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Title: Learning and Other Essays


Author: John Jay Chapman

Release date: October 12, 2021 [eBook #66522]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1910

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEARNING AND OTHER ESSAYS ***





  LEARNING
  AND
  OTHER ESSAYS

  BY
  JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

  NEW YORK
  MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
  1910




  COPYRIGHT, 1910
  BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

  _Electrotyped by
  The Maple Press
  York, Pa._




CONTENTS

                                   PAGES

  LEARNING                             1

  PROFESSORIAL ETHICS                 39

  THE DRAMA                           53

  NORWAY                              83

  DOCTOR HOWE                         89

  JESTERS                            149

  THE COMIC                          155

  THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE          175

  THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE     193

  CLIMATE                            207

  THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOOLS           213

  THE ÆSTHETIC                       235




LEARNING.


An expert on Greek Art chanced to describe in my hearing one of the
engraved gems in the Metropolitan Museum. He spoke of it as ‘certainly
one of the great gems of the world,’ and there was something in his
tone that was even more thrilling than his words. He might have been
describing the Parthenon or Beethoven’s Mass,--such was the passion of
reverence that flowed out of him as he spoke. I went to see the gem
afterwards. It was badly placed, and for all artistic purposes was
invisible. I suppose that even if I had had a good look at it, I should
not have been able to appreciate its full merit. Who could?--save the
handful of adepts in the world, the little group of gem-readers, by
whom the mighty music of this tiny score could be read at sight.

Nevertheless it was a satisfaction to me to have seen the stone. I knew
that through its surface there poured the power of the Greek world;
that not without Phidias and Aristotle, and not without the Parthenon,
could it have come into existence. It carried in its bosom a digest
of the visual laws of spiritual force, and was as wonderful and as
sacred as any stone could well be. Its value to mankind was not to be
measured by my comprehension of it, but was inestimable. As Petrarch
felt toward the Greek manuscript of Homer which he owned but could not
read, so did I feel toward the gem.

What is Education? What are Art and Religion and all those higher
interests in civilization which are always vaguely held up to us as
being the most important things in life? These things elude definition.
They cannot be put into words except through the interposition of
what the Germans call ‘a metaphysic.’ Before you can introduce them
into discourse, you must step aside for a moment and create a theory
of the universe; and by the time you have done this, you have perhaps
befogged yourself and exhausted your readers. Let us be content with
a more modest ambition. It is possible to take a general view of
the externals of these subjects without losing reverence for their
realities. It is possible to consider the forms under which art and
religion appear,--the algebra and notation by which they have expressed
themselves in the past,--and to draw some general conclusion as to the
nature of the subject, without becoming entangled in the subject itself.

We may deal with the influence of the gem without striving exactly to
translate its meaning into speech. We all concede its importance. We
know, for instance, that the admiration of my friend the expert was no
accident. He found in the design and workmanship of the intaglio the
same ideas which he had been at work on all his life. Greek culture
long ago had become a part of this man’s brain, and its hieroglyphs
expressed what to him was religion. So of all monuments, languages,
and arts which descend to us out of the past. The peoples are dead,
but the documents remain; and these documents themselves are part of
a living and intimate tradition which also descends to us out of the
past,--a tradition so familiar and native to the brain that we forget
its origin. We almost believe that our feeling for art is original with
us. We are tempted to think there is some personal and logical reason
at the back of all grammar, whether it be the grammar of speech or the
grammar of architecture,--so strong is the appeal to our taste made
by traditional usage. Yet the great reason of the power of art is the
historic reason. ‘In this manner have these things been expressed: in
similar manner must they continue to be said.’ So speaks our artistic
instinct.

Good usage has its sanction, like religion or government. We transmit
the usage without pausing to think why we do so. We instinctively
correct a child, without pausing to reflect that the fathers of the
race are speaking through us. When the child says, ‘Give me a apple,’
we correct him--“You must say, ‘An apple.’” What the child really
means, in fact, is an apple.

All teaching is merely a way of acquainting the learner with the body
of existing tradition. If the child is ever to have anything to say
of his own, he has need of every bit of this expressive medium to
help him do it. The reason is, that, so far as expressiveness goes,
only one language exists. Every experiment and usage of the past is a
part of this language. A phrase or an idea rises in the Hebrew, and
filters through the Greek or Latin and French down to our own time.
The practitioners who scribble and dream in words from their childhood
up,--into whose habit of thought language is kneaded through a thousand
reveries,--these are the men who receive, reshape, and transmit it.
Language is their portion, they are the priests of language.

The same thing holds true of the other vehicles of idea, of painting,
architecture, religion, etc., but since we have been speaking of
language, let us continue to speak of language. Expressiveness follows
literacy. The poets have been tremendous readers always. Petrarch,
Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Byron, Keats--those of
them who possessed not much of the foreign languages had a passion
for translations. It is amazing how little of a foreign language you
need if you have a passion for the thing written in it. We think of
Shakespeare as of a lightly-lettered person; but he was ransacking
books all day to find plots and language for his plays. He reeks with
mythology, he swims in classical metaphor: and, if he knew the Latin
poets only in translation, he knew them with that famished intensity
of interest which can draw the meaning through the walls of a bad
text. Deprive Shakespeare of his sources, and he could not have been
Shakespeare.

Good poetry is the echoing of shadowy tongues, the recovery of
forgotten talent, the garment put up with perfumes. There is a passage
in the Tempest which illustrates the freemasonry of artistic craft,
and how the weak sometimes hand the torch to the mighty. Prospero’s
apostrophe to the spirits is, surely, as Shakespearian as anything in
Shakespeare and as beautiful as anything in imaginative poetry.

  “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves;
   And ye, that in the sands with printless foot
   Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him,
   When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
   By moonshine do the sour ringlets make,
   Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
   Is to make midnight mushrooms that rejoice
   To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
   (Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimmed
   The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
   And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault
   Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
   Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
   With his own bolt: the strong-bas’d promontory
   Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck’d up
   The pine and cedar: graves at my command
   Have waked their sleepers; oped and let them forth
   By my so potent art.”

Shakespeare borrowed this speech from Medea’s speech in Ovid, which
he knew in the translation of Arthur Golding; and really Shakespeare
seems almost to have held the book in his hand while penning Prospero’s
speech. The following is from Golding’s translation, published in 1567:

  “Ye Ayres and windes; ye Elves of Hilles
       and Brooks, of Woods alone,
   Of standing Lakes and of the Night approach
       ye every chone.
   Through helpe of whom (the crooked banks much
       wondering at the thing)
   I have compelled streams to run clean backward
       to their spring.
   By charmes I make the calm seas rough, and make
       the rough Seas plaine.
   And cover all the Skie with Clouds and chase them
       thence again.
   By charmes I raise and lay the windes, and burst the
       Viper’s jaw.
   And from the bowels of the Earth both stones and trees
       doe draw.
   Whole woods and Forestes I remove: I make the
        Mountains shake,
   And even the Earth it selfe to grone and fearfully
        to quake.
   I call up dead men from their graves: and thee O
       lightsome Moone
   I darken oft, though beaten brasse abate thy
       perill soone.
   Our Sorcerie dims the Morning faire, and darkes
       the Sun at Noone.
   The flaming breath of fierie Bulles ye quenched
       for my sake.
   And caused their unwieldie neck the bended yokes
       to take.
   Among the Earthbred brothers you a mortell war
       did set
   And brought a sleepe the Dragon fell whose eyes
       were never shut.”

There is, and is to be, no end of this reappearance of old metaphor,
old trade secret, old usage of art. No sooner has a masterpiece
appeared, that summarizes all knowledge, than men get up eagerly
the next morning with chisel and brush, and try again. Nothing done
satisfies. It is all in the making that the inspiration lies; and this
endeavor renews itself with the ages, and grows by devouring its own
offspring.

The technique of any art is the whole body of experimental knowledge
through which the art speaks. The glazes of pottery become forgotten
and have to be hit upon over again. The knack of Venetian glass, the
principle of effect in tiles, in lettering, in the sonnet, in the
fugue, in the tower,--all the prestidigitation of art that is too
subtle to be named or thought of, must yet be acquired and kept up by
practice, held to by constant experiment.

Good artistic expression is thus not only a thing done: it is a way
of life, a habit of breathing, a mode of unconsciousness, a world of
being which records itself as it unrolls. We call this world Art for
want of a better name; but the thing that we value is the life within,
not the shell of the creature. This shell is what is left behind in the
passage of time, to puzzle our after-study and make us wonder how it
was made, how such complex delicacy and power ever came to co-exist. I
have often wondered over the _Merchant of Venice_ as one wonders
over a full-blown transparent poppy that sheds light and blushes like a
cloud. Neither the poppy nor the play were exactly hewn out: they grew,
they expanded and bloomed by a sort of inward power,--unconscious,
transcendent. The fine arts blossom from the old stock,--from the
poppy-seed of the world.

I am here thinking of the whole body of the arts, the vehicles through
which the spirit of man has been expressed. I am thinking also of
the sciences,--whose refractory, belligerent worshipers are even less
satisfied with any past expression than the artists are, for their
mission is to destroy and to rearrange. They would leave nothing
alive but themselves. Nevertheless, science has always been obliged
to make use of written language in recording her ideas. The sciences
are as much a part of recorded language as are the arts. No matter how
revolutionary scientific thought may be, it must resort to metaphysics
when it begins to formulate its ultimate meanings. Now when you
approach metaphysics, the Greek and the Hebrew have been there before
you: you are very near to matters which perhaps you never intended to
approach. You are back at the beginning of all things. In fact, human
thought does not advance, it only recurs. Every tone and semi-tone in
the scale is a keynote; and every point in the Universe is the centre
of the Universe; and every man is the centre and focus of the cosmos,
and through him passes the whole of all force, as it exists and has
existed from eternity; hence the significance which may at any moment
radiate out of anything.

The different arts and devices that time hands to us are like our
organs. They are the veins and arteries of humanity. You cannot
rearrange them or begin anew. Your verse-forms and your architecture
are chosen for you, like your complexion and your temperament. The
thing you desire to express is in them already. Your labors do no more
than enable you to find your own soul in them. If you will begin any
piece of artistic work in an empirical spirit and slave over it until
it suits you, you will find yourself obliged to solve all the problems
which the artists have been engaged on since the dawn of history. Be as
independent as you like, you will find that you have been anticipated
at every point: you are a slave to precedent, because precedent has
done what you are trying to do, and, ah, how much better! In the
first place, the limitations, the horrible limitations of artistic
possibility, will begin to present themselves; few things can be done:
they have all been tried: they have all been worked to death: they have
all been developed by immortal genius and thereafter avoided by lesser
minds,--left to await more immortal genius. The field of endeavor
narrows itself in proportion to the greatness of the intellect that is
at work. In ages of great art everyone knows what the problem is and
how much is at stake. Masaccio died at the age of twenty-seven, after
having painted half a dozen pictures which influenced all subsequent
art, because they showed to Raphael the best solution of certain
technical questions. The Greeks of the best period were so very
knowing that everything appeared to them ugly except the few attitudes,
the few arrangements, which were capable of being carried to perfection.

Anyone who has something to say is thus found to be in one sense a
slave, but a rich slave who has inherited the whole earth. If you can
only obey the laws of your slavery, you become an emperor: you are only
a slave in so far as you do not understand how to use your wealth.
If you have but the gift of submission, you conquer. Many tongues,
many hands, many minds, a traditional state of feeling, traditional
symbols,--the whole passed through the eyes and soul of a single
man,--such is art, such is human expression in all its million-sided
variety.


II.

I have thrown together these remarks in an elliptical and haphazard
way, hoping to show what sort of thing education is, and as a prologue
to a few reflections upon the educational conditions in the United
States.

It is easy to think of reasons why the standards of general education
should be low in America. Almost every influence which is hostile
to the development of deep thought and clear feeling has been at
the maximum of destructive power in the United States. We are a new
society, made of a Babel of conflicting European elements, engaged in
exploiting the wealth of a new continent, under conditions of climate
which involve a nervous reorganization to Europeans who come to live
with us. Our history has been a history of quiet colonial beginnings,
followed by a national life which, from its inception, has been one of
social unrest. And all this has happened during the great epoch of the
expansion of commerce, the thought-destroying epoch of the world.

Let us take a rapid glance at our own past. In the beginning we were
settlers. Now the settlement of any new continent plays havoc with
the arts and crafts. Let us imagine that among the Mayflower pilgrims
there had been a few expert wood-carvers, a violin player or two, and a
master architect. These men, upon landing in the colony, must have been
at a loss for employment. They would have to turn into backwoodsmen.
Their accomplishments would in time have been forgotten. Within a
generation after the landing of the pilgrims there must have followed
a decline in the fine arts, in scholarship, and in certain kinds of
social refinement. This decline was, to some extent, counteracted in
our colonial era by the existence of wealth in the Colonies and by the
constant intercourse with Europe, from which the newest models were
imported by every vessel. Nevertheless, it is hard for a colony to
make up for its initial loss; and we have recently seen the United
States government making efforts on a large scale to give to the
American farmer those practices of intensive cultivation of the soil
which he lost by becoming a backwoodsman and has never since had time
to recover for himself.

The American Revolution was our second serious set-back in education.
So hostile to culture is war that the artisans of France have never
been able to attain to the standards of workmanship which prevailed
under the old monarchy. Our national culture started with the handicap
of a seven years’ war, and was always a little behindhand. During the
nineteenth century the American citizen has been buffeting the waves
of new development. His daily life has been an experiment. His moral,
social, political interests and duties have been indeterminate; nothing
has been settled for him by society. Is a man to have an opinion?
Then he must make it himself. This demands a more serious labor than
if he were obliged to manufacture his own shoes and candlesticks. No
such draught upon individual intellect is made in an old country. You
cannot get a European to understand this distressing overtaxing of the
intelligence in America. Nothing like it has occurred before, because
in old countries opinion is part of caste and condition: opinion is
the shadow of interest and of social status.

But in America the individual is not protected against society at
large by the bulwark of his class. He stands by himself. It is a noble
idea that a man should stand by himself, and the conditions which
force a man to do so have occasionally created magnificent types of
heroic manhood in America. Lincoln, Garrison, Emerson, and many lesser
athletes are the fruits of these very conditions which isolate the
individual in America and force him to think for himself. Yet their
effect upon general cultivation has been injurious. It seems as if
character were always within the reach of every human soul; but men
must have become homogeneous before they can produce art.

We have thus reviewed a few of the causes of our American loss
of culture. Behind all these causes, however, was the true and
overmastering cause, namely, that sudden creation of wealth for which
the nineteenth century is noted, the rise all over the world of new
and uneducated classes. We came into being as a part of that world
movement which has perceptibly retarded culture, even in Europe. How,
then, could we in America hope to resist it? Whether this movement is
the result of democratic ideas, or of mechanical inventions, or of
scientific discovery, no one can say. The elements that go to make
up the movement cannot be unraveled. We only know that the world has
changed: the old order has vanished with all its charm, with all its
experience, with all its refinement. In its place we have a crude
world, indifferent to everything except physical well-being. In the
place of the fine arts and the crafts we have business and science.

Business is, of course, devoted to the increase of physical well-being;
but what is Science? Now, in one sense, science is anything that
true scientific men of the moment happen to be studying. In one
decade, science means the discussion of spontaneous generation, or
spontaneous variation, in the next of plasm, in the next of germs,
or of electrodes. Whatever the scientific world takes up as a study
becomes “science.” It is impossible to deny the truth of this rather
self-destructive definition. In a more serious sense, however, science
is the whole body of organized knowledge; and a distinction is
sometimes made between “pure” science and “applied” science; the first
being concerned solely with the ascertainment of truth, the second,
with practical matters.

In these higher regions, in which science is synonymous with the search
for truth, science partakes of the nature of religion. It purifies
its votaries; it speaks to them in cryptic language, revealing certain
exalted realities not unrelated to the realities of music, or of
poetry and religion. The men through whom this enthusiasm for pure
science passes are surely, each in his degree, transmitters of heroic
influence; and, in their own way, they form a kind of priesthood. It
must be confessed, too, that this priesthood is peculiarly the product
of the nineteenth century.

The Brotherhood of Science is a new order, a new Dispensation. It
would seem to me impossible to divide one’s feeling toward science
according to the divisions “pure” and “applied”; because many men in
whom the tide of true enthusiasm runs the strongest deal in applied
science, as, for instance, surgeons, bacteriologists, etc. Nor ought we
to forget those great men of science who have an attitude of sympathy
toward all human excellence, and a reverence for things which cannot
be approached through science. Such men resemble those saints who have
also, incidentally, been kings and popes. Their personal magnitude
obliterates our interest in their position in the hierarchy. We think
of them as men, not as popes, kings or scientists. In the end we must
admit that there are as many kinds of science as there are of men
engaged in scientific pursuits. The word science legitimately means
an immense variety of things, loosely connected together, some of
them deserving of strong reprobation. I shall use the term with such
accuracy as I am able to command, and leave it to the candid reader to
make allowance for whatever injustice this course may entail.

To begin with, we must find fault with the Brotherhood of Science on
much the same ground that we fought the old religions, upon grounds
of tyranny and narrowness, of dogmatism and presumption. In the next
place, it is evident that, in so far as science is not hallowed by
the spirit of religion, it is a mere extension of business. It is the
essence of world-business, race-business, cosmic-business. It saves
time, saves lives, and dominates the air and the sea; but all these
things may be accomplished, for ought we know, in the course of the
extinction of the better nature of mankind. Science is not directly
interested in the expression of spiritual truth; her notation cannot
include anything so fluctuating, so indeterminate, as the language of
feeling. Science neither sings nor jokes; neither prays nor rejoices;
neither loves nor hates. This is not her fault; but her limitation. Her
fault is that, as a rule, she respects only her own language and puts
trust only in what is in her own shop window.

I deprecate the contempt which science expresses for anything that
does not happen to be called science. Imperial and haughty science
proclaims its occupancy of the whole province of human thought; yet,
as a matter of fact, science deals in a language of its own, in a set
of formulae and conceptions which cannot cover the most important
interests of humanity. It does not understand the value of the fine
arts and is always at loggerheads with philosophy. Is it not clear that
science, in order to make good her claim to universality, must adopt a
conception of her own function that shall leave to the fine arts and
to religion their languages? She cannot hope to compete with these
languages, nor to translate or expound them. She must accept them. At
present she tramples upon them.

There are, then, in the modern world these two influences which are
hostile to education,--the influence of business and the influence of
uninspired science. In Europe these influences are qualified by the
vigor of the old learning. In America they dominate remorselessly, and
make the path of education doubly hard. Consider how they meet us in
ordinary social life. We have all heard men bemoan the time they have
spent over Latin and Greek on the ground that these studies did not
fit them for business,--as if a thing must be worthless if it can be
neither eaten nor drunk. It is hard to explain the value of education
to men who have forgotten the meaning of education: its symbols convey
nothing to them.

The situation is very similar in dealing with scientific men,--at least
with that large class of them who have little learning and no religion,
and who are thus obliged to use the formulae of modern science as their
only vehicle of thought. These men regard humanity as something which
started up in Darwin’s time. They do not listen when the humanities
are mentioned; and if they did they would not understand. When Darwin
confessed that poetry had no meaning for him, and that nothing
significant was left to him in the whole artistic life of the past,
he did not know how many of his brethren his words were destined to
describe.

We can forgive the business man for the loss of his birthright: he
knows no better. But we have it against a scientist if he undervalues
education. Surely, the Latin classics are as valuable a deposit as the
crustacean fossils, or the implements of the Stone Age. When science
shall have assumed her true relation to the field of human culture we
shall all be happier. To-day science knows that the silkworm must be
fed on the leaves of the mulberry tree, but does not know that the
soul of man must be fed on the Bible and the Greek classics. Science
knows that a queen bee can be produced by care and feeding, but does
not as yet know that every man who has had a little Greek and Latin
in his youth belongs to a different species from the ignorant man. No
matter how little it may have been, it reclassifies him. There is more
kinship between that man and a great scholar than there is between the
same man and some one who has had no classics at all: he breathes from
a different part of his anatomy. Drop the classics from education? Ask
rather, Why not drop education? For the classics are education. We
cannot draw a line and say, ‘Here we start.’ The facts are the other
way. We started long ago, and our very life depends upon keeping alive
all that we have thought and felt during our history. If the continuity
is taken from us, we shall relapse.

When we discover that these two tremendous interests--business and
commercial science have arisen in the modern world and are muffling
the voice of man, we tremble for the future. If these giants shall
continue their subjugation of the gods, the whole race, we fear, may
relapse into dumbness. By good fortune, however, there are other
powers at work. The race is emotionally too rich and too much attached
to the past to allow its faculties to be lost through disuse. New
and spontaneous crops will soon be growing upon the mould of our own
stubbly, thistle-bearing epoch.

In the meantime we in America must do the best we can. It is no secret
that our standards of education are below those of Europe. Our art,
our historical knowledge, our music and general conversation, show a
stiffness and lack of exuberance--a lack of vitality and of unconscious
force--the faults of beginners in all walks of life. During the last
twenty-five years much improvement has been made in those branches
of cultivation which depend directly upon wealth. Since the Civil
War there seems to have been a decline in the higher literature,
accompanied by an advance in the plastic arts. And more recently
still there has been a literary reawakening, perhaps not of the most
important kind, yet signifying a new era. If I may employ an obvious
simile, I would liken America to a just-grown man of good impulses
who has lacked early advantages. He feels that cultivation belongs
to him; and yet he cannot catch it nor hold it. He feels the impulse
of expression, and yet he can neither read nor write. He feels that
he is fitted for general society, and yet he has no current ideas or
conversation. And, of course--I say it with regret, but it is a part of
the situation--of course he is heady and proud of himself.

What do we all desire for this ingenuous youth on whom the postponed
expectation of the world, as Emerson called it, has waited so long?
We desire only to furnish him with true advantages. Let us take a
simultaneous survey of the two extremities of the youth’s education,
namely, of nursery training and of the higher education. The two
are more intimately dependent upon each other than is generally
suspected. With regard to the nursery, early advantages are the key
to education. The focus of all cultivation is the fireside. Learning
is a stove plant that lives in the cottage and thrives during the
long winter in domestic warmth. Unless it be borne into children in
their earliest years, there is little hope for it. The whole future
of civilization depends upon what is read to children before they can
read to themselves. The world is powerless to reconvey itself through
any mind that it has not lived in from the beginning,--so hard is the
language of symbols, whether in music, or in poetry, or in painting.
The art must expand with the heart, as a hot rod of glass is touched by
the gold-leaf, and is afterwards blown into dusty stars and rainbows of
mantling irradiation. If the glass expand before it has been touched by
the metal, there is no means of ever getting the metal into it.

The age of machinery has peopled this continent with promoters and
millionaires, and the work of a thousand years has been done in a
century. The thing has, however, been accomplished at some cost. An
ignorant man makes a fortune and demands the higher education for his
children. But it is too late: he should have given it to them when he
was in his shirt sleeves. All that they are able to receive now is
something very different from education. In receiving it they drag down
the old standards. School and college are filled with illiterates. The
whole land must patiently wait till Learning has warmed back to life
her chilled and starved descendants. Perhaps the child or grandchild of
the fortune-builder will teach the children on his knee what he himself
learned too late in life to stead him much.

Hunger and thirst for learning is a passion that comes, as it were,
out of the ground; now in an age of wealth, now in an age of poverty.
Young men are born whom nothing will satisfy except the arts and the
sciences. They seek out some scholar at a university and aim at him
from boyhood. They persuade their parents to send them to college.
They are bored and fatigued by everything that life offers except this
thing. Now, society does not create this hunger. All that society can
do is to provide nourishment of the right kind, good instruction, true
learning, the best scholarship which history has left behind. I believe
that to-day there is a spirit of learning abroad in America--here and
there, in the young--the old insatiable passion. I feel as if men
were arising--most of them still handicapped by the lack of early
training--to whom life has no meaning except as a search for truth.
This exalted famine of the young scholar is the hope of the world.
It is religion and art and science in the chrysalis. The thing which
society must beware of doing is of interposing between the young
learner and his natural food some mechanical product or patent food
of its own. Good culture means the whole of culture in its original
sources; bad culture is any substitute for this.

Let us now examine the higher departments of education, the university,
the graduate school, the museum,--the learned world in America.
There is one function of learned men which is the same in every age,
namely, the production of text-books. Learned men shed text-books as
the oak sheds acorns, and by their fruits ye shall know them. Open
almost any primary text-book or school book in America, and you will,
on almost every page of it, find inelegancies of usage, roughnesses,
inaccuracies, and occasional errors of grammar. The book has been
written by an incompetent hand. Now, what has the writer lacked? Is
it grammar? Is it acquaintance with English literature, with good
models, with the Bible, with history? It is all these things, and more
than all. No school-room teaching can make a man write good English.
No school teaching ever made an educated man, or a man who could
write a good primary text-book. It requires a home of early culture,
supplemented by the whole curriculum of scholarship and of university
training. Nothing else but this great engine will produce that
little book.

The same conditions prevail in music. If you employ the nearest
excellent young lady music teacher to teach your boys to play the
piano, she will bring into the house certain child’s music written
by American composers, in which the rules of harmony are violated
and of which the sentiment is vulgar. The books have been written by
incompetent people. There is a demand for such books and they are
produced. They are the best the times afford: let us be glad that they
exist at all and that they are no worse. But note this: it will require
the whole musical impulse of the age, from the oratorio society and the
musical college down to the street organ, to correct the grammar of
that child’s music book. Ten or twenty years from now a like book will
perhaps be brought into your home, filled with better harmony and with
truer musical feeling; and the change will have been wrought through
the influence of Sebastian Bach, of Beethoven,--of the masters of music.

It is the same with all things. The higher culture must hang over the
cradle, over the professional school, over the community. If you read
the lives of the painters of Italy or of the musicians of Germany, you
will find that, no matter where a child of genius was born, there was
always an educated man to be found in the nearest village--a priest or
a schoolmaster--who gave the child the rudiments himself, and became
the means of sending him to the university. Without this indigent
scholar, where would have been the great master?

It is familiarity with greatness that we need--an early and first-hand
acquaintance with the thinkers of the world, whether their mode of
thought was music or marble or canvas or language. Their meaning is not
easy to come at, but in so far as it reaches us it will transform us. A
strange thing has occurred in America. I am not sure that it has ever
occurred before. The teachers wish to make learning easy. They desire
to prepare and peptonize and sweeten the food. Their little books
are soft biscuit for weak teeth, easy reading on great subjects; but
these books are filled with a pervading error: they contain a subtle
perversion of education.

Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to
Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous. This truth is often
forgotten among us; and yet there are fields of work in which it is
not forgotten, and in such fields art springs up. Let us remember
the accomplishments of our country. The art in which we now most
excel is architecture. America has in it many beautiful buildings and
some learned architects. And how has this come about? Through severe
and conscientious study of the monuments of art, through humble,
old-fashioned training. The architects have had firstrate text-books,
generally written by Europeans, the non-peptonized, gritty, serious
language of masters in the craft. Our painters have done something of
the same sort. They have gone to Europe, and are conversant with what
is being done in Europe. If they are developing their art here, they do
it not ignorantly, but with experience, with consciousness of the past.

I do not recommend subserviency to Europe, but subserviency to
intellect. Recourse to Europe we must have: our scholars must absorb
Europe without themselves becoming absorbed. It is a curious thing
that the American who comes in contact with the old world exhibits two
opposite faults: he is often too much impressed and loses stamina, or
he is too little impressed and remains a barbarian. Contact with the
past and hard work are the cure for both tendencies. Europe is merely
an incidental factor in the problem of our education, and this is very
well shown in our conduct of our law schools. The Socratic method of
instruction in law schools was first introduced at Harvard, and since
then it has spread to many parts of the world. This is undoubtedly
one of our best achievements in scholarship; and Europe had, so far
as I know, no hand in it. The method consists in the _viva voce_
discussion of leading cases, text-books being used merely as an
auxiliary: the student thus attacks the sources themselves. Here we
have American scholarship at its best, and it is precisely the same
thing as the European article: it is simply scholarship.

If we can exhibit this spirit in one branch of learning, why not in
all? The Promethean fire is one single element. A spark of this fire
is all that is needed to kindle this flame. The glance of a child
of genius at an Etruscan vase leaves the child a new being. That is
why museums exist: not only for the million who get something from
them, but for the one young person of intelligence to whom they mean
everything.

Our American universities exhibit very vividly all the signs of
retardation in culture, which are traceable in other parts of our
social life. A university is always a stronghold of the past, and is
therefore one of the last places to be captured by new influence.
Commerce has been our ruler for many years; and yet it is only quite
recently that the philosophy of commerce can be seen in our colleges.
The business man is not a monster; but he is a person who desires to
advance his own interests. This is his occupation and, as it were,
his religion. The advancement of material interests constitutes
civilization to him. He unconsciously infuses the ideas and methods
of business into anything that he touches. It has thus come about in
America that our universities are beginning to be run as business
colleges. They advertise, they compete with each other, they pretend
to give good value to their customers. They desire to increase their
trade, they offer social advantages and business openings to their
patrons. In some cases they boldly conduct intelligence offices, and
guarantee that no hard work done by the student shall be done in
vain: a record of work is kept during the student’s college life, and
the college undertakes to furnish him at any time thereafter with
references and a character which shall help him in the struggle for
life.

This miscarriage of education has been developed and is being conducted
by some of our greatest educators, through a perfectly unconscious
adaptation of their own souls to the spirit of the age. The underlying
philosophy of these men might be stated as follows: “There is nothing
in life nobler than for a man to improve his condition and the
condition of his children. Learning is a means to this end.” Such is
the current American conception of education. How far we have departed
from the idea of education as a search for truth, or as the vehicle
of spiritual expression, may be seen herein. The change of creeds has
come about innocently, and the consequences involved in it are, as yet,
perceived by hardly anyone. The scepticism inherent in the new creed is
concealed by its benevolence. You wish to help the American youth. This
unfortunate, benighted, ignorant boy, who has from his cradle heard
of nothing but business success as the one goal of all human effort,
turns to you for instruction. He comes to you in a trusting spirit,
with reverence in his heart, and you answer his hope in this wise:
‘Business and social success are the best things that life affords.
Come to us, my dear fellow, and we will help you toward them.’ Your
son asks you for bread and you give him a stone, for fish and you give
him a serpent. It would have been better for that boy if he had never
come to your college, for in that case he might have retained a belief
that somewhere in the world there existed ideas, art, enthusiasm,
unselfishness, inspiring activity.

In so far as our universities have been turning into business agencies,
they have naturally lost their imaginative importance. Our professors
seem to be of little more consequence in the community than the
department managers of other large shops. If learning is a useful
commodity which is to be distributed for the personal advantage of the
recipients, it is a thing to be paid for rather than to be worshiped.
To be sure, the whole of past history cannot be swept away in a day,
and we have not wholly discarded a certain conventional and rhetorical
reverence for learning. A dash and varnish of education are thought to
be desirable,--the wash that is growing every year more thin.

Now, the truth is that the higher education does not advance a man’s
personal interests except under special circumstances. What it gives
a man is the power of expression; but the ability to express himself
has kept many a man poor. Let no one imagine that society is likely to
reward him for self-expression in any walk of life. He is much more
likely to be punished for it. The question of a man’s success in life
depends upon society at large. The more highly an age is educated,
the more highly it rewards education in the individual. In an age of
indifference to learning, the educated man is at a disadvantage. Thus
the thesis that education advances self-interest--that thesis upon
which many of our colleges are now being conducted--is substantially
false. The little scraps and snatches of true education which a man
now gets at college often embarrass his career. Our people are finding
this out year by year, and as they do so, they naturally throw the true
conception of the higher education overboard. If education is to break
down as a commercial asset, what excuse have they for retaining it at
all? They will force the colleges to live up to the advertisements and
to furnish the kind of education that pays its way. It is clear that if
the colleges persist in the utilitarian view, the higher learning will
disappear. It has been disappearing very rapidly, and can be restored
only through the birth of a new spirit and of a new philosophic
attitude in our university life.

There are ages when the scholar receives recognition during his
lifetime and when the paths which lead to his lecture-room are filled
with men drawn there by his fame. This situation arises in any epoch
when human intellect surges up and asserts itself against tyranny and
ignorance. In the past the tyrannies have been political tyrannies, and
these have become well understood through the struggles of intellect
in the past; but the present commercial tyranny is a new thing and
as yet little understood. It lies like a heavy fog of intellectual
depression over the whole kingdom of Mammon, and is fed by the smoke
from a million factories. The artist works in it, the thinker thinks
in it. Even the saint is born in it. The rain of ashes from the
nineteenth-century Vesuvius of business seems to be burying all our
landscape.

And yet this is not true. We shall emerge: even we who are in America
and suffer most. The important points to be watched are our university
class-rooms. If our colleges will but allow something unselfish,
something that is true for its own sake, something that is part of the
history of the human heart and intellect, to live in their class-rooms,
the boys will find their way to it. The museum holds the precious
urn, to preserve it. The university, in like manner, stands to house
the alphabets of civilization--the historic instruments and agencies
of intellect. They are all akin to each other as the very name and
function of the place imply. The presidents and professors who sit
beside the fountains of knowledge bear different labels and teach
subjects that are called by various names. But the thing which carries
the label is no more than the shell. The life you cannot label; and
it is to foster this life that universities exist. Enthusiasm comes
out of the world and goes into the university. Toward this point flow
the currents of new talent that bubble up in society: here is the
meeting-place of mind. All that a university does is to give the
poppy-seed to the soil, the oil to the lamp, the gold to the rod of
glass before it cools. A university brings the spirit in touch with its
own language, that language through which it has spoken in former days
and through which alone it shall speak again.




PROFESSORIAL ETHICS.


When I was at a university as an undergraduate--I will not say how many
years ago--I received one morning a visit from a friend who was an
upper classman; for, as I remember it, I was a freshman at the time.
My friend brought a petition, and wished to interest me in the case
of a tutor or assistant professor, a great favorite with the college
boys, who was about to be summarily dismissed. There were, to be sure,
vague charges against him of incompetence and insubordination; but of
the basis of these charges his partisans knew little. They only felt
that one of the bright spots in undergraduate life surrounded this
same tutor; they liked him and they valued his teaching. I remember no
more about this episode, nor do I even remember whether I signed the
petition or not. The only thing I very clearly recall is the outcome:
the tutor was dismissed.

Twice or thrice again during my undergraduate life, did the same
thing happen--a flurry among the students, a remonstrance much too
late, against a deed of apparent injustice, a cry in the night, and
then silence. Now, had I known more about the world, I should have
understood that these nocturnal disturbances were signs of the times,
that what we had heard in all these cases was the operation of the
guillotine which exists in every American institution of learning, and
runs fast or slow according to the progress of the times. The thing
that a little astonished the undergraduate at the time was that in
almost every case of summary decapitation the victim was an educated
gentleman. And this was not because no other kind of man could be found
in the faculty. It seemed as if some whimsical fatality hung over the
professorial career of any ingenuous gentleman who was by nature a
scholar of the charming, old-fashioned kind.

Youth grieves not long over mysterious injustice, and it never occurred
to me till many years afterward that there was any logical connection
between one and another of all these judicial murders which used to
claim a passing tear from the undergraduate at Harvard. It is only
since giving some thought to recent educational conditions in America,
that I have understood what was then happening, and why it was that a
scholar could hardly live in an American University.

In America, society has been reorganized since 1870; the old
universities have been totally changed and many new ones founded. The
money to do this has come from the business world. The men chosen to
do the work have been chosen by the business world. Of a truth, it
must needs be that offenses come; but woe be unto him through whom the
offense cometh. As the Boss has been the tool of the business man in
politics, so the College president has been his agent in education.
The colleges during this epoch have each had a “policy” and a
directorate. They have been manned and commissioned for a certain kind
of service, as you might man a fishing-smack to catch herring. There
has been so much necessary business--the business of expanding and
planning, of adapting and remodeling--that there has been no time for
education. Some big deal has always been pending in each college--some
consolidation of departments, some annexation of a new world--something
so momentous as to make private opinion a nuisance. In this regard
the colleges have resembled everything else in America. The colleges
have simply not been different from the rest of American life. Let a
man express an opinion at a party caucus, or at a railroad directors’
meeting, or at a college faculty meeting, and he will find that he is
speaking against a predetermined force. What shall we do with such a
fellow? Well, if he is old and distinguished, you may suffer him to
have his say, and then override him. But if he is young, energetic, and
likely to give more trouble, you must eject him with as little fuss as
the circumstances will permit.

The educated man has been the grain of sand in the college machine. He
has had a horizon of what “ought to be,” and he could not help putting
in a word and an idea in the wrong place; and so he was thrown out
of education in America exactly as he was thrown out of politics in
America. I am here speaking about the great general trend of influences
since 1870, influences which have been checked in recent years, checked
in politics, checked in education, but which it is necessary to
understand if we would understand present conditions in education. The
men who, during this era, have been chosen to become college presidents
have, as a rule, begun life with the ambition of scholars; but their
talents for affairs have been developed at the expense of their taste
for learning, and they have become hard men. As toward their faculties
they have been autocrats, because the age has demanded autocracy here;
as toward the millionaire they have been sycophants, because the age
has demanded sycophancy here. Meanwhile these same college presidents
represent learning to the imagination of the millionaire and to the
imagination of the great public. The ignorant millionaire must trust
somebody; and whom he trusts he rules. Now if we go one step further
in the reasoning, and discover that the millionaire himself has a
somewhat exaggerated reverence for the opinions of the great public,
we shall see that this whole matter is a coil of influence emanating
from the great public, and winding up--and generally winding up very
tight--about the necks of our college faculties and professional
scholars. The millionaire and the college president are simply middle
men, who transmit the pressure from the average citizen to the learned
classes. What the average citizen desires to have done in education
gets itself accomplished, though the process should involve the
extinction of the race of educated gentlemen. The problem before us in
America is the unwinding of this “knot intrinsicate” into which our
education has become tied, the unwinding of this boa-constrictor of
ignorant public opinion which has been strangling and, to some extent,
is still strangling our scholars.

I have no categorical solution of the problem, nor do I, to tell the
truth, put an absolute faith in any analysis of social forces, even
of my own. If I point out one of the strands in the knot as the best
strand to begin work on, it is with the consciousness that there are
other effectual ways of working, other ways of feeling about the matter
that are more profound.

The natural custodians of education in any age are the learned men
of the land, including the professors and schoolmasters. Now these
men have, at the present time, in America no conception of their
responsibility. They are docile under the rule of the promoting college
president, and they have a theory of their own function which debars
them from militant activity. The average professor in an American
college will look on at an act of injustice done to a brother professor
by their college president, with the same unconcern as the rabbit who
is not attacked watches the ferret pursue his brother up and down
through the warren, to predestinate and horrible death. We know,
of course, that it would cost the non-attacked rabbit his place to
express sympathy for the martyr; and the non-attacked is poor, and has
offspring, and hopes of advancement. The non-attacked rabbit would,
of course, become a suspect, and a marked man the moment he lifted up
his voice in defense of rabbit-rights. Such personal sacrifice seems
to be the price paid in this world for doing good of any kind. I am
not, however, here raising the question of general ethics; I refer to
the philosophical belief, to the special theory of _professorial_
ethics, which forbids a professor to protect his colleague. I invite
controversy on this subject; for I should like to know what the
professors of the country have to say on it. It seems to me that
there exists a special prohibitory code, which prevents the college
professor from using his reason and his pen as actively as he ought in
protecting himself, in pushing his interests, and in enlightening the
community about our educational abuses. The professor in America seems
to think that self-respect requires silence and discretion on his part.
He is too great to descend into the arena. He thinks that by nursing
this gigantic reverence for the idea of professordom, such reverence
will, somehow, be extended all over society, till the professor becomes
a creature of power, of public notoriety, of independent reputation
as he is in Germany. In the meantime, the professor is trampled upon,
his interests are ignored, he is overworked and underpaid, he is of
small social consequence, he is kept at menial employments, and the
leisure to do good work is denied him. A change is certainly needed in
all of these aspects of the American professor’s life. My own opinion
is that this change can only come about through the enlightenment of
the great public. The public must be appealed to by the professor
himself in all ways and upon all occasions. The professor must teach
the nation to respect learning and to understand the function and the
rights of the learned classes. He must do this through a willingness to
speak and to fight for himself. In Germany there is a great public of
highly educated, nay of deeply and variously learned people, whose very
existence secures pay, protection, and reverence for the scholar. The
same is true in France, England, and Italy.

It is the public that protects the professor in Europe. The public
alone can protect the professor in America. The proof of this is that
any individual learned man in America who becomes known to the public
through his books or his discoveries, or his activity in any field of
learning or research, is comparatively safe from the guillotine. His
position has at least some security, his word some authority. This man
has educated the public that trusts him, and he can now protect his
more defenseless brethren, if he will. I have often wondered, when
listening to the sickening tale of some brutality done by a practical
college president to a young instructor, how it had been possible for
the eminent men upon the faculty to sit through the operation without a
protest. A word from any one of them would have stopped the sacrifice,
and protected learning from the oppressor. But no, these eminent men
harbored ethical conceptions which kept them from interfering with
the practical running of the college. Merciful heavens! who is to run
a college if not learned men? Our colleges have been handled by men
whose ideals were as remote from scholarship as the ideals of the New
York theatrical managers are remote from poetry. In the meanwhile, the
scholars have been dumb and reticent.

At the back of all these phenomena we have, as I have said, the general
atmospheric ignorance of the great public in America. We are so used to
this public, so immersed in it, so much a part of it ourselves, that
we are hardly able to gain any conception of what that atmospheric
ignorance is like. I will give an illustration which would perhaps
never have occurred to my mind except through the accident of actual
experience. If you desire a clue to the American in the matter of the
higher education, you may find one in becoming a school trustee in
any country district where the children taught are the children of
farmers. The contract with any country school-teacher provides that he
shall teach for so many weeks, upon such and such conditions. Now let
us suppose a teacher of genius to obtain the post. He not only teaches
admirably, but he institutes school gardens for the children; he takes
long walks with the boys, and gives them the rudiments of geology. He
is in himself an uplifting moral influence, and introduces the children
into a whole new world of idea and of feeling. The parents are pleased.
I will not say that they are grateful; but they are not ungrateful. It
is true that they secretly believe all this botany and moral influence
to be rubbish; but they tolerate it. Now, let us suppose that before
the year is out the teacher falls sick, and loses two weeks of school
time through absence. You will find that the trustees insist upon his
making up this lost time; the contract calls for it. This seems like a
mean and petty exaction for these parents to impose upon a saint who
has blessed their children, unto the third and fourth generation, by
his presence among them. But let us not judge hastily. This strange
exaction does not result so much from the meanness of the parents, as
from their intellectual limitations. To these parents the hours passed
in school are schooling; the rest does not count. The rest may be
pleasant and valuable, but it is not education.

In the same way, the professional and business classes in America do
not see any point in paying salaries to professors who are to make
researches, or write books, or think beautiful thoughts. The influence
which an eminent man sheds about him by his very existence, the change
in tone that comes over a rude person through his once seeing the face
of a scholar, the illumination of a young character through contact
with its own ideals--such things are beyond the ken of the average
American citizen to-day. To him, they are fables, to him they are
foolishness. The parent of our college lad is a farmer compared to the
parent of the European lad.

The American parent regards himself as an enlightened being--yet he
has not, in these matters, an inkling of what enlightenment is. Now,
the intelligence of that parent must be reached; and the learned
classes must do the work of reaching it. The Fathers of the Christian
church made war with book and speech on Paganism. The leaders of the
Reformation went out among the people and made converts. The patriots
of the American Revolution--nay, the fathers of modern science, Tyndal,
Huxley, Louis Agaziz, Helmholtz--wrote popular books and sought to
interest and educate the public by direct contact. Then let the
later-coming followers in learning imitate this popular activity of the
old leaders: we need a host of battlers for the cause.

For whom do these universities exist, after all? Is it not for the
people at large? Are not the people the ultimate beneficiaries? Then
why should the people not be immediately instructed in such manner as
will lead to their supporting true universities? It is hard to say why
our professors are so timid. Perhaps too great a specialization in
their own education has left them helpless, as all-around fighters. But
the deeper reason seems to be a moral one; they think such activity is
beneath them. It is not beneath them. Whatever be a man’s calling, it
is not beneath him to make a fight for the truth. As for a professor’s
belonging to a mystic guild, no man’s spiritual force is either
increased or diminished by the name he calls his profession. Learning
is their cause, and every honest means to promote learning should be
within their duty. Nor does duty alone make this call for publicity.
Ambition joins in it; the legitimate personal ambition of making one’s
mind and character felt in the world. This blow once struck means
honor, and security of tenure in office, it means public power.

In fine, the scholars should take the public into their confidence
and dominate the business men on our college boards. This will be
found more easy than at first appears, because the money element, the
millionaire element, is very sensitive to public feeling, and once the
millionaire succumbs, the college president will succumb also. The step
beyond this would consist in the scholars’ taking charge of the college
themselves, merely making use of certain business men on their boards
for purposes of financial administration.




THE DRAMA.


When a subject is too complex and too subtle to admit of any adequate
analysis, people dogmatize about it. They believe that they are thus
recurring to first principles. But what are the principles? That
is just what no one can state. The drama is one of those difficult
subjects which lure the writer on and draw him out. It is a subject
upon which ideas flow easily, theories form of themselves, and
convictions deepen in the very act of improvisation. The writer who
will trust his own inspiration can hardly fail to end by saying
something very true about the drama. That is the trouble with the
drama: so many things are true of it. It is scarcely less confusing
than human life itself. The difficult thing is to strike some balance
between all these interlocking and oscillating truths.

Consider, for example, how many and illusive are the influences that
go to make up a good dramatic performance. The elements are interwoven
in our consciousness, mingled and flowing together like motes in the
sunbeam, rising, falling, fading, changing, glowing, and ever suffering
transformation and re-birth, like the dream-things that they are. No
matter what you say about a performance you can hardly be sure that
you have hit upon the right explanation. Let us suppose that there
has been an evening of inspiring success. Some golden lead of the
imagination has sprung up and overshot one performance--paused, passed
and vanished--leaving audience and actors, and even critics, to account
for it as they may. You think you have a clue to the situation; but
you have barely time to rejoice over your discovery, when, on the next
evening, disaster follows from the same apparent causes as led to the
first success. The fact is that some unseen power has been at work upon
one evening and not upon the next. The weather, or the composition of
the audience, or the mood of the actors has changed. The fact is that
no two occasions are really alike; but they differ in so many ways that
one can scarcely catalogue their divergencies.

There is no ill-considered thing that an author may write, or an actor
do on the stage, no mistake or violation of common sense and good
art, that may not be counterbalanced by some happiness which carries
the play in spite of it. And conversely, there is no well-reasoned,
profound, and true theory of play-writing or stage management which,
if logically carried out, may not prove the very vehicle of damnation.
The reason is that your theories are mere nets waved in the air some
miles below the stars which they seem to imprison. Your true theories
are true only to theory; the conditions always upset them. It is,
therefore, not without some trepidation that I tread the paths of this
subject. I almost fear the sound of my own voice and the conclusions
of my own reason. This fear shall be my compass, this the silken
thread, unwinding as I walk, which shall lead me back again out of the
labyrinth and into the daylight.

The aim of any dramatic performance is to have something happen on a
stage that shall hold people’s attention for two hours and a half or
three hours. Anything that does this is a good drama; and there are as
many kinds of good drama as there are flowers in the meadow. All of
these species are closely related to each other. They are modifications
that spring up from the roots of old tradition, like shoots in an
asparagus bed.

The different great divisions and species of drama depend on the size
and shape of the theatre used, more than on any other one thing.
For the great theatre you must have slow speech, or, at any rate,
a concentration of theme. For a small modern theatre you must have
quicker motion and more variety. Not only the actor but the playwright
must have some special size of theatre in his mind as he plans a play,
and must adapt his whole art to that size, as he fashions his work.
You might call this the first canon of the drama.

Now, we have, at present, no controlling conventions, no overmastering
habits of thought about stage matters, and this leads us to forget
the original force, not to say tyranny, of convention in other ages.
England has had no controlling convention in stage matters since
Charles II’s time; and the English stage has thus become a free, wild
sort of place where anything is permitted. It is like the exhibition of
the “Independents” in Paris, where anyone may hire space and hang what
pictures he please, leaving the public to reward or punish him for his
temerity.

The disadvantage of this condition of things is that the public
does not know what to expect, and therefore fine things may be
misunderstood. The playwright is not sufficiently supported by the
crutch of tradition. He has lost his task-master; but he has lost
also the key to expression. A well-developed, formal tradition is
as necessary to any powerful spiritual deliverance as a system of
punctuation is to writing. It was not until Haydn and Mozart had
developed the form of the symphony and sonata that Beethoven’s work
became possible. The same holds true of all the arts; the great artist
who finds no harness ready-made for his ideas must set to work like
Giotto to painfully create a makeshift of his own.

If we have to-day no great tyrant of contemporary convention in any
of the arts, we have a hundred fashions. The age is eclectic; the
conventional side of art is at a discount. Now in the drama, the
conventional side of art is of peculiar importance. The more you
surprise an audience, the less you will please it. The thing that
entertains and relaxes people is to have something unmistakable and
easy unrolled before them; something in which the problems are plainly
stated and solved beyond the possibility of a doubt. The good man and
bad man must be labeled; and so must the different sorts of plays
receive labels--as, Comedy, Tragedy, Farce, Problem-play, Tank-drama,
etc.; otherwise a great part of the attention of the audience will be
exhausted in finding the right humor. The modern playwright has thus a
problem that is new to the stage, the problem of giving the grand cue
to the audience as to which kind of play is coming.

After all, the condition of the contemporary stage is very much
like the condition of contemporary painting. Any good historical
gallery contains samples from the whole history of art. There are as
well-defined classes of pictures as there are of dramas: _e. g._, the
religious picture, the genre picture, the portrait, the landscape,
etc.; and within each of these classes there exists a world of
half-defined traditions in which educated persons are learned, and by
which all artists are somewhat controlled. Now each of these classes
was originally the product of an age devoted to it. But to-day the
artist is eclectic. He is eclectic in spite of himself because he is
not forced by universal expectation to do a particular thing: he must
choose. Whether he be painter or dramatist, the artist in Western
Europe to-day is born into an epoch of miscellaneous experiment. Let
him choose. The spread of international education has brought about
this state of things: art is becoming an international commodity.

Let us return to the drama, and seize upon some convenient model of
a conventional play--for instance, the old-fashioned melodrama. What
a relief it is to find in the opening act of a play that we are upon
familiar ground, that we know very well what is coming and can enjoy
the elaboration of it. We must have a taste for the whole species or
we can never either like or understand the particular example. And
so also in judging of any drama of another age we must positively
bring the whole of the epoch to bear upon it or we are lost. The
Elizabethans before Shakespeare’s time had developed a drama of
horrors, or running-mad play, in which the audience knew from the
outset that someone was to be dogged and tortured and dragged through
a living Inferno before being thrown on the dung-hill. The audience
expected to be moved to awe and to a certain sort of solemn horror by
the tragedy. The play was to be in blank verse, a narrative play full
of incident--with a host of characters and many changes of imaginary
scene. The story was to be new to the audience and as exciting as
possible. Very often it had, to our modern thinking, no plot; but was
a helter-skelter of delirious cruelty, accompanied by torrents of
passionately excited words which sometimes broke into great poetry
and more often soared in a cloudland of divine bombast. The people
loved this language. They reveled in the rhetoric of the dialogue, and
wallowed in the boldness of the action. The first line, or even the
very name of a horror-play in Elizabeth’s time, was enough to throw the
audience into the proper mood. How mistaken is it for one of us to-day
to read any old play without conjuring up something of its epoch.

Now let us remember the Greeks, since we cannot escape them. The
cultivated, conventional, logical, and over-civilized Greek wished
his tragedy to be elegant and in a just measure solemn, not to say
awe-inspiring. He expected this, much as we expect coffee after dinner
when we dine out. It was to be done through the means of one of the
old Greek myths, a thing half history, half fable in its complexion.

In the days of Æschylus the Athenian audience was made up of
God-fearing, conservative people who could be moved to awe by the
contemplation of religious ideas, and by pictures of lofty moral
sufferings. But as time went on, the people became bored by the old
Greek religion, and it required more highly colored pictures to satisfy
them. In the days of Sophocles there is a certain amount of religious
feeling left in the people, though one feels that Sophocles is making
use of it for artistic purposes. In Euripides’ day, however, everything
has been used up in the way of big moral ideas, and the emphasis is
laid on the suffering. Mental agony is manipulated by a skilled hand.
The taste is refined, the logic is perfect, the art is wonderful; but
the dramas of Euripides were felt in his own day and thereafter to
be a little corrupt. People blame Euripides instead of blaming the
insensibility of the Athenian theatre-goer who required this sort of
enginery to make him weep delicious tears. The thing to be noted in
both of these instances--from the English and the Greek stage--is the
part played by the audience. It is only through a tacit consent on all
hands that a certain game shall be played, that very highly-finished,
complex and perfect works of art are produced. There is so much
to be conveyed by a drama that unless the audience will agree to
take nine-tenths of it for granted, the project is hopeless. The
conventions! These are the precious symbols which have been developed
by centuries of toil. They possess such telling value that by their aid
even mediocrity can do good things, and genius, miracles. How shall we
preserve them?

