lively for three
a. m.

Long after your country has gone to war, I told
myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sympathies,
what may fairly be called a neutrality of the
imagination. You are aware that there is fighting,
bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the philosophic.
You do not put yourself in the place of
Americans under fire. But if this be really bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant
how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem
the supreme understander of the situation. An
enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would
run a girdle of feeling from New York to the remotest
fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. To protect
ourselves against the hysteria of hatred—that
would always be a necessity. But I grimly remembered
the phrase, “proud punctilio.” I remembered
the President’s tender-minded words, “conduct
our operations as belligerents without passion,”
and his pledge of sincere friendship to the German
people: warfare without “the desire to bring any
injury or disadvantage upon them.” Here, with the
Germans’ shell-fire plowing into our buildings and
into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of
their guns?

Becoming awake enough to think about the war,
I began to reason about this “bombardment,” to
move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson Maxim-Cleveland
Moffett zone. The detonations were
continuing, but not at all sensationally, and soon
they began to shape themselves familiarly, to sound
remarkably like the round noises of trains shunting,
from the New York Central, carried on clear dry
November air. Soon, indeed, it became impossible
to conceive that these loud reverberations from the
Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so distorted
by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my
breathless inspection of the innocent sky!

But that touch of panic, in the interest of our
whole present patriotic cultural attitude, was not to
be lost. It is the touch, confessed or unconfessed,
that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward
German art and literature and science an attitude
of appreciation and reciprocation, without disloyalty,
it must be in the presence of the idea of shell-wounds 
German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness 
is the illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth
and smug. It is Pharisaical. It comes from that
neutrality of the imagination which is another name
for selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake.

A generation less prepared than our own for the
mood of warfare it would be difficult to imagine—less
prepared, that is to say, by the situation of our
country or the color of our thought. To declare
now that New York has made no provision for the
air-traffic of the future is not to arouse any sense
of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency
was aroused ten or fifteen years ago by the bass
warnings of military men. It is not too much to say
that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have
an ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas
Murray Butler and Elihu Root and Andrew Carnegie
were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel
Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was
far more busy enunciating the recall of judges—and
he earned the Nobel Prize. Few men, even two
years ago, believed we would be sending great armies
to Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like
Homer Lea had said that the United States could
not mobilize half a million soldiers for active service
in less than three years. And in the next place,
we still felt pacifically. We had lived domestic life
too long ever to imagine our sky black and our grass
red.

Because of this mental unpreparedness for war,
this calm enjoyment of an unearned increment of
peace, there was never a greater dislocation of standards
than our recent dislocation, and never a greater
problem of readjustment. For England, at any
rate, there was a closeness to the war that helped
to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here,
besides the discrepancies in the entailment of services,
there are enormous discrepancies in sentiment
to start with, and policies still to be accepted and
cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed
or reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances,
is so much to be looked for, especially
with impetuous patriots demanding a new password
of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not
at how many outrages there are, but how few.

Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of
literary discussion, naturally. “Let the sailor content
himself with talking of the winds; the herd of
his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of
his flocks”; the critic of his books. But there is one
kind of outrage that requires to be discussed, from
the point of view of culture, if only because there
is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be
subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally
so-called, of mutilating everything German;
not only sequestering what may be dangerous
or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration
everything that has German origin or bears a
German name. The quick transformation of Bismarcks
into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into
Café New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously.
The shudderings at Germantown, Pa., and
Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same
childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian
artist is not permitted to perform because, while we
are not at war with Austria, she is our enemy’s ally.
It is different when “the music of all German composers
will be swept from the programmes of scheduled
concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh.
‘The Philadelphia Orchestra Association
wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure
to the request of the Pittsburgh Association. The
Philadelphia Orchestra Association is heartily in accord
with any movement directed by patriotic motives.’”
It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance
to culture, that suggests we have been surprised
in this whole matter of culture with our lamps untrimmed.

In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have
been unavoidably surprised—so much so that our
“proud punctilio” has been jogged considerably
loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any
pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to
be. It used to be possible, even for men whose
hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign magnanimous
truces; but science has made another kind of
warfare possible, and the civilian population of the
modern State, totally involved in a catastrophe beyond
all reckoning, falls from its complacency into
a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the
enemy is inhuman in this war.

Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred
might well go beyond the fervor of the Inquisition,
and the hope of exterminating the Germans as a
people might be universally entertained. But no one
who has read history to any purpose will trust too
far to this particular emotionality of the hour. To
say this, in the middle of a righteous war, may sound
unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could
be more traitorous and seditious than Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural Address: “Both read the same
Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes
his aid against the other.... The prayers of both
could not be answered—that of neither has been
answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.
‘Woe unto the world because of offenses!
for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we
shall suppose that American slavery is one of those
offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs
come, but which, having continued through his appointed
time, he now wills to remove, and that *he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as
the woe due to those by whom the offense came*, shall
we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a living God always
ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently
do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may
speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be
said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none;
with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as
God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s
wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the
battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do
all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting
peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” It
is, perhaps, like quoting the Lord’s Prayer. And
yet it is the neglected wisdom of a man who had
gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war.

But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside
humanity. We are engaged in a war foreordained
and necessary, a natural war. A war inescapable,
yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of
hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations
as this is, however, scarcely possible.
It is too much, in the face of superstitions, anxieties,
and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of culture
to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to
go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation
of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as
attacked The Playboy of the Western World in
New York is at once called “rowdy” and “despicable.”
But in time of war it is part of its morality,
or immorality, that culture must be subordinate
to clamor, and that even national sculpture must
become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respectable
and idealizing long feet. How far this supervision
of culture goes depends only on the degree of
pressure. It may go so far as to make the domination
of political considerations, state considerations,
paramount in everything—precisely the victory that
democracy, hoping with Emerson that “we shall one
day learn to supersede politics by education,” has
most to fear.

It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that
is free, that one must seek the opposition to enemy
culture, not in the culture that is opposed. Must
one, on this account, think any peace a good peace?
To do so is to show an immunity from the actual
which is not to be envied. It is only necessary to
imagine New York bombarded, as many French and
English and Belgian and Russian towns have been
bombarded since the beginning of the war, to realize
the rush of resistance that is born in mankind, expedient
for government to recruit and to rally to
the end. But for the man who has partaken of democratic
culture this “end” involves democracy. All
character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in the will
to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The
only course open to the man who is still concerned
for democratic culture is to remember the nobility
of Lincoln’s example—by concentrating on the offenses
rather than the persons that cause the mighty
scourge of war, to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred
which will enrage our wounds.

