MEMOIRS

of a

Superfluous Man

ALBERT JAY NOCK

AUTHOR OF “JEFFERSON,” “JOURNEY INTO RABELAIS’S FRANCE,” “FREE SPEECH AND PLAIN

LANGUAGE,” ETC.

HARPER & BROTHERS

New York and London
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a

boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother
pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me.

—SIR ISAAC NEWTON

 MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN

Copyright, 1943, by Albert Jay Nock

Printed in the United States of America

All rights in this book are reserved.

No part of the book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Brothers

K-Z
 PREFACE

I T HAS several times been suggested to me, always to my great

annoyance, that I should write an autobiography. Personal publicity of
every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to
escape it than most people make to get it. Moreover, biographical writing,
especially of the popular type, presupposes a subject who has achieved, or
at least tried to achieve, something ponderable, substantial; and I have
done neither. I have led a singularly uneventful life, largely solitary, have
had little to do with the great of the earth, and no part whatever in their
affairs or for that matter, in any other affairs. Hence my autobiography
would be like the famous chapter on owls in Bishop Pontoppidan’s history
of Iceland. The good bishop wrote simply that there are no owls in
Iceland, and that one sentence was the whole of his chapter.
One evening, however, an old friend, Mr. William Harlowe Briggs,
brought up the matter again, saying he had a new idea. He proposed that I
should write a purely literary and philosophical autobiography with only
enough collateral odds and ends thrown in to hold the narrative together.
As he put it to me, the idea seemed to have something in it. His notion was
the perfectly sound one that every person of any intellectual quality
develops some sort of philosophy of existence; he acquires certain settled
views of life and of human society; and if he would trace out the origin
and course of the ideas contributory to that philosophy, he might find it
an interesting venture. It is certainly true that whatever a man may do or
say, the most significant thing about him is what he thinks; and
significant also is how he came to think it, why he continued to think it,
or, if he did not continue, what the influences were which caused him to
change his mind. In short, what Mr. Briggs proposed was a history of
ideas, the autobiography of a mind in relation to the society in which it
found itself.
After thinking over this suggestion for a day or two, I decided to do
what I could with it. I do not think the result, as here presented, would
interest many people or benefit anybody; I did not expect or intend it to
do either. I contemplated nothing but a tour de force, a literary venture in a
field which, if not quite new, was at any rate new to me, and is one which
modern autobiographical writing tends to avoid. I now see that I have
succeeded with it much better than I supposed I should, and therefore I
have turned my manuscript over to Mr. Briggs to do with as he likes. I
have no further interest in it, except as I indulge the hope that he will
think his idea has been satisfactorily worked out.

ALBERT JAY NOCK

 CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

—AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT.

CHAPTER TWO

[Social life in the Grand Siècle] is the school of what is called honour, the universal master who shall
be everywhere our guide. Three things we observe there, and find constantly mentioned: that our

virtues should be touched with a certain nobleness, our morals with a certain freedom, our manners

with a certain politeness. The virtues exhibited in this society are always less what one owes to others
than what one owes to oneself; they are not so much a response to an appeal from our fellow-citizens as

a mark of distinction between us and them.

—MONTESQUIEU.

CHAPTER THREE

The art of aristocrats, the art of enriching life.

—MARY M. COLUM.

CHAPTER FOUR

I have fought my fight, I have lived my life,

I have drunk my share of wine;

From Trier to Köln there was never a knight

Had a merrier life than mine.

—CHARLES KINGSLEY.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis solatium et

perfugium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur,

rusticantur.

—CICERO.

CHAPTER SIX

“Niebuhr was right,” said Goethe, “when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in

it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?”

—ECKERMANN, 1831.

Great things may be accomplished in our days; great discoveries, for example, great enterprises; but

these do not give greatness to our epoch. Greatness makes itself appear notably by its point of
departure, by its flexibility, by its thought.

—SAINTE-BEUVE.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Le monde est inepte à se guarir. Il est si impatient de ce que le presse qu’il ne vise qu à s’en desfaire

sans regarder à quel prix... le bien ne succede pas necessairement au mal; un autre mal luy peult
succeder, et pire.

—MONTAIGNE.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Peggio assai che l’averla perduta

Egli è il dir: la mia gente è caduta

In obbrobrio alle genti ed a me.

—BERGHET.
 CHAPTER NINE

Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—GEORGE SANTAYANA.

Man, biologically considered,... is the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and indeed the only one
that preys systematically on his own species.

—WILLIAM JAMES.

CHAPTER TEN

A work of art should express only that which elevates the soul and pleases it in a noble manner. The

feeling of the artist should not overstep these limits; it is wrong to venture beyond.
—BETTINA BRENTANO.

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present
society a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that

day, and far more still on whether he reads during it.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Si sine uxore pati possemus, Quirites, omnes ea molestia careremus; set quoniam ita natura tradidit ut
nec cum illis satis commode nec sine illis ullo modo vivi possit, saluti perpetuae potius quam brevi

voluptati consulendum est.

—SPEECH OF THE CENSOR METELLUS NUMIDICUS, 102, B.C.

I thought love had been a joyous thing, quoth my uncle Toby. ‘Tis the most serious thing, an’ please

your honour, that is in the world, said the corporal.

—LAURENCE STERNE.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

“But what do I know of Aurelia, or any other girl?” he says to me with that abstracted air; “I, whose
Aurelias were of another century and another zone.”

—GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

—FRANCIS BACON.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the course of things, those which follow are always aptly fitted to those which have gone before; for

this series is not like a mere enumeration of disjointed things, which has only a necessary sequence, but

it is a rational connexion; and all existing things are arranged together harmoniously, so the things
which come into existence exhibit no mere succession, but a certain wonderful relationship.

—MARCUS AURELIUS.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert

facts.

—HENRY ADAMS.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Omnia exibant in mysterium.

—THOMAS OF AQUIN.

Illi sunt veri fideles Tui qui totam vitam suam ad emendationem disponunt.

—IMITATIO CHRISTI.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Quod amplius nos delectat, secundum id operemur necesse est.

—ST. AUGUSTINE.

The primary and sole foundation of virtue, or of the proper conduct of life, is to seek our own profit.
—BARUCH SPINOZA
 CHAPTER ONE
To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

—AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT.

F ROM first to last, my schooling was so irregular, so out with the whole
technique of modern pedagogy, that I suppose I might fairly be said to
have had no schooling at all. In its early stages it was as informal as it was
irregular. How I learned my letters must always remain unknown; in Lord
Dundreary’s phrase, it is “one of the things no feller can find out.” My
parents did not know; nobody knew. Some one must have taught me
them, and very early, for I practiced spelling out words when I was getting
on for three years of age; but twenty-five years later, although I asked all
around the families on both sides, I found no survivor able to say who
taught me, or when, or how. As far back as I can push my own memory, it
stops at the point of recalling a set of dirty and defaced alphabet-blocks
lying about our cellar in company with a dogeared copy of the New
England Primer. There is a bare chance that these may have helped me on
with my earliest adventures in the realm of the liberal arts, but I doubt it;
indeed, I am almost sure they did not. In the first place, I do not remember
ever playing with the blocks, or making any use of them, or even paying
any particular attention to them; nor do I remember ever noticing the
Primer until such time as I could read it, which certainly would be no later
than when I was three. Our house was a rented one; the cellar was really
rather more of a basement than a cellar; it was light, dry and clean, a
palatial playroom from a child’s point of view; so my notion is that the
blocks and the Primer were probably among the oddments discarded and
forgotten by some former tenant’s offspring.
While it is most unlikely that these bits of salvage did much to put
me on the way to literacy, the Primer may possibly have had something to
do with forming one of the channels through which the course of my
thinking was permanently set. Here again the possibility is very frail, and I
set no store by it, but it does exist. If today for the first time I met the
Primer’s statement—

In Adam’s fall
We sinnéd all.

—my first question would not be, Did Adam really fall?, nor would it be,
Did we all really sin?. It would not even be the previous question, Did
Adam ever really exist?. It would be the question previous to all these
three questions, namely: How can any one possibly know anything about
it? Moreover, not only is this the case now, at the close of a rather
uncommonly experienced and reflective old age, but even though I
stretch my memory to the utmost I do not recall a time in all my life when
I would have met a similar or analogous statement in any other way. I can
quite believe that at three years of age, praemonitis quae praemonenda, I
would have instinctively put the same question as at thirty or threescore.
Therefore my impression is that the channel of my reaction to the
Primer’s doctrine of original sin was somehow ready-cut, that my reaction
followed a habit of mind already fixed and settled, and that in so far as the
Primer’s couplet had any function in the premises, it was merely that of a
trigger, a spring of action.
A French friend, the gifted daughter of an immensely gifted father, is
much amused whenever she sees this agnostic and skeptical instinct at
work, and tells me it is my French blood cropping out; which indeed may
easily be so. My mother’s people came here as refugees from France at
some time between 1686 and 1688. Their descendants were a long-lived
lot; four generations of them were on earth in my time. Up to the last
generation they were also rather prolific for French folk; the tendency
seems to have run out then; they reverted to type so sharply as pretty
well to extinguish the line. My mother was one of ten, and I am her only
child; I had a sister who died in infancy before I was born. Out of the four
generations I knew, every one of them, man, woman or child, was an
anachronism, a straight throw-back. Scratch the skin of their mind, and
the unadulterated blood of a seventeenth-century Rochellois Protestant
would flow. Nothing interests me more now than to look back on the
excellent lucidity, integrity, detachment and humour which they brought
to bear on all the works and ways of the society around them, including
their own works and ways—especially their own; their power of
disinterested and humorous self-criticism was superb. They seem to have
held place in a true apostolic succession, for as I see them now I see an
Amyot, Montaigne, Rabelais, du Fail, des Périers, contemplating the
spectacle of Renaissance society, appraising its little infatuations with
serene preciseness, and finding them immensely diverting. My
observation of these people gave me a far freer entrance than I could
otherwise have had into the minds of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, of
Molière, Beaumarchais, yes, of Scarron also; and into minds as diverse as
those of Fontenelle, la Bruyère, St.-Simon, in the seventeenth century; or
as those of Comte, Scherer, Ste.-Beuve, Halévy, Ernest Renan, the
Goncourts and other unheeded prophets of the fin-de-siècle who were so
nearly my contemporaries; many of them actually my contemporaries,
with a generation’s difference in our ages.
 The general temperament of my mother’s family came out in various
little ways expressive of a suave irony, characteristically French. Nowhere
outside of Don Quixote have I come upon so many folk-sayings and
proverbial turns of speech as were current among them. Most of these,—
all of them, in fact, that I can remember,—I never heard elsewhere,
though they can hardly have been original with us. At the end of some
boring social function or similar round of duty, they would say, “Well,
that burying’s got by,”—a simile drawn from the sight of a rural funeral-
procession passing a house. Justifying some little extravagance, they
would ask, “What’s a shilling on a show-day?” They spoke of some
enterprise likely to be too much for the person taking it on, as “a store
job”; I am unable to make out this allusion. A specious bargain offered
“too much pork for a shilling,” and an obviously fraudful one would be
“cheap at half the money.” Carrying too many parcels at once to save a
trip, they called “carrying a lazy man’s load,” and if some one complained
of a tough steak, he would be told that “it’s tougher where there’s none.”
Once when I came down unusually late for breakfast, my mother said
drily, “I think your early rising won’t hurt you if your long fasting
doesn’t.” There was a rural flavour about most sayings like these, which
makes me doubt that they were at all original with us, for my people were
always townfolk as far as I know.
With such a heredity, and having been inured throughout childhood
to the spiritual atmosphere of a gentle and pervasive scepticism, it would
perhaps not be unnatural that as a general thing I should be found
instinctively leaning a little towards the agnostic side. Nor would it be less
so, probably, that in encountering controversial matters, such as the
theological constructions of the New England Primer, I should always
instinctively strike down through all secondary and debatable questions
and come to rest upon the one question that is primary and undebatable.
This atmosphere of scepticism fostered another instinctive trait or
habit of mind which is characteristically French; the habit of meeting any
sudden and unexpected proposal, however interesting, however simple,
even trivial, with an instant negative. Our maxim, Learn to say No, would
have no point whatever in a French copybook, for every French child is
born knowing how to say No, and in the circumstances I mentioned he
can be counted on to say it with unfailing regularity throughout his life.
Like the congenital infirmity of Goatsnose, this habit was mine from “the
remotest infancy of my childhood”; and although it amuses me as much as
it does my friends, I have long since written it off as unbreakable. I am
unable to recall a time when, if some one had proposed something on the
spur of the moment,—anything, no matter what, from the hand of the
princess to a hand at tennis or billiards—an abrupt No would not instantly
have popped out. Son lo spirito che nega in this sense truly, like my
ancestors; I come by it honestly. This habit might seem like sheer
perversity, but it is nothing of the kind. French of the French is the
instinct against committing oneself without reflection, and the negative is
merely a time-gaining device for holding open the opportunity for
reflection, however much or little reflection may actually be required or
employed. Even where assent is a foregone conclusion the opportunity
must be held open. If the princess’s hand were meanwhile forfeited
forever, it would be quite too bad and utterly lamentable, but there it is.

II

Although, as I said, there is not the faintest chance of knowing how I

learned my letters, there is no doubt about how I learned to piece them
together into words. I taught myself to do that. My playroom was in the
fore part of our basement-cellar or cellar-basement, and at the other end,
against the wall, was ranged a battery of three zinc-lined laundry-tubs
with hinged covers, also zinc-lined; a rather pretentious affair for those
days. Above the tubs was a window with a cracked lower sash, over which
was pasted, upside down, a piece cut out of the New York Herald. As I lay
prone on the tub-cover with my heels in the air and my chin propped up
from my elbows, this piece of print was level with my eyes at a
comfortable reading-distance. At irregular intervals, mostly when it
rained, I occasionally posited myself in this fashion and spelled out the
printed words, reading like a Hebrew, backwards. I did this with no notion
whatever of self-improvement, but merely as finding myself some sort of
occupation when I had nothing more interesting to do; somewhat as one
idly falls back on working out a puzzle; which even so was rather odd, for
all my life I have been desperately bored by the mere thought of any kind
of puzzle. In this way, however, I learned to read; and like Thoreau, except
for the time devoted to this exercise, I am unable to count a moment
spent over a newspaper that was not wasted. One effect of this experience
remains with me. I can still read print from right to left quite handily, and
also print which is upside down.
My first setback was the discovery that English is not a phonetic
language. The name of a certain Colonel Harry appeared on my scrap of
newspaper in some connexion which I no longer remember. I do not know
who Colonel Harry was, or anything about him; probably I never knew;
perhaps the nub of his story disappeared when my fragment of paper was
cut out. All I remember is that when I pronounced his title phonetically,
some one,—I think it was our fine old coloured cook,—corrected me.
Gradually I was introduced to anomalies like cough, tough, hough, bough,
through, and it was not long before my curiosity about them began to give
way to a vague indefinite pride in a language too great to trouble itself
about anomalies. So far from deserting me, that pride has become
progressively overweening and touchy with advancing age. Reason and
logic are all against the orthographical antics of our language, and all in
favour of the wholesale confiscations which a military despotism will no
doubt levy on our speech when all else that belongs to us has been
confiscated. As a man of reason and logic, I am all for reform; but as the
unworthy inheritor of a great tradition, I am unalterably against it. I am
forever with Falkland, true martyr of the Civil War,—one of the very
greatest among the great spirits of whom England has ever been so
notoriously unworthy,—as he stood facing Hampden and Pym. “Mr.
Speaker,” he said, “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to
change.”
Here, I am told, the English side of my ancestry comes out; and again
that may very well be so. My father’s parents came from a town in
Staffordshire, on the Worcestershire border, where their people appear to
have lived so long that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
My grandfather sprang from a race of ironworkers; I know nothing about
them, save that one of them, named Henry, was a gunmaker who had
something of a reputation in his day. An odd incident that happened when
I was in my late twenties convinced me that he must have been a first-rate
artisan. Coming on from the West Coast, I stopped-over in Missouri to
visit an old friend, an inveterate Nimrod with whom I had shot black duck
in the mouth of the Housatonic in the days when we were at school
together, doing post-graduate work—and can one imagine a self-
respecting black duck or old-squaw making its way up Stratford harbour
now? My friend presently proposed quail-shooting. The only gun he could
borrow for me was something that looked like the second or third
generation after the flintlock. It was a long, light, single-shot muzzle-
loader, perhaps a trifle over sixteen-gauge, with a beautiful barrel of thin
brown steel. I have never handled a gun that shot harder or truer, or one
that came up half as prettily; it virtually aimed itself. The end of a day’s
shooting found me head over heels in love with it and trying my best to
buy it, but the owner was obdurate; he treated me as the father of the
prize Circassian beauty would treat a common slave-trader. While
cleaning the gun with devoted care that evening, I noticed the maker’s
name in small block-letters on the lock-plate, H. Nock. I made up my mind
on the spot that if this artist were not one of the family, he should have
been; and many years afterward, quite by accident, I learned that he was.
My grandfather came to America to superintend a steel-making
concern. My impression is that he was the first in this country to make
steel of the highest quality, but I will not answer for the fact. I have been
told, though I doubt it, that he was the first to make any kind of steel here.
I should say that this could hardly be; but whatever the truth about such
matters, I can vouch for his having been a most capable workman. He had
a process of his own, which he kept secret; I do not believe he ever wrote
out the formula for it, but if he did, it has long since disappeared. He gave
my father a razor which he had fashioned out of an old file or something
of the kind; an exquisite, dainty little object that one might at first sight
take to be a miniature or toy razor, not meant for use, yet for
serviceability I have never seen one like it. He also made a sword with an
edge like a scalpel’s, and so flexible that one could touch the hilt with its
point. I do not know what became of this or any other of his artifacts.
He was a man of sterling character, habitually silent, thoughtful,
dignified, regarded by strangers as perhaps a little on the dour side. He
was in all ways a conspicuous example of the “ancient and inbred piety,
integrity, good nature and good humour of the people of England”; which,
by the way, remains the truest characterisation ever made of that people,
albeit not made by one of themselves, but by an Irishman. My
grandfather’s forebears were echt-English English out of the original
Saxon stock that landed at Ebbsfleet; they were English of the sort that as
late as my own time still looked down their noses at the descendants of
the French bastard of 1066 and his desperadoes, and spoke of them, as
“foreign devils.” His eight children, all but one born here, stood rather in
awe of him, though he was always kindly in his stiff English way, never
unjust or overbearing, and never intolerant. His tolerance, like all else of
his, was English; it had its root in authority and tradition, and was
exercised within the limits which these determined. It was therefore,
strictly speaking, unintelligent; thus standing in sharp contrast with the
tolerance practiced by my mother’s family. This was purely French; it was
founded on reason and proceeded by logic, tempered and refined by an
unfailing sense of what is amiable, graceful and becoming. My mother has
told me how often, when one of them passed a hasty judgement on
somebody for something, her father would say, “Be careful, children;
remember, you don’t know the circumstances.” It would hardly have
occurred to my English grandfather to put the matter that way.
The upright and gentle old English couple spoke such broad
Staffordshire that I could seldom make much out of what they were
saying. They were deeply religious, exercising an extremely simple and
practical faith, and asking no questions. Their type of religion was that on
which, for once in his life, Carlyle spoke out with the insight and lucidity
of a Taylor, Hales, Chillingworth, or one of the Cambridge Platonists.
“Man’s religion,” he said, “consists not in the many things he is in doubt
of and tries to believe, but in the few things he is sure of and require no
effort to believe.” No Cudworth or Whichcote could do better than that.
My grandfather was one of many who became disgusted with the
repulsive Erastianism of a State Church, and became a Dissenter, of the
Methodist persuasion; in fact, the Methodists formally commissioned him
as a lay preacher, and even after he came to this country he would
sometimes preach to Methodist congregations when no one was at hand
to do it. His preaching seemed acceptable, though I hardly see how
American hearers could have understood his speech.
Gogol’s story, Old-Fashioned Farmers, brings to my mind a good many
features of the old couple’s peaceful life in their latter days; their
devotion, their playful teasings and twittings, their intense busyness with
small activities, their hospitality and friendliness for those who found
entrance to the household. They lived long and well. When my
grandfather was ninety-three he was stepping about New York on a
firmer foot than mine is now, and at a pace as brisk as mine; at ninety-six
he complained that for some reason his eyesight was not what it used to
be. He died at some months past ninety-nine. His children also lived to a
great age, except the two youngest who died virtually by accident; if the
science of medicine had stood then where it does now, they might have
lived as long as the others. Both sides of my family ran to longevity, as far
back as they have been traced. My mother died at eighty-seven; her
father, at eighty-six; and except for deaths that were virtually accidental,
all their contemporaries in the family lived about as long, and some
longer. Two of my own contemporaries in a distant connexion are going
on for ninety, one for a hundred, and one for seventy-six. Latterly, again
like my mother’s family and even more abruptly, my father’s family
pinched out. Of my grandfather’s children, four were childless; one had
three children, all now dead; one had two; and two had one each.
My father told me of a strange incident in his mother’s life which
made such an impression on him that he remembered it clearly, although
he was no more than five or six years old when it happened. While he was
playing in the garden with two of his sisters a very large grey bird
appeared, circled slowly two or three times overhead, and settled on one
of the window-sills in my grandmother’s bedroom. My grandmother came
to the door at once, apparently in great distress, and said, “Come in the
house, children; your grandfather is dead.” Some weeks later (those being
the days of sailing-ships) she got a letter telling her that her father had
indeed died in his home in Staffordshire at precisely that hour. His illness
was short, and his death wholly unlooked-for; he was supposed to be in
the best of health. If my grandmother ever gave any account of her
sensations at the moment, my father did not know of it; no doubt she did,
but he was unlikely to have heard anything about it, since such matters
were not much discussed in the hearing of children. The odd thing is that
my grandmother would be the last person whom one would associate with
any metapsychical or superpsychical or extrapsychical (or whatever the
right word may be) experience. She was preëminently placid and
wholesome of mind, abounding in the unimaginative good sense so
typically English of the Midlands, and one would say quite insensitive to
impressions originating at all outside the commonplace.

III

I have spoken of my father’s people with this rambling particularity

because hardly anything referable to them is likely hereafter to fall within
the scope of these memorabilia. The truth is, I inherited almost nothing
on the paternal side, and what little I got is almost wholly by way of
external characteristics; blue eyes, blonde complexion running to the
rubicund, what one of my sinful friends calls the veritable boozehister’s
complexion, fit to ornament a retired admiral of the Royal Navy. A thin
skin, scanty blonde hair, small pudgy hands and feet, a villainous
tendency to gout, rheumatism, arthritis; these, I believe, make up the lot.
The only internal characteristic that I can identify positively as coming
from this side is my unreasoning jealousy in behalf of the appalling
vagaries of my native tongue. Nothing else arouses this peculiar emotion;
such feelings as I have for other things is wholly a reasoned affair, leading
me into no emotional excesses; that is to say, it is fundamentally more
French than English. The Englishman holds himself privileged to criticise
his people and their most cherished institutions as freely as he likes, but
he will not extend that privilege to others; and their assumption of it,
even when such assumption is most notoriously justifiable, at once
touches off a display of irrational resentment. With the Frenchman (as far
as my observation goes) the case is somewhat different. He may be quite
as devoted to his Marianne as the Englishman is to his Britannia, and quite
as well aware that the object of his devotion has a repulsive birthmark on
her shoulder. He will not cover up the birthmark, however, and pretend it
is not there; nor will he pretend that on occasion it is not so clearly visible
to the stranger as it is to him; nor will he assure the stranger that the
thing is not at all a birthmark but a superbly contrived beauty-spot, and
that nothing but envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness prevents
the world from accepting and admiring it as such. Wandering around the
Poitou at the time of the last Presidential election in France, I asked a
worthy Poitevin who the next President was likely to be. He shrugged his
shoulders with an expression of the utmost indifference, and replied, “I
don’t know,—some old cow.” If he had asked the question, and I had given
that answer, he might well have thought my manners were none too
good, but ten to one he would have smiled at the sally, and said, “C’est tout
a fait ça.” Hardly so the Englishman.
It amuses me to see how true to type I run in the one particular; I am
as unintelligently and absurdly jealous of the injustices, inhumanities,
iniquities, of our language as any good Briton is of those inhering in his
flagitious imperialism. Like him, I refuse to see them as unjust, inhumane,
iniquitous. I insist that they are just, beneficent, and in accordance with
the will of God. If foreigners have trouble with them, I agree that it is most
unfortunate, but really we can’t think of regularising the exquisitely
asymmetrical symmetries of our noble tongue merely to accommodate
foreigners. Let the foreigner sweat them out for himself; it serves him
right for his presumption in having been born to the use of a language so
far inferior. My French blood rises up at this, calling it the bland
hypocritical arrogance of l’Albion perfide, la Grande Voleuse. Then, English-
like, I am moved to insist in all honesty that it is nothing of the kind. It is
merely the humble and pious recognition of certain verities which were
established before the foundations of the world were laid. Since our
adorable Creator, in His wisdom and in His loving-kindness, endowed the
Briton with the natural right to rule, it was fitting that He should have
endowed him with command of a majestic and imperial language. Since
He ordained the immeasurable superiority of British character, customs,
laws and institutions, the Untouchables of the world must respect the
idiom in which that superiority is not only proclaimed but exhibited. It is
painful to find this attitude put down as arrogant and hypocritical when
we Britons are actually the most simple-hearted of mankind; but what is
one to do?
 I must confess that when the English half of my being rears up in this
preposterous fashion, the French half laughs most indecorously at the
capers I cut. It gently pulls my sleeve, and bids me once more study
prayerfully the immortal figure of Homenas praising the Decretals.
Fortunately this seldom happens; the French half controls me completely,
I think, in every department of spiritual activity save only where this
matter of linguistics comes in; and here I am as densely, as impenetrably,
English as Palmerston himself.
In respect of vocabulary, like Mr. Jefferson, I am “a friend to a
judicious neology,” but in respect of style and usage I count myself a
hidebound old British Tory, and glory in my shame. Mr. Mencken’s great
work on the American language is monumental, and I would go almost all
the way with it in granting a place in the English dictionary to its verbal
neologies of American origin; but its culpable laxity towards matters of
style and usage makes the British lion within me growl with rage. The
sensitiveness, the delicacy of perception which at once takes the right
measure of an occasion and puts a style in right relation to its subject; the
instinct for clarity, harmony and balance, the infallible sense for the exact
adaptation, often the exact sacrifice, that is needed to maintain them; this
is what determines the validity of usage. It passed King James’s translators
effortlessly on from an Attic simplicity in the story of Joseph to an almost
matchless example of the grand style in the book of Daniel, and thence to
a sort of bastard Corinthian style faithfully reflecting the crabbed Greek of
the Pauline epistles. In at least one instance, where euphony was the
primary consideration, it made them sacrifice grammar to euphony.
When force was the primary consideration, Mr. Jefferson once sacrificed
both grammar and sense to it in saying, “We have nothing scarcely to
propose to our legislature.” Brand Whitlock years ago remarked to me
how greatly Andrew Jackson’s execrable grammar strengthened his
sentence when he roared, “I know them French; they’ll never pay unless
we make em.” I wish Mr. Mencken had compared the kind of prose he
sometimes sanctions with the kind he writes himself. Mutatis mutandis, his
management of style and usage is so unerring that as far as these go I
might easily imagine that William Law or Bishop Butler had written his
Treatise On Right and Wrong.

IV

Unless one counts in the Primer, which never really interested me,
the first book to attract my notice was Webster’s Dictionary. Probably it
caught my eye as being the biggest book in my father’s library, and also as
being easily accessible in its place at the end of one of the lower shelves.
Whatever the attraction was, I dragged the volume out one day, and in the
pages of pictures at the end I struck a rich and unexpected vein of
interest. Presently I discovered that the pictures were duplicates of those
in the text, so I quite made a business of looking them up to see what was
said about them. I remember being greatly taken with the pictures of
prehistoric creatures, and when somewhere or other I heard somebody
recite a scrap of nonsense-verse about certain exploits of—

The Icthyosaurus
On the banks of the Taurus,
And the Pterodactyl
By the gurgling rill,

—I was delighted to find myself among old friends. The amount of

miscellaneous information gained in this way, however, seems not to have
done me much good qua information, since most of it did not stay long
with me; but collaterally, in the matter of reading, and especially of
spelling, the case was different. I became an uncommonly rapid reader;
and as for spelling, the seed sown by the dictionary must have fallen on
good ground, for in my later life I have seldom been seriously put to it for
the spelling of an English word; probably not more than a dozen times in
all; and this notwithstanding I never studied a spelling-book or did any
stated exercises in spelling. I use the figure of good ground advisedly,
since there seems to be a sort of congenital instinct for correct spelling in
a non-phonetic language, and many of the ablest minds are bom without
it. Two of my ablest acquaintances can but barely spell their own names
twice alike; Henry George was a wretched poor speller; and Count
Tolstoy’s manuscripts show that the great and good old man must have
kept his copyist’s teeth on edge. Something of the same sort seems to be
true of one’s speed in reading; and therefore I feel that my proficiency in
these two accomplishments is of little credit to me.
The dictionary became quite literally my bosom friend, for I lugged it
about, clasped to my breast with both hands, from one place to another
where I should not be underfoot, and there I would lay it open on the floor
and read it lying prone as I had lain on the tub-cover when perusing my
scrap of newspaper. I must have been very young then, for I could but
barely manage the book’s weight; I do not know exactly what my age was.
Once my devotion put me in the way of a bad accident. My people had
never let on to notice my doings with the dictionary, but they may have
thought it was under too much wear and tear, for one day I found its place
vacant. I said nothing, but kept a sharp eye everywhere, and presently
discovered it out of reach on a shelf in a closet. Aided by a chair with a
teeter-tottery pile of books built up on it, I somehow actually managed to
get the thing out and down again without breaking my neck. Perhaps
what Mrs. Malaprop called “an unscrupulous Providence” had decided
that a whilom student of the Primer might become a good Calvinist some
day, and took a chance on giving me an uncovenanted lift. Nothing was
said about my escapade, no questions asked; apparently it was accepted as
testimony to the mighty truth that you can’t keep a good man down; and
so my studies went peacefully on. One trace of them still remains;
considered as sheer casual reading-matter, I still find the English
dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

The net profit of my first few years of life appears to have been a
fairly explicit understanding of the fact that ignorance exists. It has paid
me Golconda’s dividends regularly ever since, and the share-value of my
small original investment has gone sky-high. This understanding came
about so easily and naturally that for many years I took it as a
commonplace, assuming that everyone had it. My subsequent contacts
with the world at large, however, showed me that everyone does not have
it, indeed that those who have it are extremely few. They seemed
particularly and pitifully few when one contemplated the colossal
pretensions which, in its modesty, the human race puts forth about itself.
I found myself projected into a society which was riotously pretentious,
forever congratulating itself at the top of its voice on its achievements
and abilities, its virtues and excellences, its resources and prospects, and
calling on all the world to admire them; and yet a society by and large
“too ignorant to know that there is such a thing as ignorance”! I was
immensely amused by this anomaly, yet I surveyed it with a mild
wonderment; it was something of a puzzle. In time I found that others had
made this discovery before me; also that other contemporary societies
were in this respect more or less like the one I was in, essentially like it,
the main difference being in the degrees of blatancy wherewith the
resemblance was proclaimed; also that past societies of men long dead
and gone were like it; also that the reasons why all this should be so had
apparently never been any clearer to others than they were to me.
Thus in my early manhood I learned to respect ignorance, to regard
ignorance as an object of legitimate interest and reflection; and as I say, a
sort of unconsidered preparation for this attitude of mind appears to have
run back almost to my infancy. Moreover, when I got around to read
Plato, I found that he reinforced and copper-fastened the notion which
experience had already rather forcibly suggested, that direct attempts to
overcome and enlighten ignorance are a doubtful venture; the notion that
it is impossible, as one of my friends puts it, to tell anybody anything
which in a very real sense he does not already know. It seemed
extraordinary that this should be so. Nevertheless, there it was; and
apparently no one could give,—certainly no one, not even Plato, did give,
—any more intelligent and satisfying reason why it should be so than I
could give; and I could give none at all.
Here again, running back to my childhood there may have been
going on a kind of vague and indefinite preparation for this discovery. I
speak with caution, for I recall only one incident pointing that way, and
withal a trivial one; yet point that way it certainly did. When I was about
seven, up in New Hampshire where my mother and I were visiting some
relatives, a priggish little boy from next-door, reeking with infantile
piosity, said to me one Sunday afternoon, “I did not see you in church this
morning, I did not.” I replied politely, “Didn’t you?” As a matter of fact, I
had not been there; but I saw no reason for discussing my absence, and I
saw one imperative reason for not discussing it. I disliked the
sanctimonious little whelp intensely, on general principles—there was
that, of course; and it was clearly none of his business where I had been or
not been—there was that also. Yet I remember distinctly that these
considerations did not move me to the reply I made. I knew the boy and
his upbringing well enough to know that if I entered into explanations
with him, his invincible ignorance would estop him from understanding a
word I said. In like circumstances I would, and always do, make a like
reply today, and for the same reason.
As time went on, I became convinced that Calvin’s idea of invincible
ignorance had a validity which the Genevese French lawyer did not
suspect. I was also interested to see that this view had strong indirect
corroboration from the practice of those whom for some odd reason—odd,
because no one ever seems to learn anything from them—we misname as
“the great teachers of mankind.” Apparently they accepted ignorance as a
fixed quantity; apparently also their direct attempts at enlightening
ignorance were extremely few and futile. But why should ignorance have
persisted as a fixed quantity throughout human history, as apparently it
has done; and why should the direct effort at enlightening ignorance
remain as inveterately impracticable and inadvisable today as it was in
the days of Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, Im-hotep, or as it must have been
found to be by the wiseacres of the Neolithic period, if any such there
were?
These were the questions which interested me, though I was never
eagerly curious about them, or much stirred by finding no answer at
hand. Now and then some circumstance would bring them to the top of
my mind long enough for me to note the circumstance’s bearing on them,
but no longer. I never broached them for discussion in my student days.
The theory of progressive evolution was top dog everywhere at that time,
and its energumens would have met my questions with the “one plain
argument” with which Lord Peter met the doubts of his brothers, in the
Tale of a Tub. This flat negation of history and common experience would
have done no more than to illustrate the quality from which the questions
take their rise, and would therefore have been pointless. Not until I was
well along in years did I come on a theory of man’s place in nature which
provided my questions with a competent and satisfactory answer.
 CHAPTER TWO
[Social life in the Grand Siècle] is the school of what is called honour, the universal master who shall
be everywhere our guide. Three things we observe there, and find constantly mentioned: that our
virtues should be touched with a certain nobleness, our morals with a certain freedom, our manners

with a certain politeness. The virtues exhibited in this society are always less what one owes to others
than what one owes to oneself; they are not so much a response to an appeal from our fellow-citizens as

a mark of distinction between us and them.

—MONTESQUIEU.

D URING the period I have been canvassing we lived in Brooklyn, the

City of Churches. Our neighbourhood had somewhat the appearance
of a moderately well-to-do suburban locality just before a congested
population has crept up on it. Chelsea, Greenwich, Harlem, probably
looked more or less like it in the early days of New York. The high-life of
Brooklyn lived on the Heights, which is still the most desirable residence-
site in the city, though the winter winds which sweep up from the bay are
colder than death. Between us and the high-life lay a sprawling
amorphous population of which we knew little. Residence-blocks had but
barely reached us, though they were fast on their way. Apartment-houses
were yet to come; I think there were hardly any of them anywhere in
Brooklyn. The houses in our locality were roomy in a Victorian style,
hence ugly enough; their grounds were spacious, all extremely well-kept,
and almost all the properties were owned by those who lived on them.
Our district served the function of a modern suburban town, for the
heads of our families mostly had their occupations in what is now called
Manhattan, and were actually commuters, going to-and-fro daily by way
of the horse-car lines down Gates or Fulton Avenue to the East River
ferries. They spent about the same length of time in transit as their
successors who now swarm in from Summit or New Rochelle; but the pace
being slower, their daily journey was less tiring, and (since comfort
largely resides in a state of mind) more comfortable. It was also less
tedious, for Ruskin’s observation that “travel becomes uninteresting in
exact proportion to its rapidity” applies as well to commuters’ travel as to
any other.
The rus in urbe type of existence prevailed among us quite
considerably. One neighbour kept a flock of guinea-fowl which ran so wild
over his rearward premises that when he wanted one for dinner he would
shoot it. Our own place, one of the few rented ones there, must have had
at least a hundred-foot frontage, I think more. The house was well back
from the street, and the garden running the full length of a long block
behind it was remarkable for having large fruit-trees in it and a line of
oversized blackberry-bushes down one side. I was more circumspect
about blackberries after the day when I came within an ace of pawing in
on a hideous huge spider which was sitting in the centre of its web amidst
the thick bushes. This monster was of a bright yellow colour with black
stripes. I have seen others of the same kind since then, but never one
much more than half its size.
Another neighbour, a patriarchal old Englishman with a white beard,
kept a great stand of bees. I remember his incessant drumming on a tin
pan to marshal them when they were swarming, and myself as idly
wondering who first discovered that this was the thing to do, and why the
bees should fall in with it. It struck me that if the bees were as intelligent
as bees are cracked up to be, instead of mobilising themselves for old man
Reynolds’s benefit, they would sting him soundly and then fly off about
their business. I always think of this when I see a file of soldiers,
wondering why the sound of a drum does not incite them to shoot their
officers, throw away their rifles, go home, and go to work. Why, instead of
producing this effect which seems natural and reasonable, does it produce
one which seems exactly the opposite? In the course of time I found that
Virgil had remarked the fact about bees, and that in his parable called The
Drum Count Tolstoy had remarked the fact about the human animal.
Neither, however, had accounted for the fact. Virgil had not tried to
account for it, and Count Tolstoy’s attempt was scattering and
unsatisfactory.
Something perhaps worth mentioning, if only for its oddity, is that
none of us children ever had any toys except such as we made for
ourselves; odder too, possibly, that none of us wanted any. I might have
had toys if I had asked for them, but I did not care enough about them to
ask, and no one offered me any, even at Christmas when we all had nice
things of one kind or another given us. Such cronies as I had seemed to be
in the same state of indifference. I vaguely remember seeing a dilapidated
rocking-horse in our cellar, but I think it was something I fell heir to, like
the alphabet-blocks and the Primer. At any rate, I did nothing with it and
cared nothing for it. When I was six or seven I collected some pieces of
board and knocked together a very good nest for myself in the upper
branches of a tree near the house, whence I surveyed the landscape after
the manner of Alexander Selkirk. I also made a practicable swing, but soon
got out of the way of using it, being attracted into fields of larger
adventure.
One side of our premises was bordered by a big stretch of vacant land
which, with the garden, gave us a playground practically illimitable. For
some reason, huge piles of broken rock had been dumped on these vacant
lots, which vastly increased their interest. We did tricks in Alpine-
climbing over these, picking out ways which involved the most hazardous
feats of balancing. One day I discovered some ten-cent pieces scattered at
the foot of one pile, and this set us off on a gold-rush at once, exploring all
the depths and crevasses of the porous heap in a search for further loot,
but we did not find any.
In all, I led a very active, busy and wholesome outdoor life, the year
round. In summer, we were hard at work in all the primitive occupations
which youngsters devise for themselves out of such resources as they
happen to find in their way, though curiously little imagination had play
in our enterprises. We did not build any castles in Spain or pretend to be
Indians, pirates, explorers, or the like. I do not know why this immemorial
privilege of childhood was lost to us, but our more prosaic doings filled
our days so full that we did not miss it. Apparently our world of practical
affairs was so large, abundant and satisfactory that we had more than
enough to do with taking it as it was. Our nearest approach to the make-
believe was in organising snowball-battles. We would build a snow fort,
then divide ourselves into attacking and defending forces, using shields
made out of barrel-heads, with leather straps through which to pass the
left fore-arm, Roman style. We had a tacit convention against “soakers”—
ammunition dipped in water and left to freeze hard—and also against
snowballs weighted with a stone core. All such practices were blacklisted
according to the doctrine that “fair’s fair” even in war. We were too young
to know that this doctrine was fast going out of fashion among our elders,
but in our innocence it seemed quite the right thing; so clearly the right
thing that I do not recall ever having heard it discussed or even
mentioned.
 Sometimes we got intimations of a larger world surrounding ours.
Once I wandered a long way eastward to where a railway ran, and there I
saw two locomotives, gorgeous with red paint and glittering brass,
bearing the strange names of Wouter van Twiller and Pieter Minuit. This
led to my learning that a very fine people called Hollanders or Dutchmen
lived across the ocean, and once long ago a colony of them had settled
here. Indeed, some of their descendants were still here, and were much
respected. I thought their governors must have been most tremendous
fellows to have such scrumptious engines named for them, and I was
especially keen on seeing some of those descendants. There were none
handy to us at the time, however, so my curiosity had to go unsatisfied for
many years. This experience not only gave me a justly high opinion of the
Dutch, but it also set up a great love for the old graceful type of
locomotive, which has never left me; and, by consequence, I now look on
the nondescript electric locomotive and the slithering, sneaking,
dishonest-looking type of “streamlined” Diesel locomotive with the
utmost abhorrence and disgust.
Although there were no Dutch in our neighbourhood, our social
atmosphere had a distinct bracing tang of cosmopolitanism which I very
early learned to breathe with interest and enjoyment. The only female
playmate I ever had came into my life at the age of four, and soon went
out again; a tiny frail blonde French girl—she impressed me as frail, but
judging by others I have seen since then, I now think she was faussemaigre.
She knew not a word of English, nor I a word of French, yet we conversed
fluently enough, and like the gifted souls at Pentecost, we somehow
managed to come at some sort of understanding, in a general way. I think
I never knew what her name was, but for purposes of identification I
spoke of her as “little Oui-oui,” which answered well enough. She did not
take to me particularly, nor I to her, but we carefully observed the
diplomatic amenities in all our relations, and the chances of a sentimental
attachment, if ever there were any, died a-bornin’.
We had several English families among us, all out of the best that the
upper-middle class could show, and with most of the objectionable insular
angularities peculiarly British worn down by attrition. One family named
Brown came from the Indian civil service. The French critic who said,
rightly enough, that in matters of colonial administration les Anglais sont
justes, mais pas bons, would gladly have made an exception for this amiable
family. Mrs. Brown taught my mother to make curry secundum artem, the
real thing, which was one of the cardinal joys of my life at home.
Memories of it today make me explode in wrath like a retired colonel
from Poona or Allahabad when I see the messes which miserable
defaulting devils stew up and put before me under the name of curry.
A few Germans lived among us, one named Kreuter, a little brisk old
man, a great friend of my father, and a master hand at making sauerkraut.
When he had got a batch of sauerkraut in prime condition, he would bring
over a couple of quarts for my father to sample and pass expert
judgement on. The discussions were so long and the aroma so pervasive
that my mother finally laid down the law that my father and Kreuter
should hold their sessions outdoors or in the woodshed. She said she
always knew when Kreuter was coming, if the wind was right, for she
could smell his tin pail long before he hove in sight. She also declared she
could see the fumes of his sauerkraut push up the cover of the pail once in
a while, like the action of a safety-valve, as he was proceeding along; but
this may have been an illusion of some kind.
Between the Kreuters and a grocer named Mahnken whom we
patronised, I picked up a bit of German which I used sometimes not really
knowing whether I was speaking German or English. Probably it is in
consequence of this that occasionally now when I try to think of an
English word, the German equivalent will come to me long before the
English word produces itself. This of course seldom happens, but it has
happened, and once or twice very awkwardly, as it did only a few days ago
when I was pointing out a stone-quarry as a landmark for some motorists
who asked for directions. I lost the word completely, and after fishing
around in my mind for a moment or two while the motorists waited, I
made the silliest possible show of myself by turning to the people with me
and asking what a Steingrube is in English.
The cosmopolitan character of our neighbourhood was rounded out
by the presence of a north-of-Ireland Scots Protestant family which in the
eternal fitness of things bore the name of Irons. When one laid eyes on old
Irons one said to oneself, Behold England’s age-long difficulty in
governing Ireland! He was a living, breathing allegory of what Burke
called “the dissidence of Dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant
religion”; that is, he was everything that a sentimental, quickwitted
people like the southern Irish would regard with frantic loathing. He
looked like Sir Edward Carson, and his harsh sepulchral voice was Carson’s
own; or Ralph Nickleby’s, as Dickens describes it. He regarded all non-
Calvinist doctrine as a lie and a heathenish superstition, and he was
especially strong for burning the Romish and High Anglican hierarchies at
the stake. Rabelais’s description of Gaster fitted him like a poultice.
Nothing could be done with Irons, “for he is imperious, blunt, hard,
severe, uneasy and inflexible; you cannot make him believe, represent
unto him, or persuade him anything; he does not hear.” My parents got an
immense deal of amusement out of Irons, though none in an ill-natured
way, for there was never a grain of ill-nature in our household. In their
view, human character in all its unaccountable manifestations is simply
the most diverting thing in the world, and as such they accepted it. Irons
was a prize exhibit after his kind; luck had thrown him our way as a kind
of spiritual windfall, to be highly appreciated for what he was, an
uncommonly interesting and comical object of character-study.
I think I am safe in saying that the touch of cosmopolitanism in our
surroundings affected me favourably and permanently. What with the
Dutch names on the locomotives, Kreuter’s sauerkraut, the little French
girl, the English, and the inveterate, almost homicidal intransigence of old
Irons, all interpreted through my family’s humorous, penetrating and
tolerant view of humanity-at-large, I got the impression of an interesting
and rather delightful variety of cultures, traditions, modes of thought, and
habits of life; and I am sure I must also have got some inkling of what
always has seemed to me, and still seems, the most rational and practical
attitude towards them. One of the most offensive things about the society
in which I later found myself was its monstrous itch for changing people.
It seemed to me a society made up of congenital missionaries, natural-
born evangelists and propagandists, bent on re-shaping, re-forming and
standardising people according to a pattern of their own devising—and
what a pattern it was, good heavens! when one came to examine it. It
seemed to me, in short, a society fundamentally and profoundly ill-bred. A
very small experience of it was enough to convince me that Cain’s heresy
was not altogether without reason or without merit; and that conviction
quickly ripened into a great horror of every attempt to change anybody;
or I should rather say, every wish to change anybody, for that is the
important thing. The attempt is relatively immaterial, perhaps, for it is
usually its own undoing, but the moment one wishes to change anybody,
one becomes like the socialists, vegetarians, prohibitionists; and this, as
Rabelais says, “is a terrible thing to think upon.”
In all our little cosmopolitan variety, I had the luck to see examples
which were invariably good, not only in the older generation, but in my
own as well. The boys of our neighbourhood were a well-brought-up lot,
manly and decent. By pure accident one day a burly English lad named
Growtege hit me on the back of my head with a stone, hurting me
severely. When he helped me home and turned me over to my mother, his
manly shouldering of responsibility and the equally manly way he “took
on” about his carelessness, were quite remarkable. I remember some
trivial bits of mischief done now and then, but I do not recall anything
mean, low, shabby or wilfully damaging, on the part of any among us.
A mysterious outsider turned up in our midst at irregular intervals,
and terrorised the neighbourhood. Nowadays he would probably be called
a problem child, whatever that is, but as a matter of fact he was a born
cutthroat and plug-ugly. None of us knew who he was or where he came
from, or anything about him. Oddly, he was always neat, clean-looking
and well-dressed. He had the strange faculty of appearing suddenly out of
nowhere and then as suddenly disappearing, like the prophet Elijah; and if
he chanced to meet another boy, he would fall on him without a word and
beat him unmercifully. We soon became fed up with him and organised a
posse comitatus or vigilance-committee to lie in wait and demolish him on
his next arrival; which we did so effectively that he never reappeared.

II

I have recounted these minutiæ of my upbringing, or I might better

say upgrowing, to correct a false impression which I may have given of
myself as a sheltered and bookish creature, something of an infant
prodigy. Perhaps too, though I hope not, I have given the impression of a
family surreptitiously forcing a precocious and repulsive development.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. I was a child of the great
outdoors, active, strong, full-blooded, never ill. My literary pursuits were
purely an indoor sport in which I was neither encouraged nor
discouraged, nor had I any more notion of educating myself than I had of
flying. I did not know what education was; I doubt that I ever heard the
word mentioned at any time in that early period. All the books in the
house were free to me, even those in my father’s professional library, and
my choices were not influenced or even noticed, as far as I could see.
There they were, and that was all.
Only one thing took place which might be debited against this
account, though I am sure it should not be. My father was far from being a
finished scholar, but he knew some Latin, and rather more Greek than
Latin. When I was beginning to talk,—at the age when a child is eager to
memorise anything, no matter what, so long as somebody gives it
something to memorise,—my father taught me a great string of Greek and
Latin paradigms. I am sure he had no ulterior motive in this, but did it
mainly because he had no other repetitious jingles to teach me; neither he
nor my mother knew any nursery-rhymes.
It may seem odd that a child of that period should grow up without
hearing a nursery-rhyme, but so it was; and I can cite another fact about
my infancy which is perhaps more unusual. My father and mother both
had glorious voices, as had most of my aunts and uncles. The love of music
ran strong through both families, many of their friends were musical,
music of sorts was always going on about the house; yet I was never sung
to sleep, never heard a lullaby or a child’s song. All hands played or sang
around me, none ever to me. Thus the first strain of music to stick in my
memory was not a lullaby or a nursery-song or a hymn-tune; it was a few
measures from the final chorus in the second act of la Traviata.
Offenbach’s experience with the eight bars from Zimmer’s waltz was like
mine, but I have not happened to hear of another like it.
Our small section of Brooklyn resembled the modern commuter’s
town in maintaining a social life of its own, distinct and separate from
those of the Heights and the nondescript district lying between. Measured
by the standards which the student of civilised man would apply, our
social life was perhaps a rather commonplace affair; a poor thing, but our
own, as Touchstone said of his lady-love. Yet as measured by the
standards then prevailing in America, it had its merits; and as measured
by those prevailing now, it was attractive and agreeable. The curse of
hardness had not wholly come upon it, nor wholly cleared a way for the
attendant curse of hideousness, of a blighting and dishevelling ennui. My
mention of Offenbach a moment ago reminds me that it had one thing
which was destined shortly to disappear from American life, a sound
sense of gaiety. Its spontaneous manifestations of true gaiety were the
first I saw in America, and they were also the last. I have seen plenty of
vapid frivolity since then; boisterousness, hysterical nerve-tensions,
mechanical escape-devices, all manner of pitiful and vulgar travesties on
the real thing; but not since I was ten years old have I encountered the
free play of a collective instinct for the best in a civilised desipere in loco.
Nor is it altogether without reason that this should be so, for as a French
writer lately remarked, American society is the only one which has passed
directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing
civilisation.

III
 As a rule our district kept little track of the high-life’s affairs down on
the Heights, and such news as occasionally seeped through to us came as
from another world. I did not come along in time to be caught in the
backwash of the great Beecher-Tilton scandal, but I heard casual mention
of it in the family circle years afterward. This cataclysm razed the Heights
from end to end, and rocked the whole country; there had never been
such a devastating social upheaval. It is forgotten now, as it should not be
by students of society at least, for its history is a compendious index to
the character and quality of American social life in Mrs. Wharton’s “days
of innocence.” No critic can hope to know precisely what representative
American society was like in that period unless he makes himself letter-
perfect in a study of this affair.
My family’s attitude towards all this commotion could hardly have
made a distinct impression on me, for I knew nothing about Beecher or
his alleged misdoings, and cared as little. Yet when I read Paxton Hibben’s
excellent study of Beecher a few years ago, it instantly interpreted that
attitude for me as one of calm and humorous detachment. Everyone in
those days subscribed tacitly to a pretty fairly uniform code of morals, but
there was a snuffiness about the ostentatious pieties and moralities of
those concerned in the Beecher-Tilton imbroglio which made it
impossible to take their contentions or representations seriously. What
people! one said at once. What a life! What a society! In its dulness, its
fatuity, its simian inability to see when it was making itself ridiculous, was
there ever anything on earth like it? My family clearly had little doubt, on
the evidence offered, that the scandal rested on a sound basis of fact; that
Beecher had been entertaining himself in dalliance with one at least, and
perhaps more, of his female parishioners. But to arraign him for that, and
then to get up a great pother about it, all on the sheer score of religion
and morality (and afterward, yes, actually, on the score of legality, when
Tilton haled Beecher into the civil courts on a charge of alienation)—this
procedure would seem the acme of a stilted burlesque.
Yet to regard a matter with humour and detachment is by no means
the same as regarding it lightly. My parents would have been the last to
regard any matter of adultery lightly, the last to dismiss it with Lincoln’s
droll saying that for those who like that sort of thing it is probably about
the sort of tiling they like. On the contrary, their view would naturally be,
and I am sure was, much more serious than any which the affair brought
to light. The eye of common sense would see simply that the courts of law,
religion and morals were not courts of competent jurisdiction. Their
sanctions were of debatable validity in the premises, and when as
egregiously overpressed as they were in the case of Beecher, the effort to
apply them became ridiculous. The court of undebatably competent
jurisdiction would be the court of taste and manners. Whatever law,
religion and morals may say or not say, the best reason and spirit of man
resents adultery as in execrably bad taste, and from this decision there is
no appeal. Moreover, the three incompetent courts could not take proper
cognisance of the fact that Beecher and Tilton were intimate friends. The
court of taste and manners could and would; and a properly enlightened
social resentment would be accordingly enhanced, for all but the very
lowest of bad manners exempts the wives of one’s friends. On the other
hand, the three courts can and do take into account the principle of raw
expediency, which in the affair of Beecher was made almost paramount,
to the intense disgust of all who had any sense of what was due to
common propriety and decency. The court of taste and manners takes no
account of it.
 I grew up in the conviction that in a truly civilised society the
sanctions of taste and manners would have a compelling force at least
equal to those of law, religion and morals. By way of corollary I became
convinced that expediency is the worst possible guide of life. Bentham’s
doctrine of expediency, on which Michel Chevalier a century ago
observed that American society was founded, seemed to me thoroughly
false, corrupting and despicable; and in my opinion the present state of
the society based on it affords the strongest evidence that it is so. I would
not say in the broad didactic manner that it was this-or-that piece of
experience,—say, the code governing our snowball-fights, or my family’s
view of the Beecher-Tilton affair,—which first put me on the way to that
conviction. Rather I would say it was the general view of human conduct
prevailing around me which did this; a view which these experiences and
many others essentially like them, fitted in with and illustrated.
Whether by one means or another, I was somehow prepared to see,
as when I was still quite young I did see, that in our society the purview of
legal, religious and ethical sanctions was monstrously over-extended.
They had usurped control over an area of conduct much larger than right
reason would assign them. On the other hand, I saw that the area of
conduct properly answerable to the sanctions of taste and manners was
correspondingly attenuated. One could easily understand how this had
come about. Law is the creature of politics, and the general course of
politics, as among others Mr. Jefferson, Franklin and John Adams had
clearly perceived, is always determined by an extremely low order of self-
interest and self-aggrandisement. Changing the legal maxim a little, est
boni politici ampliare jurisdictionem, as we everywhere see. Again, when
Christianity became organised it immediately took on a political character
radically affecting its institutional concept of religion and its institutional
concept of morals; and the same tendencies observable in secular politics
at once set in upon the politics of organised Christianity. Thus the area of
conduct in which men were free to recognise the sanctions of taste and
manners was still further straitened.
The consequence was that the one set of sanctions atrophied, and the
other set broke down; thus leaving human conduct bereft of any sanctions
at all, save those of expediency. In other words, each person was left to do
that which was right in his own eyes. What with Bentham on one side and
the hierarchs of law, religion and morals on the other, American society
had got itself crosslifted into a practical doctrine of predatory and
extremely odious nihilism. When the sanctions of law, religion and morals
broke down through persistent misapplication to matters of conduct quite
outside their purview, the sanctions of taste and manners had become too
frail and anæmic to be of any practical good. For obvious reasons the
resulting state of our society seems beyond hope of improvement.
Attempts to galvanise the sanctions of law, religion and morals for further
misapplication are ineffectual; and ineffectual also must be the attempt to
root the saving criteria of taste and manners in an ethical soil laid waste
by the Benthamite doctrine of expediency.

IV

Besides the qualities I have previously mentioned, the social life in

our section of Brooklyn preserved some vestigial characteristics which
made it especially wholesome and pleasant for children. It was leisurely,
kept down to the tempo of the horse-car. It was also cheerful. Nothing
needful to our pleasure or contentment cost much. Our people had
resources in themselves which enabled them to get on with few
mechanical aids to amusement. Living among them, one could see a great
deal of force in Spencer’s observation that “happy people are the greatest
benefactors of society.” I think our people were perhaps as nearly happy
as people could be in a land where so acute an observer as Stendhal found
that “the springs of happiness seem to have dried up” in the general
population; and where Edison, at the end of his life, told reporters that “I
am not acquainted with any one who is happy.” Like Napoleon in exile,
they may have been “not happy, precisely, but contented,” but their
contentment was a very passable imitation of happiness, quite good
enough to enable us unthinking children to get a vast deal of enjoyment
out of very little.
Once or twice each summer I was taken down to Coney Island’s “long,
bare, unfrequented shore,” a Sabbath-day’s journey at that time. These
excursions were usually made in behalf of some visitor’s turn for sight-
seeing. Even then Manhattan Beach was by no means so desolate as
Whitman’s line suggests. It had a hotel of credit and renown, where some
notable persons spent their summers, and several smaller enterprises had
sprung up for the accommodation of day-trippers like ourselves. There
was a similar development at Brighton. Gilmore’s band played at one of
the two beaches, but I do not remember which one; I think it was
Brighton. I remember the cornetist Levy’s playing to my complete
satisfaction, and I was also impressed by the fine stirring effects of a small
park of artillery brought in at the ending of the programme with some
piece like 1812. I do not remember what the piece I heard actually was, but
it was something in the military way.
What I most enjoyed on these excursions was digging clams to take
home. Excellent small quohaugs abounded on those shores, especially at
Canarsie; I suppose the last one disappeared from Coney Island all of forty
years ago, probably dying of chagrin. The general cheapness of things in
our neighbourhood is fairly well indicated by the price of clams. Once a
week or so a large round man in his shirt-sleeves, with a yellow
paintbrush beard and a tattered straw hat, would drive up from Canarsie
and around our district with a wagon-load of quohaugs in bulk. My
mother said he had three prices; his cry was “Hard clams, twenty-five
cents a hundred; hard clams, quarter a hundred; hard clams, two shillin’ a
hundred.” Four fresh sweet quohaugs for a penny, delivered, seems
nowadays like good living; and indeed we did live royally well.
The outings I most enjoyed were when my father would take me over
to New York with him for the day. He had an office there, where I was
vastly entertained by observing all sorts and conditions of men who
dropped in to hob-nob with him. I never knew another man who had a
genius for friendship like his; I have sometimes wished I had inherited
some of it. He had what Cardinal de Retz called “the terrible gift of
intimacy”; a terrible gift indeed, if one misuses it, which my father never
did; with all his gregariousness and his immense power of attracting
people to himself, he remained always one of the best of men. He had an
unerring flair for queer originals, odd fish like old Irons, and got no end of
amusement out of them. My mother did not share his partialities,
regarding these peculiar cronies as mostly the scum of the earth, though
she never interfered with his enjoyment of them, but rather
countenanced it and even mildly encouraged him in it.
Aside from these human oddities, the feature of my excursions to
New York which most fascinated me was the shipping in the East River.
The wharves were lined with sailing-ships; it is hard to believe now that
the harbour was full of sails right up to the turn of the century. Now they
are no more, and sailors are no more; only mechanicians of sorts. Coentjes
Slip was full of canal-boats when I saw it then; they are scarce now, and I
presume the canalboatman of early days has given way to some
anomalous type. Once our ferryboat passed close to a steamer of the Royal
Netherlands line. I could read its name, another Dutch name to be filed
away in my memory alongside the names of the locomotives; it was the
Prins Willem III. It had but just backed out of its slip and was almost
motionless, poised to stand downstream on its long glorious voyage of
almost a month’s time. It would make seven or eight West Indian and
Caribbean ports with fascinating names like Jéremie, Miragoane, Jacmel,
Aux Cayes, all the way to Surinam; then cut over to Madeira and up to
Amsterdam. What an entrancing voyagel What an incomparably
delightful way to reach Europe, if one liked the sea and had the time! I
made a firm resolve to take that journey some day, and of course on that
very ship, no other. But I did not know then how short the life of a
steamship is, even as measured by the little life of man. When I was
travelling by that line a few years ago, Captain Haasters stopped me on
the deck one day, and said, “The purser tells me you can remember the
Prins Frederik Hendrik.” “Yes, sir,” I said, “and I can do better than that. I
can remember the Prins Willem III.” He shook his head. “Too far back for
me,” he said, and went on.
Once when my father and I were on a Fulton ferryboat, there
happened a most amusing incident which profoundly affected my
practical attitude towards men and things throughout my life. It was on a
clear winter evening, with a bright moon which threw a sharp streak of
light about three feet wide on the after deck of the boat while it was tied
up to the bridge. Presently a man appeared, carrying a carpet-bag, such as
one almost never saw any more, even then; they probably went out of
fashion in the days of reconstruction, when the carpetbagger gained an
evil name, deservedly enough. As this man came down the bridge, he saw
the streak of moonlight and took it for an open space, thinking the boat
had started. He charged down the bridge at full speed, made a tremendous
leap over the streak of moonlight, slipped and fell; the carpetbag flew out
of his hand, flew open, and distributed its contents all over the deck.
As I said, I have never forgotten this incident. In principle, as the
diplomatists say, the same ludicrous thing has come under my
observation time and time again, in every relation of life. That it has so
seldom happened to me is due wholly to the salutary object-lesson
furnished by the man with the carpetbag. Many times in my life I have
seen it happen, not only to individuals, but to great masses of people, even
sometimes amounting to whole populations. Considering the causes and
circumstances of its happening, and the kind of people whom these causes
and circumstances victimise, one is lost in wonderment as the Psalmist
was when he faced the kittle question, What is man?, and could find no
answer.
 CHAPTER THREE
The art of aristocrats, the art of enriching life.

—MARY M. COLUM.

