UNDER DISPUTE

                                   BY
                        AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D.
             AUTHOR OF “POINTS OF FRICTION,” “COMPROMISES,”
                        “COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC.

                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press Cambridge
                                  1924

                   COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY AGNES REPPLIER
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                          The Riverside Press
                       CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
                         PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

                                 Note

Five of the twelve essays in this volume, “To Counsel the Doubtful,”
“The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography,” “The Divineness of
Discontent,” “Strayed Sympathies,” and “The Battlefield of Education,”
are reprinted through the courtesy of _The Atlantic Monthly_; four
of them, “The Masterful Puritan,” “Are Americans a Timid People?”
“Allies,” and “The American Laughs,” through the courtesy of _The Yale
Review_; “The Preacher at Large,” through the courtesy of _The Century
Magazine_; “They Had Their Day,” through the courtesy of _Harper’s
Magazine_; “The Idolatrous Dog,” through the courtesy of _The Forum_.

                               Contents

The Masterful Puritan                                                  1

To Counsel the Doubtful                                               31

Are Americans a Timid People?                                         58

The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography                             88

Strayed Sympathies                                                   119

The Divineness of Discontent                                         148

Allies                                                               178

They Had Their Day                                                   203

The Preacher at Large                                                233

The Battlefield of Education                                         258

The American Laughs                                                  286

The Idolatrous Dog                                                   312

                             UNDER DISPUTE

                         The Masterful Puritan

When William Chillingworth, preaching at Oxford in the first year of
England’s Civil War, defined the Cavaliers as publicans and sinners,
and the Puritans as Scribes and Pharisees, he expressed the reasonable
irritation of a scholar who had no taste or aptitude for polemics, yet
who had been blown about all his life by every wind of doctrine. Those
were uneasy years for men who loved moderation in everything, and who
found it in nothing. It is not from such that we can hope for insight
into emotions from which they were exempt, and purposes to which they
held no clue.

In our day it is generously conceded that the Puritans made admirable
ancestors. We pay them this handsome compliment in after-dinner
speeches at all commemorative meetings. Just what they would have
thought of their descendants is an unprofitable speculation. Three
hundred years divide us from those stern enthusiasts who, coveting
lofty things, found no price too high to pay for them. “It is not
with us as with men whom small matters can discourage, or small
discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again,” wrote William
Brewster, when one half of the Mayflower Pilgrims had died in the
first terrible year, and no gleam of hope shone on the survivors. To
perish of hunger and cold is not what we should now call a “small
discontentment.” To most of us it would seem a good and sufficient
reason for abandoning any enterprise whatsoever. Perhaps if we would
fix our attention upon a single detail--the fact that for four years
the Plymouth colonists did not own a cow--we should better understand
what life was like in that harsh wilderness, where children who could
not get along without milk had but one other alternative--to die.

Men as strong as were the Puritan pioneers ask for no apologies at our
hands. Their conduct was shaped by principles and convictions which
would be insupportable to us, but which are none the less worthy of
regard. Matthew Arnold summed up our modern disparagement of their
standards when he pictured Virgil and Shakespeare crossing on the
Mayflower, and finding the Pilgrim fathers “intolerable company.” I
am not sure that this would have been the case. Neither Virgil nor
Shakespeare could have survived Plymouth. That much is plain. But three
months on the Mayflower might not have been so “intolerable” as Mr.
Arnold fancied. The Roman and the Elizabethan were strong-stomached
observers of humanity. They knew a man when they saw one, and they
measured his qualities largely.

Even if we make haste to admit that two great humanizers of society,
art and letters, played but a sorry part in the Puritan colonies, we
know they were less missed than if these colonies had been worldly
ventures, established solely in the interest of agriculture or of
trade. Sir Andrew Macphail tersely reminds us that the colonists
possessed ideals of their own, “which so far transcended the things of
this world that art and literature were not worth bothering about in
comparison with them.” Men who believe that, through some exceptional
grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of
culture. If they believe that they share God with all races, all
nations, and all ages, culture comes in the wake of religion. But the
Puritan’s God was a somewhat exclusive possession. “Christ died for a
select company that was known to Him, by name, from eternity,” wrote
the Reverend Samuel Willard, pastor of the South Church, Boston, and
author of that famous theological folio, “A Compleat Body of Divinity.”
“The bulk of mankind is reserved for burning,” said Jonathan Edwards
genially; and his Northampton congregation took his word for it. That
these gentlemen knew no more about Hell and its inmates than did Dante
is a circumstance which does not seem to have occurred to any one. A
preacher has some advantages over a poet.

If the Puritans never succeeded in welding together Church and State,
which was the desire of their hearts, they had human nature to thank
for their failure. There is nothing so abhorrent--or so perilous--to
the soul of man as to be ruled in temporal things by clerical
authority. Yet inasmuch as the colony of Massachusetts Bay had for its
purpose the establishment of a state in which all citizens should be of
the same faith, and church membership should be essential to freemen,
it was inevitable that the preacher and the elder should for a time
dominate public counsels. “Are you, sir, the person who serves here?”
asked a stranger of a minister whom he met in the streets of Rowley. “I
am, sir, the person who rules here,” was the swift and apt response.

Men whose position was thus firmly established resented the
unauthorized intrusion of malcontents. Being reformers themselves,
they naturally did not want to be reformed. Alone among New England
colonists, the Pilgrims of Plymouth, who were Separatists or
Independents, mistrusted the blending of civil and religious functions,
and this mistrust had deepened during the sojourn of their leaders in
Holland. Moreover, unlike their Boston neighbours, the Pilgrims were
plain, simple people; “not acquainted,” wrote Governor Bradford, “with
trades nor traffique, but used to a countrie life, and the innocente
trade of husbandry.” They even tried the experiment of farming their
land on a communal system, and, as a result, came perilously close to
starvation. Only when each man cultivated his own lot, that is, when
individualism supplanted socialism, did they wring from the reluctant
soil food enough to keep them alive.

To the courage and intelligence of the Pilgrim and Puritan leaders,
Governor Bradford and Governor Winthrop, the settlers owed their safety
and survival. The instinct of self-government was strong in these men,
their measures were practical measures, their wisdom the wisdom of
the world. If Bradford had not made friends with the great sachem,
Massasoit, and clinched the friendship by sending Edward Winslow to
doctor him with “a confection of many comfortable conserves” when he
was ill, the Plymouth colonists would have lost the trade with the
Indians which tided them over the first crucial years. If Winthrop had
not by force of argument and persuasion obtained the lifting of duties
from goods sent to England, and induced the British creditors to grant
favourable terms, the Boston colony would have been bankrupt. The keen
desire of both Plymouth and Boston to pay their debts is pleasant to
record, and contrasts curiously with the reluctance of wealthy States
to accept the Constitution in 1789, lest it should involve a similar
course of integrity.

It is hardly worth while to censure communities which were
establishing, or seeking to establish, “a strong religious state”
because they were intolerant. Tolerance is not, and never has
been, compatible with strong religious states. The Puritans of New
England did not endeavour to force their convictions upon unwilling
Christendom. They asked only to be left in peaceful possession of a
singularly unprolific corner of the earth, which they were civilizing
after a formula of their own. Settlers to whom this formula was
antipathetic were asked to go elsewhere. If they did not go, they were
sent, and sometimes whipped into the bargain--which was harsh, but not
unreasonable.

Moreover, the “persecution” of Quakers and Antinomians was not
primarily religious. Few persecutions recorded in history have been.
For most of them theology has merely afforded a pious excuse. Whatever
motives may have underlain the persistent persecution of the Jews,
hostility to their ancient creed has had little or nothing to do with
it. To us it seems well-nigh incredible that Puritan Boston should have
vexed its soul because Anne Hutchinson maintained that those who were
in the covenant of grace were freed from the covenant of works--which
sounds like a cinch. But when we remember that she preached against the
preachers, affirming on her own authority that they had not the “seal
of the Spirit”; and that she “gave vent to revelations,” prophesying
evil for the harassed and anxious colonists, we can understand their
eagerness to be rid of her. She was an able and intelligent woman,
and her opponents were not always able and intelligent men. When
the turmoil which followed in her wake destroyed the peace of the
community, Governor Winthrop banished her from Boston. “It was,” says
John Fiske, “an odious act of persecution.”

A vast deal of sympathy has been lavished upon the Puritan settlers
because of the rigours of their religion, the austerity of their
lives, their lack of intellectual stimulus, the comprehensive absence
of anything like amusement. It has been even said that their sexual
infirmities were due to the dearth of pastimes; a point of view which
is in entire accord with modern sentiment, even if it falls short
of the facts. Impartial historians might be disposed to think that
the vices of the Puritans are apparent to us because they were so
industriously dragged to light. When all moral offences are civil
offences, and when every man is under the close scrutiny of his
neighbours, the “find” in sin is bound to be heavy. Captain Kemble, a
Boston citizen of some weight and fortune, sat two hours in the stocks
on a wintry afternoon, 1656, doing penance for “lewd and unseemly
behaviour”; which behaviour consisted in kissing his wife “publiquely”
at his own front door on the Lord’s day. The fact that he had just
returned from a long voyage, and was moved to the deed by some excess
of emotion, failed to win him pardon. Neighbours were not lightly
flouted in a virtuous community.

That there were souls unfit to bear the weight of Puritanism, and
unable to escape from it, is a tragic truth. People have been born out
of time and out of place since the Garden of Eden ceased to be a human
habitation. When Judge Sewall read to his household a sermon on the
text, “Ye shall seek me and shall not find me,” the household doubtless
protected itself by inattention, that refuge from admonition which is
Nature’s kindliest gift. But there was one listener, a terrified child
of ten, who had no such bulwark, and who brooded over her unforgiven
sins until her heart was bursting. Then suddenly, when the rest of the
family had forgotten all about the sermon, she broke into “an amazing
cry,” sobbing out her agonized dread of Hell. And the pitiful part of
the tale is that neither father nor mother could comfort her, having
themselves no assurance of her safety. “I answered her Fears as well as
I could,” wrote Judge Sewall in his diary, “and prayed with many Tears
on either part. Hope God heard us.”

The incident was not altogether uncommon. A woman of Boston, driven
to desperation by the uncertainty of salvation, settled the point for
herself by drowning her baby in a well, thus ensuring damnation, and
freeing her mind of doubts. Methodism, though gentler than Calvinism,
accomplished similar results. In Wesley’s journal there is an account
of William Taverner, a boy of fourteen, who was a fellow passenger on
the voyage to Georgia; and who, between heavy weather and continuous
exhortation, went mad with fear, and saw an indescribable horror at the
foot of his bed, “which looked at him all the time unless he was saying
his prayers.”

Our sympathy for a suffering minority need not, however, blind
us to the fact that the vast majority of men hold on to a creed
because it suits them, and because their souls are strengthened by
its ministrations. “It is sweet to believe even in Hell,” says that
archmocker, Anatole France; and to no article of faith have believers
clung more tenaciously. Frederick Locker tells us the engaging story
of a dignitary of the Greek Church who ventured, in the early years of
faith, to question this popular tenet; whereupon “his congregation,
justly incensed, tore their bishop to pieces.”

No Puritan divine stood in danger of suffering this particular form
of martyrdom. The religion preached in New England was a cruel
religion, from which the figure of Christ, living mercifully with men,
was eliminated. John Evelyn noted down in his diary that he heard the
Puritan magistrates of London “speak spiteful things of our Lord’s
Nativity.” William Brewster was proud to record that in Plymouth “no
man rested” on the first Christmas day. As with Bethlehem, so with
Calvary. Governor Endicott slashed with his sword the red cross of
Saint George from the banner of England. The emblem of Christianity
was anathema to these Christians, as was the Mother who bore Christ,
and who saw Him die. The children whom He blessed became to Jonathan
Edwards “young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers.” The
sweetness of religion, which had solaced a suffering world, was wiped
out. “The Puritans,” wrote Henry Adams pithily, “abandoned the New
Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to the beginning, and
renew the quarrel with Eve.”

It took strong men to live and thrive under such a ministration,
wrestling with a sullen earth for subsistence, and with an angry Heaven
for salvation. Braced to endurance by the long frozen winters, plainly
fed and plainly clad, in peril, like Saint Paul, of sea and wilderness,
narrow of vision but steadfast to principles, they fronted life
resolutely, honouring and illustrating the supreme worth of freedom.

That they had compensations, other than religious, is apparent to all
but the most superficial observer. The languid indifference to our
neighbour’s moral and spiritual welfare, which we dignify by the name
of tolerance, has curtailed our interest in life. There must have
been something invigorating in the iron determination that neighbours
should walk a straight path, that they should be watched at every step,
and punished for every fall. The Puritan who said, “I will not. Thou
shalt not!” enjoyed his authority to the uttermost. The prohibitionist
who repeats his words to-day is probably the only man who is having a
thoroughly good time in our fretful land and century. It is hard, I
know, to reconcile “I will not. Thou shalt not!” with freedom. But the
early settlers of New England were controlled by the weight of popular
opinion. A strong majority forced a wavering minority along the road of
rectitude. Standards were then as clearly defined as were boundaries,
and the uncompromising individualism of the day permitted no juggling
with responsibility.