WAR EXPERTS
===========

    “War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong
    arm. Not that these attributes do not have their place
    and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the
    chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count
    in this warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological
    science, industrial appliances, and technological training.
    As has been remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman’s
    war, and the gentleman, as such, is no better than
    a marplot in the game as it is played.”

    —Thorstein Veblen in *The Nature of Peace*.

Across a park in Washington I followed the
leisurely stride of two British officers. Their movement,
punctuated by long walking-sticks, had a military
deliberation which became their veteran gray
hairs. They were in khaki uniforms and leather
leggings, a red strip at the shoulder marking them
as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses
and tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn
to the birds they were as of a grander race of men.
After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked who
they were and learned that one of them was simply
a Canadian lawyer—and that, being a judge advocate,
he was obliged to boot and spur himself in
his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and
down the elevator in polished leggings, for the good
of the cause. Never in his life had he heard a
machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything more dangerous than his family carving knife.
On inspection his companion looked similarly martial.
The only certain veteran in the parklet was a
shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the
grass.

Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing
of this description. It excites the romantic populace,
composed of pedestrians like myself, and
serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine
order of values from which the shambling citizen
is debarred. But back of the window-dressing, the
rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared ovation
and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different
from these appearances as roots are different
from flowers. If I had ever supposed that the gist
of war was to be derived solely from contemplating
uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion
when I overheard the cool experts of war.

These experts, such of them as I happened to
overhear, had come with the British mission to
America, and they were far other than the common
notion of lords of war. The most impressive
of them was a slight figure who reminded me externally
of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw’s
Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a
don at Cambridge, a teacher of economics, and he
retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert
who counts on holding attention. It was not in
him, as it is in so many older pooh-bah professors,
to expect a deference to personal garrulity; but one
gained an impression that no words were likely to
be wasted on vacuous listeners by a person with such
steel-gray eyes.

From London, since the beginning of the war, this
concentrated man had gone out of Paris, to Rome,
to Petrograd, to join counsel with various allies on
the science of providing munitions. It would never
have occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced,
sensitive, quiet-voiced professor to work out
the economic killing of cattle. Yet almost as soon
as he had volunteered in England he began on the
task of adapting industry to slaughter, and there was
no doubt whatever that his inclusive mind had procured
the quick and effective killing of thousands of
human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen
to him. He was one of those men whom H. G.
Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort of man
who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind
as nimble as quicksilver while he devised the soundest
plan for launching the forces of his sphere. There
was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a
mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing
of America for destructiveness as an engineer
might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel with copper,
and there was as little pretension in his manner as
there was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated,
he was obviously a university man, but he
had come to the top by virtue of mental equipment.
“Mental equipment” means many things, but
plainly he was not of those remote academicians who
go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He managed
his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt
swing and drive and bite of it could escape no one,
and for all his almost plaintively modest demeanor
he had instant arresting power. It was he and a
few men like him who had made it feasible for amateur
armies to loop round an empire a burning rain
of steel.

This master of munitions was not the only schoolman
who had demonstrated brains. There was another
professor, this time the purchaser of guns.
He had come to his rôle from holding the kind of
position that Matthew Arnold once had held. A
meager figure enough, superficially the scholastic-dyspeptic,
he had shown that the bureaucracy of
education was no bad beginning for ordering a new
department with small attention to the tricks, of merchandise,
but with every thought as to technological
detail. The conversation that went about did not
seem to engage this man, except as it turned on such
engrossing topics as the necessity for circumventing
child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent
cloud that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged
itself in lightning decision which made no
change in the obscurity from which it came.

Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue
I saw one late-working member of the mission stop
wearily to fend off American inquisition. A training
in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished
exile a permanent nostalgia for Olympus—and
how Olympian the British Foreign Office is, few
Americans dare to behold. The candidature to
this interesting service of a great democracy is
limited to a “narrow circle of society” by various
excellent devices, the first of which is that official
conditions of entry fix the amount of the private
means required at a minimum of £400 a year.
“The primary qualification for the diplomatic
service,” says one friendly interpreter of it, “is a
capacity to deal on terms of equality with considerable
persons and their words and works. Sometimes,
very rarely, this capacity is given, in its
highest form, by something which is hardly examinable—by
very great intellectual powers. Ordinarily,
however, this capacity is a result of nurture in an
atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is
scarcely too much to say that the present constitution
of society provides this atmosphere of independence
only where there is financial independence. In a
very few cases freedom of mind and character is
achieved elsewhere, but then a great price, not
measurable by money, has to be paid for it—how
great a price only those who have paid it know....
The ‘property qualification’ is operative as a means
of selecting a certain kind of character; no readjustment
of pay could be a substitute for it. Undoubtedly,
as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but
the limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice
or of a mere preference for wealth—it is a limitation
imposed by the needs of the diplomatic service,
and those needs are national needs.” Out of such a
remarkable background, so redolent of “the present
constitution of society,” my exiled diplomat took his
weary stand before prying writers for the press.
They wanted to know “the critical shrinking point.”
They wished to discuss the “maximum theoretic
availability.” He had no answer to make; he merely
made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box
that he set at his feet there were undoubtedly
treasured figures, priceless information for Germany
in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box
might have been solid metal for any effect it had on
the conversation. He was a kind of expert who
took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; who
punctuated silence with, “Look here, you’ve got
hold of absolutely the wrong man.... Hanged if
I know.... My dear sir, I haven’t the very
faintest idea.”

And yet this member of a caste was only coming
through because he too was paying a technological
price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and rubber—there 
was nothing his country might need which did
not occupy him, staff officer of vital trafficking,
throughout numbered nights.