T HE tenor of my intellectual life ran smoothly, being wholly self-

directed up to my eighth year. My father’s library was large but
unpretentious; it existed only for the sake of what lay between the book-
covers. There was nothing in it to gratify a collector’s spirit; indeed, the
collector’s spirit had no foothold anywhere in our family. One can
understand book-collecting as a business, but only on the seller’s side, not
the buyer’s, except as one would buy in order to sell; one can understand
it, that is, as brokerage. I never knew a person who collected books, bric-
à-brac, postage-stamps, anything, for the sheer sake of having them, who
impressed me as being good for much else. True, I have not met many
such, so I may be recording only a set of coincidences. Perhaps also my
distaste for accumulating any kind of possessions has affected my
judgement, though I am by no means persuaded that it has.
I read some books, looked into others, and looked at a great many,
thus putting myself on the way to realising, as I did much later, the
amount of education one gets by looking at the backs of books. One’s mind
is broadened and loosened by simple observation of the immense variety
of subjects that have engaged men’s attention. Then too it sometimes
happens that the casual impressions made by certain subjects do
something towards preparing the mind to receive more serious
impressions later. As an illustration of this, I remember rummaging out a
thin little elementary Hebrew grammar (I have no idea how such a thing
happened to be there) and leafing it over by the light of a flickering
momentary curiosity, then laying it aside for good and all. Years
afterward, however, when an interest in Hebrew poetry caused me to do a
little work on the language, I was astonished to see how much I
remembered noticing on those few pages, and how clearly I remembered
it.
Good literature was much easier come by in my early days than it is
now, and it was also much cheaper. One reason for this was that the
United States had no international copyright-law until some time in the
early ‘nineties; American publishers could reproduce the works of foreign
authors at no more than the cost of printing and binding. Concerns like
the Seaside Library and Lovell’s Library drove a roaring trade in pirated
books at ten cents a copy, paper-bound, or twenty cents for “double
numbers.” Their lists were incredibly long. I got my first taste of French
literature from a translation of Eugène Sue’s novel, The Wandering Jew,
which the Seaside Library put out at twenty cents. The time I put on it was
well spent, for in his architectonics Sue was unquestionably as great a
storyteller as Dumas, though not so great in his management of detail.
Curiously, I read nothing of Dumas until much later. I was fifteen when
Monte-Cristo came my way via one of these cheap editions; and after that,
nothing until I was past thirty. My first detective-story was Gaboriau’s
gorgeous old shocker, File no. 113; it came to me by way of some pirated
reprint, I think in the Seaside Library which also carried me through the
infinite variety of Jules Verne.
We were all receleurs in those days. Not being a Benthamite, I am
unable to defend literary piracy on high moral grounds, but I must admit
that the massive testimony of our book-catalogues from, say, 1860 to 1890
comes nearer to making a complete case for the whole doctrine of
expediency than anything else I know of. If Bentham’s “greatest good to
the greatest number” sums up the whole canon of right and wrong, no
more convincing evidence could be adduced. The foreign authors and
publishers suffered, but as Bentham might have said, “what are they
among so many?” Their loss was the gain of innumerable thousands.
Probably American authorship also suffered by competition in a rigged
market, though I do not remember that protectionist spellbinders ever
brought this aspect of law-made privilege up to public notice.
Another reason why good literature was more easily accessible then
than now is that the proportion of literacy in our population was much
lower, and publishers were not under such heavy economic pressure to
block up the access to good literature with trash. In Massachusetts, where
literacy would be presumably highest, there were nearly a hundred
thousand persons unable to read or write. Things were no better in
Connecticut, where one-tenth of the child-population got no schooling at
all; and it would be fair to suppose that in the more newly-settled regions
of the country the level of literacy would be very considerably lower. One
might assume that as the level of literacy rose, the level of general
intelligence would rise with it, and consequently that the economic
demand for good literature would also rise. This, roughly, was Mr.
Jefferson’s idea, and indeed it has always been at the root of our system of
free public instruction for everyone. It has, however, somehow failed to
work out according to expectation. The level of literacy has been pushed
up very nearly to the practicable limit, but the level of general
intelligence seems not to have risen appreciably, and the economic
demand for good literature is apparently no greater in relation to a
population of a hundred and thirty million than it was to one that was
going on for sixty million; in fact, one would say it is much less. The
reason for this is plain enough; there is nothing recondite about it. In his
view of literacy, Mr. Jefferson was only half right. He was obviously right
in premising that no illiterate person can read; but he was guilty of a
thundering non distributio medii in his tacit conclusion that any literate
person can read. On the contrary, as I discovered as long ago as my
undergraduate days, very few literate persons are able to read, very few
indeed. This can be proven by observation and experiment of the simplest
kind. I do not mean that the great majority are unable to read
intelligently; I mean that they are unable to read at all—unable, that is, to
carry away from a piece of printed matter anything like a correct idea of
its content. They are more or less adept at passing printed matter through
their minds, after a fashion, especially such matter as is addressed to mere
sensation, (and knowledge of this fact is nine-tenths of a propagandist’s
equipment), but this is not reading. Reading implies a use of the reflective
faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the
anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which
makes reading practicable.
As I said, the fact that few literate persons can read is easily
determinable by experiment. What first put me on track of it was a
remark by one of my old professors. He said that there were people so
incompetent, so given to reading with their eyes and their emotions
instead of with their brains, that they would accuse the Psalmist of
atheism because he had written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is
no God.” The remark stuck by me, and I remember wondering at the time
whether the trouble might be that such people hardly had the brains to
read with. It seemed possible. At nearly the same time I came across the
observation of Bishop Butler, who was for a few years a contemporary of
Mr. Jefferson—he died in 1752, and Mr. Jefferson was born in 1743—the
observation that most people were handier at passing things through
their minds than they were at thinking about them; and therefore,
considering the kind of thing they read, very little of their time was more
idly spent than the time spent in reading. Again I wondered whether this
could mainly be accounted for on the grounds of sheer inability to do
otherwise. The curiosity excited by these two obiter dicta has caused me to
keep a weather eye out on the reading-habits of my fellow-beings ever
since, and they have testified with monotonous regularity to the fact that
while the ability to read must presuppose literacy, literacy is no guarantee
whatever of the ability to read, nor even would it suggest that ability to an
ordinarily observant mind. One might suppose that so simple and easily
demonstrable a fact as this would long ago have attracted attention and
caused comment; but it seems not to have done so.
The ex-president of one of our colleges tells me that for a dozen
years he carried on experiments in the value of literacy, using freshmen
as his guinea-pigs; that is to say, he experimented on persons who were
not only literate, but who had gone so far as to pass their entrance-
examinations. Selecting a paragraph of very simple but non-sensational
prose, he asked his students, taking them one by one, to read it carefully;
then to read it carefully again; then to read it aloud to him; then to write
down the gist of it in their own words. Hardly any one could do it; hardly
any one was able to bring anything like an adequate power of reflective
thought to bear upon the substance of a simple paragraph. In other words,
they could not read.

II
 Few diversions have interested and amused me more than watching
the operation of Gresham’s law as it bore progressively on the permeation
of a whole people by Mr. Jefferson’s faulty logic. Our primary assumption
was that literacy is a good-in-itself, an absolute good; therefore everybody
should be taught to read and write. Any question about this was
inadmissible; any doubt that everybody could be so taught was disallowed.
When I came on the scene, our system of popular instruction was driving
straight ahead with all its might towards its goal of universal literacy,
naïvely unaware that any such formidable obstacle as Gresham’s law lay
in its way. True, this obstacle was not yet in plain view, but surely one
would think that the collective foresight of a whole country would have
suspected that it must be there. Plenty of bad literature was knocking
about in my boyhood, but not enough of it to drive out the good; that is to
say, nothing like the full force of Gresham’s law had as yet been brought
to bear on literary production. Publishers could make a decent profit out
of producing books designed, not for persons who were merely literate,
but for a relatively small and steady market composed of persons who
could read. But within my lifetime the country became largely literate,
thus opening an immense market made up of persons who were unable to
read but, as Bishop Butler said, were able to pass literary produce through
their minds. As this market widened, the satisfaction of it became
increasingly profitable, and therefore the best energies of publishers,
dragooned under the iron hand of Gresham’s law, were bent that way.
Moreover, this market was unsteady; being based on nothing but
irrational fancy, it had its ups and downs, its hot and cold fits of
susceptibility or indifference towards this-or-that type of produce, this-
or-that lure of sensational appeal. Forecasting such a market became
mostly guesswork, and the character of publishing changed considerably
in consequence; from a business it became essentially a gamble bolstered
by shrewdness in a meretricious mode of salesmanship. Thus the
operation of Gresham’s law progressively edged publishers farther and
farther out of the category of merchants, properly so called, and farther
towards the category of gamblers and touts.
I have seen the fortunes of periodical publications follow the
fortunes of books, showing even more clearly what the irresistible force of
Gresham’s law can do. When literacy was at a low level they could
maintain themselves at a high level of quality and command a fairly
profitable market. As the level of literacy rose, their level of quality sank
and their market thinned. In the middle ‘seventies, when our population
was getting on for sixty million, Harper’s Magazine had a larger
circulation by one-third than it has now over a population more than
twice as large. Its average circulation from year to year for the first fifteen
years of its existence, 1850-1865, was all of ten per cent more than its
average for the fifteen years last past. In the matter of quality, Harper’s
deserves all praise for standing out against deterioration as long as a ray
of hope was left; yet comparing the issues for any year, say between 1875
and 1885, with those for any year between 1930 and 1940, a person of any
literary experience can return but the one verdict.
I speak of Harper’s with deep affection because I knew it so well and
owe it so much. We subscribed for it and also for Scribner’s Monthly,
which in 1881 was merged into the Century. My father had volumes of
these running back as far as 1873, Harper’s in austere black leather
binding, and the others in dark red cloth ornamented in gold. Publishers
of periodicals profited by our parochial copyright-law, like book-
publishers. Harper’s, for instance, carried long serials in the magazine,
then ran them off in book form from the same plates to sell at fifty cents
in paper, $1.50 in cloth. At these prices the publishers could afford to pay
the authors something, and I think Harper’s did pay some authors, though
I am not sure about this being a regular practice; Thackeray, I know, was
paid $2000 in 1858 for The Virginians. The Franklin Square Library, which
the Harper brothers built up almost entirely out of British reprints, was
several cuts above the Seaside and Lovell’s in workmanship. There is
nothing like such commercial bookmaking being done today. Its contents
also averaged higher, reproducing most of the first-class and second-class
British fiction of the period. In the early days these magazines illustrated
their pages lavishly with jack-knife pine board woodcuts which seem
rather ridiculous now, but which have a certain antiquarian interest as
giving an idea of the actual appearance of men and things at the time.
Later the magazines did better; in the hands of Pennell, Frost, Abbey,
illustrating showed itself as a great art.
Continental literature scarcely existed for us. On a mere perusal of
our book-lists one could understand Matthew Arnold’s observation that in
the things of the spirit America could hardly lay claim to be more than a
province of England. Yet it was Scribner’s which fixed forever my
veneration for Tourgueniev as incomparably the greatest of artists in
fiction; it published a translation by Professor Boyesen of the two stories
of the nobleman Tchertapkhanov, and the story called A Living Mummy,
both from the Annals of a Sportsman. Harper’s gave me a translation of the
beautiful little prose idyl of Germelshausen, from the German of Gerstäcker.
Again, Scribner’s published a couple of delightful Flemish folk-tales, and a
charming German legend of the water-princess Use. It also introduced me
to Jules Verne through an abridged version of The Mysterious Island, run as
a serial; which led to my reading every work of this truly fascinating man
that I could get my hands on, and through the Seaside Library I got my
hands on all of them, I believe, but two. Moreover, one of these
periodicals,—I no longer remember which one,—brought me the affecting
story of Mother Michel’s cat, so dear to the heart of French children. I
have always been meaning to look this story up and find out what its
source was. It may have been lifted from the Journal des Enfants, the first
child’s periodical to appear in France, if not (as I think it was) the first to
appear anywhere. None was ever better done or more successful. It was an
enterprise of the able and fastidious Lautour-Mézerai, which brought him
in $20,000 a year, even after paying men of letters like Paul Lacroix and
Charles Nodier to write for it, and keeping up a solid backlog of best-
sellers such as the elder Dumas, Léon Gozlan, Emile Souvestre and Eugène
Sue. The joys and sorrows of Mother Michel’s cat made a story that was
plenty good enough for the authorship of any of these, even as seen
through the hazy medium of a translation.
In comparing Harper’s Magazine of that period with the Harper’s of
today, one notices that the reader got about four times as much reading-
matter to the issue as he gets now. Harper’s was lavish with serials; it ran
them two and three abreast; and they were something which one could
really call serials. Harper’s ran Thackeray’s Virginians through 1858, and in
1865 it ran Armadale and Our Mutual Friend side by side. The earliest
volume to which I had access, the one for 1873, carried serials by Anne
Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Charles
Reade. Through subsequent volumes I got acquainted with George
Eliot, Trollope, Miss Mulock, Professor James de Mille, (his fine old sob-
starter, The Living Link, full of mystery and horror, ran through 1874), R. D.
Blackmore, Thomas Hardy, and William Black, who sometimes put his
heroes and heroines through most distressing situations. His Macleod of
Dare, which ran as a serial, brought out a protest in verse from one of
Harper’s readers. I can recall the first few lines of it:

O Mr. Black! Dear William Black!

Why will you be so blue?
For hypochondria’s deepest dye
Seems surely dyed in you.

Oh, why with living corpses fill

The darkling dreadful main,
Or fish them out again at will,
Only to go insane?

—I forget the rest. Black wrote good novels, however; his Madcap Violet,
Kilmeny, A Princess of Thule, were good enough for anybody, and still are. In
fact, the second-raters of the period were considerably bigger men than
modern opinion credits them with being. One turned to them with
especial relief after first-raters like Reade and Dickens were bitten by the
bug of the Uplift and took to preaching. After Hard Times, for example, or
Put Yourself In His Place, a turn at Shandon Bells or A Castle In Spain would
taste uncommonly good. Only a few years ago, somewhere, somehow, I
happened on an old novel by C. Welsh Mason, called Rape of the Gamp,
which I had read as a boy; Harper’s serialised it in 1875. When I reread it I
found that my childish impressions were correct; a cultivated reader of
today would find more merit in it than he might expect. These disparaged
second-raters seem to me to have understood the true function of the
ποίησις as Aristotle and Hesiod expound it, much better than the first-
raters who took to pulpiteering, and to have served it with far greater
fidelity.
 But it was not only fiction that Harper’s serialised. It serialised
anything that was too good to be lost and too long to be run in one piece.
Emilio Castelar’s work on the republican movement in Europe, still in
many respects the best treatment of the subject, ran through ten or more
issues; so did another elaborate historical serial called The First Century of
the Republic. I recall one on house-furnishings; one on exploration in
Central Africa; one called South Coast Saunterings in England; one on travel
in Mexico; and one in particular called Recollections of an Old Stager. This
was made up of informal backstairs gossip about actors who had strutted
and fretted through their little hour on our political scene in the days of
Webster, Clay and Calhoun.
One is struck by the scope of the older periodical, the range of topics
it presents. It gives a vivid idea of the number of things in the world
which are interesting to the best reason and spirit of man, and also gives a
lively sense of how interesting they are. Again, one is impressed by the
amount of material in it which is addressed to reflective thought, and is
therefore as good and as fresh today as when it was first read, fifty or
sixty years ago. The modern periodical is relatively devoid of such
material; whereas in my youth, besides what magazines like Harper’s and
the Century contained, we had three national monthly reviews, one of
them very distinguished, which dealt in nothing else. Henry Adams said
that the succession of Presidents from Washington to Grant was almost
enough in itself to upset the whole Darwinian theory; and if he had lived
to see the succession extended to the present time he would perhaps say
it was quite enough. So one may say that the course of the North
American Review from its illustrious editorship under Sparks, Everett,
Dana, Lowell, Adams, down to the present time, is quite enough to upset
the notion that universal literacy is an absolute good. The North American
Review stands today as intellectual America’s most impressive monument
to the genius of Sir Thomas Gresham.
In forming an editorial policy, the brothers Harper apparently
decided that out of fifty million Americans, more or fewer, there were
probably about 100,000 who could read, and that out of these there was a
respectable number who enjoyed the exercise of reflective thought. They
appear to have taken this hundred thousand as their prospective
clientèle, and to have baited their trap with an appropriately diversified
lure. The temporary abeyance of Gresham’s law enabled them to take this
course and follow it profitably up to the last decade of the century. They
could not do this now; no one could do it at any time these forty years.
The result was nuts for the inquiring disposition of a small shaver
like myself. My parents took in St. Nicholas for me; I read it and liked it,
but I had no such interest in it as I had in Harper’s and the Century. When
I was through with an issue or a volume, I was through with it, while with
the others I was never through, nor would I be through now if I could
provide myself with a full file of Harper’s and the Century down to 1890.
St. Nicholas left me where it found me; the others followed my growth. I
have often thought that the most unfortunate thing about children’s
literature is that it is written for children; when one ceases to be a child
one has hardly anything left to go on with as a permanent asset. I read St.
Nicholas for five or six years, and the only thing in it that I could read now
was Lucretia Hale’s stories of the Peterkin family, and these, like Alice, the
Bab Ballads and the Snark, were not written for children; children were
rather their occasion than their cause. Possibly I could re-read Frank
Stockton’s A Jolly Fellowship which ran as a serial in St. Nicholas, but I am
not sure. I think I might, though I remember little about it, because I know
that a year or so after I read it I did go back to it and read it again.
 One of the luckiest strokes in an uncommonly lucky life was my
liberty to wander freely over the field opened to me by Harper’s and the
Century, especially by Harper’s. They gave me my start towards a sound
sense of what culture is, and of how desirable it is. Long afterwards, when
I found culture defined as knowledge of the best that has been thought
and said in the world, I could appraise these publications at their true
value. Their aim was to clear and strengthen this sense in those who to
some degree presumably had it, and to arouse it in the casual person like
myself, whom good fortune had somehow made eligible. The snippets
which they distributed were a Vorspeise clipped off the best available for
this general purpose; not always the best there was, perhaps, but the best
that for one reason or another could be made serviceable.
Five years ago I spent a delightful summer in the truly delightful
country of Portugal, where I saw a state of things which once more set me
wondering about the actual net value of universal literacy in any society.
Portugal was densely illiterate; apparently no one knew what the volume
of illiteracy was, for I got all sorts of estimates on it, running anywhere
from fifty to eighty per cent of the population. I missed the customary
roadsigns and roadside advertisements; in fact, advertisements of any
kind were strangely infrequent; and I was told that they would not pay
because too few people could read them. I noticed the absence of anything
like what we call “popular literature,” the production whereof has become
so gigantic an industry with us. Lisbon had a newspaper which seemed
fairly prosperous. Knowing no Portuguese, I floundered through one issue
with what help I could muster from Latin, French and Italian, and
gathered a provisional notion that it was pretty good, though it appeared
to be written for a degree of intelligence somewhat above the ordinary,
rather than for popular consumption. Its methods of distribution also
indicated this, as well as I could make them out. I already knew that
Portugal, as a French authority says, had une petite élite extrémement
brillante et cultivée, and the evidence was overwhelming that this was the
only possible clientèle towards which publishers might look.
One consequence of this interested me particularly. Lisbon’s
population comes to something like half a million, and it is a considerable
retail trading-centre for the country at large. I was there at rather a bad
moment for trade; goods were moving slowly just then, and the
commercial exhibits were not especially impressive, except in two lines
where they were indeed impressive—jewellery and books. Judging in
relation to the volume of population and the volume of literacy, I have
never seen so many, so well-stocked, and so handsome bookstores in any
city. Judging in the same way, I calculated that in order to match Lisbon,
New York would have to show very nearly as many bookstores as it used
to show beer-saloons in the days before Prohibition.
To me the implications of this were obvious and striking. I saw,
however, that, (to use our current jargon), the more socially-minded and
forward-looking Portuguese disregarded them, and that the country was
out to follow the fashion of modern republics since 1789 by pressing for
an indiscriminate spread of literacy. I could find no evidence that the
wisdom of this course had been challenged or even considered;
apparently Mr. Jefferson’s estimate of universal literacy’s value was taken
as axiomatic. I thought that instead of going in for this policy hand-over-
head and sight-unseen, the Portuguese might have been wiser first to
examine it thoroughly by the light which the experience of other societies
could throw on it; the experience of our own society especially, since we
have been most heavily committed to that policy and have done most
with it. I did not suggest this to my Portuguese friends, however; my
opinion was not asked, nor would I have given it if it had been asked. I had
no wish to wet-blanket the amiable and kindly Portuguese, nor did I have
any exalted notion that I could or should enlighten them, least of all that
it was my good-neighbourly duty to try; and a person who feels no such
stirrings within him is a superfluous man in any Kulturkampf.
It is one of my oddest experiences that I have never been able to find
any one who would tell me what the net social value of a compulsory
universal literacy actually comes to when the balance of advantage and
disadvantage is drawn, or wherein that value consists. The few Socratic
questions which on occasion I have put to persons presumably able to tell
me have always gone by the board. These persons seemed to think, like
Protagoras on the teaching of virtue, that the thing was so self-evident
and simple that I should know all about it without being told; but in the
hardness of my head or heart I still do not find it so. Universal literacy
helps business by extending the reach of advertising and increasing its
force; and also in other ways. Beyond that I see nothing on the credit side.
On the debit side, it enables scoundrels to beset, dishevel and debauch
such intelligence as is in the power of the vast majority of mankind to
exercise. There can be no doubt of this, for the evidence of it is daily
spread wide before us on all sides. More than this, it makes many
articulate who should not be so, and otherwise would not be so. It enables
mediocrity and sub-mediocrity to run rampant, to the detriment of both
intelligence and taste. In a word, it puts into a people’s hands an
instrument which very few can use, but which everyone supposes himself
fully able to use; and the mischief thus wrought is very great. My
observations leave me no chance of doubt about the side on which the
balance of social advantage lies, but I do not by any means insist that it
does lie there.
 III

When I was eight years old I began to study Latin and Greek under—
what shall I say? Should I say under my father’s teaching, instruction,
direction, supervision, tutorship? No, I have precisely the right word in
mind, but unfortunately the dictionaries say it is not a good word; that is,
they say so by implication, for they do not mention it at all. My able and
distinguished friend Mr. Charles A. Beard long ago remarked to me how
sorry he was that the word l’arn, so well and truly seasoned by hard
service in New England, should have gone completely out of currency as a
transitive verb. “You can’t teach a person anything,” he said, “and
certainly you can’t learn him anything, but maybe you can l’arn him
something.” There is a nice distinction here, and one so highly valuable as
to seem especially well worth preserving for the sake of those whose
concern with pedagogy is professional; and yet I suppose it is a dynasty of
doctrinaire schoolmarms of both sexes which has done most to wipe it
out.
I do not recall that my father ever taught me anything, but in the
course of two years, no question, he l’arned me a huge deal of Greek and
Latin. It was all done informally and briefly; he never tried to do more
than keep my chin above water. We had no schedule, no fixed daily tasks,
no regular hours. When he had time, he would ask me what I had been up
to, try me out on the knotty bits to make sure I had got them properly
straightened up, throw in a word or two here and there which usually
anticipated something lying ahead, and that was all there was to it. In the
first instance, my interest in these studies, or rather my curiosity about
them, was sprung by noticing that the dictionary gave so many of our
words as coming from these sources. Naturally, however, it was not long
before I became interested in the languages on their own account and
rather keen to know what the people who spoke them were like and what
they did with themselves. For these reasons, I suppose, pottering about
with the languages never seemed like work to me, and I can take no credit
whatever to myself for any proficiency which may have come of it; no
more than for my proficiency, or lack of proficiency, at billiards, baseball,
tennis, teaching, writing, editing, or any one of the many pursuits to
which I have set a ‘prentice hand in the course of my life. Certainly no one
ever pointed my nose towards Rome and Athens; in fact, I had puzzled out
the Greek alphabet correctly and memorised it before my father took
hold, or, (I think), even before he noticed what I was about. I took up the
job on my own, kept at it as I pleased, and was fully prepared to drop it if
it failed to pan out. Apparently it is in the constitution of man that
nothing done under these conditions seems like work. It may also be that
these are the primary conditions requisite for l’arning a person
something, and that l’arning him consists merely in taking advantage of
them intelligently; but I do not know that this is so; it is only my opinion.
Being alone in my undertakings, I had the inestimable advantage of
being unaffected by the law of diminishing returns. I got all I could take in
of everything that was coming my way. Not until much later, when I had
seen something of mass-education and observed its results, did I perceive
how great this advantage is. With Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a
student on the other, the student gets the best out of Hopkins and gets as
much of it as he can absorb; the law of diminishing returns does not touch
him. Add twenty students, and neither he nor the twenty gets the same
thing; add two hundred, and it is luck if anybody gets anything remotely
like the same thing. All Souls College, Oxford, planned better than it knew
when it limited the number of its undergraduates to four; four is exactly
the right number for any college which is really intent on getting results.
Socrates chatting with a single protagonist meant one thing, and well did
he know it. Socrates lecturing to a class of fifty would mean something
woefully different, so he organised no class and did no lecturing.
Jerusalem was a university town, and in a university every day is field-day
for the law of diminishing returns. Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem, and
talked with fishermen here and there, who seem to have pretty well got
what He was driving at; some better than others, apparently, but all on
the whole pretty well. And so we have it that unorganised Christianity
was one thing, while organised Christianitv has consistently been
another.

IV

It was while we were living in Brooklyn that politics first came under
my conscious notice. I wrote an account of this in an essay published a
dozen years ago, so I can do no better than to repeat the substance of it
here. A short distance over the line which separated our semi-rural
section from the more densely-populated central district of Brooklyn
stood a ramshackle one-storey turtle-shaped wooden building known as
the Wigwam. In some way I had heard it was a “political headquarters,”
but I did not know what that meant, and was not interested enough to ask.
It was an evil-looking affair, dirty and disreputable, and the people who
frequented it looked to me even more disreputable than the premises. We
children were never actually forbidden to investigate it, as far as I know,
but I recollect my mother saying once in an off-hand way that it was a
good place to keep away from. I believe none of us was ever inside it, or
wished to be.
One summer a campaign came on. I think it may have been a
Presidential year, but I am not sure; something at any rate important
enough to stir up a great commotion in Brooklyn’s political circles. In the
evenings the Wigwam became a kind of Malebolge, spewing up long
columns of drunken loafers who marched and counter-marched, some
carrying banners and transparencies, and others carrying tin torches that
sent out clouds of kerosene-smoke. What first attracted my attention to
these obscene performances was the sound of a steam-calliope at the head
of a troop of marchers. I took this to mean that a circus-parade was going
on, and when I went down there and found that there was no circus, I was
disappointed and did not care what was taking place.
Thus my first impression of politics was unfavourable; and my
disfavour was heightened by subsequently noticing that the people
around me always spoke of politics and politicians in a tone of contempt.
This was understandable. If all I had casually seen,—the Wigwam and its
denizens, the processions of disgusting hoodlums who sweat and stank in
the parboiling humidity of our Indian-summer nights,—if all this was of
the essence of politics, if it was part and parcel of carrying on the
country’s government, then obviously a decent person could find no place
in politics, not even the place of an ordinary voter, for the forces of
ignorance, brutality and indecency would outnumber him ten to one.
Nevertheless there was an anomaly here. We were all supposed to respect
our government and its laws, yet by all accounts those who were charged
with the conduct of government and the making of its laws were most
dreadful swine; indeed, the very conditions of their tenure precluded
their being anything else. For a moment I wondered why this should be
so; but my wonderment almost immediately petered out, and I did not
brood over the rationâle of politics again for a great many years.
One incident of election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some
devoted patriot, very far gone in whisky, wandered up in our direction
and fell by the wayside in a vacant lot where he lay all night, mostly in a
comatose state. At intervals of half an hour or so he roused himself up,
apparently conscious that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and
tried to sing the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia,” but he could
never get quite through the first three measures without relapsing into
somnolence. It was very amusing; he always began so bravely and
earnestly, and always faded out so lamentably.
Having devoted a great part of my latter years to a close observation
of public affairs in many lands, I have often had occasion to remember
that man. His sense of patriotism and patriotic duty still seems as
intelligent and competent as that of any one I have met since then, and
his mode of expressing it still seems as effective as any I could suggest.
 CHAPTER FOUR
I have fought my fight, I have lived my life,
I have drunk my share of wine;
From Trier to Köln there was never a knight

Had a merrier life than mine.

—CHARLES KINGSLEY.

B ETWEEN the ages of ten and sixteen my social environment changed

twice so sharply as almost to suggest von Humboldt’s observation
that no one could pass from Siberia into Senegal without losing
consciousness. When I was just past ten my father accepted an unusually
attractive professional opportunity offered him from a town on the upper
shores of Lake Huron, so we pulled up from Brooklyn, bag and baggage,
which was a herculean chore in those days when long-distance trucking
was unknown. We and our belongings went by rail to Detroit, and thence
by steamboat to our journey’s end. Our new home was forty-five miles
from a railway, and our only means of communication with the outside
world was by steamboat in summer, and in winter by a mail-stagecoach,
or oftener a sledge, which covered those forty-five miles daily over what
was no better than a logging-road.
No one ever took this hideous ride except on an errand of life or
death. From the day navigation closed to the day it opened we were shut
in tight, a community of some seven or eight thousand persons utterly
isolated, thrown flat on their own social resources throughout a winter
that was nothing to trifle with. When you saw how much of those winters
there was and how much in earnest they were, you got up a deal of
wholesome respect for them. Every year regularly the bay would show a
blanket of ice ten miles long, ten miles wide, and five feet thick.
Shopkeepers stocked up in the autumn, but usually missed their guess, so
when a housekeeper wanted a spool of thread or a pound of crackers in
the late spring, she would be told that “we are just out of that, but we’ll
have some in as soon as navigation opens.” My mother used to say she
heard that refrain so often that if she heard it once more before the boats
ran she would be out of her mind. The whistle of the first steamboat was
the event of the year, literally. No matter at what time of day her whistle
blew, everyone would let go all holds and rush for the wharf; and if she
came in at night, she would find the whole population awake and on hand.
If the county court were in session, it would adjourn; and if the churches
were in session, as happened once at least to my knowledge, the
congregations, choirs, janitors, probably the parsons also, though I did not
wait to notice, all promptly quit the way of salvation and joined dogs with
the ungodly in a joyous stampede.
One night when the first boat was more or less expected, for we
could never be sure of her until we heard her whistle, four or five of my
father’s pet cronies were smoking and lying and having a general good
time with him downstairs, while my mother, who was upstairs with me,
saw the prospect of their keeping the household astir until all hours, and
said she wished they would clear out and go home. I said I thought it
might be managed; so I hunted up an empty quart bottle with a thick lip,
went to the back of the upper hall to give the illusion of distance, and
blew three long deep blasts on the bottle. Before the sound ceased the
men had gone through the front door like a football-rush, struggling into
their overcoats as they went. The boat did not come in until the next
afternoon, and though the incident caused considerable talk and
speculation in the town, the whistlings were never satisfactorily
accounted for. Some, remembering that the air was fresh that night, said
they might have been the sounds of wind rumbling in a chimney; while
another school of thought, somewhat more cynical, held to a theory based
on the well-known properties of Ben Kaichen’s whisky; but nothing was
ever actually determined.
The economic climate was as sharp a change from Brooklyn’s as the
physical climate. Living in Brooklyn, one was at arm’s-length from the
nearest thing to a metropolis that America could show; one rubbed elbows
with a great variety of interests and occupations. Here there was only one
primary interest and occupation—lumber. Brigades of lumberjacks went
into camp each winter, felling and stripping trees and rolling the logs to
the river. In summer the logs were floated down to the town, sorted, made
up into rafts and towed to the various sawmills to be cut. The lumber was
then piled on great docks, inspected, and loaded on barges which were
towed, two or three in a string, behind a steambarge to Buffalo, Cleveland,
or some other Lake port where their market lay. Except for a fairish
industry in frozen fish, this was the whole economic life of the town.
When we returned to the East after eight years the pine timber was near
exhaustion, and pessimists were saying that the place would soon become
a ghost-town, as so many single-industry towns had done and are still
doing; but this did not happen. A railway came in, followed by other
industries, and though I have never since been there to see how the town
is getting on, I have heard it is doing well, though hardly anything that an
old resident would recognise is left. I have even heard that no steamboats
touch there now, which seems utterly incredible and impossible. The
railway drove them off, as it drove them off the Mississippi.
 Curiously, the social and cultural climate was not so great a change
from Brooklyn’s as one might suppose. Our town was a first-generation
affair, like Jamestown and Plymouth in their early days; it had no history,
no tradition. The inhabitants had come in full-grown, mature, and were
still in full vigour, not old enough to give way, still less die off. The
children they had brought with them were as yet young, and those who
had been spawned here were quite young. This matter of settlement by
adults gave rise to a rather interesting peculiarity. We were exceptional
among American towns in having no Main Street. The business section lay
in a rectangle marked by the conjunction of Second and River Streets. Our
Main Street, what there was of it, lay along the shore, quite off to one side,
and was devoted to the more pretentious residences of the well-to-do.
Actually, however, it was not Main Street at all, though the spelling did
become corrupted into the conventional form. It was Maine Street, short
for State-of-Maine Street, so-called originally because so many of those
who had built their fine houses there were lumbermen from Maine.
In this remote, isolated, unsightly region, a wilderness of stumps and
sand-barrens, and in a settlement so new which seemed to have no more
stability than a mining-camp, one would have expected to find only the
ill-favoured and repellent social life of an American frontier town. By
some odd freak of chance this was not the case. The millowners and those
directly concerned with the production of lumber were a hardheaded,
hardfisted lot, with no interest in the amenities of existence, but
displaying an amused and rather generous tolerance towards any effort to
promote them. They were a good lot, too, as far as their lights led them;
self-reliant, hard-working, honest, hating restraint, fiercely independent,
yet friendly, kindly, and in many unexpected ways, liberal. In a word, they
were standard specimens of the kind that one of my friends speaks of in a
nostalgic strain as the old-fashioned, free-thinking, free-speaking, free-
swearing American. They interested me immensely; I had never seen
anything like them, and I studied their ways with delight. Their virtues,—
and they were great virtues,—gave our society its prevailing tone of
wholesome vigour which I look back upon as something uniquely
formative in my experience.
But our society had an overtone as well. Many of our immigrants
were not directly concerned with lumber, but had come to town in the
wake of the industry as professional men or tradesmen; and among these
an astonishing number were intelligent, thoughtful, and fairly well read.
Their conversation was excellent, they had good taste, good manners, and
a good attitude towards life’s amenities. I have seldom seen so small a
town with anything comparable to our array of musical talent; there were
so many who not only had superb voices, but who also knew how to sing
and were musically literate to a remarkable degree. We had a lyric tenor, a
lumber-inspector, who could have made his everlasting fortune in a
Continental centre, practically as he stood; also two baritones, both in the
insurance business, and a magnificent bass, a lawyer, who could have
turned the trick almost as easily. The pretty wife of one of our tradesmen,
—a charming couple, I think from Boston,—got extraordinary effects out
of whistling; her lower register had something very near the real wood-
wind timbre. Visiting connoisseurs of vaudeville who had listened to the
best that professional whistlers could do, said they had never heard her
equal. The odd thing about our fortuitous aggregation of talent was that it
had no root in any established tradition. None of it came of any
Continental stock where music was a fixed and necessary part of life.
These people were all of the Anglo-Saxon breed, some New Englanders,
some “York State Yankees,” some from the Western Reserve; and their
only traditional music was the ensemble of the bucksaw, the anvil and the
flail.
Our choral society, about forty in number, kept hard at it all winter,
giving excellent concerts. Their programmes conceded nothing to popular
taste, for there was hardly any popular taste to be considered. Our leading
citizens, the millowners and their entourage, all turned out handsomely
in support of the society, not because they knew much about its work or
enjoyed it particularly, but because it reflected uncommon credit on the
town and was something to be proud of. They took more actual pleasure
out of the shows that our rather meagre dramatic talent vamped up from
time to time. These were unpretentious, for we were as weak on the
dramatic side as we were strong on the musical side. But, like our
concerts, they were undertaken purely for the fun of the thing. The
playlets and farces were clever, all hands did the best they could, the
audiences were in a mood to be pleased, and things went off as well as one
would wish.
When all came to all, I am inclined to think that my parents were
socially better off here than they were in Brooklyn. One missed the
occasional larger opportunities of a semi-demi-metropolis, but on the
other hand, our isolation and our long stretches of enforced leisure kept
the congenial elements in our society together in a closer, more sustained,
and more intimate association. One thing that gave a perennial freshness
to our family life was that my father could indulge to his heart’s content
his gregarious fancy for cultivating rare and fruity characters. There was
no end of such; the town was simply crawling with them, all of the very
first order, and positively guaranteed no two alike. Each of them was an
inexhaustible mine of diversion for one of my father’s peculiar taste.
Their incessant pranks, the practical jokes they thought up to play on one
another, were a marvel of devilish ingenuity. They were in all stations of
life, some rich, some well-to-do, some less so; we had no poor; the grisly
social phenomenon which Mr. Dooley called the prolotoorio, (“A
prolotoorio, Jawn, is the same thing as a hobo”), had not yet appeared
among us. All these congenital nonconformists uproariously clave to my
father at first sight, and kept seeing to it that he never had a dull day
while he was in their midst; and save for those caused by failing health, I
truly think he never had one. If he went out no farther than around the
block, he would come back roaring with laughter over some absurd
rencontre. My mother did not take so much stock in these rugged
individualists. She told me once in a burst of confidence that they were
the finest assortment of human sculch she had ever laid eyes on. But her
sense of humour being what it was, she had to admit, when I pinned her
down to it, that they were also probably as diverting as anything in the
whole anthropoid creation that was ever allowed to run at large.
Life here gave me a close view of qualities which I was of course too
young to appraise at their full value, but when I came to review them in
later life I saw that my impression of them had been clear and germinal.
Independence, self-respect, self-reliance, dignity, diligence,—often
narrow and primitive in their manifestations, if you like, ill-rounded, not
at all durchgearbeitet, but there they were, the virtues that once spoke out
in the Declaration of Independence. It was noticeable, too, that these
virtues flourished as well as they did in a state of freedom. Our life was
singularly free; we were so little conscious of arbitrary restraint that we
hardly knew government existed. Aside from the county sheriff and one
deputy, the town had no police, nor seemed to need any; I heard of no
crime being committed there in my time. On the whole, our society might
have served pretty well as a standing advertisement for Mr. Jefferson’s
notion that the virtues which he regarded as distinctively American
thrive best in the absence of government. I am quite sure that John
Adams, George Mason, John Taylor, Mercer of Maryland, Jackson of
Georgia, Jones of North Carolina, would have found something admirable
and congenial in the Americanism of our citizenry at large; more
congenial and far more admirable than anything they could find in the
shoddy article now on sale everywhere under that name. I use the words
“now on sale” deliberately and advisedly.

II

During my first four years of life in these new surroundings, only two
matters out of many which came my way are entitled to a place in this
narrative. One was my scraping up a couple of valuable acquaintances;
valuable because it was through them that I got up not only a great lot of
first-class conversational German, but also considerable insight into
German life and character; and all with virtually no effort. Certain
inhabitants of our town seemed strangely above their station; above it in
education, breeding, culture, views of life. No one knew why or how they
came to be where they were, and no one asked. The town kept to the
admirable unwritten rule of frontier etiquette which regarded a person’s
antecedents as quite beyond question. “All I care to know,” said Mark
Twain, himself a product of the frontier who lived always in its spirit, “is
that a man is a human being; that is enough for me—he can’t be any
worse.” Such was the invariable attitude of our society.
Among these misplaced people were a ci-devant German-Polish count
and his wife. He did some sort of routine work, I forget what; something in
the insurance way, I think. He was a taciturn unsmiling person, while she
was a lively bright little soul, happy when she had some one to chatter
with. For some reason, the epitaph that Callimachus wrote for the sweet-
spirited Samian girl who died so young, τήν πολύμυθον, ἐπισταμένην καλὰ
παίζειν, ἡδίστην συvέpιθov, ἀεὶ λάλον always puts me in mind of her.
Finding that I knew a word or two of German, this childless and more or
less companionless woman made friends with me and kept me with her
whenever she could, telling me about the charms of her native country
and the attractions of life there. She gave me an impression of Warschau
as being truly a civitas Dei, one of the world’s wonders, and I forthwith
resolved to see it, which I have never done, and now of course never shall.
Another misplaced person was of a military type somewhat gone to
seed, and well on the far side of middle age; tall, large, extremely
handsome, and speaking the true pure German of the Hanoverian
aristocracy. Whether or not a titular aristocrat, he had every mark
betokening generations of good breeding. He seemed singularly content
in the humblest of occupations,—he was the janitor of a church,—
apparently seeking nothing beyond a very poor living and a maximum of
leisure. He had a room somewhere in which he cooked his food and slept,
but he had also converted the church’s rear basement into a large neat
Gesellschaftszimmer, where he spent most of his time, and where I too spent
many hours in his witty, humorous, philosophical company. I recall him
now as one whom experience had shown, as it showed Montaigne, that
human beings are very much what they are, that the collective character
of their society is very much what it is, and that nothing of any
conceivable consequence can be done about either, save to entertain
oneself with the kaleidoscopic spectacle of their incredibly absurd
exorbitances and divagations. The man suddenly disappeared one day,
and we never heard of him again. Probably some turn in his affairs took
him back to the Fatherland; I hope so. He got letters and newspapers
regularly from Germany, so it seems likely that some arrangement for his
return had been managed, though it would be impossible to say on what
grounds. One could never think of him as a political refugee, for the
Politiker of whatever stripe would be no more to him than a creature of
sheer obscenity, more or less amusing. He was too honest and upright to
have been concerned in any scandal, unless perchance somehow
victimised. Since he was a man of deep and simple-hearted sentiment, a
true German, I have sometimes thought that in his earlier days an
untoward sentimental attachment might have made him break with his
surroundings. Once indeed, I remember, he spoke casually of having had a
sweetheart in Germany, and when I thoughtlessly asked what had become
of her, he replied, “Sie ist längst im Grabe.”
So much for these two dear and good friends of my boyhood. I shall
always love their memory, and always be grateful for their influence in
enlarging my views of life and shaping my demands on life.
The second matter pertinent to this record was a matter of bad luck
with my studies. At twelve or thereabouts, for my sins I was sentenced to
do time over the “standard authors” which a schoolboy at my stage of
progress was supposed to read,—Cæsar, Xenophon, Homer, Virgil, Cicero,
—and God wot it was the dullest, dreariest, most unrewarding task I ever
set my hand to. If the language-difficulties attendant on it had been even
a shade more obstructive than they were, I would have thrown Greek and
Latin to the winds forever. These were the least of my troubles; my
tribulations rose from the substance of what these wretched men wrote
about; it was all so far over my head. I was not interested in bridge-
building, in Ariovistus or Vercingetorix, or in what the father of the gods
and king of men had done for Æolus. Like Pet Marjorie’s turkey, I “did not
care a single dam” about the gardens of Alcinous, the Manilian law, or the
fate of the poet Archias. The only clear impression made on me by the
Catilinian orations was that the great orator was a good deal of a stuffed
shirt; an impression which abides with me to this day.
The schools in our town were somewhat worse than none, and I did
not attend them, but had hitherto gone on with my studies in the same
happy-go-lucky fashion as in Brooklyn. My readings in Greek and Latin
had consisted of scraps culled from various works; they were mostly
short, and all were appropriate to my age. They dealt with matters well
within the compass of a child’s understanding, affairs of ordinary life,
ordinary experience; many of them were light, amusing, humorous. This
slipshod curriculum was invaluable to me in one respect. It set me on my
way to see the men and women of antiquity as I have always since then
seen them, not as story-book heroes and heroines, but as people exactly
like us, each with twenty-four hours a day to get through somehow or
other, and for the most part getting through them quite as we do; people
of the same instincts, passions, desires, ambitions, abilities, as ourselves,
and employing them precisely as we employ them. This may seem a
commonplace observation, perhaps a stupid commonplace; yet it does
point straight to the enormous difference between knowing history and
understanding history. One is often astonished to see how many there are
who seem to know a vast lot of history, but to understand hardly any of it.
Nine-tenths of the value of classical studies lies in their power to establish
a clear commonsense, matter-of-fact view of human nature and its
activities over a continuous stretch of some twenty centuries. If one
gravitates into that view at an early age, as I did, naturally, unconsciously,
not knowing that there is any other view to take, so much the better.
But my parents had the notion of some day sending me to college.
They had one particular college in mind for me, and to enter it one had to
comply with some of the most preposterous requirements that a
hidebound traditionalism could devise. They might well have come down
from the curriculum which master Tubal Holophernes imposed upon
Gargantua. Their intention was sound enough, probably, but their
prescriptions were redundant, pointless. Early in the last century Harvard
College required its candidates to show on examination that they were
able “extempore to read, construe and parse” any Latin prose or poetry
presented to them, and also “to write true Latin in prose, and to be skilled
in making Latin verse”; and the same with Greek. This was exactly right,
exactly as it should be, for the best way to find out whether or not a
person can do something is to set him at it; and that should end the
matter, then and there. Why should a poor little devil be required, over
and above this proof of competence, to have read through a dreadful
slather of what must be to any child the most uninteresting, unassimilable
and odious literature that could be put before him? If he had got his
facility by unwonted ways, out of Aulus Gellius’s scrapbook, Pliny’s letters,
bits from Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius; epigrams of Martial, Ausonius,
the Anthology; fables out of the Græca Minora, stories out of the Vulgate,
—what odds, so long as he has it? The authors whom tradition has labelled
“preparatory” have a great place in literature, but that place is far out of a
child’s reach. My notion is that Cæsar and Cicero come in with Tacitus,
Sallust and others, far along in one’s course, as topical reference-reading
in a critical study of Roman political history, as Homer and Virgil should
in a critical literary study based on Aristotle’s Poetics. Taken thus, the
student will read and re-read them with understanding and pleasure, but
taken as a corpus vile of “preparatory” material, he will detest them. I have
not read a word of Cicero’s speeches since my schooldays, (though I have
read his philosophical treatises with great attention); nor have I looked
into a copy of the Gallic War but once, and that was to settle a bet.

III

When I was just turning fourteen I was sent off to boarding-school, a

long way from home, down in the prairie country on the banks of the
Illinois River, where again I was plumped into a brand-new set of physical
and social surroundings. The town had about ten thousand people; it
made its living out of agriculture and miscellaneous manufactures, the
principal products being organs, ploughs, alcohol and corn whisky. It had
been settled by ‘forty-eighters, the best stock that Europe ever exported
here, and the descendants of those superb people were keeping very
closely to the old ways and traditions. All their social activities and
amenities were German. They had three flourishing musical societies; a
Männerchor, a Liederkranz of mixed voices, and a less formal Gesangverein of
younger folk from whom in course of time I learned practically the whole
Kommersbuch pretty well by heart. Also with the help of some of them I
learned to read music as an extra-curricular activity, with no idea of doing
anything with it in a practical way, but only with a vague notion of some
day becoming musically literate. The theory and history of music has
always interested me, and I have kept at them in a desultory fashion all
my life. For some reason there was no instrumental music, except for the
piano. In a town brimming over with vocal music of a high order, and
harbouring excellent pianists, one would at least look for a string
quartette of sorts, but I can not recall a single person who had ever
scraped a string.
A great deal of social interest centred in the Turnverein, which was an
exclusive institution. One had to have credentials running back as far as
Henry the Fowler to belong to it, so I got my knowledge of its doings
mainly by hearsay. It put on two or three really remarkable gymnastic
exhibitions each winter, which were invitation-affairs, though a few
plebeians with a “pull” were sometimes grudgingly allowed to crash the
gate for standing-room, and were promptly hunted out again when the
show was over and the festivities beginning. Some of the beauty and
chivalry off the very top layer of two neighbouring cities were usually on
hand to grace the occasion; and speaking of beauty, this region blossomed
with more pretty girls than I would have supposed there were in the
world. They were somewhat on the alfalfa-fed order, innocent of
cosmetics, and making an excellent appearance, whether singly or in
groups. They gave me the beginnings of a critical taste in such matters,
for outside of my own family I had not seen any female beauty worth
speaking of, except in some older women. Since then I have been in
regions which I thought were a shade or two more productive, and the
product rather better. Belgium, for example, seemed on long
acquaintance to be keeping up to its mediaeval record in this respect, as
appears in the old monastic hexameters,

Gandavum laqueis, formosis Bruga puellis,

Lovanium doctis, gaudet Mechlinia stultis.

Of course one can’t know exactly what sort of thing Bruges kept in stock
to fluster the monks of the Middle Ages, but at any time these thirty years
I would have put Brussels far and away ahead of Bruges or any other town
in the kingdom. I understand, however, that connoisseurs unite nem. con.
in giving the first prize for this pleasing commodity to Poland, but I have
never been in Poland or seen more than a very few Polish girls, so I can
have no opinion.
 I also acquired, quite unconsciously, the beginnings of a creditable
taste in beer. The town had a small brewery which brought forth a most
superexcellent product, and the proprietor’s son being a day-pupil in our
school, its hospitalities were open to us. It was an impressive experience
to go down to the brewery when the bock-beer season opened, and see a
jury of grave old pundits assembled, austere colossi of learning, taciturn,
profoundly scrupulous, sampling the new brew with reverent care and
finally delivering judgement. With such a start, I quite naturally grew up
in the prevailing superstition that all German beer is good, but when I
went into Germany I found a great deal that was bad. I also found that our
little brewery was an exception to the rule discussed by Herbert Spencer,
that the worst place to look for a product is the place where it is
produced. In my day Brussels imported beers from Munich and Dortmund
that were beyond belief; they were too good to drink; yet in Munich and
Dortmund the same brands of beer were not nearly so good. Thirty-five
years ago, the dark beer one got at Lüchow’s in New York, and especially
the Bavarian black beer that Jansen imported, were far better than
anything I found under the same name in Würzburg and Kulmbach, where
they were made.
Our school ran to a dozen or fifteen boarders and as many day-pupils,
all from good substantial families. It was a strange affair in some ways. Its
material equipment was poor and primitive; well-to-do parents today
would not dream of putting boys in such a place, though it was well-kept
in the sense that nothing was let go dirty or slovenly. Our food was
abundant and good; quite on the coarse side and thoroughly
uninteresting, but we got on with it and saw no reason to complain. But
our living-quarters, dormitory, schoolrooms, were bare, bleak, repellent,
as anything one would find in a county jail. One could get up as tear-
compelling a story as Copperfield’s about our discomfort and
wretchedness,—breaking a skin of ice in our wash-pitchers mornings, and
all that sort of thing,—but it would hardly go down with us, for we were
not conscious of being uncomfortable and wretched; on the contrary we
were having a very good time out of our situation. We had all known
better things, but not so much better that the contrast was heartbreaking.
I sometimes think a superheated passion for the Uplift rather overplays
the sense of hardship and misery ensuing upon circumstances like ours; at
all events, we laboured under no such distress.
With regard to my studies at the school, my extraordinary luck still
held good. Poor as the place would seem if judged by modern notions of
the American standard of living, whatever that is, it was just the place for
me. I wish now that I had thought to ask my parents how they came to
hear of it and what had moved them to send me there. The head of the
school was wise, capable, kind, hard-working, and had an excellent
literary sense. He woke me up to the fact that Greek and Roman poetry
really has some merit; he even caused my detestation of Homer and Virgil
to fade out; and he introduced me casually to a great deal that is good in
English verse. He had three assistants. One of them managed to sluice
some arithmetic and algebra into my head, but it all promptly seeped out
again, so that I had to do an extra year’s preparatory work in order to
enter college, which was humiliating. All I did in mathematics, then or
ever, was done by sheer effort of unintelligent memory. Today I am
unable to add a column of ten figures and get the same result twice, unless
by chance, and the simplest sum in long division is as far beyond me as
driving a locomotive.
Like my two friends at home, the other assistants gave the curious
impression of not belonging where they were, and one could not help
wondering how they had found their way there. One was a cripple,
moving about on crutches. He bore one of the most distinguished names
to be found in the academic circles of Massachusetts, and everything
about him betokened the indefinable quality of distinction. His culture,
manners, humour, easy affability, delightful conversation, all had the
unmistakable mark of superiority. We had boundless respect for him, and
great affection; whatever he might want from us was his. In return, he
liked us, treating us as friends, and above all invariably as gentlemen. It
was his influence in particular, even above that of the head-master, which
set the social tone of the school.
The other master was a gentle-spirited young German, an excellent
musician, (though he taught no music), who seemed always very sad. He
was a capable teacher, but outside of his work and his music there seemed
little that he had the heart to care for. He rather took to me, mainly on the
score of music in the first instance, but we soon established a friendship
on general grounds. His conversation taught me a great deal about music
and musicians, and when I left school he gave me a book of musical
exercises to remember him by, seeming to set a great deal of store by it,
much more than the book was actually worth. It bore a blue bookplate
with a woman’s name printed in heavy, bold German script, Welda Reichels.
I have sometimes wondered whether it was connected with some
romance that had missed fire.
It appears to me now that the most unusual and salutary thing about
our life in that school was its atmosphere of freedom. Within our hours of
work the discipline was strict enough to keep things going as they should,
but it was not unkind, unreasonable, or on a proper occasion, inflexible.
Out of hours we had all the range there was, free to wander in the fields,
row on the river, hob-nob with the townspeople, and strike up
acquaintances where we chose. The policy worked well enough. We were
never cautioned against putting beans up our noses, or subjected to any
snivelling talk about being on our honour, or keeping up the credit of the
dear old school, or any such odious balderdash. Nevertheless we somehow
managed to behave decently, no doubt because we had no overweening
inducements to behave otherwise. I do not recall any pranks serious
enough to come in for more than a good-natured reprimand. Yet we were
not holding any brief for Condorcet’s or Rousseau’s views on the essential
goodness of human nature. There was always plenty to do that was
legitimate and more interesting than anything likely to land us in trouble,
so why get in trouble? This was all there was to it; this was the sum of our
ethical imperative.
Not so long afterwards I began to suspect that this might also be the
sum of the ethical imperative affecting the conduct of mankind-at-large.
What first drew my attention that way was the very eloquent and
splendid passage of poetry in which Juvenal contrasts the social behaviour
of other animals with that of man.1 On a first reading it struck me that for
a first-class satirist Juvenal must have been a shocking poor observer.
When he said that there is greater concord among serpents than among
men, that the stronger lions and boars always spare the weaker, he was
saying something which I made bold to believe simply wasn’t so.

Indica tigris agit rabida cum tigride pacem Perpetuam.

—but, I said to myself, that is just what she doesn’t do. She keeps the
peace only unless and until some circumstance arises which in her
opinion justifies her in breaking it. I thought that if Juvenal had been a
better observer he could not have helped seeing that his tigresses and
bears behave precisely as men and women do, and for the same reason.
There seemed to me to be some principle at work here, some general law
of conduct prevailing throughout the animal world. But all this was casual
at the time, something that popped into my head and at once popped out
again to stay gone for years. I scribbled a ribald note on the margin of a
Tauchnitz text, and was amused by it in my subsequent re-readings of
Juvenal, but gave the matter no further thought. My mind reverted to it
immediately, however, when long afterwards I learned that there is
indeed such a law, though its universality had not been established at that
time, nor its implications fully apprehended. I found that Aristippus,
Epicurus, Aristotle and St. Augustine had brushed elbows with this law
without clearly recognising it, and so in modern times had Bishop Butler.
Bentham and Mill had occasional glimpses of it. Spencer’s view of it and
Henry George’s was clear but limited; they did not go the full length it
should have led them. Not for a long time did I come upon a competent
exposition of that law and its effects; and when I did, curiously, I did not
get it from an academic philosopher, but from a retired businessman. I
shall have something more to say of this hereafter.

IV

My summer vacations I spent at home in the Lake region, and also

the eighteen months intervening between my leaving school and entering
college. During these periods I went pretty well on furlough from routine
study, reverting to my old practice of desultory reading, and not too much
of that. One book, Tylor’s Primitive Culture, which I read at this time, did set
a line of permanent interest; it got me into a hospitable frame of mind
towards the works of Darwin, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and other
expositors of progressive evolution, when I came upon them some years
later.
 As for my other pursuits, I edged my way into baseball of the bush-
league type, doing so well that I was thought to have a promising
professional future ahead of me if I stuck at it; but although I toyed with
the idea, I never went farther with it than playing now and then
irregularly, at college and elsewhere, for a number of seasons. I fished a
bit, and shot a bird or two sometimes, but only for food; never any large
game, though it was plentiful enough. Hunting as a sport was not much
done, for some reason, so the bears and deer remained quite tame and
friendly. Once at sunset of a winter’s day, I remember, a bear and two
large cubs strolled through the middle of town, crossed the Second Street
bridge and went out again, all quite nonchalantly, tourist-fashion, as
people who were out merely to see the sights.
Occasionally I worked at various jobs around the sawmills, partly for
something to do, but mainly because I found a fascination in the process
by which large wet logs were converted into handsome pine lumber; there
was something rather pretty about it. I especially liked the niceness of
swift calculation of the way each individual log should be trimmed and cut
to insure the least wastage. The foreman had only a moment or two to
make up his mind about this, while the logs were coming up the “brow”
three or four at a time, so it was a skilled job. Then too it is always a
pleasure to see a process all the way through, complete, instead of some
mere fraction of it. Here one’s eyes could follow the history of a piece of
lumber from its origin in a standing tree down to its final state as a two-
by-four on the deck of a barge outward-bound to market. It is an amusing
thought to me nowadays that as far as knowledge goes, not physical
strength, I still could do anything there is to be done around a sawmill,
except filing the saws. I should not know how to do that, but I doubt it
would take me long to learn.
 I was in the timber-woods only once or twice; it was all very still and
sombre in their depths, and probably poetic, but the only thing that
interested me was that one could look up and see the stars in the daytime,
as one does from the bottom of a well. The absence of underbrush and the
flatness of the land gave me somewhat the feeling of being in church, so I
suppose I should have been touched by the religious awe which poets
write of, but somehow I was not. Yet our woods had a lore of their own,
and even a mythology. A few years ago, when there was quite a run of
research into the tales of Paul Bunyan and other legendary creatures of
the timberlands, I was astonished to see no mention of the principal figure
in our mythology, the hodag. I was astonished, because in my time the
horrific deeds and prowesses of this creature were known ubique et ab
omnibus in our region, wherever lumber was cut.
Like the fourth beast of Daniel, the hodag was “dreadful and terrible
and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake
in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it.” It also had a long
flat tail of bone with serrated edges, thin as a band-saw and hard as steel.
The hodag subsisted on bears, deer, wildcats and such, but its favourite
article of diet was landlookers; these being men whom the millowners
sent out to explore and report on unexploited areas of timberland. When
the hodag got on trail of a landlooker, nothing could be done; it was just
too bad. On the ground, escape was impossible; and if the landlooker
climbed a tree, the hodag would saw the tree down with its tail, and that
was the end of the landlooker. I never saw the hodag, but land-lookers
have entertained me by the hour with lurid stories of its doings. I suggest
that students of American mythology look into this matter and give the
hodag its proper place in their pantheon.
 In those years I undoubtedly built up and fortified the singular
immunity to infirmity and disease which has lasted all my life; but in
those years also my congenital indifference to nature in the wild, natural
scenery, rocks, rills, woods and templed hills, hardened into permanent
distaste. Like the Goncourts, I can see nature only as an enemy; a highly
respected enemy, but an enemy. “I am a lover of knowledge,” Socrates
said, “and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the
trees or the country.” The great Guizot never saw the ocean until he was
forty-four, and would not have seen it then if he had not had an errand in
a part of Normandy where he could not help seeing it. “At that time,” he
said, “I would not have gone a couple of miles to see the most magnificent
bit of natural scenery. I would have gone a thousand to see a man of
talent.” This sentiment being so precisely mine, I am wholly unable to
understand the passion for rusticity and rural life. In England and the
United States, urban life is so deplorably ill-organised that one must exist
in the country as best one can; but this is a forced put. In Europe, where
urban life is better organised, one views a sojourn in the country as more
or less something to be got through with. Apparently it was always so.
“What is pleasanter than the city?” cries Tibullus, “What kind of place is a
farm-house to park your best girl in?”2 True, some of the Roman poets,
even Tibullus himself, now and then dutifully churned out praises of rural
life, but they do not carry the tone of complete conviction to my ears. In a
denizen of an American city one can understand a slight exaggeration of
the joys of life “up at my little place in the country,” but in one
accustomed to the urban society of Rome, it sounds a trifle effortful and
strained. My notion is that for the moment Horace and Virgil were
perhaps not quite serious, perhaps saying somewhat the conventional
thing; but even so, one must admit that, like the House of Lords in
Gilbert’s delightful satire, “they did it very well.”
The nearest I came to feeling the divine afflatus was in my sixteenth
summer when I was making a long, slow, lazy trip on a steambarge. The
millowners used to let me travel on them when I could persuade my
father to exercise his “pull,” which was seldom. On this particular trip we
passed Port Huron at sunset and were all night going through the Detroit
and St. Clair rivers and Lake St. Clair, out into Lake Erie. The night was
clear and warm, there was no wind, the moon was full, and I was so
delighted by the resultant fine effects that I sat up all night to enjoy them.
Perhaps something might have been made of me in a poetic way if the
charm of the picture had not been so largely due to the works of man; the
farms, the houses, voices on the shores, the lights of towns and villages,
the passing boats. With these taken away and the landscape left in a state
of nature, I am quite sure I should have looked at it for a while, said it was
all very fine, very good, then turned in for a night’s sound sleep, and
afterwards thought no more about it.

1 Sat. xv, 159-171.

2 Dulcius urbe quid est? An villa sit apta puellae?

 CHAPTER FIVE
Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis solatium et
perfugium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur,
rusticantur.

—CICERO.

