CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 Dorothy Straight 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 3515.A18I6 
 
 The invisible censor.bv. Francis Hackett. 
 
 3 1924 022 458 156 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022458156 
 
THE INVISIBLE CENSOR 
 
 By FRANCIS HACKETT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc. 
 
 MCMXXI 
 
 xi. 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc. 
 PRINTED IN U. S. A. 
 
TO 
 
 MY WIFE 
 
 SIGNE TOKSVIG 
 
 WHOSE LACK OF INTEREST 
 IN THIS BOOK HAS BEEN MY 
 CONSTANT DESPERATION 
 
These sketches and articles appeared in the 
 New Republic and I am indebted to the other 
 editors for being allowed to reprint them. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Invisible Censor, i 
 
 Whisky, ii 
 
 Billy Sunday, Salesman, 17 
 
 Fifth Avenue and For^y-second Street, 32 
 
 As AN Alien Feels, 39 
 
 Scientific Management, 46 
 
 The Next New York, 51 
 
 Chicago, 59 
 
 The Clouds of Kerry, 65 
 
 Henry Adams, 71 
 
 The Age of Innocence, 80 
 
 The Irish Revolt, 84 
 
 A Limb of the Law, 92 
 
 A Personal Pantheon, 96 
 
 Night Lodging, 10 i 
 
 Youth and the Sceptic, 106 
 
 The Spaces of Uncertainty, i i i 
 
 William Butler Yeats, 114 
 
 "With Malice Toward None," 119 
 
 War Experts, 127 
 
 Okura Sees Newport, 134 
 
 The Critic and the Criticized, 140 
 
 Blind, 144 
 
 " And the Earth Was Dry," 149 
 
 Telegrams, 155 
 
 Of Pleasant Things, 160 
 
 The Aviator, 165 
 
THE INVISIBLE CENSOR 
 
 ^ OT long ago I met a writer who happened to ap- 
 ply the word " cheap " to Mr. Strachey's Eminent 
 Victorians. It astonished me, because this was an 
 erudite, cultivated woman, a distinguished woman, 
 and she meant what she said. 
 
 A " cheap " effect, I assume, is commonly one that 
 builds itself on a false foundation. It may promise 
 beautifully, but it never lives up to its promise. 
 Whether it is a house or a human character, a bind- 
 ing or a book, it proves itself gimcrack and shoddy. 
 It hasn't the goods. And of Eminent Victorians, as 
 I remembered it (having read it to review it), this 
 was the last thing to be said. The book began by 
 fitting exquisitely, but it went on fitting exquisitely. 
 It never pulled or strained. And the memory of it 
 wears like a glove. 
 
 Now why, after all, did I like this book so thor- 
 oughly, which my distinguished friend thought so 
 cheap? For many minor reasons of course, as one 
 likes anything — contributory reasons — but prin- 
 cipally, as I laboriously analyzed it, because in Emi- 
 nent Victorians the invisible censor was so perfectly 
 understood. What seemed cheap to her ladyship 
 was, I do not doubt, the very thing that made Emi- 
 nent Victorians seem so precious to me — the deft 
 disregard of appearances, the refusal to let decorum 
 stand in the way of our possessing the facts. This 
 to my critic was a proof that Mr. Strachey was im- 
 
 [ I ] 
 
perceptive and vulgar — "common" the ugly word 
 is. To me it simply proved that he knew his game. 
 What he definitely disregarded, as so many felt, was 
 not any decorum dear and worth having. It was 
 simply that decorum which to obey is to produce 
 falsification. The impeccable craft of Mr. Strachey. 
 was shown in his evaluation, not his acceptance, of 
 decorum. He did not take his characters at their 
 face value, while he did not do the other vulgar 
 thing, go through their careers with a muck-rake. 
 In vivisecting them (the awful thing to do, presum- 
 ably) , he never let them die on him. He opened 
 them out, but not cruelly or brutally. He did it as 
 Mr. William Johnston plays tennis or as Dr. Blake 
 is said to operate or as Dr. Muck conducts an or- 
 chestra or as Miss Kellerman dives. He did it for 
 the best result under the circumstances and with a 
 form that comes of a real command of the medium 
 — genuine " good form." 
 
 The essential achievement of Eminent Victorians 
 is worth dwelling on because in every book of social 
 character the question of the invisible censor is un- 
 avoidably present. By the censor I do not mean 
 that poor blinkered government oflicial who decides 
 on the facts that are worthy of popular acquaint- 
 ance. I mean a still more secret creature of still 
 more acute solicitude, who feels that social facts 
 must be manicured and pedicured before they are fit 
 to be seen. He is not concerned with the facts 
 themselves but with their social currency. He is 
 the supervisor of what we say we do, the watchman 
 over our version and our theoretical estimate of 
 ourselves. His object, as I suppose, is to keep up 
 the good old institutions, to set their example be- 
 
 [ 2 ] 
 
fore the world, to govern the imitative monkey in 
 us. And to fulfill that object he continually revises 
 and blue-pencils the human legend. He is con- 
 stantly at the elbow of every man or woman who 
 writes. An invisible, scarcely suspected of existing, 
 he is much more active, much more solidly in- 
 trenched, than the legal censor whom liberals de- 
 test. 
 
 Every one is now more or less familiar with the 
 Freudian censor, the domesticated tribal agent 
 whose function it seems to be to inforce the tribal 
 scruples and superstitions — to keep personal im- 
 pulse where the tribe thinks it belongs. This part of 
 ■- the ego — to give it a spatial name — came in for a 
 good deal of excited remonstrance in the early days 
 of popular Freudian talk. To-day, I think, the cen- 
 sor is seldom so severely interpreted. In many cases 
 there is clearly a savagery or a stupidity which brings 
 about " the balked disposition," but it is being ad- 
 mitted that the part which is regulated by the censor, 
 the " disposition " end of the ego, may not always be 
 socially tolerable; and as for the "balking," there 
 is a difference between blunt repressiveness and en- 
 lightened regulation. Still, with all this acceptance 
 of ethics, the nature of the censorship has to be re- 
 cognized — the true character of the censor is so 
 often not taste or conscience in any clear condition, 
 but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an in- 
 stitutional bully. In the censor as he appears in 
 psycho-analytic literature there is something of the 
 archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic — all just 
 as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is 
 the thing in us which is against license and anarchy. 
 In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor 
 [ 3 ] 
 
of whom Eminent Victorians is so subversive, there 
 are particularly these irrational and ritualistic char- 
 acteristics, these remnants of outgrown Institutions, 
 these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed. 
 Most biography, especially official biography. Is writ- 
 ten with such a censor In mind, under his very eye. 
 Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and 
 stumulating was precisely In Its refusal to keep him 
 In mind. Hovering behind Eminent Victorians we 
 see agonized official biography, with Its finger on 
 Its lips, and the contrast is perhaps the chief delight 
 that Mr. Strachey affords. When Cardinal Man- 
 ning's pre-clerlcal marriage, for example, came to be 
 considered by Mr. Strachey, he did not obey the con- 
 ventional Impulse, did not subordinate that fact of 
 marriage as the Catholic Church would wish It to be 
 subordinated (as a matter of " good taste," of 
 course). He gave to that extremely relevant epi- 
 sode its due Importance. And so Manning, for 
 the first time for most people, took on the look not so 
 much of the saintly cardinal of official biography as 
 of a complex living man. 
 
 What does the censor care for this aesthetic 
 result? Very little. What the censor Is chiefly In- 
 terested in Is, let us say, edification. He aims by 
 no means to give us access to the facts. He aims 
 not at all to let us judge for ourselves. With all 
 his might he strives to relate the facts under his 
 supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, what- 
 ever It may be. And so, when facts come to light 
 which do not chime In with his prepossession, he does 
 his best either to discredit them or to set them down 
 as Immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. And 
 the policy that he Is serving Is not aesthetic. 
 
 [4 ] 
 
A theory of the assthetic is now beside the point, 
 but I am sure it would move in a relation to human 
 impulses very different from the relation of the cen- 
 sor. The censor is thinking, presumably, of im- 
 mediate law and order, with its attendant conven- 
 tions and respectabilities. The aesthetic could not 
 be similarly bound. It is not reckless of conduct, 
 but surely enormously reckless of decorum, with its 
 conventions and respectabilities clustering around the 
 status quo. Hence the apparent " revolt " of 
 modernism, the insurrection of impulse against edi- 
 fication. 
 
 But there is more in Eminent Victorians than an 
 amusing, impish refusal to edify. There is the in- 
 structive contrast between the " censored celebrity " 
 and the uncensored celebrity disinterestedly ob- 
 served. Disinterestedly observed, for one thing, we 
 get something in these celebrities besides patriotism 
 and mother-love and chastity and heroism. We get 
 hot impulses and cold calculations, brandy and 
 treachery, the imperious and the supine, glorious re- 
 ligiousness and silly family prayers. And these 
 things, though very unlike the products of official 
 photography, are closely related to impulses as we 
 know them in ourselves. To find them established 
 for Mr. Strachey's " eminent " Victorians is to en- 
 joy a constant dry humor, since the invisible censor, 
 the apostle of that expediency known as edification, 
 stood at the very heart of Victorianism. 
 
 This is possibly why Samuel Butler, in his auto- 
 biographical way, is so remarkable as a Victorian. 
 In the midst of innumerable edifying figures, he de- 
 clined to edify. When people said to him, " Honor 
 thy father and thy mother," he answered in effect 
 
 [5 1 
 
that his father was a pinhead theologian who had 
 wanted to cripple his mentality, and his mother was, 
 to use his own phrase, full of the seven deadly 
 virtues. This was not decorous but it had the merit 
 of being true. And all the people whose unbidden 
 censors had been forcing good round impulses into 
 stubborn parental polygons immediately felt the re- 
 lief of this revelation. Not all of them confess it. 
 When they have occasion to speak or write about 
 " mothers " — as if the biological act of parturi- 
 tion brings with it an unquestionable " mother " 
 psyche — most of them still allow the invisible cen- 
 sor to govern them and represent them as having 
 feelings not really their own. But even this per- 
 sistence of the censor could not deprive Samuel 
 Butler of his effectiveness. He has spoken out, re- 
 gardless of edification, and that sort of work cannot 
 be undone. 
 
 A similar work is performed by such highly per- 
 sonal confessants as Marie Bashkirtseff and W. N. 
 P. Barbellion, and even by Mary MacLane. The 
 account that these impulsive human beings give of 
 themselves is sensational simply because it clashes 
 with the strict preconception that we are taught to 
 establish. But only a man who remembers nothing 
 or admits nothing of his own impulses can deny the 
 validity of theirs. The thing that takes away from 
 their interest, as one grows older, is the unimport- 
 ance of the censorship that agonizes them. Their 
 documentary value being their great value, they lose 
 importance as more specific and dramatic documents 
 become familiar. And with psycho-analysis there 
 has been a huge increase in the evidence of hidden 
 
 [ 6 ] 
 
life. It is the Montaignes who remain, the confes- 
 sants who offer something besides a psychological 
 document — a transcendence which is not incoherent 
 with pain. 
 
 But these various confessions are significant. 
 They indicate the existence and the vitality of the 
 censor. They show that in the simplest matters we 
 have not yet attained freedom of speech. Why? 
 Because, I imagine, the world is chockful of assump- 
 tions as to conduct which, while irrational and ritu- 
 alistic and primitive, have all sorts of sanctions 
 thrown around them and must take a whole new art 
 of education to correct. Until this art it established 
 and these assumptions are automatically rectified, it 
 will be impossible to exercise free speech comfort- 
 ably. An attempt may be made, of course, and in- 
 deed must be made, but to succeed too well will for 
 many years mean either being exterminated or being 
 ostracized. 
 
 It is not hard to show how each of us in turn be- 
 comes an agent of the invisible censorship. You, 
 for instance, may have a perfectly free mind on the 
 subject of suffrage, but you may have extremely 
 strong views on the subject of sex. (Miss Alice 
 Stone Blackwell, to be specific, thinks that Fielding 
 is nothing but a " smutty" author.) Or you may 
 think yourself quite emancipated on the subject of 
 sex-desires and be hopelessly intolerant on the sub- 
 ject of the Bolsheviki. The French Rights of Man 
 held out, after all, for the sacred rights of property 
 — and the day before that, it was considered pretty 
 advanced to believe in the divine right of kings. It 
 is not humanly possible, considering how relative 
 
 [ 7 ] 
 
liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even con- 
 vince oneself of the necessity of examining them, 
 and in every case we are sure to be tempted to op- 
 pose certain novel ideas in the name of inertia, re- 
 spectability and decorum. To dissemble awkward 
 facts, in such cases, is much easier than to account 
 for them — which is where the censor comes in. 
 
 I do not say that it is possible to do away with 
 every discipline, even the rule-of-thumb of decorum. 
 As a subservient middle-class citizen, I believe in 
 the regulation of impulse. But as an intellectual 
 fact, the use of the blue pencil in the interests of 
 decorum is exceedingly inept. Human impulses are 
 much too lively to be extinguished by the denial of 
 expression. And if sane expression is denied to 
 them, they'll find expression of another kind. 
 
 Decorum has its uses, especially on the plane of 
 social intercourse. I admit this all the more 
 eagerly because I have seen much of one brilliant 
 human being who has practically no sense of oppo- 
 sition. If he sees something that he wants, he helps 
 himself. It may be the milk on the lunch-table that 
 was intended for Uncle George. It may be the new 
 volume from England that it took nine weeks to 
 bring across. It may be the company of some sensi- 
 tive gentlewoman or the busy hour of the mayor of 
 Chicago. The object makes no visible difference to 
 my friend. If he wants it, he sticks out his hand 
 and takes it. And if it comes loose, he holds on. 
 
 Associated with this aggressiveness there is a good 
 deal of purpose not self-regarding. The man is by 
 no means all greedy maw. But the thing that dis- 
 tinguishes him is the quickness and frankness with 
 which he obeys his impulse. Between having an im- 
 
 [ 8 ] 
 
pulse and acting on it there lies for him a miracu- 
 lously short time. 
 
 In dealing with such a man, most people begin 
 hilariously. Not all of them keep up with him in 
 the same heroic spirit. At first it is extraordinarily 
 stimulating to find a person who is so " creative," 
 who sweeps so freely ahead. Soon the dull obliga- 
 tions, the tedious details, begin to accumulate, and 
 the man with the happy impulsiveness leaves all these 
 dull obligations to his struggling friends. His lack 
 of decorum in these respects is a source of hardship 
 and misunderstanding, especially where persons of 
 less energy or more circumspection are attendant. 
 In his case, I admit, I see the raw problem of im- 
 pulse, and I am glad to see his impulse squelched. 
 
 But even this barbarian is preferable to the 
 apathetic repressed human beings by whom he is 
 surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is 
 invaluable because " creative." And he should 
 never be blocked in: he should at most be canalled. 
 
 The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illus- 
 trated in his rational subordination of impulse, but 
 in those subordinations that violate human and social 
 freedom. And the worst of them are the filmy, the 
 vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the 
 opportunity of truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently 
 difficult picture-puzzle, but what chance have we If 
 the turnip-headed censor confiscates sotpe particularly 
 indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike? 
 On reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to 
 escape from those wax effigies that we once be- 
 lieved to be statesmen — the kind of. eflligles of which 
 text-books and correct histories and correct biog- 
 raphies are full! How we rejoice to escape from 
 
 [9] 
 
them, wondering that they had ever imposed on us, 
 wondering that teachers and pious families and loyal 
 historians ever lent themselves to this conspiracy 
 against truth! But the horrible fact is, Mr. 
 Strachey is one in a million. He has only poked his 
 finger through the great spider-web of so-called 
 " vital lies." 
 
 Meanwhile, in the decorous and respectable bio- 
 graphies, the same old " vital lies " are being told. 
 The insiders, the initiated, the disillusioned, are 
 aware of them. They no longer subsist on them. 
 They read between the lines. And yet when the 
 insiders see in print the true facts — say, about Rob- 
 ert Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or 
 John Jones — these very insiders rush forward with 
 a Mother Hubbard to fling around the naked truth. 
 We must not speak the truth. We must edify. We 
 must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced 
 world. 
 
 It means that we need a revolution in education, 
 nothing less. It means that the truth must be taken 
 out of the hands of the censor. We must be pre- 
 pared to shed oceans of ink. 
 
 [ lo ] 
 
WHISKY 
 
 It was a wet, gusty night and I had a lonely walk 
 home. By taking the river road, though I hated it, 
 I saved two miles, so I sloshed ahead trying not to 
 think at all. Through the barbed wire fence I 
 could see the racing river. Its black swollen body 
 writhed along with extraordinary swiftness, breath- 
 lessly silent, only occasionally making a swishing 
 ripple. I did not enjoy looking at it. I was some- 
 how afraid. 
 
 And there, at the end of the river road where I 
 swerved off, a figure stood waiting for me, motion- 
 less and enigmatic. I had to meet it or turn back. 
 It was a quite young girl, unknown to me, with 
 a hood over her head, and with large unhappy eyes. 
 " My father is very ill," she said without a word 
 of introduction. " The nurse is frightened. Could 
 you come in and help? " 
 
 There was a gaunt house set back from the road, 
 on a little slope. I could see a wan light upstairs. 
 " The nurse is not scared," the girl corrected, 
 " but she is nervous. I wish you could come." 
 
 " Of course," and on my very word she turned 
 and led the way in. 
 
 The hall was empty. It had nothing in it except a 
 discouraged oil lamp on a dirty kitchen table. The 
 shadowy stairs were bare. On my left on the 
 ground floor a woman with gray hair and rusty face 
 
 [ II ] 
 
and red-rimmed eyes shuffled back into the shadows 
 at my entry, a sort of ignoble Niobe. 
 
 " That's my mother," the grave child explained. 
 And to the retreating slatternly figure the child 
 called, " This man has come to help, Mother," as if 
 men dropped from the sky. 
 
 She went up into the shadows and I followed. 
 A flight of stairs, a long creaking landing. An- 
 other flight of stairs. Stumbles. Another landing. 
 A stale aroma of cat. And a general sense that, 
 although the staircase was well made and the land- 
 ings wide, there was not one stick of furniture in 
 the house. 
 
 As we approached the top floor we met fresher 
 air and the pallid emanation of a night-light. A 
 figure stood waiting at the head of the stairs. 
 
 This was a stout little nun, her face framed in 
 creaking linen, and a great rustle of robes and rosary 
 beads whenever she moved. She began a sharp 
 whisper the minute we climbed to the landing. 
 
 " He's awake. He's out of his head. I'm glad 
 you've come. Now, child, be off to bed with you, 
 like a good girl. This way, if you please." 
 
 The child's vast eyes accepted me. " I'll go to 
 Mother," she said, and she receded downstairs. 
 The nun entered an open door to the right, and 
 again I meekly followed. 
 
 It was a room out of the fables. There was a 
 tall fireplace facing the door, with a slat of packing- 
 case burning in it as well as the wind would permit, 
 and a solitary candle glimmering in a bottle, set on 
 the table at the head of the bed. Its uncertain 
 light fell on the tousled hair of a once kempt human 
 being, now evidently a semi-maniac staring at pres- 
 
 [ 12 ] 
 
ences in the room. Down the chimney the wind 
 came bluffing at intervals, and the one high window 
 querulously rattled. The center of the room was 
 the sick man's burning eyes. 
 
 I walked through his view and he did not see 
 me. The nun and myself stood watching him from 
 the head of the bed. 
 
 " Oh, he's awful bad, you have no idea how bad 
 he is ; I'm afraid for him ; I am indeed. What am 
 I to call you, Mister? Here, take this chair." 
 
 Before I answered her she continued, in a whis- 
 per that slid along from one j to the next. " They 
 said the doctor would be here at seven and it's 
 nearly twelve as it is. He's not coming. I wish 
 he was here." 
 
 The sick man seemed to see us. " That's right 
 now," he said, whistling his breath. " Bring me 
 my clothes, I want to go home." 
 
 The nun laid her arm on him. " Lean back now, 
 dear, and it'll be all right, I'm telling you." And 
 she gently but ineffectually tried to press him down. 
 
 The sick man turned his face on her, into the 
 candlelight. He was long unshaved, but the two 
 things that struck me most, after the crop of gray 
 bristle, were the dry cavern of his mouth and the 
 scalding intensity of his eyes. I was terrified lest 
 those eyes should alight on me, and yet I gazed 
 hard at him. His lips were flaked with yellow 
 scales, and dry mucus was in strings at the corners 
 of his mouth. His night-shirt gaped open, show- 
 ing a very hairy black chest. He seemed a shrunken 
 man, not a very tall man, but his shoulders were 
 broad and his chin very square. To support his 
 chin seemed the great effort of his jaws. It fell 
 
 [ 13 ] 
 
open on him, giving him a vacant foolish expression, 
 with his teeth so black and irregular, and he tried 
 his best to clamp his teeth tight. The working 
 of his jaws, however, scarcely interfered with his 
 whistling breath or his gasping words. 
 
 " They will be at the back door, I say. God! " 
 a feeble scream and whimper. " Bring me my 
 clothes. You're hiding them on me. Oh, why are 
 you hiding them on me? Can't you give me my 
 clothes?" 
 
 " You're home now, dear. You're home now," 
 the nurse assured him. " Isn't that your own clock 
 on the mantel? Lie down now and I'll make you 
 a comfortable drink and put you to sleep." 
 " Boy, fetch me my coat." 
 
 " Don't mind him," the nun turned to me, " but 
 do you cover his feet." 
 
 His feet had lost the gray blanket. They stared 
 blankly up from the end of the bed. I covered 
 them snugly, glad to have something to do. 
 
 " It's all the whisky in him," the nun whispered 
 when at last he went limp and lay down. " It's got 
 to his brain. I thought he was over the pneumonia, 
 but that whisky has him saturated. The poor 
 thing! The poor thing! " 
 
 " Well, I must be going now," the sick man ejacu- 
 lated, and with one twist of his body he was out of 
 bed. 
 
 " Oh, keep yourself covered, for the love of 
 God ! " The poor nun ran after him with the 
 blanket as his old flannel night shirt fluttered up 
 his legs. 
 
 He staggered up to me fiercely, and his eyes 
 razed my face. 
 
 [ 14 ] 
 
" Fiddle your grandmother," he muttered, " I'm 
 off home, I tell you." 
 
 " You can't leave the room; it's better for you to 
 go back to bed," and I held him round with my arms. 
 
 " See here, you," his yellow cheeks reddened with 
 his passionate effort, " you can't hold me a prisoner 
 any longer. Oh, Barrett, Barrett, what are you do- 
 ing to me to destroy me ? " 
 
 I knew no Barrett, but the poor creature was 
 shivering with anguish and cold. I put my arms 
 around him and tried to move him out of the 
 draught of the door. His thin arms closed on me 
 at the first hint of force, and he clenched with fever- 
 ish vigor. I could feel his frail bones against me, 
 his bare ribs, his wild thumping heart. 
 
 " You can't, you can't. You can't keep me 
 prisoner. ..." 
 
 He struggled, his heart thumping me. Then in 
 one instant he went slack. 
 
 We lifted him to the bed, and I felt under his 
 shirt for the flutter of his heart. His mouth had 
 dropped open, his eyes were like a dead bird's. 
 
 The little nun began, " Jesus, Mary and Joseph," 
 and other holy words, while I groped helplessly 
 over this fragile burned-out frame. Then I remem- 
 bered and I stumbled wild-minded to find that woman 
 downstairs. 
 
 I went headlong through the darkness. At my 
 knock the door opened, as if by an unseen hand, 
 and I saw, completely dressed, the pale little girl, 
 with her grave eyes. 
 
 " Your mother? " I asked. 
 
 The child stopped me sharply, " Is Father 
 worse? " 
 
 [ 15 ] 
 
" He's worse," I answered feebly. " You'd 
 better — " 
 
 The child was brushed aside by her mother, who 
 had stumbled forward from inside. She looked at 
 me vaguely. 
 
 The girl turned on her mother. " I'm going up 
 to Father. Go inside." 
 
 The woman's will flickered and then expired. 
 She pulled the door back upon herself, shutting us 
 into the hall. The child led and I followed back 
 upstairs. 
 
 [ i6 J 
 
BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN 
 
 Before I heard BUly Sunday in Philadelphia 
 I had formed a conception of him from the news- 
 papers. First of all, he was a baseball player be- 
 come revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting, 
 screaming vulgarian, a mob orator who lashed him- 
 self and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap re- 
 ligious fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were 
 fables in slang. I thought of him as vividly, tor- 
 rentially abusive, and I thought of his revival as an 
 orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by stream- 
 ing in full view to the public mourners' bench. 
 With the penitents I associated the broken humanity 
 of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her 
 knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday pre- 
 siding over a meeting that was tossed like trees in 
 a storm. 
 
 However this preconception was formed, it at 
 least had the merit of consistency. It was, that is 
 to say, consistently inaccurate In every particular. 
 
 Consider, in the first place, the orderliness of his 
 specially constructed Tabernacle. Built like a giant 
 greenhouse in a single story, It covers an immense 
 area and seats fifteen thousand human beings. 
 Lighted at night by electricity as if by sunshine, the 
 floor is a vast garden of human faces, all turned 
 
 [ 17 ] 
 
to the small platform on which the sloping tiers 
 from behind converge. Around this auditorium, 
 with its forest of light wooden pillars and braces, 
 runs a glass-inclosed alley, and standing outside in 
 the alley throng the spectators for whom there are 
 no seats. Except for the quiet ushers, the silent 
 sawdust aisles are kept free. Through police- 
 guarded doors a thin trickle fills up the last avail- 
 able seats, and this business is dispatched with little 
 commotion. Fully as many people wait to hear 
 this single diminutive speaker as attend a national 
 political convention. In many ways the crowd sug- 
 gests a national convention; but both men and women 
 are hatless, and their attentiveness is exemplary. 
 