The world of drama appears to-day to be at sea, by reason of the loss
of the great compass of a controlling dramatic tradition, yet this
is not quite true; because other influences--vague perhaps, yet very
authoritative--supply, in some degree, the place of the older tyrant,
custom. The controlling force of living dramatic practice has died away
in the world, and has become dissipated into a thousand traditions.
But in dying, it has left two influences as its heirs--namely, the
influence of criticism, and the influence of academic training. These
two watch-dogs of the drama tend to keep at least some record of the
past. They organize and classify the new varieties of drama which are
constantly springing up. For it appears that a new kind of drama is not
so very difficult a thing for a community to develop. The oratorio, for
example, and modern opera in all its forms, are even more artificial
than the Greek drama, and require an even greater conventional
sympathy on the part of the audience. Yet they have grown up naturally
among us and are true children of stage life. In quite recent years
Wagner, Ibsen, and Mæterlinck has each developed a personal theatre
of his own. Each has drawn to himself a sort of international public,
held together by ties of education, by taste and by the spirit of the
age--such a public as a novelist might collect, but which one would
never have predicted for a playwright. This could only have happened
in an age when there existed a large reading public made up of persons
who were scattered throughout all the nations. For it must be noted
that the reading of plays is as good as a chorus. It warns the people
of what is to come. Not only the reading of plays but the reading of
pamphlets and of essays is necessary in order that people may be primed
to accept any new departure in the drama. The undeniable genius of
Gluck was not able to establish his lyrical drama without the aid of
many writers, talkers, and promoters. It required a war of pamphlets
and the influence of royalty to make the new opera acceptable. Ibsen
and Wagner have been accompanied by a wagonload of pamphlets and
broadsides, as if they were the forerunners of a new circus. Bernard
Shaw went with every play he gave as an advertising agent, a gladiator
and shouting billman that would get the attention of the public at any
price. It was quieter inside the theatre than outside of it, so people
took refuge within.

Let no one think that criticism is an unnecessary part of the modern
drama. Criticism to-day is but the articulate utterance of those
conventions, those assumptions, and prejudices which must accompany and
support any drama in the mind of the audience, and which in simpler
ages hardly needed statement, because they were established. They stood
in the public consciousness much as the walls of the theatre stood in
the market-place, while the plays proceeded within them.

There has always been criticism. Aristotle did not begin it, but he
is the starting-point of that great river of Thought-about-Art which
has accompanied the developments of the arts since Greek times. The
history of criticism is tremendous in volume, in brilliancy, and in
seriousness; and it has a great utility and mission toward the world
at large. If anyone have a curiosity to know what this literature is,
let him glance through Saintsbury’s History of Criticism in three
great tomes of many hundred pages each, in which the great names and
the great theories in criticism are reviewed. This is a part of the
literary history, of the bookish history of the world. From Plato
to Lessing, from Longinus to Santayana there have been acute-minded
individuals who loved the fine arts, poetry, sculpture, music, the
drama, etc., and who busied themselves with speculation upon them.
These men would pluck out the heart of the mystery, they would touch
our quick with their needle, they would satisfy our intellect with
their explanations. And here arises one of the subtlest difficulties
in all psychology; the difficulty of explaining clearly how men of
the greatest intellect may be subject to the grossest self-delusion.
The reasonings of these critics about art are valid as reasonings
of critics about art, so long as they are kept in the arena of the
reasoning of critics about art. But if you try to translate those
reasonings back again into the substance of art itself--if, for
instance, you bid the artist follow the admonition of the critic, you
will find that the artist cannot do this without making a retranslation
of the critic’s ideas into terms which now become incomprehensible
to the critic. In order to take the critic’s advice--to produce the
effects which the critic calls for--the artist must do with his
material things which the critic has not mentioned and does not
conceive of.

The critic, after all, is a parasite. He lives by illustrating the
brains of the artist. He is an illuminator. He has produced a wonderful
literature--a literature of embroidery--and this literature is very
valuable to the world at large; but has, as it were, no mission as
toward the artist. The reason is that the artist gets his experience of
art by working directly and immediately in the art; and the problems he
works on can neither be stated nor solved except in the terms of his
art. The critic, meanwhile, believes that he himself has stated and
solved those problems; but what he says is folly to the ears of the
artist. The misunderstanding must continue forever, and neither of the
parties is to blame for it. Listen to the most good-natured of artists,
Molière, speaking with the authority of unbounded success, upon the
subject that drives lesser men to helpless rage:--

  “Vous êtes de plaisantes gens avec vos règles, dont vous
  embarrassez les ignorants et nous étourdissez tous les jours.
  Il semble, à vous ouïr parler, que ces règles de l’art soient
  les plus grands mystères du monde, et cependant ce ne sont que
  quelques observations aisées que le bon sens a faites sur ce qui
  peut ôter le plaisir que l’on prend à ces sortes de poèmes; et le
  même bon sens, qui a fait autrefois ces observations, les fait
  aisément tous les jours sans le secours d’Horace et d’Aristote.
  Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles
  n’est pas de plaire, et si une pièce de théatre qui a attrapé son
  but n’a pa suivi un bon chemin. Laissons-nous aller de bonne foi
  aux choses qui nous prennent par les entrailles, et ne cherchons
  point de raisonnement pour nous empêcher d’avoir du plaisir.”...

Even Molière is a little harsh to the critics. He seems not to remember
that critics are “seized by the entrails” by a set of psychological
terms, by “the sublime,” by “beauty,” by “contrast,” by the very
idea that there should be laws underlying the mysteries of æsthetic
enjoyment--laws which critics proclaim. The fact is that the sincerity
and enthusiasm of the critic carries all before it. It seems to the
critic as if the artist were a poor fool who does not quite understand
himself. Molière has had his say, but what of that? No critic was
listening. The critic feels too keenly about the matter to catch the
drift of Molière’s remarks. You cannot persuade Ruskin that he does not
understand painting. You cannot make Aristotle believe that he stands
in the position of an outsider toward tragic poetry. He smiles at the
suggestion. He feels himself to be quite on the level of his subject.
Before he spoke, it had not spoken. Leave the critic, then, to his
thesis: and let us confess that for everyone except for the artist,
that thesis has a great and stimulating value.

The words of the critical, even though they come from outside the
profession, have a value in preserving and in interpreting good
traditions in art. The real power, however, through which these
traditions live is the teaching done inside of the profession. What the
apprentice learns at the bench from the master-craftsman--this is what
controls the future of art. It is through this teaching that the raw
youth is turned into a craftsman. No one who has not passed through the
mill can conceive the depth to which nature must be affected through
training before art is gained. The artist is as much a product of art
as his own works are. To execute the simplest acts of his profession
he must have passed through a severe novitiate. He cannot sound a note
of it till he has been refashioned, as Mrs. Browning sang, from a reed
into a musical instrument.

There are certain ways of reciting verse and of speaking prose, certain
ways of walking on and off the stage, which are expressive, correct,
and necessary. To drop them is a sign of ignorance and decadence. They
cannot be replaced by something modern that is just as good: they are
a race inheritance. If you lose them you will have to re-discover them
subsequently, just as, if you were to lose the science of harmony, you
would have to discover it again before you could understand the music
of modern times. How is it that these practices and trade secrets of
the arts get preserved during periods of public indifference, when
perhaps the studios might forget them? It is by the institution of
Academies and Lyceums: by the endowment of galleries and theatres. The
nations of Continental Europe long ago resorted to state-supported
schools, galleries, and play-houses as a means of preserving tradition.
On the Continent no one is allowed to forget the old forms. They are
nursed and cultivated. The very nations which need training the least,
because of their natural talent, and of their proximity to the old
Mediterranean seats of culture, get the most of it, because of their
intelligent understanding of what art consists in. Among late-comers
at the table of civilization, and among young people generally, there
prevails an opinion that art is the result of genius, or of natural
temperament, or of race endowment. But the persons who have the
endowment of race, of temperament, and of genius know that art is a
question of training.

It is a sign that civilization has been spreading to find that in
England and in America, men are beginning to adopt Continental ideas
upon the subject of endowed theatres. The chaotic condition of the
English stage has been very largely due to the fact that it has been
nobody’s business to preserve the old recipes. If the public taste
swings away from lyrical drama for a decade, lyrical drama goes by the
board--the very models and old wig stands are thrown out of the window.
In a few years, only a few old actors and playgoers will remember
the lost delights that went with these trappings. A whole province
of human happiness has been eaten up by the sea of oblivion--by that
all-surrounding, ever-active ocean that gnaws away the outlying realms
of the mind, and will eat us back to mere grunts and a sign language
unless we value our inheritance of articulation. Without the support of
schools of acting the present moment remains continually too important.
Those whole classes of exquisite, beautiful things which go out of
fashion and are thereafter all but irrecoverable, should be held before
the public with as firm a hand as orchestral music has been held before
it, and for the same reasons. We are always being told by theatrical
people that the public taste will or will not support something. Does
anybody inquire whether the American public likes Bach or Beethoven,
or does anybody take advice of the press as to how the works of those
masters shall be played? No. The best traditions are followed, the best
performers obtained, and the effect upon the public mind is awaited
with patience and with certainty. That is the way a State Theatre is
run in Europe, and that is the way that a New Theatre should be run in
America.

With regard to music, we have adopted the Continental ideas easily,
because we had no music of our own. But with regard to the drama we
have certain crude ideas of our own, rooted in the existence of a
domestic drama, and these ideas impede our progress. We have, for
instance, a belief that because an audience is used to an inferior
thing, therefore it will continue to prefer that thing to something
better and that the reformer should content himself with giving the
public only a taste now and then of something fine, and should keep in
touch with them in the meantime through concessions to popular taste.
This would be sound reasoning in the mouth of the business manager of
an ordinary theatrical venture; but in the mouth of the manager of
an educational theatre, it is blasphemy. The thesis upon which all
education rests is this: give the best, and it will supplant the less
good.

I doubt if anyone in the country is more grateful than I am to the
managers of the New Theatre. They have begun a great work. The whole
country is in debt to them already. They are showing a spirit which
will make their future work continually improve; and their efforts
have, on the whole, been received with that lack of intelligent
gratitude with which society always receives its benefactors.
Nevertheless their work and their position seem to illustrate so
many points in the subject, that a little incidental criticism of
them is unavoidable. If I find fault with the New Theatre for not
being sufficiently academic, it is only to illustrate how completely
academic standards have been vanishing in America. For instance, the
art of reciting Shakespeare has been all but lost, and the New Theatre
proved this quite unconsciously by a plunge, upon some occasions, into
a sort of household naturalism in its method of reciting romantic
drama. An epoch like the present, in which the current new plays
are naturalistic, will tend to recite Shakespeare in a naturalistic
way. But only the abeyance of good tradition could have led to the
attempt to give Shakespeare’s lines in a conversational manner. We
have forgotten how effective the lines are when conventionally given,
or we should resent this experiment in taking the starch out of them.
Indeed upon certain other occasions the old standards of speech were
last winter brought back in magnificent triumph at the New Theatre. If
it was chiefly to the Englishmen and Englishwomen of the New Theatre
Company that we in America owed this beautiful lesson in speech, let us
none the less be grateful for the lesson and draw from it what profit
we may.

There are people who believe that verse is merely a decorated sort
of prose; and that in connection with the drama, verse is a foolish
superfluity. The people who think this have not heard verse well
recited. The delivery of metrical language in an elevated manner is
the noblest tradition of the stage. It is a thing at the same time
completely artificial and completely beautiful. It lifts the play into
a region native to great thoughts, where lightnings strike, as in their
element, and music like a natural thunder rolls across the scene.
To-day the secret of this majestic convention of verse is lost to the
stage. Neither in the writing of it by the poet nor in the delivery
of it by the actor, nor in the reception and enjoyment of it by the
audience can the thing come off happily except under rare conditions,
when all are prepared for it and when the right planets are in the
ascendant. We live under an eclipse; yet is not the sun extinguished.
Verse will return to the drama as soon as those themes return which
only verse can carry.

All these conventions and settings of which we have been speaking are
but the accessories, the servants of the stage; and, like insolent
lackeys, they sometimes thrust themselves vulgarly forward. The
wardrobe of Louis XIV might easily make the claim that the monarchy
could not be carried on without it. And yet, on the stage, it is not
quite so. On the stage, no particular set of accessories is ever so
important as it thinks itself. The multiplicity of the forces at work
saves us from such shameful subjection to detail. We can always, at
a pinch, get on without any of the accessories. Have you ever, when
charades were being acted, seen some talented person enter the room,
wearing an old hat and having a shawl or perhaps a window curtain drawn
across his shoulders? For some brief moments of inspiration he manages
to make you see Hector of Troy, or The Man that broke the Bank at
Monte Carlo. You cannot tell how it was done, it was so rapid. Yet you
have had a glimpse of an idea. You have been transported somehow and
somewhere. Perhaps the actor cannot do it again; for amateurs strike
sparks and call up spirits by accident. Nevertheless, the thing you
have seen is the essence of drama. An idea has been conveyed; and all
the means that conveyed it have been lost--consumed like gunpowder
in the explosion. We can all remember various amateur performances
and revivals of old plays, in which the accessories were of the
simplest; and in which the suppression of scenery and the focusing
of the audience’s whole attention upon the actors had a wonderfully
stimulating effect upon the talents of the actors. The means were at a
minimum; the idea, the thought was at a maximum. In this amateur spark
we have the key to the real theatre.

The building, the costumes, the incidental music, the blank verse,
all the accessories of a play exist for the purpose of making an
atmosphere of high conductivity, in which that spark of idea may fly
out from the stage, across the footlights, into the audience. During
great moments or great half-hours of a play this same disappearance
of the accessories takes place, and gives us the life of drama. We
are always losing this life, because the accessories have independent
and fluctuating values of their own which attract our attention.
Costume seems to be an advantage in helping to hold the illusion, and
scenery is merely an extension of costume. Either of them may attract
too much attention, and how much this too much is, depends upon the
sensibilities of the auditor. For example, Twelfth Night is injured in
my eyes when it is given with beautiful Italian scenery, no matter how
beautiful. Toby Belch is, in my mind, connected with rural England, and
to see him with Vesuvius in the background shocks me. Nevertheless,
the next man may find in this Italian scenery a gentle stimulus which
heightens his enjoyment of the inner drama. Again, blank verse, when
properly spoken, adds to a play a moving charm like an accompaniment
of music; but when the lines are declaimed with either too much or too
little artifice, they become a nuisance. All the means and vehicles of
expression should fill the mere margin of our attention, ready to step
forward when the mind’s stage is empty and to vanish on the approach of
the dramatic interest.

The Greek stage came as near to the charade as the theatre has ever
come since. Here was no scenery, and the costume was merely suggestive.
Play of feature was out of the question, because of the mask. The
appeal of the natural voice was out of the question, because of
the megaphone mouth-piece. There was nothing left but gesture and
intonation. What a denudation that seems to us! But are you sure that
the imagination is not heightened by just such devices as this? Are you
sure that Hector or Heracles are not made ten times as real by this
absence of realism as they ever could have been made by naturalistic
treatment?

A character comes on the Greek stage, and you perceive by his talk that
he is supposed to be walking in a wood. In a few moments he arrives
at an imaginary point of view. Another character walks on the stage,
and you perceive that this second character is supposed to have come
walking up the valley. Your whole attention is on the story, and any
striking scenery would be an unpleasant intrusion, an inartistic
element. Surely the Greeks were very clever at mechanical contrivances
and could have had scenery if they had desired it. What they had was
much better,--imagination.

It is the same with the French classic stage, whose meagreness of
decoration is almost an offense to the American. The higher the
intelligence of the audience, the less will scenery be valued in plays.
In the case of children’s toys, we all know that a rag doll and a
wooly dog speak a more eloquent language than a mechanical doll and a
realistic dog that walks. But we dare not employ this philosophy in
dressing our stage, because of the lack of imagination in grown people.

I have no doubt that if you had, say, thirty new plays to produce, each
of them as good as Hamlet, and if your audience were to consist of the
most intelligent people in the world, and if your actors were all and
each as good as David Garrick, I have no doubt, I say, that the most
thrilling way you could produce those plays would be on a stage without
scenery and with just such suggestion of costume as should lift the
characters into the world of idea. Such was the Elizabethan method; at
least it was the practice which the Elizabethans stumbled upon in their
riotous career.

The world of idea is what you are seeking, no matter how sure you may
be that you want realism. The power of a play comes from this, that
it makes people believe that the action on the stage is not merely a
story, which has happened and is over--but is a thing which is going
on, a truth, a spiritual, inward reality which has to do with the
life and sentiments of the audience. This is what we want, what we
always want, whether we are playing Lear, or Ibsen, or Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. The different kinds of drama use different means of suggesting
spiritual reality. Poetic images are one way, sideboards and furniture
are another way. Now it must be confessed at once that realism does
tend to convey spiritual truth to people who possess a low degree of
reflective power. A reproduction in detail of something seen in real
life--wax-works, for instance--impresses the unimaginative person
more strongly than a sketch of the same thing done by Rembrandt; yet
both the wax-works and the Rembrandt have the same end in view--to
bring home an idea to the beholder. We may, then, measure the life in
people’s fancy by the weight of suggestion which is requisite to awaken
them--a feather of imagery or a cannon ball of actuality--and in this
we shall not be dealing with several kinds of dramatic principle, but
only with several conditions of education in the audience.

The recent realism seen on our own stage shows a deadness of wit in
our life--the sad unresponsive seriousness of persons who do not
habitually live in the world of imagination. That world seems flat to
them. Nevertheless, the same persons will, with a little encouragement,
begin to enjoy humor, and trust poetry. Put them where they have no
critical responsibility and they will blossom into enjoyment. O blessed
amateurs! I wish someone would write a book and show that the whole
history of art has been but the history of amateurs; and that every
revival of painting, drama, music, architecture, and poetry has been
due to them. They cannot, perhaps, make great music themselves, but
they hand the lyre to Apollo. They have not the training, but they have
the passion that finds talent in others and protects the flame while
it is young. They suspect the secret of a lost art and go in search of
it as for the Golden Fleece. And amateurs, yes the amateurs are the
persons who will keep the drama from ever quite losing all relation to
its ancestor--its good genius--the charade.

The great aim of any drama is to make all the audience and all the
actors think of the same thing at the same moment during the entire
evening. The “argument,” as they used to call it, is the main thing.
It is astonishing what a good name this is for the exposition of
ideas that takes place in a very good play either ancient or modern.
The argument is what both audience and actors breathlessly follow.
We err only when we begin to define what the argument is. It seems,
in truth, to be something too subtle for analysis. In some plays we
think we find it in the plot, in others in the characters, in others
in the language, and so forth. But there is hardly a definition of it
which some famous example will not instantly confute. There is, for
instance, a charm that comes out of As You Like It, and which for three
hundred years has made audiences consent to sit through its three hours
of happy trifling. That charm is the “argument” of As You Like It.
You cannot state the charm. It is as subtle as the ether and as real
as the power of light that moves across the ether. Our senses are not
at fault, but only our theories. There is a fluctuating mystery about
all that happens in the theatre, and perhaps this indefinable power
is what most attaches us to the place. It is not a place of learning,
nor of scholarship, nor of information or ethics, nor even of such
flights of mind as accurate thought can always follow. It is a place of
enchantment.




NORWAY.


In Norway people live in small houses in which the air is very bad. The
people neither wash nor laugh, and common sense is unknown among them.
Each man or woman is endowed with one idea, and that is sufficient for
each. He is satisfied with it, and he is never seen without it. So that
anyone may always very easily recognize the different characters of
a Norwegian play. One knows that each idea is very significant, very
logical, and very much to be noted. Thus, if a character has the idea
of walking upstairs backward instead of forward, one feels perfectly
satisfied about that person. He is always talking about his mania,
and one knows that, in the end, some terrible and logical calamity is
going to result from the perverse habit with which stepdame nature
has endowed him. For all people in Norway are stepchildren of nature,
and are barely endowed with sufficient complexity of intelligence to
prevent them from swallowing poison, falling down wells, or walking
over precipices. Indeed they do all these things, the moment the well
or the poison or the precipice comes between themselves and their
favorite hobby.

I saw a very nice play the other day about these people. If was about
a very nice elderly man and his elderly sister, Jake Borg and Elisa
Borg. Jake loved his sister, and his sister loved her cat--a Maltese
cat of the largest variety. Both Jake and Elisa spent an hour or so
each day in talking about the cat, and of how dangerous it was for the
cat to insist upon walking on the back fence during the very hours when
Jake was practising with his flint-lock at a target erected upon the
fence. Jake, it appears, was a member of the village patriotic shooting
society and was the president of it, and his whole heart and soul were
wrapped up in it. The society used flint-locks rather than percussion
caps because the time occupied by the explosion, being quite long with
flint-locks, the nerves of the patriots would be the better steeled
to bear the noise. Thus, during the forenoon, for several years, the
devoted couple discussed the question whether or not the pet cat would
be hit by the pet bullets; and it became alarmingly evident that such
would be the case, unless one or the other of the afflicted persons
should desist from the practice of his hobby. There were various other
people who came in to help the principal characters in the play to
discuss the peril. Neither party in the great conflict would budge
from his principle--the one, for patriotic reasons, the other out of
Christian piety and affection for dumb animals.

The anguish of the situation became so intense that it was almost a
relief when the cat was shot by the heroic burgher in the very shot by
which he completed a hundred consecutive bull’s-eyes--or would have
completed them, but for the fated animal. Jake’s life was ruined by
this failure; as Elisa’s was ruined by the loss of her companion, and
the village life was ruined because there remained nothing to talk
about thereafter. So, all the inhabitants of that Norwegian hamlet
shut their windows tight, and continued each in the pursuit of his
own serious hobby, neither washing, nor smiling, nor making allowance
for the hobbies of the rest, but only grinding out remorsely the
magnificent tragic material of Norwegian life.




DR. HOWE.


There are men who have great fame during their lives, and then
disappear forever; and there are others who live unknown to their
contemporaries, and then emerge upon posterity, and cast back a
perpetual reproach upon their own times which were not worthy of them.
To neither of these classes does Dr. Howe belong; for he was a hero in
his own day, and has left behind him so many memorials of his mind and
times that he can never become wholly lost to the world. He belongs
rather to that class of reappearing reputations which die through
successive resurrections, and distribute their message to humanity
through many undulations of loss and rediscovery.

One cannot tell where to set the boundary to such men’s influence,
for while the student writes, the shadow moves. The scribbler who is
assigning values and labels to history becomes an instrument in the
hands of his subject, and something is accomplished through him which
is beyond his own horizon. This is the mechanism through which great
men reach the world. The present age has all but forgotten Dr. Howe:
his name has for some years been on the road to oblivion. For I do not
count as fame the dusty memorials and busts of dead philanthropists
which adorn and disfigure college libraries. Their honored and
obliterated features carry something, but it is not fame. They are like
neglected finger-boards which have fallen by the wayside and are calmly
undergoing unimaginable dissolution through the soft handling of the
elements. Wordsworth might have addressed a sonnet to these men had he
not been so preoccupied with external nature. “Behold, this man was
once the sign-board of classical learning, this of electricity, this of
natural science.” But Wordsworth would have been obliged first to rub
the moss from the inscriptions.

Some years ago it looked as if Dr. Howe, the great and famous Dr. Howe,
had fallen by the wayside of progress and was to remain forever a dead
finger-post and a reminiscence in the history of the world’s care for
the blind. To-day a new image of him is beginning to form above the
mass of letters, documents, and written reports which his busy life
bequeathed to the garret, and in which his daughter, Laura E. Richards,
has recently quarried for a book of memoirs. She has produced two large
volumes which give us Dr. Howe from the intimate side of his character,
and in a way that no man can be publicly known to his contemporaries.
It is of this new image or _vita nuova_ of Dr. Howe that I mean to
speak.

There is a variety of interest in his life, which shatters the
picture of a philanthropist and leaves in its place the picture of
an adventurer--an unselfish adventurer; that is to say, a sort of
Theseus or Hercules, an unaccountable person who visits this world from
somewhere else. After all, this is the impression he made upon his
own times. Perhaps we are getting a breeze of the same wind that blew
through him in life: I cannot tell. At any rate, it was not to Laura
Bridgman only that Howe was sent into the world. I confess to a feeling
that he was one of the greatest of Americans and one of the best men
who ever lived.

Seventy years ago his name was known to everybody in the civilized
world. The part he took in the Greek Revolution (1825-29) had made
him famous while still a very young man, and his success in teaching
the blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, (1837-41) seemed at the time,
and still seems, one of the great triumphs in the history of human
intellect. The world rang with it. The miracle was done in the sight of
all men, and humanity stood on the benches and shouted themselves blind
with applause. This accomplishment, which was the great accomplishment
of his life, will always remain Dr. Howe’s trade-mark and proverbial
significance; but other parts of his life almost equal it in permanent
value. The historical interest of the Greek Revolution, and of the
latter half of the anti-slavery period, are supplemented by the
scientific interest of all Dr. Howe’s philanthropic work and by the
personal interest of an extraordinary and unique character.

Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston in 1801, and was thus just
twenty years old when the Greek Revolution broke out in 1821. In that
year he was graduated at Brown University, Providence, and thereafter
studied medicine for three years in Boston. Byron’s poems had prepared
the youths of Europe and of America for the Greek struggle, and Howe
was one of the young men who responded in person to Byron’s final call
to arms. Howe did not reach Greece till a few months after Byron’s
death at Missolonghi in 1824. Howe spent six years in campaigning with
the Greek patriots. He had enlisted in the capacity of a surgeon;
but the exigencies of the primitive and very severe guerilla warfare
tended to obliterate official rank and to throw the work upon those
who had executive ability. The war was a scramble of patriot banditti
and peasant militia against Mahommetan ruffians. The name of Greece,
the name of Byron, the beauty of the scenery in whose midst the war
proceeded, the heart-rending nature of the struggle and its happy
outcome, all combine to make this the most romantic war in history. It
was one of the last wars before that effective development of steam and
gunpowder which have forever merged the picturesque in the horrible.