It is not possible to read the second chapter of “The Scarlet Letter,”
and fail to perceive one animating principle of the Puritan’s life.
The townspeople who watch Hester Prynne stand in the pillory are moved
by no common emotions. They savour the spectacle, as church-goers of
an earlier age savoured the spectacle of a penitent in sackcloth at
the portal; but they have also a sense of personal participation in
the dragging of frailty to light. Hawthorne endeavours to make this
clear, when, in answer to Roger Chillingworth’s questions, a bystander
congratulates him upon the timeliness of his arrival on the scene.
“It must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the
wilderness, to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is
searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people.” An
unfortunate speech to make to the husband of the culprit (Hawthorne is
seldom so ironic), but a cordial admission of content.

There was a picturesque quality about the laws of New England, and a
nicety of administration, which made them a source of genuine pleasure
to all who were not being judged. A lie, like an oath, was an offense
to be punished; but all lies were not equally punishable. Alice Morse
Earle quotes three penalties, imposed for three falsehoods, which show
how much pains a magistrate took to discriminate. George Crispe’s
wife who “told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly,” was
simply admonished. Will Randall who told a “plain lie” was fined ten
shillings. Ralph Smith who “lied about seeing a whale,” was fined
twenty shillings and excommunicated--which must have rejoiced his
suffering neighbours’ souls.

The rank of a gentleman, being a recognized attribute in those days,
was liable to be forfeited for a disgraceful deed. In 1631, Josias
Plastowe of Boston was fined five pounds for stealing corn from the
Indians; and it was likewise ordered by the Court that he should be
called in the future plain Josias, and not Mr. Plastowe as formerly.
Here was a chance for the community to take a hand in punishing a
somewhat contemptible malefactor. It would have been more or less than
human if it had not enjoyed the privilege.

By far the neatest instance of making the punishment fit the crime is
recorded in Governor Bradford’s “Diary of Occurrences.” The carpenter
employed to construct the stocks for the Plymouth colonists thought
fit to charge an excessive rate for the job; whereupon he was speedily
clapped into his own instrument, “being the first to suffer this
penalty.” And _we_ profess to pity the Puritans for the hardness and
dulness of their lives! Why, if we could but see a single profiteer
sitting in the stocks, one man out of the thousands who impudently
oppress the public punished in this admirable and satisfactory manner,
we should be willing to listen to sermons two hours long for the rest
of our earthly days.

And the Puritans relished their sermons, which were masterful like
themselves. Dogma and denunciation were dear to their souls, and they
could bear an intolerable deal of both. An hour-glass stood on the
preacher’s desk, and youthful eyes strayed wistfully to the slender
thread of sand. But if the discourse continued after the last grain had
run out, a tithingman who sat by the desk turned the glass, and the
congregation settled down for a fresh hearing. A three-hour sermon was
a possibility in those iron days, while an eloquent parson, like Samuel
Torrey of Weymouth, could and did pray for two hours at a stretch. The
Reverend John Cotton, grandfather of the redoubtable Cotton Mather, and
the only minister in Boston who was acknowledged by Anne Hutchinson
to possess the mysterious “seal of the Spirit,” had a reprehensible
habit of preaching for two hours on Sunday in the meeting-house (his
family and servants of course attending), and at night, after supper,
repeating this sermon to the sleepy household who had heard it in the
morning.

For a hundred and fifty years the New England churches were unheated,
and every effort to erect stoves was vigorously opposed. This at
least could not have been a reaction against Popery, inasmuch as the
churches of Catholic Christendom were at that time equally cold. That
the descendants of men who tore the noble old organs out of English
cathedrals, and sold them for scrap metal, should have been chary
of accepting even a “pitch-pipe” to start their unmelodious singing
was natural enough; but stoves played no part in the service. The
congregations must have been either impervious to discomfort, or very
much afraid of fires. The South Church of Boston was first heated in
the winter of 1783. There was much criticism of such indulgence, and
the “Evening Post,” January 25th, burst into denunciatory verse:

    “Extinct the sacred fires of love,
      Our zeal grown cold and dead;
    In the house of God we fix a stove
      To warm us in their stead.”

Three blots on the Puritans’ escutcheon (they were men, not seraphs)
have been dealt with waveringly by historians. Witchcraft, slavery
and Indian warfare gloom darkly against a shining background of
righteousness. Much has been made of the fleeting phase, and little
of the more permanent conditions--which proves the historic value
of the picturesque. That Salem should to-day sell witch spoons and
trinkets, trafficking upon memories she might be reasonably supposed to
regret, is a triumph of commercialism. The brief and dire obsession of
witchcraft was in strict accord with times and circumstances. It bred
fear, horror, and a tense excitement which lifted from Massachusetts
all reproach of dulness. The walls between the known and the unknown
world were battered savagely, and the men and women who thronged from
house to house to see the “Afflicted Children” writhe in convulsions
had a fearful appreciation of the spectacle. That terrible child,
Ann Putnam, who at twelve years of age was instrumental in bringing
to the scaffold some of the most respected citizens of Salem, is a
unique figure in history. The apprehensive interest she inspired in her
townspeople may be readily conceived. It brought her to ignominy in the
end.

The Plymouth colonists kept on good terms with their Indian neighbours
for half a century. The Bay colonists had more aggressive neighbours,
and dealt with them accordingly. It was an unequal combat. The
malignancy of the red men lacked concentration and thoroughness. They
were only savages, and accustomed to episodic warfare. The white
men knew the value of finality. When Massachusetts planned with
Connecticut to exterminate the Pequots, less than a dozen men escaped
extermination. It was a very complete killing, and no settler slept
less soundly for having had a hand in it. Mr. Fiske says that the
measures employed in King Philip’s War “did not lack harshness,” which
is a euphemism. The flinging of the child Astyanax over the walls of
Troy was less barbarous than the selling of King Philip’s little son
into slavery. Hundreds of adult captives were sent at the same time to
Barbados. It would have been more merciful, though less profitable, to
have butchered them at home.

The New England settlers were not indifferent to the Indians’ souls.
They forbade them, when they could, to hunt or fish on the Lord’s day.
John Eliot, Jonathan Edwards, and other famous divines preached to
them earnestly, and gave them a fair chance of salvation. But, like
all savages, they had a trick of melting into the forest just when
their conversion seemed at hand. Cotton Mather, in his “Magnalia,”
speculates ruthlessly upon their condition and prospects. “We know
not,” he writes, “when or how these Indians first became inhabitants of
this mighty continent; yet we may guess that probably the Devil decoyed
these miserable savages hither, in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord
would never come to destroy or disturb his absolute Empire over them.”

Naturally, no one felt well disposed towards a race which was under
the dominion of Satan. Just as the Celt and the Latin have small
compunction in ill-treating animals, because they have no souls, so
the Puritan had small compunction in ill-treating heathens, because
their souls were lost.

Slavery struck no deep roots in New England soil, perhaps because the
nobler half of the New England conscience never condoned it, perhaps
because circumstances were unfavourable to its development. The negroes
died of the climate, the Indians of bondage. But traders, in whom
conscience was not uppermost, trafficked in slaves as in any other
class of merchandise, and stoutly refused to abandon a profitable line
of business. Moreover, the deep discordance between slavery as an
institution and Puritanism as an institution made such slave-holding
more than ordinarily odious. Agnes Edwards, in an engaging little
volume on Cape Cod, quotes a clause from the will of John Bacon of
Barnstable, who bequeathed to his wife for her lifetime the “use and
improvement” of a slave-woman, Dinah. “If, at the death of my wife,
Dinah be still living, I desire my executors to sell her, and to use
and improve the money for which she is sold in the purchase of Bibles,
and distribute them equally among my said wife’s and my grandchildren.”

There are fashions in goodness and badness as in all things else; but
the selling of a worn-out woman for Bibles goes a step beyond Mrs.
Stowe’s most vivid imaginings.

These are heavy indictments to bring against the stern forbears
whom we are wont to praise and patronize. But Pilgrim and Puritan
can bear the weight of their misdeeds as well as the glory of their
achievements. Of their good old English birthright, “truth, pitie,
freedom and hardiness,” they cherished all but pitie. No price was
too high for them to pay for the dignity of their manhood, or for
the supreme privilege of dwelling on their own soil. They scorned
the line of least resistance. Their religion was never a cloak for
avarice, and labour was not with them another name for idleness and
greed. Eight hours a day they held to be long enough for an artisan
to work; but the principle of giving little and getting much, which
rules our industrial world to-day, they deemed unworthy of freemen. No
swollen fortunes corrupted their communities; no base envy of wealth
turned them into prowling wolves. If they slew hostile Indians without
compunction, they permitted none to rob those who were friendly and
weak. If they endeavoured to exclude immigrants of alien creeds,
they would have thought shame to bar them out because they were
harder workers or better farmers than themselves. On the whole, a
comparison between their methods and our own leaves us little room for
self-congratulation.

From that great mother country which sends her roving sons over land
and sea, the settlers of New England brought undimmed the sacred fire
of liberty. If they were not akin to Shakespeare, they shared the
inspiration of Milton. “No nobler heroism than theirs,” says Carlyle,
“ever transacted itself on this earth.” Their laws were made for the
strong, and commanded respect and obedience. In Plymouth, few public
employments carried any salary; but no man might refuse office when it
was tendered to him. The Pilgrim, like the Roman, was expected to serve
the state, not batten on it. What wonder that a few drops of his blood
carries with it even now some measure of devotion and restraint. These
were men who understood that life is neither a pleasure nor a calamity.
“It is a grave affair with which we are charged, and which we must
conduct and terminate with honour.”

                       “To Counsel the Doubtful”

In the “Colony Records” of Plymouth it is set down that a certain
John Williams lived unhappily with his wife--a circumstance which was
as conceivable in that austere community as in less godly towns. But
the Puritan magistrate who, in the year 1666, undertook to settle
this connubial quarrel, had no respect for that compelling word,
“incompatibility.” The afflicted couple were admonished “to apply
themselves to such waies as might make for the recovery of peace and
love betwixt them. And for that end, the Court requested Isacke Bucke
to bee officious therein.”

It is the delight and despair of readers, especially of readers
inclined to the intimacies of history, that they are so often told the
beginnings of things, and left to conjecture the end. How did Isacke
Bucke set about his difficult and delicate commission, and how did the
contentious pair relish his officiousness? The Puritans were tolerably
accustomed to proffering advice. It was part of their social code, as
well as a civil and religious duty. They had a happy belief in the
efficacy of expostulation. In 1635 it was proposed that the magistrates
of Boston should “in tenderness and love admonish one another.” And
many lively words must have come of it.

Roman Catholics, who studied their catechism when they were children,
will always remember that the first of the “Spiritual Works of Mercy”
is “To counsel the doubtful.” Taken in conjunction with the thirteen
other works, it presents a compendium of holiness. Taken by itself,
apart from less popular rulings, such as “To forgive offences,” and
“To bear wrongs patiently,” it is apt to be a trifle overbearing.
Catholic theology has defined the difference between a precept and a
counsel--when the Church speaks. A precept is binding, and obedience to
it is an obligation. A counsel is suggestive, and obedience to it is a
matter of volition. The same distinction holds good in civil and social
life. A law must be obeyed; but it is in no despite of our counsellors,
moral or political, that we reserve the right of choice.

Three hundred years ago, Robert Burton, who was reflective rather
than mandatory, commented upon the reluctance of heretics to be
converted from their errors. It seemed to him--a learned and detached
onlooker--that one man’s word, however well spoken, had no effect upon
another man’s views; and he marvelled unconcernedly that this should be
the case. The tolerance or the indifference of our day has disinclined
most of us to meddle with our neighbour’s beliefs. We are concerned
about his tastes, his work, his politics, because at these points
his life touches ours; but we have a decent regard for his spiritual
freedom, and for the secret responsibility it entails.

There are, indeed, devout Christian communities which expend their
time, money and energy in extinguishing in the breasts of other
Christians the faith which has sufficed and supported them. The
methods of these propagandists are more genial than were those of
the Inquisition; but their temerity is no less, and their animating
principle is the same. They proffer their competing set of dogmas with
absolute assurance, forgetting that man does not live by fractions
of theology, but by the correspondence of his nature to spiritual
influences moulded through the centuries to meet his needs. To counsel
the doubtful is a Christian duty; but to create the doubts we counsel
is nowhere recommended. It savours too closely of omniscience.

The counsels offered by age to youth are less expansive, and less
untrammelled than are the counsels offered by youth to age. Experience
dulls the courageous and imaginative didacticism that is so heartening,
because so sanguine, in the young. We have been told, both in England
and in the United States, that youth is now somewhat displeased
with age, as having made a mess of the world it was trying to run;
and that the shrill defiance which meets criticism indicates this
justifiable resentment. It is not an easy matter to run a world at
the best of times, and Germany’s unfortunate ambition to control the
running has put the job beyond man’s power of immediate adjustment.
The social lapses that have been so loudly lamented by British and
American censors are the least serious symptoms of the general
disintegration--the crumbling away of a cornice when the foundations
are insecure.