There were a few business men on the mission—mighty
few considering their lordship in times of
peace. Most of the dominant figures either from
Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual
who stood out as rather an exception to the
prevailing type. He was an older man whose nature
brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and
high discourse and a happy gigantic effervescence.
If a reputation brayed too loudly at him, he named
its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him,
he called it detestable and cried to knock the English
*Nation’s* head against the *Manchester Guardian’s*.
Yet he was distinguished from most of his colleagues
as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own.
To the organization of his country he had contributed
one invaluable idea, and each problem that
came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow immediate
importance into the perspective of a natural
philosophy. Not fond of a prearranged system, he
irked more than the run of his countrymen at the
stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great
sweep of vigor he would start at the proposition of
handling war industry, for example, on a basis not
inadequate to the requirements; and out of his running
oration would come a wealth of such suggestions
as spring only from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind.

These are a handful of England’s experts in wartime.
They do not bear the brunt of the fight, like
the soldiers, but the roots of the flower of war are in
just such depths as employ these hidden minds.

OKURA SEES NEWPORT
==================

Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend
of mine in Japan. Jack said that Okura was taking
two years off to study democracy, and would
I steer him around. I was delighted. I offered
Okura his choice of the great democratic scene, with
myself as obedient personal conductor. He was
very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray
manner, and he asked if we could begin with Newport.
I suspected a joke, but his eye never twinkled,
and so to Newport we went.

The dirty little Newport railway station interested
Okura. So did the choked throat of Thames Street,
with its mad crush of motors and delivery wagons
and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from
the meat market to the book shop and from the
chemist’s to the Boston Store. I explained to Okura
that this was not really Newport, only a small sample
of the ordinary shopping country town, with the
real exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind.
Okura clucked an acceptance of this remark, and our
car wove its difficult way through the narrow lane till
we returned to Bellevue Avenue.

The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded
to Okura. He expected a belle vue, not a good
plain plutocratic American street. When I told him
what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied
with its exhibition of assorted architecture, and he
broke into open comment. “So very charming!”
he cried politely. “So like postcards of Milwaukee
by the lake!” I enjoyed his naïve enthusiasm and
let it go.

He wanted to know who lived on the avenue,
and I told him all the names I could think of. He
had heard many of them, the samurai of America
being known to him as a matter of course, and he
picked up new crumbs of information with obvious
gratitude.

“Vanderbilt? Oh, yes.” That was old. So
were Astor and Belmont.

After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. “I do
not see the McAlpin mansion.”

“The McAlpins? I have never heard of them,”
I murmured indulgently.

“But that is one name I think I remember correctly,”
Okura answered with visible anxiety.
“The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the
Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not
understand. Are not the McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?”

It was hard to convince Okura that this was not
a Valhalla of hotel proprietors, but at last he got
it straight. We went back again as far as the
Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament.

Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats
up rather far—well, to be frank, among the Jamestown
and Saunderstown people. But happily we
had Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of
the ladies sat facing the tennis, some sat with their
backs to it, and a great buzz of conversation reverberated
under the roof of the stand and billowed on
to the court. On the court two young men strove
against each other with a skill hardly to be matched
in any other game, and occasionally, when something
eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple
passed through the crowd. But the applause was irregular.
People had to be watched and pointed out.
It was important to note which human oyster bore
the largest pearl. The method of entry and exit
was significant, and significant the whole ritual of
being politely superior to the game.

Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately,
and there was so much conversation he was rather
distracted.

“I hope it does not annoy you?” I asked him.

“Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so
democratic!” 

At this point the umpire got off his perch, and
came forward to entreat the fine ladies.

“I have asked you before to keep quiet,” he
wailed. “For God’s sake, will you stop talking?”

“How very interesting,” murmured Okura.

“Yes,” I said, “the religious motif.”

“Ah, yes!” he nodded, very gravely.

Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play,
and we decided to return to the tournament; but first
we took ourselves to Bailey’s Beach.

Bailey’s Beach is a small section of the Atlantic
littoral famous for its seaweed. The seaweed is
of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in in large
quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind
and other picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy
carpet through which one wades out to the more
fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies in
their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching
the more adventurous sex pick his way out of the
vegetable matter. In the pavilion of the bathhouses
sit still less adventurous groups.

It took some time to explain to Okura why this
beach, once devoted to the collection of seaweed for
manure, should now be dedicated to bathing. But
he grasped the main point, that it was a private
beach.

“Forgive me,” he said, “I see no Jews.”

“That’s all right,” I answered. “You are studying
democracy. There are no Jews here. None
allowed.”

“Oh!” he digested the fact. Then his eye
brightened. “Ah, you have your geisha girls at the
swim-beach. How very charming!” 

“No,” I corrected him. “Those are not our
geisha girls. That is the ‘shimmy set.’ You know:
people who are opposed to the daylight saving act
and the prohibition amendment.”

“Oh, I understand. Republicans,” he nodded
happily.

As the Servants’ Hour was approaching at Bailey’s
Beach, and as I had no good explanation to give
of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along by
the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by
the walk, and by the fact that it ran in front of
these private houses, free to the public as to the
wind. Once or twice we went down below stone
walls, with everything above hidden from us, but
this was exceptional. Okura thought the walk a fine
example of essential democracy.

“And what are those long tubes?” he asked, as
we gazed out toward Portugal.

“Sewer pipes,” I said bluntly, looking at the great
series of excretory organs that these handsome democratic
mansions pushed into the sea.

“Are they considered beautiful?” asked Okura.

“Quite,” I told him. “They are one of the
features provided strictly for the public.”

“So kind!” said the acquiescent Japanese.

We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose
plutocracy was not entirely intact, and but for one
instructive incident it was an ordinary civilized meal.
That incident, however, shall live long in my memory
because of my inability to interpret it to Okura.

We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat
down, when the third man was called to the telephone.

He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his
hostess, “I’m awfully sorry, I’ve got to leave.”

His hostess looked apprehensive. “I hope it’s
nothing serious?” 

“Oh, not at all; please don’t worry,” he responded,
plumping down his napkin, “but I’ve just
had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She’s a man short
and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So
long. Awfully sorry!” 

“What did that mean, please?” Okura inquired,
as we hurried back to see Kumagae play.

“Do you mean, democratically?” 

“Yes.”

“I give it up,” I retorted.

“But Mr. Owen said you would want to interpret
everything democratic to me,” Okura ventured
on, “and is there not some secret here hidden from
me? I fear I am very stupid.”

Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not explain.

“But,” pressed Okura, “‘the world has been
made safe for democracy.’ I want so much to
understand it. I fear I do not yet understand Newport.”

And he looked at me with his innocent eyes.

THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED
=============================

It is the boast of more than one proud author,
popular or unpopular, that he never reads any criticism
of his own work. He knows from his wife or
his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists.
Sometimes in hurrying through the newspaper he
catches sight of his unforgettable name. Inadvertently
he may read on, learning the drift of the
comment before he stops himself. But his rule is
rigid. He never reads what the critics say about
him.

Before an author comes to this admirable self-denial
he has usually had some experience of the
ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he started
out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself,
Of course I don’t profess to *like* criticism. Nobody
likes to be criticized. But I hope I am big enough
to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No man
can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but
so long as criticism is helpful, that’s all a man has
a right to ask. Is it meant to be helpful? If so,
shoot.

After some experience of helpful criticism, it will
often occur to the sensitive author that he is not
being completely understood. A man’s ego should
certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn’t
a man a right to his own style and his own personality? What is the use of criticism that is based
on the critic’s dislike of the author’s personality?
The critic who has a grudge against an author simply
because he thinks and feels in a certain way is
scarcely likely to be helpful. The author and the
critic are not on common ground. And the case is
not improved by the very evident intrusion of the
critic’s prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly obvious
that a man with a bias will see in a book just
what he wants to see. If he is a reactionary, he
will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik
he will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use
of reading criticism? The critic merely holds the
mirror up to his own nature, when he is not content
to reproduce the publisher’s prepared review.

The author goes on wondering, “What does he
say about me?” But the disappointments are too
many. Once in a blue moon the critic “understands”
the author. He manages, that is to say,
to do absolutely the right thing by the author’s ego.
He strokes it hard and strokes it the right way.
After that he points out one or two of the things
that are handicapping the author’s creative force,
and he shows how easily such handicaps can be removed.
This is the helpful, appreciative, perceptive
critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty
bristling young egoists who want figs to grow on
thistles and cabbages to turn into roses, and who
blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill.
These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest
in the author. They are only interested in themselves.
And so, having tackled them in a glow of
expectation that has always died into sulky gloom,
the author quits reading criticism and satisfies his
natural curiosity about himself by calling up the publisher
and inquiring after sales.

For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without
being able to point to much better models.
Critics are of course superior to most authors, yet
I do not know many critics who like to be criticized.
It does not matter whether they are thin-skinned
literary critics or the hippopotami of sociology.
They don’t like it, much. Some meet criticism with
a sweet resourcefulness. They choke down various
emotions and become, oh, so gently receptive.
Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious
diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity
that makes criticism nothing less than a personal
affront. And then there is the way of the combative
man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge
to a fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual
circles is the man who takes criticism on its
merits and thinks it natural that he should not only
criticize but be criticized.

The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in
his ego. His frigid reception of criticism corresponds
to something like a secret terror of it. His
air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity:
he hates being called on to defend himself in anything
like a rough-and-tumble fight. He resents
having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried
in the duel of dispute.

To hand down judgments, often severe judgments,
is part of the pontifical character. But the
business of meeting severe judgments is not so
palatable. As most men grow older and more
padded in their armchair-criticism, they feel that
they become entitled to immunity. The Elder
Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they
are, the more they try to browbeat their critics.
They see criticism as the critic’s fundamental inability
to appreciate their position.

If you are going to be criticized, how take it?
The best preparation for it is to establish good
relations with your own ego first. If you interpose
your ego between your work and the critic you cannot
help being insulted and injured. The mere fact
that you are being subjected to criticism is almost
an injury in itself. You must get to the point where
you realize the impregnability of your own admirable
character. Then the bumblings of the critic
cannot do less than amuse you, and may possibly be
of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself,
yet he started out rather indifferent to you, and the
mere fact that he is willing to criticize you is a
proof that he has overcome the initial inhumanity
of the human race. This alone should help, but
more than that, you have the advantage of knowing
he is an amateur on that topic where you are most
expert—namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps
if you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the
beginning of the entente between you is that he
should always start out by appeasing your ego.

BLIND
=====

He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He
could tend the furnace and help around the house—scour
the bath-tub and clean windows—but for a
powerful man these were trivial chores. The
trouble with him, as I soon discovered, was complete
and simple. He was blind.

I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be
blind, but it was terrible to be blind and at the
mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs. Angier
ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier
of a woman, very tall and very bony, with a virile
voice and no touch of femininity except false curls.
She wore rusty black, with long skirts, and a tasseled
shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls.
She hated her rooming-house and every one in it.
Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save
enough money out of her establishment to escape
from it. To that end she plugged the gaps in the
bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the
furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief
sacrifice on the altar of her economy was Samuel
Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was blind and
useless, he was dependent on her. When she called,
he literally ran to her, crying, “Coming, coming!” 
He might be out on the window-sill, risking his poor
neck to polish the windows that he would never see,
but, “Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I—would you be so good—ah, you are very kind.
Coming, Adelaide, just one moment....” and he
would paddle down stairs. She treated him like
dirt. Sometimes one would arrive during an interview
between them. The spare, gimlet-eyed Mrs.
Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel
to cringe in every limb. He was a burly man with
a thick beard, iron-gray, and his sightless eyes were
hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed
spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his
voice booming heartily, he was a cheerful, honest
figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though he was a most
platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier
tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a
water-bucket or leaving a duster on the stairs or
forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he became infantile,
tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always
changed to a sugared greeting as one was recognized.
“Good e-e-evening, isn’t it a pleasant e-e-evening?”
But the only value in speaking to Mrs.
Angier was that it permitted Samuel somehow to
shamble away to the limbo of the basement.

Of course I wanted to know how, he became blind.
Luckily, as Mrs. Angier had prosperous relatives in
another part of Chicago, she sometimes could be
counted on to be absent, and on those occasions
or when she went to church, Samuel haunted my
room. He was unhappy unless he was at work, and
he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I
really believe he liked to chatter to me: and he was
more than anxious to tell me how his tragedy had
befallen him.

“Oh, dear, yes,” he said to me, “it happened
during the strike. They hit me on the head, and
left me unconscious. And I have never seen since,
not one thing.”

“Who hit you, Samuel?”

“Who hit me? The blackguards who were out
on strike, sir. They nearly killed me with a piece
of lead pipe. Oh, dear, yes.”

It seemed an unspeakable outrage to me, but in
Samuel there was nothing but a kind of healthy indignation.
He was not bitter. He never raised
his voice above its easy reminiscent pitch.