The young Howe kept a journal, which shows a character entirely at
one with his rapturously poetic surroundings. Before I had read this
journal I did not know that the United States had ever produced a man
of this type, the seventeenth century navigator, whose daily life
is made up of hair-breadth escapes and who writes in the style of
Robinson Crusoe.--“Passed a pirate boat, but he saw too many marks of
preparation about us to attack us; in fact, if vessels only knew what
cowards these pirates are they would never be robbed, for the least
resistance will keep them off. Give me a vessel with moderately high
sides, two light guns and twelve resolute men, and I would pledge my
all on sailing about every port of the archipelago and beating off
every vessel which approaches. The pirates always come in long, light,
open boats which pull from sixteen to thirty-six and forty oars. They
sometimes have a gun, and always select calm weather to attack. But how
to get up the sides of a vessel if twelve men with cutlasses were to
oppose them.”...

“But it was a great fault on the part of commanders of vessels of war
not to have made examples. A few bodies hanging at their yard-arms,
and displayed round among the islands, would have had more effect than
all they have done.”...

There we have the reality of which Stevenson’s tales are the reflection
and the traditional imitation. Again--“If he challenges, I shall have
my choice of weapons. I am pretty good master of the small sword, and
think I could contrive to disarm him and make him beg on his knees, for
I am sure he is one of the most arrant cowards.”... Again--“They passed
along the beach at full gallop not far from us, and I gave them a rifle
ball which missed them.”... In another place--“But one of them held
his head out long enough for me to take aim at it and level him with a
rifle ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether
pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall. Said
I ‘A moment more and I may fall in the same way.’”...

On another occasion--“I plied my rifle as fast as possible, and luckily
was not called to one single wounded man, they being sheltered by the
high sides of the vessel.”... It must be remembered that inasmuch as
Howe was a surgeon he had no right to be fighting at all; but dear me!
we are on the Spanish main in Elizabeth’s time; and, as Howe observed a
few days later, “I had been directed to keep below, but the scene was
too interesting for a young man to lose sight of.”...

There was a touch of the buccaneer about Howe. His slight tendency
toward lawlessness kept cropping out all through his life. It appears
in an assault which he made on a sentinel at Rome in 1844, and in all
his anti-slavery work--of which later. A great descriptive power is
revealed in this journal, which he kept during the months when he often
slept with his head on a stone and subsisted on fried wasps. As an
example of vivid sketching take the following:

“On the road I had met bodies of peasantry of the lower class called
Vlachoi (Wallachians), driving before them all their little stock,
perhaps a few dozen sheep, as many goats, a donkey and a half-dozen
fowls, all guarded by a pair of fine-looking mountain dogs and followed
by the father lugging his rough capote, with gun in hand and an old
pistol and knife in his belt, and the mother with her baby lashed to
her back in a bread-trough, a kettle on her head, and sundry articles
of furniture in her hands. A troop of dirty ragged boys and girls,
brought up the rear, each bearing a load of baggage proportionate to
their strength, a little donkey carrying all the rest of the furniture
and farming tools, in fine, all their goods and chattels. Land they
have none; they feed their flocks on the high mountains in summer,
and now on the approach of winter they descend to the warmer valleys,
where they build a wigwam and pass the winter.”... Sieges and battles
on land and sea, assassinations and conspiracies, pictures of natural
scenery and domestic life, of happiness, pathos, humor, heroism,--the
diaries abound in all such things; and the pictures often burn and
glow and sparkle. I cannot tell whether this sparkle is a literary
quality, or a ray from Howe’s character, or an illusion of my own. But
certainly, something remarkable appears in the step and carriage of the
young man. He does not stay in the book, he walks into the room where
you are reading. The substance and setting of these Greek journals at
times remind us of George Borrow’s books; but Howe’s writing is done
without literary intention and therefore speaks from a more unusual
depth. No time has been spent over these jottings, the recorder is
hardly more responsible for them than the pen that writes them down.
The scenes have whirled themselves upon the paper. Howe was always
somewhat wanting in the reverence for letters which obtains in Boston.
He regarded himself as inferior in literary attainment to several of
his friends. He had, however, the descriptive power sometimes found
in condottieri. It is the thrilling stuff they deal in that endows
these men with such talent. I cannot forbear transcribing a passage
from a very different style of adventurer, Trelawney. It does not
concern Howe directly; but it may serve as a sample page from the Greek
revolutionary period. The passage is quoted by Sanborn in his Life of
Howe.

“On our way from Argos to Corinth, in 1823, we passed through the
defiles of Dervenakia; our road was a mere mule-path for about two
leagues, winding along in the bed of a brook, flanked by rugged
precipices. In this gorge, and a more rugged path above it, a large
Ottoman force, principally cavalry, had been stopped in the previous
autumn, by barricades of rocks and trees, and slaughtered like droves
of cattle by the wild and exasperated Greeks. It was a perfect picture
of the war, and told its own story; the sagacity of the nimble-footed
Greeks and the hopeless stupidity of the Turkish commanders were
palpable. Detached from the heaps of dead we saw the skeletons of some
bold riders, who had attempted to scale the acclivities, still astride
the skeletons of their horses, and in the rear, as if in the attempt to
back out of the fray, the bleached bones of the negroes’ hands still
holding the hair ropes attached to the skulls of the camels--death,
like sleep, is a strange posture-master. There were grouped in a
narrow space 5,000 or more skeletons of men, horses, camels, and
mules; vultures had eaten their flesh, and the sun had bleached their
bones.”... Is not this picture worthy of the prophet Ezekiel? It was
among such scenes as this that the Greek Revolution went forward.

In 1827-8 Dr. Howe concluded that the best service he could render
the Greeks was to go to America and procure help. He came to America,
and went about holding public meetings and pleading for the starving
Greeks. Great enthusiasm was excited, and money, food, and clothing
was generously contributed. Howe took charge of a vessel laden with
provisions and clothing, and hastening back to Greece, arrived in time
to prevent thousands from starving. “These American contributions,” he
says, “went directly to the people; and their effect was very great,
not only by relieving from hunger and cold, but by inspiring courage
and hope. I made several depots in different places; I freighted small
vessels and ran up the bays with them. The people came trooping from
their hiding places, men, women, children, hungry, cold, ragged and
dirty. They received rations of flour, corn, biscuit, pork, etc., and
were clad in the warm garments made up by American women. It was one of
the happiest sights a man could witness; one of the happiest agencies
he could discharge. They came, sometimes twenty, thirty, forty miles,
on foot, to get rations and clothing. Several vessels followed mine
and distributions were made.

“An immense number of families from Attica, from Psara, and from other
Islands, had taken refuge in Ægina, and there was the most concentrated
suffering. I established a main depot there, and commenced a systematic
distribution of the provisions and clothing. As the Greeks were all
idle, I concluded it was not best to give alms except to the feeble;
but I commenced a public work on which men, women, and children could
be occupied. The harbor of Ægina was not a natural one, but the work of
the old Greeks. The long walls projecting into the sea for breakwaters
were in pretty good condition, but the land side of the harbor was
nearly ruined from being filled up with débris and washings from the
town.

“I got some men who had a little ‘gumption’ and built a coffer-dam
across the inner side of the harbor. Then we bailed out the water,
and, digging down to get a foundation, laid a solid wall, which made
a beautiful and substantial quay, which stands to this day, and is
called the American Molos or Mole. In this work as many as five hundred
people, men, women, and children, ordinarily worked; on some days as
many as seven hundred, I think.”...

Encouraged by the success of his mole, Dr. Howe determined upon a more
ambitious venture.--“I applied to the government, and obtained a large
tract of land upon the Isthmus of Corinth, where I founded a colony
of exiles. We put up cottages, procured seed, cattle, and tools, and
the foundations of a flourishing village were laid. Capo d’Istria had
encouraged me in the plan of the colony, and made some promises of
help. The government granted ten thousand ‘stremmata’ of land to be
free from taxes for five years; but they could not give much practical
help. I was obliged to do everything, and had only the supplies sent
out by the American committees to aid me. The colonists, however,
coöperated, and everything went on finely. We got cattle and tools,
ploughed and prepared the earth, got up a school-house and a church.

“Everything went on finely, and we extended our domain over to the
neighboring port of Cenchraea, where we had cultivated ground and a
harbor. This was perhaps the happiest part of my life. I was alone
among my colonists, who were all Greeks. They knew I wanted to help
them, and they let me have my own way. I had one civilized companion
for awhile, David Urquhart, the eccentric Englishman, afterward M. P.
and pamphleteer. I had to journey much to and from Corinth, Napoli,
etc., always on horseback, or in boat, and often by night. It was
a time and place where law was not; and sometimes we had to defend
ourselves against armed and desperate stragglers from the bands of
soldiers now breaking up. We had many ‘scrimmages,’ and I had several
narrow escapes with life.

“In one affair Urquhart showed extraordinary pluck and courage,
actually disarming and taking prisoner two robbers, and marching
them before him into the village. I labored here day and night, in
season and out, and was governor, clerk, constable, and everything but
_patriarch_; for, though I was young, I took to no maiden, nor
ever thought about womankind but once. The government (or rather, Capo
d’Istria, the president) treated the matter liberally--for a Greek--and
did what he could to help me.”...

In 1844, about seventeen years after the planting of this Corinthian
colony Howe returned to the Isthmus in the course of his wedding
journey. “As he rode through the principal street of the village,” says
Mrs. Howe, “the elder people began to take note of him and to say to
one another ‘This man looks like Howe.’ At length they cried, ‘It must
be Howe himself’! His horse was surrounded and his progress stayed. A
feast was immediately prepared for him in the principal house of the
place, and a throng of friends, old and new, gathered round him, eager
to express their joy in seeing him.”

So let us leave him for one moment, surrounded by the children of
his adoption, submitting to their gratitude as Hercules might have
submitted, if humanity had recognized him on his return to the scene
of an earthly exploit,--let us leave him, I say, thus posed for the
monument that should express his whole life’s work, while we consider
what manner of man he was.

At whatever point you examine him, you find a man of remarkable
energy and benevolence, of a practical turn of mind, devoid of
mysticism or philosophic curiosity, a man to whom the word is a very
plain proposition, whose eyes see what they see with the power of
microscopes, and are blind to all else. Dr. Howe’s work in Greece
gives a specimen, a prophetic summary, of his whole life-work,
that is to say, it was _practical aid to those laboring under
disability_. The devastation of Greece at that time was incredible.
The peasants were living in caves and hiding their food under ground
from the guerillas. Dr. Howe goes with his hands full of supplies and
distributes them, turning the starving wretches into human beings
again, through his methods, and through his power of organization.
One is reminded by turns of Benjamin Franklin and of Prometheus, in
reading of the astute shifts of this benevolent despot, who deals with
men as if they were children, coercing them into thrift and decency. Of
course the circumstances were extraordinary, or Howe’s peculiar genius
could not have showed itself so early. A man of genius he was, but
the limitations of this remarkable man’s mind are as clear cut as his
features, which had the accuracy of bronze.

Within the field of his peculiar activity he is a great genius. Outside
of that field he was not a genius at all--as will appear by his
political course in 1859. His mission was to deal with persons laboring
under a disability, with criminals, paupers, young people--blind or
deaf people, idiots, the maimed in spirit, the defective--the people
who have no chance, no future, no hope. These were the persons to
whom his life was to be devoted: the Greek sufferers were merely the
earliest in the series of persons whom Howe pitied.

He has left behind voluminous papers and reports, and in them lives
his creed. He can hardly open his mouth without saying something
of universal application to all defective persons in all ages.
From the statement of abstract principles to the details of ward
management--whether he is writing advice to an anxious mother or
addressing the legislature--there is no side of the subject on which
he is not great. His attitude toward defectives and his point of view
about them form a splinter of absolute truth; religion, morality,
practical wisdom, and the divinest longings of the spirit are all
satisfied by it. The sight of any of these persons aroused in him such
a passion of benevolence, such a whirlwind of pity, that he could do
whatever was necessary. He lifted them in his arms and flew away with
them like an angel. It made no difference that the cause was hopeless.
He would labor a year to improve the articulation of an adult idiot,
and rejoice as much over a gain of two vowels as if he had given a new
art to mankind.

As has been seen, Howe was originally attracted to the Greek cause
through its romantic and historic appeal; but the poetry and the
patriotism of the Greek Revolution were, for him, soon merged in
philanthropy. His work in the Greek cause and the books and papers
and speeches he had written had brought him into the world’s eye. He
returned to America a famous man. He was still under thirty years of
age, an unambitious man, unaware that he was in any way remarkable.
He did not take up the cause of the blind because he felt within him
a deep desire, a God-given calling to help the blind, but because the
cause of the blind was brought to his notice by Dr. John D. Fisher,
and other gentlemen in Boston, who had been studying the methods of
the Abbé Haüy in Paris, and who contemplated founding a school for the
blind in Boston. It was a happy hour in which they met Howe; for he was
a man whose response to any call for help was automatic.

He was one of those singular men in whom we can trace no course of
development. Such as they are in early manhood, so they remain. It is
interesting to bring together two passages, one from the beginning and
the other from the latter half of his life, to show the identity of
their intellectual content.

The following is from Howe’s First Report of the Blind Asylum:
“Blindness has been in all ages one of those instruments by which a
mysterious Providence has chosen to afflict man; or rather it has not
seen fit to extend the blessing of sight to every member of the human
family. In every country there exists a large number of human beings,
who are prevented by want of sight from engaging with advantage in the
pursuits of life, and who are thrown upon the charity of their more
favored fellows.”...

The following is from the monumental justification of his ideas as
put forth in the Second Report to the Massachusetts State Board of
Charities in 1866:--

“Finally, they (the board) have dwelt upon the importance of knowing
and obeying all the natural laws, because they are ordained by our
beneficent God and Father, to bind together by bonds of mutual interest
and affection all the children of His great human family; and to
prepare them here, for his good will and pleasure hereafter.”

The thought in each of these passages is the same. Blindness,
deficiency, in fact evil, are to be accepted as part of the divine
will. This thought, taken in conjunction with the conception of the
unity of human nature, form the whole of Howe’s philosophy. The
conventional language of piety in which Howe generally expresses
himself, may perhaps conceal from some persons the first-hand power of
his nature. He seems only to be saying what everybody knows; but the
difference is that Howe sees the truth as a fact. It is not so much a
philosophic reality or abstraction as a first-hand visual perception,
always new, always reliable.

The different specific reforms with which Howe is to be credited are
neither deductions from theory, nor the summary of experiments made
by him; but simply things seen in themselves to be true. They can all
of them be grouped under almost any one of Christ’s sayings. I shall
return to this subject after speaking of Laura Bridgman, who has been
waiting too long.

The early history of the Boston Blind Asylum is like a great mediæval
romance--voluminous, glowing, many-sided. That history is recorded
in multitudinous documents and papers, letters, arguments, reports,
anecdotes--the whole mass of them being illumined by the central
figure of Howe who looms through the story like Launcelot or Parsifal.
Overpowering indeed is this literature, and it ought not to be
condensed. One should wander, and explore and browse in it. If I make a
few extracts from the story, it is not as a summary, but rather as an
advertisement. There are certain events that you cannot summarize, but
only introduce. The texture of them is greater than any condensation
can make it.

The New England Institution for the Education of the Blind began its
work in 1832. Howe, having neither house nor fortune of his own,
received a few blind children at his father’s house in Boston. Within a
very few years, however, the school was properly housed and supported,
and it remained ever a favorite with the public. It was not until 1837
that news was brought to Howe of the existence of Laura Bridgman, a
blind deaf-mute aged seven, then living with her parents on a New
Hampshire farm. He made a journey to New Hampshire to visit her, and
through good fortune was accompanied by Longfellow, Rufus Choate,
George Hilliard, and Dr. Samuel Eliot. The friends waited at Hanover
while Howe visited the Bridgman farmhouse in quest of his prize. “He
won it, and came back to the hotel triumphant,” says Dr. Eliot, “I
perfectly recollect his exultation at having secured her, and the
impression he made on me of chivalric benevolence.”

Laura Bridgman had lost her sight and hearing at the age of two,
through scarlet fever; and when she reached the school in Boston
was blind, deaf, dumb, and “without that distinct consciousness of
individual existence which is developed by the exercise of the senses.”
She was, nevertheless, a very remarkable being, sensitive, passionate,
and highly organized. Upon being transferred to the school “she seemed
quite bewildered at first, but soon grew contented, and began to
explore her new dwelling. Her little hands were continually stretched
out, and her tiny fingers in constant motion, like the feelers of an
insect. She was left for several days to form acquaintance with the
little blind girls, and to become familiar with her new home.”

Within two months Howe was able to write to Laura’s father--“I have
succeeded in making her understand several words in raised print, and I
am very sanguine in the hope that she will learn to read, and perhaps
to express her wants in writing.”... Such were the beginnings of that
remarkable intimacy which was fraught with so much consequence to the
world.

The process by which Laura Bridgman was taught the alphabet was in
principle the same as that now often employed in teaching ordinary
children; that is to say, certain words are first given to the child
as unities, and the child is led to discover the letters by thereafter
himself dissolving the words into component letters. “I had to trust,
however, to some chance effort of mine, causing her to perceive the
analogy between the signs which I gave her, and the things for which
they stood.... The first experiments were made by pasting upon several
common articles, such as keys, spoons, knives, and the like, little
paper labels on which the name of the article had been printed in
raised letters. The child sat down with her teachers and was easily led
to feel these labels, and examine them curiously. So keen was the sense
of touch in her tiny fingers that she immediately perceived that the
crooked lines in the word KEY, differed as much in form from
the crooked lines in the word SPOON as one article differed
from the other.

“Next, similar labels, on detached pieces of paper, were put into her
hands, and now she observed that the raised letters on these labels
resembled those pasted upon the articles....

“The next step was to give a knowledge of the component parts of the
complex sign, BOOK, for instance. This was done by cutting up
the labels into four parts, each part having one letter upon it. These
were first arranged in order, b-o-o-k, until she had learned it, then
mingled up together, then rearranged, she feeling her teacher’s hand
all the time, and eager to begin and try to solve a new step in this
strange puzzle.

“Slowly and patiently, day after day, and week after week, exercises
like these went on, as much time being spent at them as the child could
give without fatigue. Hitherto there had been nothing very encouraging;
not much more success than in teaching a very intelligent dog a variety
of tricks. But we were approaching the moment when the thought would
flash upon her that all these were efforts to establish a means of
communication between her thoughts and ours.”...

“The poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated
everything her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon her,
her intellect began to work, she perceived that here was a way by which
she could herself make up a sign of anything that was in her own mind,
and show it to another mind, and at once her countenance lighted up
with a human expression; it was no longer a dog or parrot--it was an
immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other
spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this truth dawned upon
her mind, and spread its light to her countenance; I saw that the great
obstacle was overcome, and that henceforward nothing but patience and
persevering, plain and straightforward efforts were to be used.”...

The visit of Laura’s mother to her daughter at the Institution must
be chronicled, not only because of the singular beauty of Dr. Howe’s
description; but because it shows an attitude on his part of welcome
toward the parent, reverence for home influence, which is seldom found
in managers of institutions. The school-teacher and the director in a
reformatory generally regard the parent as their enemy. But with Howe
it was different. He seems really to have been able to shed a domestic
atmosphere through his Institution. He merged his own family life into
the Institution’s life, and yet enriched his own hearth thereby. This
is an accomplishment which can neither be understood nor imitated. It
was a gift.

“During this year and six months after she had left home, her mother
came to visit her, and the scene of their meeting was an interesting
one. The mother stood some time gazing with overflowing eyes upon her
unfortunate child, who, all unconscious of her presence, was playing
about the room. Presently Laura ran against her, and at once began
feeling of her hands, examining her dress, and trying to find out if
she knew her; but not succeeding in this, she turned away as from a
stranger, and the poor woman could not conceal the pang she felt at
finding that her beloved child did not know her.

“She then gave Laura a string of beads which she used to wear at home,
which were recognized by the child at once, who, with much joy, put
them around her neck, and sought me eagerly to say she understood the
string was from home. The mother tried to caress her, but poor Laura
repelled her, preferring to be with her acquaintances.”...

“The distress of the mother was now painful to behold; for, although
she had feared that she should not be recognized, the painful reality
of being treated with cold indifference by a darling child was too much
for woman’s nature to bear.

“After a while, on the mother taking hold of her again, a vague idea
seemed to flit across Laura’s mind that this could not be a stranger;
she therefore felt of her hands very eagerly, while her countenance
assumed an expression of intense interest. She became very pale, and
then suddenly red; hope seemed struggling with doubt and anxiety, and
never were contending emotions more strongly painted upon the human
face. At this moment of painful uncertainty, the mother drew her close
to her side and kissed her fondly; when at once the truth flashed upon
the child, and all mistrust and anxiety disappeared from her face, as
with an expression of exceeding joy she eagerly nestled to the bosom of
her parent, and yielded herself to her fond embraces.”...

“I had watched the whole scene with intense interest, being desirous
of learning from it all I could of the workings of her mind; but I
now left them to indulge unobserved those delicious feelings which
those who have known a mother’s love may conceive, but which cannot be
expressed.”...

Laura’s progress was so rapid that she became a world wonder and took
Howe in her wake into a new province of fame. It must not be thought
that Laura Bridgman was Howe’s only preoccupation. In 1841 Laura formed
a strong friendship with Oliver Caswell, a blind deaf-mute of eight who
was brought to the Asylum.

“Another important friendship of her childhood,” says Mrs. Richards,
“was that which she formed with Oliver Caswell, a blind deaf-mute boy
whom my father discovered and brought to the Institution in 1841. He
was then eight years old, a comely and healthy child, blind and deaf
from early infancy, and had received no special instruction.”...
“Laura herself,” says Dr. Howe, “took great interest and pleasure in
assisting those who undertook the tedious task of instructing him. She
loved to take his brawny hand with her slender fingers, and show him
how to shape the mysterious signs which were to become to him keys of
knowledge and methods of expressing his wants, his feelings, and his
thoughts.... Patiently, trustingly, without knowing why or wherefore,
he willingly submitted to the strange process. Curiosity, sometimes
amounting to wonder, was depicted on his countenance, over which
smiles would spread ever and anon; and he would laugh heartily as he
comprehended some new fact, or got hold of a new idea.

“No scene in a long life has left more vivid and pleasant impressions
upon my mind than did that of these two young children of nature
helping each other to work their way through the thick wall which cut
them off from intelligible and sympathetic relations with all their
fellow-creatures. They must have felt as if immured in a dark and
silent cell, through chinks in the wall of which they got a few vague
and incomprehensible signs of the existence of persons like themselves
in form and nature. Would that the picture could be drawn vividly
enough to impress the minds of others as strongly and pleasantly as
it did my own! I seem now to see the two, sitting side by side at
a school desk, with a piece of pasteboard, embossed with tangible
signs representing letters, before them and under their hands. I see
Laura grasping one of Oliver’s stout hands with her long graceful
fingers, and guiding his forefinger along the outline while, with her
other hand, she feels the changes in the features of his face, to
find whether, by any motion of the lips or expanding smile, he shows
any sign of understanding the lesson: while her own handsome and
expressive face is turned eagerly toward his, every feature of her
countenance absolutely radiant with intense emotions, among which
curiosity and hope shine most brightly. Oliver, with his head thrown a
little back, shows curiosity amounting to wonder; and his parted lips
and relaxing facial muscles express keen pleasure, until they beam with
that fun and drollery which always characterize him.”...

It is Howe, the former buccaneer, who thus sits watching the children.
He is now forty years of age and has still thirty-five years of
incessant activity ahead of him--activity in every field of practical
education.

The brilliancy of the Laura Bridgman episode has a little dimmed the
rest of his work. The supposed philosophical importance of the thing,
and its picturesque, pathetic aspect made it almost like the discovery
of America or communication with Mars. We can to-day hardly remember
or imagine what emotion the teacher of Laura Bridgman called forth all
over the world. Looked at in retrospect, this brilliant achievement is
enmeshed in a whole life-work of activity for the dependent classes,
much of which is almost as remarkable as the Bridgman episode.
Prison reform, school reform, care of the insane, care of paupers,
reformatories for the young, trade schools for the blind, every
possible effort of a man to help his less fortunate brother--these are
the subjects to which Dr. Howe devoted his life.

The episodes of conflict, of legislative struggle, of school-board
clash and educational campaign of which that life was made up, all have
the enduring interest that clings to scenes which are lighted up by a
true light--things which have been seen in their passage by the eye
of genius. Not by their own virtue, but by this vision do they live.
Howe’s central thesis is thus given in his own words by Sanborn, being
quoted from a report of the Massachusetts State Board of Charities,
1866:--

“The attempt to reduce to its lowest point the number of the dependent,
vicious and criminal classes, and tenderly provide for those who cannot
be lifted out of them, is surely worthy the best effort of a Christian
people. But that the work may be well done, it must be by the people
themselves, directly, and in the spirit of Him who taught that the
poor ye shall always have with you--that is, near you--in your heart
and affections, within your sight and knowledge; and not thrust far
away from you, and always shut up alone by themselves in almshouses,
or reformatories, that they may be kept at the cheapest rate by such a
cold abstraction as a state government. The people cannot be absolved
from these duties of charity which require knowledge of and sympathy
with sufferers; and they should never needlessly delegate the power of
doing good. There can be no vicarious virtue; and true charity is not
done by deputy.”...

Almost any passage quoted from Howe’s reports has the same quality.
It is written by a Christian missionary, who is also, within his own
field, a scientific man. He is exuberant, he is triumphant, he is
inexhaustible. No matter how familiar be the theme, it is always new
in his hands. Turn almost at random to his letters or papers; “Do not
prevent your blind child from developing, as he grows up, courage,
self-reliance, generosity, and manliness of character, by excessive
indulgence, by sparing him thought and anxiety and hard work, and by
giving him undeserved preference over others. If he lounges in a
rocking-chair or on the sofa cushions, don’t pat him and say, ‘the poor
dear child is tired’; but rout him out and up just as you would do with
any boy who was contracting lazy habits.”...

The following is from a report upon some cases of arrested development:
“It is true that these children and youth speak and read but little,
and that little very imperfectly compared with others of their age; but
if one brings the case home, and supposes these to be his own children,
it will not seem a small matter that a daughter, who, it was thought,
would never know a letter, can now read a simple story, and a son,
who could not say ‘father,’ can now distinctly repeat a prayer to his
Father in heaven.”... Or take some words from a private letter:--

“The great lesson--the hard lesson--your son has first to learn
is--_to be blind_; to live in the world without light; to look
upon what of existence is yet vouchsafed him as a blessing and a trust,
and to resolve to spend it gratefully, cheerfully, and conscientiously,
in the service of his Maker and for the happiness of those about him.”