It is interesting, however, to note the opposing methods employed by
carping age to correct the excesses of youth. When a Western State
disapproves of the behaviour of its young people, it turns to the
courts for relief. It asks and obtains laws regulating the length of a
skirt, or the momentum of a dance. When a New England State disapproves
of the behaviour of its young people, it writes articles, or circulates
and signs a remonstrance. Sometimes it confides its grievance to
a Federation of Women’s Clubs, hoping that the augustness of this
assembly will overawe the spirit of revolt. I may add that when Canada
(Province of Quebec) disapproves of the behaviour of its young people,
it appeals to the Church, which acts with commendable promptness and
semi-occasional success.

All these torrents of disapproval have steeped society in an ebb-tide
of rejected counsels. It would seem that none of us are conducting
ourselves as properly as we should, and that few of us are satisfactory
to our neighbours. In the rapid shifting of responsibility, we find
ourselves accused when we thought we were accusers. We say that a
girl’s dress fails to cover a proper percentage of her body, and are
told that it is the consequence of our inability to preserve peace. We
pay a predatory grocer the price he asks for his goods, and are told
that it is our fault he asks it. If we plead that hunger-striking--the
only alternative--is incompatible with common sense and hard work,
we are offered a varied assortment of substitutes for food. There is
nothing in which personal tastes are more pronounced or less persuasive
than in the devices of economy. Sooner or later they resolve themselves
into the query of the famous and frugal Frenchman: “Why should I pay
twelve francs for an umbrella when I can buy a bock for six sous?”

The most hopeful symptom of our times (so fraught with sullenness
and peril) is the violent hostility developed some years ago between
rival schools of verse. There have always been individual critics as
sensitive to contrary points of view as are the men who organize raids
on Carnegie Hall whenever they disagree with a speaker. Swinburne was a
notable example of this tyranny of opinion. It was not enough for him
to love Dickens and to hate Byron, thus neatly balancing his loss and
gain. He was impelled by the terms of his nature ardently to proclaim
his love and his hate, and intemperately to denounce those who loved
and hated otherwise.

That so keen and caustic a commentator as Mr. Chesterton should have
been annoyed because he could not turn back the tide of popular
enthusiasm which surged and broke at Rudyard Kipling’s feet was natural
enough. He assured the British public that “Recessional” was the work
of a “solemn cad”; and the British public--quite as if he had not
spoken--took the poem to its heart, wept over it, prayed over it,
and dilated generally with emotions which it is good for a public to
feel. The looker-on was reminded a little of Horace Walpole fretfully
explaining to Paris that a Salisbury Court printer could not possibly
know anything about the habits of the English aristocracy; and of Paris
replying to this ultimatum by reading “Clarissa Harlowe” with all its
might and main, and shedding torrents of tears over the printer’s
matchless heroine.

The asperity of a solitary critic is, however, far less impelling than
the asperity of a whole school of writers and of their opponents.
Just when the ways of the world seemed darkest, and its nations most
distraught, the _literati_ effected a welcome diversion by quarreling
over rules of prosody. The lovers of rhyme were not content to read
rhyme and to write it; the lovers of polyphonic prose were not content
to read polyphonic prose and to write it; but both factions found their
true joy in vivaciously criticizing and counselling their antagonists.
Miss Amy Lowell was right when she said, with her customary insight and
decision, that the beliefs and protests and hates of poets all go to
prove the deathless vigour of the art. Unenlightened outsiders took up
the quarrel with pleasure, finding relief in a dispute that threatened
death and disaster to no one.

Few contentions are so innocent of ill-doing. The neighbours whom
we counsel most assiduously are the nations of the world and their
governments, which might well be doubtful, seeing that they stumble
at every step; but which perhaps stand more in need of smooth roads
than of direction. It is true that M. Stéphane Lauzanne, editor of
“Le Matin,” assured us in the autumn of 1920 that France did not
seek American gold, or ships, or guns, or soldiers--“only counsels.”
This sounded quite in our line, until the Frenchman, with that fatal
tendency to the concrete which is typical of the Gallic mind, proceeded
to explain his meaning: “We ask of the country of Edison and of the
Wrights that it will present us with a system for a league of nations
that will work. If there were nothing needed but eloquence, the
statesmen of old Europe would have been sufficient.”

Why did not M. Lauzanne ask for the moon while he was about it? What
does he suppose we Americans have been striving for since 1789 but
systems that will work? Henry Adams, commenting upon the disastrous
failure of Grant’s administration, says just this thing. “The world”
(the American world) “cared little for decency. What it wanted, it did
not know. Probably a system that would work, and men who could work it.
But it found neither.”

And still the search goes on. A system of taxation that will work.
A system of wage-adjustment that will work. A system of prohibition
that will work. A system of public education that will work. These are
the bright phantoms we pursue; and now a Paris editor casually adds a
system for a working league of nations. “If France is in the right,
let America give us her moral support. If France is in the wrong, let
America show us the road to follow.”

To presume agreement where none exists is the most dangerous form
of self-deception. When newspapers and orators tell us that to the
United States has come “the moral leadership of the world,” we must
understand them to imply that foreign nations, with whom we have little
in common, are of our way of thinking--provided always that they know
what we think, and that we know ourselves. For the wide divergence of
national aspirations, they make scant allowance; for misunderstanding
and ill-will, they make no allowance at all. Before the election of
1920, the spokesmen of both political parties assured us with equal
fervour that our country was destined to be the bulwark of the world’s
peace. Their prescriptions for peace differed radically in detail; but
all agreed that ours was to be the administering hand, and all implied
the readiness of Europe (and, if need be, Asia and Africa) to accept
our restoratives. “Want America to teach Turkey,” was the headline of
a leading newspaper, which, in October, 1920, deplored the general
unteachableness of the Turk.

Perhaps the careless crudeness of headlines deceives a large class of
hurried readers who rely too implicitly upon them. When the Conference
at Versailles was plodding through its task, a New York paper announced
in large type: “Italy dissatisfied with territory assigned her by
Colonel House.” It had a mirth-provoking sound; but, after all, the
absurdity was in no way attributable to Colonel House; and, in the
matter of dissatisfaction, not even a headline could go beyond the
facts. What has ever impelled the “Tribuna” and the “Avanti” to express
amicable agreement, save their mutual determination to repudiate the
intervention of the United States?

When Mr. Wilson risked speaking directly to the Italian people, he
paved the way for misunderstanding. To a government, words are words.
It deals with them itself, and it makes allowance for the difficulty
of translating them into action. But a proletariat is apt, not merely
to attach significance to words, but to read an intensive meaning into
them. We have not done badly by Italy. We spent a great deal of money
upon her cold and hungry children. She is sending us shiploads of
immigrants. Her resentment at our counsel has seemed to us unwise and
ungrateful, seeing that we must naturally know what is best for her.
We cannot accept ill-will with the unconcern of Great Britain, which
has been used to it, and has survived it, for centuries. We feel that
we deserve well of the world, because we are immaculately free from
coveting what we do not want or need.

And yet one wonders now and then whether, if there had been four years
of glorious and desolating war on this Western continent, and the
United States had emerged triumphant, but spent, broken and bankrupt,
we should be so sure of our mission to regenerate. Would we then be so
high-handed with England, so critical of France? No people in the world
resent strictures more than we do. No people in the world are less keen
for admonishment. The sixty-six members of the Yale Faculty who in 1920
sent a remonstrance to Congress, protesting against any interference in
the domestic policies of Great Britain, based their protest upon our
unalterable determination to preserve our own independence unviolated,
and to manage our own affairs. They felt, and said, that we should be
scrupulous to observe the propriety we exacted of others.

The ingenious device of appointing an American committee, which in its
turn appointed an American commission to sit as a court of appeal, and
receive evidence touching the relations of Great Britain and Ireland,
was the most original and comprehensive measure for counselling the
doubtful that this country has ever seen. The informality of the scheme
made it a pure delight. Governors of Wyoming and North Dakota, mayors
of Milwaukee and Anaconda, clergymen and college professors, ladies
and gentlemen of unimpeachable respectability and unascertainable
information, all responded to the “Nation’s” call, and placed their
diplomacy at its disposal.

Pains were taken by Mr. Villard to convince the public that the
object of the committee was to avert “the greatest calamity which
could befall the civilized world”--a war between Great Britain and
the United States, than which nothing seemed less likely. Its members
disclaimed anything like “improper interference in the concerns of
another nation.” They evidently did not consider that summoning
Ireland and England to appear as plaintiff and defendant before a
self-constituted tribunal three thousand miles away was in the nature
of an interference. “I meddle with no man’s conscience,” said Cromwell
broad-mindedly, when he closed the Catholic churches, and forbade the
celebration of Mass.

The humour of selecting a group of men and women in one corner of
the world, and delegating to them the unofficial task of settling
public affairs in another, was lost upon Americans, who, having been
repeatedly told that they were to “show the way,” conceived themselves
to be showing it. When Great Britain and Ireland settled their own
affairs without asking our advice or summoning our aid, there were
hyphenated citizens in New York and elsewhere who deeply resented
such independent action, and who have shown ever since a bitter
unfriendliness to their own kith and kin. Even Mr. Cosgrave’s burst of
Gaelic eloquence before the League of Nations, which should have melted
a heart of flint, was powerless to allay their ill-temper.

If well-meaning counsellors could be persuaded that there are phenomena
upon which they are not all qualified to give advice, they might
perhaps forbear to send delegations of children to the White House.
This is a popular diversion, and one which is much to be deplored. In
the hour of our utmost depression, when our rights as a free nation
were denied us, and the lives of our citizens were imperilled on land
and sea, a number of children were sent to Mr. Wilson, to ask him not
to go to war. It was as though they had asked him not to play games on
Sunday, or not to put Christmas candles in his windows. Three years
later, another deputation of innocents marched past the White House,
bearing banners with severely worded directions from their mothers
as to how the President (then a very ill man) should conduct himself.
The language used was of reprehensible rudeness. The exhortations
themselves appeared to be irrelevant. “American women demand that
anarchy in the White House be stopped!” puzzled the onlookers, who
wondered what was happening in that sad abode of pain, what women these
were who knew so much about it, and why a children’s crusade had been
organized for the control of our foreign and domestic policies.

The last query is the easiest answered. Picketing is a survival of the
childish instinct in the human heart. It represents the play-spirit
about which modern educators talk so glibly, and which we are bidden to
cherish and preserve. A society of “American Women Pickets” (delightful
phrase!) is out to enjoy itself, and its pleasures are as simple as
they are satisfying. To parade the streets, to proffer impertinent
instructions, to be stared at by passers-by, and to elude the law which
seeks to abate public nuisances--what better sport could be asked
either for little boys and girls, or for Peter Pans valiantly refusing
to mature? Mr. Harding was pursued in his day by picketing children,
and Mr. Coolidge has probably the same pleasure awaiting him. Even
the tomb at Mount Vernon has been surrounded by malcontents, bearing
banners with the inscription, “Washington, Thou Art Truly Dead!” To
which the mighty shade, who in his day had heard too often the sound
and fury of importunate counsels, and who, because he would not
hearken, had been abused, like “a Nero, a defaulter and a pickpocket,”
might well have answered from the safety and dignity of the tomb, “Deo
gratias!”

When a private citizen calls at the White House, to “frankly advise”
a modification of the peace treaty; when a private citizen writes to
the American Bar Association, to “frankly advise” this distinguished
body of men to forbear from any discussion of public affairs at their
annual meeting; when a private citizeness writes to the Secretary of
War to “frankly advise” that he should treat the slacker of to-day as
he would treat the hero of to-morrow, we begin to realize how far the
individual American is prepared to dry-nurse the Nation. Every land has
its torch-bearers, but nowhere else do they all profess to carry the
sacred fire. It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind
is unfavourable to preachment. We can hardly conceive a delegation of
little French girls sent to tell M. Millerand what their mothers think
of him. Even England shows herself at times impatient of her monitors.
“Mr. Norman Angell is very cross,” observed a British reviewer dryly.
“Europe is behaving in her old mad way without having previously
consulted him.”

“Causes are the proper subject of history,” says Mr. Brownell, “and
characteristics are the proper subject of criticism.” It may be that
much of our criticism is beside the mark, because we disregard the
weight of history. Our fresh enthusiasm for small nations is dependent
upon their docility, and upon their respect for boundary lines which
the big nations have painstakingly defined. That a boundary which has
been fought over for centuries should be more provocative of dispute
than a claim staked off in Montana does not occur to an American
who has little interest in events that antedate the Declaration of
Independence. Countries, small, weak and incredibly old, whose sons
are untaught and unfed, appear to be eager for supplies and insensible
to moral leadership. We recognize these characteristics, and resent
or deplore them according to our dispositions; but for an explanation
of the causes--which might prove enlightening--we must go further back
than Americans care to travel.