C ONSIDERED as a vestigial survival, the college I attended is worth a good

many words, but I doubt that the tongues of men or of angels could
convince the modern American mind that such an institution actually
existed short of the Jurassic period, if then; and still less that a person now
living actually attended it and remembers it and knows that it was real.
Hence in speaking of it I feel uncomfortably like a lecturer trying to
reconstruct the civilisation of Atlantis or Avalon before an incredulous
and derisive audience. To begin with, it was small, never running quite to
a hundred students; it wanted no more and would take no more,
preposterous as the fact may seem. It was situated on the blank
countryside, approachable only by something over three miles of the pre-
motorcar type of clay road which lay between us and the railway. There
was no settlement near us; a couple of undersized hamlets lay four miles
off, and the nearest pretence to a city, which was not a very plausible
pretence, was twenty miles away.
It would be hard to imagine a set of young men living more strictly
on their own. We devised our own relaxations and extra-curricular
activities with no encouragement from the authorities and no
discouragement; nothing but a tacit nihil obstat. We had no central
meeting-place, and our only gymnasium was an ancient bowling-alley,
much out of repair. Our food was pretty much the regular thing in
institutional provender; good enough, what there was of it, and plenty of
it, such as it was. We took care of our own living-quarters, with no
supervision; if we chose to tidy up, we might do so; but if we preferred to
live in squalor, we might also do that. In this way the slacktwisted among
us soon learned that neatness paid, and the tidy ones got into habits that
were almost old-maidish. One would hardly expect it to work out that
way, perhaps, but I have often noticed that the most slovenly people are
those who are most accustomed to having things done for them.
The authorities had nothing to do with us in a social way; our only
contact with them was in business hours and for business purposes. They
were men of vast learning, great dignity, always punctiliously polite, but
with no affectation of cordiality. For our part, we put up no pretence of
fondness for them, but our respect, pride, admiration of them, knew no
bounds. We would have fought for them like Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers,
at the drop of a hat. Their character impressed us even more than their
learning, great as that was; and their aloofness just suited us, because it
was so completely in character. If they had once tried to make themselves
informal, chummy, big-brotherly,—in a word, vulgar,—we would have
resented it with contempt. No student was ever spoken to, or spoken of, as
Jim or Bill, Smith or Jones, but always as Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones. Our
preceptors were gentlemen as well as scholars.
There was not a grain of sentimentalism in the institution; on the
other hand, the place was permeated by a profound sense of justice. The
most important extra-curricular lesson we learned,—and we learned it
properly,—was summed up in Chief Justice Jay’s dictum that “justice is
always the same, whether it be due from one man to a million, or from a
million to one man.” We learned this, not by precept, but by example,
which is the best way to learn such lessons. In all circumstances we were
treated justly, never coddled or pampered, but never overborne or sat
upon. Each day’s work was a full day’s work, union hours, but we could
never say we were overtasked. In my four years there I never heard of any
one getting a word of commendation for a piece of good work, though I
saw a great deal of good work, even distinguished work, being done. The
motto of the college might well have been taken from St. Luke’s words,
“When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say,
We are unprofitable servants.” Yet we rather liked this attitude, as being
in a way complimentary. We were made to understand that the burden of
education was on us and no one else, least of all on our instructors; they
were not there to help us carry it or to praise our efforts, but to see that
we shouldered it in proper style and got on with it.
We learned not only that justice is always the same in small matters
as in great, but we also learned thoroughly the consequent lesson which
seems so unaccountably hard for Anglo-Saxons ever to learn, that justice
is always the same in the case of men and things you do not like, as in the
case of those you do like. An uncommonly striking illustration of this
truth once came my way. At the beginning of my senior year there
entered a fine big handsome freshman,—a first-rate student, too,—who
would have interested George Borrow, for he turned out to be a sap-engro,
a snakemaster. He was fond of snakes, and not only kept a round dozen or
so in his room, but also usually had two or three coiled around him under
his loose flannel shirt. When you were talking with him you were likely to
see a snake’s head emerge from his shirt-front and work its tongue at you
in a sinister fashion. His peculiarity was disconcerting at first, but we soon
got used to it and became interested in the tricks he did with his snakes; it
was in this way that I found out something I did not know before, that
snakes are very playful. One evening I had to see the president, a rotund
old Scots philosopher of the university of Aberdeen, a formidable figure,
loaded to the guards with all the logic and metaphysics that ever were
heard of. The old man reposed in his favourite attitude while listening to
me, half lying in an easy-chair, legs extended, hands folded, head thrown
back, eyes closed. Another couple sat in the far end of the room,
conversing in low tones. While I was in the midst of what I had to say, the
president suddenly drew himself up with a half-turn towards the other
couple, and said, “Heh—heh—snakes?—who said snakes?—what’s that
about snakes?” Explanation took some time, but when finally he got the
whole story through his head, and was satisfied that the snakes were
harmless and did not stray off the reservation, he turned again to me, and
said, “What an extraordinary taste!—I can’t imagine such a thing,—most
revolting!—abominable!” With that he paused a moment, and then
snapped out, “However, I can’t see but that he is within his rights, and he
shall have them.”
I never forgot this, because it represented almost the last possibility
in the way of a strain on the spirit of justice. The old man was fastidious to
the point of crankiness, mortally detesting physical contact with any
living thing. Only under the peine forte et dure could he bring himself to
shake hands with any one, and when he did, he extended only the tips of
two lifeless fingers. He was also irascible; he controlled more temper
every fifteen minutes than most men control in a lifetime. If lynch law
were ever called for, it would seem to be under just these circumstances.
But there it was; “justice is always the same,” and no stress of personal
taste or distaste can force a way around the fact; and so the incident was
closed.
 Moreover, it was closed without prejudice. The young sapengro
never had the faintest official hint that his bizarre taste had come under
notice. Here, as always in like cases, the force of invariable example
brought out a third great truth about justice, namely: that justice is
seldom enough. It showed how necessary it is that matters should be
managed, not only with justice, but with the appearance of justice, and
that very often the appearance of justice is as important as the substance
of justice.
Our academic course was fixed and unchangeable as the everlasting
hills. You took it or you left it. A student in one of our undergraduate
colleges today would regard it with horror as a straight hand-me-down
from Standonck and Noël Béda in “that lousy college” of Montaigu where
Ponocrates indignantly refused to place Gargantua, and where Erasmus
nearly perished. Elective courses, majors and minors, “courses in English,”
vocational courses, and all that sort of thing, were unknown to us; we had
never heard of them. Ours was the last institution in America, I think,
except probably some managed by the Jesuits, to stick uncompromisingly
by “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” Readings and
expositions of Greek and Roman literature; mathematics up to the
differential calculus; logic; metaphysics; a little work on the sources and
history of the English language; these made up the lot. If you were good
for it, you were given a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years, and you
were then expected to get out promptly and not come back. The
incursions of alumni were most distasteful to the authorities, and were
firmly disallowed. If, on the other hand, you were not good enough to
stand the appointed strain, it was presumably a matter of God’s will, and
nothing could be done about it.
 With my usual good luck, I barely got under the wire of this salutary
régime in the nick of time. The college shortly expired; it was
“reorganised” off the face of the earth. There was no longer any function
in the American educational system for it to fulfil. Even in my time there
was none; it was running on momentum; in the view of the victorious
revolutionary pedagogy it was a chimaera bombinans in vacuo. In its new
form it led a futile and exiguous life for a while, and indeed may still be
dragging on at something of the kind, for all I know.
Education is usually described, or perhaps one should say defined, as
a preparation for life; but like all general statements, this one will stand a
little sifting to make sure we know what we mean by it. My fellow-
students and I were sent out from college with the equipment I have
described. Over and above that, I do not think any of my fellows had any
more in the way of special particularised equipment than I had, which was
virtually none at all. If preparation for life means accumulating
instrumental knowledge as a means of getting a living, our equipment was
defective. If it means laying a foundation of formative knowledge on
which to build a structure of instrumental knowledge, our equipment was
as complete, I believe, as could be devised. Our preceptors painstakingly
kept clear the difference between formative knowledge and instrumental
knowledge. Their concern was wholly with the one; with the other, not at
all. They had the theory that a young man who had gone through their
mill could turn his hand to anything in the whole range of intellectual or
manual pursuits, and do it to better advantage in the long-run than one
who had not. Without claiming too much for this theory, which is now so
heavily discounted as archaic, there is yet perhaps something to be said
for it. We were not worrying about our economic future, however, or
indeed thinking much about it. There were plenty of opportunities still
open throughout the country at that time, and we saw no reason to doubt
that we could somehow manage to make our way.
If education be a preparation for living, rather than for getting a
living; a preparation for getting the most and best out of this gift of
existence which has been dealt out to us unasked, undesired, and which at
times seems specious,—if this be so, our equipment gave us two
advantages which could hardly have been come at by any other means. I
have never seen either of them mentioned in any apologia for the ancient
régime, though they are so obvious that they must have been noticed by
some one. Perhaps they seemed too obvious to be worth mentioning; or
more probably, like the names of countries on a map, they are so obvious
as to be easily overlooked.
The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most
complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange
creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every
department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers
nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated
oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy,
architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic,
politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology,—everything, I
believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence
the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a
disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says,
into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views
contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound
and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative,
because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero
told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of
what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one
wished to characterise the collective mind of this present period, or
indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation,
reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word
immaturity.
For example, most of us probably remember the “great radio-scare”
which swept over the country a few years ago, when some radio-
entertainer gave a dramatic description, based on a story by Mr. H. G.
Wells, of a supposititious invasion of America by warriors from the planet
Mars. People everywhere from coast to coast, even students in our
universities and colleges, took this egregious yarn as a bona fide alarm, and
responded to it by going into the most extraordinary excesses of fear and
panic. My fellow-students would have greeted such a burst of semi-lunatic
idiocy with harsh, unfeeling laughter. It would have sent them back at
once to Livy’s account of similar absurdities;1 and their inference,—
discouraging indeed, but inescapable,—would have been that despite all
the nineteenth century’s vaunted progress in science, despite all the
revolutionary and expensive elaboration of modern educational systems,
the masses of mankind remain precisely as childlike in their credulity and
gullibility as they were in the year 217 B.C.
This, then, was the first advantage, usually overlooked, which our
régime gave us; it was the means of our absorbing a vast deal of vicarious
experience which ripened our minds; and as I said, I do not know of any
other discipline which could have done just that. The second advantage
usually overlooked is that, somewhat on the principle of lucus a non
lucendo, our equipment was as valuable to us for what it did not equip us
with as for what it did. We left college ignorant of practically everything
but what came within the lines of study which I have mentioned. We
knew nothing of the natural sciences this side of Aristotle, Theophrastus,
Pliny; nothing of any history since A.D. 1500, not even the history of our
own country. Our ignorance of other subjects was quite as complete.
Therefore when subsequently a new idea or a new set of circumstances
presented itself to us, it had free entrance to an unpreoccupied mind.
There was no accumulated lumber of prepossession or formula to be
cleared away. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the
king’s garment, we saw it as it was, not as somebody had told us it was, or
as we thought it might be or ought to be; and at the same time we had a
great fund of vicarious experience at hand to help us judge it correctly
and make correct inferences from it.
Plato made it the mark of an educated man that he should be able,
and above all that he should always be willing, to “see things as they are.”
Our régime did as much to put that mark on us as any educational régime
could do, and more, I believe, than any other will ever do. It did its very
powerful best to save us from what the great Stoic philosopher deplored
as “the madness and the misery of one who uses the appearance of things
as the measure of their reality, and makes a mess of it.” Thus I believe our
régime abundantly vindicated its character as a preparation for living.
One might put it that our education served the function of Mr.
Titbottom’s spectacles, which George William Curtis described in his
exquisite little prose idyl called Prue and I. When Mr. Titbottom looked
through his lenses, the appearance of the object he was looking at
instantly vanished, and he saw its stark reality.
Incidentally (or was it so? I should be disposed to say primarily
rather than incidentally, but if the reader has scruples I do not insist),—
incidentally, then, our education also served us well in a moral way; and
here our parallel with Mr. Titbottom continues. Sometimes the reality of
things was more agreeable to Mr. Titbottom than their appearance;
sometimes less so; sometimes it was hideous and horrible, as when he
looked at an eminent financier and saw a ruthless and ravening wild boar.
But after having used his spectacles occasionally for a while, he developed
an insatiable appetite for reality. Whatever the object he looked at,
whatever the cost of possible disillusionment, he could not rest content
until he had put on his spectacles and seen it as it was. Even when the
lovely Preciosa came in his range of vision,—but the story ends there
abruptly, leaving only the suggestion that Mr. Titbottom may have found
Preciosa’s reality in some respect seriously dissatisfying.
At first Mr. Titbottom was moved by curiosity, but later he seems to
have seen that the avoidance of self-deception is as much a matter of
integrity as of convenience. Our régime did a great deal to impress us with
that view. I can not say precisely how it did this; mainly, perhaps, by some
sort of spiritual osmosis, set up by the whole general course of things
being bent that way. By one means or another, however, it was so that we
did come out with a fairly clear notion that the deliberate acceptance of
appearances, the conscious exclusion of reality, is a distinct failure in
integrity, a moral failure. If we had come upon Bishop Butler’s great
saying, “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of
them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be
deceived?”—we would have taken it as merely a reinforcement of moral
integrity by the strongest kind of common sense.
Therefore in a moral way as well as intellectually and culturally, our
commerce with the minds of the ancients gave us something of a
preparation for living. I have lately observed with interest that some
cautiously counter-revolutionary critics are suspecting that the
educational revolution, like all revolutions, threw out the baby with the
bathwater, as the Germans say, and that some of the old régime’s values,
ethical as well as cultural, might be profitably salvaged. Three or four
years ago, indeed, one American undergraduate college astonished the
natives by vamping up a sort of Ersatz-classical curriculum which calls for
the reading and discussion of one hundred of the world’s best books; using
English versions of such Greek and Latin originals as are on the list. This
enterprise was a nine-days wonder in the journalistic world; the
newspapers and popular periodicals took it as an unprecedented
innovation, and gave it at least half as much space as they would normally
allot to a minor happening in Hollywood! Some hardy journalists thought
that this experiment might be the precursor of “a return to the classics,”
but a product of the old régime would be bound to view this prospect with
an eye of benevolent scepticism. It would mean not only the unscrambling
of a revolution, which is a tall order in itself, but it would also mean
unscrambling a post-revolutionary frame of mind, which I believe has not
been done since the early days of Israel in Canaan. Even then, even with
the intervention of Jehovah thrown in, it seems not to have been done any
too successfully, according to the record.

II

My life has afforded me few diversions more engaging than that of

watching the progress of our educational revolution. I have viewed it
from the outside for a great many years, and also from the inside for the
year or two in which I made a notorious failure at going through the
motions of teaching undergraduate collegians. The revolution began with
a drastic purge, a thorough guillotining of the classical curriculum,
wherever found. Such Greek and Latin as escaped the Reign of Terror was
left to die of inanition in dens and caves of the earth, such as the school
and college I attended. The elective system came in as a substitute,
proposing instruction in omni re scibili as its final consummation. During a
visit to Germany, the president of Harvard, Mr. Eliot, had taken note that
the elective system was working well in German universities, and he saw
no reason why it should not work as well in an undergraduate college like
Harvard, so he introduced it there. The country promptly carried his logic
to its full length. If the thing was good for the university, good for the
college, why not for the secondary school, why not for the primary
school? Why not try a tentative dab at its being good for the
kindergarten?—surely in a free democracy the free exercise of self-
expression and the development of an untrammelled personality can
hardly begin too young.
So the old régime’s notion that education is in its nature selective,
the peculium of a well-sifted élite,2 was swept away and replaced by the
popular notion that everybody should go to school, college, university,
and should have every facility afforded for studying anything that any
one might choose. Our institutions grew to enormous size; the country’s
student-population exceeded anything ever known. Gifts, grants,
subsidies, endowments, brought in an incredible flow of money; and our
system at once began to take on the aspect of a huge bargain-counter or a
modern drug-store. The results, however, were increasingly
unsatisfactory, so much so that in forty years the revolution has not been
able to consolidate its gains. After its preliminary clean sweep of the old
régime, the succeeding period has been one of incessant and unsuccessful
tinkering with the mechanics of the new. At the present time it seems that
about all the possibilities of further tinkering have been exhausted, and
that nobody can think of anything more to do; the experiment with the
hundred best books, to which I have alluded, appears to be the last
possible dig for the woodchuck, if I may be permitted the expression. Yet,
appraised in terms of actual education, the net result at the end of forty
years thus spent still seems to give as poor an account of itself as at the
beginning.
Knowing that the theory, the fundamental idea, is all there actually is
to any revolution, I became interested in finding out what I could about
the theory on which this one was proceeding. If a revolution liberates an
idea, that idea will emerge and take hold of the public mind for good or ill,
thus making the revolution successful, whether or not its immediate
object be attained. If it does not liberate an idea, it amounts only to a riot
which fizzles out with the gain or loss of its immediate object, and leaves
no mark. The French Revolution liberated the idea of the individual’s
right of self-expression in politics; the Russian Revolution liberated the
idea that politics are governed by economics,—the idea which John Adams
held to so staunchly, and which marked him as being a century and a half
ahead of his time. I knew what the theory of the old régime in education
was, and I had no interest whatever in the interminable cobblings and
overhaulings of the new régime’s machinery, its curricular changes,
“honour schools,” “reading periods,” its heavily publicised “plans,” such
as the Wisconsin, Yale, Chicago plans, and all that kind of thing. I was
interested only in the new régime’s fundamental theory, and in marking
the differences between that and the theory which it had displaced.
When I had learned what I could, an invitation came my way to give
three lectures at one of our universities; so, since this matter was
uppermost in my mind at the moment, I chose it as my subject. The
lectures were then published commercially.3 The book had a curious
experience. Professional educators for the most part snubbed it; those
who did not, with two exceptions, abused it heartily. I was duly chastened
by this, feeling as the Psalmist might, that I should not have been caught
meddling in great matters which are too high for me. But while I was
disconsolately looking over my work, (since I am really the most
teachable person alive), and wondering what I had done that was so bad, I
began to hear from the Jesuits. These brethren seem to have facilities for
passing the word around whenever a member of the order hits on
something which interests him, so in a short time and from all parts of the
country I got an astonishing grist of most sympathetic and encouraging
letters. This caused me to take heart again, saying to myself that the only
body of men in America who have the faintest notion of what education
really means are the Jesuits; so if Jesuits go out of their way to say that a
work on the theory of education has some merit, the chances are that it
has. I had already observed the workings of their system and method in
some of the European institutions under their control. Once, I remember,
long before my book was written, when I was listening to some young
American educators who were all agog over this-or-that new wrinkle in
curricular gadgetry, I said, perhaps with some impatience, that the Ratio
Studiorum of Acquaviva had been doing very well by itself for a little
matter of three hundred years or so, and if any one had ever suggested
any valid essential improvements on it, or could do so now, he was just
the man I should like to see. I got no takers. It turned out that these
educators had not heard of the Ratio Studiorum, and I suspect they were
not quite sure whether Acquaviva was the hero of Rossini’s opera or the
name of a Pullman car.
The theory of the revolution was based on a flagrant popular
perversion of the doctrines of equality and democracy. Above all things
the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate
the thought of an élite; and under a political system of universal suffrage,
the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail by sheer force of
numbers. Under this system, as John Stuart Mill said, the test of a great
mind is its power of agreement with the opinions of small minds; hence
the intellectual tone of a society thus hamstrung is inevitably set by such
opinions. In the prevalent popular view, therefore,—the view insisted
upon and as far as possible enforced by the mass-men whom the masses
instinctively cleave to and choose as leaders,—in this view the prime
postulate of equality is that in the realm of the spirit as well as of the
flesh, everybody is able to enjoy anything that anybody can enjoy; and the
prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody
to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. An equalitarian and
democratic régime must by consequence assume, tacitly or avowedly, that
everybody is educable.
The theory of our régime was directly contrary to this. Our
preceptors did not see that doctrines of equality and democracy had any
footing in the premises. They did not pretend to believe that everybody is
educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable, very
few indeed. They saw this as a fact in the order of nature, like the fact that
few are six feet tall. Instead of regarding the thought of an élite with the
mass-man’s dogged, unintelligent, invincibly suspicious resentment, they
accepted it as pointing to a fixture in nature’s established order. They
accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and
spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to
others. They may or may not have wished that nature had managed
otherwise, but saw quite clearly that she had not done so. There the fact
was, and all that could be done about it was to take it as it stood. If any
irrelevant doctrine of equality or democracy chose to set itself against the
fact, so much the worse for the doctrine.
 All complaints against the unsatisfactory course of the post-
revolutionary régime can be run back to the continuous effort, by some
miracle of ingenuity or luck, to translate a bad theory into good practice.
The worst result of this was a complete effacement of the line which sets
off education from training, and the line which sets off formative
knowledge from instrumental knowledge. This obliteration was done
deliberately to meet the popular perversions of equality and democracy.
The régime perceived that while very few can be educated, everyone who
is not actually imbecile or idiotic can be trained in one way or another, as
soldiers are trained in military routine, or as monkeys are trained to pick
fruit. Very well then, it said in effect, let us agree to call training
education, convert our schools, colleges, universities into training-schools
as far as need be, but continue to call them educational institutions and to
call our general system an educational system. We will insist that the
discipline of instrumental studies is as formative as any other, even more
so, and to quite as good purpose, in fact much better. We will get up
courses in “business administration,” bricklaying, retail shoe-
merchandising, and what-not, agree to call our graduates educated men,
give them all the old-style academic degrees, dress them out in the old-
style gowns and hoods,—and there we are, thoroughly democratic,
thoroughly equalitarian, in shape to meet all popular demands.
For the looks of the thing, nevertheless, something had to be done to
make some sort of show of cultural balance to all this; and here the régime
was in difficulties. Its institutions were loaded up with great masses of
ineducable persons, and it was necessary to find something for them to do
which they could do; and in a cultural way they could do nothing.
Presumably, however, they were literate; that is, they could make their
way more or less ignorantly and uncertainly down a printed page; and
therefore innumerable “courses in English” were devised for them.4 To
me, this was the most amusing démarche in the whole revolutionary
programme, for as I said somewhere back in these memoirs, we would not
have known what courses in English were. Nobody taught English in our
day; or rather, everybody taught it all the time. If we expressed ourselves
in slipshod English, unidiomatic English, we heard about it on the spot, so
we made a point of being careful. One curious hold-over from this
discipline still sticks by me. I can do fairly well with a bit of translating
from another language if I have time enough to write it out; but doing it
extempore, “on my feet,” I halt and feel my way around in the English
idiom like a beginner.
As far as my observation goes, the new régime’s discipline, for all its
incredible litter of “courses in English,” does not give nearly so good an
account of itself as ours did. I was once in a position where for four years I
encountered a steady succession of persons who had “majored in
English,” “specialised in English,” or even, Gott soll hüten, taken a master’s
degree in English. After sampling a good fair taste of their quality, I got
into the way of telling them I would take their word for all they knew
about English, since obviously the one thing they did not know was what
to do with it, and that was the only thing that interested me. Moreover,
during the same period I had many letters from persons who taught
English professionally. Half of them were written in a disreputable
journalistic jargon, and fully one-third of the remainder rubbed elbows
with illiteracy. In my day there would have been joy in the presence of the
angels over a sinner repenting, if such infamous English had come under
the eye of one of our preceptors; and that it could emanate from a master
of arts, a professor or instructor, would have been “one of those things
that simply will not bear thinking about.”
 I doubt that any of my fellow-students ever saw the inside of an
English grammar; I know I never did. But knowing Latin and Greek
grammar as well as we did, we managed to drag on quite creditably
through the intricacies of English composition. As for English literature, it
was our literature, we had a native command of it, its attractions were in
plain sight, so all we ever thought of doing was to strike into it anywhere
and enjoy it. Teaching English literature would have seemed to us like
teaching a hungry man the way to his mouth when he had a feast before
him. Almost the only chance to make myself useful that my country ever
offered me came when the president of a huge sprawling mid-Western
state university asked me (I am by no means sure how seriously,—still, he
did ask me) to go out and be the head of his department of English
literature. I was no end delighted by the compliment, but the mere
thought of such an undertaking made me shiver. I told him I had not the
faintest idea of how to set about it; I should be utterly helpless. All I could
do would be to point to the university’s library, and say, There it is,—wade
in and help yourselves. Like a very gracious man, he laughed and said that
was just what he would wish me to do; but it seemed to be clear to both of
us that I should be eminently a superfluous man in the realm of modern
pedagogy, so we got on no further.

III

In fairness it must be said that the revolution was not altogether

without reason. The earlier discipline was as a rule administered poorly
and, which is worse, indiscriminately. My fellow-students and I simply
had the luck to find ourselves where it was administered admirably and
with austere discrimination. Too often a routine of elementary Greek and
Latin was forced upon ineducable children; too often those who forced it
even on the educable were themselves ineducable. The academic world
never took proper account of the fact that an ineducable person can be
trained in the mechanics of a language or a literature, and as well trained,
as in the mechanics of dentistry or bond-selling. I have seen many a
graduate student who had gone to Germany to study under some great
classicist, like a colour-blind botanist going to a flower-show with a bad
cold in his head; he came back as a doctor of philosophy, knowing a great
deal about his subject, I dare say, but not knowing how to appreciate or
enjoy it. So between the ineducable pupil on the one hand and the
ineducable mechanical gerund-grinder, as Carlyle calls him, on the other,
the system, speaking generally, did fail; it failed, as many a good system
has failed, through getting into bad hands.
For us, Latin and Greek were purely literary languages; we were not
much taken up with their science except as it served a literary purpose.
None of us had any ambition to spend his life on the dative case. If we
found what looked like a false quantity in Statius, we did not theorise over
it; we concluded that the old boy had probably made a mistake, and let it
go at that. If we came on unfamiliar terms and neologisms in Lucian, we
were not tempted to make any of them the subject of a learned thesis.
Fortunately for us, our dealings with these literatures were set in the ways
of French, English, Irish scholarship, rather than German, which was all
the go in America when I came on the scene; this predilection being
largely due once more, I suppose, to Mr. Eliot’s pernicious influence. The
ideal towards which we were steadily directed was that of the man of
letters, not the man of science, the philologist, the grammarian, the
textual critic. Of course we were all the time accumulating science as we
went along, but this was not the be-all and end-all of academic existence.
Scholars like Gaston Boissier in France, Tyrrell and Purser in Ireland,
Mackail in England, Gildersleeve in America,—these had all the science
there was, but they were primarily men of letters, and we, in our small
way, were encouraged to make the same use of our scientific equipment
that they made of theirs; and all our lives, again in our small way, we have
done so. The services of German philological scholarship were
inestimable, prodigious; the man of letters will always gratefully make use
of them; he must do so; but no amount of philology will of itself qualify a
person as a man of letters.
I suppose it may be better to read Latin and Greek in translations
than not to read them at all. Yet what one gets is so little by comparison
with what one misses that one can never be sure; and when one thinks of
the very small amount of preliminary labour involved in getting
acquainted with the originals, provided one starts early enough, one feels
that for the primary purpose of reading, a reliance on translations is
unrewarding. It must be so, for the command of a language means the
command of everything written in that language, and one grazes on a
very short tether with translations. Many of the English classics have been
translated into French, yet a Frenchman who reads no English can have
only a poor and limited idea of the content of English literature. We have
remains of hundreds of authors in Greek and Latin, and only a toothful of
them translated. While one might not go so far as to say with the elder
Pliny that no book is so bad as to have nothing good in it, one who is
unable to make any way in this vast mass of literature misses an
incalculable amount of what is vital to one’s purpose; that purpose being
to get the run of twenty-odd centuries of the human mind’s activity, and
thus enable oneself to see contemporary men and things ever more
clearly as they are. At the present time, for example, Plutarch’s treatises
Concerning Exile, On Hearing Rightly, On Getting Good Out of Enemies, are worth
more than gold and precious stones to a reflective mind.5 As a shelter
against a hurricane of propaganda, nothing could be better than his great
saying that right hearing is the first approach to right living; for so indeed
it is.
Then, too, most of our translations are not good. Matthew Arnold
remarked that this kind of work, which he called “the journeyman-work
of literature,” is as a rule much better done in other countries; and a
comparison of translations in the Loeb series, for example, with those put
out by the Association Guillaume Budé, gives ample evidence that this is so.
Moreover, in the life-long effort to “see things as they are” one must have
help from the sense of taste and style, the instinct of beauty and poetry;
and even the best of translations can hardly excite this help. A reader who
has Mr. Long’s translation of Marcus Aurelius needs no Greek; if he has his
translation of Epictetus he will perhaps do well enough without Greek. On
the other hand, Plato’s story of Atlantis amounts almost to a liberal
education in aesthetics, and no one, not even Mr. Jowett, can reproduce
its quality; the whole genius of the language is against him. The total
effect of a page of Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, even a page of the Imitation, is
simply unreproducible upon one reading it in translation. And if this be
true of the prose of these literatures, what must one say of their poetry;
not alone the poetry of their prime, but the poetry of their decadence,
such as the verse of Theocritus and the rest of the host who appear in the
Anthology from 300 B.C. on? Who has not tried his hand at translating
elegiacs from the Anthology; and who has succeeded in reproducing
anything like their total effect upon a reader?
So when all comes to all, I doubt that a study of translations has
enough carrying-power to encourage much hope of a “return to the
classics.” I do not find this altogether lamentable, however, because I am
by no means sure that a return to the classics, even if it were practicable,
would be desirable. I am not sure that the post-revolutionary frame of
mind is so awry, not sure that any more should be done with education,
properly so called, than is being done; or that the final end and aim of
education,—the ability to see things as they are,—should any longer be
taken into account. The question at issue, obviously, is whether the
educable person can any longer be regarded as a social asset; or, indeed,
whether in time past his value as a social asset has not been
overestimated. As I came to understand much later, the final answer must
be referable to the previous question, What is man? On one theory of
man’s place in nature, the final answer would be yes, and on another, no.
The immediate answer, however, I should say would be in the negative. In
a society essentially neolithic, as ours unquestionably is at the moment,—
whatever one may hold its evolutionary possibilities to be,—there can be
no place found for an educable person but such as a trainable person
could fill quite as well or even better; he becomes a superfluous man; and
the more thoroughly his ability to see things as they are is cultivated, the
more his superfluity is enhanced. As the process of general barbarisation
goes on, as its speed accelerates, as its calamitous consequences recur
with ever-increasing frequency and violence, the educable person can
only take shelter against his insensate fellow-beings, as Plato says, like a
man crouching behind a wall against a whirlwind.

IV

The unfailing luck which attended me throughout my nonage, and

indeed through most of my life thereafter, held good in one most
important respect to which I have not yet alluded. I am profoundly
thankful that during my formative years I never had contact with any
institution under State control; not in school, not in college, nor yet in my
three years of irregular graduate study. No attempt was ever made by any
one to indoctrinate me with State-inspired views,—or any views, for that
matter,—of patriotism or nationalism. I was never dragooned into flag-
worship or hero-worship, never was caught in any spate of verbiage about
duty to one’s country, never debauched by any of the routine devices
hatched by scoundrels for inducing a synthetic devotion to one’s native
land and loyalty to its jobholders. Therefore when later the various
aspects of contemporary patriotism and nationalism appeared before me,
my mind was wholly unprepossessed, and my view of them was
unaffected by any emotional distortion. I could see them as through Mr.
Titbottom’s spectacles; I could see them as they are.
I do not know how it happened that I escaped these contaminations,
for the centres of infection were abundant enough; not as now, of course,
but there were plenty of them. The magnificent possibilities of the school
as an instrument of propaganda had been perceived very early; Alexander
Hamilton, who never missed the boat on a chance of this kind, expounded
them in 1800; but in my time their development was only nearing
completion. It was quite natural, quite inevitable, that the school should
take over from the Church in this capacity. In the Middle Ages and
afterwards, when the Church was strong and the State was weak, the
Church attended to what little secular thimblerigging was needed to keep
things moving in the right direction. When the Church became weak and
the centralised, nationalist-imperialist State grew strong, the State began
to do its own dirty work; and with the schools, press, cinema and radio
under its control, this work is now child’s play. I can testify that it is what
our Methodist friends used to call a searching experience, to look at the
bemused and unsuspecting dupes of these flagitious agencies, and say to
oneself, There but for the grace of God, go I!

1 For example, among those reported in 218 B.C., during the Second Punic

War, we find an exact parallel to the “miracle of the Marne” reported by

eyewitnesses in the last war. “Romae aut circa urbem multa ea híeme
prodigia facta, aut... multa nuntiata, et temere credita sunt: in quis
ingenium infantem semestrem in foro olitorio Triumphum clamasse:... et in
agro Amiternino multis locis hominum specie procul Candida veste visos,
nec cum ullo congressos.” Livy, xxi, 62.
Again, in the following year we see a population terrified by tidings
that the god Mars had gone on the warpath. “Augebant metum prodigia
ex pluribus simul locis nuntiata:... et Praeneste ardentes lapides coelo
cecidisse: et Arpis parmas in coelo visas, pugnantemque cum luna solem:
et Capenae duas interdiu lunas ortas: et aquas Caeretes sanguine mixtas
fluxisse, fontemque ipsum Herculis cruentis manasse sparsum maculis: et
in Antiati metentibus cruentas in corbem spicas cedidisse: et Faleriis
coelum findi velut magno hiatu visum; quaque patuerit, ingens lumen
effulsisse: sortes sua sponte attenuatas, unamque excidisse ita scriptam,
Mavors telum suum concutit: et per idem tempus Romae signum Martis
Appia via ad simulacrum luporum sudasse.” Livy, xxii, 1.
Livy further observes that from these modest beginnings people
went on to take stock in reports of prodigies too trivial to be worth
mentioning, such as goats being turned into sheep and cocks into hens.
No doubt they did; plenty there are among us today who believe that a
horsehair left to soak in rainwater will turn into a worm!
2 For the benefit of those who believe in democracy, or think they do,—or

rather, who think they think they do,—I may observe that this was Mr.
Jefferson’s notion. The scheme of public education which “the great
democrat” drew up for Virginia is more mercilessly selective than any
that has ever been proposed for any public system in this country.

3 The Theory of Education in the United States: Harcourt, Brace and Co., New

York.

4 If the reader thinks I am talking at random here, I suggest he look the

matter up and get an idea of the number of these courses given annually
by our high-schools, colleges and universities. If he does this, he has a
surprise awaiting him.

5 I confess I am not au fait with translations, so if my friends at St. John’s

College turn up with one in their teeth and shake their gory locks at me, I
shall accept the correction humbly. I believe a translation of the Moralia
was once made long ago, but I never saw it, and I think my friends will
acknowledge that if it exists at all it must be too nearly inaccessible to be
worth considering.
 CHAPTER SIX
“Niebuhr was right,” said Goethe, “when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in
it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?”

—ECKERMANN, 1831.

Great things may be accomplished in our days; great discoveries, for example, great enterprises; but

these do not give greatness to our epoch. Greatness makes itself appear notably by its point of

departure, by its flexibility, by its thought.

—SAINTE-BEUVE.

A FTER leaving college I did graduate work for the best part of three
years in different institutions, shopping around irregularly like the
vagantes, the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages, from one man to
another who had something on foot that interested me and who would let
me sit under him. Not being in quest of an advanced degree, (though
finally I did qualify for one, more by accident than intention), I could do
this. It still seems to me that the vagantes had the right idea for getting the
best out of graduate study. When a notable man appeared anywhere on
their horizon they would go where he was and camp out with him until
they had pretty well got what he had to give them, and then they would
“move on to the next pub.” Abraham Flexner once remarked to me that
getting education is like getting measles; you have to go where measles is.
If you go where it is, unless you are by nature immune, you will get it,—no
need to worry about that,—but if you don’t go where it is, you will never
get it. An effective distribution of educational germs, moreover, is a
matter of individual persons rather than of institutions. Rabelais has
Pantagruel making the rounds of the French universities, as in all
probability Rabelais himself had done, and the chapter shows that in itself
this might mean very little; but when Bridlegoose says that he had studied
law at Poitiers under Brocadium Juris,1 or when Panurge speaks of having
dipped into the Decretals with “the most decretalipotent Scots doctor,”
that really meant something.
In one institution where I spent a full year and more, I formed a close
friendship with four fellow-students; and this association was the means
of my getting my first clear view of the society in which my little
academic world was encysted. It also gave me a lively interest in finding
out what the actual collective character of that society was, how it got
that character, and what reasonable expectations might be put upon a
society which bore that character. We five always ended our evenings,
after our routine of work was done, in a sort of cénacle, a forgathering for a
couple of hours of philosophical discussion helped out by Bass’s ale. One
of our number, C. J., was the most nearly complete person I have ever
seen. He had great ability; like Posidonius, according to Strabo, he was
τῶν καθ’ ἡμãς φιλοσὄφων πολυμαθέστατος combining sound scholarship
with a vast deal of general knowledge and information. His ability and
attainments were balanced by a splendid integrity, kindness, equanimity
and unfailing humour. His tastes were simple in the extreme, and the
gentle sincerity of his manner made his conversation most attractive. As
Bishop Burnet said of Lord Rochester, “he loved to talk and write of
speculative matters, and did it with so fine a thread that even those who
hated the subjects that his fancy ran upon, yet could not but be charmed
with his way of treating them.” His interests and accomplishments and
mine were complementary. He had gone far in ways which I had not even
entered upon; for example, he not only knew modern history, especially
American history, quite well, but he also bent all the powers of his mind
towards understanding it, towards making interpretations of it which were
thoroughgoing, competent, reasonable. I, on the other hand, had been
well drilled to an understanding of ancient peoples and their collective
doings, and when he would expound this-or-that modern incident or
tendency in public life, I could match it with parallels, elucidations,
interpretations, drawn from earlier sources. We met at what was, for me,
precisely the right time; my debt to him is incalculable. After a very few
years of unambitious, undemanding, innocent life, he suddenly died,
carried off by some unsuspected affection of the heart. His end was
strange and shocking, for he was a man of uncommonly strong physique,
a great fisherman, hunter, sailor, and never known to be out of health.
The world has not seemed quite the same to me since his death; I have not
looked upon his like again.
It is a vain and superficial reflection that such a man would have
fared but ill against the blighting east wind of the twentieth century, and
that he was therefore fortunate in escaping it. This is not so; he would
have fared well, for he was beyond the reach of disappointment or injury.
His immense wisdom and penetrating humour, untouched by any taint of
cynicism, would have kept him in the spirit which appears throughout all
Greek literature; the spirit which finds its noblest expression in the
Phaedo, and its more special and restricted expression in the verse of the
later elegiac poets. He would have had Aeschylus and Sophocles always at
hand to remind him that the order fixed by human destiny is not to be
coerced or dissuaded, and he would have watched the hopeful little
meddlings and strivings of the human comedy with an eye of amused
tolerance, even as they ran off into inevitable tragedy. Omnia orta cadunt.
His was the lucid Greek sense, “born of considering the flux of things and
the tyranny of time, that man plays a losing game, and that his only
success is in refusing to play. For the busy and idle, for the fortunate and
unhappy alike, the sun rises one morning for the last time; he only is to be
congratulated who is done with hope and fear. How short-lived soever he
be in comparison with the world through which he passes, yet no less
through time Fate dries up the holy springs, and the mighty cities of the
old days are undecipherable under the green turf. It is the only wisdom to
acquiesce in the forces, however ignorant or malign in their working, that
listen to no protest and admit no appeal; that no strength can check, no
subtlety elude, no calculation predetermine.”2

II

When in my mid-twenties my eyes first opened on the American

scene, I surveyed it with the naïve astonishment of Rip van Winkle. One
would hardly believe that a boy could grow up to manhood in such
complete unconsciousness of the social and political movements going on
around him. My only experience of politics had been with the unpleasant
doings generated in the Wigwam, when we lived in Brooklyn, which now
seemed long ago; they had prompted a few childish questions, and then
their memory had become overlaid. Since then I had heard no mention of
politics; nor do I think I was exceptional in this. My notion is that the
honest and decent among our elders had pretty generally thrown over
any concern with public affairs, and given them up as a hopeless bad job.
They had lived through the Civil War, seen the unconscionable knaveries
practiced on all sides during the post-war period, frauds on a scale so
colossal that they amazed a world which had presumably become pretty
well used to such exhibitions of business enterprise. They had seen the
fraudful looting of the public domain, the abject villainies of
“reconstruction,” the Crédit Mobilier, the star-route frauds, the wholesale
raiding and looting of railway-properties, the operations of the South
Improvement Company, and so on. Not only had they seen this alliance of
business with politics in the general government, but they had seen it also
as busily at work in state and local governments throughout the country;
they had watched the Tweed Ring making hay in New York City and
Albany, and the Pennsylvania Railway’s field-hands diligently harvesting
in Harrisburg. As I said, my belief is that seeing no chance of any
practicable improvement, they had simply lost interest, and their children
had grown up, more or less as I had, in ignorance of politics; or when not
quite so ignorant as I, regarding politics as something remote,
disreputable and infamous, like slave-trading or brothel-keeping. There is
much to be said for our elders’ attitude, if I am right in supposing that
such was their attitude; their instinct was sound, though their
interpretation of that instinct was doubtless uninformed and superficial.
The view communicated to their children was also correct in principle, as
I came to learn much later; at this time I noticed only that such was pretty
generally their view. In our own little coterie of graduate students, for
example, three were probably as ignorant of public affairs as I, and
certainly quite as incurious. C. J., with his bent for philosophy, his passion
for “the reason of the thing,” was the one exception.
My first observations put me into the way of working backward
through American political history instead of forward; and from that to
working through the history of other modern nations in the same way. I
am not sure but that for the nonprofessional person, the amateur of
history, it is a good procedure. Observing some turn in public affairs
which is before one’s eyes, then going back through accounts of
antecedent turns apparently related, reasoning out one’s inferences,
conclusions and generalisations as one goes along,—perhaps in this way
one gets the clearest perception of history’s force and continuity. On the
other hand, perhaps this way came easiest to me because all the history I
knew was ancient history, and many commonplace incidents in modern
life would suggest some similar happening in the ancient world. Today,
for example, I never think of the tremendous fires we used to have in our
northern lumber-town without recalling Plutarch’s most amusing account
of the way Marcus Crassus founded his fortune. But whether the habit I
gravitated into be good or bad, there it was, and there it still is.
In the period I speak of, the Spanish War and its consequences in the
Caribbean, the mid-Pacific and the Far East were before the public. I was
looking at our first full-blown adventure in overseas imperialism, and a
most amazing and repulsive sight it was. To my unaccustomed eyes the
war itself seemed a dastardly affair, and the attendant hypocrisies
indulged in by those who were promoting it, from the President down,
seemed utterly contemptible. I could make nothing of the seizure of the
Philippines but an unprovoked act of particularly brutal highwaymanry.
Years afterward, during our next military adventure, when I saw
Americans in hysterics of pious horror over “enemy atrocities,” I
marvelled at the convenience of a memory which had so quickly granted
oblivion to Hell-roaring Jake Smith and the “water-cure.” The great
doctrine of Manifest Destiny reappeared, freshened up by a well-earned
rest from hard service in the decade 1840-1850. Now it was our manifest
destiny not only to exercise a hegemony over the whole hemisphere, but
also to raid and steal whatever desirable possessions we could wrest with
impunity from poor and weak peoples anywhere in the world.
 Newspapers especially, and popular literature generally, served up
this doctrine with a snuffy sanctimony, wholly Kiplingese, which made a
most disagreeable impression on me. We were out to take up the white
man’s burden in a conspicuously large and exemplary way; we would free
the oppressed, lift up the fallen, and distribute the blessings of a higher
civilisation with a prodigal hand. Mark Twain wrote a scorching satire on
these loathsome pretensions, addressing it To the Person Sitting in
Darkness; but his voice, like that of Howells and those of many other
distinguished men who were outraged by the whole disgraceful
performance, was lost in the clamour of a synthetic patriotism. In the
country’s journalism, led by Hearst and Pulitzer, I found a most plausible
reason why I had never seen a newspaper in my parents’ home. Like their
successors today, the papers of that period had undergone changes in
style and manner from those which Dickens described in Martin Chuzzlewit,
but none in essential character; they were very filthy. I often thought of
Sir Henry Wotton, back in the sixteenth century, saying that “an
ambassador is a man of virtue sent to lie abroad for his country; a news-
writer is a man without virtue who lies at home for himself.” For many
years I wondered how people could be got to serve the trade of
journalism, but never really understood it until some eighteen or twenty
years ago I read Count Tolstoy’s analysis of the prostitute Máslova’s view
of her trade, in the novel called Resurrection. I have known a few
journalists, not many, and have regarded their attitude attentively,
finding them curiously like other folk in general, just as Máslova was
astonishingly like other women; and their view of their execrable
profession was precisely like Máslova’s view of hers.
My observation of the Spanish War and the rape of the Philippines
led me to consider the character of our minor adventures in Samoa and
Hawaii; and there I found the same record of chicanery and fraud,
implemented by violence. In both instances the United States had
acquired possession through revolutions made to order by its official
agents. Then I went on to take stock of our continental adventures in the
same line. I knew what imperialism meant in former times, what its
springs of action were, and what its customary modes of procedure were.
My classical studies had thoroughly acquainted me with these phenomena
of the old days around the Mediterranean, and I had as yet seen nothing
to suggest any essential difference between modern imperialism and the
imperialism which I had studied and understood. Thus I was able to read
between the lines of standard American historical writing, even such as
was dished up for the young in our educational institutions. It was clear to
me that our acquisition of Texas was a matter of sheer brigandage, and
that force and fraud played approximately equal parts in our acquisition
of California. I carried on my survey of American imperialism through the
Mexican War, our systematic extermination of the Indians, and so on back
into the colonial period; and I emerged with the conviction that at least
on this one item of imperialism, our political history from first to last was
utterly disgraceful.
The last decade of the century gave one an extraordinary
opportunity for studying national imperialist activities in all parts of the
world. In 1895 Japan gathered in tremendous profits from a raid on China;
in the following year Italy came off second best in an attempt to seize
Abyssinia. While the United States was consolidating its territorial gains
in the Philippines, England was taking over South Africa, the Sudan, and
was also acquiring highwayman’s rights of various kinds in China, as
Russia, France and Germany were likewise doing. No such enormous burst
of imperialist energy had ever before been set off in so many divergent
directions at once; but, as far as I could see, the only thing that
differentiated it was its volume. Other than that it showed me nothing
new or strange. I could discern no feature of the imperialism of London or
Paris, Berlin or Tokyo, at the end of the nineteenth century, which I could
not find exactly reproduced in miniature in that of Corinth in the fifth
century B.C., or for that matter, in the imperialism of the great empire-
builder Sargon’s Akkad, in the thirty-seventh century B.C. It was mainly
this unvarying persistence of pattern that gave me such keen interest in
studying the phenomena of latter-day imperialism. Here were alliances
made and repudiated, federations formed and dissolved, all on precisely
the same basis of Realpolitik which underlay the Delian League or the
Peloponnesian League of the sixth century B.C. or the almost prehistoric
coalescence of wild shepherd raiders in Egypt. Moreover, it seemed to me
that any one who understood the collisions of imperialist interest which
took place between Rome and Carthage twenty-three centuries ago could
have no trouble about foreseeing those which were being generated by
identical conditions in Africa and the Far East. I soon came to see that all
such collisions are reducible to their lowest terms under one and the same
formula, the formula of Count Tolstoy’s peasant-proprietor Yashvin: “He
is after my shirt, and I am after his shirt.” Stripping off the sleazy pretexts
knaved up by what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de l’homme
intéressé,—pretexts of religion, morality, humanity, civilisation,
democracy, or what-not,—stripping these off, I have examined the actual
ground of a great many such collisions of interest, in the hope of some day
finding one which Yashvin’s formula would not fit as neatly as if made to
order; but I have as yet found none.
The foreign policy of McKinley and Secretary Hay was the means of
my making some instructive observations on statesmanship. I had already
got it through my head that all sound political practice is Realpolitik.
Ancient practice attested this without exception,—I was sure of that,—and
modern practice, as far as I had gone with its history, bore witness to the
same effect. This being so, it seemed to follow that the two luxuries which
a good statesman must rigorously deny himself during business hours are
conscience and sentiment; and the incident of the Philippines impressed
this on me with peculiar force.
British imperialism did not want either French imperialism or the
newer imperialism of Germany to get into a stronger position in the
southwestern Pacific by taking the Philippines. At the moment, however,
England had its hands full with preparations for plundering the Boers, and
could not very well do much about it; so the architects of our foreign
policy obligingly put themselves at England’s convenience. They declared
war against Spain, took the Philippines; and thereby, for all that one could
see, committed the United States to follow the fortunes of British
imperialism in perpetuity. Joseph Chamberlain, who, with Cecil Rhodes,
represented the ultimate in militant British imperialism at that time, said
in a public speech which was reported at large in this country, that the
Spanish War was well worth while “if in a great and noble cause, the Stars
and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon
alliance.” 3
Our seizure of the Philippines did not by any means command
unanimous approval in America. Certain special interests, with no eye for
anything beyond a prospect of immediate money, were in favour of it;
and, as always, the medley of ignorance and prejudice which goes by the
name of public sentiment was all for keeping the spoils of war. I observed
with satisfaction, however, that wiser minds were looking below the
surface of things and perceiving that in the long run the adventure, with
its attendant commitments, was likely to cost a great deal more than it
could ever possibly come to. They thought that as far as American
participation was concerned, Mr. Chamberlain’s Anglo-Saxon alliance was
nothing but an eleemosynary receivership in bankruptcy for British
imperialism; and moreover, as a matter of settled British policy, it was
meant to be just that. They believed, therefore, that Mr. Hay’s
statesmanship was almost treasonably bad, and they made no bones of
saying so.
I could not be quite sure of that. I was sure that the outcome would
be ruinously bad, but whether as the result of bad statesmanship or a bad
gamble, I was not sure. In the matter of alliances, a good statesman will
think twice about leaving a bone for a shadow. As a diplomatist, Mr. Hay
was a rank amateur, easily impressible, and during his year of
ambassadorship in London, no doubt the official set had put its best foot
forward. He may therefore have plumped a gamble on the chance of
British imperialism having a longer lease of life than it actually had. One
hardly sees how this could be, for there were plenty among the best
unofficial minds in England who could have set him straight. Aside from
that, moreover, the historical pattern invariably traced by the rise and
decline of national imperialisms would have been enough in itself to
suggest serious doubt. A Metternich would not have risked a brass
farthing on any such gamble, nor yet would a Bismarck, a Cavour, or a Leo
XIII; but Mr. Hay was no Metternich.
I took it as axiomatic that when a good statesman,—a sound
Realpolitiker who kept his conscience and his sentiment securely locked up
in the safe until the day’s work was done,— when he confronted a forced
choice between two rival imperialisms he would make terms with the one
which was on its way in rather than with the one which was on its way
out. In 1898 it had looked for some time as if England’s was certainly going
out and Germany’s quite possibly, but as yet by no means certainly,
coming in. Good statesmanship on Mr. Hay’s part therefore, it seemed to
me, would have handsomely accepted Spain’s amends, which were ample
and sincere, abstained from war, and let the Anglo-German rivalry mull
along for another ten years or so until it became more clear which way
the imperialist cat would jump. A Jefferson or a John Adams would
instantly have reminded Mr. Hay of Prince Kutusov’s maxim, Dans le doute,
abstiens-toi; but Mr. McKinley was no Jefferson. As for the other energetic
young imperialism on the Pacific, the situation was still more unclear. No
one thought much about Japan, notwithstanding its foray in China in
1895; it attracted little attention until nine years later when it gave so
startling an account of itself in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904; and even
then it was regarded as weak enough to be rather easily manageable in a
diplomatic way. In the Far East as well as on the Continent, therefore,
another ten years of salutary self-imposed isolation would have enabled
American statesmanship to see its way more clearly and to far better
purpose.
But whether Mr. Hay botched his statesmanship through a
precipitate and unwarranted commitment, or merely made an
unfortunate gamble through being led up the garden by those whom he
termed “our English friends,”—and either view is admissible,—the
consequences were the same. If the Philippine Islands were made of gold
sown broadcast with diamonds, our seizure of them could never meet its
cost, whether that cost be measured in terms of blood or of money or of
civilisation, let alone of all three together.
So ended my first lesson in modern imperialist statecraft. It was an
invaluable aid in constructing the criteria which I was ever afterwards to
apply to the conduct of public affairs in general. Yet it was a
disappointment, in that it represented no essential advance whatever on
what I already knew. Reincarnate any first-class Realpolitiker of the ancient
world, from 3800 B.C. to 1500 A.D., put him in charge of the foreign office
in any modern imperialist capital, and he would have hard work to
convince himself that he was not still doing business at the old stand.

III

A strange spirit of uneasiness and depression was abroad in the

Western world at the turn of the century. Apparently it affected all
peoples and classes alike, though not all in the same way. Three months
after I had left college with my bachelor’s degree, and had gone forth into
the outer world looking for what I might find there, I read a remarkable
work called Degeneration, written by the able Hungarian Jew, Max Nordau.
In it he described this contemporary spirit as “a mixture of febrile
restlessness and defeatist discouragement, of fear for the future and
sulking resignation. The prevalent sense is one of impending destruction
and extinction.... In our time the more highly-developed minds have been
visited with vague forebodings of a Dusk of the Nations, in which the
sunlight and starlight are gradually fading, and the human race with all its
institutions and achievements is dying out amidst a dying world.”
This put the spirit of the period very well, very correctly. The one
description of it which is incomparable in its perfection, however, was
accidental; its application was not intentional. It is found in the dream of
Aratov, in Clara Militch, Tourgueniev’s last and greatest work:

He dreamed that he was in a rich manor-house, of which he was the owner. He had

lately bought both the house and the estate attached to it. And he kept thinking, ‘It’s nice,
 very nice now, but evil is coming!’ Beside him moved to and fro a little tiny man, his

steward; he kept laughing, bowing, and trying to show Aratov how admirably everything

was arranged in his house and his estate. ‘This way, pray, this way, pray,’ he kept repeating,

chuckling at every word; ‘kindly look how prosperous everything is with you! Look at the

horses; what splendid horses!’ And Aratov saw a row of immense horses. They were standing

in their stalls with their backs to him. Their manes and tails were magnificent; but as soon as

Aratov went near, the horses’ heads turned towards him, and they showed their teeth
viciously. ‘It’s very nice,’ Aratov thought, ‘but evil is coming!’ ‘This way, pray, this way,’ the

steward repeated again, ‘pray come into the garden; look, what fine apples you have.’ The

apples certainly were fine, red and round, but as soon as Aratov looked at them they

withered and fell. ‘Evil is coming!’ he thought. ‘And here is the lake,’ lisped the steward.

‘Isn’t it blue and smooth? And here’s a little boat of gold,—will you get into it?—it floats of

itself.’ ‘I won’t get into it,’ thought Aratov; ‘evil is coming!’ but for all that he got into the

boat. At the bottom lay huddled up a little creature like a monkey; it was holding in its paws

a glass full of a dark liquid. ‘Pray don’t be uneasy,’ the steward shouted from the bank. ‘It’s of

no consequence. It’s death. Good luck to you!’

For the great majority, the last decade of the century seemed to offer
every encouragement to complacent hopefulness. All the institutional
voices of society were blended to form the sycophantic reassurances of
Aratov’s steward. Indeed, what more could one ask? Everywhere there
was steady progress in all departments of science, in invention, in
improving the mechanics of existence, and in the production of wealth.
The ancient doctrine of progressive evolution, brought out and
refurbished by Darwin,—and run into the ground by Darwin’s more
adventurous disciples,—copper-riveted the comfortable confidence that
progress would go on indefinitely, harmoniously, automatically. Man
himself had risen from the primeval slime in a straight line to his present
place in nature as Homo sapiens, thus giving earnest of his ultimate
perfectibility; and now progressive evolution, helped on by science, might
be trusted to bring forth in not too long a time a race of saints and sages
to dwell together in a society truly perfect.
There was ground for high hopefulness, too, about the more
immediate future. The business of the nineteenth century had been to
establish the individual’s right to liberty and to self-expression in politics.
This now, presumably, had been done. A great measure of personal liberty
had been effected, and republicanism had gone far enough to call its
future assured. The business of the twentieth century would be to create
circumstances for improving the emancipated and enfranchised masses,
and everything was ripe and ready for that. The applications of science
were so many, so easy and practical and so prodigally fruitful, that the
new century’s task seemed simple. With schools, colleges, universities,
free for all; with libraries, technical institutes, museums, and countless
other means of self-improvement standing wide open; with fatigue and
monotony decreased, labour lightened, and leisure for self-improvement
enlarged,—with all this, the twentieth century seemed to have the most
brilliant prospects of any since the world began.
Moreover, international affairs appeared to be fairly stable, and
peace was in the air. The sensational calling of a peace-conference in 1899
by Nicholas II had produced a great effect, even though the gesture was
obviously not made in good faith and the conference itself came to
nothing. In 1906, not to be outdone by a Muscovite autocrat, Andrew
Carnegie gave ten million dollars towards forwarding the cause of peace
by way of a “foundation,” and five years later a rich Bostonese publisher
followed suit with another foundation of the same order. In the wake of
these, innumerable international peace-societies appeared everywhere.
These manifestations all fell in with the prevailing temper of the peoples
in both hemispheres; they bolstered their shaky optimism and therefore
were acceptable at their face value.
So, what with progressive evolution approved as de fide; with new
wonders of science being disclosed and put in service every day; with the
production of wealth going on at top speed; with new comforts,
conveniences and pleasures steadily multiplying, and their accessibility
steadily increasing; with a fair prospect of peace predominating, perhaps
permanently;—with all these assets in hand, one might regard the future
with complacency. The Western world’s estate was rich and prosperous.
The horses’ manes and tails were magnificent, the apples were fine, red
and round. “It’s nice, very nice now”; and yet,—and yet,—the vague
undefined sense of impermanence and instability persisted. The
civilisation wrought out by the application of these assets was felt to be
somehow incomplete, dissatisfying, untrustworthy. “The more highly-
developed minds” in all countries were saying plainly that the social
product of these forces was utterly unworthy to be called civilisation; and
they were predicting that soon, very soon, the passenger in the golden
boat would hear the perfidious steward shouting, “Pray don’t be uneasy.
It’s of no consequence. It’s death. Good luck to you!”
My course of reading, initiated by Nordau’s work and supplemented
by observation of current affairs as well as by my conversations with C. J.,
impressed on me the basic fact that western society was entirely given
over to economism.4 It had no other philosophy; apparently it did not
know there was any other. It interpreted the whole of human life in terms
of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth. Like certain
Philippians in the time of St. Paul, its god was its belly, and it had no mind
for anything beyond the ἐπίγεια. I learned that as far as American society
was concerned, this had been so ever since the days of Columbus. Michel
Chevalier, the most acute observer among the many who had visited
America in its youth, said that American society had the morale of an
army on the march. It had the morale of the looter, the plunderer. In my
boyhood, those who had made the best success with it were held up in the
schools, the press, and even in the pulpit, as prototypal of all that was
making America great, and hence as par excellence the proper examples for
well-ordered youth to follow. Go and get it! was the sum of the practical
philosophy presented to America’s young manhood by all the voices of
the age.
When in those days or a little later I had been considering, more or
less idly and fitfully, what I should do with myself through life, what life
had to give me, and what demands I should make upon it, I sometimes
thought of the rich lumbermen whom I had known so well, and on the
whole had rather liked. Now I was looking at the great avatars of their
practical philosophy, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fricks, Hills,
Huntingtons, of the period. I asked myself whether any amount of wealth
would be worth having if,—as one most evidently must,—if one had to
become just like these men in order to get it. To me, at least, decidedly it
would not; I should be a superfluous man in the scuffle for riches. I
observed their qualities and practices closely, considered the furniture of
their minds, remarked their scale of values, and could come to no other
conclusion. Well, then, could a society built to a complete realisation of
every ideal of the economism they represented be permanently
satisfactory to the best reason and spirit of man? Could it be called a
civilised society? The thing seemed preposterous, absurd; I recalled
Teufelsdröckh’s simile of “an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each
struggling to get its head above the others.” After wealth, science,
invention, had done all for such a society that they could do, it would
remain without savour, without depth, uninteresting, and withal
horrifying.
I found that the few “more highly-developed minds” in America were
well aware of this. Thoreau was; and Emerson, Lowell; C. F. Adams and his
sons, Brooks and Henry; Curtis, Mark Twain, Howells; all these made
record of their apprehension and repugnance. Whitman lapsed from his
“barbaric yawp” of faith in economism to the desponding observation
that the type of civilisation which economism had produced was, “so far,
an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand
religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results,... It is as if we were
somehow being endowed with a vast and thoroughly appointed body, and
then left with little or no soul.” Even Henry Cabot Lodge, who did some
good service to economism, said in real distress, apparently, that society’s
exclusive acceptance of it as a practical philosophy was “the darkest sign
of all.” Even John Hay, who had incontinently dumped a moribund alien
imperialism into the lap of the United States to be nursed and pap-fed
there indefinitely, and who had glorified the extreme of economism as a
practical philosophy by writing The Breadwinners, languidly complained of
“the restless haste and hunger which is the source of much that is good
and most that is evil in American life.”
Turning to French literature, I found that the Goncourts, Mérimée,
Halévy, de Nerval, Chevalier, Flaubert, de Musset and many others had
marked the direction which French society was taking under the spur of
economism, and had declared their fixed conviction that “evil is coming.”
Their writings also reflected the great general feeling of uneasiness.
Mérimée, in his last days, testified that “everybody is afraid, though
nobody knows of what.” In Germany, two giants of the century saw what
was coming; these were Goethe and Niebuhr. I found that in England also
the most highly-developed minds had long been obsessed by a like
apprehension. As far back as 1811 Mrs. Barbauld seems to have seen the
approaching cloud of economism, then no bigger than a man’s hand, and
to have anticipated Macaulay in drawing the gloomy picture of an
outlander surveying a scene of lifeless desolation from the ruins of
London Bridge. It is all very well for economism to boast of progress and
enlightenment; so said Wordsworth, Carlyle, Kingsley, Arnold,—his
Friendship’s Garland is as fresh today as if written yesterday,—Butler,
Ruskin, FitzGerald, Morris, Hardy; it is all very well, it’s nice, very nice
now, but evil is coming!
There was good reason for this, and the reason was clearly visible
even on the surface of things; there was nothing recondite about it. The
outbreak of the Spanish War had caused me to doubt that the century’s
net gains from republicanism were substantial, or that its achievement of
personal liberty was at all valid. If two men, one an abject political hack
and the other a jobholder of dubious quality,—if these, with the power of
patronage in their hands, could manoeuvre a nation of eighty million
people into an imperialist war, I should take it as pretty good evidence
that absolutism can flourish about as luxuriantly under republicanism as
under an autocracy. Thus, while considering the phenomena of
economism and modern imperialism, I was also led to observe the
concurrent growth of what long afterward I learned to call Statism.
Within the last half-century in England, France and Germany, the State
had been continually absorbing through taxation more and more of the
national wealth, continually assuming one new coercive, regulative or
directive function after another. In the United States the same process
had begun to be speeded up to a headlong rapidity. Everywhere these
wholesale confiscations of social power were going on; everywhere social
power was being depleted, and everywhere State power being increased
at its expense.
Along with this tendency went a curious tacit rationalisation of it,
under the dogma of Statism as propounded by the German idealist
philosophers of the eighteenth century. C. J. introduced me to the basic
political theory of these gentry, and the closeness of its correspondence
with the popular belief now everywhere prevailing rather took my breath
away. In brief, what it came to was that the State is everything; the
individual, nothing. The individual has no rights that the State is bound to
respect; no rights at all, in fact, except those which the State may choose
to give him, subject to revocation at its own pleasure, with or without
notice. There is no such thing as natural rights; the fundamental doctrine
of the American Declaration of Independence, the doctrine underlying the
Bill of Rights, is all moonshine. Moreover, since the State creates all rights,
since the only valid and authoritative ethics are State ethics, then by
obvious inference the State can do no wrong.
Such was the view with which the peoples of the Western world had
become indoctrinated. To save my life I could not see a shilling’s worth of
practical difference between this and the old theory of jure divino
rulership which republicanism plumed itself on having ousted. I saw no
reason why John Cowell and Sir Robert Filmer might not shake hands
cordially with Hegel over the latter’s dictum that “the State incarnates the
Divine Idea upon earth,” or forsooth with Fichte over his declaration that
“the State is the superior power, ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely
independent.” Given a people imbued with this idea, the republicanism of
the nineteenth century seemed to me only what the Scots call “cauld kail
made het again,”—absolutism warmed up and rebaptised. In France, the
strong common sense of many like Horace Vernet and Halévy had openly
scorned it, and the far-seeing Guizot contemptuously called it the kind of
republicanism “which begins with Plato and necessarily ends with a
policeman.” In England, Herbert Spencer had written the immortal essays
subsequently put together in a volume called The Man vs. the State, in
which he demolished the doctrine of the omnipotent State, and predicted
accurately what would take place if that doctrine continued to prevail; but
his work, like that of Stuart Mill and others, had little effect. In July, 1898,
he wrote in a letter to Grant Allen, “... I said, just as you say, that we are in
course of re-barbarisation, and that there is no prospect but that of
military despotisms, which we are rapidly approaching.”
One could hardly wonder that the more highly-developed minds of
Europe had been “visited with vague forebodings of a Dusk of the
Nations.” I was in Europe for a long time at the turn of the century,
visiting Italy, Russia, France, Germany and England, and it was plain that
for all the talk of peace and liberty, no other upshot was consistent with
the general acceptance of Statism as a philosophy, and the consequent
prodigious growth of State power at the expense of social power. Any
economic dislocation, natural or fabricated, any collision of State interest,
actual or pretended, would at once everywhere open the way for a
sharking political adventurer, a modern Cleon, to come forward and
under some demagogic pretext of “emergency, the tyrant’s plea” to
commandeer all social power, reduce the people to unconditional State-
servitude, and use them for his own purposes.
I was reminded of these observations one day in the autumn of 1940,
when I unexpectedly met an old friend whom I had not seen for years, a
very wise and experienced man of about my own age, Mr. Darwin J.
Meserole. Some one had just approached him in a great state of mind,
saying that the world had gone clean crazy. Mr. Meserole replied, “You
have watched this coming for forty years, and now that it’s here, you say
the world has gone crazy!”

1 Students nicknamed their professors then as now. This was a students’

nickname for Robert Irland, a Scotsman, for nearly sixty years professor
of law at Poitiers.

2 J. W. Mackail: introductory essay on the Greek Anthology.

3 I have been interested to hear lately that highly-placed Englishry now

speak openly of these two gonfaloniers as “that wretch, Chamberlain” and

“that archvillain, Rhodes.” Sic transit. Yet Matthew Arnold, who died ten
years before the Boer War was launched, prophesied that the dissolution
of the British Empire would begin in South Africa. Arnold, however, was a
man of letters, with no pretensions to statesmanship, and therefore could
not be presumed to know what he was talking about.

4 This word is not in any dictionary, as far as I know. I use it because my

only alternative is materialism, which is ambiguous and inexact.

 CHAPTER SEVEN
Le monde est inepte à se guarir. Il est si impatient de ce que le presse qu’il ne vise qu’ à s’en desfaire
sans regarder à quel prix|... le bien ne succede pas necessairement au mal; un autre mal luy peult
succeder, et pire.

—MONTAIGNE.