“But what did you do to them? Why did the
strikers attack you? What strike was it?” 

“I did nothing at all to them. But, you see, my
horse slipped and when I was helpless on the ground
with my hip smashed, one of them knocked me out.
It was right up on the sidewalk. I had gone after
them up on the sidewalk, and I suppose the flags
were so slippery that the horse came down.”

“But what were you doing on a horse?” I asked
in despair.

“I was a volunteer policeman. These scoundrels
were led by Debs, and we were out to see that
there was law and order in Chicago.”

“Oh, the Pullman strike. Were you railroading
then?” 

“Railroading? No, sir, I was in the wholesale
dry-goods business. We had just started in in a
small way. I was married only two years, to Adelaide’s
younger sister. Ah, my accident brought
on more trouble than she could stand. She was
very different from Adelaide, quite dainty and lively,
if you follow me. We were living at that time on
Cottage Grove Avenue, on the south side. I was
building up the importing end of the business, and
then this thing came, and everything went to smash.
They gave me no compensation whatsoever, to make
the thing worse.”

“But, Samuel, how did you come to be out against
the strikers?”

“And why shouldn’t I be out, I’d like to know!” 
Samuel straightened up from rubbing a chair, and
pointed his rag at my voice. “These scoundrels
had nothing against Mr. Pullman. He treated
them like a prince. But they took the bit in their
teeth, and once they break loose where are we?
The President didn’t get shut of them till he sent
in the troops. But I’ve always contended that if
we business men had taken the matter in hand ourselves
and nipped the trouble in the bud, we’d have
had no such lawlessness to deal with in the end. It
is always the same. The business men are the backbone
of the community, but they don’t recognize
their responsibility! Take the sword to those
bullies and blackguards; that’s what I say!” 

The old man lifted both fists like a dauntless
Samson, and fixed me with his sightless eyes. He
had paid hellishly for living up to his convictions,
and here they seemed absolutely unshaken.

“That’s all right, too, Samuel,” I said, feebly
enough, “but how do you feel now? Nobody compensated
you for being laid out in that big strike,
and your business was ruined, and here you are
emptying the waste-basket. How about that? I
think it’s fierce that you got injured, but those men
in the Pullman strike weren’t out to break up society.
They were fighting for their rights, that’s
all. Don’t you think so now?” 

“*No*, sir. The solid class of the community must
be depended upon to preserve law and order. I
think that it was the duty of the business men of
Chicago to put down ruffianism in that strike and
to smite whenever it raised its head. Smite it
hip and thigh, as the saying is. Oh, no. Young
men have fine notions about these things, ha, ha!
You’ll excuse me, won’t you, but you can’t allow
violence and disorder to run riot and then talk of
men’s ‘rights’ as an excuse. Ah, but it was a great
misfortune for me, I confess. It was the end of
all my hopes. The doctors thought at first that the
sight might be restored, but I have never seen a
glimmer of light since. But we mustn’t repine, must
we? That’d never do.”

“Samuel!” Mrs. Angier’s sharp voice pierced
the room.

“Good gracious, back so soon. You’ll excuse me,
I’m sure.... Coming, Adelaide, coming!” 

He groped for his bucket, with its seedy sponge
all but submerged in the dirty water. The water
splashed a little as he hurriedly made for the door.

“Oh, dear,” he muttered, “Adelaide won’t like
that!”

“AND THE EARTH WAS DRY”
=======================

Like all great ideas it seemed perfectly simple
when Harrod first disclosed it to his unimportant
partner John Prentiss.

“Of course we’ll get back of it. We’ve got to,”
said Harrod, in the sanctity of the directors’ room.
“You’ve been down to Hopeville on pay day. It’s
the limit. Ordinary days there’s practically no
trouble. Pay day’s a madhouse. How many men,
do you think, had to have the company doctor last
pay day?” 

“You don’t expect me to answer, Robert,” Prentiss
replied mildly. “You’re telling me, you’re not
arguing with me.”

“Twenty-five, Prentiss, twenty-five drunken
swine. What do you think happened? I’ll tell you.
That doctor never stopped a minute taking stitches,
sewing on scalps, mending skulls. He was kept on
the hop all day and night all over the town. I’ll
tell you something more.” The sturdy Harrod
rapped his fist on the mahogany table, leaning out
of his armchair. “The doctor’s wife told me a
Polack came to her shack at two in the morning
with half his thumb hanging off, bitten off in a
drunken brawl. What do you think she did,
Prentiss? She amputated it herself, on her own
hook, just like a little soldier. She’s got nerve, let
me tell you. But do you think we want to stand
for any more of this? Not much. Hopeville is
going dry!” 

Mr. Harrod produced a gold pen-knife and
nicked a cigar emphatically. He brushed the tiny
wedge of tobacco from his plump trouser leg on to
the bronze carpet. He lit his cigar and got up to
have a little strut.

Poor Prentiss looked at him as only a weedy
Yankee can look at a man whose cheeks are rosy
with arrogant health. Why the stout Harrod who
ate and drank as he willed should be proclaiming
prohibition, while the man with a Balkan digestive
apparatus should be a reluctant listener, no one
could have analyzed. It never would have occurred
to Prentiss to be so restlessly efficient. But Harrod
was as simple as chanticleer. He’d made up his
mind.

“We’ll back Billy Sunday. His advance agent
will be in town this week,” Mr. Harrod unfolded.
“We’ll put the whole industry behind him. Drink
is a constant source of inefficiency. It’s an undeniable
cause. When do we have accidents? On
Mondays, regularly. The men come back stupefied
from the rotgut they’ve been drinking, and it’s
simple luck if they don’t set fire to the mine. The
Hopeville mine is perfectly safe. Except for that
one big disaster we had, it’s one of the safest mines
in the country. But how can you call any mine safe
if the fellows handling dynamite and the men working
the cage are just as likely as not to have a hangover?
We’ll stop it. We’ll make that town so
dry that you can’t find a beer bottle in it. It took
me some time to realize the common sense of this
situation, but it’s as clear as daylight; it’s ridiculously clear. We’re fools, Prentiss, that we didn’t
advocate prohibition twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years ago, Robert,” Prentiss murmured,
“you were checking coal at the pit-head. You
weren’t so damned worried about evolving policies
for the mine owners twenty years ago.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” Robert Harrod
rejoined.