 It is, if the phrase is permitted, conspicuously 
 a middle-class crowd. It is the crowd that wears 
 Cluett-Peabody collars, that reads the Ladies' Home 
 Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. It is the 
 crowd for whom the nickel was especially coined, 
 the nickel that pays carfare, that fits in a telephone 
 slot, that buys a cup of coffee or a piece of pie, 
 that purchases a shoe-shine, that pays for a soda, 
 that gets a stick of Hershey's chocolate, that made 
 Woolworth a millionaire, that is spent for chewing- 
 gum or for a glass of beer. In that crowd are men 
 and women from every sect and every political party, 
 ranging in color from the pink of the factory super- 
 intendent's bald head to the ebony of the discreetly 
 dressed negro laundress. A small proportion of 
 professional men and a small proportion of ragged 
 labor is to be discerned, but the general tone is 
 simple, common-sense, practical, domestic America. 
 Numbers of young girls who might equally well be 
 at the movies are to be seen, raw-boned boys not 
 
 [ i8 ] 
 
long from the country, angular home-keeping virgins 
 of the sort that belong to sewing circles, neat young 
 men who suggest the Y. M. C. A., iron-gray mothers 
 who recall the numbered side-streets in Harlem or 
 Brooklyn or Chicago West Side and who bring to 
 mind asthma and the price of eggs, self-conscious 
 young clerks who are half curious and partly starved 
 for emotion, men over forty with prominent Adam's 
 apple and the thin, strained look of lives fairly care- 
 worn and dutiful, citizens of the kind that with all 
 their heterogeneousness give to a jury its oddly 
 characteristic effect, fattish men who might be small 
 shopkeepers with a single employee, the single em- 
 ployee himself, the pretty girl who thinks the Rev. 
 Mr. Rhodeheaver so handsome, the prosaic girl 
 whose chief perception is that Mr. Sunday is so 
 hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won't 
 be swayed, the sedentary " providers " who cannot 
 open their ears without dropping their jaws. A 
 collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one may 
 crudely say " average " mortals, some of them 
 destined to catch religion, more of them destined 
 to catch an impression, and a few of them, sitting 
 near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a 
 cold. 
 
 Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr. 
 Sunday's small platform is a bower of lovely 
 bouquets, and the first business is the acknowledg- 
 ment of these offerings. As a means of predis- 
 posing the audience in Mr. Sunday's favor nothing 
 could be more genial. In the body of the hall are 
 seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute 
 is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver's powerful, 
 commonplace voice invites them to recognition: 
 
 [ 19 ] 
 
"Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company here?" 
 All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren. 
 " Fine, fine. We're glad to see yeh here. We're 
 glad to welcome yeh. And what hymn would you 
 like to have?" In loud concert the Pittsburgh 
 Plate Glass Co. delegation shout: " Number forty- 
 nine ! " Mr. Rhodeheaver humorously parodies the 
 shout: " Number forty-nine! It's a good 'un too. 
 Thank yeh, we're glad to have yeh here." Not only 
 immense bouquets, but gold pieces, boxes of hand- 
 kerchiefs, long mirrors, all sorts of presents, mainly 
 from big corporations or their employees, are on 
 the tight platform. One present came from a mill, 
 a box of towels, and with it not only a warm, manly 
 letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept " the product 
 of our industry," but a little poetic tribute, express- 
 ing the hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr. 
 Sunday might have a good bath and take comfort 
 in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and 
 liked it, and gazed amiably at the towels. 
 
 The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thou- 
 sand people had really joined in them the effect 
 would have been stupendous. As it was, they were 
 thrilling, but not completely. The audience was 
 not half abandoned enough. 
 
 Then, after a collection had been taken up for a 
 local charity, Mr. Sunday began with a prayer. A 
 compact figure in an ordinary black business suit, 
 it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice 
 that, for all his athleticism, he was tired to the 
 bone. He is fifty-three years old and for nine 
 weeks he had been delivering about fifteen extremely 
 intense sermong a week. His opening was almost 
 
 [ 20 ] 
 
adramatic. It had the conservatism of fatigue, 
 and it was only his evident self-possession that can- 
 celed the fear he would fizzle. 
 
 The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me 
 at first were Elbert Hubbard and George M. Cohan. 
 In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism 
 of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in 
 his physical attitude there was nothing of that 
 greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and 
 swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman 
 of his particular line of wares. 
 
 Accompanying one of the presents there had been 
 a letter referring to Billy Sunday's great work, " the 
 moral uplift so essential to the business and com- 
 mercial supremacy of this city and this country." 
 As he developed his homely moral sermon for his 
 attentive middle-class congregation, this gave the 
 clew to his appeal. It did not seem to me that he 
 had one touch of divine poetry. He humored and 
 argued and smote for Christ as a commodity that 
 would satisfy an enormous acknowledged gap in his 
 auditors' lives. He was " putting over " Christ. 
 In awakening all the early memories of maternal ad- 
 monition and counsel, the consciousness of unful- 
 filled desires, of neglected ideals, the ache for sym- 
 pathy and understanding, he seemed like an insur- 
 ance agent making a text of " over the hill to the 
 poorhouse." He had at his finger tips all the sell- 
 ing points of Christ. He gave to sin and salvation 
 a practical connotation. But while his words and 
 actions apparently fascinated his audience, while 
 they laughed eagerly when he scored, and clapped 
 him warmly very often, to me he appealed no more 
 
 [ 21 ] 
 
than an ingenious electric advertisement, a bottle 
 picked out against the darkness pouring out a foam- 
 ing glass of beer. 
 
 And yet his heart seemed to be in it, as a sales- 
 man's heart has to be in it. Speaking the language 
 of business enterprise, the language with which the 
 great majority were familiar, using his physical 
 antics merely as a device for clinching the story 
 home, he gave to religion a great human pertinence, 
 and he made the affirmation of faith seem creditable 
 and easy. And he defined his own object so that 
 a child could understand. He was a recruiting 
 officer, not a drill sergeant. He spoke for faith 
 in Christ ; he left the rest to the clergy. And to the 
 clergy he said: " If you are too lazy to take care 
 of the baby after it is born, don't blame the doctor." 
 
 It was in his platform manners that Sunday re- 
 called George M. Cohan. When you hear that he 
 goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations of 
 baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is 
 not wild. Needing to arrest the attention of an 
 incredibly large number of people, he adopts various 
 evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It 
 is a physical language with which the vast majority 
 have friendly heroic associations, and for them, 
 spoken so featly and gracefully, it works. Grasp- 
 ing the edge of the platform table as if about to 
 spring like a tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives 
 to his words a drive that makes you tense in your 
 seat. Whipping like a flash from one side of the 
 table to the other, he makes your mind keep unison 
 with his body. He keys you to the pitch that the 
 star baseball player keys you, and although you 
 stiffen when he flings out the name of Christ as if 
 
 [ 22 ] 
 
he were sending a spitball right into your teeth, you 
 realize it is only an odd, apt, popular conventional- 
 ization of the ordinary rhetorical gesture. Call it 
 his bag of tricks, deem it incongruous and stagey, 
 but if Our Lady's Juggler is romantic in grand opera, 
 he is not a whit more j-omantic than this athlete who 
 has adapted beautiful movements to an emphasis of 
 convictions to which the audience nods assent. 
 
 The dissuading devil was conjured by Sunday in 
 his peroration, and then he ended by thanking God 
 for sending him his great opportunity, his vast au- 
 dience, his bouquets and his towels. When he fin- 
 ished, several hundred persons trailed forward to 
 shake hands and confess their faith — bringing the 
 total of " penitents " up to 35,135. 
 
 Bending with a smile to these men and women 
 who intend to live in the faith of Christ, Billy 
 Sunday gives a last impression of kindliness, sin- 
 cerity, tired zeal. And various factory superin- 
 tendents and employers mingle benignly around, 
 glad of a religion that puts on an aching social 
 system such a hot mustard plaster. 
 
 II 
 
 Oyster soup Is a standard item in the money- 
 making church supper. The orphan oyster search- 
 ing vainly for a playmate in an ocean of church 
 soup is a favorite object of Billy Sunday's pity. He 
 loves to caricature the struggling church, with its 
 time-serving, societyfied, tea-drinking, smirking 
 preachers. " The more oyster soup it takes to run 
 a church," he shouts sarcastically, " the faster it 
 runs to the devil." 
 
 [ 23 ] 
 
An attitude so scornful as this may seem highly 
 unconventional to the outsider. It leads him to 
 think that Billy Sunday is a radical. The agility 
 with which the Rev. Billy climbs to the top of his 
 pulpit and then pops to the platform on all fours 
 suggests a corresponding mental agility. He must 
 be a dangerous element in the church, the outsider 
 imagines; he must be a religious revolutionary. 
 And then the outsider beholds John Wanamaker or 
 John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the platform along- 
 side the revivalist — pillars of society, prosperous 
 and respectable gentlemen who instinctively know 
 their business. 
 
 Fond as his friends are of comparing Billy Sun- 
 day to Martin Liuther or John the Baptist, none 
 of them pushes the comparison on the lines of radi- 
 calism, and Sunday himself waives the claim to being 
 considered revolutionary. " I drive the same kind 
 of nails all orthodox preachers do," he says in one of 
 his sermons. " The only difference is that they use 
 a tack hammer and I use a sledge." No one sup- 
 poses that Martin Luther could have said this. 
 Sledge-hammer orthodoxy was not exactly the dis- 
 tinguishing characteristic of Martin Luther. The 
 conservatism of Billy Sunday's message is the first 
 fact about him. Where he differs from the ortho- 
 dox preacher is not in his soul but in his resolution. 
 He has the mind of Martin Tupper rather than of 
 Martin Luther, but it is combined with that compe- 
 tent American aggressiveness which one finds in a 
 large way in George M. Cohan, Theodore Roose- 
 velt, even Ty Cobb. Theology does not interest 
 Billy Sunday. He compares it to ping-pong and 
 compares himself to a jack-rabbit and says he knows 
 
 [ 24 ] 
 
as little about theology as a jack-rabbit knows about 
 ping-pong. What he cares about is religious re- 
 vival. He knows the church is in bitter need of re- 
 vival. He is out to administer digitalis, in his own 
 phrase, instead of oyster soup. 
 
 For many years the church has been waning, and 
 Billy Sunday scorns the effeminate, Hly-handed ef- 
 forts at resuscitation that the churchmen have em- 
 ployed. To put pepperino into a religious cam- 
 paign, to make Christianity hum, requires more 
 than cushioned pews, extra music, coffee and 
 macaroons. Had Billy Sunday been in the regular 
 theatrical business he would not have fussed with 
 a little independent theatre. He would have con- 
 ducted a Hippodrome. To rival the profane 
 world's attractions he sees no reason for rejecting 
 the profane world's methods. So tremendous an 
 object as curing an institution's pernicious anemia 
 justifies the most violent, outrageous experiment. 
 
 If Jesus Christ were a new automobile or an en- 
 cyclopedia or a biscuit, Billy Sunday would have 
 varied the method he has employed in putting Him 
 over, but he would not have varied the spirit of 
 his revival-enterprise in any essential particular. 
 His object, as he sees it, is to sell Christ. It is an 
 old story that from its economic organization so- 
 ciety takes its complexion. The Sunday revival 
 takes its complexion from business enterprise with- 
 out a single serious change. There is one great 
 argument running all through Billy Sunday's ser- 
 mons — the argument that salvation will prove a 
 profitable investment — but much more clearly de- 
 rived from business than the ethics preached by 
 Billy Sunday is the method he has devised for pro- 
 
 [ 25 ] 
 
motlng Jesus Christ. Even the quarrel between 
 " Ma " Sunday and the man who has lost the post- 
 card concession is an illustration of the far-reach- 
 ing efficiency of the system. The point is not that 
 money is being made out of the system. " An effort 
 to corrupt Billy Sunday," to use a paraphrase, 
 " would be a work of supererogation, besides being 
 immoral." If Billy Sunday has a large income, 
 $75,000 or $100,000 a year, it is not because he 
 is mercenary. It is only because a large income is 
 part of the natural fruits of his promoting ability. 
 Left to himself, it is quite unlikely that Billy Sunday 
 would care a straw about his income, beyond enough 
 to live well and to satisfy his vanity about clothes. 
 It is Mrs. Sunday who sees to it that her promoter- 
 husband is not left penniless by those Christian 
 business men who so delightedly utilize his services. 
 The backbone of Billy Suhday's success is organ- 
 ization. When organization has delivered the 
 crowd, Billy is ready to sweat for it and spit for it 
 and war-whoop for it and dive for base before the 
 devil can reach him. He is ready to have " Rody " 
 come on the programme with his slide-trombone and 
 to have any volunteer who wishes to do it hit the 
 sawdust-trail. But he does not let his success de- 
 pend on any programme. His audiences are, in 
 great measure, contracted for in advance. It is in 
 grasping the necessity for this kind of prepared- 
 ness, in taking from the business world its lessons 
 as to canvassing and advertising and standardizing 
 the goods, that Billy can afford to jeer at oyster 
 soup. As his authorized biographer complacently 
 says, " John the Baptist was only a voice : but Billy 
 Sunday is a voice, plus a bewildering array of com- 
 
 [ 26 ] 
 
mittees and assistants and organized machinery. He 
 has committees galore to cooperate in his work: a 
 drilled Army of the Lord. In the list of Scranton 
 workers that is before me I see tabulated an execu- 
 tive committee, the directors, a prayer-meeting com- 
 mittee, an entertainment committee, an usher com- 
 mittee, a dinner committee, a business women's 
 committee, a building committee, a nursery com- 
 mittee, a personal worker's committee, a decorating 
 committee, a shop-meetings committee — and then 
 a whole list of churches and religious organizations 
 in the city as ex officio workers ! " In New York 
 on April 9th there was a private meeting of 7,000 
 personal workers, " another step in the direction of 
 greasing the campaign." 
 
 Unless Billy Sunday had some skill as a per- 
 former he naturally could not hold his place as a 
 revivalist. His success consists largely, however, 
 in the legendary character that has been given him 
 by all the agencies that seek to promote this des- 
 perate revival of orthodox religion. His acrobatic 
 stunts on the platform are sufficiently shocking to 
 make good publicity. His much-advertised slang, 
 repeated over and over, has a similar sensational 
 value. But the main point about him is the drama- 
 tization of his own personality. His virility is per- 
 haps his chief stock-in-trade. No one, not Mr. 
 Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much on his per- 
 sonal militant mascuHnity. Although well over 
 fifty, his youthful prowess as a baseball-player is 
 still a headline-item in his story, and every sermon 
 he preaches gives him a chance to prove he Is 
 physically fit. In addition to this heroic character- 
 istic there is his fame as a self-made man. He is 
 
 [ 27 ] 
 
a plain man of the people, as he never fails to 
 Insist. He carries " the malodors of the barnyard " 
 with him. But he has succeeded. The cost of his 
 special tabernacle is one of his big distinctions. 
 The size of his collections is another. His personal 
 fortune, in spite of all criticism, is a third. Besides 
 these heroic attributes of strength and wealth there 
 is his melodramatic simplicity of mind. All of his 
 sermons are " canned " and a great deal of the 
 material in them is borrowed, but he manages to 
 deliver his message straight from the shoulder, as 
 if it were his own. There can be no doubt that his 
 shouting, his slang, his familiarity with Jesus, his 
 buttonholing old God, his slang-version of the Bible; 
 do offend large numbers of people. They arrest 
 attention so successfully, even in these cases, that 
 they turn out to be well advised. There is nothing 
 spontaneous about these antics. They are switched 
 on at the beginning of a revival and switched off as 
 it succeeds. They are Sunday's native way of light- 
 ing up the strait and narrow path with wriggling 
 electric signs. 
 
 Billy Sunday has too much energy to stick com- 
 pletely fast in the mud of conservatism. He is 
 capable of advocating sex instruction for the young, 
 for example, and he permits himself the wild radi- 
 calism of woman suffrage. But as regards vested 
 interests and patriotism and war he is a conserva- 
 tive, practically a troglodyte. What he attacks 
 with fervor are the delinquents in ordinary conduct, 
 especially the people who lack self-control. 
 " Booze-hoisters " and card-players and tango- 
 dancers and cigarette-smokers are his pet abomina- 
 tions — genuine abominations. Profanity, strange 
 
 [ 28 ] 
 
to say, is another evil that he fights with fire. 
 Honesty, sobriety, chastity — these are virtues that 
 he exalts, illustrating the horror of failing in them 
 by means of innumerable chromatic anecdotes. 
 The devil he constantly attacks, though never with 
 real solemnity. " The devil has been practicing for 
 six thousand years and he has never had appendicitis, 
 rheumatism or tonsilitis. If you get to playing tag 
 with the devil he will beat you every chip." It is 
 more for spice and snap that he introduces the devil 
 than to terrify his public. The Bible is his serious 
 theme, and he feels about it almost the way Martin 
 Tupper did: 
 
 The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion 
 
 volume, 
 The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our 
 
 Rights . . . 
 It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare 
 A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible! 
 The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark. 
 And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning. 
 And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions. 
 In spite of learned unbelief, — we hold it all plain truth: 
 Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study; 
 Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and 
 
 Colenso . . . 
 The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian 
 
 nation . . . 
 The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square, 
 The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws . . . 
 Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salva- 
 tion. 
 
 One of Billy Sunday's boasts is that the liquor 
 interests hate him. " That dirty, stinking bunch of 
 
 [ 29 ] 
 
moral assassins hires men to sit in the audience to 
 hear me, to write down what I say and then try 
 to find some author who said something Hke it, and 
 accuse me of having stolen my ideas. I know that 
 $30,000 was offered a man in New York City to 
 write a series of articles attacking me. All right; 
 if you know anything about me that you want to 
 publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is 
 a dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole 
 thing is a frame-up from A to Izzard. I'll fight 
 them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a pair 
 of skates. By the grace of God, I've helped to 
 make Colorado and Nebraska and Iowa and Mich- 
 igan and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice on 
 the dirty gang that I'll help to make the whole 
 nation dry." (New York Times, April 19th, 
 1917.) 
 
 Assuming these points to be well taken, there is 
 still great room to doubt the deep religious effect 
 of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like William Allen 
 White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf 
 in Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many 
 hundred human beings for moral stimulus in a time 
 of need. In spite of the thousands who have hit the 
 sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that 
 more than a tiny proportion of his auditors are re- 
 ligiously affected by him. The great majority of 
 those who hit the trail are people who merely want 
 to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of 
 seriousness or " conversion." The atmosphere of 
 the tabernacle, bright with electric light and friendly 
 with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and 
 in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is 
 seldom a contagious note. His audiences are curi- 
 
 [ 30 ] 
 
ous to see him and hear him. He is a remarkable 
 public entertainer, and much that he says has keen 
 humor and verbal art and horse sense. But for all 
 his militancy, for all his pugnacious vociferation, he 
 leaves an impression of being at once violent and 
 incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but 
 not a guide or a friend. 
 
 Still, as between Billy Sunday's gymnastics and 
 the average oyster soup, Messrs. Wanamaker and 
 Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday. 
 Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of car- 
 pets and socks, Socony and Nujol, and if Christ 
 could have been put over in the same way, by live- 
 wire salesmanship, Billy was the man. 
 
 [ 31 ] 
 
FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND 
 STREET 
 
 I 
 
 1 HOUGH you do not know it, I have a soul. 
 Behold, across the way, my library. When the 
 night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees 
 shake out their greenery against the white stone- 
 work, do, you not catch a suggestion of atmosphere, 
 something of a mood? And the black cliffs around, 
 with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the 
 width of them, are they not monuments? I cleave 
 brilliantly, up and down this dormant city. It is 
 for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plod- 
 ding milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speed- 
 ing her lover's motor. Heed my long silences, my 
 slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed. 
 My buildings come about me to muse and to com- 
 mune. Receive, for once on Fifth Avenue, the soul 
 that is imprisoned in my stone and steel." 
 
 It is not for the respectable, this polite com- 
 munication. Theatre and club and restaurant have 
 long since disgorged these. New York has masti- 
 cated their money. They have done as they should 
 and are restored uptown. Even the old news- 
 woman, she who had spent starving months in the 
 Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war, 
 she has tottered from her stand down by the station. 
 The Hungarian waiter in Childs' is still there, still 
 
 [ 32 ] 
 
assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat 
 cakes, but that Is off the avenue. It is three, the 
 avenue is nearly empty. It is ready to disclose its 
 soul. 
 
 But before this subtle performance there is a pre- 
 liminary. It is a very self-respecting avenue and 
 at three on a pleasant morning, when no one is 
 around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath. 
 Perhaps a few motors go by — a taxi rolling north, 
 heavy with night thoughts, a tired white face framed 
 in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking 
 loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its 
 suburban chores. The Italian acolytes are impar- 
 tial. They spray the wheels of a touring car with 
 gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a pow- 
 erful stream under the hubs of a. Nassau News 
 wagon trundling to a train. The avenue must be 
 refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nod- 
 ding approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must 
 be prepared for the sun, under bold lamps and 
 timid stars. 
 
 A fine young morning, the watchman promises. 
 A bit of wind whiffles the water that is shot out from 
 the white-wing's hose, but It Is clearing up above 
 and looks well for the day. The hour beckons 
 memories for the watchman — fine young mornings 
 he used to have long ago. In Ireland, a boy on his 
 first adventure and he driving with the barley to 
 Ross. 
 
 It is an empty street. The hose Is wheeled away 
 over the glistening asphalt. The watchman disap- 
 pears — he has a cozy nook beyond the ken of 
 time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pil- 
 low, to hide a diminished head. With man ac- 
 
 [ 33 ] 
 
counted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to 
 the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion, 
 the buildings have their moment. Each tower 
 stretches his proud height to the morning. The 
 stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed. 
 
 II 
 
 Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it can- 
 not hold the virgin morning forever. Its windows 
 may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind the 
 walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life. 
 
 " Give us this day our daily bread." A saintly 
 venerable horse seems to know the injunction. 
 Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it 
 usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord. 
 
 And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the 
 prayer about clams, but some one in Mount Vernon 
 is destined to have them quickly. Out of the mys- 
 terious south, racing against time, a little motor flits 
 onward with gaping barrels of clams. At a decent 
 interval comes a heavier load of fish. Great express 
 wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest 
 uses of Fifth Avenue begin. 
 
 Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies. 
 The grocer and the greengrocer are early on their 
 rounds. Blit an empty American News truck con- 
 fesses that eternal vigilance is the price of circula- 
 tion. Its gait is swifter than the gait of milkman 
 or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and dew are on 
 the florist's wheels: he has come whistling by the 
 swamps of Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs 
 lightly past the juggernauts that crush down. 
 
 [ 34 ] 
 
Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His 
 trucks hurl from Grand Central to make the sub- 
 stations. But his is not the pride of place. Nor 
 is it coal or farmers' feed that appropriates the 
 middle of the street. The noblest wagons, a long 
 parade of them, announce the greater glory of beer. 
 The temperance advocate may shudder at the dese- 
 cration of the morning. He may observe " Hell 
 Gate Brewery " and nod his sickly nod. But there 
 is something about this large preparedness for thirst 
 that stills the carping worm of conscience. It is 
 good to see what solid, ample caravans are re- 
 quired to replenish man with beer. It is not the 
 single glass that is glorious. It is not even the 
 single car-load. It is the steady, deliberate, ponder- 
 ous procession that streams through the early hours. 
 Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy 
 of beer-wagons. It satisfied the faith that there 
 was Design in creation, but the Percheron is not 
 needed. There is the same institutional impressive- 
 ness about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer. 
 
 Ill 
 
 "Number, please?" She is anonymous, that 
 inquirer. But behind her anonymity there is hu- 
 manity. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street 
 caught a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M. 
 
 She was up at five in the morning. She had a 
 pang as she put on her check suit, slightly darker 
 than her check coat lined with pink. Her little hat, 
 however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked 
 breakfast while she set the table. Then she walked 
 
 [ 35 ] 
 
to the Third Avenue " L " with her friend. They 
 got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to 
 Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked 
 along Forty-second Street in time for them to do a 
 brief window-shopping as they passed the shirt- 
 waists at Forsythe's. Her friend's bronze shoes she 
 envied as they crossed the little park back of the 
 Library. On Sixth Avenue they inspected the win- 
 dow at Bernstein's. A sHght argument engrossed 
 them. They hovered over the window, chirping not 
 unlike the sparrows in Bryant Park. Then, in a 
 flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone 
 company to begin their " Number, please." 
 
 An hour earlier laborers with dinner-pails had 
 crossed Fifth Avenue, and hatless Polish girls on 
 their way to scrub. By seven o'clock the negro 
 porters and laborers were giving way to white-collar 
 strap-hangers on the elevateds and in the subway. 
 It was getting to be the hour of salesmen and sales- 
 girls and office-boys and shop-subordinates and 
 clerks. The girls back of the scenes at the mil- 
 liner's, they go up Fifth Avenue at seven, to take 
 one side-street or another. The girl who sells you 
 a toothbrush in the drug-store hurries by the shop 
 windows, herself as neat as a model. Is it early? 
 Myriads of men are pouring down already. Be- 
 sides, " 'S use of kickin' ? If you don't like it, you 
 can walk out I " 
 
 The night-watchman is going home, and an old at- 
 tendant from the Grand Central. "Tired, Pop?" 
 " Yeh, p'tty tired." " What right 've you to git 
 tired workin' for a big corporation? " The op- 
 pressed wage-slave bellows, " Ha, ha." 
 