H AVING a good deal of leisure at this time, I employed some of it in

looking over the various projects that were on foot for political and
social reform. There seemed no end of them. Counting in the smaller
schemes for reform in city and county politics, they came to a bewildering
lot. Some of the larger schemes were aimed at corrupt state legislatures;
but the projects which interested me most were those having a national
scope, like the movements for direct Federal taxation, popular election of
senators, women’s suffrage, control of commerce, and control of trust-
monopoly.
What first attracted my attention was the astonishing extent to
which these latter were animated by hatred of the rich. There was some
ground for this. These great fortunes were made by means which were
outrageously unfair, and were felt to be so. Their owners were in control
of the State’s machinery, and were using it to their own advantage by way
of land-grants, tariffs, concessions, franchises and every other known
form of law-made privilege. In the view of simple justice, this was
shocking bad. Yet I could not help seeing that it was in full accord with
the dominant social philosophy. Economism, which interprets the whole
sum of human life in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution
of wealth, must necessarily fashion its gods after its own likeness.
Economism must not conceive of the State as an instrument of justice, a
social device set up, as the Declaration says, “to secure these rights.” On
the contrary, it must be what Voltaire called it, “a device for taking
money out of one set of pockets and putting it into another.” With this
conception of the State and its functions accepted everywhere, prevailing
everywhere, what could be expected but a continuous struggle to get at
the State’s machinery and work it to one’s own advantage?
Then too, the owners of these great fortunes flaunted their allegiance
to economism in ways so brazen and assertive as to amount almost to
savagery. Their porcine insensitiveness made them easy targets for those
who had marked them out for spoliation. Not long ago I noticed in the
bar-room of one of New York’s older hotels a line of forty-two cabinet
photographs of representative rich men of that generation. They ran all
the way from Daniel Drew and Jay Gould down to Henry Ford, the only
one of the lot now living. In their totality, those pictures tell an
impressive story; a student of physiognomy would be well repaid for
giving them careful scrutiny. Such were the men of whom Charles Francis
Adams left record that he had known them, many of them tolerably well,
“and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I
have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the
next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humour,
thought or refinement.” So, while hatred may be never justifiable,
perhaps seldom reasonable, a great popular hatred of such men, under
such circumstances, is at least understandable.
The reformers of the period put me off, in the first instance, by their
careless superficial use of abstract terms. They talked about the
oppressiveness of capital, the evils of the capitalist system, the iniquities
of finance-capitalism, and so on, apparently with no idea of what those
terms mean. To me, therefore, most of what they said was sheer nonsense.
I knew that no society ever did or could exist without employing capital,
and my notion was that wherever capital is at work, there of necessity is
capitalism and a capitalist system. As I saw it, there was nothing in the
nature of capital that was unjust or oppressive, but quite the contrary. I
could see that injustice and oppression were likely to follow when great
capitalists were in a position of State-created economic advantage, like
Mr. Carnegie with his tariffs or the “railway-magnates” with their land-
grants; but the same results seemed as likely to follow where small
capitalists or non-capitalists were in a similarly privileged position.
Spencer’s Social Statics, published in 1851, had shown me that under such a
government as he contemplated,—a government divested of all power to
traffic in economic advantage,— injustice and oppression would tend to
disappear. As long as the State stood as an approachable huckster of
privilege, however, there seemed no chance but that they must persist,
and that the consequent social disorder must persist also.
The measures of the reformers took no account of all this which
seemed to me so obvious. The reformers themselves apparently did not
see that the State, as an arbiter of economic advantage, must necessarily
be a potential instrument of economic exploitation. In fact, these are but
two ways of saying the same thing, for, as Voltaire saw so clearly,
advantage to the State’s beneficiaries means disadvantage to those who
are not its beneficiaries. By putting a tariff on steel, for example, the State
simply took a great deal of money out of the pockets of American
purchasers of steel, and put it in Mr. Carnegie’s; it acted ad hoc as Mr.
Carnegie’s instrument of exploitation. Neither did the reformers see that
those who would profit most by State-enforced exploitation must always
be, and would be, those to whom nature has given the largest endowment
of that peculiar, instinctive, and unerring sagacity for finding the best
ways of access to the State’s machinery and the most fruitful ways of
operating it. They would personify the highest aims and ideals of
economism. In other words, they would be exactly like those Mr. C. F.
Adams knew, the very ones whom the reformers were proposing to
hamstring and despoil.
The actual situation confronting the reformers, as I saw it, was
nothing new or strange. The sum of it was that the American State had
always been controlled by those whom I learned shortly afterwards when
I came to read Nietzsche, to call mass-men. It was so controlled
throughout the colonial period, so in 1789, so in 1890. In sharp contrast
with the doctrine of the Declaration, the doctrine of the Constitution was
mass-man’s doctrine; the document itself was a lawyer’s digest and
charter of economism. The men of the forty-two photographs were rich
mass-men, to be sure, but mass-men, every mother’s son of them;
unintelligent, ignorant, myopic, incapable of psychical development, but
prodigiously sagacious and prehensile. If I had been asked for a definition
at that time, measuring by the standards of civilised man,—the standards
set by a Plato, a Dante, a Marcus Aurelius,—I should have put it that the
mass-man is a digestive and reproductive mechanism, gifted with a
certain low sagacity employable upon anything which bears upon the
conduct of those two functions. If he is overgifted with this sagacity and
has a measure of luck, he becomes a rich mass-man; if not, he becomes a
poor mass-man; but in either case he remains a mass-man.
None of the reformers proposed reducing the State’s power to
distribute economic advantage; on the contrary, every one of their
principal measures tended to increase it. Therefore, when all came to all, I
could not see that these measures ultimately contemplated anything
more than prying the State’s machinery out of the rich mass-man’s
control, and turning it over to the poor mass-man. I could imagine no
benefit accruing to society from that. The control would again be taken
over by the most sagacious among the poor mass-men, they would
become rich, the same abuses, jealousies and dissatisfactions would recur,
the same contest would again take place, with the same result. I was
immensely interested in reading John Adams’s clear forecast of the
scrimmage I was witnessing, and his prophecy that “the struggle will end
only in a change of impostors.” One afternoon in 1900 I listened while a
young Jewish Socialist was breathing out threatenings and slaughter
against the rich. I had asked him just what it was that he proposed to do
when he had got them all properly killed off. “We have been oppressed,”
he said, “and now we shall oppress.” I thought he put the matter very
well, for I could see no other prospect.
When one brushed aside the reformers’ verbiage, the situation was
perfectly clear. I was not witnessing a “revolt of the masses” against an
alien power; nor yet a war between labour and capital; nor yet a struggle
to break up big business; nor yet an attempt to abolish capitalism. What I
was looking at was simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one
large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of
a civilised society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising
than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing
from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to
produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter
of legalised privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on. As
John Adams had so correctly foreseen, the few more sagacious mass-men
will be continually trying to outwit the many who are less sagacious, and
the many will in turn be trying to overpower the few by sheer force of
numbers.
So I was sceptical about the reformers’ projects, and the more they
were trumpeted as “democratic,” the less good to society I thought they
boded. Now and then I was asked to lend a hand with some of them, but I
knew I should be out of place or even worse, a mere wet blanket. I knew
many of their promoters, some very well; the elder Lafollette, Lincoln
Steffens, Newton Baker, Joseph Fels, Frederic Howe. Some of them died in
the faith of reform, while others seemed finally to slack off into a vague
consciousness that something had somehow gone wrong, and that the
realisation of their visions was farther off than they had thought it was.
All those I knew, perhaps twenty-five or more, showed less power of
detachment and reflection than I should have looked for, and very little
sense of history. Their acceptance of the State as a social institution
amazed me, since its anti-social character was so plainly visible, and their
idea of mankind’s leading qualities and motives seemed as unrealistic as
Juvenal’s observations on boars and tigers. I used to ask one after another
to tell me just what reason he had for supposing that a society or an
individual could be improved through political action. History was against
it, observation and common sense were against it,— just what made him
think he was not putting the cart before the horse? I never got an answer;
they all took it as if the question had never occurred to them, as I dare say
it never had. Once I said I thought that in his sense of statesmanship and
his sense of history Thoreau was miles ahead of the whole tribe of
reformers, and had proved it by his one saying that the State had never
yet done anything to help a good cause along, except by the alacrity with
which it got out of the way.
 Thus I never quite understood these men, nor they me, though they
were always kind, true friends. I think they regarded me as a more or less
agreeable person who had been altogether born in sin and could not be
expected to do much about it; and as I recall the spirit and temper of my
ancestry, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they might not be right. But they
were always kind, tolerant, lovable. Once when I complimented Robert
Lafollette on some coup that he had brought off at the “Thyesteän banquet
of clap-trap” in the Senate, he said with a rather sad expression, “Yes, but
the trouble is, you don’t believe what I’m doing amounts to a damn.” It
was true enough, and I was sorry; yet I was not obstinate, I had no pride of
opinion, and certainly no prejudices, but quite the contrary. Aware that I
was but a youngster, green as grass, trying only to get my bearings on a
straight course of thought, all that moved me was the old Platonist desire
to “see things as they are.” I could not, nor can I now, make out that these
friends ever brought themselves to see the State as it is, or mankind as it
is; and the event has abundantly proved that they did not.
There were two exceptions, hardly to be called reformers, Herbert
Quick and Brand Whitlock. Quick was always, I believe, on the extreme
outer fringe of the reforming party, and centrifugal force soon threw
Whitlock as far out. Quick clearly saw the State as an anti-social
institution; he saw that as primarily the arbiter of economic advantage
and a potential instrument of exploitation, both its initial intent and
function are anti-social. He was the only person I knew in that period who
drew the line of distinction sharply between the idea of government, as set
forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration and amplified by Paine and
Spencer, and the idea of the State as demonstrated in the historical
researches of Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer. I owe him a great
deal, for our conversations helped me vastly to arrange my thought in an
orderly way. One recollection of him, however, is annoying. We used to
talk for a while after dinner, and then play billiards. I was no end a better
player than he was, and yet the wretched man always beat me, I don’t
know how. He used to say that when I took him on he played ten times
better than he could, which seemed to be so. Once at the Cosmos Club in
Washington I vowed I would stick at him until I beat him, if it took a week.
We did play nearly all night, but he always managed to nose me out, and I
finally quit in disgust. I get hot all through whenever I think of it.
Whitlock had made a tentative start on the path of reform in the days
of Altgeld, Eugene Debs, Pingree, Golden Rule Jones. His education and
early influences had done little to help him towards a quick and accurate
judgement on the worth of their endeavours, but having a reflective mind
and a true Platonist instinct towards “the reason of the thing,” he soon
found his bearings. The war confirmed his worst suspicions; he had felt
some “vague forebodings of a Dusk of the Nations,” but had not expected
this particular prelude to calamity to come on so soon. He was greatly
depressed. I remember well one forlorn grey Sunday afternoon in the
winter of 1914 when he and I were walking on the deserted outer
boulevards of Brussels. Suddenly he stopped and faced me with the
question, “Have you any hope at all of the human race?” I replied cannily,
“As much as I ever had, no less, no more.” As we walked on, I told him I
was like the darky nurse-girl who had never seen a railway-train until she
and her mistress boarded one that presently went into a tremendous
smash-up. When her mistress pulled herself together, she looked around
for the girl, and saw her sitting where she had evidently been thrown,
some fifty feet from the track, unhurt and composedly crooning to the
baby in her arms. “Weren’t you terribly frightened?” her mistress asked.
“No, ma’am,” the girl replied, “I thought it done had to stop dat way.”
Whitlock smiled a little mournfully, and said he wished he might have had
half that darky’s foresight.

II

Herbert Spencer’s essays, published in 1884, on The New Toryism and

The Coming Slavery left me with an extremely bad impression of British
Liberalism. Since 1860, Liberals had been foremost in loading up the
statute-book with one coercive measure of “social legislation” after
another in hot succession, each of which had the effect of diminishing
social power and increasing State power. In so doing, the Liberals were
manifestly going dead against their traditional principles. They had
abandoned the principle of voluntary social coöperation, and embraced
the old-line Tory principle of enforced coöperation. Not only so, but they
had transformed themselves into a band of political Frankensteins. By
busily cutting down the liberty of the individual piecemeal, and extending
the scope of the State’s coercive control, their work was reaching the
point where a few easy finishing-touches would reduce the individual to a
condition of complete State-servitude; thus bringing forth the monster of
collectivism, ravenous and rampant.
When I saw what American Liberals (for so they called themselves)
were doing in this line,—chiefly in their support of the movement for an
income-tax and an inheritance-tax,—I got up a distaste for Liberals which
soon ripened into horror. For years I have “sweat with agony” at the sight
of a Liberal, as Commodore Trunnion did at the sight of an attorney. I had
rather encounter rattlesnakes,—far rather,—for the rattlesnake is a
gentlemanly fellow who can be relied on to do the right thing, if you give
him half a chance. I have had dealings with him in my time, and also with
the Liberals, and I speak from knowledge.
 I have respect for the old-style Tory, and could always get on with
him, because I knew what he would do in a given situation, and above all, I
knew what he would not do. There were some things to which he would
not condescend even for the Larger Good. Once in a conversation with
Chief Justice Taft, he mentioned pressure put on him while President, in
behalf of something legal enough and probably ethical, but smelling of
sharp practice,—”dam’ low, in any case,” as an old-school Englishman
would say. I so well remember the almost childlike look of embarrassment
on Mr. Taft’s face as he said, “Why, I couldn’t do that.” Speaking after the
manner of men, you got a play for your money with the old-crusted Tory,
as at the other end of the scale I think you would with the honest outright
uncompromising radical. But one never knew what Liberals would do, and
their power of self-persuasion is such that only God knows what they
would not do. As casuists, they make Gury and St. Alfonso dei Liguori look
like bush-leaguers. On every point of conventional morality, all the
Liberals I have personally known were very trustworthy. They were great
fellows for the Larger Good, but it would have to be pretty large before
they would alienate your wife’s affections or steal your watch. But on any
point of intellectual integrity, there is not one of them whom I would
trust for ten minutes alone in a room with a red-hot stove, unless the
stove were comparatively valueless.
Liberals generally,—there may have been exceptions, but I do not
know who they were,—joined in the agitation for an income-tax, in utter
disregard of the fact that it meant writing the principle of absolutism into
the Constitution. Nor did they give a moment’s thought to the appalling
social effects of an income-tax; I never once heard this aspect of the
matter discussed. Liberals were also active in promoting the “democratic”
movement for the popular election of senators. It certainly took no great
perspicacity to see that these two measures would straightway ease our
political system into collectivism as soon as some Eubulus, some mass-
man overgifted with sagacity, should manoeuvre himself into popular
leadership; and in the nature of things, this would not be long.
Liberals were also prominent in the fast-growing movement for
women’s suffrage. I could see that in this they had logic with them; the
women’s contention was valid. I never read a counter-argument that I
thought was worth the paper it was printed on. If you are going to have
universal suffrage, it should include women, since,—at least presumably,—
women are folks, as men are. Practically, I thought it would turn out as it
has done; I thought it would do no good and no harm. The only effect it
could have would be to increase the preponderance of the mass-vote, and
that preponderance was already so overwhelming that doubling it, or
even trebling it, counted for nothing in a practical way. So, if all the mass-
men were voting, I saw no reason why the mass-women should not. I was
beginning to have grave doubts about universal suffrage, however. A
political system which, as Dean Inge says, merely counts votes instead of
weighing them, began to seem unpromising. Hence I remained inactive in
the women’s-suffrage movement, regarding its comical antics as a source
of diversion. Still, on occasion when I was asked for an opinion, I always
declared myself in favour of it, though I was minded to hold my nose
when I did so.
One reformer of the period presented himself in a double capacity.
He was a very great social philosopher who had trained himself into a
first-class polemist, crusader, campaigner; a strange combination, the
strangest imaginable. I do not recall another instance of it. This was Henry
George. I never saw him, though I might easily have done so, but his days
were ending just as I was emerging from the academic shades. C. J. once
spoke to me of his philosophy, saying with a nod of his wise head, “That’s
the real thing.” He never mentioned it again. Undoubtedly, as I discovered
later on, it was the real thing. As Robert Lafollette said to me, George’s
social philosophy and his fiscal method, taken together, made a system
“against which nothing rational has ever been said, or can be said.” As a
social philosopher, George interested me profoundly; as a reformer and
publicist, he did not interest me, though I tried hard to make the best of
him in that capacity.
George and his followers carried on a tremendous countrywide
campaign to force George’s fiscal method into politics. I knew many of his
disciples, some of them quite well; among them were Louis F. Post, C. B.
Fillebrown, Bolton Hall, Daniel Kiefer, Charles D. Williams, George Record,
A. C. Pleydell. Outside the movement, or on the fringes of it, some of the
ablest men in the country were “under conviction,” as the old-time
Methodists used to say. Newton Baker and Whitlock were in this group;
also Lawson Purdy and William Jay Gaynor, who impressed me as by far
the ablest man in our public life. Few know that he might have had the
Presidency instead of Wilson if he had consented; he was mayor of New
York at the time. The story of the approach to him is most amusing, but it
would be out of place in this narrative, like so many other amusing
matters which I am always being tempted to drag in. I have often
wondered what course the country would have taken after 1914 if he had
been in Wilson’s place.
I did not follow George’s campaign attentively, and was neither
astonished nor disappointed when it came to nothing. George’s
philosophy was the philosophy of human freedom. Like Mr. Jefferson,
Condorcet, Rousseau, and the believers in progressive evolution, he
believed that all mankind are indefinitely improvable, and that the freer
they are, the more they will improve. He saw also that they can never
become politically or socially free until they have become economically
free, but if they gained economic freedom, the other freedoms would
follow automatically; and he offered his fiscal method as the most natural,
simple, and effective means of securing them in economic freedom. All
this appeared to me sound enough,1 but the attempt to realise it through
political action seemed the acme of absurdity. The only result one could
expect was that the philosophy would be utterly lost sight of, and the
method utterly discredited; and precisely this was the result.
Socialism and one or two other variants of collectivist Statism were
making considerable political progress at the time. When I met some of
their proponents, as I did now and then, I would put the one question to
them that I always put to George’s campaigners. Suppose by some miracle
you have your system all installed, complete and perfect, it will still have
to be administered,—very well, what kind of people can you get to
administer it except the kind of people you’ve got? I never had an answer
to that question. In a society of just men made perfect, George’s system
would be administered admirably and would work like clockwork. So
would Socialism. So would any other form of collectivism. In such a
society “the dictatorship of the proletariat” would be a splendid success
for everybody all round. The trouble is, we have no such society,—far
from it. Although I was,—and am,—a firm believer in George’s philosophy
and fiscal method, I decided that if progressive evolution was to make
them practicable in fifty thousand years, it would have to step a great deal
livelier than there was any sign of its doing.
So in the ranks of the militant single-taxers, as they were called, I
knew I should make a poor soldier. Convinced that the surest way to lose
that war, like all other wars, was to win it, I should be a superfluous man.
Now and then I published a line or two by way of showing that I was on
the side of the angels, but took no further part. To console myself for my
shortcomings I pondered the example of the great social philosophers of
the past who had never crusaded for their doctrines or presumed upon
mankind’s capacity for receiving them; not Socrates, not Jesus, not Lao-
Tze, of whom Chi-Yen had said that “he was a superior man who liked to
keep in obscurity.” What wisdom! “If any man have ears to hear,” said the
Santissimo Salvatore, “let him hear.” That was all there was to be expected. I
admired the reformers, George in particular, for the splendid intrepidity
which one admires in the leader of a forlorn hope. Yet I could not resist
reminding myself of Montaigne’s great saying, that “human society goes
very incompetently about healing its ills. It is so impatient under the
immediate irritation which is chafing it that it thinks only of getting rid of
this, careless of the cost.... Good does not necessarily ensue upon evil;
another evil may ensue upon it, and a worse one.”
Taking stock of my disorderly array of political and social ideas, I saw
that I was becoming a poor sort of republican. As far as the individual was
concerned, all State systems seemed to tend about equally towards the
same end of State-slavery. In rich countries, as Mr. Jefferson had noticed,
they reached that end a little faster than in poor countries, but I could
make out no other difference. I was much impressed by France’s
remarkable experience; it seemed to me one of the most exhibitory
experiences in history, though I did not find any one who was taking it as
such. In a single century after 1789, France had tried every known kind of
State-system, some two or three times over; three republics, a couple of
monarchies, two empires, now and then a dictatorship, a directory, a
commune—every system one could think of. Each shift brought about the
same consequences to the individual, and they all alike bore testimony to
the truth of Paine’s saying, that “the trade of governing has always been a
monopoly of the most ignorant and the most vicious of mankind.” I often
wondered why this sequence of systems in France had not given rise to
more speculation about the actual net value of any one political system
over another. If it had given rise to any, I did not hear of it.
I began to think there was a good deal in William Penn’s observation
that “when all is said, there is hardly any frame of government so ill
designed by its first founders that in good hands it would not do well
enough; and story [i.e., history] tells us the best, in ill ones, can do nothing
that is great or good.” The triumph of republicanism was supposed to be a
tremendous achievement, yet the republican State, or “democratic,” as
Americans had begun to call it, (perhaps Andrew Carnegie set the fashion
with his Icarian flight of genius in Triumphant Democracy) was giving no
better account of itself than the autocratic or monarchical State had
given. Like theirs, its coercive incursions upon the individual, its
progressive confiscations of social power, were limited only by close
calculation of what the traffic would bear. Like theirs, its controlling
mass-men never lost a chance at what James Madison contemptuously
called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for
accumulating force in the government.” Looking at it from the
individual’s point of view, I could not see that the republican system had
much to commend it over any other. In theory, the republican State
existed for man; in practice, man existed for the republican State.
While I was wondering whether progressive evolution had as yet
brought mankind within gun-range of a practicable republican system, I
ran across Horace Vernet’s witty observation made when the revolution
of 1848 had ousted the July Monarchy and brought in the Second
Republic. “A la bonne heure” he cried gaily, “give me a republic such as we
understand it in France, all rulers, all natural-born kings, gods in mortals’
disguise who dance to the piping of the devil. There have been two such
since I was born; there may be another half-dozen like them within the
next two centuries, because before you can have an ideal republic you
must have ideal republicans, and nature can’t afford to fool away her most
precious gifts on a pack of jack-leg lawyers and hobnail-booted riffraff.
She condescends to make an ideal tyrant now and then, but she will never
make a nation of ideal republicans. You might as well ask her to make a
nation of Raphaels, Michelangelos, Shakespeares or Molières.”
There it was, precisely. I could see how “democracy” might do very
well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius.
Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an
ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave. The collective capacity
for bringing forth any other outcome seemed simply not there. To my
eyes the incident of Aristides and the Athenian mass-man was perfectly
exhibitory of “democracy” in practice. Socrates could not have got votes
enough out of the Athenian mass-men to be worth counting, but Eubulus
easily could, and did, wangle enough to keep himself in office as long as
the corrupt fabric of the Athenian State held together. As against a Jesus,
the historic choice of the mass-man goes regularly to some Barabbas.

III

I have said that my ideas about all these matters were disorderly,
fragmentary, for so they were. In trying to make a very long story short, I
must have given the impression of having put in a great deal more serious
sustained work on forming them than was actually the case. All I did in
that way was quite casual and planless. For one thing, I was having too
good a time, and had too many pleasanter trivialities to attend to. What
actually happened was that some turn in public affairs would attract my
notice, and I would “see it as it was,” more or less by a kind of reflex;—the
Platonist habit of looking for “the reason of the thing” had become almost
automatic. Often I let it go at that, and thought no more about it.
Sometimes I would be reminded of something apposite which I had read,
and I would look that up. Sometimes I got a suggestion that would set me
at reading something which was new to me. Sometimes I would follow
through to a provisional generalisation, but usually not. In these ways the
raw material of ideas gradually got itself together in rough shapes, like a
scattered mess of fagots, which I seldom took the trouble to put in order.
In such circumstances, one of the most animating experiences one
can have is to come suddenly on something which acts as a binder,
putting an armful of these fagots together and tying them in a neat, tight,
orderly bundle. One is exhilarated beyond measure at seeing how big the
bundle is, how beautifully the fagots are matched and fitted,—and all so
unexpectedly. Sometimes it is a chance word or two in a book which does
this, sometimes a chance word or two which one hears or overhears.
Several times in the course of my life this has happened to me, and twice
it has happened with such profound effect as to influence the whole
course of my thought. In the one instance, this effect was due to a casual
sentence dropped by a friend at a lunch-table; in the other, it was due to
an article in a popular magazine which I had idly leafed over while
waiting for something somewhere, I have forgotten what or where. I
might as soon have expected to find a Koh-i-noor in a limestone-quarry as
an article of that character in that publication.
The first incident was this: I was at lunch in the Uptown Club of New
York with an old friend, Edward Epstean, a retired man of affairs. I do not
remember what subject was under discussion at the moment; but
whatever it was, it led to Mr. Epstean’s shaking a forefinger at me, and
saying with great emphasis, “I tell you, if self-preservation is the first law
of human conduct, exploitation is the second.”
This remark instantly touched off a tremendous flashlight in my
mind. I saw the generalisation which had been staring me in the face for
years without my having sense enough to recognise and identify it.
Spencer and Henry George had familiarised me with the formula that man
tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible
exertion; but they had given me no idea of its immense scope, its almost
illimitable range of action. If this formula were sound, as unquestionably
it is, then certainly exploitation would be an inescapable corollary,
because the easiest way to satisfy one’s needs and desires is by
exploitation. Indeed, if one wished to split hairs, one might say that
exploitation is the first law of conduct, since even in self-preservation one
tends always to take the easiest way; but the question of precedence is a
small matter.
In an essay which I published some time ago, having occasion to refer
to this formula, I gave it the name of Epstean’s law, which by every
precedent I think it should have. In their observations on the phenomena
of gravitation, Huyghens and Kepler anticipated Newton closely. It was
left for Newton to show the universal scope of an extremely simple
formula, already well understood in limine, and hence this formula is
known as Newton’s law. As a phenomenon of finance, it had long been
observed that “bad money drives out good,” but Sir Thomas Gresham
reduced these observations to order under a formula as simple as
Newton’s, and this formula is known as Gresham’s law. So for an
analogous service, more important than Gresham’s and, as far as this
planet is concerned, as comprehensive as Newton’s, I thought that the
formula, Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible
exertion, should bear the name of Epstean’s law.
I was indescribably fortunate in getting, as early as I did, a clear sense
of the bearing which three great laws of the type known as “natural” have
on human conduct. I say fortunate, for it was by good fortune alone, and
not my own deserving, that I got this sense. By luck I stumbled on the
discovery that Epstean’s law, Gresham’s law, and the law of diminishing
returns operate as inexorably in the realm of culture; of politics; of social
organisation, religious and secular; as they do in the realm of economics.
This understanding enabled me at once to get the hang of many matters
which far better men than I have found hopelessly puzzling, and to
answer questions for which otherwise I could have found no answer.
For example, I have already shown in these pages how the current
value of literature is determined by the worst type of literature in
circulation—Gresham’s law. Is not the value of education determined in
the same way? I think there can be no doubt of it. Why did the projects of
the reformers fail? Why did George’s air-tight proposals fall by the
wayside? What brought ruin and desolation in the wake of the “social
legislation” championed by the recreant Liberals? Why was it impossible
to improve society or the individual through political action? Simply
because all such well-meant enterprises ran hard aground on Epstean’s
law. Something like republicanism or “democracy” will work after a
fashion in a village or even a township, where everybody knows
everybody and keeps an eye on what goes on. Why not, then, in a county,
a state, a nation? Simply because the law of diminishing returns is against
it. Will political nationalism, as we understand it, ever be made
satisfactory or permanently practicable? Not as long as Epstean’s law and
the law of diminishing returns remain in force, for no one yet has
ciphered out a way to beat them.
Once in the early nineteen-twenties some influential Russian friends
who knew I had seen Russia to the best advantage under the old régime,
quite pressed me to go there again and see what the new government was
doing. They would make my way easy, get me every facility, introduce me
to everybody, and so on. I vamped up some sort of excuse, and declined.
My notion was that any one who knew the course of our republic’s
political history, and knew the incidence of the laws which turned us into
that course and kept us to it, had no need to go to Russia to see the same
laws in operation there. I may say that subsequent events in Russia have
given me no reason to change my mind or regret my decision.
A week or so ago I spent the best part of a day with an extremely
clever, interesting and delightful man who said he had put in two years of
work on a plan for a political redistribution of power and territory after
the present war. He described his plan in full detail; it took him about
three hours. At each successive point he asked if I agreed; I said I did ex
animo. When he ended, I told him I could find no flaw in his plan; it was
complete, perfect, unassailable, as far as it went. “There is only one more
little matter,” I added. “If you can find some way to suspend the operation
of Epstean’s law, the whole thing is in your hands, and your plan will give
us a magnificent new world. I hope you won’t ask me how to do that,
however, for truly I don’t know.”
With the exception of John Adams, who was the most profound
student of government that this country ever produced, Chief Justice Jay
always seemed to me the soundest and most far-sighted statesman of his
time. Ten years after the Constitution was drafted, he wrote this (the
italics are his):
 I do not expect that mankind will, before the millennium, be what they ought to be; and

therefore, in my opinion, every political theory which does not regard them as being what

they are, will prove abortive.

But a theory which regards men as being what they are must surely
take into account the three laws which so largely determine their thought
and conduct. No political theory does this. Beyond any peradventure it
seemed to me that the theory of republicanism which overspread Western
society after 1789 was about as far away from the Chief Justice’s sensible
requirement as it is possible to get. Hence I saw nothing for it but that a
republican society must follow the historic pattern of gradual rise to a
fairly high level of power and prestige, and then a rather sudden lapse
into dissolution and displacement in favour of some other society which
in turn would follow the same pattern. And so it was that at the age of
thirty-five or so I dismissed all interest in public affairs, and have
regarded them ever since as a mere spectacle, mostly a comedy, rather
squalid, rather hackneyed, whereof I already knew the plot from
beginning to end. I have written a little about them now and then, but
from the standpoint only of a critical spectator, and as far as possible from
any controversial or propagandist intent. Seven years ago I gathered up
the substance of what I had to say, and published it under the title, Our
Enemy, the State.2 As for the predictions which I made at the end of this
volume, I did not expect to live long enough to see them realised. In the
short space of seven years, however, they all came true except the final
one which seems even now to be in course of realisation.

IV
 My adventure with the magazine-article was this: The article in
question was an essay by the eminent architect Ralph Adams Cram, whose
professional reputation is so great that it has unfortunately obscured his
merits as a philosopher and man of letters. The essay’s title, Why We Do Not
Behave Like Human Beings, attracted me at once. This was just what had
mystified me all my life; it was the one thing above all others that I
wanted to know. I had read a good many theological disquisitions on the
rationâle of human conduct, and had found them dissatisfying. If Mr.
Cram had anything better to offer, if he could throw any light on that
egregious problem, he was distinctly the man I wanted to see. The essay
has been reprinted in his excellent book called Convictions and
Controversies,3 which deserves the highest recommendation to careful
readers.
Mr. Cram’s thesis is that we do not behave like human beings because
the great majority of us, the masses of mankind, are not human beings.
We have all along assumed that the zoölogical classification of man is also
a competent psychical classification; that all creatures having the physical
attributes which put them in the category of Homo sapiens also have the
psychical attributes which put them in the category of human beings; and
this, Mr. Cram says, is wholly unwarranted and an error of the first
magnitude. Consequently we have all along been putting expectations
upon the masses of Homo sapiens which they are utterly incapable of
meeting. We have accepted them as psychically-human, dealt with them
on that assumption, and expected a corresponding psychical reaction,
when actually nothing of the sort is possible. They are merely the sub-
human raw material out of which the occasional human being is produced
by an evolutionary process as yet unexplained, but no doubt catastrophic
in character, certainly not progressive.4 Hence, inasmuch as they are the
raw material of humanity, they are inestimably precious.
All this upset me frightfully. In my view of man’s place in nature I
was still a good disciple of Mr. Jefferson. I still believed that the masses of
mankind are indefinitely improvable. Yet all the time I could see clearly
that this view presented difficulties with which I could do nothing. How
was it, for example, that I could find no shred of respectable evidence that
psychically the masses of mankind had budged a single peg in six
thousand years? Again, what about the enormous psychical “spread”
between Socrates, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, on the one hand, and on
the other hand the Akka, the Australian bushman? This spread was
prodigiously, almost infinitely, greater than the spread between the Akka
and the anthropoid. What about those borderline forms whose
classification either as Homo sapiens or as anthropoids is debatable? I still
stuck to my view more or less mechanically, but I could not help thinking
that progressive evolution had the devil’s own job on its hands to
straighten up matters like these, even granting its postulate of indefinite
time.
What was one to do? When somebody comes along with a theory
which accounts for everything otherwise unaccountable and answers all
questions otherwise unanswerable, the chances are that he has the right
pig by the ear. I held to my Jeffersonian doctrine for a long time,
meanwhile trying my best to pick holes in Mr. Cram’s theory, but with no
success. I even published two essays, a year or so apart, one in Harper’s
and the other in the Atlantic, telling my troubles to the anthropologists
and asking for help, but I had no answer. This seemed strange, for Dr.
Carrel was just then bringing out his remarkable book called Man, the
Unknown, and Mr. Hooton was making the welkin ring with demands for a
closer study of the animal man. Left in the lurch as I was, I ended by
striking my colours as gracefully as possible, parted company with the
theologians, with Mr. Jefferson, with Price, Priestley, Condorcet,
Rousseau, Mme. de Staël, and went over to the opposition with head
unbowed and withers still unwrung.
My change of philosophical base had one curious and wholly
unforeseen effect, though it followed logically enough. Since then I have
found myself quite unable either to hate anybody or to lose patience with
anybody; whereas up to that time I had always been a pretty doughty
hater, and none too patient with people. So my change of base certainly
brought me into a much more philosophical temper, and I suppose I might
even say it brought me nearer to some sort of ramshackle Christian spirit.
One can hate human beings, at least I could,—I hated a lot of them when
that is what I thought they were,—but one can’t hate sub-human
creatures or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them
unkindly. If an animal is treacherous, you avoid him but can’t hate him,
for that is the way he is. If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them
away but can’t hate them, because you know they are acting up to the
measure of their psychical capacity. If the mass-men of the forty-two
photographs were not human beings, you couldn’t hate them for not
behaving like human beings. The mass-men who are princes, presidents,
politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities
than any wolf, fox or polecat in the land. How, then, is one to hate them,
notwithstanding the appalling evil that they do?
My acceptance of Mr. Cram’s theory also caused me for the first time
really to like people-at-large. Before that I had frankly disliked people in
the mass, though never unkindly. I was often amused by their doings,
often interested, but with no feeling of affection. Now I find myself liking
them, sometimes to a degree which I should have thought impossible.
Flaubert found that le seul moyen de rester tranquille dans son assiette, c’est de
regarder le genre humain comme une vaste association de crétins et de canailles.
Unquestionably so; they are all of that. But when one gets it firmly fixed
in one’s head that they are living up to the measure of their own
capacities and can not by any conjuration increase those capacities to the
point of marking themselves as human beings, one comes at once to like
them. At least, to my great surprise, I found myself doing so.
One has great affection for one’s dogs, even when one sees them
revelling in tastes and smells which to us are unspeakably odious. That is
the way dogs are, one does not try to change their peculiar penchant, one
knows the attempt would be futile, yet one likes them. The other day I saw
a group of handsomely-dressed, well-kept women, most of them I think
older than I am, in a huddle over a loathsome spread of “news from the
front.” At the moment of my glancing at them they were gloating with
expressions of keen delight over some lurid account of the “huge piles of
enemy dead” left by some dust-up in Russia. I did not dislike them, indeed
I dare say I should have found the bloodthirsty old harpies quite likable if
I had known them. That is the way they were, and they were living up to
the best they knew. I thought of the women of Paris in October, 1789, I
thought of Deborah and Jael, and of Fulvia driving her hairpin through the
dead Cicero’s tongue. I might have found them quite likable creatures if I
had once for all consciously accepted them for what they were.
Of course, what the soldier said isn’t evidence. No amount of
sentiment goes any way at all in establishing Mr. Cram’s theory of man’s
place in nature. Nevertheless, the fact does remain that on any other
theory than his it is impossible for a reflective mind to regard our species
otherwise than with disgust and loathing and contempt.
1 True at the time. As will be seen hereafter, I have since given up the

environmentalist postulate that the masses of mankind are indefinitely

improvable. This does not invalidate George’s reasoning for me, however,
for his method would enable them, if they cared to do so, to improve
themselves up to the limit of their psychical capacity, whatever that may
be; which now they are unable to do.

2 Published by William Morrow and Co., New York, 1936.

3 Published by the Marshall Jones Co., Boston.

4 With a poet’s insight, the late Don Marquis had a glimpse of this theory.

In his delightful Chapters For the Orthodox, he suggests as an analogy that in

the days of Pleiohippus there may have been now and then a horse or two
wandering around, regarded with distrust and disfavour by the sub-
equine masses. The late Dr. S. D. McConnell, in his Immortability also
brushed elbows with Mr. Cram’s theory, but did not work it out in full.
 CHAPTER EIGHT
Peggio assai che l’averla perduta
Egli è il dir; la mia gente è caduta
In obbrobrio alle genti ed a me.

—BERCHET.

I N EUROPE, almost as soon as I had got my bearings there, I discovered

that food can be interesting. I had been brought up on food that was
good and abundant, but nothing to stir one’s imagination. One excellent
result of this was that I have always preferred a simple diet. Fortunately,
any kind of good food agrees with me perfectly and I can eat it with relish,
but I prefer the simpler sort, and in Europe I found out for the first time
how much can be done with the simplest dishes. What is simpler than
potato soup, casserole of veal, fish chowder, stewed chicken, partridge-
and-cabbage? Yet in the country where I lived, these were works of art.
Another good result of my being brought up in the unimaginative Anglo-
American tradition of the table, is that I am no great stickler for variety.
My appetite is not flighty. The Greeks never showed their wisdom better
than when they said, “Let’s have a fine thing two or three times over,”—
Δὶς ἢ τρὶς τὰ καλά. If a dish pleases me, I hardly care how often I have it; I
can pretty well eat it day in and day out. This monogamous habit clung to
me when I was amidst the foods and wines of Europe, so no doubt I missed
many confections which I should have looked into, but as I was not setting
up for an epicure I did not mind.
 What article of diet is more unpretending than Block Island turkey,
otherwise known as salt codfish? We have three or four ways of dealing
with it, all good, all fair-to-middling palatable, all profoundly unexciting.
The Portuguese have forty-one; I think I must have sampled most of them.
The way of it was that an altogether lovely and charming young
Lisbonienne told me she knew the whole forty-one and could do nearly all
of them herself, and among her family and friends the rest might be easily
managed. If I could stay in Lisbon long enough, she would mobilise all her
reserves and put me through the entire docket. This was impracticable,
however, for I was going up through the country and would not return to
Lisbon until the time came to take a steamer for Rotterdam. She
compromised by giving me a list of dishes to pick from wherever I might
be able to get them on my way; so, for a matter of two months or more I
found myself subsisting mainly on salt codfish. Like a gallant girl who
believed in her country’s cause, she offered to forfeit a kiss for each dish I
should report unfavourably when I came back to Lisbon. I was pretty sure
there must be a chance for me somewhere in a list as long as that, but
none turned up; so, being on my honour, I regretfully did the right thing,
and never harvested a single kiss.
Thinking to do my American friends a good service, I brought over
some cook-books which turned out to be useless. The trouble was that
Dutch and Flemish and French cookbooks are written for people who
already know how to cook in those traditions. They are silent about all
sorts of little matters which a native cook would attend to without being
told, and which make all the difference in the world with the product.
There seems to be even more to it than that, according to a pretty broad
hint I got one day from the proprietor of my favourite restaurant in
Brussels; a hint which made me think of Opie’s famous answer, “With
brains, sir,” when some one asked him how he mixed his colours. I had
screwed up my courage to ask this virtuoso if he would give me directions
for making his type of stewed chicken, which was not quite in the mode of
Mechelen or of Gand, and was far better than either. To my surprise he
said he would do it with pleasure,—delighted,—if I could stop by next
morning he would have the recipe for me in full detail. “But,” he added,
after a moment’s reflection, “you can’t make it.”
“I can’t make it after your directions?”
“Oh, no,—quite impossible. If you went into my kitchen and I stood
by you all the time telling you what to do, even then you couldn’t make
it.”
I got the recipe next day; it was all he said it would be, I still have it;
but there the story ends.
It seems rather odd that after all my experience with European food I
should have had to come back to the United States to find the one food
which is not only the best in the world from the standpoint of dietetics,
but also aesthetically the most interesting and (to me) the most palatable.
Up to that time, sheer provincialism had kept me away from Chinese
cookery in New York and San Francisco. I may have thought vaguely that
birds’ nests and rats were the staples of it; some silly quirk of
fastidiousness, anyway. Once when I had come back from Europe for a
three months’ stay, however, my friend Mr. Chan Pak-Sun put me through
a course of it to cure a villainous run of nervous dyspepsia, which it did in
astonishingly short order. Since then I have stood by it consistently when
I have been in this country, and have given it as careful study as I could.
When I asked Mr. Chan to explain my remarkable cure, he said in his
polite, deprecating way, “You must remember that my people had
brought the science of cooking to practical perfection when your
ancestors were eating their food raw.” When one looks into the matter
and puts a little thought on it, one sees how this is so.
It is a commonplace that a country’s food is a reliable index to its
degree of civilisation, and my experience has convinced me of its truth.
Where I found the most interesting food, as in the Low Countries,
Denmark, France, Norway, there I found the soundest idea of what
civilisation means, and the clearest understanding of the discipline
necessary to produce it. On the other hand, where I found the dullest
appreciation of food, as in America and the British Isles, there I found the
idea of civilisation standing at the lowest level, and there also by
consequence I found its discipline most persistently disparaged and
disallowed. The contrast gave me a lively notion of what existence would
be like if the Anglo-American conception of civilisation should prevail in
the world, as it then seemed likely to do, and now seems even likelier. Its
chief representatives in those days were repulsive enough, but their
successors today are men—and women—whose very names make one
shudder.

II

In my early thirties I perceived that I could get on better outside my

native land than in it, so I decided to put in as much as possible of my
lifetime in some other part of the world. I had nothing against America or
American society; nothing whatever. The author of the Imitation says
acutely that “the fewer there be who follow the way to heaven, the harder
that way is to find.” My trouble was that hardly anybody was going up my
street, which made the street hard to find and harder to keep to. Vandals
had broken down most of the traffic-signs, and knaves of every
description had so defaced the rest that they turned you off in the wrong
direction at almost every fork and cross-road. Moreover, I knew I had
nothing to contribute to our society that it would care to accept. The only
contribution it would care for was something that might helpfully fall in
with its doctrine of economism, and I had nothing of that sort to offer.
The whole sum of it was that I was like a man who had landed in
Greenland with a cargo of straw hats. There was nothing wrong with
Greenland or with the hats, and the man might be on the best terms with
the Greenlanders in a social way, but there was not the faintest chance of
a market for his line of goods.
Economism was rampant in Europe, but it had not yet made a clean
sweep of the survivals, the vestiges, of an opposing philosophy, nor had it
yet obliterated all traces of traditional respect for that philosophy and for
those who represented it. Not for nothing had Europe gone through its
long, intensive experience of the doctrine that man does not live by bread
alone, that the whole content of human life can not be summed up in the
production, acquisition and distribution of wealth. America had no such
fund of experience. Knowing only the philosophy of economism, it
respected none other, made place for none other. One who represented
any other was clearly superfluous in its society. His philosophical
existence must be a hole-and-corner affair which he would carry on as a
sort of spiritual Robin Hood. The prospect looked rather bleak and
benumbing on the whole, so I decided that I had best pack up my
philosophical straw hats as soon as might be, and go where there seemed
to be a little more doing in my line.
This decision brought me in sight of the curious notion which Mr.
Pearsall Smith observed as prevailing in American society, that a person
who leaves America for reasons like mine is somehow unpatriotic and
disloyal. I could not understand this, and the more I reflected on it the
more mechanical and unintelligent this view of patriotism appeared to be.
What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from other
spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one Was born? But birth is a
pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on
this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on
this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king
and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a
Duce or Führer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely
on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never
seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if
ever once I thought they could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political
system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-
not? But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from
the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than
names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same
for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as
good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any,
ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live
under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found
no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one
system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no
saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any
of them lies in the way it is administered.
So when people speak of loyalty to one’s country, one must ask them
what they mean by that. What is one’s country? Mr. Jefferson said
contemptuously that “merchants have no country; the mere spot they
stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which
they draw their gains.” But one may ask, why should it? This motive of
patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it be sound for merchants,
why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of
material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and
æsthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country
is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have
prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country. If Mr.
Ford and Mr. Rockefeller had been born in Burma and lived all their lives
there, America would still be their country, their spiritual home, with the
first call on their every patriotic sentiment. They would, as we say,
“belong here,” because here is where the things they love are devoutly,
nay, exclusively respected. Then if they came here in person, one would
envy them their emotion at finding themselves spiritually in step with an
enormously numerous society whose sole basic philosophy was theirs.
What could be more exhilarating than the sense of complete spiritual
unity with more than a hundred million of one’s fellow-beings? After all,
as Dumas said, “man is man’s brother.”
Burke touches this matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. “For
us to love our country,” he said, “our country ought to be lovely.” I have
sometimes thought that here may be the rock on which Western
civilisation will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which
is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide
diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one
which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of
attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run
its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own
hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it
is too ugly to be let live any longer.
 Yet I have always a regard for the America I had known in my earlier
years. In those days the ineffectual impulse which moved my friends the
reformers and “progressives” was at least understandable. One could
think of American society as Bishop Warburton thought of the English
Church, that like the ark of Noah it “is worth saving, not for the sake of
the unclean beasts that almost filled it and probably made most noise and
clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality that was as much
distressed by the stink within as by the tempest without.” Nevertheless,
with America’s basic philosophy what it was, and is, how could the thing
be done?
In Europe I watched the slow relentless suffocation of life’s amenities
as the various peoples were forced closer and closer into the pattern set
by economism. Brussels was Brussels when I first saw it; amenity still
existed in its society, the whole organisation of its life was amiable. Its
pleasures and diversions were amiable, unmechanised, satisfying. They
gave the sense of being taken as a wholesome and regular part of life. One
was as much at home in the museums, the concert-hall, the theatre, the
opera, as in one’s own house. Going to the opera was not a laborious and
costly job, and it gave one no sense of being let in on a purely professional
occasion. I would get a light, unhurried dinner at the Trois Suisses or the
Pourquoi Pas, and then when the bell rang I would leave my hat and
overcoat in the restaurant, walk twenty steps to the Monnaie’s side-
entrance, and join in a performance of high professional excellence
pervaded by the spirit of the highly-gifted, highly-cultivated amateur. I
say “join in” advisedly, for one felt that one belonged there, one was a
participant, not an auditor, an outsider. Then when the performance was
over, I would retrieve my hat and coat, stroll over to some near-by resort
for a taste of steamed mussels and Spatenbräu beer while I listened to
some energetic discussion, perhaps of the opera, perhaps of any other
subject under the sun, and then if the night were pleasant I would walk
home.
All this is perhaps a small matter, but it will pass as an illustration
showing how the aggregate of many such small matters combined with
some that were larger to make up the total of an amiable life. In my years
there, however, I saw the curious phenomenon of great continuous
improvement in the mechanics of civilisation going on pari passu with
deterioration in the quality of civilisation itself. Economism kept bringing
in a steadily increasing volume and variety of the apparatus of civilisation,
its comforts, conveniences, devices to save time and labour, devices which
if used intelligently would promote amenity; but with a curious
constancy, the larger this volume of apparatus grew, the fewer and
scantier the amenities of life became, and the faster the general standards
of civilisation declined. One remarked the progress of this deterioration
wherever one looked, in the current ideals of taste, manners, education,
culture, religion, morals and art.
In Belgium I observed also that as the material benefits of economism
increased and multiplied, not only did the quality of civilisation
deteriorate, but also the quality of happiness. One of the things which
mainly attracted me to Brussels in the first instance was the evidence of
happiness I saw there, notwithstanding the slightness of the material
basis on which they rested. An American who had some business
connexion there,—this was in 1911,—said to me one day, “It’s a queer
place. From our point of view everything in the country is dead wrong,
and yet they seem to be the happiest people 1 ever saw.” This remark
made an impression on me, for I had just returned from America where I
could not see that as a people we were happier than we were in the bad
old times before economism had given us so much apparatus. What I saw
in both countries convinced me that like the task of civilising a society,
the task of making it happy is beyond the power of economism, quite as
the religionists and moralists have said it is.
When the war of 1914 broke out, I was not prepared to attribute more
than a purely casual significance to it. Having its roots in the philosophy
of economism, it served only to accelerate a degenerative process which
had been steadily going on since first that philosophy overspread Western
society. In my view it was a mere incident, more or less spectacular, in the
general “course of rebarbarisation” which Herbert Spencer in 1898 so
clearly saw Western society taking. Its antecedents being what they were,
it was a consequence inevitable at some time or other, and the time
happened to be then. With this view of the war I naturally had no interest
in it. What I saw of its action, which was not much, has so far passed out of
my memory that I doubt I could recall any of it accurately. I kept no track
of it, read no newspapers, heard few reports. When one has known for
forty years precisely how a society’s course of rebarbarisation must turn
out in the long-run, one does not waste one’s attention on day-today
incidents of its progress.
I have often thought it might be amusing to write a humorous essay
on how to recognise the Dark Ages when you are in them. Did the average
European in the last half of the fourth century know that the Dark Ages
were closing in on him? I rather doubt it. Probably he took the
overspreading of ignorance, corruption, violence and bestiality as being
pretty much the regular thing, and evading or warding off their impact
was merely so much in the day’s work. Probably many of them took this
state of things as a challenge, as the world’s normal dare, and barged in
ruthlessly to beat it on its own terms, at anybody’s cost but their own.
People are like that now, and doubtless were like that then. In all
likelihood the man of the Dark Ages did not recognise symptoms, or know
what they meant, or pay any attention to them. Indeed, how could he?
Knowing no history, he could not understand history, and so he had no
rule of comparison by which to measure the quality of his civilisation and
determine whether it was changing for the better or the worse. The tide-
gauges set up by Lucilius, Juvenal, Horace, Persius, Tacitus, may as well
not have existed, as far as he was concerned.
Since 1914 I have been watching social symptoms, especially in the
United States where economism has had everything its own way and has
done its best. Here again the neolithic masses of the present day have no
historical measure of their own society; virtually no one knows anything
of what has gone before him, still less could understand its interpretation.
Virtually all accept economism’s word for it that where you have
“prosperity,” railways, banks, newspapers, industry, trade, there of
necessity you have civilisation. One who hinted that a society might have
all these and yet remain uncivilised; or that a society might have almost
nothing of any of them, and still be quite highly civilised;—anyone hinting
at this would be laughed at. Since 1914 the only virtues that I have seen
glorified with any kind of sincerity or spontaneous acclaim are barbaric
virtues, the virtues of the jazz-artist and the cinema-hero, tempered on
occasion by the virtues of Jenghiz Khan, Attila, Brennus. The ideals I have
seen most seriously and purposefully inculcated are those of the
psychopath on the one hand; and on the other, those of the homicidal
maniac, the plug-ugly and the thug. In a book published three or four
years ago, an able and experienced observer of social symptoms, Dr. Alexis
Carrel, says:
 Moral sense is almost completely ignored by modern society; we have, in fact,
suppressed its manifestations. All are imbued with irresponsibility.... Robbers enjoy

prosperity in peace; gangsters are protected by politicians and respected by judges; they are

the heroes whom children admire in the cinema and imitate in their games.... Sexual morals

have been cast aside; psychoanalysts supervise men and women in their conjugal relations.

There is no difference between wrong and right, just and unjust.... Ministers have

rationalised religion; they have destroyed its mystical basis. They are content with the part
of policemen, helping in the interest of the wealthy to preserve the framework of present

society; or, like politicians, they flatter the appetites of the crowd.1

Turning then to another order of social symptoms, Dr. Carrel says

further:

In the state of New York, according to C. W. Beers, one person out of every twenty-

two has to be placed in an asylum at some time or other. In the whole of the United States,...

each year about 68,000 new cases are admitted to insane asylums and similar institutions. If

the admissions continue at such a rate, about one million of the children and young people

who are today attending schools and colleges will sooner or later be confined in asylums. In

the state hospitals there were in 1932, 340,000 insane. There were also in special institutions

81,580 feebleminded and epileptics, and 10,930 on parole. These statistics do not include the
mental cases treated in private hospitals. In the whole country, besides the insane, there are

500,000 feebleminded; and in addition, surveys made under the auspices of the National

Committee for Mental Hygiene have revealed that at least 400,000 children are so

unintelligent that they cannot profitably follow the courses of the public schools. In fact, the

individuals who are mentally deranged are far more numerous. It is estimated that several

hundred thousand persons not mentioned in any statistics are affected with

psychoneuroses.2
 I suppose one might add to this the testimony of a prominent alienist
who told me lately that while the secrecy of the drug-habit makes it
impossible to get accurate statistics, a conservative estimate would put it
that more than two million of our population are to some degree
dependent upon drugs. Perhaps it might also be remarked that in the
spring of 1941 the Selective Service System reported that forty per cent of
the men examined for the draft had been rejected as physically unfit for
service.
The quality of civilisation attested by these symptoms does not
appear too much unlike what one would have expected to find prevailing
in the Dark Ages. In the face of it one can only smile at all the current
sublimated drivel about the preciousness of “democracy.” Yet it is nothing
to get stirred up about, to arouse resentment, or to evoke the pestilent
meddlings of what Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Gawdsaker. Mere hopeful
fiddling with these symptoms by devices of political quackery does
nothing but aggravate the radical disorder which gives rise to them. The
widespread corruption of a society which has committed itself root and
branch to the philosophy of economism is to be regarded sub specie
aeternitatis as simply an example of cause and effect. “Things and actions
are what they are,” Bishop Butler said, “and the consequences of them
will be what they will be.” There is no known way in the nature of things
for well-meaning persons to play the part of deputy-Providence and cut in
on the acceptance of a social philosophy to make it bring forth any social
consequences save those it must bring forth.
During the last twenty years I have often thought it would be rather
a grim joke on our pretentiousness and gullibility, if some pukka historian
of, say, A.D. 2942 should decide that the apprehensions of Max Nordau’s
“more highly-developed minds” were well-founded, and that a second
Dusk of the Nations had set in on Western society about A.D. 1870. I am
not at all sure but that he might make out a pretty plausible case for that
date, when the time comes.

III

Living in Brussels in the years before 1914 was to me curiously like

living with one’s best girl in the days of chivalry and romance. You liked
to visit other cities, look them over, perhaps make up to them a little,
maybe chuck one or two of them under the chin, but when the train rolled
into the good old North Station and you came out on the Place Rogier into
the dear creature’s arms, you would not trade her off for a whole
haremful of what you have seen. Her ways and manners, her
unpretending grace and charm, her feel of stability and soundness, are all
just as you have been impatiently expecting to find them, and her face
wears a jolly Flemish smile as you whisper in her ear the phrase of pure
contentment, Oost west, t’huis best.
She has a pair of attractive sisters, Antwerp and Liége, and doesn’t
care how much you philander with them; in fact, she rather likes it, for it
is all in the family and she isn’t above a wicked sisterly satisfaction in
putting their noses out of joint. She is not even jealous of her shoe-string
cousin Luxemburg, a raving beauty, but encourages you to go over every
spring for a long flirtatious visit. She herself is perhaps a little on the plain
side when you think of the opulent handsomeness of Paris or Kiev,
although her city-hall square is the finest single-group object in Europe.
One of the pleasantest ways to spend an idle morning is to sit in front of a
café on the north-west corner of the square with some beer and a field-
glass, and pick out the ornamental details of the city hall and the guild-
houses. As often as I did this I never failed to find some spot of beauty that
I had not noticed before. Knowing that the spire of the city hall was
completed exactly fifty years before Columbus sailed gives rise to many
reflections. One thinks there may be something in Artemus Ward’s idea
that it would have been better for the world if the savages had given Chris
a warm meal and sent him home again ore the ragin Billers.
Aside from this one feature Brussels has little to take the eye of the
sightseer or casual visitor. Her points of beauty and interest are disclosed
only gradually to her intimates, which is as it should be. The street-names
in the old part of town were a matter of unending diversion to me in my
hours of idleness. Those which marked the street as a seat of some
occupation, institution, or personage, were easy,—Chicken-market Street,
Hospital Street, Bishop’s Street. So were those named for some physical
peculiarity, like One-person Street, so narrow that two can hardly pass
without “scrooging.” But many streets have names whose significance is
completely lost. In my dalliance with them I did not really wish to know
what their significance was, nor would I have thanked any one for telling
me. I believe some Belgian archivist has done something with the subject,
but I never cared to look up his findings. Aware that a street is the most
nearly permanent of all human institutions, my satisfaction was only in
musing over them, guessing, contemplating the retrospect over the long
course of busy life which they had witnessed.
Stoofstraat,—there almost certainly was the site of a public bath in
the Middle Ages when, strange as it may seem, people did more bathing
than they did in the Renaissance and afterwards. Krakeelstraat, the street
of the Quarrel,—what quarrel, and when, and why? One would say it must
somehow have been a pretty distinguished affair, for quarrels were never
uncommon here in the old days. The little street not a pistol-shot long,
called Eclipse,—was a tavern or some sort of rendezvous by that name
located there? The street of the Virgins,—what virgins and what was the
connexion? I heard the vague legend that a mediæval fountain stood
there, three naked girls in stone à croupetons, delivering water after the
naïve manner of the Manneken-Piss. It may have been so; this bit of
naturalism was not an uncommon design for fountains in the Middle Ages.
Zespennigenstraat, the street of the Six Counters, what we now call
poker-chips,—a large building, extremely old, stands here, which by all
appearances was once an inn. I thought that in mediæval times it might
have been one called the Six Counters, and the street took its name from
that. There was considerable business going on in that neighbourhood;
the street called Navets suggests a vegetable-market or herb-market, and
the Potbakkersstraat testifies that the flourishing earthenware-industry
had its headquarters there; so probably an inn thus conveniently situated
would get some trade.
But life in Brussels was not all dreams and visions, nor yet was it all
beer and skittles. Brussels was always a hard-working, busy town, and in
that atmosphere I did more and better work,—if one can call it work,—
than I ever succeeded in doing anywhere else. One could read and study
with unruffled attention and think with undisturbed concentration. Oddly
enough, one would say that my immediate surroundings were anything
but conducive, especially in my last habitation. My living-room was an
immense affair, nearly fifty feet long by thirty wide, with a handsome
parquetry flooring, probably once a ballroom. It was full of authentic
Second Empire furniture, with mirrors galore, and large oil-paintings in
gilt frames. My landlord told me that once when the old queen was having
her portrait painted, she chose to come here for her sittings in order to
get the real thing in background and surroundings. I do not vouch for this,
for the old gentleman’s tongue hung in the middle, and some instinct told
me he was not always reliable. Still, I must say that the queen could not
have chosen better for her purpose, so the story may have been true. A
humble student might expect to feel lost and addled in the midst of all
this gorgeousness, but I found it inspiring and delightful. My improvised
work-table was a tiny thing with a heavy top in brown mottled marble,
but it served me, as I said, for the best of what little literary work I have
ever done.
In Brussels one passed one’s days in the rich, balanced, intelligently-
organised sort of life that I had vaguely felt must exist somewhere, if only
one could find it. One could work at one’s best as long as one liked, then
stroll out, sure to find pleasures that were intelligent, diverting, restful,
the kind from which one always learns something. On almost any summer
evening a concert would be going on in the city-hall square. There were
more musical societies in Brussels than there were black cats, and a more
deadly spirit of rivalry among them than cats ever knew. It is an inspiring
sight to see the Amphion Society (or whatever its name might be) march
around the square and into the stand, full of grim determination to make
the Arion Society, who are to play there tomorrow night, sound like fish-
pedlars. I heard Meyerbeer’s Struensee played there one evening by some
amateur group in a way that I have long hoped to hear again, but never
have. In the fifteenth century the Low Countries taught music to the
whole of Europe, as Rabelais bears witness in the incomparable prologue
to his Fourth Book, and they still can do it. The Belgian musician has all
the scholarly correctness of the German, and he adds to it an unfailing
superiority of intelligence, an elegance of finish, a style and grace, which I
have never found elsewhere.
My club was the most interesting in Europe, I believe, and I would
wager incidentally that it set the best table of any. It was made up largely
of the official set, endlessly experienced, hard-baked, devoid of illusions,
who discussed the rationâle of public affairs with Bismarckian frankness. I
so well remember the wily old stager Baron X, as he sat with me for long
hours one evening five years ago, dissecting “the European situation” like
a surgeon, and telling me precisely what would come of it, and why.
Again, in conversations on trains or street-cars or in cafés one would get
the talk of mature, experienced people. Belgians have a good deal of the
Americans’ gregariousness and affability; they enjoy passing the time of
day with strangers. Once in a chance talk about political theory under the
new régimes in Russia, Italy, and Germany, my fellow-gossip said
impatiently, “Oh, that’s all the same thing, that’s Statism. We know all
about that, we went through it years ago.” He was one of the plain people,
not a student; I gathered that he had some sort of commercial agency, for
he seemed to be familiar with various kinds of machinery. I wonder how
many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal,
Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism,
like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except
for the flavouring.
Then again of an evening there might be the chance of an hour’s chat
with Mme. B. after one had watched her spit fire at Filena in Mignon; or a
discreet making-up to Filena herself when she had laid aside her stage-
trappings, a charming person and a great beauty. Or perhaps one might
make up a little more seriously to another charmer, then about at the end
of her student days, full of hope and ambition, ready to shine brilliantly in
Les Noces de Jeannette. A truly lovely young woman, and the most
bewitching of soubrette singers, her career was ruined by a strange
disability. After three years of heroic struggle at the Opéra-Comique, she
was driven off the boards and almost into insanity by incurable stage-
fright. I do not know what became of her, except that she survived the
war. I met her accidentally about fifteen years after her retirement, and
spent two or three days with her at her home in a suburb of Paris. Our talk
often took a nostalgic turn, which made my visit rather a sad one, on the
whole. Her first reminiscence was of going over in the old days to eat
moules-frites on the Beenhouwersstraat, after the opera. Odd, I thought,
that such a trifling matter should have been the first to rise to the surface
of her memory.
Tout s’en va, tout passe, l’eau coule, et le cœur oublie. That is how life is,
and one should be thankful for it, as Flaubert goes on to say, for the soul
could not bear the whole weight of accumulated experience that piles up
day by day. Yet one is thankful, too, when some trifle of sentimental
recollection has unexpectedly escaped oblivion. One of the great historic
scenes which I would give much to have witnessed took place in front of a
café opposite the Comédie Française. George Sand passed by, a dowdy,
musty old woman, making her way against a driving rain, and collided
with a little old man who wore a decoration in his button-hole.
Untangling their umbrellas, they both lost their temper and blackguarded
each other venomously for several minutes. One of a group inside the café
said, “Gentlemen, there is something worth seeing. That man is Jules
Sandeau.” Once they had lived together, perhaps married, and had
collaborated in literary work for some time. Now neither had recognised
the other. Better so, no doubt. It seems unnatural and harsh, but telle est la
vie. Les nœuds les plus solidement faits se denœuent d’eux-mêmes parce que la
corde s’use. C’est une grande misère, mais....

IV
 Several times I have spoken of my luck. Good fortune has indeed
followed me with strange persistency, up to the last three or four years.
Previous to that, to the best of my recollection, no misfortune ever befell
me but such as I brought on myself. Nor do I recall that I ever had a door
closed on me without my subsequently discovering the best of reasons
why it should have been closed. I doubt that many can say as much for the
impersonal direction of their passage through life. My one piece of bad
luck came at the outset, in my being born when and where I was. I do not
say this by way of complaint, nor do I hold it as a grievance against the
order of the universe, for I have no grievance nor any complaint to make.
On the contrary, I feel that with the luck which has attended me, I have
done extremely well, undeservedly well. Nevertheless the fact stands; and
even so, I count myself lucky beyond expression to have lived through the
last sixty years rather than the next sixty.
Probably most reflective persons have now and then looked back
desirously on some period, some civilisation as better suited to them than
their own. One of my friends was saying to me only the other evening that
he would like to have lived in London of the eighteenth century. Others
have spoken of Elizabethan England as their choice, and others again of
Athens in the days of Pericles. My choice would be for none of these. If I
could have made a deal with an easy-going Providence, I would have
elected to be born in the Paris of 1810, and after a year or so of quiet
retirement on the island of Port-Cros, slip out of life in the autumn of 1885
and be buried there in the unkempt little cemetery near the manor-house.
My only stipulation would be for as good an education as the one I have
had, and for money enough to go on with in a reasonable way, without
anxiety.
 The blight of economism did not settle on all classes in France until
long after 1840; indeed, as late as 1860 one did not see the evidences of its
contaminating contact on every hand. People stayed where they were,
content in the practical philosophy of Candide; an unsettled, nomadic life
did not attract them. In 1850 France had barely fifteen hundred miles of
ramshackle railways, their ownership parcelled out among twenty-four
companies, all virtually bankrupt. When Thiers held the portfolio of the
Interior he went over to England to inspect the railway-systems, and on
his return said, “I do not think railways are suited to France,” thus setting
back railway-construction a good ten years. Noble fellow, Thiers!—one
can forgive him a great deal for that. Even after 1870, even after the
Second Empire had strained every nerve to push the cause of economism,
France obstinately remained a country of agriculture, artisanship, crafts
and trades, home industries. Paris itself remained a city of small shops
which were closed for a couple of hours each noon and for a month or so
each summer. The idea that there is something to live for besides the
production, acquisition and distribution of wealth—this idea died a slow,
hard death in France. One whom fate had cast for the part of a native of
Paris in the period 1810-1885 would have had all the best of it.
For never in the world, I believe, have so many great practitioners of
the good life, the truly humane life, been gathered together in one place,
as in the Paris of that period. In no other society could a humble amateur
of the humane life get so effortlessly a clear and complete conception of
what that life is, what its philosophy is, and what its rewards are. In no
other civilisation, if I may say so, would he find himself less an alien, less a
superfluous man.
One reason for my choice, perhaps the main reason, is that among
the fourscore names which occur to me off-hand there are so many borne
by men whom one would give anything to have known, irrespective of
their achievements and proficiencies. This is most unusual. At other times
and places there were men whom one admires and respects immensely,
but one does not feel attracted to their society. With all one’s exalted
reverence for Herbert Spencer one would be indifferent to his
acquaintance. One is not drawn to Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Matthew
Arnold, Trollope, by what one knows of them, any more than to Thiers,
Balzac, Eugène Sue. Works on the social life of Paris in the nineteenth
century,—among many others, the memoirs of Véron, Houssaye, Bertaut,
Halévy, du Camp, Daudet, Claudin, Scholl and the anonymous author of An
Englishman in Paris,—these testify that one would hardly know how to
choose among those from whom the light of the humane life shone out
with such irresistible fascination. To have grown up with Guizot, Cousin,
Villemain, Duruy; to have been on friendly terms with Ste.-Beuve. Renan,
Scherer, Taine; with the novelists Dumas, Mérimée, Daudet, Tourgueniev;
the painters Delacroix and Horace Vernet; the poets de Vigny, Leconte de
Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, de Musset; the musicians Adam, Auber,
Meyerbeer, Rossini, Offenbach! The list seems endless.
In the Brussels of the incoming century one lived on remnants, it is
true, but they were sound remnants. One could still feel oneself at the
centre of things, which was what I needed to clean off whatever spots of
provincialism and parochialism might be defacing my philosophy of
existence. I had been forming my views of life and mankind on my own, as
every dweller in America, where the winds of doctrine blow only one way,
is obliged to do. I was uncertain about them, needing reassurance of what
in them might be right even more, perhaps, than correction of what
might be wrong. For this a larger experience was necessary, an exposure
to as many different “climates of opinion” as I could find, and Brussels
afforded it. The civilisations of Holland, Germany, Luxemburg, France and
Austria were all within easy reach, and ever since the twelfth century
Brussels had done as big a trade in ideas as it had done in merchandise.