“I seldom consult others, and am seldom attended to; and I know no
concern, either public or private, that has been mended or bettered
by my advice.” So wrote Montaigne placidly in the great days of
disputation, when men counselled the doubtful with sword and gun,
reasoning in platoons, and correcting theological errors with the
all-powerful argument of arms. Few men were then guilty of intolerance,
and fewer still understood with Montaigne and Burton the irreclaimable
obstinacy of convictions. There reigned a profound confidence in
intellectual and physical coercion. It was the opinion of John Donne,
poet and pietist, that Satan was deeply indebted to the counsels of
Saint Ignatius Loyola, which is a higher claim for the intelligence of
that great churchman than Catholics have ever advanced. Milton, whose
ardent and compelling mind could not conceive of tolerance, failed to
comprehend that Puritanism was out of accord with the main currents of
English thought and temper. He not only assumed that his enemies were
in the wrong, says Sir Leslie Stephen, “but he often seemed to expect
that they would grant so obvious an assertion.”

This sounds modern. It even sounds American. We are so confident that
we are showing the way, we have been told so repeatedly that what
we show is the way, that we cannot understand the reluctance of our
neighbours to follow it. There is a curious game played by educators,
which consists in sending _questionnaires_ to some hundreds, or some
thousands, of school-children, and tabulating their replies for the
enlightenment of the adult public. The precise purport of this game
has never been defined; but its popularity impels us to envy the
leisure that educators seem to enjoy. A few years ago twelve hundred
and fourteen little Californians were asked if they made collections of
any kind, and if so, what did they collect? The answers were such as
might have been expected, with one exception. A small and innocently
ironic boy wrote that he collected “bits of advice.” His hoard was the
only one that piqued curiosity; but, as in the case of Isacke Bucke and
the quarrelsome couple of Plymouth, we were left to our own conjectures.

The fourth “Spiritual Work of Mercy” is “To comfort the sorrowful.”
How gentle and persuasive it sounds after its somewhat contentious
predecessors; how sure its appeal; how gracious and reanimating its
principle! The sorrowful are, after all, far in excess of the doubtful;
they do not have to be assailed; their sad faces are turned toward
us, their sad hearts beat responsively to ours. The eddying drifts of
counsel are loud with disputation; but the great tides of human emotion
ebb and flow in obedience to forces that work in silence.

    “The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
    Moves all the labouring surges of the world.”

                     Are Americans a Timid People?

As the hare is timid--no! They have made good their fighting record in
war. They have proved themselves over and over again to be tranquilly
courageous in moments of acute peril. They have faced “their duty and
their death” as composedly as Englishmen; and nobler comparison there
is none. The sinking of the Titanic offered but one opportunity out
of many for the display of a quality which is apt to be described in
superlatives; but which is, nevertheless, an inherent principle of
manhood. The protective instinct is strong in the native American. He
does not prate about the sacredness of human life, because he knows,
consciously or unconsciously, that the most sacred thing in life is the
will to surrender it unfalteringly.

Of what then are Americans afraid, and what form does their timidity
take? Mr. Harold Stearns puts the case coarsely and strongly when he
affirms that our moral code resolves itself into fear of what people
may say. With a profound and bitter distaste for things as they are,
he bids us beware lest we confuse “the reformistic tendencies of our
national life--Pollyanna optimism, prohibition, blue laws, clericalism,
home and foreign missions, exaggerated reverence for women, with
anything a civilized man can legitimately call moral idealism....
These manifestations are the fine flower of timidity, and fear, and
ignorance.”

Mr. Stearns is a robust writer. His antagonists, if he has any, need
never fear the sharp thrust of an understatement. He recognizes the
tyranny of opinion in the United States; but he does not do full
justice to its serio-comic aspects, to the part it plays in trivial
as well as in august affairs, to the nervousness of our regard, to
the absurdities of our subordination. There are successful newspapers
and periodicals whose editors and contributors walk a chalked path,
shunning facts, ignoring issues, avoiding the two things which spell
life for all of us--men and customs--and triumphantly presenting a
non-existent world to unobservant readers. Henry Adams said that the
magazine-made female has not a feature that would have been recognized
by Adam; but our first father’s experience, while intimate and
conclusive, was necessarily narrow. We have evolved a magazine-made
universe, unfamiliar to the eyes of the earth-dweller, and unrelated to
his soul.

When this country was pronounced to be too democratic for liberty,
the epigram came as close to the truth as epigrams are ever permitted
to come. Democracies have been systematically praised because we
stand committed to democratic tenets, and have no desire to foul
our own roost. It is granted that equality, rather than freedom, is
their animating principle. It is granted also that they are sometimes
unfortunate in their representatives; that their legislative bodies
are neither intelligent nor disinterested, and that their public
service is apt to be distinguished for its incapacity. But with so
much vigour and proficiency manifested every day in private ventures,
we feel they can afford a fair share of departmental incompetence. The
tremendous reserves of will and manhood, the incredible insufficiency
of direction, which Mr. Wells remarked in democratic England when
confronted by an overwhelming crisis, were equally apparent in the
United States. It would seem as though a high average of individual
force and intelligence failed to offer material for leadership.

The English, however, unlike Americans, refuse to survey with unconcern
the spectacle of chaotic officialdom. They are a fault-finding people,
and have expressed their dissatisfaction since the days of King John
and the Magna Carta. They were no more encouraged to find fault than
were other European commonalties that kept silence, or spoke in
whispers. The Plantagenets were a high-handed race. The hot-tempered
Tudors resented any opinions their subjects might form. Elizabeth had
no more loyal servant than the unlucky John Stubbs, who lost his right
hand for the doubtful pleasure of writing the “Gaping Gulf.” Any other
woman would have been touched when the culprit, raising his hat with
his left hand which had been mercifully spared, cried aloud, “God
save the Queen!” Not so the great Elizabeth. Stubbs had expressed his
views upon her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou, and it was no
business of his to have views, much less to give them utterance; while
his intimation that, at forty-six, she was unlikely to bear children
was the most unpardonable truth he could have spoken.

The Stuarts, with the exception of the second Charles, were as
resentful of candour as were the Tudors. “I hope,” said James the
First to his Commons, “that I shall hear no more about liberty of
speech.” The Hanoverians heartily disliked British frankness because
they heartily disliked their unruly British subjects. George the Third
had all Elizabeth’s irascibility without her power to indulge it. And
Victoria was not much behind either of them--witness her indignation at
the “Greville Memoirs,” “an insult to royalty,” and her regret that the
publishers were not open to prosecution.

It was no use. Nothing could keep the Englishman from speaking his
mind. With him it was not only “What is there that a man dare not
do?” but “What is there that a man dare not say?” Many a time he paid
more for the privilege than it was worth; but he handed it down to
his sons, who took care that it was not lost through disuse. When
Sorbière visited England in 1663, he was amazed to find the “common
people” discussing public affairs in taverns and inns, recalling the
glories as well as the discomforts of Cromwell’s day, and grumbling
over the taxes. “They do not forbear saying what they think of the
king himself.” In the “Memoirs” of the publisher, John Murray, there
is an amusing letter from the Persian envoy, Mirza Abul Hassan, dated
1824, and expressing his opinion of a government which permitted such
unrestrained liberty. Englishmen “do what they like, say what they
like, write what they like in their newspapers,” comments the Oriental
with bewildered but affectionate contempt. “How far do you think it
safe to go in defying your sovereign?” asked Madame de Pompadour of
John Wilkes, when that notorious plain-speaker had taken refuge in
Paris from his incensed king and exasperated creditors. “That, Madame,”
said the member from Aylesbury, “is what I am trying to find out.”

In our day the indifference of the British Government to what used
to be called “treasonable utterances” has in it a galling element of
contempt. Not that the utterances are invariably contemptible. Far
from it. Blighting truths as well as extravagant senilities may still
be heard in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. But the orators might be
addressing their audiences in classic Greek for any token the London
bobby gives of listening or comprehending. “Words are the daughters of
earth; deeds are the sons of Heaven.” The bobby has never heard this
grandiloquent definition; but he divides them as clearly in his own
mind into hot air and disorderly conduct, and he takes his measures
accordingly.

In the United States, as in all countries which enjoy a representative
government, censure and praise run in familiar grooves. The party
which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which
is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity
in the party which is out. This antagonism is duly reflected by the
press; and the job of arriving at a correct conclusion is left to the
future historian. As an instance of the fashion in which history can
be sidetracked by politics, the reader is referred to the portraits
of Andrew Jackson as drawn by Mr. Beveridge in his “Life of John
Marshall,” and by Mr. Bowers in his “Party Battles of the Jackson
Period.”

The first lesson taught us by the Great War was that we got nowhere
in political leading-strings, and that none of our accustomed formulas
covered this strange upheaval. It was like trying to make a correct
survey of land which was being daily cracked by earthquakes. Our
national timidity entrenched itself behind a wilful disregard of facts.
It was content to view the conflict as a catastrophe for which nobody,
or everybody, was to blame. Our national intrepidity manifested itself
from the outset in a sense of human responsibility, in a bitter denial
of our right to ignorance or indifference. The timidity was not an
actual fear of getting hurt; the intrepidity was not insensitiveness to
danger. What tore our Nation asunder was the question of accepting or
evading a challenge which had--so we at first thought--only a spiritual
significance.

In one of Birmingham’s most genially nonsensical stories, “The Island
Mystery,” there is an American gentleman named Donovan. He is rich,
elderly, good-tempered, brave, kind and humorous; as blameless in his
private life as King Arthur, as corrupt politically and financially as
Tweed or Fiske; a buyer of men’s souls in the market-place, a gentle,
profound and invulnerable cynic. To him a young Irishman sets forth the
value of certain things well worth the surrender of life; but the old
American smiles away such a primitive mode of reckoning. The salient
article of his creed is that nothing should be paid for in blood that
can be bought for money; and that, as every man has his price, money,
if there is enough of it, will buy the world. He is never betrayed,
however, into a callous word, being mindful always of the phraseology
of the press and platform; and the reader is made to understand that
long acquaintance with such phraseology has brought him close to
believing his own pretences. “In the Middle West where I was raised,”
he observes mildly, “we don’t think guns and shooting the proper way of
settling national differences. We’ve advanced beyond those ideas. We’re
a civilized people, especially in the dry States, where university
education is common, and the influence of women permeates elections.
We’ve attained a nobler outlook upon life.” It reads like a humorous
illustration of Mr. Stearns’s unhumorous invectives.

Sociologists are wont to point to the American public as a remarkable
instance of the herd mind--a mind not to be utterly despised. It makes
for solidity, if not for enlightenment. It is the most economical way
of thinking; it saves trouble and it saves noise. So acute an observer
as Lord Chesterfield set store by it as unlikely to disturb the peace
of society; so practical a statesman as Sir Robert Walpole found it
the best substratum upon which to rear the fabric of constitutional
government. It is most satisfactory and most popular when void of all
sentiment save such as can be expressed by a carnation on Mother’s
Day, or by the social activities of an Old Home Week. Strong emotions
are as admittedly insubordinate as strong convictions. “A world full
of patriots,” sighs the peace-loving Honourable Bertrand Russell, “may
be a world full of strife.” This is true. A single patriot has been
known to breed strife in plenty. Who can measure the blood poured out
in the cause that Wallace led, the “sacred” human lives sacrificed at
his behest, the devastations that marked his victories and defeats?
And all that came of such regrettable disturbances were a gallows at
Smithfield, a name that shines like a star in the murk of history, and
a deathless impulse to freedom in the hearts of a brave people.

The herd mind is essentially and inevitably a timid mind. Mr. Sinclair
Lewis has analyzed it with relentless acumen in his amazing novel,
“Babbitt.” The worthy citizen who gives his name to the story has
reached middle age without any crying need to think for himself. His
church and his newspaper have supplied his religious and political
creeds. If there are any gaps left in his mind, they are filled up at
his business club, or at his “lodge,” that kindly institution designed
to give “the swaddled American husband” a chance to escape from home
one night in the week. Church, newspaper, club and lodge afford a
supply of ready-made phrases which pass muster for principles as well
as for conversation.

Yet stirring sluggishly in Babbitt’s blood are a spirit of revolt, a
regard for justice, and a love of freedom. He does not want to join the
Good Citizens’ League, and he refuses to be coerced into membership.
He does not like the word “Vigilante,” or the thing it represents.
His own sane instinct rejects the tyranny of the conservative rich
and of the anarchical poor. He dimly respects Seneca Doane and
Professor Brockbank when he sees them marching in the strikers’
parade. “Nothing in it for them, not a cent!” But his distaste for the
strikers themselves, for any body of men who obstruct the pleasant
ways of prosperity, remains unchanged. In the end--and it is an end
which comes quickly--he finds that the one thing unendurable to his
soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought currents of his group,
he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague uneasiness. He yields,
and he yields without a pang, glad to get back into the warm familiar
atmosphere of class complacency, of smugness, of “safety first”; glad
to sacrifice a wavering idealism and a purposeless independence for
the solid substance of smooth living and conformity to his neighbours’
point of view.