 [ 36 ] 
 
IV 
 
 Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in 
 the afternoon. The diastole of travelers had 
 spread all morning from Grand Central ; the systole 
 is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in 
 the afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the 
 suburbs, tearing their way through the weaker 
 streams that are drawn up by the neighboring shops 
 and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and 
 Sherry's and Delmonico's and the Manhattan and 
 the Belmont are no longer columnar monuments, 
 holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the hu- 
 man floods which they suck in and spray out. The 
 street itself is lost to memory and vision. A swollen 
 stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are 
 permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its rest- 
 less bosom the freight of curiosity and pride and 
 favor. One might fancy, to gaze on this mad 
 throng of motors, that a new religious sect had con- 
 quered the universe, worshipers of a machine. 
 
 It is the hour of white gloves and delicate pro- 
 files, the feminine hour. A little later there will be 
 more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from 
 work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to 
 believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a per- 
 sonality, parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivo- 
 lous, composed of many styles and many types. 
 The working world intersects it rudely at Forty- 
 second Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualifi- 
 cation distinguishes those who turn up and down the 
 Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, 
 or money, but their sense that there is romance in 
 
 [ 37 ] 
 
the appearance of money and leisure. Many of the 
 white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are 
 not white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth 
 Avenue. One may pretend the world is gay. 
 
 They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds 
 on Fifth Avenue. They move as by personal will. 
 But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, com- 
 mon attractions govern them. There is a rhythm 
 in these human tides. 
 
 V 
 
 For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the in- 
 sects. He stayed with his friend the spider the 
 round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider, 
 is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the 
 scene-shifter and the detective. Some day we should 
 pitch a metropolitan observatory at the corner of 
 Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, — some day, 
 if we can find the time. 
 
 [ 38 ] 
 
AS AN ALIEN FEELS 
 
 1 WENTY-FIVE years ago I knew but dimly that 
 the United States existed. My first dream of it 
 came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay 
 flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. 
 It was a Wild West Show, and for years I asso- 
 ciated America with the intoxication of the circus 
 and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. 
 "Two a penny, two a penny, large penny oranges! 
 Buy away an' ate away, large penny oranges ! " 
 They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor 
 of them and the fumes of circus excitement gave me 
 a first gay ribald sense of the United States. 
 
 The next allied sense was gathered from a scalla- 
 wag uncle. He had sought his fortune in America 
 — sought it, as. I infer now, on the rear end of a 
 horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd 
 and delicious oaths. " Gosh hell hang it " was his 
 chief touch of American culture. He was a 
 " Yank " in local parlance, a frequently drunken 
 Yank. His fine drooping mustache too often 
 drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I 
 steadied him home under the October stars and ab- 
 sorbed a long alcoholic reverie on the Horseshoe 
 Falls. As we slept together that night in the rat- 
 pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all 
 the horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver 
 over the wonderments of the Horseshoe Falls. 
 
 This, with an instilled idea that America and 
 [ 39 ] 
 
America alone could offer " work," foreshadowed 
 the American landscape. It is the bald hope of 
 work that finally magnetizes us hither. But every 
 dream and every loyalty was with the unhappy land 
 from which I came. 
 
 For many months the music of New York harbor 
 spoke only of home. Every outgoing steamer that 
 opened its throat made me homesick. America was 
 New York, and New York was down town, and 
 down town was a vortex of new duties. There I 
 learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning 
 a living, and the art of eating at Childs'. At night 
 the hall-bedroom near Broadway, and the resource- 
 less promenade up and down Broadway for amuse- 
 ment. The only women to say " dear," the women 
 who say it on the street. 
 
 In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United 
 States. The word " settlement " gave me my first 
 puzzled intimation that there was somewhere a clew 
 to this grim struggle down town. I had looked 
 for it in boarding-houses. I had looked for it in 
 stenographic night-schools. I had sought it in the 
 blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long 
 jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among 
 the street-walkers, the first to proffer intimacy. 
 And of course, not being clever enough, I had over- 
 looked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at 
 home. 
 
 America dawned for me in a social settlement. 
 It dawned for me as a civilization and a faith. In 
 all my first experiences of my employers I got not 
 one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was 
 the language of smartness, alertness, brightness, suc- 
 cess, efficiency, and I tried to learn it, but it was a 
 
 [ 40 ] 
 
difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were law- 
 yers, but they were interested in penmanship and 
 ability to clean ink-bottles. Some of them were 
 business men, but they were interested in ability to 
 typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not 
 their fault. Ours was not an affair of the heart. 
 But if it had not been for the social settlement, I 
 should still be an alien to the bone. 
 
 Till I knew a social settlement the American flag 
 was still a flag on a circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. 
 The cheapness of the United States was the mes- 
 sage of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaude- 
 ville and Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, 
 of the promenade on Broadway. In the social set- 
 tlement I came on something entirely different. 
 Here on the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of 
 something besides success. The house was saturated 
 In the perfume of the stockyards, to make It sweet. 
 A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make 
 it musical. It was thronged with Jews and Greeks 
 and Italians and soulful visitors, to make It restful. 
 It was inhabited by highstrung residents, to make it 
 easy. But it was the first place in all America 
 where there came to me a sense of the Intention of 
 democracy, the first place where I found a flame 
 by which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer 
 words about It. The men, I learned, were molly- 
 coddles, and the women were sexually unemployed. 
 The ruling class spoke of " unsettlement workers " 
 with animosity, the socialists of a mealy-mouthed 
 compromise. Yet in that strange haven of clear 
 humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I 
 had been seeking — the knowledge that America had 
 a soul. 
 
 [ 41 ] 
 
How one discovers these things it is hard to put 
 honestly. It is like trying to recall the first fair 
 wind of spring. But I know that slowly and un- 
 consciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed 
 out the asperity of alienism. There were Ameri- 
 cans of many kinds in residence, from Illinois, from 
 Michigan, from New York, English-Americans, 
 R'ussian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German- 
 Americans, men who had gone to Princeton and 
 Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn 
 Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the 
 Americanism was of a kind that opened to the least 
 pressure from without, and never shall I forget the 
 way these residents with their " North Side " friends 
 had managed so graciously to domesticate the an- 
 nual festival of my own nationality. That, strange 
 though it may seem, is the more real sort of Ameri- 
 canization Day. 
 
 From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturaliz- 
 ing alien breathes in American air, but I doubt if I 
 should have ever known the meaning of Walt Whit- 
 man had I not lived in that initiating home. It was 
 easy in later years to see new meanings in the Amer- 
 ican flag, to stand with Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, 
 but it was in the settlement I found the sources from 
 which It was dyed. For there, to my amazement, 
 one was not expected to believe that man's proper 
 place is on a Procrustean bed of profiteering. A 
 different tradition of America lived there, one in 
 which the earlier faiths had come through, in which 
 the way to heaven was not necessarily up a sky- 
 scraper. In New England, later, I found many 
 ideas of which the settlement was symptomatic, but 
 as I imbibed them they were " America " for me. 
 
 [42 ] 
 
What it means to come at last Into possession 
 of Lincoln, whose spirit Is so precious to the social 
 settlement, Is probably unintelligible to Lincoln's 
 normal inheritors. To understand this, however. 
 Is to understand the birth of a loyalty. In the coun- 
 tries from which we come there have been men of 
 such humane Ideals, but they have almost without 
 exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of 
 the peoples of Europe have not been the governors 
 of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of the 
 governed. But here among America's governors 
 and statesmen was a simple authenticator of humane 
 Ideals. To inherit him becomes for the European 
 not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary 
 of them in a new. In the microcosm of the settle- 
 ment perhaps Lincolnism Is too simple. Many of 
 one's promptest acqulescences are revised as one 
 meets and eats with the ruling class later on. But 
 the salt of this American soil Is Lincoln. When 
 one finds that, one is naturalized. 
 
 It is curious how the progress of naturalization 
 becomes revealed to one. I still recollect with a 
 thrill the first time I attended a national political 
 convention and listened to the roll-call of the States. 
 "Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!" Empty names 
 for many years, at last they were filled with one 
 clear concept, the concept of the democratic experi- 
 ment. " As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning 
 walk " — the living appeal to each state by name 
 recalled Whitman's generous amusing scope. " Far 
 breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd! 
 The diverse ! The compact ! The Pennsylvanlan ! 
 The Virginian! The double Carolinian!" The 
 orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke Whit- 
 
 [ 43 ] 
 
man. It was intended, as It happened, to evoke 
 votes for Taft and Sherman. But even these men 
 were parts of the democratic experiment. And the 
 vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as 
 the empurpled Penrose did not answer. It was they 
 who were the leaves of our grass. 
 
 In Whitman, as William James has shown, there 
 is an arrant mysticism which his own Democratic 
 Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this credulity 
 as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an 
 alien is likely to enter if his first intimacy with Amer- 
 ica came in the aliens' creche. A settlement is a 
 creche for the step-children of Europe, and it is 
 hard not to credit America at large with some of 
 the impulses which make the settlement. Such, at 
 any rate, is the tendency I experienced myself. 
 
 With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United 
 States? I think of Lincoln and his effected mysti- 
 cism by Union, union for the experiment, and I feel 
 alive within me a complete identification with this 
 land. The keenest realization of the nation reached 
 me, as I recall, the first time I saw the capitol in 
 Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up the 
 hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets 
 gleaming after a warm shower. The plaza in front 
 of the capitol was deserted. A few high sentinel 
 lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and 
 scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the 
 dome. Standing apart completely by myself, I felt 
 as never before the union of which this strength and 
 simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the 
 night, the scent of April pervading it, gave to the 
 lonely building a dignity such as I had seldom felt 
 before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and 
 
 [ 44 ] 
 
achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, 
 for a quiet faith in the peoples and states that lay 
 away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, I thought, 
 had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night 
 in April, and felt the same promise of spring. 
 
 [45 ] 
 
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT 
 
 One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the 
 pursuit of the secret of life. That secret, however, 
 is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible to me, some- 
 where in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten, 
 it taunts my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help mak- 
 ing a lunge after it. But tied to the ball there 
 seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye 
 fixes the secret of life but it escapes my paw. 
 
 During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had 
 it. It involved a great deal of stern discipline. 
 Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston garters 
 and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, 
 hot baths followed by rolling in the snow and jiu 
 jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu hinted at the very secret 
 itself. Here was the crude West seeking to slug its 
 way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had 
 only to lay hold of life by the little finger to reduce it 
 to squealing submission. The sinister power of jiu 
 jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn it 
 we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme 
 of effortless subtlety. A people with such an art, 
 combined with ennobling vegetarianism, must neces- 
 sarily be a superior people. I privately believed 
 that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the 
 Russian fleet. 
 
 Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my 
 soul and supplanted it with a colossal contempt 
 
 [46 ] 
 
for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already 
 protested. No nation could hope to take the field 
 that subsisted on heavy foods — such unclean things 
 as sausages and beer. The secret of world mastery 
 was a diet of rice. " We all eat too much " became 
 a fixed conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a 
 greater conviction — we all sleep too much as well. 
 This thought had first come to me from Arnold Ben- 
 nett. Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. 
 We sleep ourselves stupid. Who could not afford 
 to lose a minute's sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute 
 a day — who would miss it? And in 500 days you 
 would have got down to the classical forty winks. 
 Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He 
 modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its 
 successful practicability. To cut down sleep and cut 
 down food was the only way to function like a super- 
 man. 
 
 Once started on this question of habits I spent a 
 life of increasing turmoil. From Plato I heard the 
 word moderation, but from William Blake I learned 
 that " the road of excess leads to the palace of wis- 
 dom." From Benjamin Franklin I gathered the 
 importance of good habits, but William James glee- 
 fully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. 
 And then came Scientific Management. 
 
 The concept of scientific management practically 
 wrecked my life. I discovered that there was a 
 right way of doing everything and that I was doing 
 everything wrongly. It was no new Idea to me that 
 we were all astray about the simplest things. We 
 did not know how to breathe properly. We did 
 not know how to sit properly. We did not know 
 how to walk properly. We wore a hard hat : it was 
 
 [47 ] 
 
making us bald. We wore pointed shoes : it was un- 
 fair to our little toe. But scientific management did 
 not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly 
 pointed out that " waste motions " were the chief 
 characteristic of our lives. 
 
 One of the most fantastic persons in the world is 
 the public official who, before he can write a postal 
 order or a tax receipt, has to make preliminary curls 
 of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific 
 eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our 
 effective motions could be registered on a visual tar- 
 get, our record would be found to resemble that of 
 savages who use ammunition without a sight on their 
 guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier's marks- 
 manship is wasteful, we may well look to ourselves. 
 Our life is peppered with motions that fly wide and 
 wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms 
 — waste motion! We ought to utilize that ges- 
 ture for pohshing our shoes. We rub our eyes — 
 more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sun- 
 day for the rest of the week. But it is in processes 
 like shaving that scientific management is really 
 needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave 
 with the minimum of gesture. They believe that 
 they complete the operation under five minutes. 
 But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that 
 under the inspection of the scientific manager their 
 performance would look as jagged as their razor- 
 blade under the microscope ? The day will probably 
 arrive when a superman will shave with one superb 
 motion, as delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of 
 an orange-skin in one long unbroken peel. 
 
 In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the 
 haphazard, unscrutinized conduct of his morn. We 
 
 [ 48 ] 
 
pick up our paper without any suspicion that we are 
 about to commit intellectual felony. We do not 
 know that the news editor is in a conspiracy to play 
 on our minds. If men gyrate too much physically, 
 they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start 
 to look over the news. It is not so much that they 
 begin the day with devouring the details of a mur- 
 der or lull themselves with some excuse for not read- 
 ing a British note on the blockade. It is the fact 
 that they are led by a ring running through their in- 
 stincts to obey the particular editors they read. 
 
 Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot un- 
 derstand how the human race has survived. Even 
 conceding that I was normal, it is so much the worse 
 for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous 
 breed. There is not one important layman's prac- 
 tice that we have organized with regard to discipline 
 and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in lay- 
 ing bricks, how about the motions wasted in lift- 
 ing one's hat and the circumvolutions in putting links 
 in one's cuffs? How about the impulsive child who 
 wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a 
 hug? The discovery seemed chilly that everything 
 could be scientifically managed, everything could be 
 perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at 
 the center of one's life. But a fear of being chilly 
 is a mark of inferiority. It ill becomes a human 
 machine. 
 
 Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours 
 a day, with vague longings to eat very little and 
 sleep very little and master jiu jitsu and breathe deep 
 and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and 
 give up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scien- 
 tifically and save waste motions in putting on my 
 
 [49 ] 
 
shirt, I happened to come across two European 
 thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paral- 
 leling Shakespeare's knowledge of dead languages 
 by my own knowledge of live ones, I could not read 
 these masters in the original to determine whether 
 they blended like oil and vinegar or fought like water 
 and oil. But in the eagerness of philosophic 
 poverty I grasped just two delightful words from 
 them, " instinct " and " repression." The meta- 
 physician's secret of life, apparently, was to drop 
 using one's so-called intelligence so frantically, to be- 
 come more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena 
 and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put 
 the Ten Commandments In their place. To tell the 
 truth, his detection of " repression " gave me no 
 tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the 
 evolutionist turned my thoughts away from the early 
 worries of discipline. This is the latest ball in the 
 air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of 
 any tantalizing invisible string. 
 
 [ 50 ] 
 
THE NEXT NEW YORK 
 
 I OU'D get awfully tired if I told you everything 
 about my visit to New York in A. D. 1991. Some 
 things are too complicated even to refer to, many 
 things I've already forgotten, and a number of things 
 I didn't understand. But as I had to return to my 
 work as prison doctor in 19 19 after a week of 1991 
 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest 
 you. I hope I can give them to you straight. 
 
 The people on the street took my eye the minute 
 I arrived in town. They looked so pleasing and 
 they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at 
 present, with the long indoor working day and the 
 mixture of embalmed and storage and badly cooked 
 food, the number of pasty-faced and emaciated men 
 and women is very high. I exempt the hearty 
 sweating classes like the structural iron workers and 
 teamsters and porters and even policemen. You 
 could recruit a fine-looking club from the building 
 trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue 
 and size up the condition of the passers-by. You 
 see shopgirls in thin cotton who are under-weight, 
 under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. 
 You see pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You 
 see weary, fish-eyed mothers who look as if every 
 day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle- 
 aged people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. 
 A little earlier in the afternoon it's almost impossible 
 
 [ 51 ] 
 
to share the sidewalk with the squat factory hands 
 who overflow at the lunch hour. They're hard to 
 kill, these poor fellows, but they're a puny, stink- 
 ing, stunted, ill-favored horde. But the greater 
 cleanhness of the people later on, and their better 
 clothes, doesn't put them in a very different class. 
 You hear a good deal about the queens you see, but, 
 really, the city streets of New York in 19 19, stream- 
 ing with people who have dun clothes to match dun 
 faces, make you wonder what's the use. 
 
 These people in 1991 were good to look at! The 
 three-hour working day had a lot to do with it, of 
 course, and the basic economic changes. But what 
 leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge 
 responsibility that had gone to hygienists. I mean 
 educational and administrative. In 1991, I found, 
 people were really acting on the theory that you 
 can't have civilization without sound bodies. The 
 idea itself was as old as an old joke, a platitude 
 in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city was 
 working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this 
 meant a total revision of ordinary conduct. 
 
 Building the Panama Canal was a simple little 
 job compared to making New York hygienic. 
 Thirty years must have been spent in getting the 
 folks to realize that no man and woman had any 
 hygienic excuse for breeding children within the city 
 limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before it was 
 official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At 
 first mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were 
 confiscated, but in the end they came to see justice in 
 the human version of the slogan, " an acre and a 
 cow." It got rid of the good old city-bred medical 
 formula that the best way to handle pregnancy is to 
 
 [ 52 ] 
 
handle it as a pathological condition. Of course this 
 prohibition movement made all sorts of people mad. 
 A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long 
 time on the score of personal liberty.. Women had 
 private city babies where the inspectors couldn't get 
 at them. You know, just Hke private whisky. But 
 in the end the prohibitionists won, and it had an 
 enormous effect on cleaning up Manhattan. It cut 
 out all but the detached and the transient residents, 
 and with the breathing space rules, these were far 
 less than you'd suppose. Even with the great area 
 of garden-roofs, the fixed residents were not much 
 more than 100,000. 
 
 This demobilization wasn't special to New York. 
 In other places there were much more rigid " units." 
 Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit size of cities 
 in 1 99 1. The old sprawling haphazard hetero- 
 geneous city gave place to the " modern " unit, 
 permanent residences within the city never being 
 open to families that had children under fourteen. 
 For the heads of such families, however, the trans- 
 portation problem was beautifully solved. Every 
 unit city came to be so constructed that within half 
 an hour of the " fresh air and exercise " homes, men 
 and women could reach factories and warehouses 
 in one direction, and offices and courts and banks and 
 exchanges in another. - This was after they realized 
 the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirt- 
 less, swift, freight train took the place of most 
 trucks, and of course the remaining trucks shot up 
 and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. An- 
 other thing that interested me was the plexus of all 
 the things that are to be exhibited. This involved a 
 great problem for New York before factories were 
 
 [ 53 ] 
 
deported and the moving " H. G. Wells " sidewalks 
 introduced. How to economize time and space, and 
 yet not produce too close a homogeneity, too protein 
 an intellectual and aesthetic and social diet, became 
 a fascinating question. But the devotion of Black- 
 well's Island to summer and winter art and music, 
 with all the other islands utilized for permanent ex- 
 hibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. 
 The islands were made charming. I was quite 
 struck over there, I think, on a new island in Flush- 
 ing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing, 
 where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on 
 an endless belt, that stopped when you wanted it to 
 — the kind that art exhibitions adopted for certain 
 purposes. You see, the old department stores had 
 passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and 
 display advertising and the non-preventive physician. 
 And the old game of " seasons " and fashions was 
 abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Conde 
 Nast for the undermining of the taste of shopgirls. 
 The job of the purchasing consumer was steadily 
 simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly early 
 in life what they could and what they couldn't do 
 personally in the use of color. No one thought of 
 copying another's color or design in dress any more 
 than of copying another's oculist prescription. And 
 with the guild consultants always ready to help out 
 the troubled buyer, the business of shopping for 
 clothes became as exciting and intelligent as the pas- 
 time of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, 
 backed up by the guilds, a daring employment of 
 color became generally favored. But a big item in 
 this programme was the refusal of the guilds to pre- 
 scribe any costumes for people who needed medical 
 
 [ 54 ] 
 
care first. It was useless, the guilds said, to deco- 
 rate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed. 
 
 So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound 
 body. In the hygienic riots of 1936 some horrible 
 lynchings took place. An expert from the Chicago 
 stockyards was then running the New York subways. 
 He devised the upper-berth system by which the 
 space between people's heads and the roof of the 
 car could be used on express trains for hanging up 
 passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a 
 few thousand citizens had failed to respond to the 
 pulmotor which was kept at every station to revive 
 weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to 
 decent transportation became a real public issue. 
 The hygienists made the great popular mistake of 
 trying to save the stockyards man. They knew he 
 had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho- 
 analyzing him and showing he had always wanted to 
 skin cats alive, they could put the traction question 
 on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of 
 that era took up the issue on the so-called popular 
 side. He denounced the hygienists as heartless ex- 
 perts and showed how science was really a conspiracy 
 in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots re- 
 sulted in a miserable set-back to the compulsory 
 psycho-analysis of all criminals, but the bloody assas- 
 sination of the leading hygienist of the day brought 
 about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge 
 was allowed to serve who wasn't an expert in psychic 
 work and hygiene. This decision was greatly aided 
 by the publication of a brochure revealing the rela- 
 tion of criminal verdicts to the established neuroses 
 of city magistrates. The promise that this work 
 would be extended and pubhshed as a supplement to 
 
 [ 55 1 
 
the Federal Reporter went a long way toward con- 
 verting the Bar. The old pretensions of the Bar 
 went rapidly to pieces when political use was made of 
 important psychological and physiological facts. 
 The hygienists spoke of " the mighty stream of mor- 
 bid compulsion broadening down to more morbid 
 compulsion." By 1950 no man with an CEdipus 
 complex could even get on the Real Estate ticket, and 
 the utter collapse of militarism came about with the 
 magnificently scientific biographies of all the promi- 
 nent armament advocates in the evil era. 
 
 I had a surprise coming for me In the total dis- 
 appearance of prisons. Though I hate to confess 
 It, I was a little amazed when I found that the old 
 penology was just as historical in 1991 as the method- 
 ology of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did 
 possess models of prisons like Sing Sing and Tren- 
 ton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny ad- 
 vances In the latter prisons were thought amusing. 
 But the deformity of the human minds and the social 
 systems that permitted such prisons as ours was a 
 matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, 
 even in casual unspeclalized groups. This general 
 Intelligence made it clear to me that social hygiene 
 was never understood up to the middle of the 
 twentieth century. The very name, after all, was 
 appropriated by men afraid to specify the sex dis- 
 eases they were then cleaning up. Puritanism, serv- 
 iceable as It was in its time, had kept men from ob- 
 taining and examining the evidence necessary to right 
 conclusions about conduct. " Think," said one de- 
 lightful youth to me, on my first day in 199 1, " think 
 of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological 
 laws of continence. Think of starting out after gen- 
 
 [ 56 ] 
 
eral physical well-being by the preposterous road of 
 universal military service. Think of electing Con- 
 gressmen in the old days without applying even the 
 Binet test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing 
 about ' the pursuit of happiness,' fair as that object 
 is, and yet we should no more stand for such indis- 
 criminateness than we'd allow a day to go by with- 
 out swimming." 
 
 The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, 
 what we call a girl. I had nothing to say to her. 
 Biit my mind shot back to 19 19, to which I was so 
 soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire's de- 
 vice I had once seen in Chicago. Deep in the base- 
 .aent of a great factory building there was a small 
 jlectric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was 
 a gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on 
 which was strapped an ordinary leather saddle. In 
 front of the saddle there rose two thin steel sticks, 
 and out of them came thin leather reins. By means 
 of a clever arrangement of springs down below that 
 responded to an electric current, the whole mechan- 
 ism was able to move up and down and backward 
 and forward in short stabby jerks that were sup- 
 posed to stir up your gizzard in practically the same 
 way as the motion of a horse. This was, in fact, 
 a synthetic horse, bearing the same aesthetic relation 
 to a real horse that a phonograph song does to a 
 real song that is poured out, so to speak, in the sun. 
 And here, in the bald basement cell with its two 
 barred basement windows (closed), the constipated 
 millionaires take their turns, whenever they can bear 
 it, going through the canned motions of a ride, star- 
 ing with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front 
 of them. So far, in 19 19, had the worship of 
 
 [ 57 1 
 
Hygeia carried the helot-captains of industry. And 
 from that basement, from that heathen symbol of 
 perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary 
 acteptance of the human body and a primary law 
 that Its necessities be everywhere observed. Not 
 such a great accomplishment, I thought. In seventy 
 years. And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they 
 had to have for the happiness they long for. 
 
 [58 1 
 
CHICAGO 
 
 J\. GOOD deal of nonsense is talked about the per- 
 sonality of towns. What most people enjoy about 
 a town is familiarity, not personality, and they can 
 give no penetrating account of their affection. 
 " What is the finest town in the world? " the New 
 York reporters recently asked a young recruit, eager 
 for him to eulogize New York. " Why," he an- 
 swered, " San Malo, France. I was born there." 
 That is the usual reason, perhaps the best reason, 
 why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is 
 autobiographical. 
 