1 Man, the Unknown, ed. Harper, p. 153.

2 Op. cit., p. 154.

 CHAPTER NINE
Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—GEORGE SANTAYANA.

Man, biologically considered,... is the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and indeed the only one
that preys systematically on his own species.

—WILLIAM JAMES.

T HE war of 1914 ended in an orgy of looting, as any rational being

might have known it would, even if he had never heard of the secret
treaties which predetermined this ending. It ended as all wars have ended
and must end. Any pretence to the contrary is mere idleness. One can say
for Brennus that he was no hypocrite, exuding repulsive slaver about
“mandates,” “reparations,” and the like. He chucked his sword on the
scales, saying Vae victis, and that was that. Of all the predatory crew
assembled at Versailles, the only one for whom I had a grain of respect
was old Clémenceau. He was a robber and a brigand, but he never
pretended to be anything else, and he was a robber in the grand style. His
attitude towards his associates pleased me. He regarded Lloyd George,
Wilson, Orlando and their attendant small-fry from a lofty height of
disdain, as one might imagine Jesse James or Dick Turpin regarding a gang
of confidence men, area-sneaks, porch-climbers. He also took no pains to
disguise his opinion of them, which delighted me. If you left your watch
and pocket-book at home, you could do business with Clémenceau. He
would not poison your rum-and-water or besmear your character, and all
his cards were on the table. As highwaymen go, one has a good bit of
respect for that sort.
In my view, the most significant and distressing result of the war was
one which has gone virtually unnoticed; it completed the destruction of
Europe begun by the war of 1870. Before that there had existed a very real
European spirit, a community of understanding, a reciprocity in culture,
which expressed itself in many common modes of thought and feeling,
even of action. One gets probably the most complete understanding of it
from the writings of the great Weltbürger Goethe. The persistent
pernicious meddling of England in Continental affairs had done all it could
to check the unifying influence of this spirit on European political
organization, and Bismarck, as the architect of the imperial Germany,
finished the job. It was after the events of 1870 that the Austrian
Reichskanzler von Beust made his celebrated remark, “Europe no longer
exists.” This was strictly true. The European spirit, which was the only
Europe worth preserving, the only Europe that held any promise for the
future, the only Europe that the student of civilised man cared two straws
about,—this spirit was finally asphyxiated in smoke from the guns of von
Steinmetz and Frederick-Charles.
Economism then had a clear field. The European spirit was
everywhere promptly replaced by the spirit of an unintelligent, myopic,
dogged, militant, political and economic nationalism, and the war of 1914
fixed this spirit upon Europe forever, as far as one can see. Wilson’s
shallow stultiloquence about “self-determination” and “the rights of small
nations” rationalised it everywhere to the complete satisfaction of the
political mind, and gave it respectability as good sound separatist
doctrine. Epstean’s law immediately and on all sides swept in an
enormous herd of political adventurers, the innumerable Pilsudskis,
Horthys, Kerenskys, Masaryks, Beneshes, big and little, and kept them
working tooth and nail to provide pasturage for themselves in a
mishmash of little twopenny succession-states. In each of these, strictly
according to pattern, they made it their first business to surround
themselves with a high-tariff wall and order up a first-class army.
It appeared to me, then, when the war was over, that Western society
was an extremely sick patient on the world’s hands, and as happens in the
case of certain diseases, its condition would have to get very much worse
before it could get better. The palliatives and opiates of political
empiricism ladled out like Mrs. Squeers’s brimstone and treacle every
morning of the next two decades turned out to be sheer quackery. The
effect of this dosage strengthened my conviction that death alone could
rid the social body of the bacteria of economism and Statism. It was a fair
presumption that as long as the planet can support a population it will
have one of sorts, and that the population will organise itself into some
form of society. No doubt, then, there would in time be cobbled up in
Europe and America a social reconstruction in one shape or another. But
before this could take place there must be a longer or shorter period of
death-throes in the existing order, a period like the Dark Ages, when “the
casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be supreme.” This was what
had happened before, and with conditions being what they were, there
seemed every reason to believe it was what would happen again.
What puzzled me profoundly was this: The history of all human
institutions affords a study which is really very simple, of the operation of
three great natural laws in the realm of the spirit. Homo sapiens is so
remarkably sapient about the incidence of natural law in the physical
world, and so resourceful about adapting himself to it—why, then, is he so
impenetrably stupid about recognising the incidence of natural law in the
spiritual world, and about accommodating his plans and doings to its
inflexible operation? When Homo sapiens discovered that electricity always
follows the path of least resistance, it took him no time at all to perceive
that the thing to do was to arrange a path for lightning to follow, and then
stay out of that path. The habits of electricity are a recondite matter, but
Homo sapiens was equal to discovering and dealing with them intelligently.
Why is he apparently unequal to discovering and dealing intelligently
with the natural laws which can bear so disastrously upon the social
institutions which he attempts to form?
In response to an urgent social demand, a revolutionary régime was
set up in France in 1789. At the outset it was backed and promoted by men
of far-seeing intelligence, including a good part of the aristocracy. They
charted the revolution’s course, and made a good job of it. Taine says truly
that the French aristocrats were never so worthy of power as when they
were on the point of losing it. The thing to be remarked is that the
primary interest of these men and the primary intention of the revolution
were social.
Then at the moment when the revolution became a going concern,
Epstean’s law brought in a waiting troop of political adventurers whose
interest was not social but institutional. Their views of the social demand
which brought the revolutionary organisation into being were shaped by
that interest. As Benjamin Franklin put it, they were of the sort whose
sense of political duty is, first, to themselves; second, to their party; and
third (if anything be left over) to society. Their aim was to make the
revolution serve this institutional interest, and in virtue of their numbers
and peculiar aptitudes they rather easily did so.
Then Gresham’s law struck in. As the numbers of this latter group
increased, their interest became the prevailing interest, and their view
the prevailing view. Social interest was rapidly driven out, and as almost
always happens in the case of political revolutions, those who represented
it were lucky if they escaped with their lives.
Then finally the law of diminishing returns took hold. As the
institution grew in size and strength, as its confiscations of social power
increased in frequency and magnitude, as its coercions upon society
multiplied, the welfare of society (which the original intention of the
revolution was to promote) became correspondingly depleted and
attenuated.
These three laws dog the progress of every organisation of mankind’s
effort. Organised charity, organised labour, organised politics, education,
religion,—look where you will for proof of it, strike into their history at
any point of time or place. In view of this, the question of collective
behaviour which baffled me was the one which baffled Henry Adams.
Why, if Homo sapiens be really sapient, does he not take these laws into
account in designing his institutions? I suppose that in his search for an
answer, Adams had encountered as much feeble talk about “poor fallible
human nature” as I had, and been as impatient with it. He died puzzled, as
I expected to do, and should have done if subsequently I had not been
lucky enough to come upon Mr. Cram’s theory of man’s place in nature,
which answered my question at once. There was a stroke of fate’s irony in
this, for Mr. Cram was on friendly terms with Adams; it was he who got
Adams’s consent to a commercial publication of Mont-St.-Michel and
Chartres. Mr. Cram, however, did not broach his theory until a good many
years after Adams’s death.
So as I surveyed the symptoms displayed by high-pressure
nationalism in post-war Europe, my knowledge of these three laws gave
me a clear idea of what to expect from it. The furore of jubilation over the
spread of “democracy” did not impress me, for I knew as well as Chief
Justice Jay that “every political theory which does not regard mankind as
being what they are, will prove abortive.” The peoples had once more
been persuaded, browbeaten, coerced or otherwise bedevilled into the old
stock notion that adopting this-or-that political system would make
nationalism permanently workable; whereas to make it workable under
any system is ludicrously beyond their collective psychical capacities. I
did not yet know why it was beyond their capacities; I was willing to
believe that in course of progressive evolution it would not always be so.
The present fact, however, was that by no conjuration could the thing be
done.

II

During the decade following the war I lived in New York for four
years, engaged in getting out a weekly publication modelled in format and
general appearance after the style of the London Spectator. I had no
illusions about the enterprise, for I knew it had no prospect of ever even
beginning to pay for itself, and therefore it could not last long. Gresham’s
law had already made hay of our periodical literature. My opinion on this
point was not asked, and I did not proffer it; in fact, I believe this is the
first time I have spoken of it. The venture did, however, present the
chance of what I thought might be an interesting experiment, which
turned out to be so, far beyond my expectations.
The idea was, first, to see whether such a paper as we had in mind
could be produced in this country. I did not believe it could be; I doubted
that there was enough latent literary ability of that grade to supply us
with contributors. I was soon proven wrong about that. Then, second, we
proposed to see whether the quality and character of the paper could be
successfully held up from issue to issue. Jumping three or four hurdles of
the same height is perhaps no great feat, but jumping fifty-two at a
stretch is another matter. Again I had sturdy doubts that this could be
done, and again I was proven wrong. Finally, we thought that the paper’s
distribution might give us some sort of rough measure of the general level
at which the best culture of the country stood. I had my own ideas about
this also, and for once I was approximately right. Any one who remembers
the state of the public mind in the early ’nineteen-twenties does not need
to be told that we launched our experiment under as unfavourable
circumstances as could well be imagined; and this made such success as
we had all the more satisfactory to me. In my eyes the marvel was, and
will always be, that we had any success at all.
We produced what was quite generally acknowledged to be the best
paper published in our language. I think it was that. Moreover, its
character and quality were maintained at an exact level throughout the
four years of its existence. Looking through a volume of any year, one will
find each issue precisely as good as those preceding it and those following;
precisely the same character of philosophical and literary integrity. No
issue had any soft spots or padding, nor did it have any “features” or star
contributors. The paper must have made some sort of mark, in a way, for I
notice that after twenty years a thin tradition of it still survives. I still see
it mentioned once in a while in some connexion, and always with respect,
almost always with some little touch of affection.
I feel free to speak thus frankly of the paper’s quality because I had
far less to do with forming or maintaining it than people think I had. My
chief associate was (or I should say is, for he is still living) one of the ablest
men I ever knew, far abler than I, and more experienced. He did not live in
New York and had less frequent contact with the office, so on this account
I gravitated into the status of a chargé d’affaires. With the business of the
concern I punctiliously had nothing to do. I think an editor should follow
the line of William Winter’s policy, who throughout his long career as a
critic of the drama steadfastly refused to meet an actor or actress or (I
believe, but am not quite sure) a stage-director or producer. Our business
manager was an old friend and a sensitive gentleman who kept as
decorously out of my cabbage-patch as I out of his. Our relations were
affectionate and delightful, but we never talked business.
Once only he criticised my judgement. It was at the outset, when we
were setting up the office and I had put out bait for a stenographer. After
the usual run of unemployable applicants had subsided, Miss A was
announced, and a drooping, drawling, slacktwisted creature produced
herself and collapsed into a chair. We had a few words, and I told her to be
on hand next day, and meanwhile to stop in at the manager’s office and
tell him to put her on the payroll. The manager was disgusted. “You’re a
fine one,” he said. “That wishy-washy wench you sent down this morning
doesn’t know enough to come in when it rains. You’d let any pretty red-
head with a drawl and a seventeenth-century face wander in here any
time and pull your leg.” The young lady dawdled in next morning and
went to work. A month later she graduated out of stenography, and at the
end of four months she had mastered the routine of proofreading,
indexing, making up dummies, seeing the paper through the press, and
was running the office.
I mention this because it brings me around to my qualifications as an
executive. I had only two. I am probably the poorest judge of character
now living; none could be worse. A person might be a survivor of the
saints or he might be the devil’s rag-baby, for all I should know. But I
never yet made the mistake of a hair’s breadth on a person’s ability, one
might almost say sight-unseen. If a captain of industry made me his
personnel-manager he would find me worth a ducal salary. This gift is no
credit to me, so I can speak of it without immodesty; I was born that way. I
can smell out ability as quickly and unerringly as a high-bred pointer can
smell out a partridge.
My second qualification was the belief that a good executive’s job is
to do nothing, and that he can’t set about it too soon or stick at it too
faithfully. In our early days, when some one asked me how something
ought to be done, I would look at him in a vacant kind of way, and say I
didn’t know—hadn’t thought about it—couldn’t just say, at the moment—
how would you do it? So-and-so. Well, probably that’s all right—you might
take it up with the other people and see if they have any ideas. In this way
they soon stopped looking to me for directions. I never gave any
directions or orders; sometimes a suggestion but only as the other staff-
members made suggestions, provisionally, and under correction from any
one who had anything better to offer. I did not assign subjects for editorial
treatment. Each of us picked his own, and we all discussed them together,
once a week. I did a good deal of writing for the paper at one time and
another, but the managing editor treated my copy like any one else’s; it
was in no way sacrosanct.
This plan of action was practicable because there were three
superexcellent editorial minds on the staff, and all of them totally
inexperienced. I knew what their abilities were as soon as I laid eyes on
them, and I would not let any one who had had any experience come on
the premises. Thus these persons had nothing to unlearn, they were not
unconsciously bound by any editorial conventions, and when they met a
difficulty they would deal with it by the untrammelled application of
excellent ability and sound common sense.
 My little ways as an executive, however, reacted on me by setting up
my reputation in the office as a rather amiable imbecile, and I doubt I ever
quite lived it down. It was well along in our second year, I remember,
when I overheard one of the girls talking to some woman who had come
in with something on her mind which apparently she was proposing to
unload on me. “Oh, don’t talk to Mr. Nock,” the girl said. “He doesn’t know
anything about that. Mr. Nock doesn’t know anything about anything. Go
in and talk to Miss X.” I was so delighted by this that whenever I saw the
girl afterwards I could hardly keep from thanking her for the compliment.
Miss X was my secretary for the whole of our four years, barring the
first month. When I finally told the lackadaisical Miss A that she was
getting too good for me and would have to move on, I commissioned her
to scratch me up a substitute. In a day or two she brought in Miss X,
smaller and younger than herself, and even prettier. Within a week I
began to learn what petticoat government is, and I kept on learning that
bitter lesson to the end. Miss X had Scots blood and an idea of domestic
discipline which was truly Scottish. I never got up courage to ask her
whether she had been reared in the Calvinist persuasion, but she might
well have been. I sometimes suspected that her predecessor had put her
up to taking me on as a sort of problem-child but whether so or not, that
is what she did from the first day of her sojourn with us. I could do
nothing of my own motion; my soul was not my own. She told me what I
must do, always something I preferred to put off, and what visitors I must
see, usually some one I preferred not to see; and she stood by with sweet,
calm, quiet, gentle, cussed persistence to see that I did as I was told. The
worst of it was that the wretched girl was always right, so what could one
do?
 I mention her because she was closest to me, and therefore her
attitude towards me was probably the best index of the general estimate
which the office put upon my intelligence. I had a pet name for her which
I have forgotten, perhaps Lollipop—something of the kind. One day when
an eminent and dignified professor and his wife were in my room, talking
about an article which he was bringing out in our next issue, I stepped to
the door (for I had no push-buttons on my desk, nor yet a telephone, Gott
soll hüten) and called Lollipop to fetch me a proof. After my visitors had
gone, I heard one of the girls say, “I think you ought to tell Mr. Nock to
call you Helen when such distinguished people are around.” Miss X
replied, “No, he couldn’t remember that name five minutes to save his
life.”
In the true and proper sense of the word we were a radical
publication, and gave ourselves out as such. That is to say, we struck
straight through to the root of whatever subject we discussed. We had no
ink to waste on superficialities. We were not taken in by buncombe or
clap-trap, and while we were urbane about it, we managed to let our
readers know our opinion of those who hawked these commodities. Thus,
as Mr. Beard says of us in his history of the period, we scattered acid on
many a sacred convention. Once in a while, not often,—we never overdid
it,—in a good-natured way we especially enjoyed upsetting some extra-
preposterous mare’s-nest which our Liberal friends were solemnly
exploiting. In an incurably convention-ridden, truth-dreading, humbug-
loving society, this could hardly be called giving the people what they
wanted, and we took no umbrage when it was found unpalatable. There is
some satisfaction in seeing now how very little the test of time has left us
to regret or retract; and how much there is which we said was so, and
which the people have belatedly found out is so.
 In one way, our editorial policy was extremely easy-going, and in
another way it was unbending as a ramrod. I can explain this best by an
anecdote. One day Miss X steered in a charming young man who wanted
to write for us. I took a liking to him at once, and kept him chatting for
quite a while. When we came down to business, he diffidently asked what
our policy was, and did we have any untouchable sacred cows. I said we
certainly had, we had three of them, as untouchable and sacred as the Ark
of the Covenant. He looked a bit flustered and asked what they were.
“The first one,” I said, “is that you must have a point. Second, you
must make it out. The third one is that you must make it out in eighteen-
carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.”
“But is that all?”
“Isn’t it enough for you?”
“Why, yes, I suppose so, but I mean, is that all the editorial policy you
have?”
“As far as I know, it is,” I said, rising. “Now you run along home and
write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you
can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would
rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies
at birth, you might do that—glad to have it.”
The young man grinned and shook hands warmly. We got splendid
work out of him. As a matter of fact, at one time or another we printed
quite a bit of stuff that none of us believed in, but it all conformed to our
three conditions, it was respectable and worth consideration. Ours was
old-school editing, no doubt, but in my poor judgement it made a far
better paper than more stringent methods have produced in my time.
As soon as I saw that the success of our experiment was certain and,
if I may say so, that it would be rather distinguished, my interest began to
dribble away. For some time I knew I had worked myself out of a job, as I
had all along meant to do, and when we stopped publication I felt no
regret, but only, like Spencer at the end of the Synthetic Philosophy, a sense
of “emancipation from a long task.” The clear proof that I had become a
superfluous man in our enterprise came towards the end of our third year.
I abruptly dropped everything and went to Germany, leaving instructions
that the paper should not be sent me, and that no one should write me
any letters under any circumstances. I was away about three months.
When I returned I called for all the issues that had come out in my
absence, and went over them line by line. Nowhere could I find a jot of
evidence, not even a suggestion, that I had been off duty for as much as a
day.
This was precisely as it should be. I once heard a story of Thoreau
which by internal evidence should certainly be authentic, though I do not
know that it is. When he took up his father’s trade of pencil-making he
worked at it diligently until he had made the definitive pencil, the pencil
which in every respect was beyond his power of improvement. Then he
shut up shop and made no more pencils. He was a superfluous man in the
pencil-making business. He had shown that the thing could be done,
shown how it could be done, he had hung up his achievement in plain
sight of any one who wished to look at it, and that was that. One pencil
was enough to prove his point, so why make any more?
A month ago I was dining with one of the country’s great
industrialists when something that was said led up to this story of
Thoreau, and I told it. The industrialist promptly said he thought Thoreau
was a fool. There I had before me the product of two mutually exclusive
philosophies. Economism would insist that having made the perfect
pencil, Thoreau should make more pencils and sell them for money with
which to buy more material to make still more pencils to sell for money to
buy still more material, and so on, because the making and selling of
pencils is the whole content of life. Thoreau did not believe it is the whole
content of life. It was clear that economisim’s philosophy was the only
one which my companion was capable of accepting. Detach him from his
particular specialised practice of it, and existence would have no further
meaning for him; and in this he was representative of the great bulk of
society in this present age.
I find that I have gossiped at great length about my editorial
adventure, perhaps too discursively. Nevertheless, with the aid of a little
imagination the reader may easily see that the experience was invaluable
in consolidating my views of life and in certifying that my demands on life
were rational and sound. The best way to make sure of how much one
actually knows of a thing, and especially to find out how much one does
not know, is to write about it. When one writes from the standpoint of a
certain philosophy week by week one is continually thrown back upon
one’s fundamental principles and positions to reëxamine them and satisfy
oneself that the logic of one’s conclusions from them is water-tight. My
experience was diversified and searching, and like virtually all of the
weightier experiences which luck has brought my way, it came at
precisely the right time for doing me the most good.
Four years to a day, or rather to a week, from the date of the paper’s
first issue, our enterprise closed down. It was on a Friday evening that we
of the staff bade one another farewell; and at eleven o’clock next morning,
when the Dutch liner Volendam moved out of her slip, I was aboard her on
my way to Brussels.
 CHAPTER TEN
A work of art should express only that which elevates the ‘soul and pleases it in a noble manner. The
feeling of the artist should not overstep these limits; it is wrong to venture beyond.

—BETTINA BRENTANO.

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present

society a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that

day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

I N MY brief career as a sort of jack-leg executive I had seen at close range

all I wished to see of Western society’s floundering progress towards

collectivism. American society’s antics in the course of this progress made
a spectacle which was immensely amusing for a while, but one soon
became weary of it. The absurdities of that decade were exceeded only by
those of the succeeding decade, 1930-1940. Before that I could find no
match for them in human history. American society had not the faintest
idea of what it was doing or where it was going. It simply clung to its
inveterate practice of making brag, bounce and quackery do duty for
observation, reason and common sense. It had not yet got a glimpse of the
elementary truth which was so clear to the mind of Mr. Jefferson, that in
proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it
power to do things to you; and that the State invariably makes as little as
it can of the one power, and as much as it can of the other. Mr. Harding’s
famous “return to normalcy” was not a return to anything. It was a mere
acceleration of society’s lolloping, wallowing advance towards the goal at
which it arrived in 1932.
There was nothing to be done about this, even if one had wished to
do anything, which I certainly did not, so I reverted to my own pursuits.
My editorial work had got me into the habit of writing, occasionally with a
view of publishing something I had written; a habit which has gradually
slacked off of late. I published two or three little books, none of which
attracted any particular attention. The one thing which was a labour of
grateful love, and in which I was truly interested, was my share in editing
the Urquhart-Motteux translation of the works of Francis Rabelais. The
Pantagrueline philosophy had held my chin above water ever since my
days with C. J. as a graduate student, and I wanted to do what little I could
do in return. I had no idea beyond this, and I was unfeignedly astonished
when the firm of Harcourt, Brace and Co. consented to publish so
unpromising a work.
But such has been the invariable hospitality of publishers, in my
experience. My books have been unrewarding to them, but they have
printed them hopefully, without complaint. I think Mr. Harcourt’s firm
may have made a dollar or two out of my little study of Mr. Jefferson, but I
am sure my other books have been published at a loss. I never had any but
the most pleasant book-publishing relations. Moreover, besides those who
have borne the burden and disappointment of my books, I have become
acquainted with other publishers, and there is not one of them whom I
have not come to regard with great respect and sincere liking.
Occasionally I contributed essays to periodicals. Mr. Wells, the editor
of Harper’s, got me in the way of it, and I rather enjoyed it. I wrote a good
deal for him at one time or another. After Mr. Wells retired, my old friend
Mr. Sedgwick took me on with equal hospitality in behalf of the Atlantic.
Mr. Mencken of the Mercury, and his successor, Mr. Palmer, were likewise
hospitable; and thus for a long time, whenever I had something on my
mind which seemed worth publishing, I would bring out an essay in one
or another of these publications, perhaps three or four times in the course
of a year.
With these editors my relations were always as pleasant and
satisfactory as my relations with book-publishers. They were also as
disinterested, for I do not imagine that my essays were ever anything of a
circulation-getter. Probably I had some readers, but they were not of the
sort that is likely to write in and tell the editor how they felt about what
they read. My editors were all of the old style. Mr. Palmer was a young
man, but in some mysterious way he had become infected with the old-
style tradition, and when he found that Gresham’s law had made it
impracticable to go on in that tradition, he quietly sold his magazine and
gave up editing.
Judged from a contributor’s viewpoint, my editors were all one could
desire. They respected the contributor, knew his rights, and saw to it that
he got them. They had none of the finical “rage for interference” which
George Borrow complained of in his London publisher. On the contrary,
they let me express myself as I chose to do. Never that I can remember did
Mr. Wells, Mr. Mencken or Mr. Palmer tamper with my copy in any way,
and only once or twice did Mr. Sedgwick find some insignificant
expression which he besought me to modify. I found him a very able and
lovable man, a delightful friend. Under a queer feminine mask of fussiness
and indecision he concealed a great deal of resourceful courage. When I
proposed a subject to him he would groan and sigh, and vow I was bound
to lose him his last subscriber, but in the end he would tell me to go ahead
and write the essay. All these men had the power of mature and seasoned
judgement; they were able to deal as justly with what they did not like as
with what they did like. I remember once when some subordinate
relucted at something I was publishing in Harper’s, Mr. Wells jerked his
thumb towards him as he was passing by, and said to me in an undertone,
“I’d print lots more stuff like that than he would—you see, I’ve got to
stand for it, and he doesn’t.” An editor who insists that a contribution
should in every way be a weak reflex of his own opinions or
idiosyncrasies, or that it must conform to some set pattern of his own
devising, seems to me an extremely poor, incompetent affair.
I have had very little chance to observe editors of the newer style.
From what I have seen of them, they impress me rather as misplaced
journalists and salesmen than as editors. It is true that the editor was
always a salesman, but it is also true that there are salesmen and
salesmen. A salesman for the great house of Bagstock and Buggins, wine-
merchants in the City ever since Charles I was beheaded, is a very
different breed of cats from a high-pressure salesman of mass-produced
gimcrackery. Bagstock and Buggins have always had about as much trade
as they can carry comfortably, and their clients are their old hereditary
friends, whose tastes and wishes they know as well as they know their
own merchandise. So, when the salesman goes out he is aware that the
House is distinctly less interested in his drumming up new clients than in
his taking proper care of those he has. The old-style editor seemed to me
to stand in much that same relation of salesmanship with his readers,
while the new-style editor seems to stand more in the cutthroat-
competitive attitude of Marks Pasinsky, Moe Griesman and Hymie
Salzman towards potential buyers in the heyday of the cloak-and-suit
trade, forty years ago.
 In a society given over to the philosophy of economism, this is
inevitable; and therefore I must not be taken as disparaging the more
modern type of editor. The old-style editor is merely one of the casualties
of economism. Gresham’s law has driven out his conception of the
editorial function and has replaced it by that of the go-getter, just as in
Brussels I saw it drive out the old-style restaurateur’s conception of his
function and replace it by that of the mass-producer. Brussels was known
the world over as a city of little restaurants providing the most
consummate artistry in food. Two of them had been going concerns for
something over three hundred years. One after another they disappeared
under my eyes. First, the Stielen went; its site was taken over for an
extension of a department-store, and when I first saw Brussels one could
almost say there was no one there who knew what a department-store
was. Then the Leyman went, then the Écrevisse, the Charlemagne, and so
on, until when I finally left Brussels hardly any of the higher amenities of
food were surviving, save in private kitchens.
So when, as in the case of Mr. Palmer, the modern editor is young,
able, possessed of some literary standards and would do better if he could,
so far am I from disparaging or finding fault with him that I feel he is
much to be pitied. In the nature of things it is presumable that not many
are of that character,—Gresham’s law would take care of that,—but no
doubt some of them are. They have professionalised themselves, and
considerations of one kind or another, usually economic, keep them in the
groove of their profession. With only one life to live, they must
continually feel their existence as cramping and dissatisfying, for as Paul
Bourget says, every disused or misused faculty becomes a source of
uneasiness.
 Some years ago I was in company with half-a-dozen men when the
talk somehow turned on the odd question of what are the three most
degrading occupations open to man. When the question got around to me,
I said I thought the first was holding office in a modern soi-disant republic,
the second was editing an American metropolitan newspaper, and as for
the third I was of two minds whether it would be white slave-trading or
keeping an assignation-house. Every one laughed, though I had spoken
quite seriously, and one gentleman whom I had not met before said he
thought I ought to find a place somewhere in my categories for his job,
since he was the chief fiction-editor or tripe-editor (for so he called it) of
one of our leading popular mass-produced weekly publications.
He told us interesting things about his occupation. He amazed me by
saying that notwithstanding the immense volume of trade-writing that is
being done, publications like his are sometimes at their wit’s end to get
enough printable tripe to fill their space. So this, I thought, is what Mr.
Jefferson’s cherished principle of universal literacy has come to! The
editor said further that in choosing material his aim was constantly at
what he judged to be the lowest common denominator of intelligence,
taste and style among his actual and prospective readers. Moreover, his
sole official measure of the merit of a piece of fiction was its nearness to
hitting the mark of this lowest common denominator, as indicated by the
volume of sales. “A few weeks ago,” he said, “we featured a story that was
a bit above the average, and that week our news-stand sales fell off sixty
thousand.”
This editor was a pleasant, companionable man of good taste,
considerable ability, a lively sense of humour, in all ways very far above
his distressing occupation. I felt extremely sorry for him; he seemed a
poor miserable wretch. I hope God will have mercy on his soul.
 II

While living in Europe I almost completely lost the run of literary

produce in England and America. This was not deliberate. It was due
somewhat to indolence, largely to preoccupation with other literatures,
but chiefly to the fact that there was hardly any English print available
where I was, and what there was of it was slight and poor. This was
especially true of Brussels in my earlier days there. The Belgian is one
ahead of the Swiss in the matter of native languages. The Swiss rubs along
on German, French and Italian, while the Belgian has to wrestle with
Flemish, French, Walloon and German. These tongues, however, are
pretty sharply localised. Brussels is the only place in the kingdom where
Flemish and French meet, so a person living there can get on with either.
To the north and west is solid Flemish, Walloon begins at Liége and runs
to the French line, while over on the Prussian border there are about fifty
thousand Belgians who speak German. I got the impression that there was
less English spoken in Brussels, and less English print available there, than
in any other Western European capital I visited, except Lisbon. I found a
considerable amount of colloquial English going on in Antwerp, and for
some reason that I could not make out there was also a little of it here and
there in Bruges; but in Brussels I went for months on end without sight or
sound of my native tongue.
So it was that in my four years as an amateur editor in New York I
brought a fairly fresh eye to bear upon the postwar literary doings which
had taken place without my knowledge. In the field of creative art, if one
can call it that, the field of ποίησις, Dichtung, whether prose or verse, they
presented a remarkable sight. In a way I was prepared for something of
the kind, because I had already seen evidence, especially in France, that
the current practice of music, painting and sculpture had become a tohu-
bohu, a chaos of confusion, and one would expect the current practice of
literature to be in even worse case because naturally a larger number of
ill-assorted aspirants would be trying their hand at it. The period
presented a curious phenomenon, one that I think may have been unique.
Writing is an occupation, and up to the period I speak of I believe it is the
only one, in which a person who knows nothing whatever about it can
engage and quite often achieve a popular success; so the success of
incompetent writers in this period was not exceptional. I do not know of
any other time, however, when it has been possible for a person who
knew nothing whatever about painting or music or sculpture to make any
kind of success, popular or otherwise, in the practice of any of those arts.
Yet I had seen it done; I had seen, for example, a great vogue of French
painters, a whole school of them, who (with one exception) did not even
know how to draw; and I had also seen a considerable popular interest
extended towards French and German composers who clearly lacked even
the most elementary discipline to fit them for what they were trying to do
or wanted to do. I had furthermore nibbled with long teeth at some
specimens of “modernity” in French and German writings, and saw in
them no sign of anything more promising than unwarranted ambition. So,
with what I had seen, and with my knowledge of what American society’s
critical insight and judgement were worth, I was, as I said, in a way
prepared to encounter the astonishing cultural extravagances that
awaited my return to America.
I was amused by them, and still more amused by the effort to create a
vogue for them and glorify them as permanent enrichments of art and
culture, but I did not give them any serious attention, for I expected them
shortly to succumb to asphyxiation in the atmosphere of their own
inanity and peter out, as in fact they did. To tell the truth, I was rather
inclined to encourage certain of these promoters of literary absurdities
when it fell in my way to do so. They were mainly young persons, ardent,
bungfull of self-consciousness, not doing much actual harm,—probably
not even much harming themselves in the long-run,—and they seemed to
be having such a glorious, disorderly, irresponsible good time out of
tousling our poor old austere alphabet that one could not be stepmotherly
with them, even in one’s heart. Was life given us for any purpose but that
we should get a good time out of it? Surely I think not. The sound
Pantagruelist and Rabelaisian remembers that his maistre et seigneur
Pantagruel never tried to reform Panurge or wean him from his amusing
deviltries, though he himself took no part in them. That is the way
Panurge was, Pantagruel took him as he was, loved him as he was, did not
wish him to be other than he was, always countenanced him even when
he entered on paths which he himself was disinclined to tread. According
to the great Pantagrueline philosophy, the only reform that any one is
called upon to attempt is reform of oneself. One notices that Pantagruel
was extremely strict about that, for all that a precisian moralist might call
his culpable laxness towards Panurge.
So I often, sincerely enough, gave a friendly word to breathless
young literary innovators, though I did it more or less in the spirit of a
professor under whom I sat for a time as a graduate student. He was a big
rawboned Irishman with a gorgeous brogue, a graduate of Trinity in the
great days of Mahaffy and Tyrrell. He had also been ordained in the
Anglican Church by Whately, the redoubtable archbishop of Dublin, who
was a tremendous fellow in all his ways, and moreover probably in some
respects the most cantankerous old cuss that ever filled an episcopal
chair. My professor—his name is immaterial, so let me call him Murphy—
was a man exactly after Whately’s own heart. I remember him once
shuffling into his lecture-room, glaring around at us from under his bushy
red eyebrows, and saying, “Look out f’r ye’erselves this mornin’,
gintlemen. Mrs. Murphy an’ I have had a disagreement!” Whately might
well have done just that.
He had a son named Jimmy, an exemplary fine fellow and a good
student in the class next below ours. After leading a sober, righteous and
uninteresting life for twenty years or so, as the Book of Common Prayer
prescribes, Jimmy suddenly broke out on a roaring spree one night and
came home in a state of advanced decomposition, thinking he could make
his way to bed without arousing anybody. As he was half-way upstairs,
creeping on all-fours, the old man appeared on the stair-landing in a long
cotton nightshirt, with a nightlamp in his hand. They considered each
other in silence for a minute or two, and then the old man said, “Go it,
Jimmy! Go it! Ye’re very young. Ye have plinty iv time befure ye to
diskiver what a fool ye ar’re. So, go it!” With these words he turned back
into his bedroom, closing both the door and the incident in one
magisterial motion.
In many ways the youthful dabblers in literature, painting and music
kept reminding me of Jimmy, especially when I contemplated the upshot
of their efforts. The other day I blew the dust off a volume of their
productions in verse, and remarked once more how strongly symptomatic
their aberrations were; and looking back upon the parallel aberrations
which I had observed in Europe, I saw how right Menander was in saying
that evil communications corrupt good manners. A second Max Nordau of
the ’twenties, tracing his way down from Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud,
Verlaine, to our young American aspirants, might well have conceived a
Degeneracy as a sequel to his predecessor’s Degeneration. The unmistakable
mark of degeneracy which stood out on the period’s attempts at artistic
production was an intense and conscious preoccupation with the
subjective. As Goethe remarked, all eras in a state of decline and
dissolution are subjective, while in all great eras which have been really in
a state of progression, every effort is directed from the inward to the
outward world; it is of an objective nature. I have always believed, as
Goethe did, that here one comes on a true sense of the term classic. Work
done in the great progressive eras,—the work of the Augustan and
Periclean periods, the work of the Elizabethans, of Erasmus, Marot,
Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne,—one accepts these as classic, not at all
because they are old, but because they are objective and therefore strong,
sound, joyous, healthy. Work done in an era of decadence is subjective,
and therefore with the rarest and most fragmentary exceptions
pathological, weak, bizarre, unhealthy. Indeed as Goethe suggested, in the
interest of clearness one might very well make a clean sweep of all terms
like classic, modernist, realist, naturalist and substitute the simple terms
healthy and sickly.
Hence it was the symptomatic character of artistic practice both in
Europe and America that chiefly interested me. In Europe I saw a good
deal of “modernist” French painting, done in the ’twenties by Pascin,
Soutine, Picasso, de Segonzac, de la Fresnaye, Metzinger, Dufy and others.
In literature I also nibbled gingerly at specimens of subjectivity in excelsis
furnished by Proust, Laforgue, Dujardin and practitioners of the “stream
of consciousness” principle. One’s presumptions upon any society from
which such work could emanate and get itself accepted, were inescapable.
At Gastein nine years ago, in talking with a member of the old German
General Staff, I spoke of a possible attack on France. He opened his eyes
wide with astonishment, and said, “We shall not attack France. We have
no idea of attacking France. Why should we? Why should any one attack
France? Let her alone, and she will collapse.” I had occasion to remember
this six years later, for certainly the passage of von Reichenau’s forces
from Sedan to the seacoast could hardly be dignified by the name of an
attack. It was a promenade.
But at the end of an era of unmitigated economism, what else could
one expect? How otherwise could a society dominated by this philosophy
express itself, whether in literature, music, the graphic arts, politics, or
any other mode of its collective life? All these manifestations seemed to
me purely exhibitory, and therefore quite in the order of nature. So also
seemed to me the character of the ephemera who appeared in the rôle of
chief exhibitors, star performers. Not long ago I heard a Frenchwoman
say, “I dislike Hitler heartily, I dislike everything he does and says, but the
fact remains that Hitler is only the result of us”—and she made a wide
sweeping circular gesture which brought the whole of Western society
within the scope of her indictment. An analyst like Nordau would find the
heads of our collectivist governments in both hemispheres, all of them
without exception, as wholly in the order of nature, as purely exhibitory,
as were the Rimbauds, Verlaines and Gauguins of the last century.
Revolting as they are, they are nevertheless precisely the forms of organic
life which one must expect to see, and does see, if one insists on turning
over the social plank which has so long lain rotting in the muck of
economism.

III

During my four years in New York I found our amateurs of creative

literature largely touched by the strange spirit of desperateness which
seemed to rest on a whole generation of youth in that period. Putting it
roughly, I should say that it rested heaviest on those who were
approaching adolescence when the war ended and were in their early
twenties when I first noticed them. In respect of their malady they were
exactly like Misha in Tourgueniev’s marvellous piece of analysis called A
Desperate Character. As I observed them carefully they kept reminding me
of Misha at every turn; if I had not known his story I believe I could not
have understood them. Desperate characters is just what they were. I saw
them everywhere here, and when I returned to Europe I saw many who
had transferred themselves to Continental centres, mainly to Paris,
existing as mere wastrels. The peculiar thing about them was that their
desperateness, like Misha’s, was directed only against themselves.
Depraved, they were not; no one could say so; they were simply obsessed
by Misha’s almost insane passion for self-destruction. They were
unwilling to hurt any one but themselves, and never consciously did so,
though through ignorance and thoughtlessness no doubt they often did.
Towards others their impulses were generous, kindly, simple-hearted,
affectionate. They were truthful, and with Misha’s ill-assorted type of
courage, they were very brave. Some of them had all Misha’s power of
attraction and his genius for friendship. Like Misha, they had frankly
given themselves up for lost, and were wretched, dissatisfied, desperate.
With all their good qualities which marked them sometimes with a certain
touch of nobleness, and with all their fine loyalty to anomalous social
codes of their own devising, they were desperate characters; no other
name describes them.
When such as these take to expressing themselves in literature, as
some did, not much in the way of good art can reasonably be expected.
They have little to express but an overdeveloped and disorderly self-
consciousness, and this is a most refractory material for art to manage. Il
dit tout ce qu’il veut,—so runs the terrible sentence of a French critic,—mais
malheureusement il n’a rien à dire. Yet sometimes the Not-ourselves
shoulders its way to the front of most unpromising circumstances and
produces a work of art. John Reed, a desperate character who threw away
his life on the Russian revolution, addressed an absent sweetheart in a few
lines of pure and exquisite lyric verse which might well have been written
by a Herrick or a Lovelace. Only a trifle, it is true, and it stands alone for
its merit in the thin volume in which it is printed; but there it is.
As I read it my mind turned to thoughts of Villon, a desperate
character of the old days, from whom a philosopher might draw a fairly
clear line of resemblance down through Misha and Reed to the desperate
characters of the ’twenties. One never knows when or where the spirit’s
breath will rest, or what will come of its touch. “The spirit breathes where
it will,” 1 said the Santissimo Salvatore, “and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” Out of
the slums of Paris, out of the lowest depths of wretchedness and
desperateness, came the voice which celebrated the belles dames du temps
jadis in immortal verse. A lowlived drunken tinker lying in Bedford gaol
conceived the Pilgrim’s Progress.
The only certainty I could arrive at concerning the literary produce
of the ’twenties was the one which I had already long entertained, that art
goes rancid when as art it becomes consciously this-or-that; and that the
one invincible and implacable enemy of art is the writer’s self-
consciousness, his preoccupation with the subjective. Writers sometimes
produce a work of art, perhaps great art, with no intention of doing
anything of the kind, and every intention of doing something else. They
do it in pursuance of some purpose, but the relation of that purpose to art
is fortuitous, and in their pursuance of it they do not deliberately bind
themselves to making their work illustrative of any wire-drawn formula
or theory of art. One writer wrote in haste, oppressed by terrible grief,
under great pressure for immediate money, and produced Rasselas.
Another wrote avowedly to entertain the boarding-school Backfisch and
women of the lower-middle class, and produced Evalina. This was pure
market-writing, as far as the authors’ intentions went; in point of art, they
were not concerned to show themselves as representing any school or
sect or theory. They simply went ahead and did the best they could in
behalf of the object they had in view.
My reading of current novels and poetry at that time, however, was
desultory and not extensive. I was impressed by the enormous amount of
market-writing that was being done. On the one hand, the wide spread of
a frail and futile literacy had set up a great demand for a frail and futile
literature to match. On the other hand, publishing had become one of the
country’s major industries, and the ensuing competition was so sharp that
each house had to keep its presses going at full speed in order to live. It
was a case of “print or die” with all of them, in an effort to capture a share
of the market furnished by the faintly literate, and the operation of
Gresham’s law set the general standard of what was printable. As some
one put it, a good book, from a publisher’s point of view, was a book as
nearly as possible like another book which had sold a great number of
copies.
In consequence, the great mass of writing produced to meet this
demand bore a curiously stereotyped character. As art, it was nothing;
and in point of workmanship it all stood at the same level of mediocrity.
For all one could discern, the whole of it might have been done by the
same hand. The hall-mark of individual authorship had disappeared. One
could not possibly tell from reading this-or-that popular work which one
of the authors who were prominent in public favour had written it. The
dearth of imagination, of inventive power, manifested in these
productions was also remarkable. In some cases one could hardly escape
the conviction that an author had merely changed the names of his
characters and their locale, and then written the same story over and over
again. The same state of things appeared to prevail in British market-
writing, judged by the specimens of it which were reproduced here by the
thousand; though as a rule the British writers’ workmanship was better
than ours.
Yet “the spirit breathes where it will.” In Montague Glass, whose
work lived well over into this period, America produced one of the
greatest delineators of character that ever held a pen; and in Glass’s
contemporary, Finley Peter Dunne, it produced the soundest and most
perspicacious of all critics of American society, with the single exception
of Artemus Ward. The fate of these two men was interesting to me, as
furnishing perhaps the most conspicuous proof that Gresham’s law has
destroyed the last hope of literary criticism’s resurrection in America. It
has created circumstances whereby in literary criticism as well as in social
and political criticism “the test of a great mind is its power of agreement
in the opinions of small minds.” In other words, it has effectively arranged
matters so that there shall never be at any one time in America more than
a corporal’s guard of persons capable of recognising and identifying a
work of literary art if they saw one.
Both Glass and Dunne were market-writers. Their work had a wide
vogue, it was eagerly accepted, and it furnished amusement to millions.
But in their respective fields they were also great artists, and as such they
were never recognised. So I saw their vogue pass, leaving no mark to show
their true position and status in the country’s literary history. I saw this
with especial regret in the case of Glass, for his work turns attention
steadily upon a social asset of immense value, which is rapidly
disappearing from among us; I refer to the authentic Hebrew culture and
tradition. America opened its doors wide to this Oriental people, and Jews
have made many important contributions to our civilisation; and
Gresham’s law has seen to it that the most important are those for which
they get the least credit. Readers of Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, if any
still exist, will have no trouble about getting the point of this observation.
But among other powerful incentives, our silly notion of the “melting-
pot” and our sillier conception of its function, encouraged them in a
preposterously superficial and impracticable attempt to Occidentalise
themselves; and this attempt entailed a self-chosen disparagement and
sacrifice of their culture. Our society has lost incalculably by this, and
aside from the cultural damage to the Jews themselves, I believe the social
consequences of this attempt will be most unfortunate for them.
In Europe also, during the post-war period when literature was
almost as deep in the doldrums there as it was here, I had occasion to see
how nature pursues her own free way, regardless of the formulas and
prescriptions which purblind men devise. I came upon two works of
excellent art where, under the circumstances, one would hardly expect to
find them. One was Les Thibaults, by Roger Martin du Gard. It was
published in sections appearing at intervals of some length. I read about
half of it in French, and the rest of it lately in an uncommonly good
translation. I had a high opinion of it. The second work was one mailed to
me in Brussels by an American friend who was travelling in England. It
was a tour de force of pure creative fancy, and of an art unexampled in any
work of the period which I had seen, or in any I have seen since then in
the literature of any country. It was Bruce Marshall’s Father Malachy’s
Miracle. I should not know where to look for a power of character-
portrayal superior to that which is applied everywhere, to all sorts and
conditions of men and women, throughout this small volume. With equal
precision, completeness and convincing force it exhibits what goes on in
the mind of subjects as diverse as a Benedictine monk, ballet-girls,
dancers, a Scots bishop, a jovial Scots rounder, an Italian cardinal, a pair of
raw Irish priests, a precious brace of British theatrical promoters and
their hard-boiled wives, and an ultra-modernist British Protestant parson.
I have looked industriously for something to match this achievement
within the same limit of proportions,—for as I said, the book is small,—but
I have not as yet found anything.

IV

A few months ago I re-read two or three of William J. Locke’s earlier

novels, to see how well the opinion I had formed of them twenty years ago
was holding up, and whether I still felt the attraction of one special
interest in them. Locke was a prolific market-writer, extremely popular
and successful. His later pre-war work ran somewhat on momentum, but
even so it was good strong momentum. Perhaps, like Thackeray, he may
have “taken too many crops out of his brain” at too short intervals. The
war impaired his powers, as it might well have done, and by comparison
even with The Glory of Clementina his post-war work is probably negligible.
Locke was a man of sensitive artistic instincts and fine culture, who
observed closely and wrote charmingly. One would say he had been
educated in the bad old way, as I was, for the mark of “the grand old
fortifying classical curriculum” was clearly visible on his estimate of life
and on his conception of his task.
It was by this latter aspect,—his idea of what true fiction is and what
it is for,—that his work had a special interest for me. He seemed to have
got his idea pretty straight from Hesiod and Aristotle, and had probably
considered with some care what had been done with it in the romances of
Apuleius, Heliodorus, Longus, Achilles Tatius. At all events Septimus and
The Beloved Vagabond took me back as promptly as when I first read them,
years ago, to Aristotle’s profound analysis of the difference between
history and fiction; and I thought at once how admirably, how
delightfully, Locke’s work exemplified Aristotle’s critical dictum on the
true and proper nature of fiction. History, Aristotle says, represents things
only as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought
to be; and therefore of the two, he adds, “fiction is the more philosophical
and the more highly serious.”2
My impression is that Septimus and The Beloved Vagabond come up to
Aristotle’s specifications beyond cavil or question. There is not an
implausible character in them, or an implausible situation; they all “might
be,” might easily be. Moreover, I believe the normal ordinary run of
opinion, uninfluenced by any hard-and-fast literary formula, would agree
that they “ought to be.” Locke takes title as an artist, I think, not only by
presenting his characters and situations as they might be and ought to be,
but also by doing it without communicating to the reader any sense of
strain or affectation. The reader assents to them at once; and this assent
completes the establishment of Locke’s work as a work of art. I repeat that
I am speaking of his earlier work. Here and there Clementina stirs a sense
of strain, and what I have read of those which follow,—true, I have read
but two,—pretty well keep that sense alive throughout.
For many years, indeed ever since first I had mulled over Aristotle as
a student in college, I had been in the habit of applying his dry analytical
remark as a test of whatever creative literature came before me. Nothing
in my experience or observation during the ‘twenties weakened my faith
in that procedure, but on the contrary everything tended to confirm it.
This test enabled me to put my finger firmly on the reason for my
disinclination towards most of the fiction current at the time, especially
the Tendenzschrift, the sociological novel, and the “novel with a purpose.” I
was reminded that with all my respect for Flaubert’s ability I could get
nowhere with Madame Bovary. Not all my regard for the valour and
industry of Zola, for the fine literary qualities of the Goncourts, could
keep my nose to the grindstone of La Terre or Soeur Philomène. These are
not works of fiction, but of history; and if I wanted history I preferred
getting it from historians. There was a wealth of sound criticism in the
French musician’s remark on Honegger’s imitation of the sounds of a
locomotive; he said that if he wanted to listen to a locomotive he went
down to the railway-station. The vigorous young American publicists who
are constructing novels around the various social and political
phenomena of the moment aim only at presenting things as they are.
Their work, as far as I have seen it, is not fiction, it is history. It may be
sound history or bad history, inaccurate history, but in either case it is
history. It has neither the philosophical character nor the high
seriousness which distinguish true fiction, and it lacks them because it
presents things only as they are, and not as they might be and ought to be.
So Aristotle’s remark has stood always as my first canon of criticism
applicable to creative writing. For me, it determines in every case the
answer to the question whether this-or-that work is or is not true fiction,
and if it is or is not, why. My second canon bears on the question: What is
fiction for, what is its true intention, its proper function? This second
canon was very well put in terms by Prince Alexander Kropotkin when he
advised his brother to read poetry. He said, “Poetry makes you better.” I
imagine that Prince Kropotkin would have made no difficulties about
including prose as well as verse under his term, as the Greeks did and the
Germans do; indeed, if Russian has an inclusive term like Dichtung, he may
have used it; I do not know. He put the fact exactly, however. A work of
the creative imagination which makes you better fulfils the true intention
of such literature, and one which fails to do this fails of its true intention.
There is an important distinction here. The Goncourts spoke
scornfully of a certain type of literature as an “anodyne.” They had
something on their side, no doubt, but they were undiscriminating, as our
readers and reviewers often are when they lump off certain works under
the general stigma of “escape-literature.” Any creative work which one
reads with attention will make one forget one’s troubles for the time
being, as will a hand at bridge or billiards or watching a lively comedy on
the stage. Some works do this and do no more; in the reaction from them
their total effect comes to nothing. Others do this, and their total effect is
enervating. Others again do this, but they are so conceived that the
reading of them elevates and fortifies the spirit, they are spiritually
dynamogenous, they make one better. The Goncourts missed this
distinction as completely as the degenerate realism and naturalism of the
‘twenties missed it; and in the absence of anything remotely resembling a
sound and authoritative criticism, the true function of creative writing, as
well as its true character, is everywhere lost sight of at the present time.
I have no idea of pressing my two canons of criticism upon any one’s
acceptance, nor am I disposed to argue for their usefulness to all in
general. I can say only that they are fundamental to the development of
the literary and cultural element in my philosophy of existence. Culture is
knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world; in other
words, culture means reading, not idle and casual reading, but reading
that is controlled and directed by a definite purpose. Reading, so
understood, is difficult, and contrary to an almost universal belief, those
who can do it are very few. I have already remarked the fact that there is
no more groundless assumption than that literacy carries with it the
ability to read. At the age of seventy-nine Goethe said that those who
make this assumption “do not know what time and trouble it costs to learn
to read. I have been working at it for eighteen years, and I can’t say yet
that I am completely successful.” In the course of the rigorous discipline
which learning to read imposes, I have found that with regard to creative
literature the canons of Aristotle and Prince Kropotkin together make the
most efficient sieve for a preliminary straining-out of what may be worth
reading, and separating it from the prodigious mass of what is not.
Again, the effect of keeping good company in literature is exactly
what it is in life. Keeping good company is spiritually dynamogenous,
elevating, bracing. It makes one better. Keeping bad company is disabling;
keeping indifferent company is enervating and retarding. In literature
one has the best company in the world at complete command; one also
has the worst. One has a social conscience which dissuades one from
harbouring unprofitable company in life, and I find that my two canons
are a great aid and support for an analogous literary conscience which
speaks up against consorting with unprofitable company in literature.
Literary art is appreciable only by a minority, as indeed all art must
be. This minority are capable of exercising a literary conscience and of
keeping themselves under its direction. They are unable to make its
intimations prevail at all generally, nor are they called upon to attempt
this obvious impossibility. They can, however, make them prevail in the
development of their own culture, and with that their responsibility ends.
The task of enlightening the literary conscience and enforcing its decrees
upon oneself is difficult enough to make one glad of any substantial help
that one can get; and (though, as I said, I speak only for myself) I have had
more substantial help from my two basic canons of criticism than from
any other source.

1 Τό πνεṽμα ὅπου θέλει πνεĩ John III, 8. There can be no doubt about
this reading. The Vulgate has Spiritus ubi vult spirat. I do not know what led
King James’s translators to give the reading which appears in the
Authorised Version.
2 Φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπονδαιότερον. I hope I have not made too free

with Aristotle’s ỏια ἃν γένοιτο but I think the implication is certainly

there.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
Si sine uxore pati possemus, Quirites, omnes ea molestia careremus; set quoniam ita natura tradidit ut
nec cum illis satis commode nec sine illis ullo modo vivi possit, saluti perpetuae potius quam brevi
voluptati consulendum est.

—SPEECH OF THE CENSOR METELLUS NUMIDICUS, 102, B.C.

I thought love had been a joyous thing, quoth my uncle Toby. ‘Tis the most serious thing, an please

your honour, that is in the world, said the corporal.

—LAURENCE STERNE.

D URING the post-war period I was interested in seeing how frankly the
whole output of English and American creative literature,—novels,
verse, drama,—dealt with sex-relations, conventional as well as
unconventional. This in itself did not seem to me at all objectionable; on
the contrary, the social fashion of obscurantism with regard to sex-
relations, and the literary fashion which reflected it, always impressed me
as silly and irritating. The factitious and obtrusive decencies of earlier
writers ran to indecency, like the ridiculous performances of Anthony
Comstock and the various organisations for the “suppression of vice.” For
example, when one looked over the literature designed especially for
women, one could hardly resist the harsh suspicion, probably in a
measure unjust, that Mrs. Slipslop was right in telling Lady Booby that the
gentle ladyfolk’s ears were the most modest things they had about them.
But the matter seemed a small one, either way you took it. I did not regard
either of these literary fashions as symptomatic or as having any
influence on conduct. In the nature of things one would expect the
average of sexual irregularity to run about as high in a society which
followed the fashion of obscurantism as in one which follows the fashion
of frankness; and I believe that it did run as high in pre-war American
society as it does now. So, like most fashions, neither of these seemed
anything to be taken seriously, or to get up a great pother about. To me,
the one seemed somewhat more infantile than the other,—if there be
degrees in infantilism,—and therefore somewhat more annoying; and that
was all.
On the score of art, however, my distaste for the fantastically
exaggerated literary exploitation of sex, sex-attraction, sex-relations,
soon ripened into utter disgust. My complaint was primarily that writers
acting under this obsession were attempting an impossibility; they were
trying to make too grotesquely much out of too pathetically little. The
standard English novel of the period, according to a disgruntled English
critic, consisted of two hundred pages of smooth and easy prose leading
up to an act of adultery, and then eighty pages more of smooth and easy
prose leading down again. This statement strikes one as perhaps a little
fanciful, but taken by-and-large it is really not excessive. I think that
Pharaoh, king of Egypt, was a pretty generous fellow compared with a
public taste and fashion which could even dream of getting a work of art
from a writer after giving him only such exiguous and sleazy stuff as this
to work with. The point is that the males and females of the period’s
fiction were creatures of purely physiological reactions, responsive only
to raw sensation; and literary art can do nothing with such as these, or
with the situations which they arrange for themselves.
For this reason: What Panurge whimsically calls “the act of
androgynation and the culbatising exercise” is something so extremely
undifferentiated, so undiversified, that in an objective view it is bound to
appear extremely prosaic. With respect to all its demands and fulfilments,
one man is seen to be exactly like another, one woman exactly like
another, one pair exactly like another. Evidence of its commonplace
character is found in the fact that a disinterested view of it always excites
a sense of incongruity with its sentimental associations, and therefore
excites derision. Hence with the stark act of androgynation as his pièce de
resistance the literary artist can do simply nothing. Proof of this, if one
cares for it, may be had by reading half-a-dozen of de Maupassant’s short
stories at a sitting. An hour devoted to this exercise will be found to leave
one with nothing but the sense of a viscid and sticky monotony. The
utmost that the artist can do with this piece of literary property is
something occasional and special, by way of pointing up some incident or
topic, usually of a humorous turn, as Rabelais uses it in his story of the
deaf-and-dumb Roman lady, or in his account of the nun’s misdoings at
Brignoles; or indeed wherever he chooses to employ this property.
In a word, the fiction of the period specialised in presenting sex-
attraction, sex-emotion, consistently at their lowest level. This was
understandable, and I for one saw no reason to complain of it on any score
but that of art. The neolithic masses of mankind are psychically incapable
of experiencing the emotions of sex at any but the lowest level, and
having become dimly literate, they would naturally require the level of
depicted experience to be not above that of the actuality with which they
are acquainted. This being so, the objections raised on moral and social
grounds seemed exorbitant, and did not interest me. In the austere old
Chief Justice’s phrase, those who raised them apparently did not “regard
mankind as being what they are,” and were unaware that there is nothing
in the vast overwhelming majority of mankind which could be made to
feel the force of those objections, or even to understand them.
The fashion of frankness did perhaps tend to overmagnify the
importance of crude sensuousness in our society’s scheme of life, and to
give the impression that it has a larger place there than it actually has. I
am not sure that this is so, but it may be. Purely libidinous sex-adventures
are, as the Greek philosopher said, “the occupation of those who have no
other occupation,” and certainly the intimations of magazine-covers,
advertisements of apparel, the cinema-screen, the illustrations in our
newspapers and periodicals, all would reinforce those of our fictional
literature in suggesting that our society has little else to do in its hours of
leisure and less to think about. When one considers our collective life by
its serious side, one probably finds some degree of misrepresentation
here; and as for its lighter side, one would hardly venture an opinion
either way. One gets, however, a distinct impression that when sex-
attraction does operate, it is presumed to function only on the plane of
stark sensuousness, and that sex-relations rest ultimately on no other
basis.
As a matter of observed fact, this is not the case. It is no doubt
uniformly so with the neolithic man and woman of today, as it has always
been, and therefore the sales-policies of economism are unquestionably
right in shaping themselves by the rule and taking no account of the
exception. While it may sometimes also be the case with the psychically-
human being, it is almost invariably not. Sex-attraction often operates
powerfully and fruitfully in instances where its sensuous side is in
complete abeyance, and again sometimes where its sensuous side makes a
belated appearance at the end of a long period of intimate association.
Here I think one might find some ground for believing that the physical
lure of sex-attraction, especially in view of its evanescence when alone
and unsupported, is in its nature essentially casual and incidental, as one
finds it generally throughout the animal world; and that the importance
which society has put upon the act of yielding to it is monstrously
exaggerated. As I have already remarked somewhere in these memoranda,
one may well believe that the only court of competent jurisdiction in the
premises is that of taste and manners. The idea of sex-relations on which
the mediaeval Courts of Love were instituted,—the idea which Rabelais
worked out in detail for the moral architecture of Friar John’s abbey of
Thélème,—appears most reasonable and most in accord with truth of
experience. Far from disregarding or disparaging the physical lure of sex-
attraction, this idea merely ranges it at its proper degree in the scale of
importance; the response to it is in no sense an end-in-itself. As between
persons experiencing the immense power and beauty of reciprocal sex-
influence, if this element presents itself as an ancillary part-and-parcel of
this experience, well and good; if not, well and good. In either case the
rational rule of conduct is the one which the psychically-human being will
naturally and instinctively follow for the cogent reasons which Rabelais
assigns: Fay ce que vouldras.
Everyone knows that the spiritual energies of psychically-human
men and women are vastly enhanced by the aid of appropriate sex-
relations. It is observable also that among psychically-human beings there
are some who are so little automotive that they can hardly turn a wheel
without this aid. Back in the ‘twenties, when “realistic” fiction was set in a
stereotyped pattern inimical to art, I often wondered why some one did
not try his hand at a work of true art made up around the sex-experience
of a couple whose mutual reactions were not physiological. It would be an
interesting thing to do, and a good artist could make something very fine
of it, as good artists have done in the past. Such a novel moreover, as far
as I can see, might be kept quite strictly answerable to all the tenets and
prescriptions of realism. If realism means the representation of life as it is
actually lived, I do not see why lives which are actually lived on a higher
emotional plane are not so eligible for representation as those lived on a
lower plane. It must be said, however, that while a love-story consistently
carried out on the higher emotional plane might be a work of art, even
great art, a publisher’s reader would almost automatically report it as
“not of general interest”; and considering the circumstances to which I
have alluded, he would be quite right in so doing.
Nevertheless there can be no doubt that sex-relations of a most
intimate, profound and satisfying character do persist on the higher
emotional plane and are susceptible of artistic literary treatment, not only
in the fictional form but in other forms as well. Not long ago one of my
friends asked me what I thought of an idea he had for a book which should
analyse and discuss the sex-motive in the careers of some eminent
Aspasias, ancient and modern. I told him that this ground had been gone
over pretty thoroughly already, but if he wanted a clear field he could
make a very fine enlightening analysis of the sex-motive in the instance of
certain hand-picked Egerias where physiological reaction did not come in
play. Again for reasons sufficiently obvious such a work would have no
great sale, but from any competent hand it would be interesting, and from
the hand of a Sainte-Beuve it would be superb. My friend agreed with me
fully, but did not feel that his powers of analysis were equal to the task. I
also mentioned the idea to a lady who already at my suggestion had
published a very acceptable book on some of the less well-known women
of the French Renaissance, but she too thought her analytical equipment
was hardly up to the mark, and I dare say she was right.
 One might be content to touch lightly on the loci classici among one’s
examples. A word or two would be enough to make clear what everyone
knows already, that the world of letters owes an incalculable debt to the
sex-attraction of Beatrice Portinari and to that of the none too well
identified Laura of the Canzoniere. Modern opinion, especially that large
section of it which is shaped by neolithic culture, may have it that these
sex-associations were not in any sense love-affairs; or indeed, putting it
generally, that any sex-association which does not culminate in Panurge’s
act of androgynation and the culbatising exercise is not to be classed as a
love-affair, but as an affair of simple friendship. Yet since the sex-element
is so clearly there, and since it sets up such far-reaching differentiations
in both the character and the spiritual product of the relationship, this
classification seems to me purely arbitrary. If the association of Voltaire
with Mme. du Châtelet; of Joubert with Pauline de Montmorin; of
Montaigne with Marie de Gournay; of Goethe with Bettina Brentano; of
Wilhelm von Humboldt with Henriette Herz;—if these were not love-
affairs I do not know what to call them. Such associations are a matter of
abundant record, and I believe they would prove rewarding under
analytic literary treatment.1
I found that the fashion of extreme frankness prevailing in post-war
literature prevailed also in social conversation; so, moved by curiosity, I
took advantage of it. Whenever an appropriate occasion came about,
which naturally was not often, I would bring up one or two instances of
the working of sex-attraction, such as I have just cited, to hear what
people had to say about them. By keeping up this practice for several
years and in several countries, I amassed a considerable number of
accounts of experiences confirmatory of my own conclusions. Case-
histories are rather boring, so I shall here mention the salient points of
only three. One man had maintained for twenty years what he described
as the one and only true love-affair of his life by correspondence with a
woman whom he had never seen, and from whom he had always been
separated by great distances. Another similar love-affair had gone on for
seven years, and was still going on, between two persons who had seen
each other but once; their mutual sentiment took root at first sight. An
interesting fact in this case was that neither knew the other’s language;
their communications were carried on in a third language, common to
both but native to neither.
The account I got of a third experience is especially noteworthy as
proving my point beyond peradventure. The man was deeply in love with
the young wife of one of his friends, and she with him. Both were
extremely able, brilliant, highly cultivated; their relation was perfect in all
its exquisite sympathies and confidences. He was most personable; his
presence and maimers were unusually engaging; and she was pretty,
graceful, charming. I can bear witness to all this, for I knew them well. Yet
the physical indifference obtaining between them amounted almost to
repugnance; they seldom shook hands when they met, and then only in a
perfunctory way, utterly inexpressive of sentiment. One might imagine
just such terms of association subsisting between Turgôt and Jeanne-Julie
de l’Espinasse or between Benjamin Constant and Mme. de Staël,2 or in
other historical instances.
Thus I was upheld in my belief that the physiological element in sex-
attraction is by no means invariably present, and that one’s
understanding of the term should be broadened accordingly. When sex-
attraction is spoken of, one should ask just what is meant by that. The
great Cousin, for example, who all his life had hardly ever even noticed a
pretty woman, suddenly discovered that his historical studies had forced
him into a state of most lover-like devotion to the charms of Mme. de
Longueville, who had been dead nearly two hundred years. The
experience was highly animating and energising, as the portions of his
work which are referable to it show at once. Was this a valid sex-
experience, was the attraction at the root of it a valid sex-attraction? If
not, then just what was it? What is one to say?
The sum of my observations led me to believe that society’s attempts
to canalise the course of sex-association by systems of ethical precept and
statutory law do not work well because they rest on a basis of purely
factitious generalisation. In ways both positive and negative, these
attempts have done, and still do, much more harm than good. The
psychically-human man and woman soon become aware that the only
sure principles on which their sex-relations can be satisfactorily
maintained are those which were laid down for them four hundred years
ago by Friar John of the Funnels; and that once these principles are
established, Friar John’s one simple rule becomes their only rule of
conduct in the premises: Fay ce que vouldras.