It was a matter of accident that the blind should have engrossed
Howe’s attention earlier than the feeble-minded, for whom he began his
labors in 1846, and for whom a State school was, through his efforts,
established in Massachusetts, in 1852. This institution was quite
as exclusively Howe’s creation as was the School for the Blind, and
over it also he extended his domestic influence. “He passed like light
through the rooms. Charley Smith, gentlest of fifty-year-old children,
would leave his wooden horse to run to him. They loved him, the
children whom he had rescued from worse than death. When he died they
grieved for him after their fashion, and among all the tributes to his
memory, none was more touching than theirs: ‘He will take care of the
blind in heaven. Won’t he take care of us too?’”

It is not because of any one thing that he has done or said that
Howe is important. It is because he was by nature endowed with an
unconscious, spontaneous vision of truth in regard to the defective
classes. When dealing with them, he sees society as a whole and these
classes as parts of it. He saw that the whole of society must be used
in order to work out this problem. The state and the individual,
the influence of Christ and the value of money; in fact all social
factors are, in Howe’s mind, viewed as elements in that solid mesh
and transparent unity of suffering force--humanity. When he deals
with an institution, or a theory of criminal reform, he deals with
it as an agent of the invisible. It is to him no more than a device
or a symbol. Now, when we remember that he was, above all things,
a practical man, a man of means to ends, a man of experience and of
the counting house, we are prepared to realize the magnitude of his
intellect.

It was, however, only when Howe was thinking and scheming over the fate
of the dependent classes that his mind worked in this transcendent
way. In other matters he was an ordinary man, a man of headaches and
irritability, a man of doubts and errors.

I know of nothing that so marks the inscrutability of human nature as
does the history of Dr. Howe’s relation to the slavery question. That
question had been in active eruption ever since 1830. Dr. Howe, one of
the most sensitive philanthropists known to history, lived in daily
contact with the question for many years before he became effectively
interested. Here was a dependent class indeed--the slaves: here was
a question of human suffering compared to which the sorrows of his
deaf-mutes and half idiots were trifling accidents, the inevitable
percentage of pain that fringes all civilization. Compared to the
horrors of slavery the evils which excited Dr. Howe’s compassion were
imperceptible. Hardly ever have more telling exhibitions been unrolled
before benevolent people than those which were within the daily
repertory of the abolitionists, after Garrison had begun his work.
Nevertheless, for Dr. Howe the hour had not yet struck.

At last he became drawn into the slavery question and, in fact, almost
killed himself over it. There remains a great difference, however,
between his slavery work and his other work. When it comes to slavery,
Dr. Howe’s devotion is the same, his labors are the same; but his
genius is not the same. It was not given to any man to understand the
slavery question in the way that Howe understood the cause of the blind
or the idiotic. Indeed, slavery was not a question, but a condition,
an atmosphere, a thing so close and clinging, so inherent and ingrown
that, like the shirt of Nessus, it brought the flesh with it when it
was removed. Poor or great, sinner or saint, every man stood on an
equality before the moral problems of slavery, and underwent either
conversion or corruption when the wave smote him.

It was not until 1846 that Dr. Howe’s conversion took place. For
seventeen years the abolitionists had been dancing like dervishes
before him; and as late as February 3, 1846, he wrote a note declining
Dr. H. I. Bowditch’s invitation to an anti-slavery meeting, in such
terms of polite deprecation as might have been employed by George
Ticknor:--“My duties at home will prevent my joining you at eleven
o’clock....

“I carefully cultivate my few social relations with slave-holders,
because I find I can do so, and yet say to them _undisguisedly_
that slavery is the great _mistake_, as well as the great
_sin_ of the age. Now, do what they may, they cannot prevent such
words from a friend making some impression upon their hearts, which are
as hard as millstones to denunciations from an enemy. It is not enmity
and force, but love and reason, that are to be used in the coming
strife.”...

Then comes a sudden illumination, a break, a discovery, a cry of
anguish, and the curse of slavery has leaped like a wild-cat upon the
conscience of Dr. Howe. He runs up and down with pain:--“Indeed, I for
one can say that I would rather be in the place of the victim whom they
are at this moment sending away into bondage--I would rather be in his
place than in theirs! Ay! through the rest of my earthly life I would
rather be a driven slave upon a Louisiana plantation than roll in their
wealth and bear the burden of their guilt.”... “I feel as though I
had swallowed a pepper corn, when I think that no one _dares_ to
be made a martyr of in the cause of humanity.”... “Government must be
regarded as a divine institution! Ay! and so must right and justice be
regarded as divine institutions; older, more sacred, more imperative;
and when they clash, let the first be as the potsherd against the
granite.”... “O! for a man among our leaders who fears neither God, man
nor devil, but loves and trusts the first so much as to fear nothing
but what casts a veil over the face of truth. We must have done with
expediency; we must cease to look into history, into precedents, into
books for rules of action, and look only into the honest and high
purposes of our own hearts; that is, when we are sure we have cast out
the evil passions from them.”... “Would to God I could begin my life
again or even begin a new one from this moment, and go upon the ground
that no fault or error or shortcoming should ever be covered up from my
own eyes or those of others.”...

His words, just quoted, are the words of a prophet; and yet he
was destined, in practical politics, to become an adherent of
half-measures, and a make-weight for self-seekers. It was as the
result of one of the fugitive slave cases and in the year 1846 that
Dr. Howe became immersed in the anti-slavery cause. He helped to
edit the “Commonwealth,” the organ of the Conscience Whigs: he ran
for office, and he became the head of a vigilance committee, whose
activity continued down to the outbreak of the war. Now, as everyone
knows, vigilance committees are called into being in cases when law
has broken down. The object of such committees is to do things which
are necessary, but illegal; hence their doings are secret. It was
one of the strange features of the life of that period that the most
beautiful natures of the age, the most tender, the most unselfish, the
most romantic, felt called upon to do violent, lawless and bloody work.
To threaten bad men with condign punishment, to organize the rescue of
prisoners, to condone theft, perjury and manslaughter when committed by
their own partisans--such were the duties of a vigilance committee.

The beginning of this vigilance work was the underground railroad which
existed all over the North, and even to some extent in the border
slave states. To help fugitive slaves on their way to freedom became a
passionate occupation of young and old, however, only after Garrison’s
doctrines had given a religious sanction to the practice. Social
conditions in America, at this time, led to a confusion of moral ideas
and sometimes to a perversion of the moral sense. We are familiar with
the perplexities that distressed tender-hearted people in the border
free states. In the border slave states moral questions were equally
complex. There is a page or two in Huckleberry Finn in which Mark Twain
has depicted the feelings of a boy, living in the border slave state
Missouri, as to the ethics of helping a runaway slave to escape. Surely
the passage is among the greatest pages which that great author ever
penned....

I says; “All right; but wait a minute. There’s one more thing--a thing
that nobody don’t know but me. And that is, there’s a nigger here that
I’m trying to steal out of slavery, and his name is Jim--old Miss
Watson’s Jim.”

He says: “What! Why Jim is--” He stopped and went to studying.

I says: “I know what you’ll say. You’ll say its dirty, low-down
business; but what if it is? _I’m_ low down; and I’m going to
steal him and I want you to keep mum and not let on. Will you?”

His eye lit up, and he says: “I’ll _help_ you steal him!”

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most
astonishing speech I ever heard--and I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell
considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer
a _nigger stealer_!...

Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in
earnest, and was actually going to help steal that nigger out of
slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy
that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose,
and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not
leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant, and not mean, but kind;
and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling,
than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his
family a shame, before everybody. I _couldn’t_ understand it no
way at all. It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell
him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing right
where he was and save himself. And I _did_ start to tell him;
but he shut me up and says: “Don’t you reckon I know what I’m about?”
“Yes.” “Didn’t I say I’d steal him?” “Yes.” “Well, then.” That’s all he
said and that’s all I said....

That the angel-minded Dr. Howe should have headed a vigilance committee
was no more extraordinary than many other strange and terrible things
in that epoch. Dr. Howe was perhaps by nature and early experience
fitted to head such a committee; but nothing could be farther removed
from such work than the twenty years of peaceful work in philanthropy
which had followed his stormy youth; above all, he was no longer young.
At forty-five a man cannot learn a new trade. Howe could not meet
the world on a political basis or express himself through political
agencies--whether through the constitutional vehicles of legislature,
party, and public meeting--or through the improvised vehicles of
vigilance committee and underground railroad. His activity in both of
these fields was splendid, yet lame; it was the work of a man who only
half understood his own function. In his own work, the only realities
for him are metaphysical realities. But in politics, he has the mind of
an ordinary man; his thought creeps from point to point, treats human
institutions with respect, and subordinates itself to the opinions of
other people. It is positively amazing to find Howe, the pioneer, the
fire-brand--or rather the torch-bearer--in one department of thought,
becoming a mere linkboy in another and nearly allied department.

Howe’s incapacity for leadership in politics was first shown during the
Freesoil movement. The “Coalition” which the Freesoilers made with the
Democrats in Massachusetts, soon after Webster’s defection in 1850,
was one of those political unions which are nowadays called “deals.”
Persons of conflicting principles join together in order to defeat a
common opponent, and, of course, to divide the offices. Some people
object to such deals on the ground that there is always an element
of betrayal, a lie, a debauchery of conscience somewhere and somehow
involved in them.

The coalition which Dr. Howe’s associates entered into was very
famous at the time and thereafter. I will not attempt to define its
immorality; but I will only say that it was, as Richard H. Dana Jr.
notes in his diary, “an error in moral science.” Dr. Howe did not, in
political matters, understand his own nature sufficiently to keep clear
of this coalition. He plunged into it. He was never happy thereafter.
It violated his conscience and plagued him for years. He could never
forgive the leaders of the Freesoil party, nor forget the treason. He
writes to Sumner in 1852: “I have always had an instinct in me which
I have never been able to body forth clearly--which tells me that all
this manœuvring and political expediency is all wrong, and that each
man should go for the right regardless of others.”

And again in 1853: “Now every element in my nature rises up indignantly
at the thought of our principles being bartered for considerations of
a personal and selfish nature; and all my feelings bid me do what my
reason forbids--that is, make open war, cause a clean split, appeal to
the Conscience Whigs who formed the nucleus of our party, and march out
of the ranks with a banner of our own.” He makes moan throughout six
years over this coalition. As late as 1857 he still grinds his teeth.
“Not even Sumner’s election was worth the price paid by the coalition.”

This is all admirable; but it is not enough. Had Howe understood reform
politics as he understood philanthropy, had he had an early training
in reform politics, he would have taken a sledge-hammer and battered
the coalition in public. If the matter had occurred in philanthropy,
Howe would have cleared the air. If, for instance, Dr. Howe had
returned from Europe and found Charles Sumner giving Laura Bridgman
dogmatic religious instruction, he would have stopped it; yes, even
if he had been obliged to placard the town against the Sumner. But in
politics he was helpless. As to the Whigs, he says: “I have done what I
could, for where else can I go? Under what organization can I fight in
this terrible emergency?”

Alas, there is no banner for a man like Howe to fight under. He must
weave his own banner. For his own philanthropic work, Dr. Howe had done
this; but he could not do it for politics. The anti-slavery problems
came to him on top of his multitudinous activities. He was already
superhumanly active, but he was a man incapable of refusing work which
was offered to him. He took on the abolition duties in addition to
his regular work. His health broke down almost immediately; but there
was no leisure for him to attend to his health. His solution of all
problems was by work, work, work. He was not, it must be remembered,
of a thoughtful nature. His thinking was usually done for him by the
energy of his temperament, which handed him a list of agenda each
morning and at night sent him to the slumbers of fatigue. Thus there
was no very distinct philosophy underlying his course of action in
regard to slavery--no historic point of view, or reasoned theory, no
illumination.

It is very terrible to see Howe making journeys to Kansas at a time
when he should have been in bed with a sick-nurse beside him. Pegasus
at the plow is good; but this was not exactly the right plow for Howe.
The sight is a sublime one, all the same. The old buccaneer retains
an instinctive belief in force. “Force is not yet eliminated from the
means employed by God, bloodshed is necessary, bloodshed will come. But
when, but how?--Under what circumstances may we resort to it?” This
is the burden of many letters. In the meantime he and his vigilance
committee were getting into deeper water all the time with the fugitive
slave law, and with the still fiercer Kansas-Nebraska problems, until
finally matters were brought to a crisis by John Brown’s raid, of which
I must say a few words here.

It is wrong to compare John Brown with Joan of Arc, as is so often
done. John Brown’s name is stained with massacre. He is a spirit of
a far lower heaven than Joan of Arc. And yet he is to be classified
under Joan of Arc; because he is an example of the symbolism inherent
in human nature and in human society. Everyone understands both Joan
of Arc and John Brown, but nobody can explain them. It takes an epoch,
it takes the whole of a society, it takes a national and religious
birthpang to produce either Joan of Arc or John Brown. Everyone living
at the time takes some part in the episode; and thereafter, the story
remains as a symbol, an epitome of the national and religious idea,
which was born through the crisis. John Brown and his raid are an
epitome, a popular summary of the history of the United States between
the Missouri Compromise and the Gettysburg celebration. Not a child
has been born in the country since his death to whom John Brown does
not symbolize the thing that happened to the heart and brain of the
American people between 1820 and 1865. He is as big as a myth, and the
story of him is an immortal legend--perhaps the only one in our history.

The relation which the anti-slavery people bore to the John Brown
episode is that of a chorus: they hailed the coming of the Lord. It is
also that of a client: they backed him with money and arms. They are
the link between the myth and the fact. They lived inside the swirl
of rhapsody which was bearing Brown across the horizon. The progress
of righteous-minded law-breaking, which began as soon as Garrison
had explained the iniquity of the Federal Constitution, was very
rapid after the passage of the fugitive slave law in 1850. To help
fugitive slaves escape was a good training for those who were to supply
anti-slavery swords and guns to the private war in Kansas. Criticism
stands dumb before this situation: no man can tell what he himself
would have done under the circumstances. The anti-slavery scholars and
saints regarded themselves as the representatives of law and order in
fomenting this carnage; and perhaps they were.

But the mind of John Brown took one more stride, and imagined a holy
war to be begun through a slave insurrection. Nobody could have stopped
Brown: he was wound up: he was going to do the thing. He naturally
came to his Eastern partisans for support, and of course obtained a
different degree of support from each individual to whom his horrifying
scheme was disclosed. The people who would listen sifted themselves
down by natural law to half a dozen, and among this half-dozen was
Dr. Howe. Brown moved about under assumed names, and his accomplices
corresponded in cryptic language, raising money and arms. The natural
power and goodness of the man cast a spell over many who met him. It
was more than a spell, it was the presence and shadow of martyrdom.
And it fell upon the imagination of enthusiasts who had spent years
of their lives in romantic, sacrificial law-breaking. More than
this: John Brown was the living embodiment of an idea with which the
anti-slavery mind was always darkly battling--the idea of atonement,
of vicarious suffering. Howe and his associates somehow felt that they
would be untrue to themselves--false to God--if they did not help John
Brown, even if he were going to do something that would not bear the
telling. John Brown thus fulfilled the dreams of the abolitionists; he
was their man. He portended bloodshed--salvation through bloodshed.
It was to come. Brown himself hardly knew his own significance or he
would have demanded personal service, not money, from his patrons.
Suppose John Brown had said to Gerrit Smith, and to Sanborn and Howe
and Higginson and Stearns: “I do not want your money, but come with me.
And if you will not come now, yet next year you will come--and the year
after--you, and your sons by the thousand. You will follow me and you
will not return, as I shall not return.”

Brown did not say this, but the truth of it was in the sky already,
and when the raid occurred at Harper’s Ferry men shuddered not only
with horror, but with awe. The raid took place. It took place, not in
Kansas, a long way off, but within a few miles of Washington. Innocent
men were killed. No one could tell whether a slave insurrection was to
follow. A wave of panic swept across the South, and of something not
unlike panic across the North. The keynote was struck. There was no
doubt about that, anywhere. The conspirators, that is to say Brown’s
secret committee, fled to Canada, with the exception of Gerrit Smith
who went into an asylum--and of Higginson who went about his business
as usual. They burnt their papers and look legal advice as to the
law concerning conspiracy and armed rebellion. Dr. Howe, under the
belief that his doing so would somehow shield Brown, published a card
disclaiming knowledge and complicity in the raid.

It is interesting to note the various reasons which moved the
conspirators to flight, at least to contrast the reasons which they
afterward gave for their several sudden disappearances. Sanborn ran
away because he feared that if the conspirators were arrested, their
personal insignificance might damage the cause. It seemed to him “very
important that the really small extent of any movement should be
concealed and its reach and character exaggerated.” But Howe published
his disclaimer for the very opposite reason. He wished that the
smallness of extent and reach of the movement should be thoroughly well
exposed to the public. This, he thought, would “rather help Brown than
otherwise, because if he were shown to be an isolated individual acting
for himself and not the agent of others, the affair would be less
formidable and the desire for vengeance less strong.” Perhaps anyone
implicated in a terrible crime is apt to discover some reason why his
own temporary disappearance will serve the cause of righteousness.
At any rate, it is too much to expect the humor of the situation to
appear very strongly in the correspondence of the secret committee.
Dr. Howe afterward went to Washington to testify in the investigation
which followed, partly, no doubt, that he might rectify the impression
created by his card, which had led people to believe that he knew less
of Brown’s plans than was the case.

This momentary concern for their own safety a little tarnishes the
heroic glamor that hangs about the conspirators, and which in another
age would have been quickly restored by their execution. But they were
really safe. All that the South had hoped for was to implicate the
leaders of the Republican party in the raid, and in this it failed. The
panic which seized all the conspirators except Higginson was a natural
reaction in men who were dominated by another man’s idea, sustained
above themselves by another man’s will and thought. They believed they
understood; but they did not understand. When the climax came--a climax
proper to that will and thought--they were thrown to the ground. They
forsook him and fled. This does not mean that when their own hour shall
come these same men will not die cheerfully at the stake or on the
cross.

One word must be added as to the effect of casuistry upon the intellect
of those enthusiasts who backed Brown while begging him to be gentle.
Dr. Howe writes to Theodore Parker: “And I sent him a draft of fifty
dollars as an earnest of my confidence in him and faith of his adhesion
to what he so often assured me was his purpose--to avoid bloodshed
and servile insurrection.” Now Brown’s previous history and avowed
intentions made bloodshed an integral part of his scheme; and no one
knew this better than the secret committee. But destiny endows each
man with so much blindness as enables him to fulfil his part in the
drama of history. It was necessary for Dr. Howe to support John Brown.
His nature required it of him. In order to do so, it was necessary
for Howe to undergo a slight mental obfuscation; and lo, how easily
it was accomplished! He gives Brown a pistol and begs him not to use
it; he seriously remonstrates with Brown as to the stealing of horses,
even when done in aiding slaves to escape. This is not humbug but
hallucination.

It should no more be counted against Howe that he could not express
himself through the medium of politics than it is counted against
Goethe that he could not paint. To have mastered one vehicle is enough
for one man in this world. To have seen life from a point of view
which unifies contradictions, merges thought with feeling, identifies
religion and common sense, is enough to give a man a niche in the
temple of humanity--yes, even though this power of vision is accorded
to him only at moments, or when he is dealing with a particular
subject, or when he has a violin or a paint-brush in his hand.

It is the man that makes this unity--this stained-glass window through
which truth shines. The artists have had a monopoly of logic, and are
the only people who get the credit of being expressive. Yet now and
then a philosopher like Kant draws together a lot of old junk, and
thinks over it, and arranges it till it becomes--to anyone who can
follow the reasoning--a sort of cathedral of logic. Or again, a man who
is the very antipodes of Kant--a man of action who arranges nothing,
but whose thought and conduct are arranged for him by nature--becomes
so polarized and at one with himself that he sheds a sort of glow about
him; but whether this glow comes out of his words or from his conduct
and words taken together we hardly know. The vehicle is nothing; the
man is all. Such unitary natures are rare enough; and Howe, within his
own limitations, and while standing over his own tripod with his own
peculiar lyre in his hand, is one of them.

The outbreak of the war put an end to all those conditions which had
been turning human nature inside out during the fifties. It was no
longer necessary for idealism to seek its outlet in crime, nor for
half-good men to be turned into devils because they had not in them the
stuff that makes martyrs. When the war came, the average man found the
sacrifice prepared for him in a form which he could understand. He gave
himself freely. He gave all he had. There followed such an outpouring
of virtue and heroism that the crimes of all humanity might seem to
have been wiped out by it; and at the end of the war the United States
resumed her place among modern nations, and took up the conventional
problems of modern life.

During the war Dr. Howe was a member of the Sanitary Commission; and
during the remainder of his life he continued to be the greatest
authority on everything that concerned organized charity, and probably
the most active individual who had ever taken part in such things in
the United States.

In this sketch there has not been time to touch upon the international
side of Howe’s life; his relation to the liberals and philanthropists
of Europe, from Lafayette to Kossuth. I omit the picturesque episodes
which that relation gave rise to, as, for instance, Howe’s imprisonment
in Prussia in 1832, and his being chosen, at a later date, as the
depository for the stolen crown jewels of Hungary. “When the jewels
were recovered,” writes Mr. W. J. Stillman in his autobiography, “they
were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for which that vicinity was
noted, and then carried to Constantinople, from which point I was to
take charge of them and deliver them in Boston to Dr. S. G. Howe, the
well-known Philhellene.” The jewels were recovered by the Austrian
Government before they could be transferred to America, and this was,
no doubt, a fortunate outcome for all concerned. Dr. Howe’s liberalism
remained at the same temperature throughout his life. It led him in
1867 to revisit Greece for the last time, as a distributor of supplies
to the insurgent Cretans. It led him in 1871 to favor the Annexation of
Santo Domingo to the United States.

Howe died in 1876. The rapid cycle of social revolutions in the United
States which followed the Civil War, heightened the contrast between
the veteran and the new age, and strengthened the romance that had
always hung about him. To have taken part in the Greek Revolution
seemed, in 1870, almost the same thing as to have been present at the
siege of Troy. The mantle of Byron and the Isles of Greece never quite
fell from his shoulders.

Dr. Howe seems to have been one of those nimble, playful, light-footed
natures who are as strong as steel and can be as stern as steel upon
occasion. His physical endurance was so great that it led to his
habitually overtaxing himself. His excitability made him a hard man to
live with; and he was occasionally hasty, harsh, and exacting. This
irritability of Dr. Howe’s is deeply related to his whole mind and
being. He was constitutionally deficient in the power to rest. The
blind headaches which clouded the last third of his life were probably
the convulsions through which outraged nature resumed her functions.
He supposed them to be the residuum of Grecian malaria; but anyone
reading of Howe’s daily life would look for breakdown somewhere. There
is a gleaming elfin precocity about him which the human machine cannot
support forever. He was ever in action: as he so wonderfully says of
himself, “he prayed with his hands and feet.”

Dr. Howe had that kind of modesty which seems to be confined to the
heroes of romantic adventure: rough soldiers have it, and people whose
courage has been put to the proof a thousand times.

“I do assure you, my dear Sumner,” he writes in 1846, “the sort of
vulgar notoriety which follows any movement of this kind is a very
great drawback to the pleasure of making it. To the voice of praise
I am sensible, too sensible I know; but I do detest this newspaper
puffing, and I have been put to the blush very often by it.”

The following is his account of his reception by the peasants on the
Isthmus of Corinth when he was recognized in 1844.

“The whole village gathered about the house, and to make a long story
short, I went away amid demonstrations of affectionate remembrance and
continued attachment, so earnest and so obvious that they made one of
my companions shed tears, though he understood not a word of the spoken
language. But I must not enlarge on this now, for I have no time;
perhaps I ought not to do so even had I ever so much time; but you will
not, I know, suspect me of vanity in making any communications to you.”

Charles Sumner is almost the only man to whom he unbosoms himself
on such subjects: “It is quite too bad to keep people under such a
delusion about me. One gentleman, an F. R. S., writes that he wants to
see me more than any other man in Europe. He has published a little
book, with physiological reflections on privation of senses, which
he dedicates “To Dr. Howe, the ingenious and successful teacher of
Laura Bridgman.” The man looks _up_ to me; yet it is evident,
from reading his books, that he has himself tenfold more talent,
acquirement, and merit than I have or ever shall have.”... To Horace
Mann he writes in 1848, “It is absurd for me to reach up from my
littleness to tender counsel to one so high as you; but my love for you
is as great as though we stood face to face.”

He thus questions Sumner as to whether he himself can learn to be an
editor: “Tell me my best, my almost only friend, is there any reason to
suppose that by any apprenticeship I could, without rashness, enter the
editorial field.” This from a man who had only to touch any cause to
make the world ring with it, is incredible. One cannot hope really to
understand such a character: it reminds one of the meekness of Moses.
There is a rose-leaf girlish quality about this modesty which makes it
one of the most wonderful things in nature. Few of us have ever seen
it; we have only read about it; for people are always writing about it,
and it evokes literature. No sooner does one of these modest people
appear than everyone praises him. I suppose people feel that praise
cannot injure such a nature: there is nothing for praise to stick
to. The bitter lips of malice break into eulogy before this quality,
which shrinks from commendation as most people shrink from censure.
In Dr. Howe’s case this modesty set off not only deeds of physical
prowess, but intellectual accomplishments of a most dazzling kind.
Hence the enormous number of somewhat tedious eulogies upon him. One is
obliged to approach him through a stack of funeral wreaths.

He was totally without personal thought, personal self-consciousness,
and more like a disembodied spirit than a man. This impersonal quality
gave him the power of telling home truths to people without offending
them. To strangers, to acquaintances, to intimate friends, to proud
spoiled egotists, to bad men with whom he is at odds--he can always
tell the exact truth without conveying any personal ill-feeling. He
flashes in through the walls and turrets of Charles Sumner, or of
Theodore Parker, and puts the house in order with lightning strokes of
wit, and with bold home-thrusts of spontaneous ridicule. He touches his
friend’s soul with celestial surgery, then quickly rubs salve upon the
wounds, and is back again at his desk before the patient has discovered
his visitation. To say that he is the warmest nature that ever came
out of New England would not be expressive. He is the warmest Anglo
Saxon of whom I have ever read or heard tell. Constant expressions
of love and affection flow from him, effusive, demonstrative,
emotional. It is not necessary to cite them. Open the book. The German
romanticists of whom Jean Paul Richter is a type come into one’s mind;
but there was a literary tang to their sentiment. I must, however,
quote two passages illustrative of Howe’s ordinary state of mind:--

“My Well-beloved Friend:--

“Your note from New York found me last evening, and gave me a feeling
as near akin to pure joy as I ever expect to feel on earth. Why is it
that we men are so shy about manifesting a natural feeling in a natural
way, and letting down the flood-gates of the eye to the flow of tears?
I feared to go and bid you adieu on Wednesday, lest I should not be
able to conceal my emotion, hide my tears. I succeeded, however; I wept
not until I was alone!”