 But towns do have personality. Contrast Lon- 
 don and New York, or Portland and Norfolk, or 
 Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has 
 a personality, and it would be obscurantism of the 
 most modern kind to pretend that there was no 
 " soul " in Chicago either to like or to dislike. Peo- 
 ple who have never lived in Chicago are usually con- 
 tent with disliking it, and those who have seen it 
 superficially, or smelled it in passing when the stock- 
 yard factories were making glue, can seldom un- 
 derstand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, 
 of course, profess to admire it, with the eagerness of 
 anxious missionaries seeking to make good with can- 
 nibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or 
 
 Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G. 
 Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 
 
 [ 59 ] 
 
Belfast, and slipped into Chicago as into old slip- 
 pers — men like Arnold Bennett and George Ber- 
 mingham — there are few outsiders who really feel 
 at home. Stevenson passed through it on his im- 
 migrant journey across the plains, pondering that 
 one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to 
 restore the city after the fire should be compelled 
 to pay for his own ham and eggs. He thought 
 Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from 
 it like a sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. 
 Wells thought it amazing, but chiefly amazing as a 
 lapse from civilization. All of these leave little 
 doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, 
 dirty, unruly and mean. It has size without spa- 
 ciousness, opportunity without imaginativeness, ac- 
 tion without climax, wealth without distinction. A 
 sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though 
 far from gracious where most characteristic; but for 
 the most part it is shoddy, dingy and vulgar, making 
 more noise downtown than a boiler works, and rain- 
 ing smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from 
 heaven. It is not for its beaux yeux that the out- 
 sider begins to love the town. 
 
 But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; 
 one must see it altogether before one can define it; 
 one can believe almost anything monstrous from a 
 partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is su- 
 premely necessary — about three years as a mini- 
 mum. Then its goodness passeth all pre-matri- 
 monial understanding; its essence is disclosed. 
 
 Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far 
 as time is concerned, to speak of Chicago, and I 
 think it would be churlish not to agree that from 
 the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city 
 
 [ 60 ] 
 
proud. All old Chicagoans will recognize at once 
 why Mr. Taylor should go back to the beginning, 
 and they will be delighted at the clarity with which 
 the early history is expounded, as well as the era be- 
 fore the Civil War. They will also understand and 
 rejoice over the repetition of grand old names — 
 Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, 
 Uranus H. Crosby, Sherman of the Sherman hotel. 
 General Hart L. Stewart and Long John Went- 
 worth. In every town in the world there is, of 
 course, a Long John or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans 
 will savor this reference to their own familiar, and 
 will delight in the snug feeling that they too " knew 
 Chicago when." Mr. Taylor is also dear to his 
 townsmen when he harks back to days before the 
 Fire. In those days the West-siders were a little 
 superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral 
 of Saints Peter and Paul, and the church-going folk 
 could hear the " fast young men " speeding trotting 
 horses past the church doors. Such performances 
 seemed fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor 
 himself drive his high-steppers to the races at Wash- 
 ington Park, and did he not woo the heart of the 
 city where gilded youth cherished a " nod of recog- 
 nition from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John 
 A. Rice." The dinners of antelope steak and roast 
 buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago ante- 
 dating the World's Fair that left strong traces into 
 the twentieth century, a Chicago that is commemo- 
 rated with grace and kindliness in the fair pages of 
 this book. 
 
 But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor's heart 
 lingers among the " marble-fronts " of his youth, 
 this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such fond reminis- 
 
 [ 6i ] 
 
cence is the common nature of man. And a better 
 basis for loving Chicago must be offered than the 
 evidence that one teethed on it, battered darling that 
 it is. Mr. Taylor's better explanation, as I read it, 
 is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully 
 and eagerly with the New Englanders who made the 
 town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters and specula- 
 tors, war widows and politicians and anarchists and 
 aliens — all these go into his perspective, as do the 
 emergencies of the Fire and the splendors of the 
 Fair. But the marrow of his pride in Chicago is 
 his community with its origins in " men, like myself, 
 of New England blood, whose fathers felled our 
 forests and tilled our prairie land." Since the time 
 he was born, he tells us, more than two million peo- 
 ple have been added to the population of Chicago. 
 Only a fifth of the Great West Side are now Ameri- 
 can-born, and the Lake Shore Drive was still a ceme- 
 tery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified 
 West Side. This links Mr. Taylor closely to the be- 
 ginning of things. Hence he likes to insist in his 
 kindly spirit that Chicago's puritan " aristocracy " 
 is the source of Chicago altruism, that " the society 
 of Chicago [is] more puritanical than that of any 
 great city in the world," and that " back of Chicago's 
 strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her 
 founders holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pil- 
 grim Fathers being still a potent factor in her life 
 . . . She possesses a New England conscience to 
 leaven her diverse character and make her truly 
 — the pulse of America." 
 
 Every bird takes what he finds to build his own 
 spiritual nest. Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and 
 wild and rude, but I prefer to see it as an impuritan. 
 
 [ 62 ] 
 
Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed 
 a direct result of the private-minded policy that dis- 
 tinguished Chicago's big little men. The triumvi- 
 rate that Mr. Taylor mentions had no statesmanship 
 in them. One was an admirable huckster, another 
 an inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine 
 who carved a destiny in ham. But these men gave 
 themselves and their city to business enterprise in 
 its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its 
 remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality 
 of that enterprise Is a main characteristic of the city, 
 a characteristic barely suggested by Mr. Taylor, not 
 clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his graceful 
 drawings, so beautifully reproduced. 
 
 One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor's 
 pleasant picture, some leaves from Upton Sinclair's 
 Jungle, Jack London's Iron Heel, Frank Norris's 
 Pit, H. K. Webster's Great Adventure, the fiction of 
 Edith Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Her- 
 rick and Will Paine and Weber Linn and Sherwood 
 Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and 
 Carl Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one 
 who looked at the City Council ten years ago, for 
 example, can forget the brutality of that institution 
 of collective life. 
 
 They called the old-time aldermen the " gray 
 wolves." They looked like wolves, cold-eyed, 
 grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side, 
 West side. North side, making the shaky tenements 
 and black brothels and sprawling immigrant-filled in- 
 dustries pay tribute in twenty ways. One night, 
 curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went 
 to a place that was glibly described as " the wickedest 
 place in the world." It was a saloon under the West 
 
 [ 63 ] 
 
side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At 
 first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its 
 runty negro at the raucous piano. But at last the 
 regular customers collected; the sots, the dead-beats, 
 the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a 
 fat pallor, the woman without a nose . . . They 
 surrounded us, piled against us, clawed us. And 
 that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead's Satanic vision 
 of it revealed. 
 
 But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago 
 is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from 
 caste and cant which is so much an essential of de- 
 mocracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, 
 the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago 
 is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and 
 passionate creator struggling with hucksters and 
 hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the 
 assassins of genius, a frontier against the Europe 
 that meant an established order, an order of succes- 
 sion and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all 
 its Philistinism, there is the condition of hope that is 
 half the spiritual battle, whatever stockades the puri- 
 tans try to build. It is that that makes one lament 
 the silence in Mr. Taylor's pleasant book. But the 
 puritanical tradition requires silence. Polite and re- 
 fined, self-centered and private-minded, attached to 
 property and content within limitations, it made 
 visible Chicago what it is. 
 
 [ 64 ] 
 
THE CLOUDS OF KERRY 
 
 It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes 
 Kerry so wet. All the reservoir of the Atlantic, 
 at any rate, lies to the west and south, and the pre- 
 vailing winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry 
 lifts its mountains to those Impinging winds — 
 mountains that in the sunlight are a living colorful 
 presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the 
 constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly 
 from the sea, soft voluminous clouds gathered in 
 their arms, and as they pass they sweep their droop- 
 ing veils down over the silent and somewhat melan- 
 choly land. 
 
 In the night-time a light or two may be seen dot- 
 ted at great intervals on those lonely hillsides, but 
 for the most part the habitations are in the cooms 
 or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel 
 hills. The soil on the mountains is washed away. 
 The vestiture that remains is a watery sedge, and it 
 is only by garnering every handful of earth that the 
 tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms. 
 Their fields, often held in common, are so small as 
 to be laughable, and deep drainage trenches are 
 dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting 
 sunlight between showers a light-green patch will 
 loom magically in the distance, witness to man's inde- 
 fatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the rocks. 
 An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and 
 
 [ 65 ] 
 
if one goes ther.e one may find a typical tall spare 
 countryman, bright of eye and sharp of feature, 
 housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood 
 of children. To build with his own hands a water- 
 tight house is the ambition for which this man is 
 slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready 
 there near the pit which he himself has dug for 
 foundation. A yellowish wife will perhaps be nurs- 
 ing the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed hovel, 
 and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible, 
 and admirable in more ways than he can ever dream 
 of, one elf after another will come out, bare-legged, 
 sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from far off at 
 the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hill- 
 side man, but his starvelings go down the boreen 
 to the bare cold schoolhouse, to be taught whatever 
 the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their 
 minds of an education designed for civil service 
 clerks. The children may be seen down there if one 
 passes at their playtime, kicking a rag football with 
 their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds. 
 
 There was a time when the iron was deep in these 
 farmers' souls. Eking the marrow from the 
 bones of the land, they were so poor that they had 
 nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their 
 own tiny cattle, the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle 
 that alone can pick a living from that ground. Un- 
 til twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the 
 hillside men had never bought a pound of tea in 
 their lives, or known what it was to spend money for 
 clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored 
 homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine 
 sturdy middle-aged farmers with a cut to their home- 
 made clothes that reminds one of the Bretons. It 
 
 [ 66 ] 
 
was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting 
 nature for grim life, that landlords took their rack- 
 rents — one of them, the Earl of Kenmare, erecting 
 a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of Amer- 
 icans have admired. The fight against landlordism 
 was bitter in Kerry. I met one countryman who was 
 evicted three times, but finally, despite the remorse- 
 less protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in 
 a lean-to against the wall of the church. There 
 were persecutions and murders, the mailed hand of 
 the law and the stealthy hand of the assassin. Even 
 to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure 
 of me he would not have spoken his mind. But 
 when he was sure, he confided with a winning smile 
 that at last he had something to live for and work 
 for, a strip of land that was an " economic holding," 
 determined by an Estates Commission which has 
 shouldered thv" landlord to one side and estimated 
 with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive 
 possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog. 
 Why do they stay? But most of them have not 
 stayed. Kerry has not one-third the people to-day 
 that it had seventy years ago. The storekeeper in 
 a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little 
 father of the people if there ever was one, yet had 
 acted the dubious role of emigration agent, and had 
 passed thousands of his countrymen on to America. 
 A few go to England. " For nine years," one hard- 
 working occupier mentioned to me, " I lived in the 
 shadow of London Bridge." But for Kerry, the 
 next country to America, America is the land of 
 golden promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue, 
 " hollow of the dock leaves," I stopped to ask of a 
 bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking 
 
 [ 67 ] 
 
me the way to America. It is west they turn, away 
 from the Empire that " always foul-played us in the 
 past, and I am afeard will foul-play us again." 
 
 " The next time you come, please God you'll bring 
 us Home Rule." That is the way they speak to you, 
 if they trust you. They want government where it 
 cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of 
 old. 
 
 I went with a government inspector on one mis- 
 sion in Kerry. At the foot of the forbidding west- 
 ern hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off 
 by two mountain streams. At times these streams 
 were low enough to ford with ease, but after a h^avy 
 rain the water would rise four or five feet in a few 
 hours and the streams would become impassable tor- 
 rents. For the sake of a widow whose hovel stood 
 on this island the Commission consented to build a 
 little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at 
 either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons 
 in weight, had only just been planted when a rain 
 came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy block of 
 cement had toppled over in the stream. This little 
 catastrophe was the first news conveyed by the 
 paternal storekeeper to the inspector on our arrival 
 in town, and we walked out to see what could be 
 done. 
 
 Standing by the stream, we were visible to the 
 expectant woman on the hill. In the soft mournful 
 light of the September afternoon I could see her 
 outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to 
 learn her fate. She came bare of head and bare of 
 foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to her bosom with 
 one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body 
 as she leaned on her own pier and bent her deep 
 
 [68 ] 
 
eyes on us across the stream. As she told in the 
 slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of 
 the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those 
 eyes to the inanimate bulk of concrete, half sub- 
 merged in the water, as if to contemn it for lying 
 there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited 
 or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression 
 bespoke the sternness and gravity of her fight for 
 existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant fighter. 
 She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have 
 ever beheld. 
 
 If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the 
 anxieties of the winter. She seemed to look into 
 them through the grayness of the failing light. She 
 foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race 
 for her children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carry- 
 ing them across on her back. And she clung to her 
 children. 
 
 "You have had trouble, my poor woman?" the 
 inspector said, knowing that her husband two years 
 before had been drowned in the torrent. 
 
 " Aye, indeed, your honor, 'tis I am the pity of the 
 world. One year ago my child was lost to me. It 
 was in the night-time, he was taken with a hemor- 
 rhage, with respects to your honor. I woke the 
 children to have them go for to bring the doctor, 
 but it was too late an they returned. He quenched 
 in my arms, at the dead hour of night." 
 
 " The pity of the world " she was in truth. The 
 inspector could do nothing until the ground was 
 firm enough to support horses and tackle in the 
 spring. We walked back through the somber bog, 
 the mountains seeming to creep after us, and we 
 speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To 
 
 [ 69 ] 
 
the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there 
 we came on another aspect of that plaintive acquies- 
 cence so strong in the woman. Yes, the store- 
 keeper admitted with instant reasonableness, the In- 
 spector was right : Foley had failed about the bridge. 
 " I'll haul him over," he said, full of sympathy for 
 the woman. And he would haul him over. And 
 the pier would lie there all winter. 
 
 If the people could feel that this solicitude of the 
 Estates Commission were national, it would bind 
 them to the government. But most of the Inspectors 
 are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees, 
 well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read be- 
 tween the lines. And so Kerry remains with the 
 old tradition of the government, suspicious of Its 
 Intentions, crediting what genuine services there are 
 to the race of native officials who alone have the 
 Intuition of Kerry's kind. 
 
 They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend 
 the Empire ; that Empire which meant landlords and 
 land agents and rackrents for so many blind and 
 crushing years. They want those straight and stal- 
 wart and manly fellows In the trenches. But Kerry 
 knows what the trenches of Empire are already. It 
 has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs 
 between sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years 
 It can remember. It Is no wonder Kerry cannot 
 grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so 
 readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted 
 a lease to live. 
 
 [ 70 ] 
 
HENRY ADAMS 
 
 Henry ADAMS was bom with his name on the 
 waiting list of Olympus, and he lived up to it. He 
 lived up to it part of the time in London, as secre- 
 tary to his father at the Embassy; part of the time 
 at Harvard, teaching history; most of the time in 
 Washington, in La Fayette Square. Shortly before 
 he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the 
 United States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and 
 Olympus were confused. But not so long after 1838 
 the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to 
 control the country through the railroads there was 
 an inevitable shift in political gravity, and the center 
 of power became Ohio. It was Henry Adams's fate 
 to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in 
 power; and Ohio did not comprehend Adams's cre- 
 dentials. Those credentials, accordingly, were the 
 subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor. 
 They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history, 
 and Henry Adams gave a dozen years to Jefferson 
 and Madison. It was his humor afterwards to say 
 he had but three serious readers — Abram Hewitt, 
 Wayne MacVeagh and John Hay. His composure 
 in the face of this coolness was, however, a strange 
 blending of serenities derived equally from the cos- 
 mos and from La Fayette Square. He was not 
 
 The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: 
 Houghton Mifflin Co. 
 
 [ 71 ] 
 
above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even his 
 autobiography, a true title to Olympus, was issued 
 to a bare hundred readers before his death, and was 
 then deemed too incomplete to be made public. It 
 is made public now nominally for " students " but 
 really for the world that didn't know an Adams when 
 it saw one. 
 
 For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry 
 Adams had the advantage of full years and happy 
 faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of both. 
 He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality 
 which is a bad tradition in English recollections. 
 He saved himself from mere recollections by taking 
 the world as an educator and himself as an experi- 
 ment in education. His two big books were con- 
 trasted as Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study 
 of Thirteenth-Century Unity, and The Education of 
 Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century MuU 
 tiplicity. The stress on multiplicity was all the more 
 important because he considered himself eighteenth 
 century to start with, and had, in fact, the unity of 
 simple Americanism at the beginning. 
 
 Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of 
 basil in this always expanding tale of a development. 
 There are points about the development, about its 
 acceptance of a " supersensual multiverse," which 
 only a Karl Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satis- 
 factorily discuss or criticize. A reader like myself 
 gazes through the glass bottom of Adams's style into 
 unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths 
 are clear and crisp. They deserve to be investi- 
 gated. But a " dynamic theory of history " is no 
 proper inhabitant of autobiography, and " the larger 
 synthesis " is not yet so domesticated as the plebeian 
 
 [ 72 ] 
 
idea of God. That Adams should conduct his study 
 to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent culmina- 
 tion. A theory of life is the fit answer to the super- 
 sensual riddle of living. But when the theory must 
 be technical and even professional, an autobiography 
 has no climax in a theory. It is better to revert, as 
 Adams does, to the classic features of human drama : 
 " Even in America, the Indian Summer of Ufe should 
 be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and 
 infinite in wealth and depth of tone — but never 
 hustled." It is enough to have the knowledge that 
 along certain lines the prime conceptions were shat- 
 tered and the new conceptions pushed forward, the 
 tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in the twentieth 
 century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of 
 acceleration. 
 
 Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams 
 embraced the modernity that gradually dawned on 
 him and gave him his new view of life. Take his 
 fresh enthusiasm for world's fairs as a solitary ex- 
 ample. One might expect him to be bored by them, 
 but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford White and 
 Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of 
 America, and Henry Adams soared over their ob- 
 viousness to a perception of their " acutely interest- 
 ing " exhibits. He was after — something. If the 
 Virgin Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or 
 St. Louis could give it to him among the Jugo-Slavs 
 and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done. 
 No vulgar prejudices held" him back. He who could 
 interpret the fight for free silver without a sniff of 
 impatience, who could study Grant without the least 
 filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his 
 nose at unfashionable faiths or to espouse fashion- 
 
 [ 73 ] 
 
able heresies. He was after education and any cen- 
 tury back or forward was grist to his mill. And 
 his faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in 
 it. " All one's life," as he confesses grimly, " one 
 had struggled for unity, and unity had always won," 
 yet " the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, 
 was increasing, and threatened to increase beyond 
 reason." Beyond reason, then, it was reasonable to 
 proceed, and the son of Ambassador Adams moved 
 from the sanctity of Union with his feet feeling 
 what way they must, and his eye on the star of 
 truth. 
 
 So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how 
 keen it is. But there is no single dullness, as I re- 
 member, in 505 large pages, and there are portraits 
 like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or 
 the Adamses, which have the economy and fidelity 
 of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not, nor is he 
 a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct 
 expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and 
 he can load a sentence with a world of meaning. 
 Take, for instance, the phrase in which he denies 
 unity to London society. " One wandered about in 
 it like a maggot in cheese ; it was not a hansom cab, 
 to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time." He says 
 of St. Gaudens that " he never laid down the law, 
 or affected the despot, or became brutalized like 
 Whistler by the brutalities of his world." In a 
 masterly chapter on woman, he summed up, " The 
 woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, 
 and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and 
 the family. The idea that she was weak revolted 
 all history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that 
 even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed 
 
 [ 74 ] 
 
at; but it was surely true that, if force were to be 
 diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and 
 the family must pay for it. . . . She must, like the 
 man, marry machinery." In Cambridge " the live- 
 liest and most agreeable of men — James Russell 
 Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son 
 Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and 
 a dozen others, who would have made the joy of 
 London or Paris — tried their best to break out and 
 be like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but 
 society called them professors, and professors they 
 had to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy 
 for companionship, all were famished for want of it. 
 Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The 
 elements were there ; but society cannot be made up 
 of elements — people who are expected to be silent 
 unless they have observations to make — and all the 
 elements are bound to remain apart if required to 
 make observations." 
 
 Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact, 
 that Henry Adams himself felt the necessity of mak- 
 ing observations. He approached autobiography 
 buttoned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human 
 beings he had a real impulse to release himself, and 
 to release himself in an autobiography if nowhere 
 else ; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he could no 
 more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day 
 than he could dance like Nijinskl. In so far as the 
 Adamses were Institutional he could talk of them 
 openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence 
 Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge 
 and St. Gaudens as any liberated host might reveal 
 himself in the warm hour after dinner. But this is 
 not the DIonysiac tone of autobiography and Henry 
 
 [ 75 ] 
 
Adams was not Dionysiac. He was not limitedly 
 Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was receptive, he 
 was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the 
 mere mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the pre- 
 face of this autobiography raises doubts as to Henry 
 Adams's evasive principle, " the object of study is 
 the garment, not the figure." The figure, Henry 
 Adams's, had nagging interest for Henry Adams, but 
 something racial required him to veil it. He could 
 not, like a Rousseau or " like a whore, unpack his 
 heart with words." 
 
 The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on 
 the word " education." Although he was nearly 
 seventy when he laid the book aside and although 
 education means nothing if it means everything, the 
 whole seventy years were deliberately taken as devo- 
 tion to a process, that process being visualized much 
 more as the interminable repetition of the educa- 
 tional escalator itself than as the progress of the per- 
 son who moves forward with it. Moves forward 
 to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams's 
 detachment that no escalator could move him for- 
 ward anywhere because he was not bound anywhere 
 in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak 
 of his life as perpetually educational. One reason, 
 of course, was his economic security. There was no 
 wolf to devour him if his education proved incom- 
 plete. Faculty qua faculty could remain a perma- 
 nent quandary to him, so long as he were not forced 
 to be vocational, so long as he could speculate on " a 
 world that sensitive and timid natures could regard 
 without a shudder." 
 
 The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, how- 
 ever, is one of the principal fascinations of this al- 
 
 [ 76 ] 
 
together fascinating book. What was it that kept 
 Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay? 
 What was it that sent him from Boston to Mont- 
 Saint-Michel and Chartres? The man was a capa- 
 ble and ambitious man, if ever there was one. He 
 was not merely erudite and reflective and eman- 
 cipatingly skeptical : he was also a man of the largest 
 inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man 
 of the nicest temper and the sanest style. How 
 could such justesse go begging, even in the United 
 States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry 
 Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen 
 he sat waiting for a clientage that never came, while 
 through a hole he could see a steady crowd go pour- 
 ing into the gilded doors across the way. The 
 modest screen was himself. He could not detach 
 it. But the United States did not see beyond the 
 screen. A light behind a large globule of colored 
 water could at any moment distract it. And in 
 England, for that matter, only the Monckton Mil- 
 neses kept the Delanes from brushing Adams away, 
 like a fly. 
 
 The question is, on what terms did Adams want 
 life? It is characteristic of him that he does not 
 specify. But one gathers from his very reticence 
 that he had least use of all for an existence which re- 
 quired moral multiplicity. Where he seems gravest 
 and least self-superintending is in those criticisms 
 of his friends that indicate the sacrifice of integrity. 
 He was no prig. . Not one bleat of priggishness 
 is heard in all his intricate censure of the eminent 
 British statesmen who sapped the Union. But there 
 is a fund of significance in his criticism of Senator 
 Lodge's career, pages 418 and on, in which "the 
 
 [ 77 ] 
 
larger study was lost in the division of interests and 
 the ambitions of fifth-rate men." It is in a less 
 concerned tone that the New Yorker Roosevelt 
 is discussed. " Power when wielded by abnormal 
 energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roose- 
 velt's friends know that his restless and combative 
 energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more 
 than any other man living within the range of notori- 
 ety, showed the singular primitive quality that be- 
 longs to ultimate matter — the quality that medie- 
 val theology assigned to God — he was pure act." 
 Pure act Henry Adams was not. If Roosevelt ex- 
 hibited " the effect of unlimited power on limited 
 mind," he himself exhibited the contrary effect of 
 limited power on unlimited mind. Why his power 
 remained so limited was the mystery. Was he a 
 watched kettle that could not boil? Or had he no 
 fire in his belly? Or did the fire fail to meet the 
 kettle? Almost any problem of inhibition would 
 be simpler, but one could scarcely help ascribing 
 something to that refrigeration of enthusiasm which 
 is the Bostonian's revenge on wanton life force. Ex- 
 cept for his opaline ethics, never glaring yet never 
 dulled, he is manifestly toned down to suit the most 
 neurasthenic exaction. Or, to put it more crudely, 
 he is emotion Fletcherized to the point of inanition. 
 Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the 
 autobiography is a refutation of anaemia. There 
 was, indeed, something meager about Henry 
 Adams's soul, as there is something meager about a 
 butterfly. But the lack of sanguine or exuberant 
 feeling, the lack of buoyancy and enthusiasm. Is 
 merely a hint that one must classify, not a command 
 that one condemn. For all this book's parsimony, 
 
 [ 78 ] 
 
for all its psychological silences and timidities, it is 
 an original contribution, transcending caste and class, 
 combining true mind and matter. Compare Its com- 
 ment on education to the comment of Joan and Peter 
 — Henry Adams Is to H. G. Wells as triangulation 
 to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations 
 which goes by the name of understanding was part 
 of his very nature. Unlike H. G. Wells, he was In- 
 capable of cant. He had no demagoguery, no mob- 
 oratory, no rhetoric. This enclosed him in himself 
 to a dangerous degree, bordered him on prigglsh- 
 ness and on egoism. But he had too much quality 
 to succumb to these diseases of the sedentary soul. 
 He survives, and with greatness. 
 