The curious thing about Mr. Lewis’s analysis is that back of the
contempt he strives to awaken in our souls is a suspicion that
Babbitt’s herd mind, the mind of many thousands of Americans, is, on
the whole, a safe mind for the country. It will not raise us to any
intellectual or spiritual heights, but neither will it plunge us into
ruin. It is not making trouble for itself, or for the rest of the
world. In its dull, imperfect way it represents the static forces of
society. Sudden and violent change is hostile to its spirit. It may
be trusted to create a certain measure of commercial prosperity, to
provide work for workers, and safety for securities. It is not without
regard for education, and it delights in practical science--the science
which speeds transit, or which collects, preserves and distributes
the noises of the world. It permits artists and authors to earn their
daily bread, which is as much as artists and authors have any business
to expect, and which is a very precious privilege. In revolutionary
Russia, the intelligentsia were the first to starve, an unpleasant
reminder of possibilities.

What Mr. Lewis implies is that, outside of the herd mind he is
considering, may be found understanding and a sense of fair play.
But this is an unwarranted assumption. The intelligence of the
country--and of the world--is a limited quantity; and fair play is
less characteristic of groups than of individuals. Katharine Fullerton
Gerould, in an immensely discontented paper entitled “The Land of the
Free,” presents the reverse of Mr. Lewis’s medal. She contends that,
as a people, we have “learned fear,” and that, while England has kept
the traditions of freedom (a point on which Mr. Chesterton vehemently
disagrees with her), we are content with its rhetoric. But she finds
us terrorized by labour as well as by capital, by reformers and
theorists as well as by the unbudging conservative. Fanatics, she says,
are no longer negligible. They have learned how to control votes by
organizing ignorance and hysteria. “In company with your most intimate
friends you may lift amused eyebrows over the Fundamentalists, over the
anti-cigarette organization, over the film censors, over the people
who wish to shape our foreign policy in the interests of Methodism,
over the people who wish to cut ‘The Merchant of Venice’ out of school
editions of Shakespeare. But it is only in company with your most
intimate friends that you can do this. If you do it in public, you are
going to be persecuted. You are sure, at the very least, to be called
‘un-American.’”

It is a bearable misfortune to be called un-American, because the
phrase still waits analysis. The only sure way to escape it is by
stepping warily--as in an egg-dance--among the complicated interests
sacred to democracies. The agile egg-dancer, aware that there is
nothing in the world so sensitive as a voter (Shelley’s coddled plant
was a hardy annual by comparison), discountenances plain speech on
any subject, as liable to awaken antagonism. There is no telling whom
it may hit, and there is no calculating the return blows. “To covet
the truth is a very distinguished passion,” observes Santayana. It
has burned in the bosom of man, but not in the corporate bosoms of
municipalities and legislative bodies. A world of vested interests is
not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candour.

The plain-speaker may, for example, offend the Jews; and nothing can be
more manifestly unwise than to give umbrage to a people, thin-skinned,
powerful and clannish, who hold the purse-strings of the country. Look
what happened to Sargent’s fresco in the Boston Library, which angered
the Synagogue it inadequately represented. Or he may offend the Irish,
who control wards, and councils, and local elections; and who, being
always prompt to retaliate, are best kept in a good humour. Or he may
offend either the Methodists or the Roman Catholics, powerful factors
in politics, both of them, and capable of dealing knock-down blows. A
presidential election was once lost and won through an unpardonable
affront to Catholicism; and are we not now drinking soda-fountain
beverages in obedience to the mandates of religious bodies, of which
the Methodists are the most closely organized and aggressive?

It is well to consider these things, and the American press does very
soberly and seriously consider them. The Boston “Transcript” ventured,
it is true, to protest against the ruling of the Navy Department
which gave to Jewish seamen of the ancient faith three days’ leave
of absence, from the thirty-first of March, 1923, to the second of
April, with such “additional time” as was practicable, that they
might attend the rites of the Synagogue; while Gentile seamen of the
Christian faith enjoyed no such religious privileges. The newspapers
in general, however, discreetly avoided this issue. “Life” pointed out
with a chuckle that the people who disapproved of President Lowell’s
decision to exclude negroes from the Harvard Freshman dormitories “rose
up and slammed him”; while the people who approved were “less vocal.”
When Rear Admiral Sims said disconcertingly: “The Kentucky is not a
battleship at all. She is the worst crime in naval construction ever
perpetrated by the white race”; even those reviewers who admitted that
the Admiral knew a battleship when he saw one, were more ready to
soften his words than to uphold them.

The negro is a man and a brother. He is also a voter, and as such
merits consideration. There is no more popular appeal throughout the
length and breadth of the North than that of fairness to the coloured
citizen. Volumes have been written about his rights; but who save
President Roosevelt ever linked responsibilities with rights, duties
with deliverance? Who, at least, save President Roosevelt ever paused
in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the crime of lynching (a
stain on the Nation’s honour and a blight on the Nation’s rectitude)
to remind the black man that his part of the contract was to deliver
up the felon to justice, that his duty to his country, his race, and
his manhood was to refuse all sanctuary to crime? A few years ago an
acute negro policeman in Philadelphia recognized and trapped a negro
criminal. For this he received his full measure of commendation;
but he also received threatening letters from other negroes whose
simple conception of a policeman’s part was the giving of shelter and
protection to offenders of his own race.

The nastiest bit of hypocrisy ever put forward by wrong-doers was the
cant of the early slave-dealers about Christianity and the negroes’
souls. The slaves were Christianized by thousands, and took kindly to
their new creed; but their spiritual welfare was not a controlling
factor in the commerce which supplied the Southern States with labour.
That four fifths of the labourers were better off in America than
they would have been in Africa was a circumstance equally unfit to be
offered as a palliative by civilized men. The inherent injustice of
slavery lay too deep for vindication. But now that the great wrong has
been righted (and that three hundred thousand white men laid down
their lives in the righting is a fact which deserves to be remembered),
now that the American negroes are free, Christian, educated, and
privileged (like artists and authors) to earn their daily bread, they
cannot candidly regret that their remote ancestors had not been left
unmolested on the coast of Guinea. They have their grievances; but they
are the most fortunate of their race. The debt the white men owed them
has been paid. There is left a mutual dependence on the law, a mutual
obligation of self-imposed decency of behaviour from which not even
voters are exempt.

Timidity is superimposed upon certain classes of men who are either
tied up with red tape, like teachers, soldiers and sailors, or unduly
dependent upon other men, like legislators, and like clerics in those
churches which are strong enough to control the insubordinations of
the pulpit. Of all these classes, legislators are the worst off,
because their dependence is the most ignoble and disastrous. So long
as a future election is the controlling influence in their lives, they
have no alternative but to truckle to any compact body of voters that
bullies them into subjection. So long as they take for their slogan,
“We aim to please,” they must pay out their manhood for the privilege
of pleasing. In 1923 Senator Borah charged Congress with “organized
cowardice” in the matter of the soldiers’ bonus. It was a borrowed
phrase neatly refitted. The spectacle of a body of lawmakers doubling
and turning like a hare in its efforts to satisfy the servicemen
without annoying the taxpayer struck the Senator--and others--as the
kind of exaggerated subjection which paves the way to anarchy.

Timidity was as alien to the soul of Henry Adams as it is alien to the
soul of Admiral Sims. He was not a man who skirted the hard places on
the road, or who was so busy keeping both feet on the ground that he
feared to take a step. But he was conscious of the inquisitorial spirit
which is part of the righteousness of America, and which keeps watch
and ward over all the schooling of the country. “Education,” he wrote,
“like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has to shut his
eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest.”

The policy of shutting one’s eyes and holding one’s tongue is highly
esteemed in all professions, and in all departments of public service.
The man who can hear black called white without fussily suggesting that
perhaps it is only grey; the man who evades responsibility, and eschews
inside criticism (like the criticism of a battleship by an admiral);
the man who never tells an unpalatable truth “at the wrong time” (the
right time has yet to be discovered), is the man whose success in life
is fairly well assured. There is an optimism which nobly anticipates
the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism
which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness. The first belongs to brave and
lonely men; the second is the endearing quality of men whose sagging
energy and cautious content can be trusted to make no trouble for their
kind.

The plain-speaking of soldiers and sailors is reprobated and punished,
but their discretion is less conspicuously rewarded. They are expected
to be undeviatingly brave in the field and at sea; but timorous and
heedful when not engaged in fighting their country’s enemies. They
are at a disadvantage in times of peace, strait-jacketed by rules and
regulations, regarded with suspicion by sociologists, with hostility by
pacifists, with jealousy by politicians. A grateful Republic dismisses
the men who fought for her, and cherishes her army of office-holders.
When General Wood and Admiral Sims spoke some unpleasant truths, nobody
ventured to call these truths lies; but everybody said that General
Wood and Admiral Sims were not the proper persons to speak them. As the
proper persons to speak them never would have spoken them, the country
would have been spared the discomfort of listening, and the “common
quiet,” which is mankind’s concern, would have been undisturbed.

So far, then, is Mr. Harold Stearns right in accusing us as a nation
of timidity. So far, then, is Mrs. Gerould right in accusing us of
exaggerated prudence. That something akin to timidity has crept into
the hearts of Englishmen, who are fortified by a long tradition of
freedom and common sense, is evidenced by the title given to two
recent volumes of scholarly, and by no means revolutionary, papers,
“Outspoken Essays.” Frankness must be at a discount when it becomes
self-conscious, and constitutes a claim to regard. The early essayists
were fairly outspoken without calling anybody’s attention to the fact.
The contributors to those great and grim “Reviews” which so long held
the public ear were outspoken to the verge of brutality. A comfortless
candour was their long suit. Never before in the history of English
letters has this quality been so rare as to be formally adopted and
proclaimed.

Santayana, analyzing the essentials of independence, comes to the
discouraging conclusion that liberty of speech and liberty to elect our
lawmakers do not materially help us to live after our own minds. This
he holds to be the only positive and worthwhile form of freedom. He
aims high. Very few of us can live after our own minds, because the
tyranny of opinion is reënforced by the tyranny of circumstance. But
none of us can hope to live after our own minds unless we are free to
speak our own minds; to speak them, not only in the company of friends
(which is all Mrs. Gerould grants us), but openly in the market-place;
and not with a blast of defiance, but calmly as in the exercise of an
unquestioned prerogative. Under no other circumstance is it possible to
say anything of value or of distinction. Under no other circumstance
can we enjoy the luxury of self-respect. There is an occasional
affectation of courage and candour on the part of those who know they
are striking a popular note; but to dare to be unpopular, “in the best
and noblest sense of a good and noble word,” is to hold fast to the
principles which speeded the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock, and Penn to
the shores of the Delaware.

               The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography

Mr. Edmund Gosse, commenting on the lack of literary curiosity in
the early years of the seventeenth century, ascribes it to a growing
desire for real knowledge, to an increasing seriousness of mind. Men
read travels, history, philosophy, theology. “There were interesting
people to be met with, but there were no Boswells. Sir Aston Cokayne
mentions that he knew all the men of his time, and could have written
their lives, had it been worth his while. Instead of doing this, the
exasperating creature wrote bad epigrams and dreary tragi-comedies.”

A century later, when literary curiosity had in some measure revived,
Sir Walter Scott, losing his temper over Richard Cumberland’s
“Memoirs,” wrote of their author in the “Quarterly Review”: “He has
pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by publishing his own
life, and the private history of his acquaintances.”

A better illustration of La Fontaine’s wisest fable, “The Miller, his
Son, and the Ass,” could not anywhere be found. The only way to please
everybody is to have no ass; that is, to print nothing, and leave the
world at peace. But as authorship is a trade by which men seek to live,
they must in some way get their beast to market, and be criticized
accordingly.

It is probable that the increasing vogue of biography, the amazing
output of books about men and women of meagre attainments and
flickering celebrity, sets the modern autobiographer at work.

    “For now the dentist cannot die,
    And leave his forceps as of old,
    But round him, ere his clay be cold,
    Is spun the vast biography.”

The astute dentist says very sensibly: “If there is any money to be
made out of me, why not make it myself? If there is any gossip to be
told about me, why not tell it myself? If modesty restrains me from
praising myself as highly as I should expect a biographer to praise me,
prudence dictates the ignoring of circumstances which an indiscreet
biographer might drag into the light. I am, to say the least, as
safe in my own hands as I should be in anybody else’s; and I shall,
moreover, enjoy the pleasure dearest to the heart of man, the pleasure
of talking about myself in the terms that suit me best.”