II

Towards the end of my term as an editor in New York I stumbled on a

statement that considerably more than half the national wealth of the
United States was in the hands of women. This interested me to the point
of taking measures to find out if it were true; and it was true, to my
surprise. I knew that the dean of St. Paul’s had described American society
as an ice-water-drinking gynecocracy, but I did not imagine that his view
could be borne out by anything so cogent. I immediately formed the
reasonable notion that so large an amount of economic control combined
with full political equality, full equality of educational and cultural
opportunity, and an unprecedented liberation from traditional
disabilities,—all this should be showing some distinct and salutary social
effects. I not only saw no signs of any such effects being produced,
however, but I also saw no signs of any disposition to produce them, still
less of any sense of responsibility in the premises; and this excited my
curiosity. Considering the great enlargement of opportunity for American
women to do what they liked with themselves, I was curious to see what,
if anything, they were actually doing; and I made this a matter of
observation and inquiry for several years, whenever occasion offered.
Putting the results in a word, I found that they were contenting
themselves with doing exactly what men do. Their conception of their
new-found liberties and the use to be made of them did not reach beyond
this. All the evidence I could turn up tended with unfailing regularity to
this conclusion. Women entered the same trades and professions as
competitors with men, played politics with the same unscrupulous
predacity and mountebankery, shared the same unintelligent habits of
mind, accepted the same cultural standards, the same codes of social life
and manners. They wore men’s dress on occasion, smoked, swore and
used loose language as men do drank and sat around bar-rooms as men
do. I was amused at observing that their ideal of general conduct, both
good and bad, was not that of doing the same things men do and doing
them better or even differently. Apparently they were quite satisfied,
rather slavishly as it seemed to me, to do just the same things in just the
same ways, and do them just as well.
These observations diverted me immensely, and in the end my
amusement was the means of my making a great fool of myself in the
public prints. Some six or seven years after I had first noticed the
statement concerning the distribution of our national wealth I wrote two
essays mildly critical of our women’s lack of initiative and enterprise, and
sent them over from Brussels to my old friend Mr. Sedgwick, who was
kind enough to publish them at once for me in the Atlantic. The story of
these essays is worth telling because it shows so well the discouraging
way Fate has of dropping the warmth of one’s self-esteem down to the
zero-point, and keeping it there. I thought uncommonly well of those two
essays, and so did Mr. Sedgwick. They covered all the ground, they were
written in a good spirit, they were playful enough to be ingratiating, and
their logic was burglar-proof if one accepted the implied major premise,—
but just there, alas, was where the cat lay down in the pepper.
I had based my essays in all good faith on the premise which I had
accepted without question from Condorcet, Rousseau, Mr. Jefferson,
Henry George, Herbert Spencer and the rest of the goodly fellowship of
the prophets; this premise being that the individual Homo sapiens, female
and male alike, is psychically human and indefinitely improvable, and by
consequence the collective Homo sapiens is a human society likewise
indefinitely improvable. If this premise were valid, my essays would be
sound as a nut. But just as I was congratulating myself on a pleasing
success, Mr. Cram produced his hypothesis concerning man’s place in
nature; it blew my premise sky-high, and made my essays not worth the
paper they were written on.
The point of my essays was that while admittedly women can do
pretty much anything that men can do, and do it pretty much as well,
they can also do something which men do not show, and have never
shown, any appreciable aptitude for doing; they can civilise a society. In
view of this I ventured to suggest that in their peculiarly privileged
position American women might do well to get a really competent
understanding of what civilisation is and what its terms are, and then
apply themselves to quickening the extremely stodgy dough of American
society with the leaven of civilisation. If one were addressing an
aggregation of psychically-human beings, this would be all very well. But
when Mr. Cram showed that neolithic society is not one whit more truly
civilised now than it was six thousand years ago, and in the nature of
things will be no more truly civilised six thousand years hence, he
reduced all I had been saying to sheer nonsense. What it amounted to was
that I had been putting the most fantastically extravagant expectations
upon psychical capacities which do not exist, never did exist, and in all
probability never will. I had placed myself in the absurd position of one
recommending the study of analytic geometry to a flock of more or less
attentive ewes.

III

The change in women’s economic status helped to bring about a

great increase in the number of divorces; and this in turn went far in
relieving divorce almost entirely from the weight of social obloquy which
had long rested on it. This seemed to me an unqualified good thing. In
itself, the growing number of divorces was unimportant; what really
counted was the disappearance of a prejudice largely superstitious and
wholly unintelligent. With the views I entertained of sex-relations in
general, I was glad to see the subject of marriage and the family brought
up for some measure of reconsideration, and my only regret was that the
reconsideration was not more thorough-going.
I regard marriage in the way that the French have of regarding it, as
a partnership effected for certain definite purposes, essentially practical.
If sentimental considerations favour it at the outset, or if they make a
favourable ėntry after the partnership is established, that is all very well;
but the institution itself, das Ding an sich, is of a purely business-like and
non-affectional character. This view keeps the issues distinct, separate,
clear-cut, thereby avoiding the endless trouble caused by confusion and
misapprehension. If Potash and Perlmutter were antecedently fond of
each other, no doubt that helped; if subsequently they become fond of
each other, no doubt that helps; but the purpose of their partnership is
the production and sale of cloaks and suits, and the personal qualities and
aptitudes called into play for successful promotion of a sentimental
attachment are by no means the same as those called into play for
successful promotion of the cloak-and-suit business. Thus it was that
notwithstanding the notable tepidity of friendship between the partners
Klinger and Klein, they were held together by a perfect community of
interest in the conduct of a thriving trade. So in the matter of marriage,
whether sentimental considerations make their appearance first or last or
not at all, they have only an incidental bearing on the purpose for which
the partnership is formed. If I remember correctly, it was Mr. Zudrowsky,
of the firm of Zudrowsky and Cohen, who said that “for a business man,
understand me, love comes after marriage”; and apparently as many
successful marriages have been arranged on that basis as on any other.
What had always seemed to me thoroughly unfair and objectionable
was society’s merciless insistence on making the marriage-bed a bed of
Procrustes, if I may put it so; and on the principle that half a loaf is better
than no bread, I was pleased to see this insistence even slightly
moderated. Society insisted that persons who wished to realise for
themselves the immense benefits of a sex-relationship—and I humbly
hope I have made clear just what I mean by a sex-relationship—must
subject themselves to the duties, sanctions, responsibilities, changes and
chances of a quasi-industrial enterprise before they could be permitted to
do so. Any other arrangement, however much more appropriate and
satisfactory, was inadmissible. Thus marriage was, most arbitrarily as it
seemed to me, interposed as a bar or condition between the individual
and one of the main sources of his or her well-being. So arbitrarily were
these requirements laid down that they took no account whatever of the
individual’s ability to meet them; and here is where the sheerly
Procrustean unfairness of the matter is apparent.
Regarding marriage as essentially a quasi-industrial partnership, a
business enterprise, and then looking over the persons of one’s
acquaintance who are engaged in it, one must see, I think, that the
distribution of natural aptitude for it is about what it is for other
occupations. There are many misfits, many who through no great fault of
theirs have obviously mistaken their calling. Society’s tacit assumption is
that all normal persons are qualified for matrimony, and this is not so.
Many women are as ill-adapted to a career in matrimony as they are to a
career in blacksmithing or steam-riveting; many men are equally ill-
adapted. I refer to disability imposed by nature, not by circumstance.
When such as these experience a valid sex-attraction of whatever type,
and seek to make the most of it by accepting the only terms that society
has hitherto presented as admissible, the consequences clearly are bound
to be unfortunate. The best they can do is to maintain a position on the
bare edge of spiritual solvency through a continuous series of stultifying
compromises and makeshifts; and at that, the spiritual deputy-sheriff is
always lurking about their dooryard, armed with a warrant of levy-and-
distress. Mr. Marquand’s recent novel, H. M. Pulham, Esquire, bears upon
these difficulties, and illustrates them admirably.
Again, one may observe if one be candid about it, that polygamy and
polyandry are phenomena as common among mankind as they are
elsewhere in the animal world, and are therefore to be regarded as
natural; though here once more I express the hope that this statement
will not be interpreted with exclusive reference to Panurge’s acte mouvent
de belutaige. On the stage in the Beggar’s Opera we have Captain Macheath
declaring roundly that “a man who loves money might as well be content
with one guinea as I with one woman”; and I believe that if intelligent
men and women examined their hearts without prejudice they would find
there the question: Well, just why should he be content with one woman?
Why should Polly Peachum or Lucy Lockit be content with one man? Why
should any man or woman be so content? Goethe found that question not
easy to answer. He gives the institution of marriage a rather shaky leg-up
by saying it deserves respect as one of the triumphs of culture over
nature, but he leaves one doubting whether this may not be a Pyrrhic
triumph after all, for he adds that “marriage, properly speaking, is
unnatural.”
It is unnatural for the reason, among others, that it tends to interfere
with a free association of men and women, such as Friar John of the
Funnels contemplated in the design for his abbey. One remarks the
interesting fact that Rabelais, who never made a mistake in his
interpretations of the spirit of man, has no married couples in Thélème,
though he makes no rule against such being there. He says that if for any
reason a man wished to leave the abbey and go out into the world, taking
his declared sweetheart with him,3 they would then marry and live
happily ever after. Not to put too fine a point on it, there seems here a
distinct intimation that however appropriate marriage might be to
conditions prevailing in society-at-large, it was inappropriate to those
prevailing in the abbey; and by testing one’s own reactions to the story
one can see how this would be so. The abbey’s tenants were such as on Mr.
Cram’s hypothesis would be classed as human beings, and when one
considers their character and qualities one is conscious of considerable
violence in any attempt to associate the idea of marriage with them.
After Mme. de Staël had eased her rather plantigrade husband out of
the reckoning, she lived on the freest terms of intimacy with such men as
Talleyrand, A. W. Schlegel, de Sismondi, Benjamin Constant, travelled
with them on occasion, and on occasion occupied the same premises with
them. Each of these had something peculiarly his own to contribute
towards the enrichment of her cultural life, and she to theirs; and among
them all, in virtue of this free association, they contrived to add a fairish
bit to the resources of European civilisation. She had great gifts and a
great power of sex-attraction, though by all accounts not much on the
physiological side; but she had no more natural faculty for partnership in
the quasi-industrial enterprise of marriage than she had for handling a
steam-shovel. Manifestly, then, any social pressure tending to hold her to
an occupation for which she had no aptitude, and interfering with her
advancement in activities for which she had great aptitude, would result
in loss and damage, and therefore must, at least by me, be regarded as
pernicious.
One often sees great loss traceable to this cause, if one keeps an eye
out for it. I saw notable loss incurred in the instance of sex-relation cited
in my third case-history a page or two back. The lovers in question seldom
met, though there was no definite agreement not to meet, but merely a
tacit understanding. The lady had no fears or scruples, and her husband
was not one to make any difficulties about the intimacy; on the contrary,
he understood it perfecdy and was glad to encourage it. But her social and
domestic responsibilities frittered her time and energies, and her lover
had the spirit of the preux chevalier, unwilling that the lady should run the
least chance of being exposed to suspicion or her husband to
embarrassment. So their romance went undeclared, and they got but little
out of each other; which was a profound misfortune for them and a loss to
all who moved in their social orbit.
My survey of these matters left me with the belief that in the view of
a sound practical philosophy, marriage should be reduced to a footing
with other respectable industrial enterprises, and that all discussion of it
should leave sentimental considerations aside. For those whose natural
aptitudes run that way,—and there are many, both of men and women,—
there could be no better upshot to a sex-relation than marriage; and for
those whose aptitudes do not run that way, hardly anything could be
worse. I think the great majority will always take to marriage, however
free they may be to choose their estate. Pending a régime of complete
economic freedom, most women will certainly take to it,—Epstean’s law
will attend to that,—and I should say the majority of men will also. But of
both there will always be a minority who see in marriage something
which for them is unnatural, disabling and retarding.
In behalf of these I think the unintelligent opprobrium of
impropriety and “irregularity” attaching to relations such as those which
Mme. de Staël established for herself should be dissipated. One observes
with satisfaction that the large measure of economic independence which
American women have gained has already done much towards clearing it
away. This is one of many indications pointing to the great truth which
apparently must forever remain unlearned, that if a régime of complete
economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow
automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political
freedom can exist. Here one comes in sight of the reason why the State
will never tolerate the establishment of economic freedom. In a spirit of
sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people “four
freedoms,” or six, or any number; but it will never let them have
economic freedom. If it did, it would be signing its own death-warrant, for
as Lenin pointed out, “it is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling
the State and liberty.” Our economic system being what it is, and the State
being what it is, all the mass of verbiage about “the free peoples” and “the
free democracies” is merely so much obscene buffoonery.

IV

At the time when I was turning over in my mind this matter of sex-
relations, a German friend said to me in bitterness one day, “I tell you, the
man who invented the family was an enemy of the human race.” My poor
friend was not altogether without reason. With all the advantages of
wealth, social position and high culture, he had led for many years what
Mrs. Quickly called “a very frampold life” with a domineering spouse and
some unsatisfactory daughters, of whom he had the misfortune to be very
fond. I believe that under the régime of economism nearly all men have at
one time or another had to face the grievous truth of Bacon’s aphorism
concerning hostages to fortune. No doubt also many women, especially
those who have gone into matrimony under the spur of Epstean’s law,
sometimes feel that they have let themselves in for a hard bargain.
Nevertheless in general the family, regarded as an institution, still seems
to work about as well as the rest of our rickety institutions do, since the
majority of people like children, more or less, and therefore may perhaps
be said to have some sort of rough-and-ready aptitude for it. On the other
hand, a very respectable minority have not even the most attenuated
aptitude for it. In my opinion, the most prolific source of misfortune lies
in taking a strong biological urge towards procreation as evidence of this
aptitude. Women are peculiarly liable to this error, but even the standard
jokes in our comic papers show that men also fall victims to it. Herbert
Spencer liked children, but felt that he had no faculty whatever for family
life, and God wot he was right. So, like the resourceful man of science
which he was, he used to borrow batches of children from the neighbours
and hob-nob with them in order to keep the springs of his affectional
nature from drying up. Mark Twain, whom certainly nature never cut out
for a family man,—poor soul!—also did something with this practice; and
how bitterly one regrets that the colossal Tolstoy did not confine his
affectional excursions to it! I think it is a sound practice, and one to be
encouraged in all such circumstances. I would follow it myself if I liked
children, but I have a great horror of them.
Where the family chiefly shows itself as inimical to the human race,
to borrow my German friend’s term, is in its character as the strongest
bulwark of whatever economic system may be in force, even the most
iniquitous. No wonder the State and the Church unite in coddling the
family and hedging it about with all the protective devices that law and
factitious ethics can devise! A person with a family does what he must and
as he must. Often, like the tripe-editor I spoke of a moment ago, he has to
reconcile himself to stultifying and despicable courses of conduct which,
if he were free to do so, he would refuse even to consider. He must stay
within the economic system and uphold it; and thus the demands of
family are responsible for the atrophy of many fine talents, and for the
progressive moral dim-out which darkens many lives.
Throughout the post-war period I listened to a vast deal of vague
lugubrious talk about the evil of divorce and the ruinous loosening of
family ties. I saw nothing in all this but what was to be expected, nor
could I make it seem so calamitous as these prophetic voices made it out
to be. In the time of an individualist agricultural economy the family was
an economic asset; the larger it was, the better. The shift to an industrial
economy with mass-production in agriculture converted it into an
economic liability. The inflow of women into the trades and professions
took up some of the slack, thereby somewhat redressing the balance of
loss and gain, with the important difference that the women so employed
earned money-wages, which under the old economy they did not do, and
they kept control of their earnings. This tended to break up the family as
an economic unit, and to leave it held together only by such affectional
bonds as might exist on their own merits. This seemed to me quite as it
should be, and quite to be expected. As for the increase in divorce, I took
it as an outcome of women’s altered economic status, quite inevitable,
quite to be expected, and suggesting nothing especially immoral or
reprehensible. Like the facilities for dissolving other forms of partnership,
the facilities for divorce are susceptible of abuse and no doubt are
sometimes seriously abused; but once again if one “regards mankind as
being what they are,” one sees that this also is to be expected; it is
inevitable.
I was much impressed by my learned friend Hendrik Willem van
Loon’s remark that “a sense of the inevitable” is the most valuable thing
one can get out of one’s classical studies. I have already shown in these
pages how steadily from the very beginning my own studies were directed
towards an intensive cultivation of this sense; and I can never be thankful
enough for the good fortune which brought me that advantage. In
speaking of William the Taciturn, who had “absorbed some slight
admixture of the old Roman and Greek philosophies with his more formal
Christian training,” Mr. van Loon shows how almost automatically this
saving sense, when it is well developed, gets itself applied to every
appraisal of mankind’s ways and doings. One may wish they were better
and wiser than they are, but the sense of the inevitable gives warning that
no force of wishing or striving can make them so; and therefore the less
they are meddled with, the better.
It is interesting to see how often the poet’s conclusions, arrived at by
the light of this sense, are identical with the philosopher’s. Goethe’s sense
of the inevitable made his forecast of mankind’s progress identical with
Mr. Cram’s. “Man will become more clever and sagacious,” said Goethe,
“but not better, happier or showing more resolute wisdom; or at least,
only at periods.” Inevitably so. Cleverness and sagacity are traits which
the neolithic man shares with his humbler relatives in the animal world;
he owes his survival to his immense superiority in combining and
managing the two. In respect of the other traits he is devoid of capacity;
they characterise the human being. Perhaps the most striking evidence of
this is found in the apparent anomaly which so baffled Mr. Jefferson and
Henry Adams: that with all man’s marvellous ability to invent things
which are potentially good, he can always be counted on to make the
worst possible use of what he invents; as witness the radio, printing-press,
aeroplane and the internal-combustion engine. On the assumption that
the neolithic men and women massed in society are human and therefore
indefinitely improvable, the problem of conduct here presented is past all
resolving. Mr. Jefferson gave it up in despair, saying “What a Bedlamite is
man!” On the contrary assumption there is no anomaly, and hence no
problem; we perceive at once that all which seemed to be unaccountable
is quite in the order of nature and quite to be expected.

V
 My meditations on the family and family life hardened me in the sin
of cleaving to a most unorthodox idea which I had formed long before. I
believe that a mother should have nothing to do with her daughters’
bringing-up and should be with them as little by way of companionship as
possible; and likewise a father with his sons. I came by this idea originally
through noticing the excellent results of this practice in the few instances
where I knew of its having been followed. The girl brought up by her
mother until she reaches the age of twelve or thirteen gets only the
feminine view of life-in-general, into which view she is bound to gravitate
in any case. She does not know the male mind well at first-hand, does not
know how it works or what its dispositions are, nor can she get a
competent knowledge of this as long as she is subjected to a confusing
association with the feminine mind. She is equally unable to get a
sympathetic understanding of the male character as long as she knows it
only through a maternal interpretation. The boy brought up in habitual
association with his father is under a like disability at every point.
I might mention also my belief that after children are past the stage
of bringing-up, all formal teaching of them in school, college and
university should be done by men. I have not examined my grounds for
this belief very closely, and I am quite willing to listen to reason in the
matter of making room for an occasional Hypatia in post-graduate
instruction, but my present strong conviction is that under any
circumstances the employment of women as teachers is disadvantageous.
I have sometimes wondered, perhaps rather perversely, whether the
fashion of easy divorce might not tend to make the “irregular” type of
sex-relation more durable than the conventional type. I must repeat the
assurance that I am not speaking of the relation as exhibited by the heroes
and heroines of our popular literature, notably by those of Mr. H. G.
Wells’s latest novel, You Can’t Be Too Careful. Far from that, I speak of it
only as exhibited by psychically-human beings in the instances I have
cited. My thoughts were set going in this direction by some words from an
experienced married woman in her late twenties. An observant friend had
just then been telling me that in his opinion the most moral men in
America are actors, “because,” he said, “they always marry their
wenches.” I was amused by this,—it did seem really to have some point,—
and I mentioned it to the lady by way of a joke. “I don’t quite see that,”
she said. “The way things are, it’s a lot easier to get rid of a wife than a
wench.”
One can see how this might be so for the general run of mankind, and
one can see a special reason why it should be so for the psychically-
human being. In the city of Tours one day I looked in on one of the great
regional markets where buyers from all parts of France were dealing with
peasants for grain. I was astonished to see that every bit of business on
the premises was done on parole; no formal contracts, no memoranda, not
a pen-scratch or a pencil-mark in evidence anywhere. I was told that this
is an invariable custom, because reading and writing were suspect arts
with the French peasant from time immemorial. Make an agreement with
him by word of mouth, and he would never fail, never was known to fail.
Force him to sign a formal contract, if you could, and there was no telling
what he would do, but you could pretty well count on its being something
you might not like.
It may be that in the psychically-human being there is a streak of this
resentment, however larval, against the obligations of formal contract in
general. I think there is. It is conceivable also that in the case of a formal
marriage-contract this resentment might be heightened by the
consciousness that society’s assumption of a clear right to barge in and
regulate a relation so distinctly personal is open to question. Hence if the
relation became unsatisfactory, one would feel no great compunctions
about taking any available way out of it. On the other hand, if the relation
were established on parole or by tacit understanding, one would have to
stick it as best one could, and no doubt all the better for knowing that
whatever discipline of spirit may be called for is self-imposed. At the
instant when a sentiment of affection becomes authoritative a dry rot sets
in on it. When Polly let it out that she meant to marry her dashing
captain, Mr. Peachum asked her in great indignation, “Do you think your
mother and I should have lived comfortably so long together if ever we
had been married?”
But the reader must remember that this chapter, like all my chapters,
amounts to nothing but the more or less aimless reminiscences of a
superfluous man. It would be vain to pretend that I am wiser about
mankind’s affectional relations than any one else would be who had
watched their tacks and turns as long as I have watched them from my
seat in the grandstand. Perhaps at that distance one misses many of the
game’s most interesting fine points of play, so que scai-je? Certainly I do
not know so much that I should write out my reflections on these or any
other subjects with a view to any one’s interest but my own.

1 A striking contemporary instance appears in the association of Mr.

G. B. Shaw with Miss Ellen Terry. This is described at length in the recent
biography of Mr. Shaw, by Hesketh Pearson. Since the account of the
relationship was authorised by Mr. Shaw I see no indelicacy in citing it.
2 It is impossible to say how far the current notion that the relations
of Constant with Mme. de Staël came to more than this, can be justified.
Some circumstances make it seem erroneous, while others admit the
possibility, but establish nothing. I incline to the former view. The
relations of Turgôt with Mile, de l’Espinasse have never been under
suspicion, as far as I know.
3 Celle laquelle l’auroit prins pour son devot.
 CHAPTER TWELVE
“But what do I know of Aurelia, or any other girl?” he says to me with that abstracted air; “I, whose
Amelias were of another century and another zone.”

—GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

—FRANCIS BACON.

W HEN I said a moment ago that I thought all teaching should be done
by men, I hope I made it clear that my reference was to formal
teaching, institutional teaching. A great deal of informal non-professional
teaching is, and should be, done by women,—indeed must be, if it is to be
done at all, for only women can do it; and here I am referring not so much
to instruction in the nursery or kindergarten as to the invaluable
directions, suggestions and spiritual assistances that one gets continually
from women throughout one’s later life. I must observe, however, that my
opinion about women’s place in professional teaching is only an opinion. I
think that, ceteris paribus, women are less well adapted to a career in
teaching than men are. Given two persons, a man and a woman whose
abilities and attainments are in every respect exactly equal, I believe the
student will profit more from the man’s instruction than from the
woman’s. I do not know why this should be so, and I am sure I could not
defend my belief to the satisfaction of the intrepid ladies who so nobly fit,
bled and died in the cause of feminism some twenty-odd years ago. The
matter appears to me as one of the innumerable phenomena of nature
which simply are so, and about whose reason, necessity or justification
one finds it useless to speculate.
But the enlightenment,—let me say, the education,—which one gets
from women is of immense abundance and priceless value. One may easily
see how this should be so, for women are roughly one-half of the race, and
in studying the special endowments and characteristics of this feminine
mass, in observing the ways by which they approach and take hold of life,
their particular adaptabilities, their instinctive turns of view upon specific
questions, interests, sets of circumstances,—by this means one gets a vast
amount of education that is otherwise unobtainable. It is surely
unreasonable to think that one can round out a practical philosophy of
existence without taking full account of a distinctly differentiated half of
the beings among whom that existence must, for better or worse, be
spent. For my own part I am free to say that, taking my education as a
whole, I am indebteded to women for the most valuable part of it; even
though, to the best of my recollection, I never got a single line of book-
l’arnin’ through the instrumentality of any woman.
One of the most fascinating adventures of my life was exploring the
literature of the Querelle des Dames. What started me on it was Rabelais’s
account of Panurge’s shillyshallying indecision about taking a wife, which
makes up practically the whole subject-matter of the Third Book. One
would hardly believe that during the last half of the fifteenth century and
well into the sixteenth, a red-hot feminist controversy raged in Europe
like the plague, and that virtually all the capable male minds of the time
lent themselves to it, some maintaining that woman is by nature an
inferior being, properly subject to man, and others maintaining the
contrary. The subject had a large literature before the invention of
printing; and after that, a great number of books appeared. Even the
colossal Erasmus of Rotterdam chipped in with a short treatise, On
Christian Marriage, which was probably more or less done to order at the
instance of his English friends.
Scholars think that Rabelais published the Third Book as a piece of
market-writing, knowing that feminism was a live topic, and hoping that a
playful work which touched on it would have a good sale. I disagree with
that view. My notion is that Rabelais was wickedly delighted by the
spectacle of full-grown men making such a tremendous pother over
nothing, and felt an irresistible temptation to stir up the animals. It is
clear that nothing pleased him more than a chance of this kind, and he
never missed one. Even a careless reader of the Third Book can see that
when it got into the hands of people who took all this foolishness
seriously, whether they were on one side of the controversy or the other,
it would make them madder than wet hens, as in fact it did; and I believe
he meant it to do just that. I can see him now, slapping his thigh and
roaring with laughter as he turned off one salty paragraph after another
at the top of his speed. He was promptly blackguarded as an anti-feminist,
for such is the habit of the neolithic mentality under such circumstances;
and this despite the exalted view of women which he expressed when
writing seriously in his description of Thélème. A few years after
Rabelais’s death François Billon, who wrote a massive history of the great
controversy, renewed the old calumny, and in some quarters it sticks to
this day.
It was many years ago, just after I had finished my graduate studies,
that I dipped into this literature. I touched on it in a superficial way, as I
was reading only for fun, so actually I did little with it beyond sampling it
here and there as something would strike my fancy, and I soon gave it up.
I got enough out of it, however, so that when the British suffragettes
broke loose under the lead of Mrs. Pankhurst, and the American
sisterhood dutifully followed suit by going on the warpath, I found I had a
complete perspective on their doings. I was on familiar terms with the
whole substance of their contention; I had been familiar with it, so to say,
for four hundred years; it was good classical fifteenth-century stuff.
Perceiving this at once, I saw I was in for a long season of excellent
diversion, and I accordingly got myself comfortably squared away to enjoy
it.
I remembered one matter which had interested me at the time of my
earlier readings. I had noticed that in Rabelais’s period the controversy
was carried on by men. Men wrote all the books, did all the
pamphleteering. Women did nothing. I thought this was rather
remarkable, especially as the French Renaissance brought forth any
number of women perfectly capable of lending a hand if they had seen fit
to do so. They were able, brilliant, successful in politics and literature, and
were at the top of the heap in point of social influence and prestige. Those
were the days when Louise of Savoy, Marguerite of Angoulême, Anne of
Brittany, Renée of France, were distinguishing themselves in public
affairs. Some women of the time, moreover, had that rarest of gifts, potent
even after the lapse of four hundred years, the power of making one wish
mightily that one could have known them. They were not great, no doubt,
except for this wonderful gift of imparting, if I may put it so, a delicate
and delicious fragrance to their period’s literary history. I am unable at
the moment to think of any of the great historical female characters of
the period, or any period, whom I should much care to meet, but I would
cheerfully give all my old boots and shoes if I could have known the belle
cordière Louise Labé, Anne Tallonne, Sybille and Claudine Scève, and
Pernette du Guillet, who must have been the most exquisite of spirits, and
who died so young.
Yet out of all this array of feminine ability, no one seems to have got
up much steam over the question which was agitating the men-folk: the
question whether by nature women are, or are not, inferior beings. I
suspect that with good hard common sense they, like Rabelais, thought
the whole contention was supremely silly. If the men saw fit to fool away
their time on it, well and good, let them do so; it would do no harm, and
might tend to keep them out of mischief; but as for themselves, they had
better fish to fry. I think that here one can recognise a turn of realism
essentially feminine, or should I say French-feminine? It is noteworthy
that Marguerite of Angoulême befriended Rabelais, as she did Marot, des
Périers, Dolet and other unruly gentry who made the mistake of being too
openly sportive about matters which the authorities of State and Church
regarded as serious. She wangled a copyright for Rabelais out of her
brother Francis I, which was a hard thing to get in those days, and
Rabelais paid off the favour by dedicating the Third Book to her in a short
flight of shocking poor verse. She unquestionably read the Third Book, for
there is a reminiscence of the lively thirty-fifth chapter in one of her own
poems; so if she saw any signs of anti-feminism in it, she seems not to
have taken them to heart.
So much, then, for the attitude of women towards the earlier
controversy. When the storm broke out afresh in the twentieth century I
made two interesting observations. The first one was that this time, in
both England and America, it was the women who were sweating all the
blood and raising all the commotion. They had some men under
conviction in both countries, but they were largely of the Liberal
persuasion and hence devoid of humour, incapable of recognising the
essential futility of causes which for some reason seem always chiefly to
attract them. A few others gave a diffident and sheepish sort of allegiance,
probably under domestic dragooning of a severe type. Aside from these,
the men stood aloof; many of them, especially in England, annoyed by the
various arsons, assaults, picketings and general carryings-on with which
the ladies were entertaining themselves; and the rest either indifferent or
displaying only a sporting interest. In short, the men and women of the
twentieth-century cast had simply swapped rôles with the actors in the
earlier performance four centuries ago.
I was much interested by this, and far more by my second
observation, that in France the women were standing pat, precisely like
the women of the Renaissance, and the men had cooled off to the zero-
point, so that feminism was distinctly a dead issue. I looked into the
matter, and found that French law prima facie bore as hardly on women as
English law, much harder than American law, yet Frenchwomen seemed
to be doing very well under its iniquities, and were quite indisposed to
make a fuss about them. Missionaries from England got no results; the
Frenchwomen were polite and pleasant, but firmly declined to get stirred
up. The result of my investigations convinced me that if they had full
suffrage presented to them outright they would not take the trouble to
find out when election-day was due. I was pleased by these discoveries.
When I contrasted the Frenchwomen’s attitude with that of the British
and American sisterhood, I was no end delighted at perceiving that the
steady-headed, realistic, thoroughly objective spirit of the great Louises,
Marguerites and Renées was still to the front and going strong.
As I saw it, the Frenchwomen were toeing the Platonist mark of
seeing things as they were; not as they thought they should be, or wanted
them to be, but as they actually were. With regard to suffrage, they could
see that as long as the State was administered by criminals and
psychopaths, their vote would not be worth casting. Moreover, they
might know what any one of ordinary common sense would know, that
the State must go on being administered by criminals and psychopaths
because in the nature of things none but a criminal or psychopath would
take the job, or could get it, or could do anything with it if he had it.
France’s century of political experience would seem to have drummed a
sense of this transcendent truth into the Frenchwoman’s head. If by an
untoward stroke of fate some one who was neither a criminal nor a
psychopath found himself at the head of the State’s affairs in a modern
republic, he would do about as well and last about as long as Adrian VI at
Rome or John Quincy Adams at Washington. The British suffrage was
extended to women; the suffragettes won their case,—and look at
England’s political record of the past twenty years! The American
suffragettes also won their case; they have been busily voting, jobholding
and saving the country ever since, and now,—God help us all!—just look at
it!
I say this not by way of aspersing American womankind or of
offloading any undue responsibility on them. As I have already explained,
a sense of logic and justice put me on the side of the suffragettes and kept
me there. I was, and am, for full suffrage, full rights of property, a “single
standard of morals,” whatever that is, divorce on demand,—I do not think
there is a single moot point on which I would be found tripping. I am
interested only in remarking that by the test of practice the contention
proved worthless, quite as I knew it would; and that the attitude of the
Frenchwomen was far more sensible. They had made France a woman’s
country, not by voting or jobholding or getting up parades and mass-
meetings, organising clubs, and so on, but by making themselves
indispensable to the country’s welfare. France was a country of small
businesses, and women managed them; women managed the household,
the family; in fact, there was precious little in the day-to-day life of France
that women did not manage, and manage exceedingly well. They knew
they were indispensable; the men also knew it, and went very gingerly
about interfering with any of their prerogatives, law or no law. When
Marianne spoke up, her menfolk listened earnestly and took due notice.
Experience, I repeat, must have bred in the realistic Marianne a calm
Emersonian disregard of Falstaff’s “old Father Antic, the law”; and
properly so. If one has an unbreakable grip on the reality of power, why
bother to coerce an omniumgatherum of illiterate blackguards into
validating the mere appearance of it?
I saw a delicious exhibition of this spirit only a few weeks ago when I
was in company with a lady who was bitterly resentful—and rightly so—of
some of our statutes affecting women. It appears that somewhere in the
Grand Republic there is a state law permitting a husband to alienate his
children from their mother by will. This did not seem so heinous to me
(though I did not say so) for I understand that in the state where I am
sojourning a man can be put in gaol for kissing his wife on Sunday, though
I have not yet heard of its being done. A case which the lady cited as the
locus classicus was that of a wife who found under the pillow of her
husband’s death-bed a scribbled codicil bequeathing his unborn child to
another woman, said to be his mistress. Most thoughtlessly (the French
strain in me is always cropping out when it should not, and getting me
into trouble) I said at once it was no doubt an excellent arrangement, for
the man knew both women and knew all the circumstances, and therefore
—but I was not permitted to go on. When the smoke cleared away, a
French girl in the company quietly said, “A Frenchwoman would just have
torn up that paper and said nothing about it.”
Precisely so; there you have it! That girl knew her countrywomen. I
was so delighted that I yearned to kiss the hem of her garment, but being
new to this country she could not possibly have understood why I should
make so much fuss over what would seem to her a very small matter of
everyday good sense; so I restrained myself and gave no sign.
By a series of adjustments and understandings, quite elaborate and
entirely extra-legal, Frenchwomen had built themselves into a position of
power and authority substantial enough not only to make them
indispensable to the working of their social system, but also to make them
recognised as indispensable; so what the law might say or not say
mattered little. While I was on the side of our suffragettes, I could not help
thinking that their contention was paltry, as the outcome has shown it to
be, and that they might have done better with their energy and devotion
if they had taken a leaf out of the Frenchwomen’s book. American women
had long been in a notoriously privileged position; the fact was known
wherever the sun shines; and I wondered why they had not shown the
Frenchwomen’s sagacity and cleverness in consolidating their advantage.
Quite evidently they had not done so, and the exhibitions they have put
on since they were legally enabled to cut a larger figure on the public
stage gave additional evidence that they neither had nor have any idea of
doing so.
On one point of doctrine, perhaps, I was a little heretical. I was all for
equality of the sexes before the law, but the left-wing doctrine of “natural
equality” impressed me as profound nonsense. The Tiraqueaus and
Bouchards of the Renaissance struck me, as they did Rabelais, as acting
like incredible simpletons, and so did their continuators in the twentieth
century. Any one capable of seeing what he looks at knows that there is
no such thing as this natural equality anywhere in the mammalian world.
It is ten to one that neither Tiraqueau nor Bouchard ever kept cats,
though such a thing is hard to believe of any Frenchman. Women, like the
she-females of any mammalian species, are in some respects superior to
their males, immeasurably so, and in other respects are distinctly inferior.
These qualities of excess and defect are complementary, and the practical
thing is to adjust one’s personal sex-relations in correspondence with that
natural arrangement. Here again the Frenchwomen, in my opinion, have
shown themselves the soundest of feminists, and American women, as I
observed in my last chapter, the most unsound.
My belief is that the most unfortunate result of the American querelle
des dames has been an aggravation of the peculiarly American itch for
inquisitional meddling, snooping, prying into all sorts of ill-understood
matters, and bustling about in the effort to regulate, re-shape and, Gott soll
hüten, to improve them; and invariably invoking the very worst and most
incompetent agency for the purpose—political action. I do not imply, nor
do I believe, that American women are more subject to this odious
disorder than American men. I observe merely that for obvious reasons
their seizures are usually more violent and longer protracted; also that
their change of legal status adds greatly to the epidemic force and spread
of this mania. Since the first days of Prohibition, whenever I have visited
this country I have found its atmosphere reeking with the “insane smell,”
familiar to alienists, of Weltverbesserungswahn; and in the last ten years its
thickening stench has become unbearable. Thus one may say quite justly,
I believe, that the New Woman of Anglo-American feminism has
contributed much more than her full share to a continuous process of
debasement and vulgarisation. As a matter of simple honesty, the first act
of our present Administration should have been to take the legend E
pluribus unum off our currency, and substitute Goethe’s phrase, Was uns
alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

II

Since I began this chapter I have been prodding my memory

vigorously to see what I could stir up about the little girls who were in my
orbit when I was a little boy. The result is that I have drawn a complete
blank, except for the French child who lived next door to us, or it may
have been two or three doors away, in Brooklyn. I think my remembering
her at all may be due to the fact which would naturally make a
considerable impression on a child, that while apparently she knew well
enough how to talk, she did not say anything that I could understand, nor
could she understand anything I said to her. Aside from this, all I can
recall of her is that she was a light blonde and seemed frail. I do not
remember her face, her actions, or anything that passed between us
except two or three haphazard attempts at making conversation.
Barring this episode, my life up past the age of ten seems to have
been completely girlless. There must have been a herd of girl-children
loose about our neighbourhood, but I do not remember ever seeing any. I
do not recall a single name, face, skirt, pinafore or hair-ribbon. Of the boys
I played with, some at least must have had sisters, but if they ever spoke
of them I’do not recall it. This seems rather strange, now that I think of it,
for most men have preserved some little recollection of having been
thrown with girls at no later age than ten, playing games with them,
fighting them, teasing and bullying them, and being teased and bullied in
return. But I have no such recollection. One reason may be that I did not
go to school, for I suppose it is usually at school that boys and girls first
find themselves mixed up promiscuously. Another reason may be that I
had no sisters; all my associations in the family were with men and
women around the age of thirty, so my views and impressions of
womankind and their relations with men were formed on adults.
In this I was extremely lucky, for the women around me were,
without exception, superb specimens of their kind. They were able, gifted,
handsome, witty, strong-minded, humorous, and above all they were
downright. There was not a grain of humbug or sickly-sentimentalist
nonsense in any of them. I was loved devotedly as none too many children
are, but I was also respected as far too few children are. No woman ever
petted me, took me on her lap, made up to me, gushed baby-talk over me.
I should have taken anything of the kind as a low indecency and an
outrage. I know this, for I remember one attempt made by a silly old
blister who was talking with my mother at our front gate when I
happened along. She got as far as patting me on the back, with a maudlin
word or two thrown in, when I retired in silent indignation with every
feather bristling, and I never went near the sappy old creature again.
Thus my early impressions of women were not of a kind to provoke
any curiosity about their nature or their peculiarities; still less, to excite
any sense of their inferiority or their superiority. There the women were,
and I took them as they were. They were different from the men, different
in appearance, dress, interests and occupations, but they did not seem at
all superior to men or in the least inferior, but merely different. I liked
them immensely, thought they were splendid, and they never amused me
more than when they were matching wits with their menfolk; but my
affection for them was no deeper than for the men, nor yet any shallower.
As for their relations, I saw that in certain well-defined ways the men
looked after the women, and in other ways, equally well-defined, the
women looked after the men; and this seemed perfectly reasonable and
natural.
I noticed also that both the women and men came in for certain
conventional deferences as matter-of-course, and could count on their
being punctiliously yielded; but these stirred in me no sense of inequality
either way, nor did they seem to betoken any sacrifice of self-respect. I
was instinctively all in favour of these deferences, since I saw that both
the women and men were far above taking any unscrupulous advantage of
the spirit which prompted them. I could understand how they would
make things go easier, more agreeably and gracefully, and hence I liked
them and more or less unconsciously fell in with them. The two sets of
deferences were different, naturally, but they were equally effortless and
prepossessing. All this probably did something towards putting me in the
way, later on, of appreciating the devoted and undemanding spirit of the
cavaliere servente, which I have always believed to be the best for men’s
cultivation, and which I always have cultivated in my relations with all
sorts and conditions of women. As well as I can judge from observation,
experience, and the reading of history, the cavaliere servente has always
got the best out of womankind, and hence I think it likely that he always
will.
As for the girls in our northern lumber-town, my memory serves me
but little better. There were some with whom I was on terms that were
friendly and pleasant enough, but all I had to do with them was casual,
and I remember almost nothing about them. I suppose I had too much else
on hand to get up any great amount of interest in cultivating them. I can
recall a few names, but no faces to answer to them. I remember any
number of older women well enough, but no girls of anywhere near my
own age. Perhaps the doings of a long life among many peoples have
overlaid these memories, but I do not think so. I think they have faded out
because there was so little of any consequence to be remembered.
I do, however, remember very clearly when I began to take critical
notice of youthful female beauty; I believe I have already mentioned
somewhere that it was in the period of my being away at boarding-school.
The town was brimming with pretty girls, and I took a good deal of
interest in studying their looks and making comparisons, as one does
when considering objects in a jeweller’s window. We boys scraped
acquaintance with a number of them; probably some of us flirted with
them more or less, and perhaps one or two of us came down with mild
cases of calf-love, though this is only a suspicion on my part. I did not get
so far as any of this. The girls were always amiable and pleasant with me,
and that was all.
Nevertheless I liked to look at them, more than anything for the sake
of making out just what it was in which their good looks consisted. I began
to consider such matters as bone-structure, facial contour, types of
feature. The one whom I put up in my mind as entitled to the blue ribbon
had a perfect Roman face, in full and in profile, and she carried herself
with somewhat of a Roman bearing; which was rather remarkable, for she
was echt-German as Dortmund beer, like nearly all the girls in that town.
Still, she may have thrown back to some irregular ancestor in camp on the
banks of the Lippe confronting the mighty Arminius; perhaps to Varus
himself. There is a pleasant irony in the thought of all the innumerable
social complexities and dishevelments which the mere lapse of time so
quickly irons out.
Somehow I managed to contemplate this kaleidoscopic array of
alluring loveliness without being seriously smitten by anything I saw. I
liked the girls I knew, liked to look at them, liked to please them and do
them what little courtesies were in my power, and was usually ready to
chatter small-talk with them till the cows came home; yet, after one had
chattered, looked and listened through a session of small-talk, what was
there to show for it? Later I discovered the reason why these girls had so
little affected my peace of mind. They were stunning beauties, sweet as
they could be, and horribly out of luck in being born too soon to make
their everlasting fortune in Hollywood or on magazine-covers. But despite
all this, there was no denying that their beauty not only betokened
immaturity, which was quite to be expected, but also disclosed the certain
forecast of a mature being who, in point of perspicacity, imagination and
humour, would be more than a little dumm. Their good looks gave no
promise of ever becoming ausdrucksvoll with the irresistible power of
attraction which I had seen residing in the faces of the women I had
known since first my eyes were opened on the world.
My perception of this was instinctive at the time, but accurate. Ever
since then,—or always, in fact, counting in the period during which my
preferences were established by instinct,—this quality which I then found
undetectable in prospect has been the one to mark the difference between
effective charm and the lack of it in determining my reaction to female
beauty. Mere regularity in beauty has never interested me, though until it
became so filthily vulgarised I enjoyed looking at it with the appreciation
of a connoisseur. I soon became aware of the curious magnetic power
resident even in certain positive defects, though I do not more than half-
understand it; the kind of thing that helped out the astonishing popularity
of stage-women like Anna Held, Polaire and Rigolboche. Once at a foreign
summer-resort, when I was twenty-six or so, I wasted a great deal of time
on putting myself in the way of a pretty-pretty young girl who had one
green eye and one brown eye. I had not the slightest wish to meet her or
talk with her, but I could see how this strange defect might be a great
asset to a face that carried the expression, which hers distinctly did not
carry, of high intelligence and refinement. With those eyes a Marguerite
or Renée might have made even the inexorable Tiraqueau come to terms.
I presume my sense of this magnetic power may account for the rather
silly satisfaction I got out of tagging around after the young woman for
views of her eyes. I do not know how else to account for it.

III

To me it appears indisputable that out of all peoples, nations and

languages, male writers of every sort and size have committed themselves
to more damneder fiddle-faddle on the subject of women than on any
other subject under the sun. Perhaps in saying what little I have to say on
the subject I am merely adding one more to the list. I must take my
chances on that, however, in pursuance of the purpose of this book, as I
have already explained; withal admitting, as I do, that with so many
eminent writers talking nonsense, the chances are heavily against one so
obscure as myself. The writers of the French Renaissance, incredible
numskulls as Rabelais seems to have thought them, were in my opinion
quite as rational in their appraisals of women as writers of the nineteenth
century on whose works I browsed. These could be roughly sorted into
three schools; the dry-nursing, the analytic, and the lyrical. I have in mind
chiefly the French representatives of these schools, because they are the
most thorough-going; but they had able competitors in England and
Germany whose names will at once occur to any reader, and no doubt in
other countries as well.
The school of dry-nursing,—the cult devoted to exploiting the enfant
malade et douze fois impure,—might well have compressed what they had to
say into a pamphlet and brought it out as a brochure On the Care and
Feeding of Women. Only the other day I came on a three-star passage by
one of these artists (one does not see how he could have been a great
writer, but he was) which for emetic efficiency and promptness can
hardly be matched. Here is a paragraph from it:

He who has preserved in his heart the flame of gallantry which burned in the last

centuries surrounds women with a tenderness at once profound, gentle, sensitive and
vigilant. He loves everything that belongs to them; everything that comes from them;

everything that they are; everything they do. He loves their toilette, their knick-knacks,

their adornments, their artifices, their naïvetes, their little perfidies, their lies, and their

dainty ways.... He knows how, from the very first word, by a look, by a smile, to show that he

adores them, to arouse their attention, to sharpen their wish to please and to display for his

benefit all their powers of seduction. Between them and him there is established a quick

sympathy, a fellowship of instincts, almost a relationship through similarity of character

and nature. Then begins a combat of coquetry and gallantry,...

—but I closed the book at this point, lest haply I should pewk. The reader
will probably be willing to take the rest of the passage on faith, as I am.
One can see well enough what the besotted man is driving at in his
darkened way, and can see that it is something very admirable; but
spewing whole pages of neurasthenic slaver over it tends only to obscure
and befoul it.
Then there is the school of the psychologie de l’amour moderne, the
school which spreads itself on analysing and psychologising women as
mysterious beings, unpredictable, unprincipled, predacious, infinitely
subtle, and for the most part exceedingly nasty; such, for example, as the
disgusting henhussies of Bourget’s Mensonges. It gives one a turn of
hopelessness to see Amiel edging himself into this gallery with a piece of
simply inimitable nonsense:

A woman is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and

contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of

prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without

knowing it.

Amiel was a much-travelled philosopher, an excellent critic and man

of letters, with all the culture of Europe in his head, yet he did not see that
what he says here is equally applicable to either sex. He is adverting to
qualities and behaviour which are characteristic of the psychically-
anthropoid; and the vast overwhelming majority of Homo sapiens, women
as well as men, are psychically-anthropoid. Psychically-human females do
not exhibit such traits, nor yet do psychically-human males.
The third school, the lyrical or panegyrist, glorify woman as a kind of
Institution. If they are French, they glorify her as a National Institution,
like the Academy or the Comédie Française, which none but Frenchmen
can properly appreciate and reverence. All of them do this; from Michelet
up and down, all are guilty. Crimine ab uno disce omnes; the documentary
evidence is complete in the pages of La Femme and L’Amour.
The curious thing is that the men of all three schools actually
believed in the dreadful balderdash which they put forth about women.
There is no doubt of it; no one could counterfeit such fatuous sincerity.
This has the effect of giving a fantastic semblance of reality to such
figures of womanhood as I have never seen and never expect to see, nor
do I wish to see, whether on earth, in heaven, or in the waters under the
earth.
 IV

One of my valued friends is an Armenian merchant, dealing in objects

of art. Armenians are known the world over as uncommonly shrewd
merchants, and my friend is no exception; I can bear witness to this, for I
have seen him in action. When I go in his shop he knows he has nothing in
stock that I would take as a gift, let alone pay money for. I go in, seeking
nothing, expecting nothing but an hour or so of his interesting and
instructive companionship. Hence our conversation is free, disinterested,
intimate, affectionate. I get a great deal out of it in respect of many
recondite matters pertaining to the Oriental world of thought and action,
and I think he also gets something. What we get, however, is not at all
what we would get if I approached him in his capacity as merchant; and
without pretending to answer for him, I may say that what I get is
infinitely more valuable. This story may not seem apposite to a discussion
of sex-relations, but it is, as I shall now show.
I think there can be “no manner of doubt, no probable, possible
shadow of doubt” that men need women far more than women need men.
I am not speaking of relative susceptibility to “the sexual urge.” All that is
as it may be, but it is entirely out of present consideration. Women may
like men and want them, but on a forced put they can, and do, get on very
handily without them. Men may not like women or want them, but
without them they can hardly get on at all. I do not know why this should
be so, though I can think of several contributory reasons, as any one can;
but however the fact may be accounted for, there it seems to be.
Obviously this fact causes women, by and large, to appear before men
in a double capacity. They appear in the capacity of friends and fellow-
beings, casual associates; but they also appear in the capacity of
merchants, exercising a sort of natural monopoly, and looking for trade.
In their capacity as merchants they regard men primarily as potential
customers. They have a merchant’s eye out for the best customers
available among those who present themselves, and they have the
monopolist’s instinct for regulating the terms of their market according
to careful calculation of what the traffic will bear. The standard British
novelists, such as Trollope, Thackeray, Jane Austen, consistently exhibit
women in this capacity, and women’s assumption of it is everywhere a
matter of observed and acknowledged fact.
One may reluct a little at an exposition of this matter in such plain
terms, perhaps, but when one understands the laws governing mankind’s
conduct one perceives at once that there can be no reasonable complaint
of the fact, and therefore no particular point to glossing it over. Woman’s
basic needs and desires are the same as man’s; they need and desire a
steady and stable supply of food, clothing and shelter. In the effort to
ensure this supply they tend always, precisely as men do, to follow the
path of least resistance—Epstean’s law. In the great majority of instances
that path leads by way of bargaining with men through marriage. The
Church of England’s formula for solemnising marriage reflects the
operation of Epstean’s law by introducing the clause, “with all my worldly
goods I thee endow.” In instances where “social security” is effected by
other means, such as an adequate inherited income, the path of least
resistance does not usually run that way, save where a dominant motive
of pure greed affords newspapers a chance to make a splurge over “the
union of two great fortunes.” Such instances are relatively infrequent. Nor
would I dream of intimating that these needs and desires are the only
ones that women have, for that would be simply silly; I say no more than
that they are basic, primary, which most obviously they are. It is the part
of wisdom in all circumstances, however, to keep steadily in mind the fact
that Epstean’s law bears just as powerfully on women as on men.
Whatever a woman’s needs and desires may be, from the least to the
greatest, she tends always, as men do, to satisfy them with the least
possible exertion; that is to say, by exploitation whenever exploitation is
practicable. There are circumstances in which one is sometimes tempted
to lose sight of this, but it is inadvisable to do so.
And now to my main point, indeed my only point, which is sincerely
practical. If you approach women with the faintest suggestion of being a
potential customer, you may expect to find the ensuing relation tinctured
heavily with a spirit of mercantilism exactly analogous to that which my
Armenian friend displays when some one comes in to look over his stock.
The ways in which this spirit is displayed are of infinite variety and
exceedingly attractive; my Armenian friend is one of the most
accomplished coquettes I ever saw, when it suits him to turn the pressure
on a potential customer. But these elaborate little arts all tending steadily
in one direction, coynesses, backings and fillings, turns of finesse, are so
well understood that there is no need to multiply words about them. Any
one who does not understand them simply shows himself not only most
unobservant, but also deplorably ignorant of literature, for even the
literature of the modern Emancipation makes its roughneck heroines
display them all.
On the other hand, if you approach a woman as I approach my
Armenian, on the understanding that nothing is to be expected in the way
of business, the ensuing relation will turn out to be infinitely rewarding.
Unless all my experience and observation go for nothing, it will be
devoted and enduring, intimate, candid, understanding, truly affectionate
and disinterested. It will assay much richer in all these qualities than any
comparable relationship between men, because it brings into reciprocal
action qualities which are naturally complementary, thus correcting
defects, smoothing down excesses, and carrying on a general course of
strengthening and enlargement of both mind and spirit. To give but one
illustration, I have learned ten times as much practical wisdom from
women as from men, in virtue of all the superiority of women’s realism
and objectivity. It must be understood that in all I have been saying on
this point I speak only of the psychically-human woman; of the
psychically-anthropoid or mass-woman I can of course say no more than
for her male congener.
The understanding I posit should be arrived at tacitly; I never told
my Armenian friend in so many words that I was not interested in his
merchandise, nor did he ever openly suggest an indisposition to selling
me anything. But however arrived at, the understanding must be
established in sincere good faith. No counterfeit, albeit ever so well made,
will pass the test; and here may be seen the force of what I said a moment
ago about the spirit of the cavaliere servente as being the best for men’s
cultivation. In Thélème and the Courts of Love it was thoroughly drilled
into the lady’s head that she had nothing in the world that her cavaliere
servente was after. She could not sell him a pennyworth of anything. He
was by her side day in and day out for no reason but that it suited him to
be there. Under those conditions, whatever either of them got out of their
association was not subject to “the higgling of the market.” It came as a
gift freely offered, not asked for or suggested. The whole philosophy of
their relationship is summed up in the deep observation of Filena to
Wilhelm, “If I love you, what business is that of yours?”
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the course of things, those which follow are always aptly fitted to those which have gone before; for
this series is not like a mere enumeration of disjointed things, which has only a necessary sequence, but
it is a rational connexion: and all existing things are arranged together harmoniously, so the things

which come into existence exhibit no mere succession, but a certain wonderful relationship.

—MARCUS AURELIUS.

A LL I saw during the later ’twenties and the ’thirties pointed straight
to the rather sombre conclusion that Homo sapiens has,—and, as I
believe, can have,—no sense whatever of history’s continuity. Even among
the more experienced peoples of Europe I found few who understood that
because the nineteenth century was what it was the twentieth century
must be what it is, and that there is no way of cutting in between cause
and effect to make it something different from what it must be. On the
surface, the scene was one of incredible confusion, absurdity, futility. One
would say that all the extravagances which lunacy could devise were
running wild. But on looking beneath the surface one saw a spectacle of
majestic and necessary order. Cause and effect, Emerson’s implacable
“chancellors of God,” were working at their task without haste and
without rest, in all precision and in all regularity.
These great agencies were building up a stupendous body of
testimony to the august truth that there never was, never is, and never
shall be, any disorder in nature; and so one surveyed their work with the
scientific curiosity which attracted the elder Pliny to the eruption of
Vesuvius. If ever there were a clear demonstration that anthropologists
have drawn the line between Pithecanthropus erectus and Homo sapiens at
the wrong level, the period 1920-1942 has furnished it. Throughout these
years one saw—as one sees now and I suspect will always see—a baldly
journalistic view of humanity’s doings prevailing everywhere. Men and
events were taken, as they now are, as phenomena virtually isolated,
virtually improvised, with nothing behind them but their immediate
exciting cause. Only the other day I heard some one saying what an
appalling thing it is that the destiny of all Western society should be in
the hands of two paranoiacs, a homicidal maniac, a mediæval condottiere
and a mountaineer brigand. But such a view is utterly journalistic, utterly
futile, for with Western society at this stage of the course it has pursued
since 1850, what must its leaders inevitably be? History prescribed these
men upon the world, prescribed their courses of action, and marshals
them in those courses with an iron hand. History goes on to its end,
carrying all incidental and temporary leadership in its sweep, and
throwing it away when it has served its little shred of particular purpose.
“I have seen so many kings,” sighed old Rossini plaintively, as he declined
an invitation to meet Napoleon III.
One who contemplates the spectacle of a society’s impending
dissolution has little energy to waste upon any emotions but those of awe
and reverence for the natural forces which have brought about this vast
débâcle. The ordinary feelings of concern, pity, sympathy, are transcended
and effaced by the exaltation of sheer wonder and admiration. “I consoled
myself for the approaching death,” wrote the younger Pliny, “with the
reflection: Behold, the world is passing away!” Wonder is evoked by the
magnificence of the process; admiration is evoked by its unearthly beauty.
The quick and sensitive eye of Marcus Aurelius perceived that “in the ripe
olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a
peculiar beauty to the fruit.” So at each phase in the disintegration of a
society one remarks the peculiar and supremely affecting beauty of
inevitableness, the beauty which shines out from the sequences of
causation.
Everywhere one saw evidence that the pace of society in its “course
of rebarbarisation” had been greatly quickened since the turn of the
century. As one phase after another unfolded, it was interesting to see
how suddenly the eminent characters associated with a previous phase
fell into oblivion. In Europe I saw Woodrow Wilson as the great luminous
figure of the second decade. At the opening of the third decade people
almost had to think twice before they could remember who he was. When
I came to America in 1929 he seemed to be as shadowy and remote a
personage in the country’s history as Zachary Taylor or Ten-cent Jim
Buchanan. In the second decade William II was “the mad dog of Europe,”
the object of universal execration. Lloyd George won a post-war election
by promising to hang him. In the third decade hardly any one troubled
himself to wonder whether he and Lloyd George were still alive. So also it
was with the representatives of a period’s culture. The versifiers,
romancers, painters, musicians of the ’twenties were eclipsed in the
’thirties; the men of religion, the soi-disant economists, the proponents of
social theory, dropped into obscurity. The dead among them were
promptly forgotten, and the survivors led a spectral unconsidered life,
like that of the surviving politicians.
In my view the insensate irrational rapidity of these fluctuations
clearly indicated that Western society had everywhere lost its stability
and that its collapse was nearer than one might think. Mr. Ralph Adams
Cram says most truly that a visitor from another world would see those
years as a space “in which all sense of direction had been lost, all
consistency of motive in action; all standards of value abolished or
reversed.... With no lucid motive for doing anything in particular, self-
appointed arbiters in almost every field of human activity from painting
to politics were starting the first thing that came into their heads, tiring
of it in a week, and lightly starting something else.... The futile
philosophies, the curious religions, and the unearthly superstitions of the
last days of Rome were matched and beaten by a fantastic farrago of auto-
intoxication, while manners and morals lay under a dark eclipse.”
This vivid picture is accurate; it is a picture which suggests a ruinous
social disorder. Yet if Mr. Cram’s visitor had the mind of a Pliny he would
see that there was no disorder there. Pliny saw that a simple
redistribution of energy was taking place in a perfectly orderly way,
whatever might be the effect on Herculanum and Pompeii. The witless
agitation of the people—Julia with her necklace, the man with his hoard of
gold, the baker leaving his bread in the oven,—bore orderly witness to
impending disaster due to the fact that the towns should not have been
built where they were. So, as viewed by the light of reason, the behaviour
of Western society in the last two decades is a simple matter of prius
dementat, orderly, regular, and to be expected. It presages calamity close
at hand, due to the fact that society’s structure is built on a foundation of
unsound principles.

II

Mr. Cram’s visitor from another sphere would have enjoyed many a
hearty laugh at the discussions of “civilised warfare” which I heard going
on among statesmen and publicists of the period. The naïve seriousness
with which this resounding absurdity was debated gave immense
amusement to one who saw things as they were. I could never quite make
up my mind whether or not the statesmen and publicists had their tongue
in their cheek about this matter. They were so far out of habitual contact
with any kind of reality, their lives were so drenched in make-believe,
that very possibly they were in earnest and their weird verbosity was
prompted by some kind of conviction which, however fatuous, was
sincere. At all events, they took the matter with as much solemnity as if it
had some substance of fact; and until their lucubrations grew tedious they
were entertaining enough as prime examples of their kind.
For my own part, the war of 1914 convinced me that thereafter the
conduct of warfare should revert to the primitive policy of extermination.
This was the original intention of warfare; to take perhaps the most
familiar example, it was the intention exhibited against the Palestinian
tribes by the Israelites under Joshua, according to the Scriptural legend.
This policy, however, was soon amended into a policy of sparing and
enslaving eligible survivors, taking occasional women for use as
instruments of pleasure, and occasional men for use as labour-motors.
Nevertheless, where enslavement was for any reason impracticable or
economically disadvantageous, the earlier policy has been resumed; as it
was, for example, in the instance of the American Indians, by the
Spaniards in the south and by ourselves in the north. Versailles clearly
demonstrated that enslavement is no longer practicable as a policy of
major warfare; and the profit-and-loss account of the nineteenth
century’s adventures in imperialism show as clearly that it is no longer
practicable as a policy of minor warfare. It costs more than it comes to.1
In 1918, therefore, I saw every reason why in future the logic of war
should be run out to its full length in a policy of systematic extermination.
I could find no objection to this on moral grounds, since by no conjuration
can warfare be thought of as either more or less than organised
assassination and robbery. In its nature nothing else can be made of it,
and in its history it is nothing but a progressive taking of advantage, with
assassination and robbery as the end in view. Again, on economic grounds
there can be no objection, for every economic consideration points
straight the other way. Finally, objection on humanitarian grounds would
seem the acme of inconsistency. If humanitarianism can reconcile itself to
swallowing nine-tenths of the logic of warfare,—as apparently it has no
trouble in doing,—one must put down its reluctance to swallow the
remaining tenth as a rather nauseating affectation. After Versailles my
impression was that in subsequent wars the policy of enslavement would
go more or less gradually into desuetude and would be replaced by the
primitive policy of extermination; and that impression still remains with
me.
As time went on through the ’twenties and the ’thirties, one could
see the sentiment and moral sense of mankind in continuous preparation
for something of the kind. Burke’s acute observation kept recurring to my
memory, that if ever a great change is impending, “the minds of men will
be fitted to it.” I refer to the progressively lowered estimate put upon the
value and quality of individual human life. To one who can remember
where that estimate stood even so late as forty years ago, the difference is
startling in its significance. Respect for life is at the vanishing-point, and
respect for the dignity of death has disappeared. The preparation I speak
of as indicated by this change was not, of course, deliberately designed. It
is merely one casual induration among the many which are incidental to
progress in our course of re-barbarisation.
One slight bit of testimony, so slight that I speak of it only because it
has an amusing side, is the change one sees in the branch of popular
literature known as the mystery-story. I am not concerned with the
widespread vogue of this type of literature, but with its structure, with
what one might call its architectural pattern. Stories of crime have always
had a great vogue, and I see no valid reason why they should not have it.
In so far as literature is at all to be taken as a pastime, this form of
literature seems to me as innocuous as any. As for its being an incentive to
crime, which I understand some say it is, I believe the few instances
alleged are extremely doubtful.
But whereas formerly the mystery-story was built around any and
every kind of crime, it is now invariably, as far as my observation goes,
built around the one crime of murder. Murder seems as necessary to the
architecture of the modern story as a roof is to the architecture of a
modern house. I once asked a publisher who does a good deal with
mystery-stories why this should be so. He said in some surprise that he
had not the faintest idea; he had never thought of its being so until I spoke
of it. Murder was so much the regular thing that he had taken it as a
matter of course, not noticing its monopoly. Murder had a place with
Dickens, but I do not remember that it was at all to the front with Wilkie
Collins or Gaboriau. Nor do I recall that the mighty Sherlock had anything
to do with murder, save in one instance, unless you count in a couple of
attempts at murder which he foiled.
I can not hold my memory strictly accountable, so I speak of this
matter under correction. There can be no question, however, about the
later product. Therefore one might take it that the change from the
practice of Doyle, Collins, Gaboriau, or even the fifty-per-cent record of
Poe, to that of the writers of the ‘thirties does reflect, however faintly, a
corresponding change in the estimate popularly put upon the value and
sanctity of human life. This interested me because by far the best creative
work I found going on in the ’thirties was done by those mystery-writers
who had a real story to tell and who showed themselves painstaking
workmen in the telling of it. The only writer I could put with them in the
rank of merit (and they will agree with me, I am sure, in putting her a
little ahead of them) was Mrs. Thirkell, who carried on in the fine
tradition of Jane Austen with exquisite insight, exquisite sympathy and
captivating charm. One notable mystery-writer has shown in Gaudy Night
that Lord Peter Wimsey and his lady-love could make themselves quite as
competent and engaging in association with other mysterious illegalities
as with murder. What a pity! one says, that they were not given another
chance or two; for really, one does not read about their adventures for the
rather hollow satisfaction of finding out “who done it” and why and how.
One reads because the accounts of their adventures are excellent
examples of the art of story-telling. The fact that his lordship never had
another chance is pretty good evidence, to my mind, that the observation
I have made is not altogether fanciful.