 [ 79 ] 
 
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE 
 
 oWEET and wild, if you like, the first airs of 
 spring, sweeter than anything in later days; but 
 when we make an analogy between spring and 
 youth and believe that the enchantment of one is 
 the enchantment of the other, are we not dreaming 
 a dream? 
 
 Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not 
 a poet. Just because it is formative and fugitive 
 it evokes imagination ; it has a bloom too momentary 
 to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it 
 is seen. In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses 
 itself. It is a delicacy as tender as the first green 
 leaf, an innocence like the shimmering dawn, 
 " brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle 
 of falling water and singing birds." People feel 
 this when they accept youth as immaculate and heed 
 its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at 
 twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think 
 that youth has the air of spring about it, that spring 
 is the morning of the gods. Youth is so often 
 handsome and straight and fearless; it has its mys- 
 terious silences — its beings are beings of clear fire 
 in high spaces, kin with the naked stars. Yet there 
 is in it something not less fiery which is far more 
 human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers 
 on board. 
 
 As one grows older one is less impatient of the 
 [ 80] 
 
supposition that innocence actually exists. It ex- 
 ists, even though mothers may not properly interpret 
 it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism 
 which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth 
 is neither innocence nor experience. It is a duel 
 between innocence and experience, with the attain- 
 ments of experience guarded from older gaze. Hu- 
 man beings take their contemporaries for granted, 
 no one else: and neither teachers nor superiors nor 
 even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that 
 innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw 
 around youth. 
 
 If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its 
 own innocence, the coming of experience is all the 
 more painful. The process of change Is seldom 
 serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality. 
 The impressionable and histrionic youth has inces- 
 sant disappointment in trying misfit spiritual gar- 
 ments. The undisciplined faculty of make-believe, 
 which Is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to 
 torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been 
 earned and self-acceptance begun. 
 
 Do mature people try to help this? Do they 
 remember their own uncertainty and frustration? 
 One of the high points in Mr. Trotter's keen psycho- 
 logical study. Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 
 War, indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr. 
 Trotter goes beyond Samuel Butler and Edmund 
 Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful ex- 
 perience. He shows the forces at work behind the 
 patronizing and victimizing of the young. 
 
 The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge 
 and experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man 
 
 [ 8i ] 
 
and to surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or 
 taste. . . . 
 
 Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the 
 ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of 
 age and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history, 
 proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence 
 and enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immem- 
 orial wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling 
 of senile decay. 
 
 The day will come when our present barbaric at- 
 titude toward youth will be altered. Before it can 
 be altered, however, we must completely revise our 
 conventions of innocence. Youth is no more cer- 
 tainly innocent than it is certainly happy, and the 
 conspiracy of silence that surrounds youth is not 
 to be justified on any ground of over-impression- 
 ableness. Innocence, besides, can last too long. 
 Every one has pitied stale innocence. If a New York 
 child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may quite 
 easily be shocking to older people. Already, with- 
 out any particular viciousness or precocity, he has 
 accumulated a huge number of undesirable impres- 
 sions, and shoved them under the surface of his 
 mind. What, then, to do? The air of spring that 
 is about him need not mislead his guardians. They 
 may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a 
 naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only 
 one agent of innocence, and not the most successful. 
 Certainly not the most successful for domesticating 
 youth in the sphere that men and women consider 
 fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain 
 innocent long after it recognizes the example and 
 feels the impulses of its elders, the invitation will go 
 unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or 
 
 [ 82 ] 
 
see the moving pictures without realizing a dis- 
 crepancy between conduct and precept, which, is one 
 hint to precept to take off its bib. 
 
 This Icnowingness is not quite what it seems to 
 be. Youth is never so young as when experienced. 
 But those who must deal with it cannot lose by mak- 
 ing it more articulate, by saving It from the silly 
 adult exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this 
 jealousy and pride continually operates against 
 youth in the name of dignity and discipline. And 
 so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction 
 that portrays youth as the spring time of the spii-it; 
 that pipes a song about a lamb, and leads the lamb 
 to slaughter. 
 
 t 83 1 
 
THE IRISH REVOLT 
 
 " It may be a good thing to forget and forgive ; but it 
 is altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven." — 
 G. K. Chesterton in The Crimes of England, 1916. 
 
 W HEN a rebellion has failed men say it was 
 wicked or foolish. It is, on the contrary, wickedness 
 and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise 
 against authority the measure of their act cannot 
 be loyalty or prudence. It is the character of the 
 authority against which men revolt that must shape 
 one's mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on 
 his life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction 
 on authority. Is it just authority, representative, 
 tolerable ? The only revolt that is wicked or foolish 
 is the revolt against reasonable or tolerable author- 
 ity. If authority is not livable, revolt is a thou- 
 sand times justified. 
 
 The Irish rebellion was not prudent. Its im- 
 prudence did not weigh with the men who took to 
 arms. Had hope inspired them, they would have 
 been utterly insane. But hope did not inspire them. 
 They longed for success ; they risked and expected 
 death. The only consequence to us, wrote Padralc 
 Pearse before action, is that some of us may be 
 launched into eternity. " But who are we, that we 
 should hesitate to die for Ireland? Are not the 
 claims of IreUnd greater on us than any personal 
 
 [ 84 ] 
 
ones ? Is it fear that deters us from such an enter- 
 prise? Away with such fears. Cowards die many 
 times, the brave only die once." To strike a de- 
 cisive blow was the aspiration of the Irish rebels. 
 But decisive or not, they made up their minds to 
 take action before the government succeeded in at- 
 taching all their arms. 
 
 In this rebellion there was no chance of material 
 victory. Pearse, MacDonagh, Connolly, Clark, 
 Plunkett, O'Rahilly, O'Hanrahan, Daly, Hobson, 
 Casement, could only hope against hope. But their 
 essential objective was not a soldiery. It was an 
 idea, the idea of unprotested English authority in 
 Ireland. It was to protest against the Irish nation's 
 remaining a Crown Colony of the British Empire 
 that these men raised their republican standard and 
 under it shed their blood. In the first process of that 
 revolt few of them were immediately sacrificed. 
 Their fight was well planned. They made the most 
 of their brief hour. But when they were captured 
 the authority they had opposed fulfilled their expecta- 
 tions to the utmost. Before three army officers, 
 without a legal defender, each of the leaders was 
 condemned by court-martial. Their rebellion had 
 been open. Their guilt was known and granted. 
 They met, as they expected to meet, death. 
 
 The insurrection in Ireland is ended. A cold 
 tribunal has finished by piecework the task that the 
 soldiers began. The British Empire is still dominant 
 in Dublin. But ruthless and remorseless behavior 
 sharpens the issue between authority and rebellion. 
 Even men who naturally condemn disorder feel Im- 
 pelled to scrutinize the authority which could deliber- 
 ately dispense such doom. If that authority de- 
 
 [ 85 ] 
 
served respect in Ireland, if it stood for justice and 
 the maintenance of right, its exaction of the pound 
 of flesh cannot be questioned. It does not represent 
 " frightfulness." It represents stern justice. Its 
 hand should be univei^sally upheld. But if, on the 
 other hand, English authority did not deserve re- 
 spect in Ireland, if it had forfeited its claims on these 
 Irishmen, then there is something to be made known 
 and said about the way in which this Empire can 
 abuse its power. 
 
 Between the Irish people and English authority, 
 as every one knows, there has been an interminable 
 struggle. A tolerable solution of this contest has 
 only recently seemed in sight. The military neces- 
 sity of England has of itself precluded one solution, 
 the complete independence of Ireland. The desire 
 for self-government in Ireland has opposed another 
 solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Be- 
 tween these two goals the struggle has raged bit- 
 terly. But human beings cannot live forever in 
 profitless conflict. After many years the majority 
 of the English people took up and ratified the Irish 
 claims to self-government. In spite of the conserv- 
 ative element in England and the British element in 
 Ireland, the modus vivendi of home rule was ar- 
 ranged. It is the fate of this modus vivendi, ac- 
 cepted by the majority of Irishmen as a reasonable 
 commutation of their claims, that explains the recent 
 insurrection. These men who are dead were once 
 for the most part Home Rulers. Their rebellion 
 came about as a sequel to the unjust and dishonest 
 handling of home rule. 
 
 For thirty-five years home rule has been an Issue 
 in Great Britain. The majority of the British peo- 
 
 [ 86 ] 
 
pie supported Gladstone during many home rule 
 sessions. The lower house of Parliament repeatedly 
 passed the measure. The House of Lords, however, 
 turned a face of stone to Ireland. It icily rejected 
 Ireland's offer to compound her claims. This irrec- 
 oncilable attitude proved in the end so monstrous 
 that English Liberalism revolted. It threw its 
 weight against the rigid body that denied it. It com- 
 pelled the House of Lords to accept the Parliament 
 act, its scheme for circumventing the peers' veto. 
 Then, three times in succession, it passed the home 
 rule bill. 
 
 Every one knows what happened. During the 
 probation of the bill the forces that could no longer 
 avoid it constitutionally made up their minds that 
 they would defeat it unconstitutionally. Men left 
 the House of Lords and the House of Commons to 
 raise troops in eastern Ulster. These, not the Irish, 
 were Germany's primary allies in the British Isles. 
 Cannon, machine guns, and rifles were shipped to 
 Ireland. Every possible descendant of the im- 
 planted settlers of Ireland was rallied. Large num- 
 bers were openly recruited and armed. The Ulster 
 leaders pleaded they were loyal, but they insisted 
 that the Liberals of England did not and could not 
 speak for the Empire. The only English authority 
 they recognized was an authority like-minded to 
 themselves. Lord Northcliffe joined with Lord 
 Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and Lord Wil- 
 loughby de Broke and Lord Roberts and Sir Ed- 
 ward Carson and Bonar Law to advise and stimu- 
 late rebellion. Some of the best British generals in 
 the army, to the delight of Germany, were definitely 
 available as leaders. A provisional government, 
 
 [ 87 ] 
 
with Carson as its premier, was arranged for in 
 191 1. The Unionist and Orange organizations 
 pledged themselves that under no conditions would 
 they acknowledge a home rule government or obey its 
 decrees. In 19 12 the Solemn Covenanters pledged 
 themselves " to refuse to recognize its authority." 
 During this period the government negotiated, but 
 took no action. There were no Nationalists under 
 arms. 
 
 If free men have a right to rebel, how can any 
 one gainsay Ulster? It was the Ulster contention 
 that home rule would be unreasonable, intolerable, 
 and unjust. This was a prophecy, perhaps a natural 
 and credible prophecy. But it is not necessary to 
 debate the Ulster rebellion. It was a hard heritage 
 of England's crime against Ireland. It is enough 
 to say that English authority refused to abandon 
 the home rule measure and in April, 19 14, Mr. As- 
 quith promised to vindicate the law. 
 
 The British League for the support of Ulster had 
 sent out " war calls." The Ulster Unionist Council 
 had appropriated $5,000,000 for volunteer widows 
 and orphans. Arms had been landed from Amer- 
 ica and, it was said, from Germany. Carson had 
 refused to " negotiate " any further. His mobili- 
 zation In 1914 became ominous. The government 
 started in moving troops to Ulster. The King inter- 
 vened. Mr. Balfour Inveighed against the proposal 
 to use troops. The army consulted with Carson. 
 Generals French and Ewart resigned. 
 
 About this period, with Asqulth and Birrell fail- 
 ing to put England's pledges to the proof, the Na- 
 tional Volunteers at last were being organized. Mr. 
 Asquith temporized further. At his behest John 
 
 [ 88 ] 
 
Redmond peremptorily assumed control of the 
 Volunteers. Their selected leader was Professor 
 MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the non-political 
 Gaelic revival. There was formal harmony until 
 the European war was declared, when Mr. Red- 
 mond sought to utilize the National Volunteers for 
 recruiting. This move made definite the purely na- 
 tional dedication of the Irish Volunteers. 
 
 Four events occurred in rapid succession to de- 
 stroy the Irish Volunteers' confidence in English au- 
 thority. These were decisive events, and yet events 
 over which the Irish Volunteers could have no con- 
 trol. 
 
 On July loth, 19 14, armed Ulster Volunteers 
 marched through Belfast, and Sir Edward Carson 
 held the first meeting of his provisional government. 
 
 On July 26th, 19 14, the British troops killed three 
 persons and wounded thirty-two persons because 
 rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, sub- 
 sequent to their futile attempt to intercept Irish 
 Volunteer arms. 
 
 On Sept. 19th, 1 9 14, the home rule bill was signed, 
 but its operation indefinitely suspended. 
 
 In May, 191 5, Sir Edward Carson became a mem- 
 ber of the British Cabinet. 
 
 These events were endured by John Redmond. 
 He had early accepted a Fabian policy and put his 
 trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the price 
 of maintaining the law they decreed. The more 
 radical men in Dublin were not so trusting. They 
 had heard Asquith promise that no permanent divi- 
 sion of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned 
 he had bargained for It. They had heard him 
 promise he would vindicate the law, and they saw 
 
 [ 89 ] 
 
him sanction the defiant military leader as com- 
 mander-in-chief and the defiant civil leader as a min- 
 ister of the crown. With the vivid memory of Brit- 
 ish troops killing Irish citizens on the streets of 
 Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English 
 honor. They had no impulse to recruit for the de- 
 fense on the Continent of an Empire thus honor- 
 able. They looked back on the evil history they had 
 been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and 
 to die. 
 
 Irishmen like myself who believed In home rule 
 and disbelieved in revolution did not agree with this 
 spirit. We thought southern Ireland might per- 
 suade Ulster. We thought English authority was 
 possibly weak and shifty, but benign. We did not 
 wish to sqe Ireland, In the words of Professor Mac- 
 Neill, go fornicating with Germany. When our 
 brothers went to the European war we took Eng- 
 land's gratitude as heartfelt and her repentance as 
 deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest, 
 torture, rape, enforced subservience, ignorance, 
 poverty, famine. But we listened to G. K. Chester- 
 ton about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous 
 Ireland: " It was to doubt whether we were worthy 
 to kiss the hem of her garment." 
 
 All the deeper, then, the shock we received from 
 the execution of our men of finest mettle. They 
 were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so was De 
 Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a 
 calculation based on the greater military strength 
 of the Dutch. A government which had negotiated 
 with rebels in the North, which had allowed the 
 retention of arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in 
 the Cabinet, could not mark an eternal bias in its 
 
 [ 90 ] 
 
judgment of brave men whose legitimate constitu- 
 tional prospects it had raised high and then in- 
 tolerably suspended. But this English government, 
 often cringing and supine, was brave enough to slay 
 one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in 
 the name of " justice," the judges in this rebellion 
 being officers of an army that had refused to stand 
 against rebellion in Ulster. 
 
 It is not in vain, however, that these poets and 
 Gaelic scholars and Republicans have stood blind- 
 folded to be shot by English soldiers. Their ver- 
 dict on English authority was scarcely in fault. 
 They estimated with just contemptuousness the tem- 
 per of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland has long 
 been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone 
 from Ireland, by the fulfillment of England's bond, 
 the memory of this rebellion must flourish. It testi- 
 fies sadly but heroically that there are still Irish- 
 men who cannot be sold over the counter, Irish- 
 men who set no ultimate sanction on a dishonest 
 authority. Irishmen who set no ultimate value on 
 their merely mortal lives. 
 
 L 91 ] 
 
A LIMB OF THE LAW 
 
 J-<OOK here," said the policeman, tapping me 
 on the chest, " Mrs. Trotsky used to live up here 
 above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And 
 then see what happens — she turns up in Stockholm 
 with two million roubles. 
 
 " Oh, I don't blame her. But ain't we all hu- 
 man — Socialists, Democrats, Republicans ? All 
 we need is a chance. 
 
 " I admit, Socialism has beautiful ideas. But are 
 they practical? That's what I ask. Now, pardon 
 me, just a minute ! Just one minute, please ! 
 Socialism is a fine theory, but look at Emma Gold- 
 man. That woman had seven lovers. Free love. 
 Yes, many a time I've heard them, preaching the 
 children belonged to the state. Here's their argu- 
 ment, see, they say that a man and a woman wants 
 to get married but the man figures, have I enough 
 to support her? and the woman figures, how much 
 has he got? and the only thing for them to do in 
 that case is to turn the children over to the state. 
 Now, I ask you, is that human ? 
 
 " You say, a lot of these women in limousines 
 practice free love without preaching it. Oh, I don't 
 deny it. And, look't here, I'm surprised there isn't 
 more bombs at that. Right here on the Avenue you 
 see the cars in one long procession all day, like every 
 one was a millionaire, and three blocks over you see 
 
 [ 92 ] 
 
people who haven't the means of livelihood, without 
 a shirt to their backs. I'm a public offcer, as you 
 might say, and maybe it sounds queer what I'm go- 
 ing to say, but I'm afraid to have my own children 
 on the steps of the apartment house. I takes the 
 night-stick to them and I says, ' Beat it out of here, 
 don't let the landlord see you, or he'll raise the rent 
 again.' 
 
 " You said it, something's rotten somewhere. 
 What do you think of the government holding back 
 all that meat, just because the packers want it fixed 
 that way, and plenty of people on the Lower East 
 Side there willing to buy it all up — and at good 
 prices too? But, no, it has to be held back to suit 
 the packers. And then they lower the price a little. 
 Because why? The government lets them have all 
 that meat for what they like. 
 
 " It's the same way with the ice. Did you see 
 what they done ? The mayor gets them all together, 
 to prevent them boosting the price on it, and it's 
 fixed; they can't raise the price this summer to more 
 than five fifty a ton. They wait two days at the old 
 price, and then they put it at five fifty. Two days 
 they wait, that's all. 
 
 " Of course this is the best government in the 
 world. I'll tell you what proves it — all these for- 
 eigners coming over here. Look at that soda-foun- 
 tain man there. You heard him talk up for the 
 Bolsheviki, didn't you? Well, he hasn't much gray 
 matter in here, but just the same that fellow makes 
 as much in three months as I get for a whole lousy 
 year. Three months, and he hasn't been here ten 
 years. And my people been here two hundred. 
 But these immigrants come over ignorant and un- 
 
 [ 93 ] 
 
educated, and only down in Kentucky and Tennessee 
 are our people not able to read and write. I hear 
 down there they are regular tribes, fighting each 
 other and all that. Of course that soda-fountain 
 man, he couldn't associate with lots of the people I 
 go with. If he walked in, they'd look at him as 
 much as to say, 'Who have we here?' But he 
 rolls up the coin just the same. 
 
 " But the trouble with the Russian people, I'll 
 tell you. Why, eighty per cent of them can't read 
 or write. Now I'll tell you what it's like. It's 
 like this: the Russian people is like a dog was tied 
 up in the back-yard, see, and then he was let loose 
 and he run wild with joy all over the place, and 
 then it depended who was the first to whistle to him, 
 whee-whee, and Lenin and Trotsky they whistled, 
 whee-whee, and the Russian people came right to 
 them. Of course I dpn't think it'll work. They 
 want to do away with money over there. You know, 
 you want to buy a shoeshine and you give a man a 
 head of cabbage. That's impractical. And then 
 again the government can't own everything. It's 
 all right for public utilities, but you take and try 
 to control everything and what'U happen? It can't 
 be done. What I say is, let a man earn a million 
 or so, and then say to him, anything over and above 
 that million we take away, see? And when he has 
 his million he doesn't go on trying to monopolize 
 everything. But now, you have all these unedu- 
 cated people around here, and the more money they 
 earn the worse they are. 
 
 " I'll tell you. Right across the hall from where 
 my wife and me live there's a lovely woman, a Jew- 
 ess, one of the nicest people you could want to meet, 
 
 [ 94 ] 
 
and I'm in her house and she's in mine all the time, 
 until her husband comes home. But he's one of 
 that kind, you know! The other night he comes 
 home with three friends and he says to me, ' Say, 
 Charlie, come on down to Long Island with us in 
 the car for a week. I'll pay all your expenses I ' 
 ' You will, eh,' I says. ' Now I'll tell you some- 
 thing. That sort of thing don't go with me. In 
 the first place, you know I can't get leave to be away 
 from the police department for a week; in the second 
 place, you know I can't leave my wife here; in the 
 third place, you know damn well I can't afford 
 to go with you. I know your kind! You have 
 your three friends here and you want them to see 
 what a great guy you are. Well, I'll tell you what 
 you are,' and I told him. Now he'll be the same 
 if he has a million. And I'll tell you another kind 
 that hasn't respectability. No, I mean decency. 
 She was a big fat woman and her baby was crying 
 here the other day, and she opened her dress right 
 there and leaned down to feed the child. You 
 know, just like that statue, I forget the name. And 
 all the little boys rubbering around. That's the 
 class of people you have to contend with around 
 here in this place, with the air full of fish guts they 
 throw out of the windows, and everything. 
 
 " But the German ones are different. Not that 
 I want to praise the Germans or the like of that, 
 but they're self-respectful, you know. It's the lack 
 of education with them others — those others. 
 
 " But you put the Socialists in power and what 
 difference will it make? I'm — I'm not against 
 Socialism, I want you to understand. But there's 
 human nature ! " 
 
 [ 95 ] 
 
A PERSONAL PANTHEON 
 
 ^OT long ago, In the Metropolitan Magazine, 
 Clarence Day shied a cocoanut at old Henri Fabre. 
 Personally I had nothing against Henri. I rather 
 liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clar- 
 ence said publicly, " that old bird-artist, you don't 
 have to admire him any longer." Without waiting 
 for further encouragement I bounced Henri off the 
 steps of my Pantheon. 
 
 Have you a little Pantheon? It Is necessary, I 
 admit, but nothing is so important as to keep it from 
 getting crowded with half-gods. For many months 
 my own Pantheon has been seriously congested. 
 Most of the ancient deities are still around — 
 George Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom 
 Hardy and Sam Butler — and there is a long wait- 
 ing list suggested by my friends. Joseph Conrad 
 has been sitting in the lobby for several years, hun- 
 gering foi; a vacant pedestal, and I have had re- 
 peated applications from such varied persons as 
 Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, Anatole 
 France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P. 
 Shelley, John Mulr, George Washington and Mary 
 Wollstonecraft. But with so many occupants al- 
 ready installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed 
 in, it has been impossible to open the doors to new- 
 comers. My gods are like the office-holders — few 
 die and none resign. And when a happy accident 
 
 [ 96 ] 
 
occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel 
 as one feels when some third person is good enough 
 to smash the jardiniere. 
 
 I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while. 
 Two or three years ago he swept into the Pantheon 
 on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse 
 for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest 
 gods I had ever encountered. His smile, his long 
 jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a Tussaud 
 figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and 
 William Blakes. I stood him in the corner when he 
 first arrived, debating where to put him, but at no 
 time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young 
 Teddy Junior helped rne to like Woodrow. So did 
 Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did Mr. Wadsworth 
 and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all, 
 had kept Mr. Wilson from being a Republican? 
 How did he differ intrinsically from a Henry Stim- 
 son, a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton? 
 The pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had 
 not the heart to enthrone him; and never shall I 
 enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the 
 flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and 
 commonplace humanity. He is President, as was 
 Taft. So is he impressive. But the expectation I 
 had blown up for him is punctured. He would have 
 been a god, despite all my prejudice against his styles, 
 if at any time he had proved himself to be the reso- 
 lute democrat. But the resolute democrat he was 
 not. He was just an ordinary college president in- 
 flating his chest as well as he could, and he has to 
 get out of my Pantheon. 
 
 This eviction of the President relieves my feelings 
 like a good spring cleaning. To be con-structive 
 
 [ 97 ] 
 
gives me pleasure, but not half so much pleasure as 
 to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former 
 mental and spiritual habitations. A great many- 
 people are catholic. They have hearts in which 
 Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East 
 Lynne. I envy these people and their receptive 
 natures, but my own chief joy is to asphyxiate my 
 young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bond- 
 age of loyalty. 
 
 There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I 
 was unjust to Upton Sinclair that I almost subscribed 
 to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel, Jimmie 
 Higgins, I actually read it. 
 
 " My best book," Mr. Sinclair assures the world. 
 If that is really the case, as I hope, I am happily 
 emancipated from him forever. He is something of 
 an artist. He converts into his own kind of music 
 the muck-rake element in contemporary journalism. 
 He is always a propagandist, and out of religious 
 finance or the war or high society or the stockyards 
 or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that 
 nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on 
 such stimulants, one ought to choose them carefully, 
 and I'd much rather go straight to Billy Sunday than 
 take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on 
 reading his well-known health books, I nearly fasted 
 nine days under his influence. That is to say, I 
 fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which 
 I dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced 
 me that I was perhaps a coarser organism than Mr. 
 Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an ordinary diet. 
 But until I had a good reason for expelling this 
 uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was al- 
 ways in danger of taking him seriously. Now, I am 
 
 [ 98 ] 
 
glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am 
 safe. 
 
 Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom 
 Upton Sinclair is nothing but a gargoyle ; yet the ex- 
 pulsion of Nietzsche was also required. When we 
 used to read the New Age ten years ago, with Oscar 
 Levy's steady derision of everything and anything 
 not Nietzschean, I had a horrible sense of inade- 
 quacy, and I started out to read the Master's works. 
 It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and 
 worm as I was, I found Nietzsche upsetting all the 
 other fellows in the Pantheon. He and William 
 Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christian- 
 ity. Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny 
 stories. He was sulky with George Meredith and 
 frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss 
 Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but 
 I voted him away. 
 