Perhaps it is this open-hearted enjoyment which communicates itself to
the reader, if he has a generous disposition, and likes to see other
people have a good time. Even the titles of certain autobiographical
works are saturated with self-appreciation. We can see the august
simper with which a great lady in the days of Charles the Second
headed her manuscript: “A True Relation of the Birth, Breeding and Life
of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Written by Herself.” Mr.
Theodore Dreiser’s “A Book About Myself” sounds like nothing but a loud
human purr. The intimate wording of “Margot Asquith, An Autobiography,”
gives the key to all the cheerful confidences that follow. Never before
or since has any book been so much relished by its author. She makes
no foolish pretence of concealing the pleasure that it gives her; but
passes on with radiant satisfaction from episode to episode, extracting
from each in turn its full and flattering significance. The volumes are
as devoid of revelations as of reticence. If at times they resemble the
dance of the seven veils, the reader is invariably reassured when the
last veil has been whisked aside, and he sees there is nothing behind
it.

The happiness of writing an autobiography which is going to be
published and read is a simple and comprehensible emotion. Before books
were invented, men carved on stone something of a vainglorious nature
about themselves, and expected their subjects, or their neighbours,
to decipher it. But there is a deeper and subtler gratification in
writing an autobiography which seeks no immediate public, and contents
itself with the expression of a profound and indulged egotism. Marie
Bashkirtseff has been reproached for making the world her father
confessor; but the reproach seems hardly justified in view of the fact
that the “Journal,” although “meant to be read,” was never thrust by
its author upon readers, and was not published until six years after
her death. She was, although barely out of girlhood, as complex as
Mrs. Asquith is simple and robust. She possessed, moreover, genuine
intellectual and artistic gifts. The immensity of her self-love and
self-pity (she could be more sorry for her own troubles than anybody
who ever lived) steeped her pages in an ignoble emotionalism. She was
often unhappy; but she revelled in her unhappiness, and summoned the
Almighty to give it his serious attention. Her overmastering interest
in herself made writing about herself a secret and passionate delight.

There must always be a different standard for the confessions which,
like Rousseau’s, are made voluntarily to the world, and the confessions
which, like Mr. Pepys’s, are disinterred by the world from the caches
where the confessants concealed them. Not content with writing in a
cipher, which must have been a deal of trouble, the great diarist
confided his most shameless passages to the additional cover of
Spanish, French, Greek and Latin, thus piquing the curiosity of
a public which likes nothing better than to penetrate secrets and
rifle tombs. He had been dead one hundred and twenty-two years before
the first part of his diary was printed. Fifty years later, it was
considerably enlarged. One hundred and ninety years after the garrulous
Secretary of the Admiralty had passed into the eternal silences,
the record of his life (of that portion of it which he deemed worth
recording) was given unreservedly to English readers. The “Diary” is
what it is because of the manner of the writing. Mr. Lang says that of
all who have gossiped about themselves, Pepys alone tells the truth.
Naturally. If one does not tell the truth in a Greek cipher, when shall
the truth be told?

The severe strictures passed by George Eliot upon autobiographies
are directed against scandal-mongering no less than against personal
outpourings. She could have had the English-speaking world for a
confidant had she consented to confide to it; but nothing was less to
her liking. She objected to “volunteered and picked confessions,” as in
their nature insincere, and also as conveying, directly or indirectly,
accusations against others. Her natural impulse was to veil her own
soul--which was often sick and sore--from scrutiny; and, being a person
of limited sympathies, she begrudged her neighbour the privilege of
exhibiting his soul, sores and all, to the public. The struggle of
human nature “to bury its lowest faculties,” over which she cast
unbroken silence, is what the egotist wants to reveal, and the public
wants to observe. When Nietzsche says debonairly of himself, “I have
had no experience of religious difficulties, and have never known what
it was to feel sinful,” the statement, though probably untrue, creates
at once an atmosphere of flatness. It is what Walt Whitman ardently
admired in beasts--

    “They do not lie awake in the dark, and weep for their sins,
    They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.”

Next to the pleasure of writing lovingly about ourselves--but not
comparable to it--is the pleasure of writing unlovingly about our
fellows. Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
I think that the last years of Saint-Simon, those sad impoverished
years when he lived forgotten by his world, must have been tremendously
cheered by the certainty that, sooner or later, the public would read
his memoirs. Nobody knows with what patient labour, and from what
devious sources he collected his material; but we can all divine the
secret zest with which he penned his brilliant, malicious, sympathetic,
truth-telling pages. Thirty years after his death some of these pages
crept cautiously into print; but a full hundred years had passed
before the whole text was given to the world. Perhaps the dying
French gentleman anticipated no earlier resurrection for his buried
manuscript; but he knew his nation and he knew his work. The nation and
the work were bound to meet.

A somewhat similar satisfaction must have stolen into the heart of
Charles Greville when he wrote the last pages of his diary, and laid
it aside for future publication. Nineteenth-century England presented
none of the restrictions common to eighteenth-century France; and ten
years after Greville’s death the first instalment of the ever-famous
“Memoirs” exploded like a bomb in the serried ranks of British official
and fashionable life. It shook, not the security, but the complacency
of the Queen on her throne. It was an intelligent and impartial picture
of the times; and there is nothing that people like less than to be
intelligently and impartially described. Moreover, the writer was no
anonymous critic whose words came unweighted by authority, no mere man
of letters whom men of affairs could ignore. He had lived in the heart
of administrative England, and he knew whereof he spoke.

Lord Hervey’s memoirs are not autobiographical at all: they are
historical, like the memoirs of Sully, and Jean de Joinville, and
Philippe de Comines. They are very properly entitled “Memoirs of the
Reign of George the Second,” and what their author did not know about
that interesting reign (as seen from the angle of the Court) was not
worth the knowing. Historians have made free use of his material; and
some of those to whom it has been most valuable, like Thackeray, have
harshly depreciated the chronicler. Dr. Jowett, in a moment of cynical
misgiving, said that every amusing story must of necessity be unkind,
untrue, or immoral. Hervey’s stories are not untrue, and not often
immoral; but they _are_ unkind. What did he see about him of which he
could consistently write with kindness? His sharpest thrusts have a
careless quality which redeems them from the charge of vindictiveness.
When he says of Frederick, Prince of Wales, “He was as false as his
capacity would allow him to be,” it sounds like an observation passed
with casual unconcern upon a natural phenomenon which had chanced to
come under his notice.

Sully was a maker of history as well as a writer of history. He had
no taste and no time for self-analysis, and, like Joinville, he had
the rare good fortune to serve a master whom he sincerely loved and
admired. Comines also admired his master, but he did not love him.
Nobody has yet been put on record as loving Louis the Eleventh. All
these men wrote with candour and acumen. No pleasure which they can
have taken in compiling their memoirs can equal, or even approach, the
pleasure with which we read them. Their accuracy is the accuracy of the
observer, not of the antiquarian. “In my opinion,” writes Comines, “you
who lived in the age when these affairs were transacted have no need to
be informed of the exact hours when everything was done.” “I now make
known to my readers,” observes Joinville composedly, “that all they
shall find in this book which I have declared I have seen and known, is
true, and what they ought most firmly to believe. As for such things as
I have mentioned as hearsay, they may understand them as they please.”

These excursions into the diversified region of the memoir lead us
away from the straight and narrow path of the autobiography. These
saunterings along the pleasant byways of history distract us from
the consideration of the human soul, as shown us by its too ecstatic
possessor. We know as much as we need to know about the souls of Lord
Hervey, and Sully, and of the Sire de Joinville, which was really a
beautiful article; but we know a great deal more about the souls of
George the Second, and Henry of Navarre, and of Saint Louis, shining
starlike through the centuries. What we gain is better worth having
than what we lose.

When we read the true autobiography, as that of Benvenuto Cellini, we
see the august men of the period assume a secondary place, a shadowy
significance. They patronize the artist or imprison him, according to
their bent. They give him purses of five hundred ducats when they are
complacent, and they banish him from their very limited domains when
he kills somebody whom they prefer to keep alive. But not for one
moment is our attention distracted from the narrator himself to these
rude arbiters of fate. He makes it plain to us from the start that he
is penning his autobiography in a spirit of composed enjoyment, and
because he deems it “incumbent upon upright men who have performed
anything noble or praiseworthy to record with their own hand the events
of their lives.” He tells us in detail how it pleased God that he
should come into the world; and he tells us of all that he has done
to make God’s action in the matter a source of regret, as well as of
satisfaction, to others. Those true words of Frederick the Great,
“On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scélérat,” are singularly
applicable to this particular rascal. It is as difficult to find
standards by which to appraise his worth as it is to find rules by
which to test his accuracy. Just as it has been said of Rousseau, that
even in the very ecstasy of truth-telling he does not tell the truth,
so it may be said of Cellini, that even in the very ecstasy of lying he
does not wholly lie.

It is characteristic of a simpler age than the one we live in now
that autobiographers sang their own praises candidly and lustily.
Cellini puts graceful eulogies of himself into the mouths of his
contemporaries, which is one way, and a very good way, of getting them
said. The Duchesse de Montpensier (La Grande Mademoiselle) goes a step
further, and assures us that the Creator is sympathetically aware of
her merits and importance. “I may say without vanity that just Heaven
would not bestow such a woman as I am upon a man who was unworthy of
her.” Wilhelmina, Margravine of Baireuth, and sister of Frederick the
Great, writes with composure: “Happily my good disposition was stronger
than the bad example of my governess”; and, as the testimony of the
governess was not taken, Wilhelmina’s carries the day.

This directness contrasts pleasantly with the more involved, and
possibly more judicious, methods employed by memoir-writers like
Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the immortal Maria, and by
autobiographers like Harriet Martineau. Mr. Edgeworth, recounting his
first experience of married life, says with conscious nobility: “I felt
the inconvenience of an early and hasty marriage; and though I heartily
repented of my folly, I determined to bear with fortitude and temper
the evil I had brought upon myself.”

Miss Martineau, whose voluminous work is ranked by Anna Robeson Burr as
among the great autobiographies of the world, does not condescend to
naïveté; but she never forgets, or permits her reader to forget, what
a superior person she is. When Miss Aiken ventures to congratulate
her upon her “success” in London society, she loftily repudiates the
word. Success implies endeavour, and she (Harriet Martineau) has
“nothing to strive for in any such direction.” When she sails for the
United States, it is with the avowed purpose of “self-discipline.” She
has become “too much accustomed to luxury,” and seeks for wholesome
hardships. It sounds a trifle far-fetched. Byron--an incomparable
traveller--admits that folks who go “a-pleasuring” in the world must
not ask for comfort; but even Byron did not visit the East in order to
be uncomfortable. He was not hunting a corrective for St. James Street
and Piccadilly.

There is no finer example in the world of the happiness of writing an
autobiography than that afforded us by Miss Martineau. Her book is a
real book, not an ephemeral piece of self-flattery. Her enjoyment of
it is so intense that it impedes her progress. She cannot get on with
her narrative because of the delight of lingering. Every circumstance
of an uneventful childhood invites her attention. Other little girls
cry now and then. Mothers and nurserymaids are aware of this fact.
Other little girls hate to get up in the morning. Other little girls
are occasionally impertinent to their parents. But no one else has
ever recorded these details with such serious and sympathetic concern.
A petulant word from an older sister (most of us have lived through
something of the kind) made her resolve “never to tell anybody anything
again.” This resolution was broken. She has told everybody everything,
and the telling must have given her days, and weeks, and months of
undiluted pleasure.

Miss Martineau’s life was in the main a successful one. It is natural
that she should have liked to think about it, and write about it.
But Mrs. Oliphant, a far more brilliant woman, was overburdened,
overworked, always anxious, and often very unhappy. Arthur Young was a
melancholy, disgruntled man, at odds with himself, his surroundings,
and the world. The painter, Haydon, lived through years so harassed by
poverty, so untempered by discretion, so embittered by disappointments,
that his tragic suicide was the only thing which could have brought his
manifold miseries to an end. Yet Mrs. Oliphant took comfort in setting
forth her difficulties, and in expressing a reasonable self-pity.
Arthur Young relieved his mind by a well-worked-out system of intensive
grumbling. Even Haydon seems to have sought and found a dreary solace
in the recital of his woes. The fragment of autobiography is painful to
read, but was evidently the one poor consolation of its writer’s life.

That George Sand’s “Histoire de Ma Vie” afforded its author more than
her proper share of contentment is evidenced by its length, and by the
relish which is stamped on every page. Sir Leslie Stephen pronounced
it the best autobiography he had ever read. It seems to have delighted
him as Rousseau’s “Confessions” delighted Emerson; which goes to
prove that intellectual kinship need not necessarily be accompanied
by any similarity of taste. “If we would really know our hearts,”
says Bishop Wilson, “let us impartially review our actions.” George
Sand and Rousseau reviewed their actions with the fondest solicitude;
but were biased in their own favour. Gibbon reviewed his actions, and
such emotions as he was aware of, with an impartiality that staggers
us; but his heart, at no time an intrusive organ, gave him little
concern. Franklin, with whom truth-telling was never an “ecstasy,” but
a natural process like breathing and eating, reviewed his actions
candidly, if not altogether impartially, and left the record without
boast, or apology, or the reticence dictated by taste, to the judgment
of coming generations. He was a busy man, engaged, like Sully, in
making history on a large scale. It pleased him, not only to write
his recollections, but to bequeath them, as he bequeathed so much
else, to the young nation that he loved. He never sought to patent his
inventions. He never sought to publish his autobiography. His large
outlook embraced the future, and America was his residuary legatee.