III

The “hurricane of farcicality” which the Spanish philosopher Ortega

y Gasset speaks of as raging through Western society at this time played
inordinate tricks with the structure of economic law. Many no doubt
remember the “new economics” hatched in the consulship of Mr.
Coolidge, whereby it was demonstrated beyond question that credit could
be pyramided on credit indefinitely, and all hands could become rich with
no one doing any work. Then when this seductive theory blew up with a
loud report in 1929, we began to hear of the economics of scarcity, the
economics of plenty, and then appeared the devil-and-all of “plans,”
notions about pump-priming, and disquisitions on the practicability of a
nation’s spending itself rich. America’s economic aberrations during 1920-
1942 have often been compared to those let loose in the later career of
John Law, but I thought the comparison was lame, even as any matter-of-
fact comparison was bound to be. These vagaries defied all criticism,
surpassed all comment; they stood entirely outside the purview of serious
consideration. I could find no match for them, not even in the prodigies
witnessed by Gulliver in the academy of Lagado, or the marvels wrought
at the court of Queen Whims, as described by Rabelais in the twenty-first
and twenty-second chapters of the Fifth Book.
The oddest of these infatuations is perhaps worth a word or two
because only now, at the time I am writing this, it seems to have reached
its peak. Ever since 1918 people everywhere have been thinking in terms
of money, not in terms of commodities; and this in spite of the most
spectacular evidence that such thinking is sheer insanity. The only time I
was ever a millionaire was when I spent a few weeks in Germany in 1923. I
was the proud possessor of more money than one could shake a stick at,
but I could buy hardly anything with it. I crossed from Amsterdam to
Berlin with German money in my bill-fold amounting nearly to $1,250,000,
prewar value. Ten years earlier I could have bought out half a German
town, lock, stock and barrel, with that much money, but when I left
Amsterdam my best hope was that it might cover a decent dinner and a
night’s lodging. One might suppose that a glance at this state of things
would show the whole world that money is worth only what it will buy,
and if it will not buy anything it is not worth anything. In other words,
one might suppose people would be set thinking, not at all about money,
but about commodities.
But nothing of the kind happened. The general preoccupation with
money led to several curious beliefs which are now so firmly rooted that
one hardly sees how anything short of a collapse of our whole economic
system can displace it. One such belief is that commodities—goods and
services—can be paid for with money. This is not so. Money does not pay
for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the
hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services;
but twenty years ago this axiom vanished from everyone’s reckoning, and
has never reappeared. No one has seemed in the least aware that
everything which is paid for must be paid for out of production, for there
is no other source of payment.
Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has
money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in
America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. Its existence is
purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on
the production of others. “Government money,” of which one hears so
much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing. One is especially
amused at seeing how largely a naïve ignorance of this fact underlies the
pernicious measures of “social security” which have been foisted on the
American people. In various schemes of pensioning, of insurance against
sickness, accident, unemployment and what-not, one notices that the
government is supposed to pay so-much into the fund, the employer so-
much, and the workman so-much. Only the other day I read that some
paperassier in the Administration at Washington,—or no, on second
thought I believe it was a paperassière,—had forged out a great new
comprehensive scheme on this principle, to be put in effect after the war.
But the government pays nothing, for it has nothing to pay with. What
such schemes actually come to is that the workman pays his own share
outright; he pays the employer’s share in the enhanced price of
commodities; and he pays the government’s share in taxation. He pays the
whole bill; and when one counts in the unconscionably swollen costs of
bureaucratic brokerage and paperasserie, one sees that what the workman-
beneficiary gets out of the arrangement is about the most expensive form
of insurance that could be devised consistently with keeping its
promoters out of gaol.
The sum of my observations was that during the last twenty years
money has been largely diverted from its function as a mere convenience,
a medium of exchange, a sort of general claim-check on production, and
has been slily knaved into an instrument of political power. It is now part
of an illusionist’s apparatus to do tricks with on the political stage—to aid
the performer in the obscenities incident to the successful conduct of his
loathsome profession. The inevitable consequences are easily foreseen;
one need not speak of them; but the politician, like the stockbroker, can
not afford to take the long-time point of view on anything. The jobholder,
be he president or be he prince, dares not look beyond the moment. All
the concern he dares have with the future is summed up in the saying,
Après moi le deluge.

IV

At any time after 1936 it was evident that a European war would not
be unwelcome to the Administration at Washington; largely as a means of
diverting public attention from its flock of uncouth economic chickens on
their way home to roost, but chiefly as a means of strengthening its
malign grasp upon the country’s political and economic machinery. In
such circumstances, as Prévost-Paradol observed at the time of Louis-
Napoléon’s Italian adventures, it is usually absolute governments which
look to this means of maintaining the security of their régime. My
European friends had watched with fascinated amazement the goings-on
in our economic Witches’ Sabbath, and wondered whether in the
circumstances the Administration would make a decisive move,—which
we agreed it might easily and effectively make,—to forestall the outbreak
of war. We had a good many conversations about this. My opinion was
that the Administration would make no move. I reminded my friends of
the formidable domestic difficulties which the British régime was facing
in 1914, and how that while these difficulties made it certain that the
régime would take the action it did, they also made it politically
impracticable for it to declare its intentions until after the first gun had
been fired.2
If in July 1914 Sir Edward Grey had served Prince Lichnowsky with a
firm notice of the régime’s intentions, it is a hundred to one that war
would have been considerably deferred; but England would have been left
split up by convulsions far worse than those of the eighteen-forties, and
the Liberal régime would be tossed to the dogs. Mr. Asquith’s Government
evidently took the realistic view that British connivances had already
made war a certainty; they had made British intervention also a certainty;
and, this being so, things had best be arranged to let the war break at a
time when it would be likely to do the most good and the least harm to
British political interests. The results justified this judgement; politically,
Britain came out of the war a very heavy winner, though in other
respects, of course, she did not. After 1936, as I told my friends, our
Administration seemed to me to be in much the same situation as Mr.
Asquith’s after 1911, and I expected it to act in the same way and for the
same reasons; as in fact it did.
Nevertheless the outbreak of war in 1939 took me quite by surprise; I
had no expectation of its breaking before another year. I was both a good
prophet and a bad prophet, as it turned out. In 1935 I put myself in print
that the break would come in the summer of 1939, as it did. A year or so
afterwards, circumstances caused me to change my mind and put the time
a year ahead, so in the spring of 1939 I was assuring all my American
friends that they had still another long year to go before they need begin
to worry; and they turned the laugh on me in royal style a few months
later. I suppose the moral is as one of my friends said: Make your
prophecy and then stick to it. One may as well do that, for forecasting a
war within a year or two is mainly guesswork. An “incident” can always
be arranged or manufactured or better yet, provoked, as we have often
seen; and then the fat is in the fire. In recent years, as far as I can
remember, every pretext for war has been carefully hand-tailored. The
Maine was, the invasion of Belgium notoriously was, and so were von
Bülow’s “damned missionaries.” As for the present war, the Principality of
Monaco, the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, would have taken up arms
against the United States on receipt of such a note as the State
Department sent the Japanese Government on the eve of Pearl Harbour.
Knowing its antecedents, one could regard the current war only as
one did the last, as an incident in a long and regular sequence of cause and
effect. It is so completely in order, so completely in the natural succession
of things, that one can feel little concern with its fortuitous ups-and-
downs or with its immediate outcome. A few months ago a member of the
Administration asked me if I thought we were “gypped on this war,” and I
replied briefly that I did. I could not enter into any discussion of the
matter, for my questioner would not have understood a word I said; or
perhaps might not even have believed me if I had explained that anything
like military victory or military defeat was farthest from my thought. I
could not explain that a boatman moving around in the gulf of St.-Malo or
in the Bay of Fundy is not at all interested in what the waves are doing,
but is mightily interested in what the tide is doing, and still more
interested in what it is going to do.
After the war of 1914, Western society lived at a much lower level of
civilisation than before. This was what interested me. Military victory and
military defeat made no difference whatever with this outcome; they
meant merely that the waves were running this way or that way. The
great bulk underlying and carrying the waves, the tidal mass, was silently
moving out at its appointed speed. So likewise I might have told my
questioner that we are “gypped on this war” because not victory, not
defeat, not stalemate, can possibly affect the tidal motion of a whole
society towards a far lower level of civilisation.
Therefore this war, like the last, has held no interest for me. I have
had no curiosity about its progress, have read nothing of it, and all I have
heard has been casual. I did not go in with any of the non-interventionist
movements, partly because I knew their efforts were futile, but mainly
because I was not sure they were well-advised. I knew, with Bishop Butler,
that things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them
will be what they will be; and therefore the attempt to cut in on those
consequences is not to be gone into lightly. Indeed, my respect for “the
chancellors of God” is so profound that if at any time I could have
defeated the Administration’s intentions by turning over my hand, I
greatly doubt that I would have done it. I certainly would not have done it
in 1914, and I am quite sure I would not have done it in 1939.
One must wonder how many of the multitude now reading War and
Peace read the sections devoted to historical and philosophical analysis;
and of those who do read them, how many read them carefully enough to
understand them; or are capable of understanding them, however
carefully they may read them.
 V

Wherever I went in Europe I was struck by the persistence of the old

original idea that America, and especially the United States, has no reason
for existence except as a milch cow for Europe. People there were
apparently born with this idea, as they might have been in the days of
Columbus and Balboa. I observed it not only in the higher walks of society,
but also in the lower. I observed also that Americans do not quite
understand this persuasion, which is why I speak of it here. As far as I
could see, there was no meanness about it, no spirit of grafting or
sponging, or of bilking a rich and easy-going neighbour. It seemed rather
to be the simple, natural expression of a sort of proprietary instinct. The
general harmony and fitness of things required that America’s resources
should at all times be at the disposal of Europe for Europe’s benefit.
Especially it was imperative that when Europe got in any kind of scrape,
America’s plain duty was to take the brunt of it, and to stand by when the
scrape was settled, and clean up the débris at American expense.
I was prepared to find this view prevailing in England, but not so well
prepared to find it on the Continent, though undoubtedly I should have
been. The two views, however, differed slightly. Ever since Elizabeth’s
spacious days, the general run of Englishry seem bred to the idea that all
peoples, nations and languages should be privileged to keep seeing to it
that Britannia is supported in the style to which she has been accustomed;
and naturally the United States is expected to come down handsomely
whenever the hat is passed. The Continental European’s view is more
prosaic; he has no notion of doing America any favour by tapping her
resources, but merely pockets the proceeds in a matter-of-fact way, and
thinks no more about it. The French Government, for example, entered up
the American war-loans as a “political debt”; in other words, they were all
in the day’s doings, and nothing to worry about.
It was this matter of the war-debts that suggested a misapprehension
on America’s part. Most Americans were of Mr. Coolidge’s mind, that
“they hired the money, didn’t they?” and when they saw that the money
was not coming back, they felt that they had been let in, and were pretty
warm about it, which was natural. Just as naturally the Europeans, who
did not share Mr. Coolidge’s view of the situation, were irked at being
regarded as dead-beats and swindlers; and the result was a great deal of
useless recrimination and bad blood. The Europeans simply did not get
Mr. Coolidge’s drift, and Americans did not quite understand that a
traditional line of thought which had persisted unbroken for four
hundred years was something to be reckoned with.
I could not help seeing also that America had unwittingly done a
great deal to keep this line of thought going. For a century and a half
America has consistently displayed towards Europe, and especially
towards England, a great sense of inferiority. Its attitude, both official and
social, has been one of ill-bred servility alternating with one of ill-bred
truculence. When I thought of Hay, Reid and Page in my own time it
seemed to me that Mr. Dooley’s remark about our ambassador “going to
Buckingham Palace as fast as his hands and knees would carry him” was
neither unkind nor uncalled-for. When one looks at the unending
effervescence of American snobbery displayed in social matters,—such as
court-presentations abroad, and at home the insensate pawing and
adulation bestowed upon “distinguished foreigners,”—one can hardly
wonder that Americans should be assessed at the valuation they put upon
themselves.
 Then again, over long periods America has been taking great masses
of unacceptable population off Europe’s shoulders; partly to satisfy
industrialists in search of cheap low-grade labour, and partly from
motives of a highly questionable humanitarianism. These immigrants
caused great streams of money to flow out of America to the folks at
home; and up to 1914, many came only with the intention of going back
for the rest of their lives as soon as they had got together enough money
for the purpose. The consequent political evils, due to our system of
universal suffrage, have been most calamitous; but, aside from that, it is
clear that this reckless policy of immigration must have done a great deal
to strengthen the conviction that America’s only mission in life is that of
being a good steady producer for Europe.

VI

The redistributions of population in Europe, brought about by the

war of 1914, showed some interesting phenomena. They made it seem
probable that if the process went on much longer, Europe would be
inhabited by a population of hybrids, mongrels, like the population of the
United States. In many obvious ways, this would be by no means a bad
thing in the long-run; but for the time being, the ignorance and predacity
of politicians were bound to make it troublesome. Among the many
knotty morsels in the messes of hash which these prehensile gentry
dished up under the name of succession-states, the problem of minorities
was perhaps the most refractory. This problem at best is always difficult,
and under the idiotic prescriptions laid down at Versailles, nothing could
be done about it.
Surveying the plight of minorities in Europe, I was reminded of the
appalling consequences of political intervention upon the problem of the
Negro minority in America. The effect of emancipation-by-fiat was never
better put than by Mr. Dooley; it “turned th’ naygur out iv th’ pantry an’
into th’ cellar.” It discharged upon the country a huge avalanche of
industrial specialists—mostly single-crop agriculturists—with nothing to
do, and no provision made for their getting anything to do. This was bad
enough, but political intervention had yet to show that it could do its
worst. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were a device
deliberately contrived by Ben Wade, Ben Butler, Thad Stevens and their
co-beauties to perpetuate the dominance of a Republican party
representing the economic interests of the industrial North. Politically,
this device did all that could be expected; it was successful to the last
degree; but it made the problem of the American Negro (in my opinion)
permanently insoluble by any means consistent with reason, decency or
humaneness.
With the very grave problem presented by another American
minority, the Jew, political considerations have until very lately had little
to do, except in the matter of regulating immigration. The seriousness of
this problem is being recognised, but its terms are confused in the public
mind. Apparently very few know what its actual terms are; and as long as
this confusion and ignorance persist, the way is open to all sorts of
misapprehension, suspicion, unreasoned hatred, and every undesirable
complication. It must be said that the peculiar temper and disposition of
the American Jew—I refer of course to the preponderating element among
them, the inferior order—enhances this confusion most unfortunately. He
resents vehemently any discussion of his people’s status as an American
minority, and he is alone among minorities in the pursuance of this
wholly irrational policy. This morbid sensitiveness is not without reason,
certainly, and its reason is plain. Nevertheless, as the wiser and more
intelligent Jews are well aware, it adds greatly to the problem’s confusion,
and thereby reacts most unfavourably upon the Jew himself.
Some time ago, noticing that the problem had become more pressing
and that its actual terms were not at all understood by the majority, I had
the idea of writing a small book which should show exactly what, in my
judgement, the terms of the problem are. This had never been done
categorically, as far as I knew, and I thought it should be. My book would
keep scrupulously away from the Jewish side of the fence; it would be
addressed to none but my own people, the American majority, peoples of
Western European stock. As a matter of good taste and courtesy it would
of course do this; but since responsibility for the exercise of reason,
justice, tolerance and good temper rests always heaviest on a majority in
these circumstances, I felt that it was with the majority that the book
should concern itself. I had the book about two-thirds ready when the war
unexpectedly came on, public attention was diverted, and the pressure of
the problem lightened; so I laid the book aside, to be picked up again and
published at a more favourable time.
I have no idea how the problem of these two American minorities
will finally be settled. I regret to say my conviction is that they will be
dealt with in the traditional manner, with immediate results which one
does not care to contemplate; that is to say, they will not be settled at all. I
know, however, that the problem of no minority anywhere can be settled
unless and until two preliminaries are established. First, that the principle
of equality before the law be maintained without subterfuge and with the
utmost vigour. Second, that this principle be definitively understood as
carrying no social implications of any kind whatever. “I will buy with you,
sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following,” said
Shylock; “but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.
 These two preliminaries demand a much clearer conception of
natural as well as legal rights than I think can ever prevail in America. The
French have this conception well established. If I choose to associate with
Negroes, and they choose to have me do so, whatever the terms of the
association may be, I am within my rights and so are they. If I insist on
other Negroes forming like associations, I exceed my rights; if Negroes
insist on others of my race forming them, they exceed their rights. The
doctrine of equality does not carry any competence in the premises to
justify either the Negroes or myself. The most agreeable and improving
social relations which I have enjoyed of late in America have been with a
coterie of Jews living in Pennsylvania. If they had found me unacceptable
and had excluded me, the doctrine of equality would have suffered no
infringement; nor would it if a Negro hotel-keeper or Jewish restaurateur
had turned me away; nor if the white proprietor of a theatre had refused
to let it for a performance by Negro or Jewish actors and actresses. The
principle of equality carries no implications of this kind, and the attempt
to foist them on that principle is an error of the first magnitude.
Sometimes I felt vaguely dissatisfied at finding so little in the state of
Europe and its peoples to excite my sympathy. It seemed as if perhaps the
sources of sympathy within my nature might be drying up; yet I knew in
reason that this was not so. Everything was so completely in the
sequences of cause and effect that one could not become sentimental any
more than one could sentimentalise the suicidal policy of the lemming.
Mankind had been striving after forms of organisation, both political and
social, too large for their capacities; believing that because they could
organise a small unit like the family, the village, even the township, with
fair-to-middling success, they could likewise successfully carry on with a
state, a province, a nation. Just so the lemmings on their migrations,
finding themselves able to cross small bodies of water, think, when they
come to the ocean, that it is just another body of water like the others
they have crossed; and so they swim until they drown. Season after
season, they make these attempts, unable to learn that the thing is
impracticable. Likewise, age after age, mankind have made the attempt to
construct a stable and satisfactory nationalist civil system, unable to learn
that nothing like that can, in the nature of things, be done.
For the trials and tribulations of America during the last twenty
years, like the great Mommsen, I could feel neither sympathy nor interest.
I often thought of a story which I heard from a friend years ago, and heard
again from him only the other day. His mother was expostulating with
Mommsen for some extremely severe strictures which that eminent man
was making upon the United States. She offered the usual plea-in-
avoidance to the effect that he ought to have more sympathy with us in
our shortcomings, because we were such a young nation. Mommsen
replied austerely, “Madame, your nation has had open before it the whole
history of Europe from the beginning; and without exception you have
consistently copied every mistake that Europe has ever made. I have no
sympathy whatever for you, and no interest in you.”

1 On this conclusion cf. C. J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, ed.

Harper, p. 238, and the discussion preceding.

2 These difficulties were: the impending consolidation of labour into the

One Big Union; the pressure for home rule for Scotland and Wales as well
as for Ireland; and the pressure for land-value taxation. All these matters
were due to come to a head simultaneously in the summer of 1914.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert
facts.

—HENRY ADAMS

I N SPITE of my French turn for scepticism and for “burning my nightcap

every morning,” which Louis XI recommended as sound diplomatic
practice, sheer curiosity has now and then let me into some rather
pointless adventures. They were of the sort which I knew well enough
would come to nothing, but I thought the experiment would in itself,
probably, be interesting enough to make it worth while. My editorial
experience was a case of that kind; I have shown my reasons for
undertaking editorial work for which I had not the slightest professional
qualification, and I have also shown what came of it. I think it was towards
the end of the ‘twenties, though I do not remember just when, that I was
asked to do some teaching. One of my friends who was busy in that line, a
man for whom I have great respect and affection, was very strong for my
taking up with the proposal, and so I did. The idea was that I should settle
down to it as a full-time occupation, but I demurred at that. My roots were
firmly fixed in Europe, and I had no notion of pulling them up. It was
agreed finally that I should come over for two months each winter, and
give two courses. I did this for two years, and then having had enough of
it to satisfy my curiosity, I gave it up.
Ever since I left college I had felt recurrent spasms of interest in the
American system of education. The revolution which took place towards
the turn of the century made an impression on me, enough so that I was
rather keen to see what would come of it, and therefore whenever I was in
this country I looked over its development in a general way. In course of
time I came to some pretty definite conclusions about this development,
and about its social effects. I even went as far as writing two or three
fugitive essays for Harper’s and the Atlantic on certain phases of the
subject. But all this was from the outside. I had no experience, no practical
acquaintance with the educational machinery which the revolutionary
forces had designed and built. So when the chance for an inside view came
along I decided that it would probably be worth taking.
The students who sat under me were presumably, I believe,
something of a picked lot; something, that is, rather above than below the
level of intelligence set by “the average student,” whatever that may
signify. They may have been all of that; I am not in a position to commit
myself on this point. What struck me with peculiar force was that only
one out of the whole batch was taking work with me because he wanted to
learn something about my subject. Most of them were taking it as a filler.
They sat where they did because they had to sit somewhere in order to
meet some requirement in an intricate system of “credits,” and the most
convenient place for them to sit happened to be in my lecture-room.
Some were there for purposes connected with their prospective ways of
getting a living. The majority, however, for all I could make out, were
there because they were, at the moment, nowhere else; they put me in
mind of the cheerful old drinking-song which we used to sing to the tune
of Auld Lang Syne:

We’re here because

We’re here because
We’re here because
 We’re here.

In spite of persistent effort, neither they nor I could produce any more
plausible reason why they were there, or for that matter, why they should
be anywhere. The point is that with one exception, these persons did not
regard the subject as one to be pursued disinterestedly for its own sake.
They were not even moved to it by an impulse of intellectual curiosity;
they simply cared nothing about it.
This state of things was not exceptional, or at all peculiar to the
institution which I served. Any one who understood the philosophy of
economism and who knew how well our educational system had been
formed to fit its requirements, would expect to find just those conditions
prevailing in any American college or university. He would expect to find
the student body divisible into two groups, the first made up of those who
were there in a sort of social quarantine. They had come to get a further
respite from going to work, or to make advantageous social contacts, or
because it was in fashion for everybody to go to college, or for some
equally irrelevant reason or combination of reasons. The second and
larger group would be made up of those who were in pursuit of such
studies as bore directly on their preparation for getting a living. Outside
these groups one might expect to find now and then a person of some
pretensions to intelligence, some conception of education as a formative
process; one who had intellectual interests unconnected with getting a
living, and who had perhaps also a vague suspicion that the philosophy of
economism falls a trifle short of covering the whole content and purpose
of our existence on this earth.

II
 I was greatly interested in seeing that our system of free popular
instruction was producing results, both negative and positive, which were
quite different from those which its original designers expected it to
produce. As Herbert Spencer has shown, no man or body of men has ever
been wise enough to foresee and take account of all the factors affecting
blanket-measures designed for the improvement of incorporated
humanity. Some contingency unnoticed, unlooked-for, perhaps even
unforeknown, has always come in to give the measure a turn entirely
foreign to its original intention; almost always a turn for the worse,
sometimes for the better, but invariably different. It is this which
predestines to ultimate failure every collectivist scheme of “economic
planning,” “social security” and the like, even if it were ever so honestly
conceived and incorruptibly administered; which as long as Epstean’s law
remains in force, no such scheme can be.
Our system was founded in all good faith that universal elementary
education would make a citizenry more intelligent; whereas most
obviously it has done nothing of the kind. The general level of intelligence
in our citizenry stands exactly where it stood when the system was
established. The promoters of our system, Mr. Jefferson among them, did
not know, and could not know, because the fact had not been determined,
that the average age at which the development of intelligence is arrested
lies somewhere between twelve and thirteen years. It is with intelligence
as it is with eyesight. No oculist can give one any more eyesight than one
has; he can only regulate what one has. So education can regulate what
intelligence one has, but it can not give one any more. It was this
unforeseen provision in nature’s economy which wrecked the
expectations put upon our system. As for raising the general level of
intelligence, the sluicing-out of any amount of education on our citizenry
would simply be pouring water on a duck’s back.
Aside from this negative result, I saw that our system had achieved a
positive result. If it had done nothing to raise the general level of
intelligence, it had succeeded in making our citizenry much more easily
gullible. It tended powerfully to focus the credulousness of Homo sapiens
upon the printed word, and to confirm him in the crude authoritarian or
fetishistic spirit which one sees most highly developed, perhaps, in the
habitual reader of newspapers. By being inured to taking as true whatever
he read in his schoolbooks and whatever his teachers told him, he is bred
to a habit of unthinking acquiescence, rather than to an exercise of such
intelligence as he may have. In later life he puts this habit at the
unreasoning service of his prejudices. Having not the slightest sense of
what constitutes a competent authority, he tends to take as authoritative
whatever best falls in with his own disorderly imaginings.
Thus a system of State-controlled compulsory popular instruction is
a great aid in making Homo sapiens an easy mark for whatever deleterious
nonsense may be presented to him under the appearance of authority.
One does not have to go farther than the account which the Pickwick
Papers give of the great election at Eatanswill to see how this is so. The
spread of literacy enabled Mr. Pott of the Gazette and Mr. Slurk of the
Independent to approach the credulousness of a greater number of people
than they could otherwise reach, and to debauch their credulousness
much more effectively. It enabled Mr. Pott to play upon the meanest
prejudices of the Blues, and Mr. Slurk to inflame the worst passions of the
Buffs; and thus to keep alive the feud of ignorant partisanship, like the
feud of the Greens and Blues in Rome and Byzantium so long ago, or the
feud of Whigs and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, Black Shirts and
Red Shirts, in more recent years. Mr. Pott and Mr. Slurk knew as well as
the editor of today’s newspaper knows, that what best holds people
together in pursuance of a common purpose is a spirit of concentrated
hate and fear. They knew that their constituents, Blue and Buff alike, were
a mere mob, intellectually as irresponsible as the wild dogs of Algiers, and
that an appeal to intelligence would be vain, nay, embarrassing. “Mere
reason and good sense,” said Lord Chesterfield, “is never to be talked to a
mob. Their passions, their sentiments, their senses and their seeming
interests are alone to be applied to. Understanding, they have collectively
none.” I am reminded here of an acute French critic’s remark made almost
a century ago, that this observation of Lord Chesterfield constitutes one of
the most serious arguments against representative government. In my
opinion it is by far the most serious argument; indeed, I believe a century
of experience has shown that it is the only argument needed. One may
confidently rest one’s case on it.
I observed that the course of our educational revolution had followed
the regular pattern common to all revolutions; but knowing the inflexible
laws which prescribe that pattern, I was not disappointed or taken aback.
“The sense of the inevitable” which Mr. van Loon speaks of had warned
me that the inevitable upshot of other revolutions would be the inevitable
upshot of this one. As soon as the system was on its way to become a going
concern with the taxing-power of the State behind it, the path of least
resistance lay open to a rapidly-increasing flow of persons whose interest
in education was secondary. These were careerists of sorts, impelled by
the fundamental law of conduct, that man tends always to satisfy his
needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Then the general
estimate, the currency-value, of education,—the generally-accepted idea
of what education is and ought to be,—was set by the worst form in
circulation, a form which had virtually nothing to do with education, but
only with training; and those forms which had more to do with education
were forced out. Then finally, after the system had passed a certain point
of development in size, power and prestige, the percentage of net profit
(putting the matter in commercial terms) began to show a steady decline.
Furthermore, the curiously composite public character of the system,
as I observed it in the late ‘twenties, interested me as having likewise
come out inevitably according to pattern; the pattern set in earlier times
by the Church, and now by the State. As a State-controlled enterprise
maintained by taxation, virtually a part of the civil service (like organised
Christianity in England and in certain European countries) the system had
become an association de propaganda fide for the extreme of a hidebound
nationalism and of a superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State.
In another view one saw it functioning as a sort of sanhedrim, a levelling
agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social
deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the
enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and
irregularities and suppressing them. In still another view one saw it
functioning as a trade-unionist body, intent on maintaining and
augmenting a set of vested interests; and one noticed that in this capacity
it occasionally took shape as an extremely well-disciplined and powerful
political pressure-group.
During my brief and unserviceable career as an instructor of youth I
had a good many hearty laughs whenever I thought of the quiet fun one
might have with Mr. Jefferson if he could return to the Republic and see
what his pet project of universal popular instruction had come to. I had
studied his character rather carefully, and could not make out that the
great and good old man had been blessed with an over-keen sense of
humour. Apparently he had enough to go on with, but not much more,
and what he had was of a dry type. I think, however, he would have risked
a wry smile at the spectacle of our colleges annually turning out whole
battalions of bachelors in the liberal arts who could no more read their
diplomas than they could decipher the Minoan linear script. He might also
find something to amuse him in the appearance of eminent shysters,
jobholders, politicians, and other unscholarly and unsavoury characters,
on parade in gowns and hoods of the honorary doctorate. Yet it would
probably occur to him that academic misdemeanours of evil example
were not unknown even in his own day. Only some half-dozen years after
Mr. Jefferson’s death, Harvard College admitted to its doctorate a man
whom John Quincy Adams very properly described as a barbarian,
incapable of putting a grammatical sentence together, and barely able to
spell his own name—Andrew Jackson.
One can not be sure that Mr. Jefferson would look with the eye of
humour upon certain other results of the system’s working. I suppose that
in the whole country today one would have to go a good long way to find a
boy or girl of twenty who does not automatically take for granted that the
citizen exists for the State, not the State for the citizen; that the individual
has no rights which the State is bound to respect; that all rights are State-
created; that the State is morally irresponsible; that personal government
is quite consistent with democracy, provided, of course, it be exercised in
the right country and by the right kind of person; that collectivism
changes character according to the acceptability of the peoples who
practice it. Such is the power of conditioning inherent in a State-
controlled system of compulsory popular instruction.
When it came to matters like these, Mr. Jefferson was an extremely
serious and outspoken person. I doubt that he would be in the least
amused by the turn which his pet project has given them since his time;
and not only in his own country, but in all countries where his project has
taken root. On the contrary, I believe he would regard the entire exhibit
with unstinted disgust and contempt.

III

Back in the days when I was doing editorial work, immediately after
the war, I had heard so much exasperating talk about education that I
became heartily sick of the word. War, like whisky, engenders seasons of
repentance, and that was one of them. The post-war dislocations,
disturbances and distresses got no end of well-meaning people stirred up
over the idea that nothing of the kind should ever be allowed to happen
again. They wrote, printed, lectured, organised clubs, associations,
forums, brought forth reconstruction-plans, peace-plans, and the devil-
and-all of other plans and projects designed to educate war off the face of
the earth. I was astonished at their number; one would hardly believe
there could be so many. Everything I remember of them now is that they
were all very strong for education, highly articulate, highly ineffectual,
and did not last long.
My occupation obliged me, for my sins, to keep more or less track of
these doings, but I went no further than that with any of them; and with
most of them, if the truth must be told, I rather scamped my job. None of
them contemplated anything really fundamental. One might agree that if
people can be educated to a common will in pursuance of a common
purpose to abolish war, the purpose will no doubt be accomplished; but
the main question surely is whether, if one “regards mankind as being
what they are,” the thing can be done at all; and the second question, if
the first be answered in the affirmative, is how to set about it. I saw no
evidence that the main question had ever even entered the heads of these
enthusiasts, or that the second had been entertained in any but a
superficial, handover-head fashion which could produce nothing
practicable or even sensible. Some of the more adventurous spirits,
apparently under the effects of Mr. Wilsons inspiration, went so far as to
propose educating all mankind into setting up a World State which should
supersede the separatist nationalist State; on the principle, so it seemed,
that if a spoonful of prussic acid will kill you, a bottleful is just what you
need to do you a great deal of good. I did not join forces with any of the
groups engaged in these endeavours. I was as much against war as they
were, and as much in favour of education as any one could be; and I also
had the highest respect for their earnestness and devotion. But I knew, as
they apparently did not, that if you go in for education you must first
make sure of having something educable to educate; and second, you
must have some one with a clear and competent idea of what he is about,
to do the educating. I saw no prospect that either condition would be met.
With the average of intelligence standing immovable at the thirteen-year-
old level, I knew that the first one could not possibly be met; and as for
the second, even in the case of the educable, it would be a Sisyphean job
to offset the processes of intensive conditioning which the State
continually applies to its citizens, beginning from the first day of their
conscription into its system of compulsory instruction, and ending on the
last day of their lives.
Another numerous body of opinion had a grievance against war, but
it was rather particular than general. They did not make so much of moral
and humanitarian issues as the others did, though probably in principle
they disapproved of war quite as heartily. Their particular contention,
however, was that never again should the United States pull anybody’s
chestnuts out of the fire but its own. The outcome of the war bore hard on
those who had swallowed the jobholders’ glib mendacity about the
enterprise being a war to end all wars and to make the world safe for
democracy. When it finally became clear that the war was no such noble
undertaking as all that, but was merely a disreputable scuffle for loot,
exactly like the wars which for untold ages had preceded it, those who
had accepted it in good faith as a crusade for righteousness felt that they
had been outrageously let in, and made no bones of saying what they
thought about it.
I was not one of this number, for I had already cut my eye-teeth on
the Spanish War. My observations of foreign affairs since the days of
McKinley and John Hay convinced me that what British jobholders were
wanting in 1914 was exactly what British jobholders had wanted in 1898.
It was clear to me in 1898, as I have already said somewhere in these
pages, that the British Foreign Office had constantly before its eyes the
vision of a world at peace, dominated and operated by British imperialism,
with the United States kept in hand to act as a bouncer and pay heavily
for the privilege, whenever malcontents became obstreperous. I could
make nothing else of Mr. Hay’s conduct; of the British Colonial Secretary’s
“blowing the gaff”; and of our military and diplomatic doings in the
Pacific. The Spanish War had turned out to be a tradesmen’s war; there
was no doubt of it. So when the war of 1914 came on, I bent a jaundiced
eye upon its officially-advertised aims and motives, for I knew too much
of what had been going on in European politics since 1910 to believe a
word of them. When the secret treaties came to light after the Bolshevist
revolution, and the reports of Belgian diplomatists in Berlin, Paris and
London were published, the whole rationale of the war was shown to be
just what one would know it must be. When the peace-terms were seen to
correspond with the terms of the secret treaties and not with those of the
infatuated Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, it could surprise no one. When
the League of Nations proved to be only a blind for jobholders intent on
maintaining the status quo, what else could one expect?
I felt somewhat sorry for the gudgeons who had been hooked by the
lies of jobholders and their tagtails of the press, pulpit and platform, as
one must always feel sorry for the victims of any set of common
swindlers; but I did not see how anything could be done about it. I thought
the hardest trial they had to bear must be the memory of all the appalling
drivel they had poured forth in their spasms of pseudopatriotic ardour.
During the war I often witnessed the sorry spectacle of old acquaintances,
normally quite cool-headed persons, emitting great volumes of lurid
nonsense about “the mad dog of Europe” and his murderous designs on
the world in general; and how if Britain and France should fall, the whole
structure of Western civilisation (for so they naïvely called it) would
collapse in ruin. What must they have thought of themselves when
daylight finally broke in on them!
I never disputed or discussed these views,—what was there to
discuss?—but I often recalled them afterwards when projects of
“education for peace” were being broached. I could imagine how far any
of these projects, or all of them put together, would be likely to get with
an average popular mentality capable at any time, on twenty-four hours’
notice, of being sent clean daft by any egregious canard that officialdom
saw fit to disseminate. Writing from Rome in 1536 to the bishop of
Maillezais, the great realist Rabelais grimly cites Claudian’s line, Mobile
mutatur semper cum principe vulgus. So it did in 1914, virtually overnight;
and conditions being what they were, I saw no way of ever educating it to
do otherwise thereafter.
 But after all, as I reflected on the wild whirling words of my
acquaintances, I asked myself is not all this just democracy? As I
understand the term, it is of the very essence of democracy that the
individual citizen shall be invested with the inalienable and sovereign
right to make an ass of himself; and furthermore, that he shall be invested
with the sovereign right of publicity to tell all the world that he is doing
so. I do not know whether these rights are implicit in the Magna Carta,
but if a sufficient political interest were at stake no doubt the Supreme
Court could discover that they somehow are. I do know, however, that
they are expressly stipulated in the American Bill of Rights; they are
declared beyond peradventure in the First Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States. Well then, if any citizen or body of
citizens chooses to exercise these sovereign rights, on any pretext or on
none, is it competent for another member of the democracy to demur or
interfere? I think not; but however this may be, why in the name of
common sense should an intelligent person have the least wish to
interfere?
So when in their course of killing off the Kaiser and his myrmidons
by word of mouth, my vehement acquaintances now and then paused to
catch their breath, I would say, “Yes, yes, exactly—just so—I quite
understand you,” and let it go at that.

Dans le pays des bossus

II faut l’être
Ou le paraître.

IV
 I have always been profoundly grateful for my luck in having been
enabled in my early youth to understand that education is one thing and
training quite another, and thus to avoid the vicious errors resulting from
confusion of the two terms. It can not be too often reiterated that
education is a process contemplating intelligence and wisdom, and
employing formative knowledge for its purposes; while training is a
process contemplating sagacity and cleverness, and employing
instrumental knowledge for its purposes. Education, properly applied to
suitable material, produces something in the way of an Emerson; while
training, properly applied to suitable material, produces something in the
way of an Edison. Suitable material for education is extremely scarce;
suitable material for training abounds everywhere. The young men I saw
during my brief term of service as a teacher (not those in particular who
sat under me, but generally) were manifestly ineducable beyond the
thirteen-year static level of intelligence; but they were fully endowed
with cleverness and sagacity, and were capable of being excellently well
trained in any number of ways.
When one considers man’s place in nature, one gets a firm grasp on
this distinction. In our loose and inaccurate speech, we say commonly
that man rose to dominance over the rest of the animal world in virtue of
his superior intelligence. I can find no evidence that this is so. It seems
clear, on the contrary, that he rose to this position of dominance in virtue
of his immeasurably superior cleverness and sagacity. He had the sharp-
set Edisonian sagacity to notice all manner of things that were about him,
to observe their relations and reactions, what they did and how they
worked, and he had the Edisonian cleverness in rearranging, modifying
and adapting them for the satisfaction of his needs and desires. But
intelligence, properly so called, would seem to have been as sporadic, as
unevenly distributed, as it is now, and its average level undoubtedly
neither lower nor higher.
When I was an undergraduate student I read the elaborate work
called Anti-Lucretius, by the accomplished French cardinal-statesman or
statesman-cardinal, Melchior de Polignac, written to refute the neo-
Epicurean doctrines which had been promulgated at that time by
Gassendi and others. I was much impressed by a long passage in the sixth
book, in which the cardinal shows how primitive man got his start in the
world by observing the practices of other animals and improving on them.
Philosophically, the Anti-Lucretius can hardly be said to have hit the mark,
perhaps, but it is an excellent specimen of seventeenth-century
hexameter, well worth my quoting a few lines from the passage I have
mentioned. They give a thought-provoking view of various tricks which
our sagacious and clever ancestors picked up in this way, such as dam-
building, deer-stalking, netting birds and fish, mining, and even the
lighter arts of dancing, acting and petty larceny:

Hinc aliquas vitiis, aliquas virtutibus olim

Insignes dixere feras; hominique fuisse
Primitus exemplo, atque opera ad complura magistras:
Ut canis occultum silvis deprendere Damam
Nare sagax, et odora sequi vestigia praedae,
Veneri docuit....
Forte etiam insidias Vulpes, artemque latendi,
Perque canaliculos fodiendae subtus arenae
Monstravit, fecitque viam ad querenda metalla;
Unde homines docti coeperunt viscera terrae
Rimari....
Et quid non Elephas, quid mimo Simia gestu
 Non praestat; vafra et Felis; saltator et Ursus?...
Paxillos in aquam primus defigere Castor
Instituit, laribusque inimicum avertere flumen,
Et ligna intrito atque intritum jungere lignis;...
Callida quinetiam dum tendit Aranea laxos
In foribus casses, internectitque sagenam,
Retibus et pisces et aves captare dolosis
Admonuit.

So the passage goes on through many more instances of the same kind.
But as far as my reading goes, the clearest and most interesting brief
précis of what pure sagacity and pure cleverness have done for mankind
is found in the sixth chapter of Mr. Charles F. Lummis’s remarkable work
called Flowers of Our Lost Romance. This excellent book was published in
1929, so I suppose it has been long out of print, but if one can find a copy
of it anywhere it will be worth all the trouble one has had to look for it.
It was this great endowment of cleverness and sagacity which
enabled the frail, feeble and unintelligent Homo sapiens in the first
instance to survive, and then to gain dominance over his more physically-
powerful competitors in the struggle for existence. Furthermore it was
this, and this only, which has enabled him to build up the prodigious
apparatus of civilisation which with unconscious humour he persists in
regarding as evidential of civilisation itself. I can not make out where
intelligence played any part in the process; still less, wisdom. The satirist’s
view of man’s creation is certainly not without the appearance of reason.
One can see an uproarious cosmic jest (and I think by no means a bitter
one; on the contrary, I should regard it as harmless, even on the whole,
benevolent) in the idea of creating a being with enough sagacity and
cleverness to harness all the forces of nature in constructing the most
elaborate mechanism of civilisation, and then not giving him intelligence
enough to civilise himself, or even to understand what civilisation means.
Here then, in the inordinate lack of balance between these two sets
of forces,—sagacity and cleverness on the one hand, intelligence and
wisdom on the other,—I perceived a valid reason why the social
agglomerations of mankind are so unstable. They can be stabilised only by
the continuous exercise of a very considerable and generally-diffused
intelligence and wisdom; and these are simply not to be had, they do not
exist, have never existed, and at present one sees no prospect that they
ever will. Homo sapiens has already gone so astonishingly far in the
progress which Goethe predicted, without any corresponding advance in
intelligence and wisdom, as to make it easily conceivable that in the long-
run he may perish through his own inventions. Goethe himself, with a
poet’s insight, had an uneasy suspicion of something like this. In the next
sentence after his prediction he says, “I foresee the time when God will
have no further pleasure in man, but will break up everything for a new
creation.” There is a pleasing touch of irony in the thought that the forces
which have enabled Homo sapiens to survive and dominate, and to indulge
in all manner of inflated conceits about himself, his merits, and his
importance,—that these forces may very easily be the ones to bring about
his annihilation. The broken sentence found graven on the tomb of one of
the Scipios, words which for sombrous majesty have no equal in any
literature, might well serve as an epitaph upon the race. Qui apicem
gessisti... mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos fama virtusque, gloria
atque ingenium.

V
 Circumstances being as they are, one has no trouble about seeing
that a State-controlled system of popular instruction is bound to lean
heavily to the side of training, since the trainable masses stand
immeasurably in excess of the educable few. But by looking a little beyond
this, one can perceive another reason, equally valid, why the system
should tend to be stepmotherly with the educable few; that reason being
that the coercive collectivist State is distinctly uninterested in the
cultivation of intelligence and wisdom. This is understandable, and there
can be no complaint of it, for the State has no uses to which persons of
intelligence and wisdom can be put. It is notorious that the State’s affairs
can be successfully carried on only by persons of sagacity and cleverness,
heavily tempered with improbity. We all accept this fact as matter-of-
course and agreeable to the nature of things, which it unquestionably is;
the proof of it is found in the invariable character of those who are most
conspicuous in administering those affairs. Sometimes when an autocratic
ruler wishes to make an impression of enlightenment, he will put men of
intelligence and wisdom in some conspicuous sinecure as window-
dressing, or confer some kind of ostentatious patronage on them, as
Catherine II did with d’Alembert and others of the Encyclopaedists; but in
all these instances the motive is political. Speaking of Napoleon’s
patronage of men such as Fontanes, Joubert, Chateaubriand, Count
Lüxburg put it very well that “he considers these people as drugs of the
imperial pharmocopœia, ingredients to be mixed up in the chemical mass
of an emperor’s government.”
But throughout history the man of intelligence and wisdom has been
merely so much useless lumber in view of the State’s purposes. Voltaire’s
gay epigram on le superflu, chose trèsnecessaire has distinctly not been
applicable to him. Often indeed, like the Swifts, Arnolds, Butlers, Gilberts,
Shaws, he has been something of an embarrassment. In England at the
time of the Tangier incident, I could not keep back a smile,—rather
sardonic, I am afraid,—at the thought that if the British State had ten
thousand of the world’s wisest and most intelligent men at its disposal, it
could not find a single thing for them to do which would not be most
dreadfully embarrassing. When I was next in England, four years later,
intelligence and wisdom would not have exempted a Socrates, Jesus,
Confucius, if of military age, from conscript service as a private in the
front line, side by side with the half-witted; what other use would the
State have had for his proficiencies? It all seemed natural and reasonable
enough, and I could not get stirred up about it, as so many were. What was
the best that the State could find to do with an actual Socrates and an
actual Jesus when it had them? Merely to poison the one and crucify the
other, for no reason but that they were too intolerably embarrassing to be
allowed to live any longer.
On the other hand, the State can use as much highly-developed
sagacity and cleverness as its institutions can turn out. There is room to
spare for these everywhere throughout its bureaucracy and in the wide
field of its practical politics. The State could do nothing with a thousand
Emersons, but it would count itself lucky if it could build its personnel on
the foundation of a thousand persons who had all of Edison’s highly-
trained sagacity and cleverness, and none of his integrity. There is no
need to press this point, however; every one understands it. Why, then,
should a State-controlled system of instruction do more than go through
the motions of dealing with an educable minority? I see no reason why it
should. It is perfectly logical that it should not; the disparagement of
intelligence and wisdom is all in the general “course of rebarbarisation”
on which Spencer saw so clearly that Western society had set forth nearly
a century ago. It is inevitable, and therefore the part of wisdom is not to
resent it or deplore it or think overmuch about it.
At one time I had the notion that our system might do a little better
than it was doing by the educable minority. I thought that with all its
innumerable training-schools for the ineducable, it might establish two or
three modest institutions which should be strictly educational, devoted to
cultivating intelligence in those who gave proof of having it, and holding
out the attainment of wisdom as an end preëminently desirable for its
own sake. The idea seemed unpretentious enough, and putting it into
effect as an experiment would cost relatively little. I went on the
assumption that although persons of intelligence and wisdom were no
asset to the State, they might be something of an asset to society, and
were therefore worth a moderate amount of attention. I had not actually
given the matter much thought, however, and as soon as I turned it over
in my mind I perceived that it was nothing to be taken seriously; for
obviously, whether or not such persons are an asset to society depends
altogether on the kind of society you have, on what philosophy governs it,
on what it is trying to make of itself, what it is driving at. As soon, then, as
I found myself back on the solid ground of reason and logic, I saw that our
system was all in the right, and that my notion of the educable minority
being a potential social asset was quite wrong.
If the whole content and purpose of mankind’s existence can be
summed up in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution of
wealth, it is impossible to see where intelligence and wisdom come in for
a footing. A society completely committed to the philosophy of
economism has no more use for them than the State has; naturally so,
since in such a society the State is the organised expression of
economism.1 Hence such a society has nothing to gain by the presence of
wise and intelligent persons; they are not a social asset. The best it can
find to do with them is to make them hewers of wood and drawers of
water for the sagacious and clever majority. The young person of
intelligence who sets out to “get wisdom, get understanding,” as the
Jewish Scriptures exhort him to do (and it is interesting to look up these
exhortations and see how many and how forcible they are) does so in full
knowledge that society will continually be reminding him in various well-
understood ways, mostly rather harsh, that he is wasting his time and
should be doing something useful.
All this again is so completely in the course of nature, so orderly and
logical, that I saw no reason why one should feel any bitterness about it or
complain of it, though I knew that many did feel great bitterness. I
remember having been much impressed many years ago by the dedication
of a novel by Jules Vallès, the revolutionist of 1870 and member of the
Commune. I think the title was Le Bachelier, though I am not sure; I was so
little taken with the book itself that I have forgotten. The dedication ran:

à tous ceux qui, nourris de grec et

de latin, sont morts de faim.

But I asked myself why, when all comes to all, should they not die of
starvation? I saw no reason. They were useless to the State, useless to
economism, and they mustered far too few votes to interest a political
collectivist humanitarianism, so how could either the State or society be
reasonably expected to keep them alive? “And to think,” cried Voltaire, in
a burst of wrath, “that an army-contractor makes $4000 in a day!” I could
not share his indignation. That army-contractor was a man of sagacity
and cleverness who was performing an indispensable service to the State’s
iniquitous undertakings; and if he could turn a trick to net himself $4000
by way of a day’s pickings, his service was no doubt worth it from the
State’s point of view. During the war of 1914 I saw fortunes made in this
way by sagacious men who one might think were considerably overpaid,
but a moment’s reflection would show that the question depended on the
point of view from which one estimated the value of their services. From
the point of view of civilised man, that is to say the psychically-human
being, those services were of no value; but from that of the anthropoid
mass-man they were of great value. Hence I could find nothing out of the
way in the State’s liberality, and so far from sharing Voltaire’s indignation
against it in a like case, I thought it was very just. As I saw the matter in
1914, the psychically-anthropoid masses of democracy were accepting the
State’s designs and even whole-heartedly glorifying them; and moreover,
ex hypothesi it is never the State’s business to promote civilisation. So to
expect the State to take Voltaire’s point of view on the sagacious war-
profiteer seemed to me most illogical; and for a critical observer to take
that point of view seemed not only illogical, but also,—which is no doubt a
more serious irregularity,—undemocratic.

VI

When I was surveying educational matters at closer range than

ordinarily, what impressed me most was the dissatisfaction of
professional educationists with the results produced by our system.
Complaints on this score, coming as they did from many of the most
distinguished men in the service, seemed almost innumerable, and they
were expressed with a force-fulness betokening disappointment and
grievance. One conference of educationists, I remember, wound up in
fairly general agreement, according to the press-reports, that our system
is a failure. The president of a huge straggling university said
despondently that our undergraduate colleges had been trying for forty
years to find an effective substitute for the discarded classical curriculum,
and had not yet succeeded. Reports made under the auspices of various
foundations amounted actually to indictments. On a distinguished public
occasion one educationist said that the type of education offered by our
million-dollar high schools is about one-twentieth as valuable as the type
offered by the little red schoolhouse of a past generation. I am told that
these lamentations continued unabated long after I had ceased to keep
any track of them. In fact, only two or three years ago I happened on a
searching deliverance from the president of one of our largest colleges for
women, and found it quite in the old familiar vein. I quote a few lines from
it because in a general way they set forth the main ground of all the
complaints I had been reading in the ’twenties:

Any one who has opportunity to meet and study in large numbers the alumni of the

American colleges is likely to have attacks of depression. In spite of the vast investment of

money and energy in these institutions it is only too clear that in a great many cases
education has failed to “take,” or the infection has been so slight that few traces are to be

perceived after five or ten years of the wear and tear of American life.

I thought that this complaint which as I said is typical, would stand a

little sifting. While I had felt every sympathy with the system’s critics and
was in complete agreement with them about the validity of the facts
which they brought forward, I could not agree that the system was in
quite such a bad way as they thought it was. They impressed me as being
either victims of confusion about what exactly the system was supposed
to drive at, or else victims of a rather serious failure in realism, a failure to
see things in their true nature and appraise them for what they are. In
forming estimates of this kind, one must above all be realistic; one must
remain as little as possible unaffected by prejudice, convention or
sentiment, no matter how generally laudable these may be. On all these
grounds I was as far on the side of the complainants as it was possible for
a child of the old educational régime to go; I was with them as far as the
combined forces of prejudice, convention and sentiment could carry me.
Nevertheless, in a clear view of the requirements which the State puts
upon the system, and the requirements which the ruling social doctrine of
economism puts upon it, and the inexorable prescriptions which nature
puts upon it, I could not see but that it was doing an extremely good job.
In the first place, how can education “take” when those who are
exposed to it have had nature’s gift of complete immunity conferred on
them at the age of twelve or thereabouts? Any such expectation is
manifestly and preposterously exorbitant. Training will “take” to some
extent in almost any instance where it does not encounter absolute
imbecility, but education will not. If education contemplates intelligence
and wisdom—and what else can it contemplate?—one who for years had
been president of a notable college for women must surely have perceived
that the vast majority of his students were ineducable. He could do great
things for them in the way of sagacity and cleverness; he could make
them excellent routineer biologists, botanists, geologists, chemists,
perhaps even passable cooks and housekeepers if his institution carried
the requisite equipment; he could make them good grammarians,
philologists, even historians, all of a psittacene type; but educate them he
could not.
In the second place, why should education be expected to “take” in a
society where the qualities of intelligence and wisdom are of necessity
classified not even as by-products of its corporate life, but as waste-
products? These qualities notoriously play no part in the production,
acquisition and distribution of wealth, and therefore a social philosophy
which regards this process as accounting for the whole content and
purpose of mankind’s existence must write them off as so much slag.
So in all this I found no reason why a clear-minded person should be
“likely to have attacks of depression.” I certainly experienced none.
“Things and actions are what they are,” said Bishop Butler, “and the
consequences of them will be what they will be.” There the State was,
fixed, immovable, standing as the great instrument of economic
exploitation; there also was the philosophy of economism; there also was
a system of compulsory popular instruction, answering to the
requirements of both. In its great work of training and conditioning the
ineducable masses, I thought our system was doing, on the whole, a first-
rate job, and I said so publicly. As for the educable minority, they were
merely casualties of the time and circumstances into which they were
born, and that was that. The whole course of things seemed to me
perfectly logical, orderly, with each step making the next one inevitable
in the long sequence of cause and effect, “the chancellors of God,” as
Emerson so well and truly calls them. There seemed no incentive to
depression or fault-finding anywhere in the sequence; the aspect of
nature’s great Inevitable is too august, too admirable, to admit of either.
For a brief time I had a notion that in the interest of simple
straightforwardness and honesty all systems such as ours might do very
well to give up their nugatory fiddling with degenerate fag-ends of what
used to be known as the “humanities,” and throw them on the dust-heap
for good and all. I did not set much store by this notion, however, for one
could see plainly that they must come to that in the natural course of
things; indeed, in the ’twenties one could see that they must come to it
very soon. Coercive collectivism was on its way throughout the Western
world, and logically the first thing for the coercive collectivist State to do,
as soon as it had got itself well established, would be to shut down firmly
on all instruction which did not bear intensively on conditioning its
children and young people to an unquestioning ex animo acceptance of the
State’s will; and this would of course do away with even the sleaziest sort
of education. It may be imagined with what interest I remarked how
promptly the Fascist government of Italy fulfilled my expectations by
doing just that, and since then how regularly the other great coercive
collectivist governments in both hemispheres have followed the Fascist
example.
It has been profoundly interesting to me to observe how closely the
nationalist State’s technique of conditioning its citizens into an attitude of
docile servility follows that of the mediæval Church. Up to the sixteenth
century the Church was the great instrument of exploitation, as the State
is now. The individual was born into the Church, and the Church’s
superintendence regulated every step of his daily existence as long as he
lived. Its coercions, interferences and exactions were limited only by
calculation of what the traffic would bear. In pursuance of its purposes it
devised an elaborate system of conditioning; and in the sixteenth century,
when the nationalist State took over its purposes and hamstrung its
competition, it also took over its technique of cultivating obedience and
docility in its subjects. On this point I can do no better than to quote from
one of Mr. Carlton J. H. Hayes’s admirable essays on nationalism:

Nowadays the individual is born into the State, and the secular registration of birth is the

national rite of baptism. With tender solicitude the State follows the individual through life,

teaching him in patriotic schools the national catechism, and commemorating his vital

crises by formal registration not only of his birth, but likewise of his marriage, of the birth of

his children, and of his death. And the death of national potentates and heroes is celebrated
 by patriotic pomp and circumstance that make the obsequies of a mediæval bishop seem

drab.... Nationalism’s chief symbol of faith and central object of morality is the flag, and

curious liturgical forms have been devised for ‘saluting’ the flag, for ‘dipping’ the flag, and

for hoisting’ the flag.... Nationalism has its parades, processions and pilgrimages. It has,

moreover, its distinctive holy days, and just as the Christian Church adapted certain pagan

festivals to its own use, so the National State has naturally borrowed from Christianity....

Every national State has a ‘theology,’ a more or less systematised body of official doctrines
which have been deduced from the precepts of the ‘Fathers’ and from admonitions of the

national scriptures, and which reflect the ‘genius of the people’ and constitute a guide to

national behavior.

It has taken a good three hundred years for the superstitions cultivated by
the Church’s system of conditioning to show signs of wearing off, and they
are not yet by any means worn off. From this one may infer that the
kindred superstitions cultivated by the nationalist State’s system have a
fairish lease of life, and that their manifestations will remain pretty much
what they are. For a man of his ability and experience, the late Senator
Borah seemed to me singularly naïve in his saying that “the marvel of all
history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens
unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.” To me the marvel is
that any one can marvel at it.
Thus logic and the course of events in the ‘twenties combined their
forces to convince me that the well-disposed persons whom I saw
hopefully relying on education to bring about world-peace, to achieve
some semblance of a civilised society, or to fulfil some other grandiose
collective purpose, were leaning on a broken staff. Their hopes were based
on an egregious misconception of man’s place in nature, of his intellectual
and psychical accessibility, of the laws which mainly determine his
conduct; and finally, they were based on an enormously erroneous
conception of the State’s character and function. Such being the case, it
appeared to me impossible that these hopes could come to anything but
speedy and overwhelming disaster, as they now seem to have done.

1 For an illustration of this point I may again refer to Mr. Marquand’s

novel passim; and I might take this occasion to remark that H. M. Pulham,
Esquire is in my judgement the nearest thing to adult fiction that has come
from an American pen in many years.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Omnia exibant in mysterium.

—THOMAS OF AQUIN.

Illi sunt veri fideles Tui qui totam vitam suam ad emendationem disponunt.

—IMITATIO CHRISTI.

I N MYschooldays in Illinois, sometimes when we had a free evening

three or four of us would be asked out to some house in town where we
would find a group of companionable pretty girls waiting for us. We had
what might now seem a curiously chivalrous sentiment towards these
girls, regarding them as something to be deferred to, pampered and
protected. Perhaps our fine old friend Major Pendennis would have called
it one of the “damned romantic notions boys get from being brought up
by women,” but there it was. On one of these pleasant social evenings we
tried our hand at table-turning. The great wave of interest in spiritist
manifestations which swept over Europe and America in the eighteen-
forties had pretty well subsided, but one still found backwaters of it here
and there. We had never heard of table-turning, but the girls had got wind
of it somehow and were eager for a trial. By spreading our finger-tips on a
table-top and using some formula—I have forgotten what it was,—to
concentrate our attention, we soon had the table rocking at a great rate,
and even moved it all around the room.
Inspired by this success, we tried another experiment. Seating a girl
in a heavy arm-chair, four of us stood around her, two on a side. Each of
us put the tips of his forefingers together, his arms extended full length.
Then three times in unison we raised our arms high and lowered them,
inhaling deeply and exhaling as we did so. When our arms came down for
the third time, we put the joined tips of our forefingers under the edge of
the chair-seat and lifted the load of chair and girl four feet in the air as if
it were a Windbeutel. There was no hocus-pocus about it; the chair was
good sound Victorian walnut, and the girl was a hulking wench who must
have run to a hundred and thirty, net; and the odd thing was that in
lifting all that mass, none of us felt more than a feather’s weight on his
finger-tips. We repeated this once or twice, with the same result. Then we
tried lifting without going through the preliminary motions, and failed.
We tried again as before, but breaking the rhythm, making the
preliminary motions out of unison, and this also was a failure.
We had not the faintest idea of how these odd phenomena “made
themselves,” as the French say, but they tapped no vein of superstition in
any of us, nor did they move us to take stock in any theory of a spiritist
agency at work. The thing was too trivial for that, even in the minds of
schoolboys. Table-tipping and hoisting a corn-fed strapping hussy four
feet or more in the air would seem an incongruous business for a
disembodied spirit to be entertaining himself with, unless he were a
jocular fellow like Rabelais’s Cincinnatulo, who liked to mystify people;
which I suppose is conceivable. We did not speculate about it, but took it
merely as a trick of some kind which we did not understand, and thought
no more about it.
Once shortly after this incident I tried spirit-writing out of pure
curiosity; I had just then heard of it for the first time. I got several
“messages” of such a commonplace character that I could not associate
them with the personages from whom they purported to emanate. One
which laid claim to come from a deceased aunt, warned me against
tobacco and liquor, this being about the last thing which that particular
aunt would have in mind to do. I put all this down as sheer nonsense of no
evidential value whatever, as far as any external influence was concerned.
One Sunday morning, not long after I had left college, I was in the
gallery of the church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn. The choir had just
begun the Venite and I was all absorbed in the magnificent music when
suddenly I was struck with horrible illness and faintness. Something
impelled me to turn around, and there I saw sitting in an indolent
attitude, his eyes fixed on me with a dull, sinister phosphorescence, a man
who might have passed for a twin brother of King Edward VII. The sight of
him affected me with the utmost horror and loathing; I never experienced
such a sensation even in encountering a water-moccasin. I somehow
managed to stagger out of the building, and in a few minutes I recovered
completely.
Some months later, in the same place and at the same point in the
service, the same thing happened again, precisely as before. I had
meanwhile been attending the church quite regularly, always in the same
pew, and all memory of the incident had passed out of my mind.
About two years afterwards I was walking up Court Street late one
night in a driving rain with my old roommate at college whose home was
in South Brooklyn. The street was quite deserted; no one had passed us”.
All at once I was taken with a hideous illness and faintness, and put my
hand on my roommate’s shoulder to steady myself. He asked what the
matter was, and I said, “I don’t know, but I feel as if I had been shot hard
by something.” At that moment some one passed us, half-hidden by an
umbrella; he turned his head as he went by. It was the same man.
 At a friend’s house one evening in the ‘twenties I met a Russian
operatic tenor, a fine artist. I had already heard him distinguish himself as
Hermann in a marvellous performance of Pique-Dame, such as one could
never forget. This evening after dinner my friends persuaded him, much
against his wish, to show off a curious trick. Standing before him, you
presented the back of your hand; he put the tips of his forefingers
together and pointed them at it, about three inches distant. In a minute or
so you would feel a strong jet of ice-cold air coming out of his forefingers
against your hand as out of a blowpipe. He did this “with great toil and
vexation,” like Thaumast in his colloquy with Panurge; he said the effort
so exhausted him that if he did the trick oftener than twice at a stretch he
was completely done in, which reminded me of Vassily’s collapse, in
Tourgueniev’s Strange Story. He did not know how the thing was done, and
I wondered how he discovered that he had this peculiar gift. I never heard
of another instance of it; though that is saying little, for it may be in every
professional magician’s repertoire, for all I would know. There was
certainly no unconscious collusion about it, for the subject was not told
what to expect.
These three or four extremely trivial experiences in the realm of
what is called the hyperphysical or extraphysical are all I ever had. I think
I may not have the psychical sensitiveness which invites them; I doubt
that spiritists would find me a good medium. I knew nothing, really, about
spiritism proper until 1911 when I was in London, and the late William T.
Stead talked with me for two hours about his adventures in that sphere.
He showed me spirit-photographs, writings, evidences of levitation, and
some of the stories connected with these were most remarkable. What
interested me chiefly was his saying that he had got thought-transference
down to such a fine point that he had practically given up the use of his
telephone. Only that morning, he said, he had fixed his mind on getting
back an umbrella which some one had borrowed, and the man promptly
turned up with it just before I came in. I was reminded of my
grandmother’s strange experience at the time of her father’s death in
England. There seems to be something in this matter of thought-
projection. Goethe left record of some striking instances of it, as did Mark
Twain, and as no doubt many others have done. The notable instance of
the French officer, Captain de Géroux, and his impressionable sister, an
instance amounting to clairvoyance, is well authenticated. The idea that
disembodied spirits play any part in thought-projection, however, seems
to me gratuitous.