Dr. Howe’s aged friend, Mr. F. W. Bird, has left an anecdote of their
last meeting which would add a beauty to Homer:

“As I rose to leave, he followed me into the hall, threw his arms
around my neck and with a beautiful smile said: ‘My dear old fellow,
let me kiss you,’ and gave me a warm kiss. Within two days the thick
curtain fell.” At the time of this parting Bird was sixty-six, and Howe
seventy-five.

Is it not evident from all that has gone before that Dr. Howe was a
saint? He constantly suggests one or other of the great saints in the
Roman Calendar. And I will predict that the world has rather begun than
finished with its interest in him. His work in charity will never be
superseded. Succeeding penologists will recur to it to save them from
the science of their times.




JESTERS.


It is right to break up old china because it is ugly; but to
destroy the china because you enjoy the sound of the crash is a
little depraved. Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton, _et id omne
genus_--the race of joyous tomboys who dash things about--have a
great charm always. The bored, cultivated, sedentary people in any old
civilization wake up more cheerfully in the morning when there is one
of these fellows at work. A new thrill comes into the journals which
the literati had grown to hate so heartily. “Ah,” cry the leisure
classes, “what has Tommy got to say this morning, I wonder.”

These two gentlemen, Shaw and Chesterton, are the Max and Moritz of the
present epoch. For this reason I have tried to like them. I have tried
to tolerate them. I have tried to believe that they are serviceable to
mankind from some point of view which is not yet revealed to me. I do
believe this; but I believe it with the head and not with the heart.
The following reflections are, after all, a mere groping toward the
light, and the tapping of the staff of a blind man.

Any one who has ever passed through London must have been struck
with the competition for notice among all classes of people whose
conspicuousness depends upon their personal activity. In England
there are such masses of any one kind of man or woman that the desire
for identification--in itself a noble desire--leads people to resort
to every expedient for attracting notice to themselves. This is the
explanation of the hyphen in names. Edward B. Jones is a name that no
one can remember; but Edward Burne-Jones is easy. In like manner ladies
turn to lion-hunting, not because they love lions but because it gives
them a status. Indeed, England has always been full of sham lions, who
spring into existence to supply the demand created by these ladies. So
of charity; so of culture; so of politics.

Now there are often intellectual men--like Beaconsfield, and Oscar
Wilde, and Whistler--who are unwilling to wait for their talents to
lift them into notice, but who resort to artificial notoriety in order
to expedite matters. They stick a feather in their cap and call it
‘maccaroni’. Their times suggest this course to them, and their times
claim them instantly when they have complied with the suggestion. In
literary England there is such an enormous and immediate acclaim for
any new cleverness, that a poor and talented young man is under strong
temptation to become surprising and brilliant in his writing. If he
will only do this he will find himself petted, fed, and proclaimed
almost at once.

This particular entry into the Temple of Fame, however, exacts a heavy
toll; for a man who has written in order to break the crust of the
public with his pungency, is not allowed ever thereafter to write
without pungency. I believe that the talent of all the men I have named
would have developed more seriously if they had not in early life given
way to the taste of the public for sensation. But they would not wait:
they must sting themselves into notice.

As for Shaw and Chesterton, they seem to have become partners in a sort
of game of buffoonery--for the world will have its jesters. They are
tumblers on a raft, floating down stream, surrounded by a whole Henley
regatta, an armada of applauding multitudes, on barges, wherries, tugs,
and ferry-boats and river-craft innumerable, whose holiday passengers
shout their admiration to the performers on the raft, and egg on the
favorites to superhuman effort. Shaw shows how far he can stick out his
tongue while continuing to stand on one leg. “Bravo! Huzzah!” roars the
audience. “Did you ever see the like? O Jesu, this is excellent sport!
Faith! How he holds his countenance! He doth it as like one of these
harlotry players as ever I see.”

Chesterton thereupon puts his wrists on the carpet and lifts his back
like a cat. “Lord save us! This was Ercles’ vein! He hath simply the
best wit of any handy-craftsman in Athens. You have not a man in all
Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he!”

There is some exaggeration in this picture; but, I think, some truth
also. The loss which Shaw and Chesterton share in common is a loss of
delicacy. They are crude: they are all edge. They are, indeed, a little
vulgar. But this is not the serious objection to them. The serious
objection to Shaw and Chesterton is that they have no intellectual
independence. They are moving with the show. It will pass, and they
with it.




THE COMIC.


I.

In the caverns of our nature lie hid various emotions, like beasts
in a lair. They are shy to the voice of question or of curiosity,
and they slink and crouch all the more, if we try to lure them out
for inspection. But they come gambolling and roaring forth at the
call of ingenuous human utterance. Any utterance that has in it no
afterthought, but is mere speech that has grown out of a need to speak,
lays a spell upon the wild things within us. Before the echo of it
has died away they are rampant in the open, ignorant of how they came
forth. Let no one then wonder at the difficulties that surround all
study of the human emotions,--blushing giants, vanishing Genii that
they are.

It is easy for us to-day to see that comedy is in its nature the same
sort of thing as tragedy. They arise out of the same need, convey the
same truth, depend upon the same talent. The English drama interwove
comedy and tragedy in the same play, and Shakespeare’s greatness in
one is of a piece with his greatness in the other. Indeed there are
scenes in Lear, Shylock, and Henry IV where tragedy and comedy are
overlaid--where the same scene is both tragic and comic and we laugh
and cry at the same time. But for a Greek to have seen this identity
is very remarkable; because Greek tragedy and Greek comedy represented
distinct professions and were totally different in their methods of
appeal. A Greek tragedy was a drama of fate, based on a familiar
bit of religious folk-lore. The plot was known, the interest lay in
the treatment. A Greek comedy, however, was a farrago of licentious
nonsense, developed in the course of a fantastic narrative-play: it was
what we should call a musical extravaganza. Greek comedy is gigantesque
buffoonery, interspersed with lyric and choral passages of divine
beauty--the whole, following a traditional model as to its arrangement.

With this machinery Aristophanes proceeds to shake the stones of the
Greek theatre with inextinguishable laughter. He will do anything to
raise a laugh. He introduces Socrates hung up in a basket and declaring
that he is flying in the air and speculating about the sun. He makes
the god Dionysus--the very god in whose honor the theatre and festival
exist--to leap from the stage in a moment of comic terror, and hide
himself under the long cloak of his own high-priest, whose chair of
state was in the front row of the pit. Is it possible to imagine what
sort of a scene in the theatre this climax must have aroused? There has
been no laughter since Aristophanes. There is something of the same
humor in Rabelais; but Rabelais is a book, and there each man laughs
alone over his book, not in company with his whole city or tribe, as in
the Greek theatre.

Now what is it they are laughing at? It is sallies of wit, personal
hits, local allusions, indecencies, philosophical cracks, everything
from refined satire to the bludgeons of abuse--and the whole thing is
proceeding in an atmosphere of fun, of wild spirits, of irrepressible
devilry. Compared to Aristophanes, Shakespeare is not funny; he lacks
size. He is a great and thoughtful person, of superabundant genius and
charm, who makes Dutch interiors, drenched in light. But Aristophanes
splits the heavens with a jest, and the rays of truth stream down
from inaccessible solitudes of speculation. He has no epigram, no
cleverness, no derivative humor. He is bald foolery. And yet he conveys
mysticism: he conveys divinity. He alone stands still while the whole
empyrean of Greek life circles about him.

From what height of suddenly assumed superiority does the race of birds
commiserate mankind:

  [A]“Come now, ye men, in nature darkling, like to the race of
  leaves, of little might, figures of clay, shadowy feeble tribes,
  wingless creatures of a day, miserable mortals, dream-like men,
  give your attention to us the immortals, the ever-existing, the
  ethereal, the ageless, who meditate eternal counsels, in order
  that when you have heard everything from us accurately about
  sublime things, the nature of birds, and the origin of gods and
  rivers, of Erebus and Chaos, you may henceforth bid Prodicus from
  me go weep, when you know them accurately.”

  [A] Hickie’s translation.

Into what depth of independent thought did the man dream himself, that
such fancies could take hold of him? When Aristophanes has had his
say, there is nothing left over: there is no frame nor shell: there
is no theatre nor world. Everything is exploded and scattered into
sifting, oscillating, shimmering, slowly-sinking fragments of meaning
and allusion. If anyone should think that I am going to analyze the
intellect of Aristophanes, he is in error. I wish only to make a
remark about it; namely, that his power is somehow rooted in personal
detachment, in philosophical independence.

It was the genius of Aristophanes which must have suggested to Plato
the idea which he throws out in the last paragraph of the Symposium.
That great artist, Plato, has left many luminous half-thoughts behind
him. He sets each one in a limbo--in a cocoon of its own light--and
leaves it in careless-careful fashion, as if it were hardly worth
investigation. The rascal! The setting has cost him sleepless nights
and much parchment. He has redrawn and arranged it a hundred times. He
is unable to fathom the idea, and yet it fascinates him. The setting in
which Plato has placed his suggestion about the genius of tragedy and
comedy is so very wonderful--both as a picture and as his apology for
not carrying the idea further--that I must quote it, if only as an act
of piety, and for my own pleasure.

  [B]“Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the
  couch by Socrates, when suddenly a band of revellers entered,
  and spoiled the order of the banquet. Someone who was going out
  having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made
  themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and everyone was
  compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said
  that Eryximachus, Phaedrus and others went away--he himself
  fell asleep, and as the nights were long, took a good rest: he
  was awakened toward daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he
  awoke, the others were either asleep or had gone away; there
  remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were
  drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and
  Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half
  awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the
  chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other
  two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with
  that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an
  artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent,
  being drowsy and not quite following the argument. And first of
  all Aristophanes dropped off; then, when the day was already
  dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose
  to depart, Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At
  the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the
  evening he retired to rest at his own home.”

  [B] Jowett’s translation.

What can Plato have had in mind, that glimmers to us in the dawn as
a sort of dim, divine intimation, and is almost immediately drowned
by daylight and the market place? I suppose that Plato may have had
in mind certain moments in comedy where the self-deluded isolation of
some character is so perfectly given as to be almost sublime, and thus
to suggest tragedy; or Plato may have had the opposite experience,
and may have found himself almost ready to laugh at the fate of Ajax,
whose weaknesses of character work out so inevitably, so logically, so
beautifully in the tragedy of Sophocles. Perhaps the thought passed
through Plato’s mind: “If this were not tragedy, what wonderful comedy
it would be! If only the climax were less painful, if the mad Ajax,
instead of killing himself should merely be driven to eat grass like an
ox for a season, or put on his clothes hind-side-before--in fact, if
Ajax’s faults could only be punished quite mildly in the outcome, here
would be a comedy indeed!”

The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The
foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into tragedy;
and this is the chief difference between the two. We readily understand
the Nemesis of temperament, the fatality of character, when it is
exposed upon a small scale. This is the business of comedy; and we do
not here require the labored artifice of gods, mechanical plot, and
pointed allegory to make us realize the moral.

But in tragedy we have the large scale to deal with. A tragedy is
always the same thing. It is a world of complicated and traditional
stage devices for making us realize the helplessness of mankind
before destiny. We are told from the start to expect the worst: there
is going to be suffering, and the suffering is going to be logical,
inevitable, necessary. There is also an implication to be conveyed that
this suffering is somehow in accord with the moral constitution of the
universe. The aim of the whole thing is to teach us to submit--to fit
us for life.

There is profound truth at the bottom of these ideas; for whether you
accept this truth in the form of the Christian doctrine of humility,
or in the form of the Pagan doctrine of reverence for the gods, there
is no question that a human being who is in the state of mind of Lear
or of Ajax is in a dangerous state. He is going to be punished: he is
going to punish himself. The complexities of human life, however, make
this truth very difficult to convey upon the grand scale. It is, in
daily existence, obscured by other and more obvious truths. In order
to dig it out and present it and make it seem at all probable, every
historical device and trapping and sign-post of suggestion--every
stage tradition must be used. The aim is so exalted and sombre, and
the machinery is so ponderous that laughter is out of the question: it
is forbidden. The magnitude of the issues oppress us; and we are told
that it would be cruel to the hero and to the actor and to the author
for us to laugh. And yet we are always on the verge of laughter, and
any inattention to the rubric may bring on a fit of it. If a windlass
breaks we really laugh harder than the occasion warrants.

In reading the Book of Job, where the remoteness of the scene and
certain absurdities in the plot relieve the strain of tragedy, we laugh
inevitably; and the thing that makes us laugh is the very thing that
ought to fill us with awe--the rigor of the logic.

Thus much for the sunny side of tragedy. But let us recur to the night
side of comedy. Falstaff is a comic figure, is he not? And yet what
thoughtful man is there who has not enough of the Puritan in him to
see the tragedy of such a character as Falstaff? How must Falstaff
have appeared to Bunyan!--every stroke of genius which to us makes
for the comic, adding a phosphor-gleam of hell-fire. And Bunyan is
right: Falstaff is an awful picture; and had Shakespeare punished him
adequately he would appear awful. Let us imagine that Shakespeare had
written a play about the old age of Falstaff, picturing his decay of
intellect, his destitution, his flickering return to humor which is no
longer funny--what could have been more tragic?

       *       *       *       *       *

Was it with such arguments as these that Socrates put Aristophanes
and Agathon to sleep on the famous morning which Plato chronicles? We
cannot tell. Plato has cast the magic of a falling star over the matter
and thus leaves it: his humor, his knack, his destiny compelled him to
treat subjects in this way. Something passes, and after a light has
fallen far off into the sea, we ask “What was it?” Enough for Plato’s
purpose that he has placed Comedy where, perhaps, no philosopher before
or after him ever had the vision to place it--in the heaven of man’s
highest endeavor.


II.

The divine affinities of comedy have thus been established, and we
may make some few stray observations on the nature of the comic, not
hoping to explain laughter, which must remain forever a spontaneous
mystery, but only to point out places where this mystery crosses
the other mysteries and refuses to be merged in them, keeping its
own course and intensifying the darkness of our ignorance by its
corruscations. In the first place the comic is about the most durable
vehicle that truth has ever found. It pretends to deal with momentary
interests in terms of farce and exaggeration; and yet it leaves an
image that strikes deeper and lasts longer than philosophy.

In our search for truth we are continually getting into vehicles that
break down or turn into something else, even during our transit. Let
us take, for example, the case of Plato’s dialogues. How much we have
enjoyed them, how much trusted them! And yet there comes a time when we
feel about Plato’s work that it is almost too well lighted and managed,
too filled with parlor elegance. He seems more interested in the
effects that can be got by manipulating philosophy than in any serious
truth. There is something superficial about the pictures of Greek life
that you get from Plato. The marble is too white, the philosophers
are too considerate of each other’s feelings, Socrates is too clever,
everything is a little arranged. Greek life was not quite like that,
and the way to convince yourself of this is to read Aristophanes.

In Aristophanes you have the convincing hurly-burly, the sweating,
mean, talented, scrambling, laughing life of the Mediterranean--that
same life of which you find records in the recent Cretan discoveries,
dating from 2500 B. C., or which you may observe in the market-places
of Naples to-day. Plato’s dialogues do not give this life. They give a
picture of something that never existed, something that sounds like an
enchanted picture, a picture of life as it ought to be for the leisure
classes, but as it never has been and never can be while the world
lasts, even for them.

The ideas which we carry in our minds criticize each other, despite
all we can do to keep them apart. They attack and mutilate each
other, like the monsters in a drop of muddy water, or the soldiers
of Cadmus when the stone of controversy was thrown among them. It
is as hard to preserve the _entente cordiale_ between hostile
thoughts as between hostile bull-dogs. We have no sooner patted the
head of the courtly and affable Socrates given to us by Plato--the
perfect scholar and sweet gentleman--than the vulgarian Socrates given
to us by Aristophanes--the frowzy all-nighter, the notorious enemy
to bathing--flies at the throat of Plato’s darling and leaves him
rumpled. So far as manners and customs go, nothing can rival good
comic description: it supersedes everything else. You can neither write
nor preach it down, nor put it down by law. Hogarth has depicted the
England of the early Georges in such a way as to convince us. No mortal
vehicle of expression can upset Hogarth.

When we come to pictures of life which belong to a more serious
species--to poetry, to history, to religion--we find the same conflicts
going on in our minds: one source criticizes another. One belief eats
up the next belief as the acid eats the plate. It is not merely the
outside of Socrates that Aristophanes has demolished. He has a little
damaged the philosophy of Socrates. He undermines Greek thought: he
helps and urges us not to take it seriously. He thus becomes an ally of
the whole world of later Christian thought. If I were to go to Athens
to-morrow, the first man I would seek out would be Aristophanes. He is
a modern: he is a man.

We have been speaking of Greek thought and Greek life; yet between
that life and ourselves there have intervened some centuries of
Christianity, including the Middle Ages, during which Jewish influence
pervaded and absorbed other thought. The Hebrew ruled and subdued
in philosophy, poetry, and religion. The Hebrew influence is the
most powerful influence ever let loose upon the world. Every book
written since this Hebrew domination is saturated with Hebrew. It
has thus become impossible to see the classics as they were. Between
them and us in an atmosphere of mordant, powerful, Hebraic thought,
which transmutes and fantastically recolors them. How the classics
would have laughed over our conception of them! Virgil was a witch
during the Middle Ages and now he is an acolyte, a person over whom
the modern sentimental school maunders in tears. The classics would
feel toward our notions of them somewhat as a Parisian feels toward a
French vaudeville after it has been prepared for the American stage.
Christianity is to blame.

I have perhaps spoken as if Christianity has blown over with the
Middle Ages; but it has not. The Middle Ages have blown over; but
Christianity seems, in some ways, never to have been understood before
the nineteenth century. It is upon us, sevenfold strong. Its mysteries
supersede the other mysteries; its rod threatens to eat up the rods
of the other magicians. These tigers of Christian criticism within
us attack the classics. The half-formed objections to Plato which I
have mentioned are seriously reinforced by the Hebrew dispensation,
which somehow reduces the philosophic speculations of Greece to the
status of favors at a cotillion. It is senseless to contrast Christ
with Socrates; it is unfair and even absurd to review Greek life
and thought by the light of Hebrew life and thought. But to do so is
inevitable. We are three parts Hebrew in our nature and we see the
Mediterranean culture with Hebrew eyes. The attempts of such persons
as Swinburne and Pater to writhe themselves free from the Hebrew
domination always betray that profound seriousness which comes from
the Jew. These men make a break for freedom--they will be joyous,
antique, and irresponsible. Alas, they are sadder than the Puritans and
shallower than Columbine.

It has become forever and perpetually impossible for any one to treat
Greek thought on a Greek basis: the basis is gone. As I wrote the
words a page or two back about “Comedy having been placed by Plato in
the heaven of man’s highest endeavor,” I thought to myself, “Perhaps
I ought to say highest _artistic_ endeavor.” There spoke the Jew
monitor which dogs our classical studies, sniffing at them and hinting
that they are trivial. In the eye of that monitor there is no room for
the comic in the whole universe: there is no such thing as the comic.
The comic is something outside of the Jewish dispensation, a kind of
irreducible unreason, a skeptical or satanic element.

One would conclude from their records that the Jews were people who
never laughed except ironically. To be sure, Michal laughed at
David’s dancing, and Sara laughed at the idea of having a child, and
various people in the New Testament laughed others “to scorn.” But
nobody seems to have laughed heartily and innocently. One gets the
impression of a race devoid of humor. This is partly because it is not
the province of religious writings to record humor; but it is mainly
because Jewish thought condemns humor. Wherever humor arises in a
Christian civilization--as in the popular Gothic humor--it is a local
race-element, an unsubdued bit of something foreign to Judah. Where the
Bible triumphs utterly, as in Dante and Calvin, there is no humor.

And yet the comic survives in us. It eludes the criticism of
Christianity as the sunlight eludes the net. Yes, not only our own
laughter survives, but the old classic comedy still seems comic--and
more truly comic than the old lyric poetry seems poetic or the drama
dramatic. Ancient poesy must always be humored and nursed a little; but
when the comic strikes home, it is our own comic; no allowances need be
made for it.

There is a kind of laughter that makes the whole universe throb. It
has in it the immediate flash of the power of God. We can no more
understand it than we can understand other religious truth. It reminds
us that we are not wholly Jew. There is light in the world that does
not come from Israel; nevertheless, that this is a part of the same
light that shines through Israel we surely know.

I have not tried to analyze laughter; but only to show the mystery
that surrounds its origin. Now a certain mystery surrounds all human
expression. The profoundest truths can only be expressed through the
mystery of paradox--as philosophers, poets, prophets, and moralists
have agreed since the dawn of time. This saying sounds hard; but its
meaning is easy. The meaning is that Truth can never be exactly stated;
every statement is a misfit. But truth can be alluded to. A paradox
says frankly, “What I say here is not a statement of the truth, but
is a mere allusion to the truth.” The comic vehicle does the same.
It pretends only to allude to the truth, and by this method makes a
directer appeal to experience than any attempted statement of truth can
make.

There is, no doubt, some reason at the back of this strange fact,
that our most expressive language is a mere series of hints and
gestures--that we can only hope, whether by word or chisel, to give, as
it were, a side reference to truth. To fathom this reason would be to
understand the nature of life and mind.

I have often thought that the fact that life does not originate in
us, but is a thing supplied to us from moment to moment--as the power
of the electric current is supplied to the light--accounts for the
paradoxical nature of our minds and souls. It is a commonplace that
the poet is inspired--that Orpheus was carried away by the god. So
also it is a commonplace that the religious person is absorbed in
the will of God--as St. Paul said, his own strength was due to his
weakness. So also it is a commonplace of modern scientific psychology
that unconsciousness accompanies high intellectual activity. Sir Isaac
Newton solved his problems by the art he had of putting them off his
mind--of committing them to the unconscious.

All these are but different aspects of the same truth, and we must
regard consciousness as resistance to the current of life. If this be
true, it is clear that any wilful attempt to tell the truth must _pro
tanto_ defeat itself, for it is only by the surrender of our will
that truth becomes effective. This idea, being a universal idea, is
illustrated by everything; and the less you try to understand it, the
more fully will you understand it. In fact one great difficulty that a
child or a man has in learning anything, comes from his trying too hard
to understand.

Once imagine that our understanding of a thing comes from our ceasing
to prevent ourselves from understanding it, and we have the problem
in its true form. Accept once for all that all will is illusion, and
that the expressive power is something that acts most fully when
least impeded by will, and there remains no paradox anywhere. The
things we called paradoxes become deductions. Of course St. Paul’s
weakness was the foundation of his strength; of course Orpheus was
irresponsible; of course the maximum of intellectual power will be
the maximum of unimpeded, unconscious activity. And as for our Comic,
of course--whatever laughter may be in itself--laughter will be most
strongly called forth by anything that merely calls and vanishes. Such
things are jokes, burlesques, humor. They state nothing: they assume
inaccuracy: they cry aloud and vanish, leaving the hearer to become
awakened to his own thoughts. They are mere stimuli--mere gesture and
motion, and hence the very truest, very strongest form of human appeal.




THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE.[C]

  [C] This was an address delivered before the graduating class at
      Hobart College in 1900.


If one could stand on the edge of the moon and look down through a
couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be apparent
that everything that happened on the earth was directly dependent on
everything else that happened there. Whether the Italian peasant shall
eat salt with his bread, depends upon Bismarck. Whether the prison
system of Russia shall be improved, depends upon the ministry of Great
Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield is in power, there is no leisure in
Russia for domestic reform. The lash is everywhere lifted in a security
furnished by the concurrence of all the influences upon the globe that
favor coercion. In like manner, the good things that happen are each
the product of all extant conditions. Constitutional government in
England qualifies the whole of western Europe. Our slaves were not set
free without the assistance of every liberal mind in Europe; and the
thoughts which we think in our closet affect the fate of the Boer in
South Africa. That Tolstoy is to-day living unmolested upon his farm
instead of serving in a Siberian mine, that Dreyfus is alive and not
dead, is due directly to the people in this audience and to others like
them scattered over Europe and America.

The effect of enlightenment on tyranny is not merely to make the
tyrant afraid to be cruel, it makes him not want to be cruel. It makes
him see what cruelty is. And reciprocally the effect of cruelty on
enlightenment is to make that enlightenment grow dim. It prevents men
from seeing what cruelty is.

The Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor you of his.
Every ukase he signs makes allowance for you, and, on the other hand,
the whole philosophy of your life is tinged by him. You believe that
the abuses under the Russian government are inscrutably different
from and worse than our own; whereas both sets of atrocities are
identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, in taste and smell
and substance than your prejudice is willing to admit. The existence
of Russia narrows America’s philosophy, and misconduct by a European
power may be seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on
the following day. More Americans have abandoned their faith in free
government since England began to play the tyrant in South Africa than
there were colonists in the country in 1776.

Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, the same language.
The life that has been transplanted to North America during the last
three centuries, is European life. From your position on the moon
you would not be able to understand what the supposed differences
were between European and American things, that the Americans make so
much fuss over. You would say, “I see only one people, splashed over
different continents. The problems they talk about, the houses they
live in, the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their education and
catchwords are identical. They are the children of the Classics, of
Christianity, and of the Revival of Learning. They are homogeneous, and
they are growing more homogeneous.”

The subtle influences that modern nations exert over one another
illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But if we turn to ancient
history we find in its bare outlines staggering proof of the
interdependence of nations. The Greeks were wiped out. They could not
escape their contemporaries any more than we can escape the existence
of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor Assyria Persia, nor
Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, nor Rome the Goths. Life is not
a boarding-school where a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of
the rest. He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much here as we
are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every
Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal--of such is our
civilization.

Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and
political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let
us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest conclusion of
science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every
individual of that population has an influence as certain and far more
discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the
solar system?

A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitution of the United
States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The
deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an
answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a
throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true
when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to
think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter
incessantly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out
of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind.