John Wesley kept a journal for fifty-five years. This is one of the
most amazing facts in the history of letters. He was beyond comparison
the hardest worker of his day. John Stuart Mill, who knew too much and
did too much for any one man, also wrote an autobiography, which the
reading world has been content to ignore. But Mill’s failing health
compelled him sometimes to rest. Wesley never rested. It is estimated
that for over thirty years he rode, on an average, eight thousand miles
a year. He preached in his lifetime full thirty thousand sermons--an
overwhelming and relentless figure. He wrestled with lagging
Churchmen of the Establishment no less than with zealous Antinomians,
Swedenborgians, Necessitarians, Anabaptists and Quakers. Other records
of human endeavour read like the idling of a summer day alongside of
his supernatural activities. Yet so great is the compulsion of the born
diarist to confide to the world the history of his thoughts and deeds
that Wesley found time--or took time--to write, in a minute, cryptic
short-hand, a diary which fills seven large volumes. He not only wanted
to do this; he _had_ to do it. The narrative, now bald and itemized,
now stirring and spirited, now poignant and terrible, was part of
himself. He might have said of it more truly than Walt Whitman said of
“Leaves of Grass,” that whoever laid hold upon the book laid hold upon
a man.

To ask that the autobiographer should “know himself as a realist, and
deal with himself as an artist,” is one way of demanding perfection.
Realists are plentiful, and their ranks are freshly recruited every
year. Artists are rare, and grow always rarer in an age which lacks
the freedom, the serenity, the sense of proportion, essential to their
development. It has happened from time to time that a single powerful
and sustained emotion has forced from a reticent nature an unreserved
and illuminating disclosure. Newman’s “Apologia pro Vita sua” was
written with an avowed purpose--to make clear the sincerity of his
religious life, and to refute a charge of deceitfulness. The stern
coercion which gave it birth, and which carried it to a triumphant
close, was remote from any sense of enjoyment save such as might be
found in clarity of thought and distinction of workmanship. The thrust
of truth in this fragment of autobiography has carried it far; but it
is not by truth alone that a book lives. It is not by simple veracity
that minds “deeply moralized, discriminating and sad” have charmed, and
will always charm, the few austere thinkers and fastidious critics whom
a standardized world has spared.

The pleasure derived by ordinary readers from memoirs and reminiscences
is twofold. It is the pleasure of acquiring agreeable information in
an agreeable way, and it is, more rarely, the pleasure of a direct
and penetrating mental stimulus. “The Education of Henry Adams” has
so filtered through the intelligent public mind that echoes of it
are still to be heard in serious lectures and flippant after-dinner
speeches. We can, if we are adroit borrowers, set up intellectual
shop-keeping on Mr. Adams’s stock-in-trade. We can deal out over our
own counters his essentially marketable wares.

The simpler delight afforded us by such a charming book as Frederick
Locker’s “Confidences,” which is not confidential at all; or by John
Murray’s well-bred “Memoirs of a Publisher”; or by Lord Broughton’s
“Recollections of a Long Life,” is easy to estimate. We could ill spare
Lord Broughton’s volumes, both because he tells us things we do not
learn elsewhere, and because of his illuminating common sense. The
world of authorship has of late years so occupied itself with Lord
Byron that we wince at the sound of his name. But if we really want
to know him, we must still turn to Broughton for the knowledge. The
account of Byron’s wedding in the “Recollections” is as unforgettable
as the account of Byron’s funeral in Moore’s diffuse and rambling
“Memoirs.” It is in such narratives that the eye-witness eclipses, and
must forever eclipse, the most acute and penetrating investigator.
Biographers cannot stand as Broughton stood at the door of Seaham,
when the ill-mated couple drove away to certain misery: “I felt as if
I had buried a friend.” Historians cannot stand as John Evelyn stood
on the Strand, when the second Charles entered London: “I beheld him
and blessed God!” Or at Gravesend, seven years later, when the Dutch
fleet lay at the mouth of the Thames: “A dreadful spectacle as ever
Englishmen saw, and a dishonour never to be wiped off!”

Ever since that most readable book, “An Apology for the Life of Mr.
Colley Cibber, Comedian,” was given to the English world, actors and
playwrights have been indefatigable autobiographers. They may write
about themselves alone, as did Macready, or about themselves and the
world, after the fashion of Frances Kemble. They may be amusing, like
Ellen Terry, or discursive, like Augustus Thomas, or casual, like John
Drew. But they fall into line, and tell us what dramas they wrote, what
companies they managed, what parts they played, and when and where
they played them, together with any scraps of theatrical gossip they
may be fortunate enough to recollect. All, at least, except the once
celebrated Mrs. Inchbald. She recollected so much that the publisher,
Phillips, offered her a thousand pounds for her manuscript; and her
confessor, a wise and nameless Catholic priest, persuaded her to burn
it unread. Yet there are people so perversely minded as to disapprove
of auricular confession.

The golden age of the autobiographer has come, perhaps to stay.
Mr. Howells, observant and sympathetic, welcomed its dawning, and
the fullness of its promise. He was of the opinion that this form
of composition represented “the supreme Christian contribution to
literature”; and, while admitting that there were bad as well as
good specimens of the art, he stoutly maintained that one more
autobiography, however indifferent, was better than one less--a
disputable point.

The question which confronts the reading public is this: “How far
should the law of kindness, which we all profess to follow, influence
us in allowing to our fellow creatures the happiness of writing books
about themselves?” There is no use saying that it would be impossible
to stop them. Nothing in the way of inhibitions is impossible to the
United States. “There is no country,” says the observant Santayana, “in
which people live under more powerful compulsions.”

Americans have so far been inclined to tolerate the vanity of the
autobiography, because mankind is naturally vain, and to forgive
its dullness, because life is frequently dull. Moreover, they are
well disposed towards any form of art or letters that lays claim to
the quality of truth; and it is generally conceded that a man knows
himself better than others know him. He does not know, and he never
can know, how he appears to his acquaintances. The sound of his own
voice, the light in his own eye, his accent, his mannerisms, his
laugh, the sensations, pleasurable or otherwise, which he produces
by his presence--these things, apparent to every casual observer,
are unfamiliar to him. But his _naturel_ (a word too expressive for
translation) which others must estimate by the help of circumstantial
evidence, he can, if he be honest, know and judge.

This, at least, is the theory on which rest the lucidity of art
and the weight of conscience. Yet George Sand, who was given to
self-inspection, self-analysis and self-applause, admitted the dimness
of her inward vision. “The study of the human heart,” she wrote, “is of
such a nature, that the more we are absorbed by it, the less clearly do
we see.”

                          Strayed Sympathies

 It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for
 any unpopular person than to give way to perfect raptures of moral
 indignation against his abstract vices.--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

It is not only more instructive--it is more enlivening. The
conventionalities of criticism (moral, not literary, criticism) pass
from mouth to mouth, and from pen to pen, until the iterations of the
press are crystallized in encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries.
And from such verdicts there is no appeal. Their laboured impartiality,
their systematic adjustments, their careful avoidance of intuition,
produce in the public mind a level sameness of misunderstanding. Many
sensible people think this a good result. Even a man who did his own
thinking, and maintained his own intellectual free-hold, like Mr.
Bagehot, knew and upheld the value of ruts. He was well aware how
far a little intelligence can be made to go, unless it aspires to
originality. Therefore he grumbled at the paradoxes which were somewhat
of a novelty in his day, but which are out-worn in ours, at the making
over of virtue into vice, and of vice into something more inspiriting
than virtue. “We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies on Henry the
Eighth, devotional exercises to Cromwell, and fulsome adulations of the
first Napoleon.”

That was a half-century ago. To-day, Tiberius is not so much out of
favour as out of mind; Mr. Froude was the last man really interested
in the moral status of Henry the Eighth; Mr. Wells has given us his
word for it that Napoleon was a very ordinary person; and the English
people have erected a statue of Cromwell close to the Houses of
Parliament, by way of reminding him (in his appointed place) of the
survival of representative government. The twentieth century does
not lean to extravagant partialities. Its trend is to disparagement,
to searchlights, to that lavish and ironic candour which no man’s
reputation can survive.

When Mr. Lytton Strachey reversed Mr. Stevenson’s suggestion, and
chose, as subject-matter of a book, four people of whom the world had
heard little but good, who had been praised and reverenced beyond their
deserts, but for whom he cherished a secret and cold hostility, he
experimented successfully with the latent uncharitableness of men’s
minds. The brilliancy with which the four essays were written, the
keenness of each assault, the charm and persuasiveness of the style,
delighted even the uncensorious. The business of a biographer, said the
author in a very engaging preface, is to maintain his own freedom of
spirit, and lay bare events as he understands them, “dispassionately,
impartially, and without ulterior intentions.”

It sounds fair and square; but the fact remains that Mr. Strachey
disliked Manning, despised Arnold, had little sympathy with Gordon, and
no great fancy for Florence Nightingale. It must be remembered also
that in three cases out of four he was dealing with persons of stubborn
character and compelling will, as far removed from irreproachable
excellence as from criminality. Of such, much criticism may be offered;
but the only way to keep an open outlook is to ask, “What was their
life’s job?” “How well did they do it?” Men and women who have a
pressing job on hand (Florence Nightingale was _all_ job) cannot
afford to cultivate the minor virtues. They move with an irresistible
impulse to their goal. It is a curious fact that Mr. Strachey is
never so illuminating as when he turns his back upon these forceful
and disconcerting personages, and dallies with their more amenable
contemporaries. What he writes about Gordon we should be glad to
forget; what he writes about Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington we
hope to remember while we live.

The popularity of “Eminent Victorians” inspired a host of followers.
Critics began to look about them for other vulnerable reputations. Mr.
J. A. Strahan, stepping back from Victoria to Anne, made the happy
discovery that Addison had been systematically overpraised, and that
every side of his character was open to assault. The result of this
perspicuity is a damning denunciation of a man whom his contemporaries
liked and esteemed, and concerning whom we have been content to take
the word of those who knew him. He may have been, as Mr. Strahan
asserts, a sot, a time-server, a toad-eater, a bad official and a worse
friend; but he managed to give a different impression. Addison’s
friends and neighbours found him a modest, honourable, sweet-tempered
gentleman; and Steele, whom he had affronted, wrote these generous
words: “You can seldom get him to the tavern; but when once he is
arrived to his pint, and begins to look about him, you admire a
thousand things in him which before lay buried.”

This seems to me a singularly pleasant thing to say about anybody. Were
I coveting praise, this is the form I’d like the praise to take.

The pressure of disparagement, which is one result of the cooling of
our blood after the fever-heat of war, is lowering our enthusiasms,
thinning our sympathies, and giving us nothing very dazzling in the
way of enlightenment. Americans are less critical than Englishmen, who
so value their birthright of free speech that censure of public men
has become a habit, a game of hazard (pulling planks out of the ship
of state), at which long practice has made them perfect. “The editor
of the ‘Morning Post,’” observed Mr. Maurice Hewlett wearily, “begins
his day by wondering whom he shall denounce”; and opposing editors, as
nimble at the fray, match outcry against outcry, and malice against
malignity.

I doubt if any other than an Englishman could have written “The
Mirrors of Downing Street,” and I am sure that, were an American able
to write such a book (which is problematic), it would never occur to
him to think of it, or to brag of it, as a duty. The public actions
of public men are open to discussion; but Mr. Balfour’s personal
selfishness, his parsimony, his indifference to his domestics, are not
matters of general moment. To gossip about these things is to gossip
with tradesmen and servants. To deny to Lord Kitchener “greatness
of mind, greatness of character, and greatness of heart,” is harsh
speaking of the dead; but to tell a gaping world that the woman “whom
he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times,
could never bring herself to marry him,” is a personality which “Town
Topics” would scorn. “The Mirrors of Downing Street” aspired to a moral
purpose; but taste is the guardian of morality. Its delicate and severe
dictates define the terms upon which we may improve the world at the
expense of our neighbour’s character.

The sneaking kindness recommended by Mr. Stevenson is much harder to
come by than the “raptures of moral indignation,” of which he heard
more than he wanted, and which are reverberating through the world
to-day. The pages of history are heavy with moral indignation. We teach
it in our schools, and there are historians like Macaulay who thunder
it rapturously, with never a moment of misgiving. But here and there,
as we step apprehensively into historic bypaths, we are cheered by
patches of sunshine, straight glimpses into truths which put a more
credible, because a more merciful, construction upon men’s actions, and
lighten our burden of dispraise.

I have often wondered why, with Philippe de Commines as an avenue of
approach, all writers except Scott should deal with Louis the Eleventh
as with a moral monstrosity. Commines is no apologist. He has a natural
desire to speak well of his master; but he reviews every side of
Louis’s character with dispassionate sincerity.