II

By all the evidence of sense-perception there appeared to be

“something in” the Russian tenor’s odd performance, as there was in our
table-turning and chair-lifting, and as there is in the phenomena of
telepathy, clairvoyance, thought-transference, the Poltergeist, and so on.
When one has said that, apparently one has said all there is for one to say.
But even so, it is also apparently as much as one can say about many of
the commonest phenomena observable in our everyday existence. I have
often wondered why Protestant theologians make so much of the
Scriptural miracles and mysteries when one sees daily so many miracles
which are far more impressive and no end more purposeful. The fact that
ice floats instead of sinking, which I understand to be a most exceptional
phenomenon in nature’s economy, seems to me much more impressive
than the miracle of Elisha’s ax-head, or of Jesus and Peter walking on the
waters of Galilee. It also seems much more to the point, when one reflects
on what this planet would be like if ice did not float, and what would
happen to all forms of life if it should cease to float.
Maintaining the order of nature appears to me quite as respectable a
miracle as an isolated, momentary and relatively very insignificant
interruption of that order would be. Gravitation, always varying directly
as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, holds the stars in
their courses to the farthest reaches of the universe; and here, on a third-
rate planet moving in a tenth-rate solar system, it also enabled me this
morning to find my shoes exactly where I left them when I took them off
last night. I should say that by way of a miracle, either of those
performances would be quite as respectable as the other, and quite as
respectable as any to be found mentioned in Holy Writ. Mr. Long, the
translator of Marcus Aurelius, says most truly that “we can not conceive
how the order of the universe is maintained. We can not even conceive
how our own life from day to day is continued, nor how we perform the
simplest movements of the body, nor how we grow and think and act,
though we know many of the conditions which are necessary for all these
functions.” As I see it, there is small choice among miracles in this world,
for no one has the faintest idea of how, still less why, the order of nature
came to be arranged as it is; no one knows how or why the stars came to
follow their courses or my shoes came to stay put overnight. “Natural
law” accounts for nothing, for natural law means not a thing in the world
but the registration of mankind’s experience. Not long ago I read of a fine
exhibition of intellectual integrity by a physicist lecturing on magnetic
attraction. He told his students that he could describe the phenomena, put
them in order, state the problem they present and perhaps carry it a step
or two backward, but as for the final “reason of the thing,” the best he
could say was that the magnet pulls on the steel because God wants it to.
 Some of the Roman Catholic theologians are more to my mind. “All
things keep continually running out into mystery,” said St. Thomas of
Aquin, seven hundred years ago. In matters where the mystery is more or
less sensational or apparently irregular, like our chair-lifting or Mr.
Stead’s thought-transference, and where any hypothesis about it is as
hard to disprove as it is to prove, my Platonist interest in “the reason of
the thing” runs out, and my agnostic French strain keeps me content to
have no hypothesis whatever. Like Mr. Jefferson, I have always been
content to “repose my head on that pillow of ignorance which a
benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should
be forced to use it.”
The unknown author of the Imitation was moved to offer a prayer of
such wisdom that I have always kept it by me for use as an emergency-
brake when my Platonist spirit of inquiry showed signs of getting out of
hand. “Grant, O Lord, that the kind of knowledge I get may be the kind
that is worth having.”1 I have already mentioned somewhere far back in
these pages that one of the deepest impressions made on me in my
childhood was made by my perceiving that ignorance exists, that people
know actually very little about anything, nor are they equipped for
knowing much more than they do. My friend Henry Stanley Haskins, in
his remarkable little work, Meditations In Wall Street, puts it drily that “the
eyes, ears, nose, taste and touch are the only parts of our equipment that
we can’t rely on for complete and accurate information.” As I grew older I
learned that the uses of ignorance, when kept within its proper scope, are
great and salutary, and nowhere more so than in matters pertaining to
the realm of the spirit. If our knowledge of the causes operating in that
realm were complete and certified, I do not believe we should be any
better, any wiser in managing our mundane life, or, in spite of the
buoyant sentence of Lucretius, any happier. I am sure I should not be; and
therefore for me at least, such knowledge is not of the kind that is worth
having.

III

If I were asked to name the most striking spectacle observable in my

time, I should say it was the long round-trip voyage which science made
away from metaphysics and back again to the most egregious mess of
metaphysics that ingenuity could devise. When I was a lad, science had
tossed metaphysics into the junkpile. The scientific Left, headed by
Moleschott and Büchner, had gone in for Strafford’s policy of “thorough”
against the idealist philosophers, especially Hegel. Straight materialist
monism was the thing; the universe was to be interpreted strictly in terms
of matter and force. Boscovich’s hypothesis had even resolved matter
itself into “centres of force,” whatever those might be. Consciousness was
a function of the brain; “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes
bile.” The moderate and sensible Huxley, Romanes and others, thought it
was not quite so simple as all that, and dissented vigorously. But
metaphysics were at a ruinous discount all round, and in particular the
metaphysics of Christian theology were condemned in terms so severe as
to make the exitiabilis superstitio of Tacitus seem mild and judicial.
Science went on with its investigations of matter and force,
consciousness, space and time, like the donkey after the carrot, but the
carrot apparently as far away as ever. When one was through with atoms,
molecules, ions, electrons, protons, and so on, where was one, what had
one actually got? Now I see that one great mathematician goes a bit ahead
of Boscovich by resolving matter, not into centres of force, but into
“groups of occurrences,” and thinks that matter as an actuality, a thing-
in-itself, may not exist at all. Another savant thinks that matter is a
characteristic of space, while still another suggests that space is a
characteristic of matter. Another sage has decided that space has a
definite diametrical limit, beyond which there is no space, no matter, not
only no anything, but literally no nothing.
I am far from setting myself up as a judge of these deliverances, but
in all diffidence I maintain that in their totality they amount to as fine an
exhibit of metaphysics as anything the Schoolmen can show. In the course
of their efforts to express the inexpressible, define the indefinable, and
imagine the unimaginable, these master minds have made the
metaphysical grand tour and are back once more in the old familiar port
of the Middle Ages, safe and sound. When I heard of a disagreement about
the shape of space, one pundit holding that space is cylindrical and
another that it is globular, I went back for refreshment to the eleven great
theses of Pantagruel, which Rabelais says were “debated after the manner
of the Sorbonne, in the Schools of the Decree near St. Denis de la Chartre,
at Paris.” I especially wished I might hear our two great men of science
debate Pantagruel’s third thesis, which seems so particularly in their line:
“Whether the atoms, turning about at the sound of the Hermagorical
harmony, would make a compaction or a dissolution of the quintessence
by subtraction of the Pythagorean numbers.” In point of intelligibility I do
not see a pin to choose between the metaphysics of the Athenasian Creed
and the fresh-laid metaphysics set forth in current scientific doctrines
concerning matter, space and time. As between the two, I turn from both
and seek safety on the old and well-tried ground of agnosticism.

IV
 By the time I was thirty I had read quite a bit of theological literature
by fits and starts, for no reason in particular but that the subject-matter
was interesting and the literature superbly good. I had no religious doubts
or misgivings to resolve. Somehow I had completely missed out on the
eruption of Sturm und Drang which is supposed, I do not know how
correctly, to accompany adolescence, and which is said to give rise
oftentimes to religious self-searchings. That period of my life was marked
by no more spiritual stress than any other; that is to say, by none. I think,
though it is mere conjecture, that this exemption may have been due to
the heavy pressure of other matters. I had so much baseball to play just
then, so much responsibility about dogs, so much fishing, sailing,
swimming, skating, iceboating, horseback-riding, and other general-
utility jobs of like nature to attend to, that when these duties were over
for the day I was too bone-tired to worry about my spiritual status, or
indeed to worry about anything. Perhaps also the lack of emphasis laid on
the minutiæ of religious beliefs and observances during my childhood
may have had most to do with it. However it may have come about, I do
not recall in all my life any religious experience that was disturbing, any
harrowing doubts, any stretch of bumptious juvenile atheism, or anything
of the kind. And so it was, I suppose, that I approached the magnificent
literature of religion with as few prepossessions, as unbiased a mind, as
any one could have.
I did hardly anything with comparative religion, except as other
reading had brought me into casual contact with the religions of Greece
and Rome, and now that in later years I have scratched the surface of that
study I wish I had done more. The part of Christian literature which I
found most acceptable was the work of writers who had applied an
enlightened common sense, combined with an enlightened fervour, to
“the divine impossibilities of religion,” and who drove most directly at
practice. On the other hand, I found the part of it which was devoted to
metaphysical and institutional system-building or system-propping
largely unacceptable, as savouring less of religion than of science or, as I
thought, pseudo-science. Arnold’s Literature and Dogma gave me a
thoroughly satisfactory account of Christianity’s nature and function. His
conception of religion as “morality touched by emotion” satisfied me. The
object of religion, as I saw it, is conduct; and whatever mode or form one’s
religious persuasions may take, if it bears fruit in sound conduct it is ad
hoc sound religion.
My philosophical counsellor Edward Epstean lately put this to me in
a rather striking figure. He accepts the Pauline doctrine of the
dichotomous man, the doctrine of the “two selves,” about which I may
presently have more to say, and he likens man’s progress through life,
with respect to conduct, to the progress of a rope-walker. Being
dichotomous, man is always being put off balance by the promptings of
the “lower and apparent self,” and religion functions as a balancing-pole
to bring him into equilibrium again and hold him steady under control of
“the higher and real self.” It makes no difference, my friend said in his
forceful way, “whether that pole is made of Christian oak or Jewish steel
or Confucian teak or Mohammedan bamboo, as long as the man finds it
best adapted to doing what he wants done, and really makes it work.”
Goethe said truly enough that man never knows how
anthropomorphic he is. But man can know, if he has the very small
amount of reflective power requisite to enable him to find out, and is
willing to use it. The advantage of doing this is that if a person knows how
anthropomorphic he is, and if he keeps the consciousness of it constantly
in mind, he can then go on being as anthropomorphic as he likes, and no
harm done. Some such idea may have been in the back of Joubert’s mind
when he said that “it is not hard to know God, provided one does not
trouble oneself to define Him.” Any nomenclature will do, any set of
hypothetical attributes, if one is constantly aware that all these are a mere
matter of words thrown out, as Arnold so happily puts it, at a reality
immeasurably beyond one’s power of expression.2 One may speak of Deus,
Zeus, God, Jehovah; of the Ens infinitum infinité, with Spinoza; of the Not-
ourselves, making for righteousness, with Arnold; of the Unknown and
Unknowable First Cause, with Spencer; of the Best one knows or can
know, with Luther; but one may use these or any other terms with safety
only if one knows to a certainty how anthropomorphic one is in one’s use
of them.
For my own part, aware that I am in any case shut up to
anthropomorphism, I see nothing against making a complete job of it.
Today I habitually think and speak of God as “a magnified and non-natural
man,” as did the two bishops against whom Arnold discharged his
broadsides of deadly raillery. The attributes I assign Him are all human,
and among the foremost of them I place a highly refined and lively sense
of humour. I sometimes imagine Him as immensely tickled by the capers
of his pretentious little creatures here below, and I have now and then
suspected Him of arranging matters to make those capers show to the
best advantage. We oldsters all remember Mr. Garfield’s “heatless
Mondays” in the last war, and how regularly on Sunday nights the
mercury would drop headlong to an appalling death. After this had been
repeated three or four times, one ghastly Monday morning Allen McCurdy
met me on the street and said, “Who’s coming out ahead on this, d’ye
think, God or Garfield?” The same amusing thought was in my own mind.
I remember too, one day when Charles Beard and I were in one of what he
used to call humorously our Meditations on the New Testament, he said,
“I believe if you approach God in a perfectly frank, self-respecting
manner, as one gentleman to another, He will meet you half-way and do
the decent thing by you. But I have noticed nine times out of ten, if you go
cringing and snivelling up to Him on your hands and knees and try to
butter Him up, work Him for something, or make a deal with Him, He
won’t even listen; and the tenth time He will wait till you get real close up,
and then kick the seat right out of your pants.” This is an
anthropomorphic view, surely; but in the premises, what view can be less
so?
Aware that the mode of my own religious persuasions was most
imperfect and must always be so, I felt great tolerance towards other
modes, even those which were based on what seemed to me sheer
superstition. As Flaubert says that politics are for the canaille, so with
equal truth Joubert says that superstition is the only basis of religion
which the lower order of mind is capable of accepting. In so far, then, as
superstition alone is effectual in working on that order of mind to bring
forth sound conduct, I regard it as respectable and not to be meddled
with.
I read considerably in the English religious philosophers of the
seventeenth century, especially the group called the Cambridge
Platonists, which included Cudworth, John Smith, Whichcote, Glanvill,
Culverwel. I imagine that they are quite forgotten now, though I do not
know where at this present time one could get a more intelligent practical
guidance towards the essential nature of Christianity and towards a more
satisfying respect and love for it, than these men offer. To my mind, their
great merit lies in keeping a firm grasp on actuality, in their insistence on
the evidential value of mankind’s actual experience, and in their emphasis
on conduct. Even in skirting the edges of metaphysics, they never let
themselves be swept off their feet. When Smith amplifies Luther’s
definition by saying, “Where we find wisdom, justice, loveliness,
goodness, love and glory in their highest elevations and most unbounded
dimensions, that is He; and where we find any true participations of these,
there is a true communication of God; and a defection from these is the
essence of sin and the foundation of hell,”—when Smith says this, one
feels that he has gone as far with a prescriptive system of dogmatic
theology as it is safe to go; and he goes no farther. Taylor also, with his
mind on metaphysical credenda, gives warning that “too many scholars
have lived upon air and empty nothings, and being very wise about things
that are not and work not.” And work not—there he comes back, as these
men are always coming back, to the basic ground of practice, of conduct;
and how great is the reason why they should, for as Whichcote says, “men
have an itch rather to make religion than to practice it.” Conduct is the
final thing, and dogmatic constructions which fail to give proof of
themselves in bringing forth conduct are worse than useless.

The history of organised Christianity is the most depressing study I

ever undertook, and also one of the most interesting. I came away from it
with the firm conviction that the prodigious evils which spot this record
can all be traced to the attempt to organise and institutionalise something
which is in its nature incapable of being successfully either organised or
institutionalised. I can find no respectable evidence that Jesus ever
contemplated either; the sort of thing commonly alleged as evidence
would not be substantial enough to send a pickpocket to gaol. By all that is
known of Jesus, He appears to have been as sound and simon-pure an
individualist as Lao-Tsze. His teaching seems to have been purely
individualistic in its intent. One would say He had no idea whatever of its
being formulated into an institutional charter, or a doctrinal hurdle to be
got over by those desirous of being called by His Name. If there is any
reputable evidence to the contrary, I can only say with Pangloss, “It may
be; but if so it has escaped me.”
Organised Christianity has had the same fate which has beset all of
mankind’s attempts at organising itself around some great and good social
purpose. The same influences have conspired to vitiate it that have
vitiated all other-like attempts, and have done this in the same familiar
way. Not much is known about Christianity’s organisation in the first
three centuries, but apparently what there was of it was relatively loose
and informal. In any case, with due allowance made for intolerances,
disagreements, bizarre aberrations, rabid fanaticisms,—and of all these
there was no doubt plenty,—the main interest of its rank and file would
seem to have been religious. Indeed, it is hard to see where any other kind
of interest could have come in, for Christianity had no prestige, no wealth;
it was a proscribed, persecuted, hole-and-corner affair, regarded by the
State as seditious and by Roman society as contemptible, much as the
American State and American society regarded Mormonism not so many
years ago. Early in the fourth century, however, Constantine I, like the
good politician which he was, foresaw the future of Christianity and
established it as the official religion of the Lower Empire. His object was
political, not religious; he was out to establish a régime of political
absolutism, and he saw that an official religion could be made an
extremely useful instrument not only for helping him on in that purpose,
but also for keeping people docile under absolutism when it was achieved.
So he gave the organisation considerable wealth, a great deal of prestige,
and put it on its way to be what Mr. Middleton Murry calls “a good wife to
the State.” Ever since then the Christian organisation has pretty diligently
fulfilled that function wherever it has been established by the State or
subsidised by tax-exemption.
Constantine’s act gave Christianity a social cachet, making it
eminently respectable and fashionable. Then Epstean’s law, which before
that had not seen much chance to show what it could do, at once herded
into the organisation a swarm of persons whose interest was not religious,
but secular. Many of these were turned towards it by a careerist motive,
but all by one-or-another motive of secular profiteering. For them it was
the way of satisfying their needs and desires with the least possible
exertion. In the fourth chapter of the Fifth Book, Rabelais gives a racy but
substantial account of the operation of Epstean’s law at the time of the
Protestant Reformation; in fact, as an exposition of Epstean’s law the
whole episode of the Ringing Island is worth a careful reading.
Then on the heels of Epstean’s law came Gresham’s law, fixing the
currency-value of religion by the worst type in circulation; that is to say,
allowing no more face-value to “morality touched by emotion” than it
allowed to a punctilious pro forma acceptance of ecclesiastical dogma and
ritual, thus tending to drive the former out. Then finally came the law of
diminishing returns, which saw to it that the greater the organisation
grew in size, wealth and prestige after passing a certain point, the more
the net spiritual product accruing from its operation tended to diminish.

VI

Not long ago a woman I have long known but had not seen for some
years, said to me, “I have a surprise for you. I have become a Christian.”
This declaration gave me a slight chill. If it meant one thing, it was such
an enormous pretension that I could hardly imagine a person of any
delicacy who knew its implications would dare to advance it. If it meant
another, one would hardly know how seriously to take it; not but what my
friend was serious enough, but simply that a better-informed person
might find that the statement pointed at something mostly meaningless
or even largely stultifying. The question whether one is or is not religious
is hard enough to answer; and the question whether one is or is not a
Christian is in my opinion impossible to answer categorically; the answer
might mean anything or nothing.
I do not find any evidence that Jesus laid down any basic doctrine
beyond that of a universal loving God and a universal brotherhood of
man. There is no report of His having discussed the nature of God or
laying stress on any other of God’s attributes, or that He ever said
anything about them. He also exhibited a way of life to be pursued purely
for its own sake, with no hope of any reward but the joy of pursuing it; a
way of entire self-renunciation, giving up one’s habits, ambitions, desires
and personal advantages. The doing of this would establish what He called
the Kingdom of Heaven, a term which, as far as any one knows, He never
saw fit to explain or define. His teaching appears to have been purely
individualistic. In a word, it came to this: that if every one would reform
one (that is to say, oneself) and keep one steadfastly following the way of
life which He recommended, the Kingdom of Heaven would be
coextensive with human society. The teaching of Jesus, simple as it was,
was brand-new to those who listened to it. Conduct, “morality touched by
emotion,” put forth as the whole sum of religion, was something they had
never heard of.
Simple as the teaching of Jesus may have been, it was also very
difficult. Following the way of life which He prescribed is an extremely
arduous business, and my opinion is that those who can do it are, and
have always been, relatively few; even those able to understand the terms
of its prescriptions would seem to be few. If the record be authentic, Jesus
appears to have been clearly aware that this would be so. Yet there is
abundant evidence that Jesus was not merely offering an impracticable
counsel of perfection, for the thing has been done and is being done;
mainly, as is natural, in an inconspicuous way by inconspicuous persons,
yet also by some like St. Francis and others among the great names one
meets in the history of Christian mysticism, whom circumstances
rendered more or less conspicuous.
Assuming that a person took these matters as stated, and that he
faithfully followed out their prescriptions, I think that in the first century
and probably in the second, he would have passed muster as a Christian.
Later on, when Gresham’s law, which had used St. Paul as its chief
instrument, completed its work of intellectualising Christianity into an
entirely different public character,—a character which it has maintained
ever since,—the case was somewhat different. I greatly doubt that our
hypothetical person could have got himself accepted as a Christian at any
time in the latter part of the third century, certainly not in the fourth; and
certainly not now, unless by some sort of low and unscrupulous collusion-
in-perjury which would make hay of the official articles of the Christian
Faith.
At the beginning of the fourth century organised Christianity showed
a pattern set, not by Jesus, but by Gresham’s law; a pattern essentially
Jewish, but sophisticated by some Mithraic accretions. It had reverted to
the Jewish conceptions of a particularised and bargaining God, and of a
redeeming Messiah. This Christian Messiah, however, was Jesus, who was
God’s only Son, and with a third being, called the Holy Spirit, was an
integral part of the Godhead. It had reverted to the old metaphysical ideas
concerning blood-sacrifice, blood-atonement, refining them somewhat in
the transference; it also reverted to an elaborate system of ritual
ceremonies and a professional priesthood, and it took over the Mithraic
Sunday.
One would be hard put to it to find that Jesus ever had in mind any
forecast of anything like all this; there is certainly no suggestion of such a
forecast anywhere in the Gospels. Nevertheless organised Christianity is
still set in this pattern, and hence the question whether or not one is a
Christian is not in most cases, I believe, susceptible of a categorical
answer. For myself, I would not pretend to give any kind of answer. My
impression is that in the course of a couple of centuries Gresham’s law
supplanted a stark and simple doctrine of practice by a stark and highly
complex doctrine of belief; and how far the two can be reconciled I should
say depends on the individual’s powers of self-persuasion. I can do
nothing whatever with reconciling them.
Concerning the legends of miracle and mystery which have grown up
around the historic figure of Jesus, I notice with interest that my attitude
of mind is exactly what it was when as a three-year-old child I
encountered the New England Primer’s doctrine of original sin. For
example, I would not affirm or deny that Jesus was born of a virgin
mother; I would merely raise the previous question, How can any one
possibly know anything about it?3 Or, if I had been at the council of Nicæa
in the year 325, and Arius had told me that Jesus was not an integral part
of the Godhead, I would have asked him how he knew that; and if
Athenasius had told me that He was, I would have asked him the same
question. I have seen too many miracles and mysteries in the course of my
life ever to take “the high priori road” of affirmation or denial with respect
to any.
What impresses me about such matters, however, is not so much the
paucity of evidence available concerning them, as that, for all I can see,
they are essentially immaterial, adventitious. All the credenda to which
Gresham’s law has committed organised Christianity seem to me not
nearly so difficult in their improbability as in their pointlessness. I do not
see that they have any bearing upon practice. If it were proven beyond
doubt that Epicurus was born of Athene’s brain and came into the world
like Gargantua, by way of his mother’s ear, I do not see how the fact could
affect either the soundness of his philosophy or its applicability. So
likewise if all the mass of organised post-Pauline Christianity’s
metaphysics were proven true or false tomorrow, I do not see that one’s
view of the historic Jesus and His teaching would be in the least affected.
For some years I have been observing that organised Christianity is
in a poor way; it has come into some disrepute, but far more into general
disregard. It has lost the power of making itself feared, and has gained no
power of making itself loved; its ancient prestige has dwindled to the
point where Epstean’s law can no longer do any business with it. Its
officials are uneasily aware of this, and some of them are looking about for
a new apologetic which shall enable “the Church,” as they call it, to
recover its lost ground. I doubt their success, and I think with reason. The
more forthright of the Church’s officials distribute the responsibility for
this disintegration between an irreligious materialistic society and a
spineless secularised Church. I suspect that there is far more to it than
that. I suspect the trouble is that people at large, even good people,
religious people, even those who by Mr. Cram’s classification are to be
reckoned as human, have simply stopped thinking of religion in
institutional terms; they have become ad hoc individualists.
If this be so, I can not deplore it; neither can I argue any calamitous
consequences from it, but quite the contrary. I can conceive of a post-
Pauline Church going to destruction, carrying with it the whole cargo of
metaphysics which Gresham’s law has loaded on it, yet leaving the
historic Jesus standing before society in a clearer light than ever. I have
every respect for Sir Thomas Gresham’s memory, but I take leave to think
that the religious apologetic produced by the mighty power of his law,—
an apologetic based on metaphysics, miracle and magic (there is no word
for it but that one),—is no longer serviceable.
The only apologetic for Jesus’s teaching that I find in any way
reasonable is the one which Jesus Himself propounded—experience. His
way of life is not to be followed because He recommended it, or because
He was virgin-born, or was a part of the Godhead, or could work miracles,
or for any other reason than that experience will prove that it is a good
way, none better, if one have but the understanding and tenacity of
purpose to cleave to it; neither of which I have, and I believe very few
have. Here once more is where the hard gritty common sense of the Jew
comes out, in his instinctive recourse to the apologetic of experience: “O
taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” It was also the signal merit of the
Cambridge Platonists that they recognised experience as the sum-total of
Jesus’s own apologetic. Smith, in his discourse on the Method of Attaining to
Divine Knowledge, urges it in more impassioned language than any of the
others, with the possible exception of Culverwel. “Ἔστι καὶ ψυχῆς
αἴσθησίς τις.” Smith says, in a noble passage. “The soul itself hath its
sense, as well as the body; and therefore David, when he would teach us
how to know what the divine goodness is, calls not for speculation but
sensation. Taste and see how good the Lord is.” Continuing, Smith remarks
the progressively increasing power of spiritual insight accruing from the
discipline of experience—

We shall then converse with God τῷ νῷ, whereas before we conversed with Him only τῇ

διανοίᾳ, with our discursive faculty, as the Platonists were wont to distinguish. Before, we

laid hold on Him only λόγῳ ἀποδεικτικῷ, with a struggling, agonistical and contentious
reason, hotly combating with difficulties and sharp contests of divers opinions, and

labouring in itself in its deductions of one thing from another. We shall then fasten our

minds on Him λόγῳ ἀποφαντικῷ, with such a serene understanding, γαλήνῃ νοερᾷ, such

an intellectual calmness and serenity as will present us with a blissful, steady and invariable

sight of Him.

As with the other inscrutable phenomena which I have mentioned, I think

there is “something in” the phenomenon of a progressively clarified
spiritual insight at which these words are thrown out. It appears by all
evidence as something specific, and the sense of it perhaps as to some
degree communicable. Beyond this I can say nothing, and I doubt that
anything can be said.

VII

I was much interested in some further conversation with Edward

Epstean on the subject of religion, tending to show that organised
Christianity has made somewhat a mess of its conception of sin and of
what to do about it. The point of our talk took me back to Mr. Beard’s
remark which I have quoted, about the stultifying ineptitude of
orthodoxy’s cringing approach to God as in the prayers we all repeat and
the hymns we all sing. Mr. Epstean’s view was based on his Pauline
assumption of the dichotomous man, the man of “the two selves,” one
divine and the other bestial, and he thought that progress on the way of
life recommended by Jesus is better made by an energetic strengthening
of the former than by direct efforts to repress and weaken the latter.
Whether or not the basic assumption be sound, I believe that the method
is eminently sound, and that in laying stress on the opposite method
organised Christianity has brought a great deal of avoidable, enervating
and rather cruel distress upon those of its adherents who took its
pretensions seriously.
“When God created man,” Mr. Epstean said, “He was not out to create
a race of competitors, nor could He have done that without upsetting the
whole run of His universe; at least, we can’t see how He could, and we do
see that He very evidently didn’t. He created man part divine, part bestial,
and the two elements have been at war within the individual ever since.
When the bestial side gets the better of it for the moment, as it will every
now and then, and you go wrong, don’t bother over repenting and
nagging yourself about it. Let it go,—forget it,—to hell with it!—and put
your energy harder than ever on building up the divine side. Don’t try to
repress the bestial side. Repression is negative, enervating. Put all your
work on the positive job, and you can afford to let the bestial side take its
chances.”
I am not so clear in my mind as I once was about the dichotomous
man; Mr. Cram has made some serious difficulties for me on that score.
But this does not affect the validity of Mr. Epstean’s view, considered as a
matter of method. As such, I think it may be regarded as the one in all
respects most consistent with the general discipline contemplated by
Jesus’s teaching.
1 Da mihi, Domine, scire quod sciendum.

2 One reason why the religious literature of the Jews is so inestimably

precious is that it is thoroughly permeated by a sense of this. The Oriental

mind does not take kindly to the subtleties of metaphysics. In the Old
Testament the Jew lets his anthropomorphism range with the utmost
freedom, but one is all the time conscious that behind it is the hard, clear,
cold-pressed, realistic common sense which is always instantly ready to
say with Job, “Lo, these are parts of His ways; but how little a portion is
heard of Him.”

3 Parthenogenesis occurs in several groups of the animal world and is

probably much more common than has been supposed; hence one might
agree that it would be perfectly competent for nature, if so minded, to
produce an instance of it, or indeed any number of instances, among
mankind. That such an instance has or has not in fact occurred, however,
is purely a matter of evidence.
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Quod amplius nos delect at, secundum id operemur necesse est.

—ST. AUGUSTINE.

The primary and sole foundation of virtue, or of the proper conduct of life, is to seek our own profit.

—BARUCH SPINOZA.

F ROM what I have now written I think one may easily see how it came
about that by the time I was in my early thirties I found myself settled
in convictions which I suppose might be summed up as a philosophy of
intelligent selfishness, intelligent egoism, intelligent hedonism. It may be
seen also how subsequent observation and reflection confirmed me in this
philosophy. With a squeeze here and a pull there, any of those terms,
selfishness, egoism, hedonism, might be made to fit in a hand-me-down
fashion; but I do not like them, because they connote something
academic, elaborate, something which needs a great deal of explaining.
My findings are too simple and commonplace for anything like that. If it
were obligatory to put a label on them, I should say, with Goethe’s well-
known remark in mind, that they amount merely to a philosophy of
informed common sense. To know oneself as well as one can; to avoid self-
deception and foster no illusions; to learn what one can about the plain
natural truth of things, and make one’s valuations accordingly; to waste
no time in speculating upon vain subtleties, upon “things which are not
and work not”;—this perhaps is hardly the aim of an academic philosophy,
but it is what a practical philosophy keeps steadily in view. Because the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so consistently does keep just this in view,
it still remains, and for those who can take it will probably always remain,
the best of handbooks to the art of living.
The fundamental validity of egoism and hedonism seems to me
indisputable, as it did not only to the Cyrenaics and to Epicurus, but to
Christian moralists like Butler and Wilson among Protestants, to Spinoza
among Jews, and to the mighty Augustine of Hippo among Catholics. But
putting all such authority aside, I hold it to be a matter of invariable
experience that no one can do anything for anybody. Somebody may
profit by something you do, you may know that he profits and be glad of
it, but you do not do it for him. You do it, as Augustine says you must do it,
are bound to do it (necesse est is the strong term he uses), because you get
more satisfaction, happiness, delight, out of doing it than you would get
out of not doing it; and this is egoistic hedonism.
By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for
“society.” When the great general movement towards collectivism set in,
about the middle of the last century, “society,” rather than the individual,
became the criterion of hedonists like Bentham, Hume, J. S. Mill. The
greatest happiness of society was first to be considered, because in that
the individual would find a condition conducive to his greatest happiness.
Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism, and it found
its way at once into everyone’s mouth, although it is utterly devoid of
meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind; This
hybrid or rather this degenerate form of hedonism served powerfully to
invest collectivism’s principles with a specious moral sanction, and
collectivists naturally made the most of it. It bred a numerous race of
energumens, professional doers-of-good; and surrounding these were
clusters of amateur votaries whose concern with improving society was
almost professional in its intensity. When in the later ’nineties I first
observed this fetichistic exaggeration of society’s claims against the
individual I regarded it as transparent nonsense, as I still do. I also
regarded the activities of its promoters as so ill-conceived and ill-advised
as to be in the main pernicious, as the mere passage of time has now
shown that they were.
In those days I noticed with amusement that some philosophers of
“the social consciousness” had carried their speculations up into the
higher realm of scholastic metaphysics. I could make nothing of Sir Leslie
Stephen’s notion of a “social organism” but that society exists as an
objective entity apart from the individuals who make it up. I had long
known that the Church lays claim to that sort of unsubstantial existence,
but I was never metaphysician enough to get a very clear idea of how this
could be so. I should say that if a Church or “the Church” no longer had
any members it would no longer have any existence; and I should say the
same of society. Albertus Magnus and his great pupil Thomas would sniff
at Sir Leslie Stephen’s “social organism” and the curious product,
apparently ectoplasmic, which he calls a “social tissue,” and they would at
once catch the fine old familiar fusty aroma of universals existing
objectively.
For my part, although for the sake of convenience I use the term
society freely enough, I am not sure but that a fairly plausible argument
could be made out for the thesis that there is no such thing as society. I
say this, however, with no intention of coming forward as a modern
William of Ockham, to fight the nominalist-realist battle all over again. I
merely observe that I have never been able to see “society” otherwise
than as a concourse of very various individuals about which, as a whole,
not many general statements can be safely made. The individual seems to
be the fundamental thing; all the character society has is what the
prevailing character of the individuals in its environment gives it. If they
mostly work in factories, you have an industrial society; if they are mostly
civilised, you have a civilised society; if they mostly drink too much, you
have a drunken society; and so on. A tendency to disallow and disregard
the individual’s claims against society, and progressively to magnify and
multiply society’s claims against the individual, seems to me fatuous in its
lack of logic. I have regularly had occasion to notice that grandiose
schemes for improving society-at-large always end in failure, and I have
not wondered at it because it is simply not in the nature of things that
society can be improved in that way.
I have known many persons, some quite intimately, who thought it
was their duty to take “the social point of view” on mankind’s many
doings and misdoings, and to support various proposals, mainly political,
for the mass-improvement of society. One of them is a friend of long
standing who has done distinguished service of this kind throughout a
lifetime, and is directly responsible for the promulgation of more
calamitous and coercive “social legislation” than one could shake a stick
at. In a conversation with me not many months ago, this friend said
mournfully, “My experience has cured me of one thing. I am cured of
believing that society can ever be improved through political action. After
this, I shall ‘cultivate my garden.’”
Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise
called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more
informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century
hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words
sum up the whole social responsibility of man. The only thing that the
psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society
with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only
way society can be improved is by the individualist method which Jesus
apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can
be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing
his very best to improve one.
In practice, however, this method is extremely difficult; there can be
no question about that, for experience will prove it so. It is also clear that
very few among mankind have either the force of intellect to manage this
method intelligently, or the force of character to apply it constantly.
Hence if one “regards mankind as being what they are,” the chances seem
to be that the deceptively easier way will continue to prevail among them
throughout an indefinitely long future. It is easy to prescribe
improvement for others; it is easy to organise something, to
institutionalise this-or-that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies,
form pressure-groups, start revolutions, change forms of government,
tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried
unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for six thousand years
has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep
on trying them again and again. This being so, it seems highly probable
that the hope for any significant improvement of society must be
postponed, if not forever, at any rate to a future so far distant that
consideration of it at the present time would be sheer idleness.
Admittedly, mankind have never shown themselves capable of
devising a sound and stable collective life for themselves, or one that
exhibited any actual advance of civilisation beyond the point reached by
other attempts which have preceded it. As evidence of this, the collective
life established in Crete has always seemed to me the most completely
conclusive in history. Its conditions were unique; no such combination of
favorable circumstances is known to have existed anywhere. The salient
circumstance was that continuously for one thousand years, from 2500 to
1500 B.C., the Cretans lived not only free from attack by outsiders, but also
free from fear of it. They traded all around the eastern Mediterranean,
and there is every indication that those thousand years were a period of
unexampled peace and prosperity. They built up an elaborate apparatus
of civilisation perfectly suited to all their needs and fancies, singularly
modern in matters of convenience and comfort, such as drainage,
household water-supply, plumbing, bathtubs. The arts flourished
vigorously. One would say that if ever a people had the chance to
demonstrate that society is indefinitely improvable, the Cretans had it.
Everything was in their favour; climate, resources, wealth, commerce and,
above all, peace and immunity from interference. Moreover, a thousand
years of this is a good long time, quite long enough to show some
detectable results. Apparently, however, the improvement of Minoan
society went static at a point not much ahead, if any, of the point where
ours stopped. As with us, so evidently with the Cretans, cleverness and
sagacity did wonders in developing the mechanics of civilisation, but the
intelligence and wisdom requisite for developing civilisation itself were
simply not there.
I can make nothing of it but that in the attempt to stabilise anything
more highly differentiated than the primitive patriarchal form of society,
mankind are attempting something which is quite beyond their powers.
Not too often has the mass-man made any conspicuous success even with
the patriarchal form. Really, when one thinks of it, what a preposterous
thing it is to put the management of a nation, a province, even a village, in
the hands of a man who can not so much as manage a family! Friar John of
the Funnels uttered golden speech when he asked how he could be
expected to govern an abbey, seeing that he was not able to govern
himself Absurdum quippe est ut alios regat qui seipsum regere nescit was a good
legal maxim in the Middle Ages, and it remains forever as a maxim of
sterling common sense.
So seeing, with Goethe, no present prospect that mankind will
become happier, wiser or better than they now are, or than they were in
their highly-privileged circumstances on the island of Crete five thousand
years ago, I see as little prospect that their collective life will show the
marks of a civilised society any more clearly than did the Minoan
collective life of 2000 B.C. To the calm and profound thought of Marcus
Aurelius this reflection seems to have been always present. The things to
come, he says, will certainly be of like form with the things of the past,
“and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the
things which take place now. Accordingly, to have contemplated
mankind’s life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for
ten thousand years; for what more wilt thou see?” Henry Adams ends his
autobiography with a moving remembrance of two lifelong friends.
Perhaps, he says, the three may be allowed to return to earth for a holiday
and look things over, say in 1938, their centenary year; “and perhaps then,
for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores,
they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard
without a shudder.” No such world awaited them in 1938, as we can testify

II

In former days when I believed in the doctrine of the Enlightenment,

that evolution is strictly progressive and that Homo sapiens and his society
are indefinitely improvable, my “contemplation of mankind’s life for forty
years” was on the whole a rather puzzling business, but by no means
discouraging. True, the stretch of history from Sumer and Akkad down to
1850 did present a pertinacious sameness. But then had come the great
period of Naturforschung, the progress of discovery and invention, which
would surely speed up the evolutionary process. It made such swift,
spectacular and salutary changes on the surface of life that beyond doubt
it must effect some corresponding changes, slight as they might be, in
life’s essential quality, in the essential quality of Homo sapiens himself. No
such changes, however, became discernible, nor the symptoms of any.
Still, I thought, the span of six thousand years is but a moment in the
evolutionary course; one must be patient and content. But while I was
sustaining myself with thoughts of what mankind and their society would
be like at the end of sixteen thousand years of progressive evolution, the
observations of de Vries and others made it clear that the Darwinian
formula must undergo a far more drastic amendment than Weismann had
suggested; that evolution is by no means necessarily and invariably
progressive; that it may on occasion be catastrophic, and its course quite
unpredictable. Then archaeology produced unassailable evidence of an
order of civilisation prevailing thousands of years ago in Crete, Egypt and
Mesopotamia, which was in no respect inferior to our own, and in some
respects almost certainly higher; and thus the whole foundation of the
overwhelming determinist optimism which pervaded the Western world
at the turn of the century was blown to pieces.
I have already spoken of the uneasy premonition that this huge
structure of optimism was about to collapse, and of the tone of resentful
disappointment, discouragement, despondency, which appears in the
literature of the period. Many gifted minds felt that the Enlightenment
was a mere mirage, and its grandiose promises were only so much
sweetened wind. Some, like Henry Adams, surveyed the life of mankind
with gentle and amiable resignation; some, like Tourgueniev, with a
profound and noble grief; some, like de Maupassant, with bitter dejection;
some, like Flaubert, with almost frantic disgust. I could not share this
despondency, though I was as puzzled as any one. Sometimes during the
war of 1914 I suspected that I might be too insensitive, too much a
creature of the moment, to get myself into the frame of mind of these
great men, though actually I knew well enough that this was not so. There
seemed, as a matter of common sense, something clearly wrong with the
basic assumptions of the Enlightenment, but I did not know what it was,
and the fact itself, if it were a fact, did not seem to call for such acute
distress. Later on, Mr. Cram’s brilliant thesis showed me plainly what was
wrong, and all my puzzlement evaporated. In a passage of eloquent prose
de Maupassant, whose conclusion runs curiously close to Mr. Cram’s,
turns his back on Condorcet and Rousseau with this sentence:

Ah, yes, we shall ever continue to be borne down by the old and odious customs, the

criminal prejudices, the ferocious ideas, of our barbarous forefathers, for we are but animals

and we shall remain animals, led only by the instincts that nothing will ever change.

If this be so, I thought, mankind are unquestionably living up to the

measure of their psychical capacities, they are doing the best they can.
Why, then, should their collective life provoke disappointment, distress,
despondency, on the part of those who contemplate it “as from a height,”
as Plato says it should be contemplated? I saw no reason why it should do
so.
Every day I divert myself with watching, outside my window, a
concourse of chickadees, woodpeckers, tree-sparrows, nuthatches and
other small birds, feeding on grain, seeds and suet which the household
puts out for them. They had lost no time in discovering that they could
satisfy their needs and desires with less exertion by exploiting the
household than by scratching up a living for themselves; hence they are
always promptly on hand. Presently two jays appear, imperialist
freebooters whom I have named respectively Joseph Chamberlain and
Cecil Rhodes. They consider the situation, then fly off and report to a
lurking band of jay-profiteers who descend in a body, disperse the original
exploiters, and “take over.”
This scene would disappoint no one, distress no one, because that is
the way birds are, and everybody knows it, and knows also that nothing
can be done about it. They are living up to the measure of their psychical
capacities; they are doing quite the best they can. There is an interest and
even a certain kind of beauty, in the faithfulness with which they fulfil the
majestic and terrible law of exploitation, Epstean’s law, and there is
beauty also in the little nefarious tricks and stratagems incident to its
fulfilment. One is led to reflect deeply on the enormous scope, the
innumerable ramifications and implications of this law which operates as
inflexibly in the lowest range of animate nature as in the highest; and
there is great profit in these reflections.
So one feels no distress or despondency at the sight of like behaviour
on the part of psychical anthropoids, as when imperialist jobholders
resorted to war for political purposes in 1898 and 1914, or as when in 1900
British exploiters evicted and took over from Dutch exploiters who, in
their turn, had evicted and taken over from Kafirs; or again as when in
1918 British exploiters took over from German exploiters in Africa. During
the war of 1914 I regarded the movements of both sides with singular
indifference, sometimes scarcely knowing which was which. My little
dialogue with Brand Whitlock in Brussels, which I have mentioned
somewhere back in these pages shows that my reaction to the situation,
although at that time almost purely instinctive, was sound. That is the
way people are. The war was detestable enough, but the anthropoid
jobholders who engineered it and the masses whom they coerced and
exploited were doing the best that the limitations of their nature
admitted of their doing, and one could expect no more than that. There
was even a certain grave beauty, such as one observes in a battle of snakes
or sharks, in the machinations which they contrived in order to fulfil the
law of their being. One regarded these creatures with abhorrence, yes;
sometimes with boredom and annoyance, yes; but with despondency and
disappointment, no.

III

Like the general run of American children, I grew up under the

impression that mankind have an innate and deep-seated love of liberty.
This was never taught me as an article of faith, but in one way and
another, mostly from pseudo-patriotic books and songs, children picked
up a vague notion that “the priceless boon of liberty” is really a very fine
thing, that mankind love it and are jealous of it to the point of raising Cain
if it be denied them; also that America makes a great speciality of liberty
and is truly the land of the free. I first became uncertain about these
tenets through reading ancient accounts of the great libertarian wars of
history, and discovering that there were other and more substantial
causes behind those wars and that actually the innate love of liberty did
not have much to do with them. This caused me to carry on my
observations upon matters nearer at hand, and my doubts were
confirmed. If mankind really have an unquenchable love for freedom, I
thought it strange that I saw so little evidence of it; and as a matter of fact,
from that day to this I have seen none worth noticing. One is bound to
wonder why it is, since people usually set some value on what they love,
that among those who are presumed to be so fond of freedom the
possession of it is so little appreciated. Taking the great cardinal example
lying nearest at hand, the American people once had their liberties; they
had them all; but apparently they could not rest o’nights until they had
turned them over to a prehensile crew of professional politicians.
So my belief in these tenets gradually slipped away from me. I can
not say just when I lost it, for the course of its disappearance was not
marked by any events. It vanished more than thirty years ago, however,
for I have consciously kept an eye on the matter for that length of time.
What interested me especially is that during this period I have discovered
scarcely a corporal’s guard of persons who had any conception whatever
of liberty as a principle, let alone caring for any specific vindications of it as
such. On the other hand, I have met many who were very eloquent about
liberty as affecting some matter of special interest to them, but who were
authoritarian as the College of Cardinals on other matters. Prohibition
brought out myriads of such; so did the various agitations about
censorship, free speech, minority-rights of Negroes, Jews, Indians; and
among all whom I questioned I did not find a baker’s dozen who were
capable of perceiving any inconsistency in their attitude.
According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily
tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. They are
readily reducible to submission, so readily conditionable (to coin a word)
as to exhibit an almost incredibly enduring patience under restraint and
oppression of the most flagrant character. So far are they from displaying
any overweening love of freedom that they show a singular contentment
with a condition of servitorship, often showing a curious canine pride in
it, and again often simply unaware that they are existing in that
condition. Byron, one of the world’s greatest natural forces in poetry, had
virtually no reflective power, but in the last lines of his poem on
Bonnivard, who “regained his freedom with a sigh,” he displays a flash of
insight almost worthy of Sophocles, into mankind’s easy susceptibility to
conditioning.1
I do not know the origin of this idea that mankind loves liberty above
all things, but the American revolution of 1776 and the French revolution
of 1789 apparently did most to give it currency. Since then it has done
yeoman’s service to an unbroken succession of knaves intent on
exploiting the name and appearance of freedom before mankind, while
depriving them of the reality. Such is the immense irony of history. The
goddess of liberty, as she lay in the arms of de Noailles and Lafayette, was
a beautiful and alluring figure; but after she had been passed on to the
arms of Mirabeau, then handed on to the embraces of Danton,
Robespierre, Saint-Just, Marat, Barras, Carrier, and finally Bonaparte, she
was left in an extremely raddled and shopworn condition. “Good old
revolution!” said one of my friends in a meditative mood, during the
stormy times of 1936 in Paris. “Liberté, Égalité, Défense d’uriner. They still
keep the fine old motto posted up, I see, but it doesn’t seem to mean much
more now than it did when Robespierre was running things.”
I might have witnessed some of the revolutions which occurred in
my time, but having a pretty clear notion of what they would come to, I
paid little attention to them. Like Ibsen and Henry George, I have little
respect for political revolutions, for I never knew of one which in the
long-run did not cost more than it came to. Beheading a Louis XVI to
make way for a Napoleon seems an unbusinesslike venture, to say the
least of it. Passing from the tyranny of Charles I to the tyranny of
Cromwell is like taking a turn in a revolving door; the exertion merely
puts you back where you started. If every jobholder in Washington were
driven into the Potomac tonight, their places would be taken tomorrow
by others precisely like them. Nor have I any more respect for what the
Duke of Wellingtoncalled “a revolution by due course of law” than I have
for one of the terrorist type. In this country, for example, unseating
predatory and scampish Republicans to give place for predatory and
scampish Democrats, and vice versa, has long proved itself not worth the
trouble of holding an election. I have also been extremely cautious about
taking revolutionary “ideologies” at anything like their face value. I have
found that the façade of ideology counts for little; it is the too, too solid
flesh of the human material behind it that really counts. A very able
Frenchman of the eighteen-thirties, one who wanted nothing and who
steadfastly refused to enter public life, said, “Political opinion in France is
based on the fact that the louis d’or is worth seven times as much as the
three-franc écu.” To the best of my observation, this is the only kind of
“ideology” to which political opinion, revolutionary or otherwise, has
been answerable in any country. Furthermore, my sense of this has made
me always look very closely at the instigators, promoters and fautors of
revolutionary activity. In this I have taken pattern by an Englishman who
witnessed the French revolution of 1848, and left this record:

From that day forth I have never dipped into any history of modern France,

professing to deal with the political causes and effects of the various upheavals during the

nineteenth century in France. They may be worth reading; I do not say that they are not. I

have preferred to look at the men who instigated those disorders, and have come to the

conclusion that had each of them been born with five or ten thousand a year, their names

would have been absolutely wanting in connexion with them. This does not mean that the

disorders would not have taken place, but they would have always been led by men in want

of five or ten thousand a year. On the other hand, if the d’Orléans family had been less
 wealthy than they are, there would have been no firmly-settled Third Republic; if Louis-

Napoléon had been less poor, there would in all probability have been no Second Empire; if

the latter had lasted another year, we should have found Gambetta among the ministers of

Napoleon III, just like Emile Ollivier.

So much, then, for the binding force of “ideologies.” The one

phenomenon which interested me in this connexion has been a general
revival of the practice which the Roman State employed when it was on
its last legs, of quieting discontent by a palliative system of bribery and
subsidy in the form of doles, pensions, “relief” and the like. As Mr. G. B.
Shaw said scornfully, “You can buy off any revolution for thirty bob.” For
obvious reasons these measures mark a long step forward in a society’s
“course of rebarbarisation,” and are in fact rather desperate; their end is
so plainly visible from their beginning. Dumas turned a neat phrase when
he said that Necker, who had been called back to the Treasury after the
fall of the Bastille, was “trying to organise prosperity by generalising
poverty.” That is what such measures plainly amount to, and it is all they
amount to.

IV

It would seem to be in the order of nature that the history of

mankind’s efforts to stabilise a collective life should be the same hereafter
as it has been in the past, a history of repetitions following a singularly
exact pattern. Out of a period of anarchy and dissolution mankind have
come together in the production of something which for lack of a better
word may be called a culture, frail and tottering at the outset, but
becoming gradually stronger, and describing an upward curve in power
and importance. As it rises, the forces of Epstean’s law, Gresham’s law and
the law of diminishing returns act upon it with progressively increasing
energy, and when it has reached a certain height the combined play of
these forces drives it down again into another period of anarchy and
dissolution. There has been a curious periodicity observable in this
performance; the rise and fall of these cultures has been a matter,
roughly, of five hundred years each.
Hence history is on the side of those observers who see Western
culture as standing today where Roman culture stood at the end of the
fourth century; standing, that is, at the verge of extinction. Seven years
ago I ventured a prediction with special reference to the impending fate
of American culture, but a minori ad majus my findings, as it now appears,
were equally applicable to the whole body of Western culture:

What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in

collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralisation; a

steadily-growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power

and faith in social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of

the national income; production languishing; the State in consequence taking over one

“essential industry” after another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption,

inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system of forced labour. Then at some
point in this progress a collision of State interests, at least as general and as violent as that

which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for

the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to “the rusty death

of machinery” and the casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be supreme.

Seven years ago this forecast was regarded as utterly fanciful and
preposterous. I doubt that the most inveterate optimist can so regard it
now.
 With regard to the régime of collectivism which under one-and-
another trade-name has fastened itself firmly upon Western society, I can
view it only as a logical and necessary step in a general “course of
rebarbarisation.” Spencer speaks of society’s evolutionary progress from
the militant type, which is purely collectivist, to the industrial type, which
is marked by less and less of State interference with the individual. The
collectivism of today is plainly a reversion from the industrial or semi-
industrial to the militant type, and is therefore quite what one would
expect to see coming forth at this stage of a society’s rebarbarisation.
Considering mankind’s indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility
and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue
that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and
their capacities. Under its régime the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of
the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing
as he is told. He takes what is allotted to him, obeys orders, and beyond
that he has no care. Perhaps, then, this is as much as the vast psychically-
anthropoid majority are up to, and a status of permanent irresponsibility
under collectivism would be most congenial and satisfactory to them.
Given a just and generous administration of collectivism this might
very well be so; but even on that extremely large and dubious
presumption the matter is academic, because of all political modes a just
and generous collectivism is in its nature the most impermanent. Each
new activity or function that the State assumes means an enlargement of
officialdom, an augmentation of bureaucracy. In other words, it opens one
more path of least resistance to incompetent, unscrupulous and inferior
persons whom Epstean’s law has always at hand, intent only on satisfying
their needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Obviously the
collectivist State, with its assumption of universal control and regulation,
opens more of these paths than any other political mode; there is virtually
no end of them. Hence, however just and generous an administration of
collectivism may be at the outset, and however fair its prospects may then
be, it is immediately set upon and honeycombed by hordes of the most
venal and untrustworthy persons that Epstean’s law can rake together;
and in virtually no time every one of the régime’s innumerable bureaux
and departments is rotted to the core. In 1821, with truly remarkable
foresight, Mr. Jefferson wrote in a letter to Macon that “our Government
is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to
destruction, to wit: by consolidation first [i.e., centralisation] and then
corruption, its necessary consequence.”
The idea of a self-limiting or temporary collectivism impresses me as
too absurd to be seriously discussed. As long as Newton’s law remains in
force, no one can fall out of a forty-storey window and stop at the
twentieth storey. So, as long as Epstean’s law remains in force there can
be no such thing as a ten-per-cent collectivist State for any length of time.
One might just as sensibly speak of a ten-per-cent mammalian pregnancy.
It seems quite pointless to speculate upon what may succeed the
present period of disintegration and dissolution, for whatever it may be,
those who are now living will not see it, nor yet will their grandchildren.
So much seems fairly certain, since the duration of these periods has
hitherto run roughly to something like two hundred years; and therefore
if we set the beginning of our period at 1870, we might say that only about
one-third of its term has expired. Many observers, relying on history,
expect it to be followed by another renaissance, another rise and fall,
fulfilling the regular five-hundred-year cycle, and running out into
another term of dissolution. This seems reasonable, but the matter is too
far off to make any conjecture about its details worth while. I think it is
much more profitable to spend one’s energy on the effort to get a measure
of the period in which we actually are living, and be content to let the
future bring forth what it may.
Henry Adams, relying on the validity of Carnot’s principle, appears to
have thought that the rise and dissolution of societies would go on
indefinitely, pretty much on the pattern which they have hitherto
followed, until the equilibrium of physical forces should be established at
absolute zero, in the silence and inanition of universal death. The later
findings of physicists, however, suggest that Carnot’s law needs a radical
overhauling, and that the conclusions which Adams drew from it are open
to doubt. But aside from this, one can not safely predict even so much as
that the periodic ups and downs of mankind’s sociopolitical
agglomerations will continue indefinitely, because one never knows what
nature is going to do. To the best of our knowledge nature abruptly shut
down on production of the great saurians, and replaced them as abruptly
with mammals. By analogy it would be perfectly competent for nature, if
and when she were so disposed, to shut down abruptly on production of
the neolithic psychically-anthropoid variety of Homo sapiens, which now
exists in an overwhelming majority, and replace it with the psychically-
human variety, which now exists only sporadically. This seems highly
improbable as matters stand at present; but so, presumably, did the fate of
the saurians. All one can say is that such a feat is not impossible with
nature; it could happen; and if it did happen, the one sure thing is that the
subsequent history of mankind and mankind’s institutions would be
entirely different from what it had been in the past.

V
 If there were any credit due me for the conduct of an extraordinarily
happy and satisfying life, I should feel diffident about speaking of it; but
there is none. The foregoing pages will show, I believe, that all I have done
towards the achievement of a happy life has been to follow my nose. I can
say with Marcus Aurelius in that best of all autobiographies, the first book
of the Meditations, that “to the gods I am indebted for having good
grandfathers, good parents, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen
and friends, nearly everything good.” With him I can also say that
whatever unhappiness I have had was “through my own fault, and
through not observing the admonitions of the gods and, I may almost say,
their direct instructions.” I learned early with Thoreau that a man is rich
in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone; and in
view of this I have always considered myself extremely well-to-do. All I
ever asked of life was the freedom to think and say exactly what I pleased,
when I pleased, and as I pleased. I have always had that freedom, with an
immense amount of uncovenanted lagniappe thrown in; and having had
it, I always felt I could well afford to let all else alone. It is true that one
can never get something for nothing; it is true that in a society like ours
one who takes the course which I have taken must reconcile himself to
the status of a superfluous man; but the price seems to me by no means
exorbitant and I have paid it gladly, without a shadow of doubt that I was
getting all the best of the bargain.
One evening when Amos Pinchot and I were at dinner in the Players’
Club, we heard the news of a very dear friend and fellow-member’s death.
We talked of him a long time, feeling that the club would never be quite
the same to us without him, nor would life itself be quite the same. “Yes,
we shall miss him,” Amos said, finally, “but just think of the crowd that is
going to be down at the railway-station when our train pulls in!” I thought
this whimsical turn of phrase was an unusually charming expression of
the great hope that has beset mankind for uncounted generations.
Socrates, standing before his judges, told them with simple eloquence of
the fine time he was going to have when he could talk things over with
Minos, Rhadamanthus, Triptolemus and the heroes of Troy; and how
happy he would be to go on looking into the order of nature and searching
for the plain natural truth of things, in company with the great
philosophers who had preceded him. He made it clear that he thought
very little of the life he was leaving by comparison with the life that
awaited him; and so when Crito asked him how he wished to be buried, he
said, “Bury me any way you like, if you can catch me.” Then, laughing, he
turned to Simmias and the others, and said it seemed he could never quite
get it through Crito’s head that the dead body which remained would not
be Socrates at all, and that the real Socrates would still be keeping on at
his old line of trade, the same as ever, but under circumstances vastly
more favourable.
The same dream and desire, the same hope and expectation, appear
throughout the history of mankind. Cicero, the Macaulay of Roman
letters, always a great rhetorician, but also, like Macaulay, probably as
honest a rhetorician as he knew how to be, voices this expectation in the
noble periods which he puts in the mouth of the elder Cato: “Oh, what a
glorious day it will be when I can set forth to that association and
companionship of godlike minds, and take leave of this crowded filthy
rout and rabble!” Probably not many of us but have at one time or another
indulged some such fancy. My own mind has dwelt on eschatological
matters as little and as casually as any one’s, perhaps, but sometimes I
have thought what a wonderful treat it would be, for instance, to pass the
time of day with Rabelais and his incomparable Scots translator Sir
Thomas Urquhart, as they stroll arm-in-arm through the Elysian fields to
forgather with Lucian, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Cervantes and such other
kindred spirits as might be happening along. Or again, to move in that
galaxy of great Frenchmen who ushered the nineteenth century out into
the dies tenebrarum atque caliginis which is the twentieth century. Or again,
to refresh myself with the keen, well-bred, sceptical and humorous
wisdom of the race of gentlefolk from whom, however unworthily, I had
my earthly being. Or again, to fraternise once more with other rare souls
whose acquaintance graced my passage through this life; most of them in
rather humble station, superfluous persons, entire strangers to the tenets
of economism, content that the sublime and exquisite quality of their
lives should pass unnoticed and unpraised of men.
It is always one’s privilege to entertain dreams and desires of this
order, no doubt, but when they transform themselves into anything like
definite hope and expectation one must ask oneself how far they can be
justified. To this there is but one answer: Not at all. The persistence or
extinction of consciousness, the survival or extinction of personality, is
purely a matter of evidence, and there is no available evidence tending
either one way or the other. “What is there in the realms below?” cries
Callimachus at the tomb of Charidas,—and the mournful answer comes,
“Great darkness!”2 The mystery of consciousness has never been
penetrated. Huxley and Romanes long ago observed that the transition
from the physics of the brain to the facts of consciousness is unthinkable.
Consciousness which, as Huxley said, is neither matter nor force nor any
conceivable modification of either, is perceived by us to exist only in
association with that which has the properties of matter and force.
Whether or not it must always so exist, we do not know. If one says it can
and does exist independently or in some other mode of association, we
can only ask what evidence he has that this is so; and if one says it can
not, we must ask the same question. I know of no valid ground for any a
priori conclusion; the matter is entirely one of evidence, and since
(fortunately for us, I think) there is not a shred of evidence available,
one’s only refuge is on the safe ground of agnosticism. If evidence were
ever discovered that Socrates was right,—that it is in the order of nature
for those like himself who are eminent in the practice of the psychically-
human life to overlive physical death,—the discovery would not surprise
me. I might even go so far as to say that such a provision of nature would
seem to me most agreeable to what little I know or can know of her august
economy. But evidence either for or against any such provision of nature
is wholly lacking, and therefore no one of intellectual integrity can say
more than this that I have said.
Probably a good many, as age advances, have tried to settle with
themselves whether or not they would choose to live their lives over
again if they had the offer of it. The two old ex-Presidents, Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams, raised this question in the correspondence
which they carried on after their public career had closed; one of the few
truly great correspondences in literary history, and one which the deadly
force of Gresham’s law has now made virtually inaccessible. Mr. Jefferson
had no doubts. “You ask,” he wrote his old friend, “if I would agree to live
my seventy, or rather seventy-three, years over again? To which I say,
yea.” His experience of life had been so pleasurable, interesting and in all
ways desirable, as to make it well worth repeating. John Adams did not see
it quite that way. At eighty he was hale and alert, making his short legs
carry him three or four miles a day, his mind and memory were good as
ever, and he was willing to acknowledge that he had never known a day
which had not brought him more pleasure than pain. He was not tired of
life by any means, but as for going over it all again, he thought once was
enough.
Enough is precisely the right word. One might agree that life has far
more joy than sorrow, as my life has had,—immeasurably more,—and yet
might feel, as Adams did, that even of the best of things one can have
enough. I remember as a child congratulating an old relative on her
seventy-third birthday, and wishing her many happy returns. She said,
“Oh, don’t wish me anything like that; I have lived long enough.” Perhaps
one’s decision is shaped largely by temperament; perhaps some incline to
the ne quid nimis more readily than others. When I was five or six years old
my father’s oldest brother who was visiting us, a rich man for those days,
offered me a silver quarter. I thanked him with due formality, and he said
gruffly, “Polite fellow, anyway,—I’ll have to give you another one for
that.” I thanked him as before, and he gave me another and still a fourth,
at which I drew back, and said, “No, thank you, I’ve had enough.” My
uncle made no comment on this, but some time afterwards when I noticed
that he seemed to be considering me attentively, he said to my mother,
“Can’t make the chap out. Only person I ever saw that knew when he had
enough money.” The turn of my temperament may have been stiffened
later on when I was pumped full of Aristotle’s far-famed formula of virtue
and the philosophical excellence of the μηδὲν ἄγαν but apparently the
original turn of temperament was there, for to the best of my recollection
I was never taught to be moderate in my desires, and can only suppose
that some instinct, helped out by the absence of any serious temptations
to be otherwise, put me in the way of it.
So while one must be unspeakably thankful for all the joys of
existence, there comes a time when one feels that one has had enough.
However happily one has “warmed both hands before the fire of life,”
however much may remain that is greatly worth seeing and hearing, one
gradually slips into a state of grateful certainty that one has seen and
heard enough. For a while there survives a pleasurable interest, as
Flaubert says, in “watching life grow up over one’s head, like the grass,”—
in seeing how certain habits of mind, modes of thought, sets of principles,
by which one’s own life has been rigorously guided, have now become for
others a mere matter of history, unregarded and for the most part
unknown. But this interest is slight and fitful, and does not last; and one
finds oneself, like the two old ex-Presidents, surveying the scene of
contemporary activity with profound detachment.
Nevertheless normally, as in the case of these superb old men, this is
far from degenerating into a culpable taedium vitae. I remember once
lately discussing with a friend the instance of some one we knew who had
become bored with existence and had taken his own way out of it. I said I
could not object to suicide on the ethical or religious grounds ordinarily
alleged, and I saw nothing but uncommonly far-fetched absurdity in
Rousseau’s plea that suicide is a robbery committed against society. My
invincible objection to suicide is, if I may put it so, that it seems to me so
distinctly one of the things that a person just does not do. An instance of
the kind we were discussing always sets up a certain sharp
disappointment, a sense of failure, of inability, as our slang goes, to take it
on the chin;—in all, it gives rise to a regretful sense that the victim was
not quite the man we thought he was. In my view, the only justification
for suicide is consideration for others. If for any reason one becomes a
permanent burden on others, greater than they can well bear, or should
be called upon to bear, I would applaud his following the example of the
learned Euphrates, whom Pliny speaks of so highly, and taking himself out
of their way.
 With regard to the dread of death, one has one’s worry for nothing
when death comes in the course of nature, for the dread evaporates in
face of the event. Indeed, in any case one has one’s worry for nothing, as
every person who studiously contemplates the order of nature is well
aware. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that “he who fears death either
fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt
have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt
acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a different kind of living
being, and thou wilt not cease to live.” This is all one can know, doubtless,
but it is also all one needs to know.

1 It should be unnecessary to say that this susceptibility exists only in

respect of faculties which they possess. It is the error of those who are
dazzled by illusive schemes for the mass-improvement of society to
imagine that it exists in respect of faculties which they do not possess.

2 Palatine Anthology, vii, 524.