 This Olympian problem does not seem to bother 
 men like William Marion Reedy. Mr. Reedy is 
 the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee 
 Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritual- 
 ism, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. 
 He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile 
 salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops 
 and publishers, and he is genuinely himself with all 
 of them. He finds the common denominator in 
 machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and 
 without turning a hair he moves from tropical to 
 arctic conversation. He is at home with Celtic fair- 
 ies and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance and 
 St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe 
 he has, it must be a good deal like a Union depot, 
 with gods coming in and departing on every train 
 
 [ 99 ] 
 
and he himself holding a glorious reception at the 
 information booth. I am sure he can still see the 
 silver lining to W. J. Bryan and the presidential 
 timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun 
 of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a 
 good word for Freud. He has nothing against 
 Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This recep- 
 tivity puzzles me. A person with such open sym- 
 pathies is called upon to slave in their service, to rush 
 here and there like a general practitioner, to sleep 
 with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at 
 his head. How does he find the energy to do it! 
 I admire it. I marvel at men who understand all 
 and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore 
 Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt 
 Whitman. Think of those who have a good word 
 to say for Bonar Law ! It is less democratic, I am 
 sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a 
 lot of much-needed vitality. Give me a temple on 
 a high hill, with a long drop down from the exit. 
 
 [ loo ] 
 
NIGHT LODGING 
 
 IT is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim 
 Gorki's Night Lodging of " gloom." Gloomy 
 plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one 
 of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a 
 play like She Walked in Her Sleep? That de- 
 funct comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle 
 race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies 
 that. But to believe that a somber play must 
 necessarily be a " gloomy " play is like believing that 
 Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply 
 isn't true, and to suppose it is mentally inelastic. 
 
 But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We 
 say. Ah yes, Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen, 
 the man who bites on granite; or Gorki, the Big 
 Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are 
 simply human beings who have got beyond the com- 
 prehensions of the fifth grade. This is itself an old 
 story in criticism. Only the story has to be re-told 
 every time the New York newspaper critics are called 
 upon to characterize a serious drama. With a regu- 
 larity as unfailing as the moon, the New York critics 
 reaffirm their conviction that a play concerning dere- 
 lict human beings must of course be squalid, sodden, 
 high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to 
 believe and assert such things, yet their belief and 
 assertion are endemic in the New York newspapers, 
 like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps. 
 
 [ loi ] 
 
Mr. Arthur Hopkins's presentation of Night 
 Lodging at the Plymouth Theatre may or may not 
 be better than the presentation some time ago at the 
 German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the 
 performance at the German theatre and I am in- 
 dined to distrust the persons to whom the German 
 theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick 
 with which to whack the American theatre. But, 
 better or worse than the German performance, Mr. 
 Hopkins's is to the good. It is a strong, firm, spa- 
 cious, capable performance, resting not so much on 
 a few pinnacles as on a general level of excellence. 
 It is presented bravely. Making no attempt tO' 
 sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics, 
 it allows the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate 
 every word and action of the performance. The 
 result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every actor 
 in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness. 
 But the result is viable, Russian or not. A sense of 
 human incident and human presence is quickly se- 
 cured, and after that there comes a stream of events 
 which never loses its reality either in force or direc- 
 tion. The impact is tremendous. Gorki inundates 
 one's consciousness with these human fortunes and 
 misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while 
 occasional accents slip awry in the tumult of his 
 creation, the substance of his story finds one a cor- 
 roborator — in a way that one simply never corrob- 
 orates depression or gloom. 
 
 The men and women, who come together in this 
 night lodging of a Russian city, are of the emanci- 
 pated kind that one sees on the benches in Madison 
 Square. They are recruited from the casual worker 
 and the non-worker, the unemployed and the unem- 
 
 [ I02 ] 
 
ployable, the loafers and the criminals and the broken 
 and the declasse. On the first evening when one 
 hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit base- 
 ment, one realizes that their anarchism is bitter. 
 They grate on one another, sneer at one another, 
 bawl at one another, tell one another to go to hell. 
 They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled 
 them. They do not understand or accept their fate. 
 They are full of self-pity. They are, in a word, 
 one's tired and naked self. But this relaxed and 
 wanton selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps 
 for his people the freshness of childhood — a fresh- 
 ness charming in some cases, horrible in others, but 
 always with a touch of imxnortality. How they re- 
 veal themselves in this nudity of common poverty! 
 A woman in the corner is coughing, coughing. She 
 wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His 
 patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies 
 a man half recovered from a drunken brawl. He 
 aches loudly with stale liquor and stale wounds. In 
 the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the 
 wife of the lodging-house keeper — a mistress from 
 whom he pines to escape. The " baron " sits in the 
 shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary 
 sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young ac- 
 tor repeats the medical verdict that his organism is 
 poisoned with alchohol. " You mean ' organon,' " 
 shouts another. " No, organism. My organ- 
 ism . . ." And so, these lives sweep round and 
 round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the sport of 
 the winds of heaven. 
 
 Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical 
 patriarchal wanderer. Quite simply he fits into this 
 life of the basement, but unlike the rest he is no 
 
 [ 103 ] 
 
longer self-centered or self-afBicted. He walks erect 
 In his anarchism. And gradually the lives of the 
 night lodging group around him. He sits by the dy- 
 ing woman. He talks of women to the young thief, 
 and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beck- 
 oning to the young. He stands like an untroubled 
 oak in the gales that toss the others hither and 
 thither. Lord, he has seen life ! And he meets 
 them all with compassion, a man among children. 
 
 He goes. His presence has not prevented the 
 lodging-house keeper's wife from driving the young 
 man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented that 
 flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the 
 young man really loves. But though the old man 
 departs he leaves after him a rent of blue in the 
 clouds that choke these people's lives. One after 
 another the night lodgers question life afresh under 
 the wanderer's influence. The tartar's arm is still 
 smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is 
 still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The 
 actor is still alcoholic. But there is aroused in the 
 night lodging the imperishable dream of happiness, 
 and no one is ready to quench it. 
 
 Why is the grave and beautiful play not gloomy? 
 It is not enough to say that the really gloomy play 
 gives a naturalistic version of life which the spectator 
 rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the 
 falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows 
 or in its discords but in its absence of the vitamen 
 of beauty. Many plays are denied truth because 
 their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied 
 beauty simply because their beauty is a stranger. 
 Yet we know that truth or beauty may be as sable 
 as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a water- 
 [ 104 ] 
 
fall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the 
 child of ingrained ugliness, not the child of acci- 
 dental, conventional ugliness. It is the people who 
 think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see 
 Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail 
 in beholding life. It is not poor in sympathy. 
 
 [ 105 ] 
 
YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC 
 
 IN 19 1 2, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the 
 public how Mr. Taft had bitten the hand that fed 
 him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft's rejoinder but it 
 was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further obser- 
 vations from the colonel. Those were the days. 
 Nothing but peace on earth and good will among 
 Republicans. 
 
 About that time I happened to have lunch with a 
 most attractive young man, one of the first American 
 aviators. He was such a clear-cut young man, with 
 trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said 
 he to me, " But how can these things be true? I 
 can't understand it. If any one else said these things 
 you'd pay no attention to them, but both of these men 
 are fine men; they've both been president; and if 
 these things they say are true, then neither of them 
 can be such fine gentlemen. I can't make it out, hon- 
 estly." And he looked at me with a profundity of 
 pained inquiry. 
 
 What could I say? What can you say when you 
 meet with such simple faith? It took years of 
 primary school and Fourth of July and American 
 history to build up this conception of the American 
 presidents, and now the worst efforts of a president 
 and an ex-president had only barely shaken the top- 
 structure. What was the good of forcing this youth 
 to unlearn everything he had learned? If I took 
 [ 106 ] 
 
away his faith in the divine office of president, per- 
 haps he might begin to lose his patriotism and his 
 willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Per- 
 haps he might go on and lose faith in the jury 
 system, the institution of marriage, the right of free 
 speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance 
 of Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endow- 
 ment. If I unhinged this lad's faith, perhaps he 
 would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther, 
 Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma 
 Goldman — the "Goldman Woman" as the Ochs 
 man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed 
 man call her in their outbursts of American chivalry. 
 I wanted no such arid and lonely career for this 
 splendid young man. I hated to think of his wear- 
 ing an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his 
 fresh bloom to be a subversive idealist like Eugene 
 Debs. Much better, said I to myself, that he should 
 hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than that he 
 should repulse him and face life without him. So I 
 gave the lad soothing words and earnest though in- 
 sincere glances, and he went his way puzzled but 
 greatly reassured. 
 
 Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say 
 that simple faith is all very well, but a man ought to 
 live in the real world and know his way around. 
 Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing 
 situation. He is compelled to evade uncomfortable 
 facts. Very true. Quite right. Exactly so. But 
 is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of 
 being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a 
 simpleton and yet a wholesome man of action, a man 
 of will and character and pep? What is the good 
 of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalat- 
 [ 107 ] 
 
able facts, If it confuses you and upsets you and 
 undermines everything you've been brought up to be- 
 lieve ? What's the use ? Voltaire may be all right 
 in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we 
 all be Voltaires? 
 
 If I stick up for good faith in the character of 
 presidents, I know that there will be a bad come- 
 back. I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even 
 if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I 
 therefore to give in to them? I refuse to admit 
 that there is nothing else than to destroy a beautiful 
 faith in the good that is everywhere. 
 
 What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old 
 argument of the war. They say: Yes, your fine 
 brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical prod- 
 uct of patriotism. And where were the prime ex- 
 amples of patriotism to be found? In Germany. 
 He happens. In your instance, to believe in the divine 
 office of the presidents. But it is much more char- 
 acteristic of him to be on his knees to the Kaiser. 
 Yet consider how one-sided you are. When he de- 
 clares himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the 
 joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his 
 reverence over the Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of 
 Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when It comes 
 to an American you say, " Oh, don't let's destroy 
 this beautiful faith ! How precious It is, how noble, 
 how commendable ! Hands off, please." And you 
 act in the same way toward the Constitution or the 
 Supreme Court. It's magnificent when the Germans 
 come ahead with a perfectly good new constitution, 
 model 1920. But we must stick to the brand of 
 1789, with the cow-catcher added In 1910. Hail to 
 Our Iron Constitution ! And hall to the Old Man's 
 [ 108 ] 
 
Home down in Washington where they hand out the 
 uncontaminated economics that they themselves 
 lisped at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country. 
 Straight from the source, these old men got their 
 inspiration, and they are a credit to the early nine- 
 teenth century. You think we exaggerate your 
 loyalty? You agree that the simple faith of 'young 
 Germans and young Turks can be highly dangerous, 
 but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young 
 Americans? 
 
 That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way; 
 but hardly likely to fool the intelligent, law-abiding, 
 God-fearing citizen. Because no good American 
 could admit for one instant that the cases are on all 
 fours. America, after all, is a democracy. And 
 when a young man starts out having faith in a democ- 
 racy he is in an altogether different position from 
 Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet 
 Russians and people like that. A democracy, what- 
 ever its faults, is founded in the interests of all the 
 people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple 
 faith in it is equivalent to simple faith in a first 
 principle; and you cannot go behind first principles. 
 
 That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic. 
 He thinks it is very clever to question the things 
 that are of the light in just the same spirit that he 
 questions things that are of the darkness. And of 
 course he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who 
 cuts away the sound flesh rather than the diseased 
 flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive 
 not con-structive. 
 
 And so I am g'lad that I did not seek to disillusion 
 my fine young aviator. If I had succeeded in dis- 
 illusioning him, who can tell what the consequences 
 
 [ 109 ] 
 
might have been? We know that during the war 
 there were grim duties to be performed by our young 
 men — towns to be bombed where it took excessive 
 skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the 
 women and the children. If I had sapped this boy's 
 faith even one pulsation, perhaps he would have 
 failed in his duty. 
 
 You cannot be too careful how you lead people to 
 rationalize. In this world there is rationalism and 
 plenty of it. But is there not also a super-rational- 
 ism? And must we not always inculcate super-ra- 
 tionalism when we know we possess the true faith? 
 
 [ no ] 
 
THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY 
 
 OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID 
 [Inscribed to the Little Revie'w} 
 
 1 HE floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so 
 he had to pick his steps with care. But at last 
 he came to a French window, which he opened, and 
 sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was 
 a poet, and that is what young poets do. 
 
 He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men 
 go. Unformed, of course — perhaps twenty min- 
 utes late and the hall only two-thirds full. But he 
 was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the 
 gas. He was from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, 
 but he had long resided with an aunt in Nebraska 
 and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts 
 and a lemon tie. At Harvard — he went to 
 Harvard — he had opened his bean with consider- 
 able difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of 
 temperament. So that he could never stop himself 
 when he beheld a passing star. 
 
 The motion was full, with significant curves. It 
 made him a little air-sick at first, but he preferred 
 air-sickness. He made no compromise with the 
 public taste for pedestrlanism. After a few days 
 that quickly ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. 
 He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of Venus on the 
 main line. 
 
 [ III ] 
 
In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick 
 their heels toward Mercury, and utter startling 
 cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the menag- 
 erie, and they feed mathematical instructors through 
 a hole in the wall. This new participant had too 
 much of the stern blood of the Puritan in his rust- 
 proof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, 
 but when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of 
 seventy years he felt a little wishful, and permitted 
 himself a trifling ululation. The local cheer-leader 
 heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard 
 Acutlst, and there was joy in Asphodelia. 
 
 A year or so sufEced him. He grew tired of sleep- 
 ing in the branches of the cocoanut tree, and the 
 river of green ink wearied him. So when the next 
 star swung around he slipped away from his pink 
 duenna and crept into the lattice-work to steal his 
 passage home. 
 
 Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He 
 hung there lonely, in his Reis underwear, aching in 
 the void. 
 
 He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he 
 trans-shipped to New York in ordinary ways, he 
 prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue 
 course on Front Street. 
 
 " My boy," said his uncle, " what do you want 
 me to do for you? Speak the word. You have 
 been gone so long, and you were^given up for lost." 
 
 " Only one thing do I want," confessed the for- 
 mer Acutist. 
 
 " And what might that be? " the uncle more cir- 
 cumspectly inquired. 
 
 *' Take me at once to the great simple embrace 
 pf wholesome Coney Island." 
 
 [ "2 ] 
 
So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, 
 the young poet stepped from Acutism on to the 
 Iron Boat. 
 
 And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants? 
 . . . But must we not leave something to waft in 
 the spaces of uncertainty? 
 
 [ "^ ] 
 
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 
 
 1 AM sorry now not to have treasured every word 
 that came from my poet. At the moment I disliked 
 to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my dignity. 
 But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the note- 
 book are not ashamed to be the Boswells of medioc- 
 rity. Why should I have hesitated to take notes 
 of William Butler Yeats? 
 
 In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his 
 host agreed, and I intruded on him as far as Phila- 
 delphia. I say intruded: his forehead wrinkled in 
 tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I 
 was welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he 
 was not unwilling to speak. His dark eyes, oblique 
 and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and 
 remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a 
 secret. He opened them for utterance almost as in 
 a dream. As if he were spokesman of some sacred 
 book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, 
 he pronounced his opinions seriously, occasionally 
 raising his hands to fend his words. He was, I 
 think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was 
 indeed attentive. I had never listened to more dis- 
 tinguished conversation. Or, rather, monologue — 
 for when I talked he suspended his animation, like 
 a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down. 
 
 It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked 
 him if he'd write for it, and he answered characterise 
 [ "4 ] 
 
tically. He said that journalism was action and that 
 nothing except the last stage of exasperation could 
 make him want to write for a journal as he had 
 written about Blanco Posnet or The Playboy. The 
 word " journalism " he uttered as a nun might utter 
 " vaudeville." He was reminded, he said, of an 
 offer that was made to Oscar Wilde of the editor- 
 ship of a fashion paper, to include court gossip. 
 Wouldn't it interest Wilde? "Ah, yes," re- 
 sponded Wilde, " I am deeply interested in a court 
 scandal at present." The journalist (devourer of 
 carrion, of course) was immediately eager. 
 " Yes," said Wilde, " the scandal of the Persian 
 court in the year 400 B. c." 
 
 It was telling. It made me ashamed for my pro- 
 fession. I could not forget, however, pillars of the 
 Ladies' World edited by Oscar Wilde which I used 
 to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended 
 in the end. 
 
 Yeats's mind was bemused by his recollection of his 
 fellow-Irishman. Once he completed his lectures he 
 would go home, and a " fury of preoccupation " 
 would keep him from being caught in those activities 
 that lead to occasional writing. His lectures would 
 not go into essays but into dialogues, " of a man 
 wandering through the antique city of Fez." In the 
 cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there 
 was a mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of 
 the moment, the gaze of a stranger to fashion who 
 might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond 
 space and time. 
 
 " And humanitarian writing," he concluded, with 
 a weary limp motion of his hand, " the writing of 
 reformers, ' uplifters,' with a narrow view of de- 
 [ "5 ] 
 
mocracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And 
 truistic." 
 
 I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel's narrow anti- 
 democracy and belief in the non-existence of pro- 
 gress, such as he had argued in Virginia during the 
 Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate 
 nature. The progress he denied was a progress 
 wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the early Vic- 
 torians. It was founded on " truisms " not really 
 tnie. Whether Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to 
 repudiate these ideas he didn't know: possibly Mit- 
 chel was. 
 
 Yeats's one political interest at that time, before 
 the war, was the Irish question. He believed in 
 home rule. He believed the British democracy was 
 then definitely making the question its own, and 
 ' " this is fortunate." I spoke of Jung's belief in 
 England's national complex. He was greatly inter- 
 ested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted. 
 " The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspira- 
 tion," he said, " and Carson has stimulated this. 
 His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so there 
 cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with 
 Redmond that Carson has gone ahead on a military 
 conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for a party 
 reason. - I am neither radical nor tory. I think 
 Asquith is a better man than Lloyd George — less 
 inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed up with big 
 phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it 
 arises. ... I object to the uplifter who makes other 
 people's sins his business, and forgets his chief busi- 
 ness, his own sins. JaneAddams? Ah, that is dif- 
 ferent." 
 
 His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a 
 [ "6 ] 
 
good deal of audiences. In his own audiences he 
 found no one more eager, no one who knows more, 
 than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He 
 was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find 
 prosperity go hand in hand with culture in this coun- 
 try. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely 
 to be a poor audience. Where it is good, the audience 
 is good. In his own country the happiest woman he 
 could name was a woman living in a Dublin slum 
 whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fan- 
 tasies. Is poverty an evil? We should desire a 
 condition of life which would satisfy the need for 
 food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in im- 
 agination. The merchant builds himself a palace 
 only for auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as 
 rich as the merchant. I said yes, but that a brute or 
 a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination. 
 He agreed. " Life is the warring of forces and these 
 forces seem to be irreconcilable." 
 
 It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. 
 I spoke of the deadness of so much of the work done 
 by William Sharp and Grant Allen. He said it was 
 Allen's own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too 
 many thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up 
 their children on the same scale as their friends' 
 children ! And he kindled at this folly. " A 
 woman who marries an artist," he said with much 
 animation, " is either a goose, or mad, or a hero. 
 If she's a goose, she drives him to earn money. If 
 she's mad she drives him mad. If she's a hero, they 
 suffer together, and they come out all right." 
 
 Phrases like this were not alone. There was the 
 keen observation that the Pennsylvania station is 
 "free from the vulgarity of advertisement"; the 
 
 [ 117 ] 
 
admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry 
 except in The Dark Rosaleen and Hussey's Ode; a 
 generalization on Chicago to the effect that " courts 
 love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art." Not 
 for a moment did this mind cease to move over the 
 face of realities and read their legend and interpret 
 its meaning. Meeting him was not like Hazlitt's 
 meeting Coleridge. I could not say, " my heart, 
 shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has 
 never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak 
 to; but that my understanding also did not remain 
 dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to 
 express itself, I owe to Coleridge." But the Yeats 
 I met did not meet me. I remained on the periph- 
 ery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in 
 the sesame of poets. I hope that some one to-day, 
 nearer to him than a journalist, is wise enough to 
 treasure his words. 
 
 [ ii8 1 
 
"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE" 
 
 l^AST night I woke up suddenly to the sound of 
 bombardment. A great detonation tore the silence ; 
 an answering explosion shook it; then came a series 
 of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look 
 out on a rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip 
 of sky to the south. In the ache of something not 
 unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as quickly 
 as I could what was happening. No result from the 
 explosions was to be seen. The skyscrapers were 
 gaunt and black, with a square of lost light in a room 
 or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the 
 stars unperturbed. Still the shots barked and mut- 
 tered, insanely active, beyond the blank buildings, 
 under the serene sky. 
 
 I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it 
 be on the river? Could it be gun practice, or was 
 there really an interchange of gun-fire? A U-boat? 
 An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be ex- 
 plained and my mind was singularly lively for three 
 a. m. 
 
 Long after your country has gone to war, I told 
 myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sym- 
 pathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality of the 
 imagination. You are aware that there Is fighting, 
 bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the phil- 
 osophic. You do not put yourself in the place of 
 Americans under fire. But if this be really bom- 
 
 [ 119 ] 
 
bardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an in- 
 stant how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem 
 the supreme understander of the situation. An 
 enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would 
 run a girdle of feeling from New York to the re- 
 motest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. To pro- 
 tect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred — that 
 would always be a necessity. But I grimly remem- 
 bered the phrase, " proud punctilio." I remem- 
 bered the President's tender-minded words, " con- 
 duct our operations as belligerents without passion," 
 and his pledge of sincere friendship to the German 
 people: warfare without "the desire to bring any 
 injury or disadvantage upon them." Here, with the 
 Germans' shell-fire plowing into our buildings and 
 into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of 
 their guns? 
 
 Becoming awake enough to think about the war, 
 I began to reason about this " bombardment," to 
 move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson Maxim- 
 Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were 
 continuing, but not at all sensationally, and soon 
 they began to shape themselves familiarly, to sound 
 remarkably like the round noises of trains shunting, 
 from the New York Central, carried on clear dry 
 November air. Soon, indeed, It became impossible 
 to conceive that these loud reverberations from the 
 Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so distorted 
 by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my 
 breathless inspection of the innocent sky! 
 
 But that touch of panic, in the interest of our 
 whole present patriotic cultural attitude, was not to 
 be lost. It is the touch, confessed or unconfessed, 
 that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward 
 
 [ 120 ] 
 
German art and literature and science an attitude 
 of appreciation and reciprocation, without disloyalty, 
 it must be in the presence of the idea of shell- 
 wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-minded- 
 ness is the illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth 
 and smug. It is Pharisaical. It comes from that 
 neutrality of the imagination which is another name 
 for selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake. 
 
 A generation less prepared than our own for the 
 mood of warfare it would be difficult to imagine — 
 less prepared, that is to say, by the situation of our 
 country or the color of our thought. To declare 
 now that New York has made no provision for the 
 air-traffic of the future is not to arouse any sense 
 of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency 
 was aroused ten or fifteen years ago by the bass 
 warnings of military men. It is not too much to say 
 that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have 
 an ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas 
 Murray Butler and Elihu Root and Andrew Carnegie 
 were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel 
 Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was 
 far more busy enunciating the recall of judges — 
 and he earned the Nobel Prize. Few men, even two 
 years ago, believed we would be sending great armies 
 to Europe in 19 17. In the first place, men like 
 Homer Lea had said that the United States could 
 not mobilize half a million soldiers for active serv- 
 ice in less than three years. And in the next place, 
 we still felt pacifically. We had lived domestic life 
 too long ever to imagine our sky black and our grass 
 red. 
 
 Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, 
 this calm enjoyment of an unearned increment of 
 
 [ 121 ] 
 
peace, there was never a greater dislocation of stand- 
 ards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater 
 problem of readjustment. For England, at any 
 rate, there was a closeness to the war that helped 
 to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, 
 besides the discrepancies in the entailment of serv- 
 ices, there are enormous discrepancies in sentiment 
 to start with, and policies still to be accepted and 
 cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed 
 or reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these cir- 
 cumstances, is so much to be looked for, especially 
 with Impetuous patriots demanding a new password 
 of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not 
 at how many outrages there are, but how few. 
 
 Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of 
 literary discussion, naturally. " Let the sailor con- 
 tent himself with talking of the winds; the herd of 
 his oxen ; the soldier of his wounds ; the shepherd of 
 his flocks " ; the critic of his books. But there is one 
 kind of outrage that requires to be discussed, from 
 the point of view of culture, if only because there 
 Is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be 
 subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, pro- 
 visionally so-called, of mutilating everything Ger- 
 man; not only sequestering what may be dangerous 
 or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of tolera- 
 tion everything that has German origin or bears a 
 German name. The quick transformation of Bis- 
 marcks into North Atlantlcs, of Kaiserhofs into 
 Cafe New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seri- 
 ously. The shudderings at Germantown, Pa., and 
 Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same 
 childlike class. But it Is different when an Austrian 
 artist Is not permitted to perform because, while we 
 
 [ 122 ] 
 
are not at war with Austria, she is our enemy's ally. 
 It is different when " the music of all German com- 
 posers will be swept from the programmes of sched- 
 uled concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Pitts- 
 burgh. ' The Philadelphia Orchestra Association 
 wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure 
 to the request of the Pittsburgh Association. The 
 Philadelphia Orchestra Association is heartily in ac- 
 cord with any movement directed by patriotic mo- 
 tives.' " It is this sort of thing, extending intoler- 
 ance to culture, that suggests we have been surprised 
 in this whole matter of culture with our lamps un- 
 trimmed. 
 