We have an inherited and stupid notion that the East does not change.
If Japan goes through a transformation scene under our eyes, we still
hold to our prejudice as to the immutability of the Chinese. If our
own people and the European nations seem to be meeting and surging and
reappearing in unaccustomed rôles every ten years, till modern history
looks like a fancy ball, we still go on muttering some old ignorant
shibboleth about East and West, Magna Charta, the Indian Mutiny, and
Mahomet. The chances are that England will be dead-letter, and Russia
progressive before we have done talking. Of a truth, when we consider
the rapidity of visible change and the amplitude of time--for there is
plenty of time--we need not despair of progress.

The true starting-point for the world’s progress will never be reached
by any nation as a whole. It exists and has been reached in the past as
it will in the future by individuals scattered here and there in every
nation. It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing conditions
as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts to their own
kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their own nation. You will think
I have in mind poets and philosophers, for these men take humanity as
their subject, and deal in the general stuff of human nature. But the
narrow spirit in which they often do this cuts down their influence
to parish limits. I mean rather those men who in private life act out
their thoughts and feelings as to the unity of human life; those same
thoughts which the poets and philosophers have expressed in their
plays, their sayings, and their visions. There have always been men
who in their daily life have fulfilled those intimations and instincts
which, if reduced to a statement, receive the names of poetry and
religion. These men are the cart-horses of progress, they devote their
lives to doing things which can only be justified or explained by the
highest philosophy. They proceed as if all men were their brothers.
These practical philanthropists go plodding on through each century
and leave the bones of their character mingled with the soil of their
civilization.

See how large the labors of such men look when seen in historic
perspective. They have changed the world’s public opinion. They have
moulded the world’s institutions into forms expressive of their will. I
ask your attention to one of their achievements. We have one province
of conduct in which the visions of the poets have been reduced to
practice--yes, erected into a department of government--through the
labors of the philanthropists. They have established the hospital and
the reformatory; and these visible bastions of philosophy hold now a
more unchallenged place in our civilization than the Sermon on the
Mount on which they comment.

The truth which the philanthropists of all ages have felt is that
the human family was a unit; and this truth, being as deep as human
nature, can be expressed in every philosophy--even in the inverted
utilitarianism now in vogue. The problem of how to treat insane people
and criminals has been solved to this extent, that everyone agrees that
nothing must be done to them which injures the survivors. That is the
reason we do not kill them. It is unpleasant to have them about, and
this unpleasantness can be cured only by our devotion to them. We must
either help the wretched or we ourselves become degenerate. They have
thus become a positive means of civilizing the modern world; for the
instinct of self-preservation has led men to deal with this problem in
the only practical way.

Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will be cared for. You may lie
awake at night drawing up reasons for doing something different with
this disgusting Chinaman--who, somehow, is in the world and is thrown
into your care, your hospital, your thought--but the machinery of your
own being is so constructed that if you take any other course with
him than that which you take with your own people, your institution
will instantly lose its meaning; you would not have the face to beg
money for its continuance in the following year. The logic of this,
which, if you like, is the logic of self-protection under the illusion
of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bottom of all human
progress. I dislike to express this idea in its meanest form; but I
know there are some professors of political economy here, and I wish
to be understood. The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick.
It is to teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not accorded to
them because they cure the sick, but because they stand for love, and
responsibility.

The appeal of physical suffering makes the strongest attack on our
common humanity. Even zealots and sectaries are touched. The practice
and custom of this kind of mercy have therefore become established,
while other kinds of mercy which require more imagination are still in
their infancy. But at the bottom of every fight for principle you will
find the same sentiment of mercy. If you take a slate and pencil and
follow out the precise reasons and consequences of the thing, you will
always find that a practical and effective love for mankind is working
out a practical self-sacrifice. The average man cannot do the sum,
he does not follow the reasoning, but he knows the answer. The deed
strikes into his soul with a mathematical impact, and he responds like
a tuning-fork when its note is struck.

Everyone knows that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The child takes his
nourishment from the tale of heroism as naturally as he takes milk.
He feels that the deed was done for his sake. He adopts it: it is his
own. The nations have always stolen their myths from one another, and
claimed each other’s heroes. It has required all the world’s heroes
to make the world’s ear sensitive to new statements, illustrations
and applications of the logic of progress. Yet their work has been so
well done that all of us respond to the old truths in however new a
form. Not France alone but all modern society owes a debt of gratitude
to Zola for his rescue of Dreyfus. The whole world would have been
degraded and set back, the whole world made less decent and habitable,
but for those few Frenchmen who took their stand against corruption.

Now the future of civil society upon the earth depends upon the
application to international politics of this familiar idea, which
we see prefigured in our mythology, and monumentalized in our
hospitals--the principle that what is done for one is done for all.
When you say a thing is “right,” you appeal to mankind. What you mean
is that everyone is at stake. Your attack upon wrong amounts to saying
that some one has been left out in the calculation. Both at home and
abroad you are always pleading for mercy, and the plea gains such a
wide response that some tyranny begins to totter, and its engines are
turned upon you to get you to stop. This outcry against you is the
measure of your effectiveness. If you imitate Zola and attack some
nuisance in this town to-morrow, you will bring on every symptom and
have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same,
for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation of the
reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the influences of his
townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip,
the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition.
The public influence is the same, for every citizen of that town can
thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect.
But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, nor to Parisians is
this force confined. It goes out in all directions, continuously. The
man is in communication with the world. This impulse of communication
with all men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice,
cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of the same
non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that stops messages, that
strikes dumb the speaker and deafens the listener. You will find
that it makes no difference whether the non-conductor be a selfish
oligarchy, a military autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of
humanity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only an evil
because it stifles men.

Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to Albany and watch
what it is that comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German
sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a
friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is
your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentlemen
have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire
of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who wish you well.

And what will you get in return? Well, if I must for the benefit of
the economist, charge you with some selfish gain, I will say that you
get the satisfaction of having been heard, and that this is the whole
possible scope of human ambition.

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say
to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say.
If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you.
Refuse to learn anything that you cannot proclaim. Refuse to accept
anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy,
a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech,
no matter what other power you lose. If you can take this course,
and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far
as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded
executioners. As for your own private character it will be preserved by
such a course. Crime you cannot commit, for crime gags you. Collusion
with any abuse gags you. As a practical matter a mere failure to speak
out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and
when the utterance of an uncalled-for suspicion is odious, will often
hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. It will bind and gag
you and lay you dumb and in shackles like the veriest serf in Russia.
I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out
always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but
don’t be gagged.

The choice of Hercules was made when Hercules was a lad. It cannot be
made late in life. It will perhaps come for each one of you within
the next eighteen months. I have seen ten years of young men who rush
out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf
the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They
believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little
eminence from which they can make themselves heard. “In a few years,”
reasons one of them, “I shall have gained a standing, and then I
will use my power for good.” Next year comes and with it a strange
discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has
evaporated; he has nothing to say. The great occasion that was to have
let him loose on society was some little occasion that nobody saw, some
moment in which he decided to obtain a standing. The great battle of a
lifetime has been fought and lost over a silent scruple. But for this,
the man might, within a few years, have spoken to the nation with the
voice of an archangel. What was he waiting for? Did he think that the
laws of nature were to be changed for him? Did he think that a “notice
of trial” would be served on him? Or that some spirit would stand at
his elbow and say, “Now’s your time?” The time of trial is always. Now
is the appointed time. And the compensation for beginning at once is
that your voice carries at once. You do not need a standing. It would
not help you. Within less time than you can see it, you will have
been heard. The air is filled with sounding-boards and the echoes are
flying. It is ten to one that you have but to lift your voice to be
heard in California, and that from where you stand. A bold plunge will
teach you that the visions of the unity of human nature which the poets
have sung, were not the fictions of their imagination, but a record
of what they saw. Deal with the world, and you will discover their
reality. Speak to the world, and you will hear their echo.

Social and business prominence look like advantages, and so they are if
you want money. But if you want moral influence you may bless God you
have not got them. They are the payment with which the world subsidizes
men to keep quiet, and there is no subtilty or cunning by which you
can get them without paying in silence. This is the great law of
humanity, that has existed since history began, and will last while man
lasts--evil, selfishness, and silence are one thing.

The world is learning, largely through American experience that freedom
in the form of government is no guarantee against abuse, tyranny,
cruelty, and greed. The old sufferings, the old passions are in full
blast among us. What, then, are the advantages of self-government? The
chief advantage is that self-government enables a man in his youth,
in his own town, within the radius of his first public interests, to
fight the important battle of his life while his powers are at their
strongest, and the powers of oppression are at their weakest. If a man
acquires the power of speech here, if he says what he means now, if
he makes his point and dominates his surroundings at once, his voice
will, as a matter of fact, be heard instantly in a very wide radius.
And so he walks up into a new sphere and begins to accomplish greater
things. He does this through the very force of his insistence on the
importance of small things. The reason for his graduation is not far
to seek. A man cannot reach the hearts of his townsfolks, without
using the whole apparatus of the world of thought. He cannot tell
or act the truth in his own town without enlisting every power for
truth, and setting in vibration the cords that knit that town into the
world’s history. He is forced to find and strike the same note which
he would use on some great occasion when speaking for all mankind. A
man who has won a town-fight is a veteran, and our country to-day is
full of these young men. To-morrow their force will show in national
politics, and in that moment the fate of the Malay, the food of the
Russian prisoner, the civilization of South Africa, and the future of
Japan will be seen to have been in issue. These world problems are now
being settled in the contest over the town-pump in a western village. I
think it likely that the next thirty years will reveal the recuperative
power of American institutions. One of you young men may easily become
a reform President, and be carried into office and held in office by
the force of that private opinion which is now being sown broadcast
throughout the country by just such men as yourselves. You will concede
the utility of such a President. Yet it would not be the man but the
masses behind him that did his work.

Democracy thus lets character loose upon society and shows us that in
the realm of natural law there is nothing either small or great: and
this is the chief value of democracy. In America the young man meets
the struggle between good and evil in the easiest form in which it was
ever laid before men. The cruelties of interest and of custom have
with us no artificial assistance from caste, creed, race prejudice.
Our frame of government is drawn in close accordance with the laws of
nature. By our documents we are dedicated to mankind; and hence it is
that we can so easily feel the pulse of the world and lay our hand on
the living organism of humanity.




THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE.[D]

  [D] This was an address which I delivered before the International
      Metaphysical League eight or nine years ago.


A dogma is a phrase that condenses much thought. It is a short way of
stating a great truth, and is supposed to recall that truth to the
mind. Like a talisman it is to be repeated. Open sesame--and some great
mystery of life is unlocked.

A dogma is like a key to a map, a thread to a labyrinth. It is all that
some man has brought back from a spiritual exaltation in which he has
had a vision of how the world is made; and he repeats it and teaches
it as a digest of his vision, a short and handy summary and elixir by
which he, and as he thinks anyone else, can go back into his exaltation
and see the truth. To him the words seem universally true--true at
all times and in any aspect. Indeed, all experience, all thought, all
conduct seem to him to be made up of mere illustrations, proofs, and
reminiscences of the dogma.

It is probable that all the dogmas were originally shots at the same
truth, nets cast over the same truth, digests of the same vision.
There is no other way of accounting for their power. If the doctrine of
the Trinity signified no more than what I can see in it, it would never
have been regarded as important. Unless the words “Salvation by Grace”
had at one time stood for the most powerful conviction of the most
holy minds, we should never have heard the phrase. Our nearest way to
come at the meaning of such things is to guess that the dogmas are the
dress our own thought might have worn, had we lived in times when they
arose. We must translate our best selves back into the past in order to
understand the phrases.

Of course, these dogmas, like our own dogmas, are no sooner uttered
than they change. Somebody traduces them, or expounds them, or founds
a sect or a prosecution upon them. Then comes a new vision and a new
digest. And so the controversy goes rolling down through the centuries,
changing its forms but not its substance. And it has rolled down to
us, and we are asking the question, “What is truth?” as eagerly, as
sincerely, and as patiently as we may.

Truth is a state of mind. All of us have known it and have known the
loss of it. We enter it unconsciously; we pass out of it before we are
aware. It comes and goes like a searchlight from an unknown source.
At one moment we see all things clearly, at the next we are fighting
a fog. At one moment we are as weak as rags, at the next we are in
contact with some explaining power that courses through us, making us
feel like electrical conductors, or the agents of universal will. In
the language of Christ these latter feelings are moments of “faith”;
and faith is one of the very few words which he used a great many times
in just the same sense, as a name for a certain kind of experience.
He did not define the word, but he seems to have given it a specific
meaning.

The state of mind in which Christ lived is the truth he taught. How
he reached that state of mind we do not know; how he maintained it,
and what it is, he spent the last two years of his life in expressing.
Whatever he was saying or doing, he was always conveying the same
truth--the whole of it. It was never twice alike and yet it was always
the same; even when he spoke very few words, as to Pilate “Thou sayest
it,” or to Peter “Feed my sheep”; or when he said nothing, but wrote
on the ground. He not only expressed this truth because he could not
help expressing it, but because he wished and strove to express it. His
teaching, his parables, his sayings showed that he spared no pains to
think of illustrations and suggestions; he used every device of speech
to make his thought carry.

Take his directest words: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; “Love
your enemies.” One might call these things descriptions of his own
state of mind. Or take his philosophical remarks. They are not merely
statements as to what truth is; but hints as to how it must be sought,
how the state of mind can be entered into and in what it consists.
“Whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” “That which cometh
out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” Or more prosaically still. “If
any man shall do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.” To this
class belongs the expression “Resist not evil.”

The parables are little anecdotes which serve to remind the hearer
of his own moments of tenderness and self-sacrifice. The Lost Sheep,
the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Repentant Sinner, are
illustrations of Christ’s way of feeling toward human nature. They are
less powerful than his words and acts, because no constructed thing has
the power of a real thing. The reply of the Greek woman who besought
Christ to cure her daughter, “Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table
eat of the children’s crumbs,” is one of the most affecting things in
the New Testament. It is more powerful than the tale of the Prodigal
Son. But you will see that if the Prodigal’s father had been a real
father, and the Greek mother had been a personage in a parable, the
power would have been the other way.

And so it is that Christ’s most powerful means of conveying his thought
was neither by his preaching nor by his parables; but by what he
himself said and did incidentally. This expressed his doctrine because
his state of feeling was his doctrine. The things Christ did by himself
and the words he said to himself, these things are Christianity--his
washing the disciples’ feet, “Forgive them, for they know not what they
do,” his crucifixion.

I have recalled all these sayings and acts of Christ almost at
random. They seem to me to be equivalent one to another as a thousand
is equivalent to a thousand. They are all messages sent out by the
same man in the same state of feeling. If he had lived longer, there
would have been more of them. If you should summarize them all into a
philosophy and then reduce that philosophy to a phrase, you would have
another dogma.

The reason I called this lecture Non-resistance instead of using
some more general religious title, is that I happened to be led into
re-examining the meaning of Christ’s sayings through his phrase “Resist
not evil; but overcome evil with good.” It came about in the course of
many struggles over practical reforms. I had not the smallest religious
or theoretical bias in entering the field of politics. Here were
certain actual cruelties, injurious things done by particular men, in
plain sight. They ought to be stopped.

The question is how to do it. First you go to the wrongdoers and
beg them to stop, and they will not stop. Then to the officials in
authority over them, with the same result. “Remove these officials”
is now your conclusion, and you go and join the party that keeps them
in power; for you intend to induce that party to change them. You now
engage in infinitely long, exhausting struggles with the elements
of wickedness, which seem to be the real cause and support of those
injuries which you are trying to stop. You make no headway; you find
you are wasting force; you are fighting at a disadvantage; all your
energies are exhausted in antagonism. It occurs to you to join the
other party, and induce that party to advocate a positive good, whereby
the people may be appealed to and the iniquities voted down. But your
trouble here begins afresh, for it seems as hard to induce the “outs”
to make a square attack on the evil as it is to get the “ins” to desist
from doing the evil. Your struggle, your antagonism, your waste of
energy continues. At last you leave the outs and form a new party, a
reform party of your own. Merciful heavens! neither will this new party
attack wickedness. Your mind, your thought, your time is still taken
up in resisting the influences which your old enemies are bringing to
bear upon your new friends.

I had got as far as this in the experience and had come to see plainly
that there was somewhere a mistake in my method. It was a mistake to
try to induce others to act. The thing to do was to act myself, alone
and directly, without waiting for help. I should thus at least be able
to do what I knew to be right; and perhaps this was the strongest
appeal I could make to anyone. The thing to do was to run independent
candidates and ask the public to support good men. Then there occurred
to me the phrase, “Resist not evil,” and the phrase seemed to explain
the experience.

What had I been doing all these years but wrangling over evil? I had a
system that pitted me in a ring against certain agencies of corruption
and led to unending antagonism. The phrase not only explained what
was wrong with the whole system, but what was wrong with every human
contact that occurred under it. The more you thought of it, the truer
it seemed. It was not merely true of politics, it was true of all
human intercourse. The politics of New York bore the same sort of
relation to this truth that a kodak does to the laws of optics. Our
politics were a mere illustration of it. The phrase seemed to explain
everything either wrong or mistaken that I had ever done in my life.
To meet selfishness with selfishness, anger with anger, irritation
with irritation, that was the harm. But the saying was not exhausted
yet. The phrase passed over into physiology and showed how to cure a
cramp in a muscle or stop a headache. It was true as religion, true as
pathology, and true as to everything between them. I felt as a modern
mathematician might feel, who should find inscribed in an Egyptian
temple a mathematical formula which not only included all he knew, but
showed that all he knew was a mere stumbling comment on the ancient
science.

What mind was it that walked the earth and put the sum of wisdom into
three words? By what process was it done? The impersonal precision
and calm of the statement give it the quality of geometry, and yet it
expresses nothing but human feeling. I suppose that Christ arrived
at the remark by simple introspection. The impulse which he felt in
himself to oppose evil with evil--he puts his finger on that impulse as
the crucial danger. There is in the phrase an extreme care, as if he
were explaining a mechanism. He seems to be saying “If you wish to open
the door, you must lift the latch before you pull the handle. If you
wish to do good, you must resist evil with good, not with evil.”

It is the same with his other sayings. They are almost dry, they are
so accurate. “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath
committed adultery with her already in his heart”; the analysis of
emotion could hardly be carried farther. “How hard it is for them that
trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God”; here is neither
exaggeration nor epigram. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”; a statement
of fact. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you”; this is the summary
of Christ’s whole life down to the time his teaching began. He had
knocked and it had been opened to him. He had wished to make men
better, and inasmuch as he wished it harder than anyone else before or
since has wished it, he got farther than anyone toward an understanding
of how to do it. The effectiveness of his thought has been due to
its coherence. He was able to draw the sky together over any subject
till all the light fell on one point. Then he said what he saw. Every
question was shown to break up into the same crystals if subjected to
the same pressure. Nor does his influence upon the world present any
anomaly. It is entirely due to ordinary causes. Every man’s influence
depends upon the depth of his will; for this determines his power of
concentration. The controlled force that could contract Christ’s own
mind to so small a focus, brings down to the same focus other minds
of less coherence than his. This is will; this is leadership; this is
power.

Yet in spite of his will there were plenty of things that Christ
himself could not do, as, for instance, change the world at once, or
change it at all except through the slow process of personal influence.
He could not heal people who had no faith, or get followers except by
going into the highways and hedges after them. And his whole life is
as valuable in showing what cannot be done, as in showing what can be
done. If you love your fellow-men and wish to benefit them, you will
find that the ways in which it is possible to do this are not many. You
can do harm in many ways, good only in one.

The world is full of people who want to do good, and men are constantly
re-discovering Christ. This intelligence, superior to our own,
possesses and utilizes us. There is always more danger of his influence
being perverted than of its dying out; for as men begin to discover
the scope and horizon of his thought they are tempted to becloud it
with commentary. They wish to say what he meant, whereas he has said it
himself. We think to explain something whose value is that it explains
us. If we understood him, very likely we should say nothing.

The mistake Christians make is that they strive to follow Christ as
a gnat follows a candle. No man ought to follow Christ in this way. A
man ought to follow truth, and when he does this, he will find that,
as he gropes his way through life, most of the light that falls on the
path in front of him, and moves as he moves, comes from the mind of
Christ. But if one is to learn from that mind one must take it as a
lens through which to view truth; not as truth itself. We do not look
at a lens, but through it.

There are moments in each of our lives when all the things that Christ
said seem clear, sensible, relevant. The use of his sayings is to
remind us of these moments and carry us back into them. The danger of
his sayings is lest we rely upon them as final truth. They are no more
truth than the chemical equivalents for food are food, or than certain
symbols of dynamics are the power of Niagara. At those moments when
the real Niagara is upon us we must keep our minds bent on how to do
good to our fellow-men; not the partial good of material benevolence,
but the highest good we know. The thoughts and habits we thus form and
work out, painfully plotting over them, revising, renewing, remodeling
them, become our personal church. This is our own religion, this is our
clue to truth, this is the avenue through which we may pass back to
truth and possess it. No other cord will hold except the one a man has
woven himself. No other key will serve except the one a man has forged
himself.

Christ was able to hold a prism perfectly still in his hand so as to
dissolve a ray of light into its elements. Every time he speaks, he
splits open humanity, as a man might crack a nut and show the kernel.
The force of human feeling behind these sayings can be measured only
by their accomplishments. They have been re-arranging and overturning
human society ever since. By this most unlikely means of quiet
demonstration in word and deed, did he unlock this gigantic power.
The bare fragments of his talk open the sluices of our minds; they
overwhelm and re-create. That was his method. The truth which he
conveyed with such metaphysical accuracy lives now in the living. Very
likely we cannot express it in dogmas, for such intellect as it takes
to utter a dogma is not in us. But we need have no fear for our power
of expressing it. It is enough for us to see truth; for if we see it,
everything we do will express it.




CLIMATE.


The influence of the planets, of deities good and bad, of spells and
incantations--of fatal or beneficial forces suddenly unlocked and, as
it were, let loose upon innocent men--as though one had walked into
a trap--all these myths and symbols were invented in past ages, by
discerning, deep-seeing men to express the impotence which they saw
about them, to express the fact that all men are walking in their
dreams and their dreams control them. What we see is illusion: what we
say is illusion. The reality is behind all; and we neither see it, nor
say it, but only feel it.

So also of those mysterious planes of identity which lie between soul
and soul, forming a continuous country and habitable world, between men
apparently sundered from one another by every human condition--sundered
by age, sex, epoch, language, occupation, religion--and yet undergoing
the same experience, valuing the same idea, twinned by the fact that
across time and space something in them is identical. Some wheel in
each of them is being turned by the same power at the same rate, and
makes these creatures cognate. They are one thing; they are portions
of a continuous, indestructible reality which conditions them both.

The experience comes to almost everyone at some time or moment in his
life, that he is nothing in himself, but only a part of something else.
It is a consciousness of the process of life, a consciousness of what
is happening. Whether through the touch of sickness or through intense
concentration, or through absolute abstraction, most men have felt the
prick of this thought, though the leisure and the impulse to record it
have been denied to them.

When European cattle are taken to Egypt, their forms begin to change
in one or two generations. Their backs and horns seem to be imitating
the cattle in the bas-reliefs of the rock tombs, which were carved
twenty-five centuries before Christ. So too, when American parents
settle in Rome, their children resemble Romans. It is not merely in
the expression of the face, or in the cut of the hair. It is in the
bones of the forehead and in the way the hair grows out of the skin
that these youngsters resemble the modern inhabitants of ancient Rome.
Professor Boaz has found by measurement that the skulls of children
born in America to foreign parents assume the American type. There
is something in the air here, or under the earth, that is at work
upon the immigrant child even before it is born. On the ship they are
remodeled, and in the womb they are shaped by the power that fashions
the skull to such dimensions as it is provided we shall wear to-day in
America. If you should steer the ship toward New Zealand or Japan, the
form of the infant’s cranium would vary and be modified accordingly.
The force that accompanied the ship would arrive with you, and be
present at your landing. The child would grow up in some sort of
unthinkable relation to the continent or island on which it landed. It
would be as one of the children of that land--nearer to them perhaps
than to its parents. We may call this influence climate, but if we do
so we must be sure to remember that perhaps the influence is really
due to soil, to electrical, magnetic, or even to sidereal influences.
As the influence is impalpable and tremendous, so it is unknown and
perhaps cannot be known.

I see the immigrant land and toil and push his fortunes. I see the
professor, with his calipers and his microscope, measuring the
immigrant’s brain. And above the professor, bending over him as he
looks into his microscope, I see the formative power modeling the
professor’s skull as he measures the skull of the immigrant--assigning
him what he shall see in it, apportioning to him what he shall believe
and tell other men about it--leading him on, yes, leading him as a
child is led by a butterfly. And all this vision of mine ranks itself
as a thing that has happened long ago, and is always happening. It is a
part of universal experience. I that suffer it am but feeling what man
has always felt, and shall feel forever--the power of God behind his
own illusion, modeling his thoughts--letting its influence be shut off
by his opacity, or else flash through him to its own ends in directions
which he cannot comprehend.




THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOOLS.


We are obliged to approach any church school through our own personal
religious sentiments. We do all of us approach it in this way. Any
religious institution is a tiny sample of the great question; and
whatever we say of it is a little voice in the great chorus of
humanity. We cannot isolate our subject: it is a part of the great
subject, religion. We have no achromatic lens through which to view
life. All that we see is colored by our own past, and surely, for any
man to believe that in describing his youth or his school-days he can
clear his mind of error, would be the greatest error and delusion of
all. It seems safer, then, in dealing with such a tremulous matter, to
lay it out as simply as one may, leaving others to be the judge of its
value.

Some years ago I had a long illness; and during those periods of mental
fixity which illness brings with it, my mind used to dwell in strange
places. It would pause over some spot in the world--some room or field
that I had seen, however casually, in former years--and would refuse to
move on. It would choose its exact position so that the perspective
of the place should be accurately seen, and there it would rest.
Sometimes for days at a time it would remain as carefully placed as a
camera, giving no reason for its choice, yet deriving some mysterious
assistance from the scene. The places were always empty--never a
person in them. There was, for example, a particular nook by a country
roadside--a barred gate with elm trees bending above it and a meadow
beyond--which I had passed by on the way to a child’s funeral some
years before. This place opened itself up out of the picture-book of my
memory, and for some weeks I lived within its influence--for there was
no question that life streamed out of it to me.

Under these circumstances it was natural enough that I should sometimes
have found myself back as St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire,
and should have wandered once more in the dreamland of boyhood. Indeed,
during many months of convalescence, I lived in my imagination at
St. Paul’s, always alone with the place, suffering it to move itself
through me and present the most forgotten aspects, angles, and bits of
scenery with silent, friendly precision. Immense sadness everywhere;
immense power.