First, as a Catholic: “The king was very liberal to the Church, and, in
some respects, more so than was necessary, for he robbed the poor to
give to the rich. But in this world no one can arrive at perfection.”

Next, as a husband: “As for ladies, he never meddled with them in my
time; for when I came to his court he lost a son, at whose death he was
greatly afflicted; and he made a vow to God in my presence never to
have intercourse with any other woman than the queen. And though this
was no more than he was bound to do by the canons of the Church, yet it
was much that he should have such self-command as to persevere firmly
in his resolution, considering that the queen (though an excellent lady
in other respects) was not a princess in whom a man could take any
great delight.”

Finally, as a ruler: “The king was naturally kind and indulgent to
persons of mean estate, and hostile to all great men who had no need
of him.... But this I say boldly in his commendation, that in my whole
life I never knew any man so wise in his misfortunes.”

To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in
misfortune is to conquer fate. We cannot easily or advantageously
regard Louis with affection; but when Commines epitomizes history in an
ejaculation, “Our good master, Louis, whom God pardon!” it rests our
souls to say, “Amen!”

We cannot easily love Swift. The great “professional hater” frightens
us out of the timid regard which we should like--in honour of English
literature--to cherish for his memory. But there is a noble sentence
of Thackeray’s which, if it does not soften our hearts, cannot fail to
clarify our minds, to free us from the stupid, clogging misapprehension
which we confuse with moral distaste. “Through the storms and tempests
of his [Swift’s] furious mind the stars of religion and love break out
in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds
and maddening hurricane of his life.” One clear and penetrating note
(“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”) is worth much careful auditing
of accounts.

The picture of John Wilkes drawn by Sir George Otto Trevelyan in his
“Early History of Charles James Fox,” and the picture of Aaron Burr
drawn by Mr. Albert J. Beveridge in his “Life of John Marshall,” are
happy illustrations of unpopular subjects treated with illuminating
kindness. Wilkes was a demagogue and Burr a trouble-maker (the terms
are not necessarily synonymous), and neither of them is a man whose
history is widely or accurately known. Both historians are swayed by
their political passions. An historian without political passions is as
rare as a wasp without a sting. To Trevelyan all Conservatives were in
fault, and all Liberals in the right. Opposition to George the Third
is the acid test he applies to separate gold from dross. Mr. Beveridge
regards the Federalists as the strength, and the Republicans as the
weakness, of the young nation. Thomas Jefferson is _his_ test, and a
man hated and hounded by Jefferson necessarily wins his support.

Nevertheless, Wilkes and Burr are presented to us by their sympathizers
in a cold north light which softens and conceals nothing. Men of
positive quality, they look best when clearly seen. “Research and fact
are ever in collision with fancy and legend,” observes Mr. Beveridge
soberly; and it is to research and fact that he trusts to rescue
his accomplished filibuster from those unproved charges which live
by virtue of their vagueness. Writers of American school histories,
remembering the duty of moral indignation, have played havoc with the
reputation of Aaron Burr; and American school-children, if they know
him at all, know him as a duellist and a traitor. They are sure about
the duel (it was one of the few facts firmly established in my own mind
after a severe struggle with American history); but concerning the
treason, they are at least as ill-informed as their elders.

British children do better, perhaps, with John Wilkes. Little Londoners
can gaze at the obelisk which commemorates his mayoralty, and think of
him as a catless Whittington. The slogan “Wilkes and Liberty” has an
attractive ring to all who are not of Madame Roland’s way of thinking.
No man ever gave his partisans more to defend, or his opponents better
chances to attack; and friends and foes rose repeatedly and fervently
to their opportunities. A century later, Sir George Trevelyan, a friend
well worth the having, reviews the case with wise sincerity, undaunted
confidence, a careful art in the arrangement of his high lights, and a
niceness of touch which wins halfway all readers who love the English
language. Wilkes was as naturally and inevitably in debt as was William
Godwin, and Wilkes’s debts were as naturally and inevitably paid by
some one else as were Godwin’s; but when Trevelyan alludes softly to
his “unambitious standard of solvency,” this sordid detail becomes
unexpectedly pleasurable. So easily are transgressions pardoned, if
they provoke the shadow of a smile.

Lord Rosebery’s “Napoleon: the Last Phase” is a work nobly conceived
and admirably executed; but its impelling motive is an austere resolve
to make what amends a single Englishman can make for an ungenerous
episode in English history. Its sympathy for a fallen foe bears no
likeness to the sympathy which impelled Théodore de Banville, broken in
health and hope by the siege of Paris, to write a lyric in memory of a
young Prussian officer, a mere boy, who was found dead on the field,
with a blood-stained volume of Pindar in his tunic. Lord Rosebery’s
book is written with a proud sadness, a stern indignation, eminently
fitted to its subject; but he is not so much kind as just. Napoleon is
too vast a figure to be approached with benevolence. It is true, as Mr.
Wells asserts, that, had he been unselfish and conscientious, he would
never have conquered Europe; but only Mr. Wells is prepared to say
that a lack of these qualities won him renown. He shares the lack with
Wilhelm the Second, who has had neither an Austerlitz nor a Waterloo.

There is a wide assortment of unpopular characters whose company it
would be very instructive to keep. They belong to all ages, countries
and creeds. Spain alone offers us three splendid examples--the Duke
of Alva, Cardinal Ximenez, and Philip the Second. Alva, like the
Corsair, possessed one virtue, which was a more valuable virtue than
the Corsair’s, but brings him in less credit, because the object of
his unswerving loyalty and devotion was not a guileless lady, but a
sovereign, less popular, if possible, than himself. Cardinal Ximenez,
soldier, statesman, scholar, priest, ascetic, author and educator,
was also Grand Inquisitor, and this fact alone seems to linger in the
minds of men. That, for his day, he was a moderate, avails him little.
That he made a point of protecting scholars and professors from the
pernicious interference of the Inquisition ought to avail him a great
deal. It might were it better known. There is a play of Sardou’s in
which he is represented as concentrating all the deadly powers of his
office against the knowledge which he most esteemed. This is the way
the drama educates.

And Philip? It would be a big piece of work to win for Philip even a
partial recognition of his moderate merits. The hand of history has
dealt heavily with him, and romance has preyed upon his vitals. In
fact, history and romance are undistinguishable when they give free
play to the moral indignation he inspires. It is not enough to accuse
him of the murder of the son whom he hated (though not more heartily
than George the Second hated the Prince of Wales): they would have
us understand that he probably poisoned the brother whom he loved.
“Don John’s ambitions had become troublesome, and he ceased to live
at an opportune moment for Philip’s peace of mind,” is the fashion in
which Gayarré insinuates his suspicions; and Gayarré’s narrative--very
popular in my youth--was recommended to the American public by
Bancroft, who, I am convinced, never read it. Had he penetrated to the
eleventh page, where Philip is alluded to as the Christian Tiberius, or
to the twentieth, where he is compared to an Indian idol, he would have
known that, whatever the book might be, it was not history, and that,
as an historian, it ill became him to tell innocent Americans to read
it.

But how were they to be better informed? Motley will not even allow
that Philip’s fanatical devotion to his Church was a sincere devotion.
He accuses him of hypocrisy, which is like accusing Cromwell of levity,
or Burke of Jacobinism. Prescott has a fashion of turning the King’s
few amiabilities, as, for example, his tenderness for his third wife,
Isabella of France, into a suggestion of reproach. “Well would it be
for the memory of Philip, could the historian find no heavier sin to
lay to his charge than his treatment of Isabella.” Well would it be
for all of us, could the recording angel lay no heavier charge to our
account than our legitimate affections. The Prince of Orange, it is
true, charged Philip with murdering both wife and son; but that was
merely a political argument. He would as soon have charged him with
the murder of his father, had the Emperor not been safely isolated at
Yuste; and Philip, in return, banned the Prince of Orange--a brave and
wise ruler--as “an enemy of the human race.”

Twenty-five years ago, an Englishman who was by nature distrustful of
popular verdicts, and who had made careful studies of certain epochs of
Spanish history, ventured to paint Philip in fresh colours. Mr. Martin
Hume’s monograph shows us a cultivated gentleman, with a correct taste
in architecture and art, sober, abstemious, kind to petitioners, loyal
and affectionate to his friends, generous to his soldiers and sailors;
a man beloved by his own household, and reverenced by his subjects,
to whom he brought nothing but misfortune. The book makes melancholy
reading, because Philip’s political sins were also political blunders;
his mad intolerance was a distortion, rather than a rejection, of
conscience; and his inconceivable rigidity left him helpless to face
the essential readjustments of life. “I could not do otherwise than I
have done,” he said with piercing sincerity, “though the world should
fall in ruins around me.”

Now what befell Mr. Hume who wrote history in this fashion, with
no more liking for Philip than for Elizabeth or the Prince of
Orange, but with a natural desire to get within the purlieus of
truth? Certain empty honours were conferred upon him: a degree from
Cambridge, membership in a few societies, the privilege of having
some letters printed after his name. But the University of Glasgow
and the University of Liverpool stoutly refused to give him the
chairs of history and Spanish. He might know more than most men on
these subjects; but they did not want their students exposed to new
impressions. The good old way for them. Mr. Hume, being a reader, may
have recalled in bitterness of spirit the words of the acute and
unemotional Sully, who had scant regard for Catholicism (though the
Huguenots tried him sorely), and none at all for Spain; but who said,
in his balanced, impersonal way, that Philip’s finer qualities, his
patience, piety, fortitude and single-mindedness, were all alike “lost
on the vulgar.”

Lucrezia Borgia is less available for our purpose, because the
imaginary Lucrezia, though not precisely beloved, is more popular in
her way than the real Lucrezia could ever hope to be. “In the matter
of pleasantness,” says Lucian, “truth is far surpassed by falsehood”;
and never has it been more agreeably overshadowed than in this fragment
of Italian history. We really could not bear to lose the Lucrezia of
romance. She has done fatigue duty along every line of iniquity. She
has specialized in all of the seven deadly sins. On Rossetti’s canvas,
in Donizetti’s opera, in Victor Hugo’s play, in countless poems and
stories and novels, she has erred exhaustively for our entertainment.
The image of an attractive young woman poisoning her supper guests is
one which the world will not lightly let go.

And what is offered in return? Only the dull statements of people who
chanced to know the lady, and who considered her a model wife and
duchess, a little over-anxious about the education of her numerous
children, but kind to the poor, generous to artists, and pitiful to
Jews. “She is graceful, modest, lovable, decorous and devout,” wrote
Johannes Lucas from Rome to Ercole, the old Duke of Ferrara. “She is
beautiful and good, gentle and amiable,” echoed the Chevalier Bayard
years later. Were we less avid for thrills, we might like to think
of this young creature, snatched at twenty-one from the maelstrom of
Rome, where she had been a pawn in the game of politics, and placed
in a secure and splendid home. The Lucrezia of romance would have
found the court of Ferrara intolerably dull. The Lucrezia of history
took to dullness as a duck to water. She was a sensible, rather than
a brilliant woman, fully alive to the duties and dignities of her
position, and well aware that respectability is a strong card to play
in a vastly disreputable world.

There was a time when Robespierre and Marat made a high bid for
unpopularity. Even those who clearly understood the rehabilitation
of man in the French Revolution found little to say for its chosen
instruments, whose purposes were high, but whose methods were open to
reproach. Of late, however, a certain weariness has been observable
in men’s minds when these reformers are in question, a reluctance to
expand with _any_ emotion where they are concerned. M. Lauzanne is,
indeed, by way of thinking that the elemental Clemenceau closely
resembles the elemental Robespierre; but this is not a serious
valuation; it is letting picturesqueness run away with reason--a habit
incidental to editorship.

The thoroughly modern point of view is that Robespierre and Marat
were ineffective; not without ability in their respective lines, but
unfitted for the parts they played. Marat’s turn of mind was scientific
(our own Benjamin Franklin found him full of promise). Robespierre’s
turn of mind was legal; he would have made an acute and successful
lawyer. The Revolution came along and ruined both these lives, for
which we are expected to be sorry. M. Lauzanne does not go so far
as to say that the Great War ruined Clemenceau’s life. The “Tiger”
was seventy-three when the Germans marched into Belgium. Had he been
content to spend all his years teaching in a girls’ school, he might
(though I am none too sure of it) have been a gentler and a better
man. But France was surely worth the price he paid. A lifeboat is not
expected to have the graceful lines of a gondola.

“Almost everybody,” says Stevenson, “can understand and sympathize
with an admiral, or a prize-fighter”; which genial sentiment is less
contagious now than when it was uttered, thirty years ago. A new type
of admiral has presented itself to the troubled consciousness of men,
a type unknown to Nelson, unsuspected by Farragut, unsung by Newbolt.
In robbing the word of its ancient glory, Tirpitz has robbed us of an
emotion we can ill-afford to lose. “The traditions of sailors,” says
Mr. Shane Leslie, “have been untouched by the lowering of ideals which