 In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have 
 been unavoidably surprised — so much so that our 
 " proud punctilio " has been jogged considerably 
 loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any 
 pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to 
 be. It used to be possible, even for men whose 
 hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign magnani- 
 mous truces; but science has made another kind of 
 warfare possible, and the civilian population of the 
 modern State, totally involved in a catastrophe be- 
 yond all reckoning, falls from its complacency into 
 a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the 
 enemy Is inhuman in this war. 
 
 Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred 
 might well go beyond the fervor of the Inquisition, 
 and the hope of exterminating the Germans as a 
 people might be universally entertained! But no one 
 who has read history to any purpose will trust too 
 far to this particular emotionality of the hour. To 
 say this, in the middle of a righteous war, may sound 
 unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could 
 
 [ 123 ] 
 
be more traitorous and seditious than Lincoln's 
 Second Inaugural Address: "Both read the same 
 Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes 
 his aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both 
 could not be answered — that of neither has been 
 answered fully. The Almighty has his own pur- 
 poses. ' Woe unto the world because of offenses ! 
 for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe 
 to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we 
 shall suppose that American slavery is one of those 
 offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs 
 come, but which, having continued through his ap- 
 pointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he 
 gives to both North and South this terrible war, as 
 the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall 
 we discern therein any departure from those divine 
 attributes which the believers in a living God always 
 ascribe to him ? Fondly do we hope — fervently 
 do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may 
 speedily pass away. Yet, ... so still it must be 
 said, ' The judgments of the Lord are true and 
 righteous altogether.' With malice toward none; 
 with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as 
 God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to 
 finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's 
 wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the 
 battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do 
 all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting 
 peace among ourselves, and with all nations." It 
 is, perhaps, like quoting the Lord's Prayer. And 
 yet it is the neglected wisdom of a man who had 
 gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war. 
 
 But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside 
 humanity. We are engaged in a war foreordained 
 [ 124 ] 
 
and necessary, a natural war. A war inescapable, 
 yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of 
 hundreds of books speak. . . . To ask for such dis- 
 criminations as this is, however, scarcely possible. 
 It is too much, in the face of superstitions, anxieties, 
 and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of culture 
 to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to 
 go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation 
 of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as 
 attacked The Playboy of the Western World in 
 New York is at once called " rowdy " and " des- 
 picable." But in time of war it is part of its mo- 
 rality, or immorality, that culture must be subordin- 
 ate to clamor, and that even national sculpture must 
 become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respec- 
 table and idealizing long feet. How far this super- 
 vision of culture goes depends only on the degree of 
 pressure. It may go so far as to make the domina- 
 tion of political considerations, state considerations, 
 paramount in everything — precisely the victory that 
 democracy, hoping with Emerson that " we shall one 
 day learn to supersede politics by education," has 
 most to fear. 
 
 It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that 
 is free, that one must seek the opposition to enemy 
 culture, not in the culture that is opposed. Must 
 one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? 
 To do so is to show an immunity from the actual 
 which is not to be envied. It is only necessary to 
 imagine New York bombarded, as many French and 
 English and Belgian and Russian towns have been 
 bombarded since the beginning of the war, to realize 
 the rush of resistance that is born in mankind, ex- 
 pedient for government to recruit and to rally to 
 
 [ 125 ] 
 
the end. But for the man who has partaken of dem- 
 ocratic culture this " end " involves democracy. All 
 character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in the will 
 to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The 
 only course open to the man who is still concerned 
 for democratic culture is to remember the nobility 
 of Lincoln's example — by concentrating on the of- 
 fenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty 
 scourge of war, to avoid the war-panic and war- 
 hatred which will enrage our wounds. 
 
 [ 126 ] 
 
WAR EXPERTS 
 
 " War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong 
 arm. Not that these attributes do not have their place 
 and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the 
 chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count 
 in this warfare are technological exploits; exploits of techno- 
 logical science, industrial appliances, and technological train- 
 ing. As has been remarked before, it is no longer a gentle- 
 man's war, and the gentleman, as such, is no better than 
 a marplot in the game as it is played." — Thorstein Veblen in 
 The Nature of Peace. 
 
 Across a park in Washington I followed the 
 leisurely stride of two British officers. Their move- 
 ment, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had a mili- 
 tary deliberation which became their veteran gray 
 hairs. They were In khaki uniforms and leather 
 leggings, a red strip at the shoulder marking them 
 as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses 
 and tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn 
 to the birds they were as of a grander race of men. 
 After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked who 
 they were and learned that one of them was simply 
 a Canadian lawyer — and that, being a judge ad- 
 vocate, he was obliged to boot and spur himself In 
 his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and 
 down the elevator in polished leggings, for the good 
 of the cause. Never in his life had he heard a 
 machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished any- 
 
 [ 127 ] 
 
thing more dangerous than his family carving knife. 
 On inspection his companion looked similarly martial. 
 The only certain veteran in the parklet was a 
 shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the 
 grass. 
 
 Part of the politico-military art is window-dress- 
 ing of this description. It excites the romantic pop- 
 ulace, composed of pedestrians like myself, and 
 serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine 
 order of values from which the shambling citizen 
 is debarred. But back of the window-dressing, the 
 rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared ova- 
 tion and patriotic tears, there is a reality as differ- 
 ent from these appearances as roots are different 
 from flowers. If I had ever supposed that the gist 
 of war was to be derived solely from contemplating 
 uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion 
 when I overheard the cool experts of war. 
 
 These experts, such of them as I happened to 
 overhear, had come with the British mission to 
 America, and they were far other than the com- 
 mon notion of lords of war. The most impressive 
 of them was a slight figure who reminded me ex- 
 ternally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw's 
 Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a 
 don at Cambridge, a teacher of economics, and he 
 retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert 
 who counts on holding attention. It was not in 
 him, as it is in so many older pooh-bah professors, 
 to expect a deference to personal garrulity; but one 
 gained an impression that no words were likely to 
 be wasted on vacuous listeners by a person with such 
 steel-gray eyes. 
 
 From London, since the beginning of the war, this 
 [ 128 ] 
 
concentrated man had gone out of Paris, to Rome, 
 to Petrograd, to join counsel with various allies on 
 the science of providing munitions. It would never 
 have occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine- 
 faced, sensitive, quiet-voiced professor to work out 
 the economic killing of cattle. Yet almost as soon 
 as he had volunteered in England he began on the 
 task of adapting industry to slaughter, and there was 
 no doubt whatever that his inclusive mind had pro- 
 cured the quick and effective killing of thousands of 
 human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen 
 to him. He was one of those men whom H. G. 
 Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort of man 
 who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind 
 as nimble as quicksilver while he devised the soundest 
 plan for launching the forces of his sphere. There 
 was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a 
 mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organ- 
 izing of America for destructiveness as an engineer 
 might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel with copper, 
 and there was as little pretension in his manner as 
 there was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cul- 
 tivated, he was obviously a university man, but he 
 had come to the top by virtue of mental equipment. 
 " Mental equipment " means many things, but 
 plainly he was not of those remote academicians who 
 go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He managed 
 his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt 
 swing and drive and bite of It could escape no one, 
 and for all his almost plaintively modest demeanor 
 he had instant arresting power. It was he and a 
 few men like him who had made it feasible for ama- 
 teur armies to loop round an empire a burning rain 
 of steel. 
 
 [ 129 ] 
 
This master of munitions was not the only school- 
 man who had demonstrated brains. There was an- 
 other professor, this time the purchaser of guns. 
 He had come to his role from holding the kind of 
 position that Matthew Arnold once had held. A 
 meager figure enough, superficially the scholastic- 
 dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of 
 education was no bad beginning for ordering a new 
 department with small attention to the tricks of mer- 
 chandise, but with every thought as to technological 
 detail. The conversation that went about did not 
 seem to engage this man, except as it turned on such 
 engrossing topics as the necessity for circumventing 
 child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent 
 cloud that gathered the ascending vapors, and dis- 
 charged itself in lightning decision which made no 
 change in the obscurity from which it came. 
 
 Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue 
 I saw one late-working member of the mission stop 
 wearily to fend off American inquisition. A training 
 in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished 
 exile a permanent nostalgia for Olympus — and 
 how Olympian the British Foreign Office is, few 
 Americans dare to behold. The candidature to 
 this interesting service of a great democracy is 
 limited to a " narrow circle of society " by various 
 excellent devices, the first of which is that official 
 conditions of entry fix the amount of the private 
 means required at a minimum of £400 a year. 
 " The primary qualification for the diplomatic 
 service," says one friendly interpreter of it, " is a 
 capacity to deal on terms of equality with consider- 
 able persons and their words and works. Some- 
 times, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its 
 [ 130 ] 
 
highest form, by something which is hardly examin- 
 able — by very great intellectual powers. Ordinar- 
 ily, however, this capacity is a result of nurture in an 
 atmosphere of Independence. Unfortunately, it is 
 scarcely too much to say that the present constitution 
 of society provides this atmosphere of independence 
 only where there is financial independence. In a 
 very few cases freedom of mind and character is 
 achieved elsewhere, but then a great price, not 
 measurable by money, has to be paid for it — how 
 great a price only those who have paid it know. . . . 
 The ' property qualification ' is operative as a means 
 of selecting a certain kind of character; no readjust- 
 ment- of pay could be a substitute for it. Undoubt- 
 edly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but 
 the limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice 
 or of a mere preference for wealth — it is a limita- 
 tion imposed by the needs of the diplomatic service, 
 and those needs are national needs." Out of such a 
 remarkable background, so redolent of " the present 
 constitution of society," my exiled diplomat took his 
 weary stand before prying writers for the press. 
 They wanted to know " the critical shrinking point." 
 They wished to discuss the " maximum theoretic 
 availability." He had no answer to make ; he merely 
 made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box 
 that he set at his feet there were undoubtedly 
 treasured figures, priceless information for Germany 
 in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box 
 might have been solid metal for any effect it had on 
 the conversation. He was a kind of expert who 
 took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; who 
 punctuated silence with, " Look here, you've got 
 hold of absolutely the wrong man. . . . Hanged if 
 
 [ 131 ] 
 
I know. ... My dear sir, I haven't the very 
 faintest idea." 
 
 And yet this member of a caste was only coming 
 through because he too was paying a technological 
 price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and rubber — 
 there was nothing his country might need which did 
 not occupy him, staff officer of vital trafficking, 
 throughout numbered nights. 
 
 There were a few business men on the mission — 
 mighty few considering their lordship in times of 
 peace. Most of the dominant figures either from 
 Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellec- 
 tual who stood out as rather an exception to the 
 prevailing type. He was an older man whose nature 
 brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and 
 high discourse and a happy gigantic effervescence. 
 If a reputation brayed too loudly at him, he named 
 its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him, 
 he called it detestable and cried to knock the English 
 Nation's head against the Manchester Guardian's. 
 Yet he was distinguished from most of his colleagues 
 as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. 
 To the organization of his country he had contrib- 
 uted one invaluable idea, and each problem that 
 came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow im- 
 mediate importance into the perspective of a natural 
 philosophy. Not fond of a prearranged system, he 
 irked more than the run of his countrymen at the 
 stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great 
 sweep of vigor he would start at the proposition of 
 handling war industry, for example, on a basis not 
 inadequate to the requirements; and out of his run- 
 ning oration would come a wealth of such suggestions 
 as spring only from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind. 
 [ 132 ] 
 
These are a handful of England's experts in war- 
 time. They do not bear the brunt of the fight, like 
 the soldiers, but the roots of the flower of war are in 
 just such depths as employ these hidden minds. 
 
 [ 133 ] 
 
OKURA SEES NEWPORT 
 
 OkURA was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend 
 of mine in Japan. Jack said that Okura was tak- 
 ing two years off to study democracy, and would 
 I steer him around. I was delighted. I offered 
 Okura his choice of the great democratic scene, with 
 myself as obedient personal conductor. He was 
 very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray 
 manner, and he asked if we could begin with New- 
 port. I suspected a joke, but his eye never twinkled, 
 and so to Newport we went. 
 
 The dirty little Newport railway station interested 
 Okura. So did the choked throat of Thames Street, 
 with its mad crush of motors and delivery wagons 
 and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from 
 the meat market to the book shop and from the 
 chemist's to the Boston Store. I explained to Okura 
 that this was not really Newport, only a small sample 
 of the ordinary shopping country town, with the 
 real exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind. 
 Okura clucked an acceptance of this remark, and our 
 car wove its difficult way through the narrow lane till 
 we returned to Bellevue Avenue. 
 
 The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded 
 to Okura. He expected a belle vue, not a good 
 plain plutocratic American street. When I told him 
 what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied 
 with its exhibition of assorted architecture, and he 
 [ 134 ] 
 
broke into open comment. "So very charming I" 
 he cried politely. " So like postcards of Milwaukee 
 by the lake ! " I enjoyed his naive enthusiasm and 
 let it go. 
 
 He wanted to know who lived on the avenue, 
 and I told him all the names I could think of. He 
 had heard many of them, the samurai of America 
 being known to him as a matter of course, and he 
 picked up new crumbs of information with obvious 
 gratitude. 
 
 "Vanderbilt? Oh, yes." That was old. So 
 were Astor and Belmont. 
 
 After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. " I do 
 not see the McAlpin mansion." 
 
 " The McAlpins? I have never heard of them," 
 I murmured indulgently. 
 
 " But that Is one name I think I remember cor- 
 rectly," Okura answered with visible anxiety. 
 " The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the 
 Bellevue-Stratfords ? Please forgive me, I do not 
 understand. Are not the McAlpins also Bellevue- 
 McAlpins?" 
 
 It was hard to convince Okura that this was not 
 a Valhalla of hotel proprietors, but at last he got 
 it straight. We went back again as far as the 
 Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tourna- 
 ment. 
 
 Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats 
 up rather far — well, to be frank, among the James- 
 town and Saunderstown people. But happily we 
 had Newport In the boxes right below us. Some of 
 the ladies sat facing the tennis, some sat with their 
 backs to it, and a great buzz of conversation rever- 
 berated under the roof of the stand and billowed on 
 
 [ 135 ] 
 
to the court. On the court two young men strove 
 against each other with a skill hardly to be matched 
 in any other game, and occasionally, when some- 
 thing eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple 
 passed through the crowd. But the applause was ir- 
 regular. People had to be watched and pointed out. 
 It was important to note which human oyster bore 
 the largest pearl. The method of entry and exit 
 was significant, and significant the whole ritual of 
 being politely superior to the game. 
 
 Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately, 
 and there was so much conversation he was rather 
 distracted. 
 
 " I hope it does not annoy you? " I asked him. 
 
 " Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so 
 democratic ! " 
 
 At this point the umpire got off his perch, and 
 came forward to entreat the fine ladies. 
 
 " I have asked you before to keep quiet," he 
 wailed. " For God's sake, will you stop talking? " 
 
 " How very interesting," murmured Okura. 
 
 " Yes," I said, " the religious motif." 
 
 " Ah, yes 1 " he nodded, very gravely. 
 
 Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play, 
 and we decided to return to the tournament ; but first 
 we took ourselves to Bailey's Beach. 
 
 Bailey's Beach Is a small section of the Atlantic 
 littoral famous for its seaweed. The seaweed is 
 of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in in large 
 quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind 
 and other picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy 
 carpet through which one wades out to the more 
 fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies in 
 their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching 
 [ 136 ] 
 
the more adventurous sex pick his way out of the 
 vegetable matter. In the pavilion of the bath- 
 houses sit still less adventurous groups. 
 
 It took some time to explain to Okura why this 
 beach, once devoted to the collection of seaweed for 
 manure, should now be dedicated to bathing. But 
 he grasped the main point, that it was a private 
 beach. 
 
 " Forgive me," he said, " I see no Jews." 
 
 " That's all right," I answered. " You are study- 
 ing democracy. There are no Jews here. None 
 allowed." 
 
 " Oh ! " he digested the fact. Then his eye 
 brightened. " Ah, you have your geisha girls at the 
 swim-beach. How very charming! " 
 
 "No," T corrected him. "Those are not our 
 geisha girls. That is the ' shimmy set.' You know : 
 people who are opposed to the daylight saving act 
 and the prohibition amendment." 
 
 " Oh, I understand. Republicans," he nodded 
 happily. 
 
 As the Servants' Hour was approaching at Bailey's 
 Beach, and as I had no good explanation to give 
 of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along by 
 the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by 
 the walk, and by the fact that it ran in front of 
 these private houses, free to the public as to the 
 wind. Once or twice we went down below stone 
 walls, with everything above hidden from us, but 
 this was exceptional. Okura thought the walk a fine 
 example of essential democracy. 
 
 "And what are those long tubes? " he asked, as 
 we gazed out toward Portugal. 
 
 " Sewer pipes," I said bluntly, looking at the great 
 [ 137 ] 
 
series of excretory organs that these handsome demo- 
 cratic mansions pushed into the sea. 
 
 "Are they considered beautiful?" asked Okura. 
 
 " (Quite," I told him. " They are one of the 
 features provided strictly for the public." 
 
 "So kind!" said the acquiescent Japanese. 
 
 We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose 
 plutocracy was not entirely intact, and but for one 
 instructive incident it was an ordinary civilized meal. 
 That incident, however, shall live long in my mem- 
 ory because of my inability to interpret it to Okura. 
 
 We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat 
 down, when the third man was called to the tele- 
 phone. 
 
 He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his 
 hostess, " I'm awfully sorry, I've got to leave." 
 
 His hostess looked apprehensive. " I hope it's 
 nothing serious? " 
 
 "Oh, not at all; please don't worry," he re- 
 sponded, plumping down his napkin, " but I've just 
 had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She's a man short 
 and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So 
 long. Awfully sorry ! " 
 
 " What did that mean, please? " Okura inquired, 
 as we hurried back to see Kumagae play. 
 
 " Do you mean, democratically? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " I give it up," I retorted. 
 
 " But Mr. Owen said you would want to inter- 
 pret everything democratic to me," Okura ventured 
 on, " and is there not some secret here hidden from 
 me? I fear I am very stupid." 
 
 Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not ex- 
 plain. 
 
 [ 138 ] 
 
" But," pressed Okura, " ' the world has been 
 made safe for democracy.' I want so much to 
 understand it. I fear I do not yet understand New- 
 port." 
 
 And he looked at me with his innocent eyes. 
 
 [ 139 ] 
 
THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED 
 
 It is the boast of more than one proud author, 
 popular or unpopular, that he never reads any criti- 
 cism of his own work. He knows from his wife or 
 his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists. 
 Sometimes in hurrying through the newspaper he 
 catches sight of his unforgettable name. Inadver- 
 tently he may read on, learning the drift of the 
 comment before he stops himself. But his rule is 
 rigid. He never reads what the critics say about 
 him. 
 
 Before an author comes to this admirable self- 
 denial he has usually had some experience of the 
 ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he started 
 out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself. 
 Of course I don't profess to like criticism. Nobody 
 likes to be criticized. But I hope I am big enough 
 to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No man 
 can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but 
 so long as criticism is helpful, that's all a man has 
 a right to ask. Is it meant to be helpful? If so, 
 shoot. 
 
 After some experience of helpful criticism, it will 
 often occur to the sensitive author that he is not 
 being completely understood. A man's ego should 
 certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn't 
 a man a right to his own style and his own person- 
 [ 140 ] 
 
ality? What is the use of criticism that is based 
 on the critic's dislike of the author's personality? 
 The critic who has a grudge against an author simply 
 because he thinks and feels in a certain way is 
 scarcely likely to be helpful. The author and the 
 critic are not on common ground. And the case is 
 not improved by the very evident intrusion of the 
 critic's prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly ob- 
 vious that a man with a bias will see in a book just 
 what he wants to see. If he is a reactionary, he 
 will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik 
 he will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use 
 of reading criticism? The critic merely holds the 
 mirror up to his own nature, when he is not content 
 to reproduce the publisher's prepared review. 
 
 The author goes on wondering, " What does he 
 say about me?" But the disappointments are too 
 many. Once in a blue moon the critic " under- 
 stands " the author. He manages, that is to say, 
 to do absolutely the right thing by the author's ego. 
 He strokes it hard and strokes it the right way. 
 After that he points out one or two of the things 
 that are handicapping the author's creative force, 
 and he shows how easily such handicaps can be re- 
 moved. This is the helpful, appreciative, percep- 
 tive critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty 
 bristling young egoists who want figs to grow on 
 thistles and cabbages to turn into roses, and who 
 blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill. 
 These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest 
 in the author. They are only interested in them- 
 selves. And so, having tackled them in a glow of 
 expectation that has always died into sulky gloom, 
 the author quits reading criticism and satisfies his 
 
 [ ^' 3 
 
natural curiosity about himself by calling up the pub- 
 lisher and inquiring after sales. 
 
 For my own part, I deprecate this behavior with- 
 out being able to point to much better models. 
 Critics are of course superior to most authors, yet 
 I do not know many critics who like to be criticized. 
 It does not matter whether they are thin-skinned 
 literary critics or the hippopotami of sociology. 
 They don't like it, much. Some meet criticism with 
 a sweet resourcefulness. They choke down various 
 emotions and become, oh, so gently receptive. 
 Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious 
 diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity 
 that makes criticism nothing less than a personal 
 affront. And then there is the way of the combative 
 man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge 
 to a fight. The rare man even in so-called intellec- 
 tual circles is the man who takes criticism on its 
 merits and thinks it natural that he should not only 
 criticize but be criticized. 
 
 The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in 
 his ego. His frigid reception of criticism corre- 
 sponds to something like a secret terror of it. His 
 air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity: 
 he hates being called on to defend himself in any- 
 thing like a rough-and-tumble fight. He resents 
 having his slow, careful processes hustled and har- 
 ried in the duel of dispute. 
 
 To hand down judgments, often severe judg- 
 ments, is part of the pontifical character. But the 
 business of meeting severe judgments is not so 
 palatable. As most men grow older and more 
 padded in their armchair-criticism, they feel that 
 they become entitled to immunity. The Elder 
 [ 142 ] 
 
Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they 
 are, the more they try to browbeat their critics. 
 They see criticism as the critic's fundamental ina- 
 bility to appreciate their position. 
 
 If you are going to be criticized, how take it? 
 The best preparation for It is to establish good 
 relations with your own ego first. If you interpose 
 your ego between your work and the critic you can- 
 not help being insulted and Injured. The mere fact 
 that you are being subjected to criticism Is almost 
 an injury in itself. You must get to the point where 
 you realize the impregnability of your own admir- 
 able character. Then the bumblings of the critic 
 cannot do less than amuse you, and may possibly be 
 of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, 
 yet he started out rather indifferent to you, and the 
 mere fact that he is willing to criticize you is a 
 proof that he has overcome the initial Inhumanity 
 of the human race. This alone should help, but 
 more than that, you have the advantage of knowing 
 he is an amateur on that topic where you are most 
 expert — namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Per- 
 haps if you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the 
 beginning of the entente between you Is that he 
 should always start out by appeasing your ego.. 
 
 [ 143 J 
 
BLIND 
 
 OE was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He 
 could tend the furnace and help around the house — 
 scour the bath-tub and clean windows — but for a 
 powerful man these were trivial chores. The 
 trouble with him, as I soon discovered, was com- 
 plete and simple. He was blind. 
 
 I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be 
 blind, but it was terrible to be blind and at the 
 mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs. An- 
 gier ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier 
 of a woman, very tall and very bony, with a virile 
 voice and no touch of femininity except false curls. 
 She wore irusty black, with long skirts, and a tas- 
 seled shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls. 
 She hated her rooming-house and every one in it. 
 Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save 
 enough money out of her establishment to escape 
 from it. To that end she plugged the gaps in the 
 bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the 
 furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief 
 sacrifice on the altar of her economy was Samuel 
 Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was blind and 
 useless, he was dependent on her. When she called, 
 he literally ran to her, crying, " Coming, coming I " 
 He might be out on the window-sill, risking his poor 
 neck to polish the windows that he would never see, 
 but, " Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I — 
 [ 144 1 
 
would you be so good — ah, you are very kind. 
 Coming, Adelaide, just one moment ..." and he 
 would paddle down stairs. She treated him like 
 dirt. Sometimes one would arrive during an inter- 
 view between them. The spare, gimlet-eyed Mrs. 
 Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel 
 to cringe in every limb. He was a burly man with 
 a thick beard, iron-gray, and his sightless eyes were 
 hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed 
 spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his 
 voice booming heartily, he was a cheerful, honest 
 figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though he was a most 
 platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier 
 tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a 
 water-bucket or leaving a duster on the stairs or 
 forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he became in- 
 fantile, tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always 
 changed to a sugared greeting as one was recog- 
 nized. " Good e-e-evening, isn't it a pleasant e-e- 
 evening? " But the only value in speaking to Mrs. 
 Angier was that it permitted Samuel somehow to 
 shamble away to the limbo of the basement. 
 
 Of course I wanted to know how he became blind. 
 Luckily, as Mrs. Angier had prosperous relatives in 
 another part of Chicago, she sometimes could be 
 counted on to be absent, and on those occasions 
 or when she went to church, Samuel haunted my 
 room. He was unhappy unless he was at work, and 
 he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I 
 really believe he liked to chatter to me : and he was 
 more than anxious to tell me how his tragedy had 
 befallen him. 
 