“Perfectly,” retorted Prentiss. “And I’m with
you, though all the perfumes of Arabia won’t cleanse
these little hands.”

That was the first gospel, so to speak, and Harrod
was as good as his word. He saw Sunday’s advance
agent, he rallied the industry, he lunched with
innumerable Christians and had a few painful but
necessary political conferences. The prohibitionist
manager he discovered to be a splendid fellow—direct,
clean-cut, intelligent, indefatigable. The
whole great state was won to prohibition after a
strenuous preparation and a typically “bitter” campaign.

And everything went well at Hopeville. At first,
not unnaturally, there was a good deal of rebellion.
A few of the miners—you know Irish miners,
born trouble-makers—talked considerably. Something
in them took kindly to the relief from monotony
that came with a periodic explosion, and they
muttered blasphemously about the prohibitionists,
and time hung heavy on their hands. A few of them
pulled out, preceded by the gaunt Scotchman who
had run the bare “hotel” where most of the
whisky was consumed. These were led by a sullen
compatriot of their own, a man who once was a fine
miner but who had proved his own best customer in
the liquor business and whose contour suggested
that his body was trying desperately to blow a bulb.
One miner left for a neighboring state (still wet)
to purchase a pair of boots. He crawled back on
foot after a week, minus the new boots, plus a pawn-ticket,
and most horribly chewed by an unintelligent
watchdog who had misunderstood his desire to borrow
a night’s lodging in the barn. The drinking
haunts were desolate reminders of bygone entertainments
for weeks after the law took effect, and
few of the younger men could look forward to tame
amusement, amusement that had no elysium in it,
without a twinge of disgust. But on the whole,
Hopeville went dry with surprising simplicity. A
great many of the miners were neither English,
Scotch, Cornish, Welsh nor Irish, but Austrians
and Italians and Poles, and these were not so inured
to drinking and biting each other as Mr. Harrod
might have thought. The mud in Hopeville, it is
true, was often from nine inches to four feet deep,
and there were no named streets, and no known
amusements, and a very slim possibility of distraction
for the unmarried men. After prohibition,
however, a far from unpleasant club house was
founded, with lots of “dangerous” reading material,
and a segregated place for homemade music,
and bright lights and a fire, and a place to write
letters, and a pungent odor of something like syndicalism
in the air.

That was the beginning. The men did not detonate
on pay day, except in lively conversation.
There was less diffused blasphemy. It concentrated
rather particularly on one or two eminent men.
And when the virtues and defects of these men were
sufficiently canvassed, the “system” beyond them
was analyzed. Even the delight of the Hunkies in
dirt, or the meanness of certain bosses, began to
be less engrossing than the exact place in the terrestrial
economy where Harrod and Prentiss got
off.

“Well, Robert,” inquired the man of migraine,
back in the home office, “how is your precious
prohibition working? It seems to me the doctor’s
wife is the sole beneficiary so far.”

“Working?” the rubicund Harrod responded
urgently. “I don’t know what we’re going to do
about it. You can’t rely on the men for anything.
A few years ago, after all, they took their wages
over to Mason and blew it all in, or they soaked up
enough rum in Hopeville to satisfy themselves, and
come back on the job. Now, what do they do?
They quit for two weeks when they want to. They
quit for a month at a time. And still they have a
balance. You can’t deal with such men. They’re
infernally independent. They’re impudent with
prosperity. I never saw anything like it. We can’t
stand it. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

“You’re going to back the liquor trade, Robert,
of course. That’s simple enough.”

“You may laugh, but it is too late, I tell you,
the harm’s done. We can’t remedy it. National
prohibition is right on top of us. I don’t know what
we’ll do.”

“Sell ’em Bevo. That’ll keep them conservative.
Ever drink it?”

“Bevo? Conservative? Prentiss, this is serious.
These men are completely out of hand.”

“Well, aren’t they more efficient?”

“Of course they’re more efficient. They’re too
damnably efficient. They wanted Hopeville drained
and they’re getting it drained. They’ll insist on
having it paved next. They’ll want hot and cold
water. They’ll want bathtubs. That’ll be the
end.”

“The end? Come, Robert, perhaps only the
beginning of the end.”

“It’s very amusing to you, Prentiss, but you’re
in on this with me. We’ve forced these working-men
into prohibition, and now they’re sober, they’re
everlastingly sober. They’re making demands and
getting away with it. We’ve got to go on or go
under. Wake up, man. I’ve played my cards.
What can we do?” 

“What can we do? That is not the point now.
Now the point is, what’ll *they* do.”

TELEGRAMS
=========

In my simple world a cablegram is so rare that
I should treasure the mere envelope. I should not
be likely to resurrect it. It would be buried in
a bureau, like a political badge or a cigar-cutter—but
there is a silly magpie in every man, and a cable
I would preserve. To discuss cablegrams or even
cut-rate wireless, however, would be an affectation.
These are the orchids of communication. It is the
ordinary telegram I sing.

There was a magnificence about a quick communication
in the days before the Western Union.
Horsemen went galloping roughshod through scattering
villages. It was quite in order for a panting
messenger to rush in, make his special delivery, and
drop dead. This has ceased to be his custom. In
Mr. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class there is
one omission. He neglected to deal with that great
adept in leisure, the messenger-boy. “Messenger-boy”
is a misnomer. He is either a puling
infant or a tough, exceedingly truculent little ogre
of uncertain age and habit. His life is consecrated.
He cares for nothing except to disprove the axiom
that a straight line is the shortest distance between
two points. Foreseeing this cult of the messenger
service, the designers of the modern American city
abandoned all considerations of beauty, mystery, and
suggestion in an heroic effort to circumvent the boy
in blue. But the boy in blue cannot be beaten.
By what art he is selected I know not. Whether
he is attributable to environment or heredity I dare
not guess. But with a possible inferiority to his
rival, the coat-room boy, and, of course, nature’s
paradox the crab, he is supreme.

It is not a telegram in its last stages that has
magic. Much better for the purposes of drama to
have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not a
laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a telegram
has magic. If you are hardened you do not
register. It is the fresh who have the thrill. But
no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever
so inured, there is one telegram, *the* telegram, which
will find your core.

Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while
an important person, usually a man but occasionally
a woman, gets a handful of mail without any sign
of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even
sorting out the wires. Such persons are marked.
They are in public life. It is pardonable. There
must be public men and public women. I should not
ask any one to give up his career for the peculiar
ecstasies of the telegram. But no one can deny that
these persons have parted with an essence of their being.
What if I find a solitary notice? “It is under
your door.” I bolt for the elevator, thrilled, alive.

It may be suggested that my over-laden predecessors
are not in public life; that they are very
distinguished, very wealthy personages, receiving
private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their
children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other
of their responsibilities, accessories, possessions.
With every deference I answer that you are mistaken. Unless their riches are in a stocking, these
are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels.
Their title may be secure, but not their peace of
mind. Whatever they wish, they are obliged to
administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of
gravitation keeps pulling, pulling at their chandeliers.
And so in some degree they are connected
with, open to, shared by, innumerable people.
Without necessarily being popular, they are in the
center of populace. They have to meet, if only to
repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus being
public characters. It is often against their desires.
But being called upon to convert a part of
their souls into a reception-room, a place where
people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it
follows that they give up some of their ecstatic
privacy in order to retain the rest. This I do not
decry. For certain good and valuable considerations
one might be induced to barter some of one’s
own choice stock of privacy, but for myself I should
insist on retaining enough to keep up my interest
in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be
dogged by urgent brokers and punctilious butlers,
no.

“There’s a telegram upstairs for you, sir.” “A
telegram? How long has it been here?” “It
came about half an hour ago.” “Ah, thank
you.... No, never mind, I’m going upstairs.”
What may not this sort of banality precede? Perhaps
another banality, in ink. But not always. A
telegram is an arrow that is aimed to fly straight
and drive deep. Whether from friend or rival,
whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the
heart is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the
message has come, singing enigmatically across the
country. But there is a path that leaps out of the
dingy office to countless court-rooms, business buildings,
homes, hospitals. That office is truly a ganglion
from which piercing nerve-fibers curve into the
last crevices of human lives. When you enter it to
send a telegram it may depress you. You submit
your confidence across a public counter. But what
does it matter to a creature glazed by routine? He
enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of
their meaning. To him a word is not a bullet—just
an inert little lump of lead.

Some messages come with a force not realizable.
Tragedy dawns slowly. The mind envisages, not
apprehending. And then, for all the customary
world outside, one is penned in one’s trouble alone.
One remembers those sailors who were imprisoned
in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off from
escape, red-hot iron plates between them and the
assuaging waters on every side, they could see the
free, could cry out to them, could almost touch hands.
But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a
slip of paper one may meet one’s own. There are
countries to-day where the very word *telegram* must
threaten like a poisoned spear. And such wounds as
are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often
powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in suspense
is worse than dreadful certainty. But there
are shocks which are irreparable. It is cruel to
break those shocks, crueler to deliver them.

All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion,
the telegram attends on death, it attends no less
eagerly on love and birth. “A boy arrived this
morning. Father and child doing well”—this is
more frequently the tenor of the wire. And the
wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remember
Bernard Shaw’s rebuff to Lady Randolph
Churchill for asking him to dinner? He had the
vegetarian view of eating his “fellow-creatures.”
He chided her for inviting a person of “my well-known
habits.” “Know nothing of your habits,”
came the blithe retort, “hope they’re better than
your manners.”

The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we
struggled to put our all in ten words—simple, at
least, if not sensuous and passionate. Now the day-letter
and night-letter lead us into garrulity. No
transition from Greek to Byzantine could be worse
than this. We should resist it. The time will
doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as
austere and frugal in our use of the telegram. But
we should preserve this sign of our Spartan manhood.
Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of
long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive,
virginal, terse.

OF PLEASANT THINGS
==================

When I was a child we lived on the border of
the town, and the road that passed our windows
went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under
the old city gateway and out through the mean city
“lanes.” The other branch turned round our
corner and ran into the countryside. Day and night
many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing.
In the day-time I took no pleasure in them,
but when I awoke at night and the thick silence was
broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it
filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this
enchantment. The steady effort of the wheels, their
rattle as they passed over the uneven road, their
crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute
pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a
solitary lantern swings underneath the wagon. In
the old days the load might be coal, with the colliery-man
sitting hunched on the driver’s seat, a battered
silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery,
making a start at dawn. Or it might be a load of
singing harvest-women, hired in the market square
by the sweet light of the morning. But not the
wagon or the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so
much as that honest, steady, homely sound coming
through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find
it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like
it till I die.

The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes,
in lazy summer evenings, I like the faint
rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble of the
elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows
and its passengers relaxed and indolent after the
exhausting day. Always I like the moaning sounds
from the river craft, carried so softly into the town.
But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are
usually discords. I hate bells—the sharp spinsterish
telephone bell, the lugubrious church bell, the
clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the
sleigh bell or the dinner bell.

I like the element of water. An imagist should
write of the waters of Lake Michigan which circle
around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is the
hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths.
When the sun shines on the bottom, every pebble
is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a happy
memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of
Maine one has the same visual delight in water as
clear as crystal, and on the coast of Ireland I have
seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst
or thunder in a wall of emerald. On the
southern shore of Long Island, who has not seen
the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy
as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New
York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching.

The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty
that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline
except at night. In the day-time those punctured
walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the
river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare.
Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren
as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A little wisp of white steam may suggest
humanity, but not these bleak cliffs themselves.
At night, however, they become human. They
look out on the black moving river with marigold
eyes. And Madison Square at nightfall has the
same, or even a more ætherial, radiance. From
the hurried streets the walls of light seem like a
deluge of fairy splendor. This is always a gay
transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who
is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him.

Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I
like flowers, but seldom cut flowers. The gathering
of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily wanton,
and is it not hateful to see people coming
home with dejected branches of dogwood or broken
autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already rusting
in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness
of the meadow or the solitude of a forsaken garden.
Few things are so pleasant as to find oneself all alone
in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to sea.
The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones,
the life that trails so impudently across the path,
the life that spawns in the forgotten pond—this
has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners.
Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient
turtle, ourselves the only living things within sight or
sound. When the turtle wearied of sunning himself
he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily
paddled through waters laced down with scum. It
was pleasant to see him, a not too clean turtle in
waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family
had been home the gardener would have scoured
him.

Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire—which
I thank heaven I am not, nor scarcely a millionth
part of one—I should take pleasure in the
silent orderliness that shadowed me through my
home. Those invisible hands that patted out the
pillows and shined the shoes and picked up everything,
even the Sunday newspapers—those I should
enjoy. I should enjoy especially the guardian angel
who hid from me the casualties of the laundry and
put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is
no laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire
the laundry is sent and the laundry is sorted
away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire; I
envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen
sheets.

The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude
that life is in the striving. Is this altogether true?
I think not. Not for those menial offices so necessary
to our decent existence, so little decent in their
victims or themselves. But one does remember certain
striving that brought with it almost instant happiness,
like the reward of the child out coasting or
the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding
game. It is pleasant to think of one’s first delicious
surrender to fatigue after a long day’s haul on a
hot road. That surrender, in all one’s joints, with
all one’s driven will, is the ecstasy that even the
Puritan allowed himself. It is the nectar of the
pioneer. In our civilization we take it away from
the workers, as we take the honey from the bees—but
I wish to think of things pleasant, not of our
civilization. Fatigue of this golden kind is unlike
the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It is
the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it
from games, even golf, I think it is pleasant. It is
the great charm that Englishmen possess and understand.

These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant
things of the poet. They barely leave the hall
of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine, is one
who captures in the swift net of his imagination the
wild pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be
flying presences quickly lost to view. But every man
must bag what he can in his own net, whether he be
rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my
imagination to keep from being snared by too many
publicists and professors and persons of political intent.
These are invaluable servants of humanity,
admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But
they fill the mind with *-ations*. They pave the
meadows with concrete; they lose the free swing of
pleasant things.

THE AVIATOR
===========

  | *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
  | *Kept me within his eye,*
  | *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
  | *And followed up the sky.*
  |
  | I was the lark whose song was heard
  | When I was lost to sight,
  | I was the golden arrow loosed
  | To pierce the heart of night.
  |
  |   I fled the little earth, I climbed
  |   Above the rising sun,
  |   I met the morning in a blaze
  |   Before my hour was gone.
  |
  | I ran beyond the rim of space,
  | Its reins I flung aside,
  | Laughter was mine and mine was youth
  | And all my own was pride.
  |
  |   *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
  |   *Kept me within his eye,*
  |   *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
  |   *And followed up the sky.*
  |
  | From end to end I knew the way,
  | I had no doubt or fear;
  | The minutes were a forfeit paid
  | To fetch the landfall near.
  |
  |   But all at once my heart I held,
  |   My carol frozen died,
  |   A white cloud laid her cheek to mine
  |   And wove me to her side.
  |
  | Her icy fingers clasped my flesh,
  | Her hair drooped in my face,
  | And up we fell and down we rose
  | And twisted into space.
  |
  |   *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
  |   *Kept me within his eye,*
  |   *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
  |   *And followed up the sky.*
  |
  | Laughter was mine and mine was youth,
  | I pressed the edge of life,
  | I kissed the sun and raced the wind,
  | I found immortal strife.
  |
  |   Out of myself I spent myself,
  |   I lost the mortal share,
  |   My grave is in the ashen plain,
  |   My spirit in the air.
  |
  | Good-by, sweet pride of man that flew,
  | Sweet pain of man that bled,
  | I was the lark that spilled his heart,
  | The golden arrow sped.
  |
  |   *So endlessly the gray-lipped sea*
  |   *Kept me within his eye,*
  |   *And lean he licked his hollow flanks*
  |   *And followed up the sky.*

.. class:: center

   THE END
   
.. vspace:: 5

.. _pg_end_line:

\*\*\* END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE CENSOR \*\*\*

.. backmatter::

.. toc-entry::
   :depth: 0

.. _pg-footer:

A Word from Project Gutenberg
=============================

We will update this book if we find any errors.

This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35091

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one
owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and
you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set
forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to
protect the Project Gutenberg™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge
for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not
charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
They may be modified and printed and given away – you may do
practically *anything* with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.


.. _Project Gutenberg License:

The Full Project Gutenberg License
----------------------------------

*Please read this before you distribute or use this work.*

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/license.


Section 1. General Terms of Use & Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

**1.A.** By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by
the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

**1.B.** “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.

**1.C.** The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United
States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a
right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™ works
in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project
Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily comply with
the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format
with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it
without charge with others.



**1.D.** The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work.  The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country outside the United States.

**1.E.** Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

**1.E.1.** The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
  almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
  re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
  with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org

**1.E.2.** If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating
that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work
can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without
paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing
access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with
or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements
of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of
the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in
paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

**1.E.3.** If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and
any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.

**1.E.4.** Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project
Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.

**1.E.5.** Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute
this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.

**1.E.6.** You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other
than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ web site
(http://www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or
expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a
means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original
“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include
the full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

**1.E.7.** Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

**1.E.8.** You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided
that

.. class:: open

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
  the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you
  already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to
  the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to
  donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg
  Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60
  days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally
  required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments
  should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg
  Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4,
  “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
  Archive Foundation.”

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
  works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
  receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
  distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

**1.E.9.** If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and
Michael Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact
the Foundation as set forth in Section 3. below.

**1.F.**

**1.F.1.** Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend
considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg™
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

**1.F.2.** LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES – Except for the
“Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the
Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

**1.F.3.** LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND – If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.

**1.F.4.** Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set
forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS,’ WITH
NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

**1.F.5.** Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.

**1.F.6.** INDEMNITY – You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation,
the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.


Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™'s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will remain
freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future generations. To
learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and
how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org .


Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf . Contributions to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to
the full extent permitted by U.S.  federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr.
S. Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are
scattered throughout numerous locations. Its business office is
located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801)
596-1887, email business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date
contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
official page at http://www.pglaf.org

For additional contact information:

 | Dr. Gregory B. Newby
 | Chief Executive and Director
 | gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without wide spread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing
the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely
distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest array of
equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to
$5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status
with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate


Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works.
`````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````


Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg™
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the
U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's
eBook number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
compressed (zipped), HTML and others.

Corrected *editions* of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
the old filename and etext number. The replaced older file is
renamed. *Versions* based on separate sources are treated as new
eBooks receiving new filenames and etext numbers.

Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
facility:

  http://www.gutenberg.org
            
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg™, including
how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe
to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.