Now my connection with the school had been very short and quite
unsatisfactory. I was sent there as a very small boy, remained less
than three years, and then went home sick. I had, in fact, an acute
attack of pneumonia which carried away with it a nervous breakdown from
which I had been suffering; and it was several years before my health
became fully re-established. In consequence of this experience my views
about the school were thereafter quite gloomy. I regarded the place
as a religious forcing-house, a very dangerous sort of place for any
boy to go, especially if he were inclined by nature toward religion. I
habitually abused the school, and I even took the trouble to go back
there and have a quarrel with Dr. Coit about something he had said or
done which seemed to me to deserve the reprobation of all just men.
I poured over him a few vitriolic letters; and I still believe that
the right was on my side in the matter, though perhaps I was wrong to
assume the rôle of the Angel of Retribution.

It was at a date about twenty years after my leaving the school, and
at the age of forty-odd, and through the medium of another and very
severe illness, that my nature began to take up again the threads of
St. Paul’s School influence, and to receive the ideas which Dr. Coit
had been striving to convey, though in forms that would have been
incomprehensible to himself. The school had somehow been carrying on
its work within me through all these years.

Youth is a game of blindman’s buff, a romp and struggle in which we
hold on fiercely and shout loudly, but know less as to whom we are
holding or who is holding us than we shall ever know again. As we
grow older we get true glimpses of things far away; and recognize at
a distance what we could never understand so long as we were at close
quarters with it. Middle age draws some curtains down, but lifts
others; and of all the new visions that come when youth is past, there
is none more thrilling than that new vision of the familiar past
which shows us what unsuspected powers were at play within us. This
experience is necessary and useful to us; and only thus can we come to
understand the incredible subtlety of human influence.

Not long ago there was a St. Paul’s School dinner at which two hundred
and fifty men met to hear speeches in praise of their school and of
its influence. Among other proceedings there was a speech by one (not
an alumnus) who was a prospective headmaster of the school. Now this
speech was a religious appeal, and ended by a sort of burst of feeling,
only a word or two long, to the effect that the world was “God’s
World.” I cannot tell what it was that startled me in the reception of
the speech by the audience; but I think it was the unexpected sincerity
of the applause. It seemed as if all these men had been waiting all
their lives to hear this thing said, and now gave a great triumphant,
unconscious sigh and roar of relief to hear someone say it. I glanced
critically about the room. The diners looked like any other set of
diners. Why should they be so much moved by the mention of the works of
God?--For they were not applauding the school, they were applauding the
Creation. I looked and pondered, and presently I remembered that most
of the men at the dinner had lived under the personal influence of Dr.
Coit during their early and sensitive years. The fibres of their being
had been searched and softened by contact with a nature whose depth
made up for its every other deficiency.

“I myself,” I reflected, “am one of them. Perhaps my experience with
the place is more typical than I had supposed. Perhaps each of these
men was offered something at St. Paul’s School which he could not
receive at the time, and therefore rejected, but which in later life he
found again for himself in a new form, and thereafter accepted as part
of his intimate nature.”

Inasmuch as the whole nature of St. Paul’s School resulted from the
manner of its formation, we may begin by a glance at its early days.
The inception of the place was as unheralded as any event could well
be. Dr. Coit, being a man with a mission and a message, retired in
1856 to a farm in New Hampshire, and opened a school, having four
or five pupils to start with. He would neither appeal to the public
for funds nor advertise for scholars.[E] The school was, at first, a
mere extension of his family circle and of himself; and as it grew,
it remained a mere extension of himself. Persons became attached
to this family circle one by one; and, whether they were boys or
masters or servants, they thus, one by one, became members of a sort
of invisible and visible church, or brotherhood--a society of the
sanctuary. No opposing or critical influence could enter that circle.
It rejected criticism as the jet of a fountain rejects a dried leaf.
The whole system at St. Paul’s was really no system at all, but only
the unconscious working out of one man’s nature in the formation of a
school community. Perhaps the important part of any school is always no
more than that.

  [E] The land and funds were, during the early years, supplied by Dr.
      George C. Shattuck, of Boston, who had, I believe, long harbored
      the idea of founding a school, and who gave his county house and
      farm to the purpose.

Dr. Coit was a tall man in a long black coat; and, as he moved and
walked about the paths and corridors, he remained always within an
invisible tower of isolation, so that you could not be sure that his
feet rested on quite the same ground as your own. Half the time he
was in an abstraction, but this did not prevent him from seeing and
observing everything and everybody, especially the individualities
of boys, about whom he acquired a preternatural astuteness. He
lived within that solitude which a great purpose and constant prayer
sometimes cast about a man. There was a chasm between him and the rest
of mankind which could not be bridged by trivial intercourse. Neither
he nor the rest of mankind were at fault for the difference in tension
between them. He was so charged with moral passion that many people
could not receive the delivery of it.

I was never able to establish a relation with him, either as a boy of
thirteen or subsequently. His low, vibrant voice, and his hand laid
gently upon one’s shoulder caused such a strong physical, moral, and
galvanic appeal to my sensibilities that I invariably burst into tears.
I think I never got through an interview with him without weeping. The
appeal which his nature made was the appeal of enormous human feeling,
penned up in a narrow language, restricted by a narrow experience. This
temperamental isolation was, of course, intensified by his becoming
a school-master. How strongly the influence of such a man must have
affected the little family circle of the early school may be imagined.
He lived habitually in a state of such vivid religious feeling that
his face was ablaze with zeal; and he settled down to teach school in
a farmhouse, knowing all the while, seeing with his mind’s eye all the
while, the future of the enterprise. We can imagine the fervor of the
tiny community, and the awe in which it must have stood toward the
great man.

And yet all of his austerity, all of his closely confined, ebullient
vitality was no more than a love of men. Down to his last days Dr. Coit
never took his solitary drives about the countryside without stopping
to bestow upon his poorer neighbors small offerings of food from his
own table. It was done furtively and almost as an indulgence of those
warm personal feelings toward all humanity, of which his mission denied
him the expression. Behind his towering zeal there was a suffering,
benevolent, and humble person.

Dr. Coit had, as it were, no secular side to his human intercourse,
and the social side of St. Paul’s School was, in consequence, always a
little stiff and ecclesiastical. On the other hand, his romantic and
spontaneous feelings were permitted the outlet of secular literature,
both ancient and modern; and he inspired his school with a love of
letters. You were somehow made welcome to the joys of reading. The
old-fashioned family education and atmosphere of a gentleman’s home
qualified the boarding-school book-shelf. An interest in cultivation
often goes with high-pitched, ecclesiastical natures; witness the
outburst of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
all that profound thought which makes that epoch in some ways outshine
the Renaissance. Not only did Dr. Coit enjoy romantic literature, but
he was himself like some character in mediæval romance--like Arthur, or
Merlin; and the power of his personality was so great that whenever I
am at St. Paul’s, I still feel as if the old Doctor were, somehow, not
far away. I should hardly be surprised to see him step out from behind
a clump of bushes on the margin of the stream, or to come across his
rapt figure, on the athletic field, standing as I have seen him stand
to watch the games, shading his eyes with his hand.

Dr. Coit was one of those saints who come into the world determined to
found something: they are predestinate founders. They make and occupy
the thing they found, repelling all the world beside, fleeing from
all the world except this; and they generally become tyrants within
the boundaries of their own creation. The tyrant founder-saint is a
well-known figure in the Middle Ages; St. Bernard is a typical example;
and Dr. Coit would have been more readily understood in any previous
age of the world than he was in his own. He was in himself a piece of
the Middle Ages, and to have known him is to have come in contact with
all the piety, the romanticism, the mystery, the beauty, the depth and
power of human emotion which flamed over Europe in Mediæval times,
and which have been temporarily forgotten. To-day these provinces of
human existence are abandoned to the art critic, to the moralist, and
to the sentimental writer--to the very classes of persons who are the
least likely to understand them. If we except the German philosophic
historian, I suppose that no person in the world is so cut off by
nature from an understanding of St. Francis or of Thomas Aquinas as is
the modern æsthetic person, who cultivates a sympathetic interest in
religion. The only hope of understanding the Middle Ages is through a
living personal belief in Christianity.

It is only for convenience that I refer to the Middle Ages in order to
explain Dr. Coit. His right to exist as a modern is incontestible: he
was as modern as anyone else. He merely belonged to a type which, for
the time being, has become rare. To us to-day, the tyrant founder-saint
of the Middle Ages appears like a person not wholly a Christian. Judged
by the standards of the New Testament, these men seem to be only half
converted, or three-quarters converted, to Christianity, the rest of
them remaining Tartar. The non-converted fraction of them makes them
autocrats who trust no one but themselves, men of unfaith who rely on
bolts and bars, on ordinances and arrangements.

At the worst, these enthusiasts are schemers, unscrupulous, crafty, and
cruel. At the best they are merely opinionated, arbitrary, and lonely
men. Their weakness is seen only in the fact that they have a slightly
blind side, a side on which walk the favorites and hypocrites who have
been formed in the shadow of their tyranny. The same parasites which
grow upon autocracy in the great world seem often to appear in the
miniature kingdom of a school.

That Christianity should have given rise to this peculiar kind of
tyrant has often thrown me into wonderment. It seems as if any
formulation of spiritual truth, uttered by a higher intelligence, were
apt to act as an astringent upon the lower intelligence. The bread of
life poisons many men. The formula means more than the neophyte is
able to understand; and this overplus of meaning stimulates him to
fierceness. The phenomenon may be observed on a small scale by anyone
who will contrast the teachings of Froebel with the methods often found
in kindergartens. Each mind in the world is capable of a different
degree of abstraction; and when a mind is stretched to its widest and
you give it still something more, you arouse passion. At any rate, the
fact remains that Christ’s gentlest words have, as he predicted, become
fire and sword in the world, and that through this fire and sword
truth spreads. Men like Dr. Coit, for all their fury and for all their
narrowness, leave peace in their wake, and bequeath to their followers
not only gentleness, but breadth of view. Their unselfishness--their
powerlessness to be other than they are--touches the heart of the
world. Christ has been in their dungeons all the while.

I do not know whether it was the result of Dr. Coit’s own prophetic
nature or the result of a more reasoned theory about the education
of boys; but the fact remains that at St. Paul’s School you were
encouraged to dream. You were permitted to wander alone in the woods.
You were left much to yourself; and the fact that you were a thoughtful
child, slow in development and perhaps backward in your studies was
allowed for. They understood the need of letting God attend the child,
and of not being too much worried about the outcome. There is a
divergence of feeling among modern school-masters as to how much boys
should be left to themselves. The freedom accorded to us at St. Paul’s
resulted, no doubt, from the original domestic, non-institutional
atmosphere of the place. A boy who is living at home in the country
always has a good deal of time to himself. The school was at first
a mere country home in which a clergyman conducted the education
of boys--appending it to his own family life; and the traditions of
boyhood-in-the-country survived as the school grew to more serious
proportions. The place itself, moreover, was an example of independence
and natural growth rather than of watched assistance. It was not the
child of riches, receiving all that money and thought could give even
from its birth onward; but was rather the child of hunger and thirst,
thriving upon neglect, and gaining in character and in vigor throughout
a youth of hardy loneliness.

To my mind the isolation of St. Paul’s is its strongest feature, its
rarest influence. The founding of institutions is done to-day by the
circulation of petitions, by the calling of friends into a circle and
the issuing of stock or advertisements. Hardly any other method is
deemed possible by practical men. The institutions thus founded are in
very close touch with their public. They rely upon their patrons, and
are controlled by their clients. They become the creatures of the age
they live in. But St. Paul’s School was not the creature of any age.
It was the child of one man who planted his house upon a hill. As it
has owed nothing to the age, so it has remained inaccessible to the
influences of the age. It is not in competition with other schools;
it is not affected by the fluctuating and journalistic currents of
contemporary thought; it has, one might say, no relation to the
superficial influences in America. The place seems not to be a part
of modern American life. We know, of course, that the school is in
reality a part of that life, and relies, as every school must, on the
community at large into which its roots extend. The apparent isolation
of St. Paul’s comes from the fact that it represents few influences.
These influences are everywhere prevalent, but they are not everywhere
visible. The school seems to live to itself; but in reality it draws
its life from those deep and invisible sources of religious feeling
which exist, but which do not come to the surface in contemporary life.

That there should be a spot in the United States having the atmosphere
of another world, that is the valuable and wonderful part of St. Paul’s
School. To plunge a boy even for the fraction of a year into this
pool is to give him a new outlook upon humanity. What is it that we
lack in America? Why, we lack variety. Our interests and pleasures,
our occupations in social, in commercial, in religious life are all
so stamped with the identical pattern--each of them is so like the
rest--our views and feelings are so narrow--that to put an American
youth to school in Central Asia for a year or two, under the Grand
Llama, would be apt to make a man of him. We need to give our boys an
insight into some species of life that belongs to the great world,
the historic world, the empire of the soul. We cannot snatch this
life from Europe without running the danger of that expatriation
which makes men shallow. We must find and create centres of it upon
our own shores--centres of social life devoted to unworldly aims. Not
only for our children, but for ourselves have we felt this need. New
well-springs in our heart and intelligence are unlocked by living for
some period of our lives in such a community; and the earlier in life
we can receive this experience the richer will it leave us.

A school is far more than the school community which gives it a name.
A school is the whole body of graduates, friends, and fosterers, whose
affections are attached to the place, whose memories go back to it,
whose character has been formed by it. These people, though they exist
dispersedly, have an influence in common. They belong to a club. They
are united by one of the strongest ties that can bind men together.
This club is as much a part of the school as the school itself. The
stream of boys flowing from the club to the school constitutes a sort
of river of time, a perpetual current of the ideas of the founder,
an immortality of influence. This stream must change, of course, but
it changes slowly--so great is the conservatism of boys at school,
and of old boys sending their sons to a school. I suppose that of
all human institutions a boys’ school is, by its nature, the most
traditional and old-fashioned. The boys regard themselves as the
school, and regard the masters as necessary figureheads; and in any
large school, where the mass and volume of young life rolls on without
much possible interference from above, there is a good deal of truth in
the conception.

When one hears other people talking about their pet school there is
a personal ring to the conversation which does not always please us.
The truth is that the foundation of a school is a matter of personal
magnetism, and that any school becomes a sort of clan or clique. It
is no accident that certain particular boys are sent to a certain
particular school. They go there as the needle swings to the pole. They
flow there as the ants flow to their native hill. The matter is settled
by personal affinity.

This is a fact about all leadership; only it receives very visible
proof in the case of school-masters. Every man’s followers are given
to him by destiny; and a leader of men may see himself in this
looking-glass if he have a mind to do so. It will give him a truer
picture of his own soul than he will find elsewhere in the world.
The followers of any man resemble each other, and, of course, they
also resemble their leader; though their resemblance to the leader is
not always apparent, but belongs rather to the category of spiritual
mysteries.

Dr. Coit himself was an ecclesiastic, rustling with dogma and vestment
and having ritual and anathema in his very being. And yet, as a matter
of fact, he did attract to himself persons who at first sight do not
seem to resemble him at all. The parents who sent their boys to the
school were, as a rule, a somewhat commonplace and very valuable sort
of people. They were good, straight-forward, God-fearing burghers, who
wished their sons to become honorable men, and were rather deficient
in business and social ambition for their children. These people,
quite often, did not like Dr. Coit, nor understand him; but they felt
that he would do for their sons what they wished done. They were warm
people: he was a hot person. Their quiet natures responded to his great
religious faith by an act of personal trust; and that was enough for
Dr. Coit, for he wanted the boys.

After the death of the first Doctor there followed a mitigation of
religious discipline at the school and a relaxation in the social
atmosphere. The quality of the place, however, remained the same.
The volume of life rolled with its old momentum. The characteristic
charm of the place remained unchanged. In the practical working of the
organization there ensued, I believe, great disturbances; but they did
not affect the spirit of the place so far as an alumnus could observe.
The same magic wave was over all as before. Indeed, for my own part, I
never could thoroughly enjoy St. Paul’s School while the old Doctor was
alive. His peace came to me only after he had departed; and whenever
I am at Concord it seems to roll through the fields and to overspread
the grounds like a mist. In returning to St. Paul’s, or in taking leave
of it, my imagination is always haunted by the idea of the place as it
must have been in its infancy--the farmhouse, the family group, and the
intense soul of the Doctor. When I think of that passionate fountain
of life, rising and bubbling in the remote New Hampshire wilderness,
in a solitude as complete as that of Abraham on the plains of Mamre, I
cannot but be moved. Here was faith indeed! A project all aim and no
means. If a strange quietude lies over the acres of St. Paul’s School
to-day, and steeps in a perpetual peace the little community which
this fiery soul left behind him, it is because in this place a man
once wrestled with invisible antagonists and saw ladders going up into
heaven, with the angels ascending and descending upon them. The school
is a monument to this vision--a heap of stones cast there, one by one,
by followers and by witnesses.

The fiftieth anniversary of the school brought together all its
adherents and fosterers and old boys, and peopled Concord for a day
with the race of gentle burghers that had followed the Doctor. It was
a touching assemblage; because here in these people was to be found
the peace of which he had all his life preached so much and felt so
little. He had attained it in others. He had left it as a dower and an
inheritance to the institution that he loved almost too passionately.
Out of the strong had come forth sweetness.




THE ÆSTHETIC.


There are two distinct functions of the mind with regard to art:
first, the creative function; second, the enjoying function. The first
is the rôle of the artist, the second, the rôle of the public. The
difference between these two rôles is that in the artist’s rôle the
active part--the part that counts, the part that makes the beholder
have sensations--is unconscious. The artist should be wholly creator,
and not at all spectator. If, while he works, there is anything in him
that applauds and enjoys as a spectator might do, this part will leave
a touch of virtuosity, of self-consciousness, of exaggeration, in his
work. If the matter be humorous, this exaggeration will perhaps appear
in the form of smartness; if the matter be serious, as sentimentality
or melodrama.

The artist must not try to enjoy his own work by foretaste, or he
will injure it. His æsthetic sense must not be active during the
hours of creation; it must be consumed in the furnace of unconscious
intellectual effort. The _reductio ad absurdum_ of the view here
suggested would be somewhat as follows:--The supremely great artist
would be indifferent to the fate of his own works, because he would
not know they were great. The whole creature would have become so
unconscious during the act of creation that there would be nothing left
over which should return to mankind and say, “See this great work!”
This seems to have happened in the case of Shakespeare.

It must be confessed that there are very great artists in whose work we
find a self-conscious, self-appreciatory note. There is, at times, such
a note in Dante, and in Goethe. And it seems to me that even here the
note a little deflects our attention from the matter in hand. Not by
reason of this element, but in spite of it, does their work prevail.

The practical lesson for any artist to draw from such an analysis
as the present is the lesson of detachment, almost of indifference.
An artist must trust his material. The stuff in hand is serious,
delicate, self-determined and non-emotional. The organic, inner logic
of the thing done may reach points of complexity, points of climax,
which--except in the outcome--are incomprehensible. They must not be
appreciated in the interim, but only obeyed. In the final review, and
at a distance they are to justify themselves, but not in the making.

The question of whether or not an artist has succeeded, whether or
not he has made something that speaks, is one which it is generally
impossible for the artist himself to answer. He cares too much, and
he stands too near the material. Sometimes a man having immense
experience, and having acquired that sort of indifference which grows
out of a supernal success, can make a just estimate of one of his
own later works; but, in general, the artist must stand mum and bite
his nails if he wishes to find out what there was in him. Let him be
perfectly assured that the truth of the matter will get to him, if
he will only do nothing except desire the truth. Someone will say
something not intended for his ears, which will reveal the whole
matter. This is the hard, heroic course which wisdom dictates to all
artists, except, perhaps, to those very gifted persons who by their
endowment are already among the elect. Most men are obliged to mine in
their endowment and draw it to the surface through years of hard labor.
The pretty good artist has need of the fortitude and self-effacement of
a saint.

Thus much of the creative side of art. Our conceptions of the subject,
however, are colored by the emotional view proper to the grand public.
The receptive function, the enjoying function, the æsthetic sense,
as it is often called, is very generally supposed to be art itself.
Almost all writing on art has been done by men who knew only the
æsthetic side of the matter. Now the enjoyment of art is a very common,
very conscious, very intense experience; and yet it is not a very
serious affair compared to the creation of art. It does not affect the
recipient to any such depths of his nature, as one might expect it
to do, from the vividness of his feelings during the experience. It
leaves in him, as a general rule, no knowledge about the art itself, no
understanding of the rod he has been lashed with, no suspicion of the
intellectual nature of the vehicle.

Æsthetic appreciation gives a man the illusion that he is being
spiritually made over and enlarged; and yet that appreciation is
capable of an absolute divorcement from the intellect. It is--to take
the extreme case--very strong in sleep. Dr. Holmes has recorded, in
his own felicitous way, the experience, common to sensitive people, of
writing down a dream-poem at midnight and discovering in its place at
dawn a few lines of incomprehensible rubbish. The æsthetic sense is
easily intensified by stimulants, by tea, coffee and tobacco. Anything
that excites the heart or stimulates the emotions--praise, happiness,
success, change of scene, any relief from mental tension--is apt to
give a man new, and sudden entry into unexplored worlds of art. He
thinks himself a new man. And yet this man stands, perhaps, in as
great danger of loss as he does in hope of gain. It is not through
receptivity, but through activity, that men are really changed.

How trivial men become who live solely in the appreciation of the fine
arts all of us know. The American who lives abroad is an intensely
receptive being; but he has divorced himself from the struggles of
a normal social existence, from communal life and duty. His love of
the fine arts does not save him, but seems rather to enfeeble him the
more. No European can effect a similar divorce in his own life; for
the European is living at home: his social and political obligations
make a man of him. Besides this, the fine arts are an old story to
the European; and he does not go mad about them, as the American
Indian goes mad about whiskey. The European is immune to the æsthetic;
and neither a fine wainscot nor a beautiful doorknob can have the
same power over him that it may have over that zealous, high-strung,
new discoverer of the old world, the American who begins to realize
what good decoration really means. Let anyone who thinks that this
impoverishment is a purely American disease read the description
of the Stanhope family in Trollope’s “Barchester Towers.” Here is
the beefiest kind of a British county family, reduced to anemia
by residence in Italy. Prolonged exile, and mere receptivity have
withdrawn the energy from the organs of these people.

It will be noticed that in those cases where art is an enfeebling
influence there is always a hiatus between the public and the artist.
Let us consider the case of the folk-song as sung by the peasants of
Suabia. Such songs are written by one peasant and sung by the next.
The author and the singer and the hearer are all one. To the audience
the song is life and emotion, social intercourse, love, friendship,
the landscape, philosophy, prayer, natural happiness. You can hardly
differentiate, in this case, between the artist and the public: both
are unconscious. But if you take that song and sing it in a London
drawing-room, or on a ranch in Colorado, it will perform a very
different function in the audience. To these foreigners the song is a
pleasing opiate. They hold it like a warm animal to their breast. The
Oxford pundit who raves over a Greek coin, the cold-hearted business
magnate in New York who enjoys the opera--these people live in so
remote a relation to the human causes, impulses, and conditions behind
the arts they love, that their enjoyment is exotic: it is more purely
receptive, more remote from personal experience than the enjoyment of
any living and native art could be.

A certain sickness follows the indulgence in art that is remote from
the admirer’s environment. This slightly morbid side of æstheticism
has been caricatured to the heart’s content. The dilettante and the
critic are well-known types. To a superficial view these men seem like
enemies of the living artist. They are always standing ready to eat
up his works as soon as they shall be born. Goethe thought criticism
and satire the two natural enemies to all liberty, and to all poetry
proceeding from a spontaneous impulse. And surely the massive authority
of learned critics who know everything, and are yet ignorant of the
first principles of their subject, hangs like an avalanche above the
head of every young creator. We cannot, however, to-day proceed as if
we were early Greeks, stepping forward in roseate unconsciousness. The
critics and their hurdy-gurdy are a part of our life, and have been so
for centuries.

The brighter side of the matter is that the æsthetic person, even
when morbid, is often engaged in introducing new and valuable arts to
his countrymen. The dilettante who brings home china and violins and
Japanese bronzes is the precursor of the domestic artist.

We must now return to the two functions of art, and endeavor to bring
them into some sort of common focus. We cannot hope to understand or to
reconcile them perfectly. We cannot hope to know what art is. Art is
life, and any expression of art becomes a new form of life. A merchant
in Boston in 1850 travels in Italy, and brings home a Murillo. Some
years later a highly educated dilettante discovers the Murillo in
Boston, and writes his dithyrambs about it. Some years later still,
there arises a young painter, who perhaps does not paint very well, and
yet he is nearer to the mystery than the other two. All these men are
parts of the same movement, and are essential to each other; though
the contempt they feel for each other might conceal this from us, as
it does from themselves. All of them are held together by an invisible
attraction and are servants of the same force. This force it is which,
in the future, may weld together a few enthusiasts into a sort of
secret society, or may even single out some one man, and see and speak
through him. Then, as the force passes, it will leave itself reflected
in pictures, which remain as the record of its flight.




Transcriber’s Note:

Hyphenation has been retained as published in the original publication.

  Page 7
    free-masonary of artistic craft _changed to_
    freemasonry of artistic craft

  Page 9
    of old metapor _changed to_
    of old metaphor

  Page 15
    prevailed under the the old monarchy _changed to_
    prevailed under the old monarchy

  Page 22
    the whole race, we fear, way relapse _changed to_
    the whole race, we fear, may relapse

  Page 27
    university training, Nothing else _changed to_
    university training. Nothing else

  Page 33
    in the community that the department _changed to_
    in the community than the department

  Page 59
    canot escape them _changed to_
    cannot escape them

  Page 65
    stated and solved those proplems _changed to_
    stated and solved those problems

  Page 89
    DR. HOWE _changed to_
    DR. HOWE.

  Page 101
    was immediately propared for him _changed to_
    was immediately prepared for him

  Page 112
    New paragraph added before
      “The distress of the mother was now painful

  Page 115
    feature of her contenance _changed to_
    feature of her countenance

  Page 123
    “We must have done with expediency; _changed to_
    We must have done with expediency;

  Page 125
    Tow Sawyer _changed to_
    Tom Sawyer

  Page 143
    only deeds of physical prowness _changed to_
    only deeds of physical prowess

  Page 169
    But noboby seems to have laughed _changed to_
    But nobody seems to have laughed

  Page 219
    early school may he imagined _changed to_
    early school may be imagined

  Page 225
    To my mind the insolation of _changed to_
    To my mind the isolation of

  Page 228
    institutions a boy’s school is _changed to_
    institutions a boys’ school is


        
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