 " Oh, dear, yes," he said to me, " it happened 
 during the strike. They hit me on the head, and 
 
 [ J45 ] 
 
left me unconscious. And I have never seen since, 
 not one thing." 
 
 "Who hit you, Samuel?" 
 
 " Who hit me ? The blackguards who were out 
 on strike, sir. They nearly killed me with a piece 
 of lead pipe. Oh, dear, yes." 
 
 It seemed an unspeakable outrage to me, but in 
 Samuel there was nothing but a kind of healthy in- 
 dignation. He was not bitter. He never raised 
 his voice above its easy reminiscent pitch. 
 
 " But what did you do to them? Why did the 
 strikers attack you? What strike was it? " 
 
 " I did nothing at all to them. But, you see, my 
 horse slipped and when I was helpless on the ground 
 with my hip smashed, one of them knocked me out. 
 It was right up on the sidewalk. I had gone after 
 them up on the sidewalk, and I suppose the flags 
 were so slippery that the horse came down." 
 
 " But what were you doing on a horse ? " I asked 
 in despair. 
 
 " I was a volunteer policeman. These scoun- 
 drels were led by Debs, and we were out to see that 
 there was law and order in Chicago." 
 
 " Oh, the Pullman strike. Were you railroading 
 then? " 
 
 " Railroading? No, sir, I was in the wholesale 
 dry-goods business. We had just started in in a 
 small way. I was married only two years, to Ad- 
 elaide's younger sister. Ah, my accident brought 
 on more trouble than she could stand. She was 
 very different from Adelaide, quite dainty and lively, 
 if you follow me. We were living at that time on 
 Cottage Grove Avenue, on the south side. I was 
 building up the importing end of the business, and 
 [ 146 ] 
 
then this thing came, and everything went to smash. 
 They gave me no compensation whatsoever, to make 
 the thing worse." 
 
 " But, Samuel, how did you come to be out against 
 the strikers? " 
 
 " And why shouldn't I be out, I'd like to knowl " 
 Samuel straightened up from rubbing a chair, and 
 pointed his rag at my voice. " These scoundrels 
 had nothing against Mr. Pullman. He treated 
 them like a prince. But they took the bit in their 
 teeth, and once they break loose where are we? 
 The President didn't get shut of them till he sent 
 In the troops. But I've always contended that if 
 we business men had taken the matter in hand our- 
 selves and nipped the trouble in the bud, we'd have 
 had no such lawlessness to deal with in the end. It 
 is always the same. The business men are the back- 
 bone of the community, but they don't recognize 
 their responsibility I Take the sword to those 
 bullies and blackguards; that's what I say! " 
 
 The old man lifted both fists like a dauntless 
 Samson, and fixed me with his sightless eyes. He 
 had paid hellishly for living up to his convictions, 
 and here they seemed absolutely unshaken. 
 
 " That's all right, too, Samuel," I said, feebly 
 enough, " but how do you feel now? Nobody com- 
 pensated you for being laid out in that big strike, 
 and your business was ruined, and here you are 
 emptying the waste-basket. How about that? I 
 think it's fierce that you got injured, but those men 
 in the Pullman strike weren't out to break up so- 
 ciety. They weire fighting for their rights, that's 
 all. Don't you think so now?" 
 
 " No, sir. The solid class of the community must 
 [ U7 ] 
 
be depended upon to preserve law and order. I 
 think that it was the duty of the business men of 
 Chicago to put down ruffianism in that strike and 
 to smite whenever it raised its head. Smite it 
 hip and thigh, as the saying is. Oh, no. Young 
 men have fine notions about these things, ha, ha I 
 You'll excuse me, won't you, but you can't allow 
 violence and disorder to run riot and then talk of 
 men's ' rights ' as an excuse. Ah, but it was a great 
 misfortune for me, I confess. It was the end of 
 all my hopes. The doctors thought at first that the 
 sight might be restored, but I have never seen a 
 glimmer of light since. But we mustn't repine, must 
 we? That'd never do." 
 
 " Samuel ! " Mrs. Angier's sharp voice pierced 
 the room. 
 
 " Good gracious, back so soon. You'll excuse me, 
 I'm sure . . . Coming, Adelaide, coming! " 
 
 He groped for his bucket, with its seedy sponge 
 all but submerged in the dirty water. The water 
 splashed a little as he hurriedly made for the door. 
 
 " Oh, dear," he muttered, " Adelaide won't like 
 that!" 
 
 [ 148 ] 
 
" AND THE EARTH WAS DRY " 
 
 L^IKE all great ideas it seemed perfectly simple 
 when Harrod first disclosed it to his unimportant 
 partner John Prentiss. 
 
 " Of course we'll get back of it. We've got to," 
 said Harrod, in the sanctity of the directors' room. 
 " You've been down to Hppeville on pay day. It's 
 the limit. Ordinary days there's practically no 
 trouble. Pay day's a madhouse. How many men, 
 do you think, had to have the company doctor last 
 pay day? ' 
 
 " You don't expect me to answer, Robert," Pren- 
 tiss replied mildly. " You're telling me, you're not 
 arguing with me." 
 
 " Twenty-five, Prentiss, twenty-five drunken 
 swine. What do you think happened? I'll tell you. 
 That doctor never stopped a minute taking stitches, 
 sewing on scalps, mending skulls. He was kept on 
 the hop all day and night all over the town. I'll 
 tell you something more." The sturdy Harrod 
 rapped his fist on the mahogany table, leaning out 
 of his armchair. " The doctor's wife told me a 
 Polack came to her shack at two in the morning 
 with half his thumb hanging off, bitten off in a 
 drunken brawl. What do you think she did, 
 Prentiss? She amputated it herself, on her own 
 hook, just like a little soldier. She's got nerve, let 
 me tell you. But do you think we want to stand 
 
 [ 149 ] 
 
for any more of this? Not much. Hopeville is 
 going dry! " 
 
 Mr. Harrod produced a gold pen-knife and 
 nicked a cigar emphatically. He brushed the tiny 
 wedge of tobacco from his plump trouser leg on to 
 the bronze carpet. He lit his cigar and got up to 
 have a little strut. 
 
 Poor Prentiss looked at him as only a weedy 
 Yankee can look at a man whose cheeks are rosy 
 with arrogant health. Why the stout Harrod who 
 ate and drank as he willed should be proclaiming 
 prohibition, while the man with a Balkan digestive 
 apparatus should be a reluctant listener, no one 
 could have analyzed. It never would have occurred 
 to Prentiss to be so restlessly efficient. But Harrod 
 was as simple as chanticleer. He'd made up his 
 mind. ' 
 
 " We'll back Billy Sunday. His advance agent 
 will be in town this week," Mr. Harrod unfolded. 
 " We'll put the whole industry behind him. Drink 
 is a constant source of inefficiency. It's an un- 
 deniable cause. When do we have accidents? On 
 Mondays, regularly. The men come back stupe- 
 fied from the rotgut they've been drinking, and it's 
 simple luck if they don't set fire to the mine. The 
 Hopeville mine is perfectly safe. Except for that 
 one big disaster we had, it's one of the safest mines 
 in the country. But how can you call any mine safe 
 if the fellows handling dynamite and the men work- 
 ing the cage are just as likely as not to have a hang- 
 over? We'll stop it. We'll make that town so 
 dry that you can't find a beer bottle in it. It took 
 me some time to realize the common sense of this 
 situation, but it's as clear as daylight; it's ridicu- 
 [ 150 ] 
 
lously clear. We're fools, Prentiss, that we didn't 
 advocate prohibition twenty years ago." 
 
 " Twenty years ago, Robert," Prentiss murmured, 
 " you were checking coal at the pit-head. You 
 weren't so damned worried about evolving policies 
 for the mine owners twenty years ago." 
 
 " Well, you know what I mean," Robert Harrod 
 rejoined. 
 
 " Perfectly," retorted Prentiss. " And Pm with 
 you, though all the perfumes of Arabia won't cleanse 
 these little hands." 
 
 That was the first gospel, so to speak, and Har- 
 rod was as good as his word. He saw Sunday's ad- 
 vance agent, he rallied the industry, he lunched with 
 innumerable Christians and had a few painful but 
 necessary political conferences. The prohibitionist 
 manager he discovered to be a splendid fellow — 
 direct, cleancut, intelligent indefatigable. The 
 whole great state was won to prohibition after a 
 strenuous preparation and a typically " bitter " cam- 
 paign. 
 
 And everything went well at Hopeville. At first, 
 not unnaturally, there was a good deal of rebellion. 
 A few of the miners — you know Irish miners, 
 born trouble-makers — talked considerably. Some- 
 thing in them took kindly to the relief from monot- 
 ony that came with a periodic explosion, and they 
 muttered blasphemously about the prohibitionists, 
 and time hung heavy on their hands. A few of them 
 pulled out, preceded by the gaunt Scotchman who 
 had run the bare " hotel " where most of the 
 whisky was consumed. These were led by a sullen 
 compatriot of their own, a man who once was a fine 
 miner but who had proved his own best customer in 
 
 [ 151 ] 
 
the liquor business and whose contour suggested 
 that his body was trying desperately to blow a bulb. 
 One miner left for a neighboring state (still wet) 
 to purchase a pair of boots. He crawled back on 
 foot after a week, minus the new boots, plus a pawn- 
 ticket, and most horribly chewed by an unintelligent 
 watchdog who had misunderstood his desire to bor- 
 row a night's lodging in the barn. The drinking 
 haunts were desolate reminders of bygone enter- 
 tainments for weeks after the law took effect, and 
 few of the younger men could look forward to tame 
 amusement, amusement that had no elysium in it, 
 without a twinge of disgust. But on the whole, 
 Hopeville went dry with surprising simplicity. A 
 great many of the miners were neither English, 
 Scotch, Cornish, Welsh nor Irish, but Austrians 
 and Italians and Poles, and these were not so inured 
 to drinking and biting each other as Mr. Harrod 
 might have thought. The mud in Hopeville, it is 
 true, was often from nine inches to four feet deep, 
 and there were no named streets, and no known 
 amusements, and a very slim possibility of distrac- 
 tion for the unmarried men. After prohibition, 
 however, a far from unpleasant club house was 
 founded, with lots of " dangerous " reading ma- 
 terial, and a segregated place for home-made music, 
 and bright lights and a fire, and a place to write 
 letters, and a pungent odor of something like syndi- 
 calism in the air. 
 
 That was the beginning. The men did not de- 
 tonate on pay day, except in lively conversation. 
 There was less diffused blasphemy. It concentrated 
 rather particularly on one or two eminent men. 
 And when the virtues and defects of these men were 
 [ 152 ] 
 
sufficiently canvassed, the " system " beyond them 
 was analyzed. Even the delight of the Hunkies in 
 dirt, or the meanness of certain bosses, began to 
 be less engrossing than the exact place in the ter- 
 restrial economy where Harrod and Prentiss got 
 off. 
 
 " Well, Robert," inquired the man of migraine, 
 back in the home office, " how is your precious 
 prohibition working? It seems to me the doctor's 
 wife is the sole beneficiary so far." 
 
 "Working?" the rubicund Harrod responded 
 urgently. " I don't know what we're going to do 
 about it. You can't rely on the men for anything. 
 A few years ago, after all, they took their wages 
 over to Mason and blew it all in, or they soaked up 
 enough rum in Hopeville to satisfy themselves, and 
 come back on the job. Now, what do they do? 
 They quit for two weeks when they want to. They 
 quit for a month at a time. And still they have a 
 balance. You can't deal with such men. They're 
 infernally independent. They're impudent with 
 prosperity. I never saw anything like it. We can't 
 stand it. I don't know what we're going to do." 
 
 " You're going to back the liquor trade, Robert, 
 of course. That's simple enough." 
 
 " You may laugh, but it is too late, I tell you, 
 the harm's done. We can't remedy it. National 
 prohibition is right on top of us. I don't know what 
 we'll do." 
 
 " Sell 'em Bevo. That'll keep them conservative. 
 Ever drink it?" 
 
 " Bevo? Conservative? Prentiss, this is seri- 
 ous. These men are completely out of hand." 
 
 "Well, aren't they more efficient?" 
 [ 153 ] 
 
" Of course they're more efficient. They're too 
 damnably efficient. They wanted Hopeville drained 
 and they're getting it drained. They'll insist on 
 having it paved next. They'll want hot and cold 
 water. They'll want bathtubs. That'll be the 
 end." 
 
 "The end? Come, Robert, perhaps only the 
 beginning of the end." 
 
 " It's very amusing to you, Prentiss, but you're 
 in on this with me. We've forced these working- 
 men into prohibition, and now they're sober, they're 
 everlastingly sober. They're making demands and 
 getting away with it. We've got to go on or go 
 under. Wake up, man. I've played my cards. 
 What can we do? " 
 
 " What can we do? That is not the point now. 
 Now the point is, what'U they do." 
 
 [ 154 J 
 
TELEGRAMS 
 
 IN my simple world a cablegram Is so rare that 
 I should treasure the mere envelope. I should not 
 be likely to resurrect it. It would be buried in 
 a bureau, like a political badge or a cigar-cutter — 
 but there is a silly magpie in every man, and a cable 
 I would preserve. To discuss cablegrams or even 
 cut-rate wireless, however, would be an affectation. 
 These are the orchids of communication. It is the 
 ordinary telegram I sing. 
 
 There was a magnificence about a quick commu- 
 nication in the days before the Western Union. 
 Horsemen went galloping roughshod through scat- 
 tering villages. It was quite in order for a panting 
 messenger to rush in, make his special delivery, and 
 drop dead. This has ceased to be his custom. In 
 Mr. Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class there is 
 one omission. He neglected to deal with that great 
 adept in leisure, the messenger-boy. " Messen- 
 ger-boy " is a misnomer. He is either a puling 
 infant or a tough, exceedingly truculent httle ogre 
 of uncertain age and habit. His life is consecrated. 
 He cares for nothing except to disprove the axiom 
 that a straight line is the shortest distance between 
 two points. Foreseeing this cult of the messenger 
 service, the designers of the modern American city 
 abandoned all considerations of beauty, mystery, and 
 suggestion in an heroic effort to circumvent the boy 
 
 [ 155 ] 
 
in blue. But the boy in blue cannot be beaten. 
 By what art he is selected I know not. Whether 
 he is attributable to environment or heredity I dare 
 not guess. But with a possible inferiority to his 
 rival, the coat-room boy, and, of course, nature's 
 paradox the crab, he is supreme. 
 
 It is not a telegram in its last stages that has 
 magic. Much better for the purposes of drama to 
 have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not a 
 laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a tele- 
 gram has magic. If you are hardened you do not 
 register. It is the fresh who have the thrill. But 
 no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever 
 so inured, there is one telegram, the telegram, which 
 will find your core. 
 
 Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while 
 an important person, usually a man but occasionally 
 a woman, gets a handful of mail without any sign 
 of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even 
 sorting out the wires. Such persons are marked. 
 They are in public life. It is pardonable. There 
 must be public men and public women. I should not 
 ask any one to give up his career for the peculiar 
 ecstasies of the telegram. But no one can deny that 
 these persons have parted with an essence of their be- 
 ing. What if I find a solitary notice? " It is under 
 your door." I bolt for the elevator, thrilled, alive. 
 
 It may be suggested that my over-laden pre- 
 decessors are not in public life; that they are very 
 distinguished, very wealthy personages, receiving 
 private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their 
 children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other 
 of their responsibilities, accessories, possessions. 
 With every deference I answer that you are mis- 
 [ 156 ] 
 
taken. Unless their riches are in a stocking, these 
 are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels. 
 Their title may be secure, but not their peace of 
 mind. Whatever they wish, they are obliged to 
 administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of 
 gravitation keeps pulling, pulling at their chan- 
 deliers. And so in some degree they are connected 
 with, open to, shared by, innumerable people. 
 Without necessarily being popular, they are in the 
 center of populace. They have to meet, if only to 
 repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus be- 
 ing public characters. It is often against their de- 
 sires. But being called upon to convert a part of 
 their souls into a reception-room, a place where 
 people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it 
 follows that they give up some of their ecstatic 
 privacy in order to retain the rest. This I do not 
 decry. For certain good and valuable considera- 
 tions one might be induced to barter some of one's 
 own choice stock of privacy, but for myself I should 
 insist on retaining enough to keep up my interest 
 in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be 
 dogged by urgent brokers and punctilious butlers, 
 no. 
 
 " There's a telegram upstairs for you, sir." " A 
 telegraml? How long has it been here?" "It 
 came about half an hour ago." " Ah, thank 
 you. . . . No, never mind, I'm going upstairs." 
 What may not this sort of banality precede? Per- 
 haps another banality, in ink. But not always. A 
 telegram is an arrow that is aimed to fly straight 
 and drive deep. Whether from friend or rival, 
 whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the 
 heart is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the 
 
 [ 157 ] 
 
message has come, singing enigmatically across the 
 country. But there is a path that leaps out of the 
 dingy office to countless court-rooms, business build- 
 ings, homes, hospitals. That office is truly a gang- 
 lion from which piercing nerve-fibers curve into the 
 last crevices of human lives. When you enter it to 
 send a telegram it may depress you. You submit 
 your confidence across a public counter. But what 
 does it matter to a creature glazed by routine? He 
 enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of 
 their meaning. To him a word is not a bullet — 
 just an inert little lump of lead. 
 
 Some messages come with a force not realizable. 
 Tragedy dawns slowly. The mind envisages, not 
 apprehending. And then, for all the customary 
 world outside, one is penned in one's trouble alone. 
 One remembers those sailors who were imprisoned 
 in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off from 
 escape, redhot iron plates between them and the 
 assuaging waters on every side, they could see the 
 free, could cry out to them, could almost touch hands. 
 But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a 
 slip of paper one may meet one's own. There are 
 countries to-day where the very word telegram must 
 threaten like a poisoned spear. And such wounds as 
 are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often 
 powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in sus- 
 pense is worse than dreadful certainty. But there 
 are shocks which are irreparable. It is cruel to 
 break those shocks, cruder to deliver them. 
 
 All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion, 
 the telegram attends on death, it attends no less 
 eagerly on love and birth. " A boy arrived this 
 morning. Father and child doing well " — this is 
 
 [ 158 ] 
 
more frequently the tenor of the wire. And the 
 wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remem- 
 ber Bernard Shaw's rebuff to Lady Randolph 
 Churchill for asking him to dinner? He had the 
 vegetarian view of eating his " fellow-creatures." 
 He chided her for inviting a person of " my well- 
 known habits." " Know nothing of your habits," 
 came the blithe retort, " hope they're better than 
 your manners." 
 
 The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we 
 struggled to put our all in ten words — simple, at 
 least, if not sensuous and passionate. Now the day- 
 letter and night-letter lead us Into garrulity. No 
 transition from Greek to Byzantine could be worse 
 than this. We should resist it. The time will 
 doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as 
 austere and frugal in our use of the telegram. But 
 we should preserve this sign of our Spartan man- 
 hood. Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of 
 long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive, 
 virginal, terse. 
 
 [ 159 ] 
 
OF PLEASANT THINGS 
 
 When I was a cWld we lived on the border of 
 the town, and the road that passed our windows 
 went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under 
 the old city gateway and out through the mean city 
 " lanes." The other branch turned round our 
 corner and ran into the countryside. Day and night 
 many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hear- 
 ing. In the day-time I took no pleasure in them, 
 but when I awoke at night and the thick silence was 
 broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it 
 filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this 
 enchantment. The steady effort of the wheels, their 
 rattle as they passed over the uneven road, their 
 crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute 
 pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a 
 solitary lantern swings underneath the wagon. In 
 the old days the load might be coal, with the colliery- 
 man sitting hunched on the driver's seat, a battered 
 silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery, 
 making a start at dawn. Or it might be a load of 
 singing harvest-women, hired in the market square 
 by the sweet light of the morning. But not the 
 wagon or the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so 
 much as that honest, steady, homely sound coming 
 through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find 
 it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like 
 it till I die. 
 
 [ i6o ] 
 
The city sounds improve with distance. Some- 
 times, in lazy summer evenings, I like the faint 
 rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble of the 
 elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows 
 and its passengers relaxed and indolent after the 
 exhausting day. Always I like the moaning sounds 
 from the river craft, carried so softly into the town. 
 But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are 
 usually discords. I hate bells — the sharp spinster- 
 ish telephone bell, the lugubrious church bell, the 
 clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the 
 sleigh bell or the dinner bell. 
 
 I like the element of water. An imagist should 
 write of the waters of Lake Michigan which circle 
 around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is the 
 hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths. 
 When the sun shines on the bottom, every pebble 
 is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a happy 
 memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of 
 Maine one has the same visual delight in water as 
 clear as crystal, and on the coast of Ireland I have 
 seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing ame- 
 thyst or thunder in a wall of emerald. On the 
 southern shore of Long Island, who has not seen 
 the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy 
 as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New 
 York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching. 
 
 The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty 
 that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline 
 except at night. In the day-time those punctured 
 walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the 
 river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare. 
 Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren 
 as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff- 
 [ i6i ] 
 
dwellers. A little wisp of white steam may sug- 
 gest humanity, but not these bleak cliffs themselves. 
 At night, however, they become human. They 
 look out on the black moving river with marigold 
 eyes. And Madison Square at nightfall has the 
 same, or even a more astherial, radiance. From 
 the hurried streets the walls of light seem like a 
 deluge of fairy splendor. This is always a gay 
 transformation to the eye of the citydweller, who 
 is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him. 
 
 Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I 
 like flowers, but seldom cut flowers. The gather- 
 ing of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily wan- 
 ton, and is it not hateful to see people coming 
 home with dejected branches of dogwood or broken 
 autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already rust- 
 ing in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness 
 of the meadow or the solitude of a forsaken garden. 
 Few things are so pleasant as to find oneself all alone 
 in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to sea. 
 The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones, 
 the life that trails so impudently across the path, 
 the life that spawns in the forgotten pond — this 
 has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners. 
 Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient 
 turtle, ourselves the only living things within sight or 
 sound. When the turtle wearied of sunning himself 
 he shuflHed to the artificial pond, and there he lazily 
 paddled through waters laced down with scum. It 
 was pleasant to see him, a not too clean turtle in 
 waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family 
 had been home the gardener would have scoured 
 him. 
 
 Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire — 
 [ 162 ] 
 
which I thank heaven I am not, nor scarcely a mil- 
 lionth part of one — I should take pleasure In the 
 silent orderliness that shadowed me through my 
 home. Those invisible hands that patted out the 
 pillows and shined the shoes and picked up every- 
 thing, even the Sunday newspapers — those I should 
 enjoy. I should enjoy especially the guardian angel 
 who hid from me the casualties of the laundry and 
 put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is 
 no laundry, or mending of laundry. For the mil- 
 lionaire the laundry is sent and the laundry is sorted 
 away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire; I 
 envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen 
 sheets. 
 
 The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude 
 that life is in the striving. Is this altogether true? 
 I think not. Not for those menial offices so neces- 
 sary to our decent existence, so little decent in their 
 victims or themselves. But one does remember cer- 
 tain striving that brought with it almost instant hap- 
 piness, like the reward of the child out coasting or 
 the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding 
 game. It is pleasant to think of one's first delicious 
 surrender to fatigue after a long day's haul on a 
 hot road. That surrender, in all one's joints, with 
 all one's driven will, is the ecstasy that even the 
 Puritan allowed himself. It is the nectar of the 
 pioneer. In our civilization we take it away from 
 the workers, as we take the honey from the bees — 
 but I wish to think of things pleasant, not of our 
 civilization. Fatigue of this golden kind is unlike 
 the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It is 
 the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it 
 from games, even golf, I think it is pleasant. It is 
 [ 163 ] 
 
the great charm that Englishmen possess and under- 
 stand. 
 
 These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleas- 
 ant things of the poet. They barely leave the hall 
 of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine, is one 
 who captures in the swift net of his imagination the 
 wild pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be 
 flying presences quickly lost to view. But every man 
 must bag what he can in his own net, whether he be 
 rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my 
 imagination to keep from being snared by too many 
 publicists and professors and persons of political in- 
 tent. These are invaluable servants of humanity, 
 admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But 
 they fill the mind with -ations. They pave the 
 meadows with concrete ; they lose the free swing of 
 pleasant things. 
 
 [ 164 ] 
 
THE AVIATOR 
 
 So endlessly the gray-lipped sea 
 Kept me within his eye, 
 And lean he licked his hollow flanks 
 And followed up the sky. 
 
 I was the lark whose song was heard 
 When I was lost to sight, 
 I was the golden arrow loosed 
 To pierce the heart of night. 
 
 I fled the little earth, I climbed 
 Above the rising sun, 
 I met the morning in a blaze 
 Before my hour was gone. 
 
 I ran beyond the rim of space. 
 
 Its reins I flung aside, 
 
 Laughter was mine and mine was youth 
 
 And all my own was pride. 
 
 So endlessly the gray-lipped sea 
 Kept me within his eye, 
 And lean he licked his hollow flanks 
 And followed up the sky. 
 
 From end to end I knew the way, 
 I had no doubt or fear; 
 [ 165 ] 
 
The minutes were a forfeit paid 
 To fetch the landfall near. 
 
 But all at once my heart I held, 
 My carol frozen died, 
 A white cloud laid her cheek to mine 
 And wove me to her side. 
 
 Her icy fingers clasped my flesh, 
 Her hair drooped in my face. 
 And up we fell and down we rose 
 And twisted into space. 
 
 So endlessly the ^ray-lipped sea 
 Kept me within his eye, 
 And lean he licked his hollow flanks 
 And followed up the sky. 
 
 Laughter was mine and mine was youth, 
 I pressed the edge of life, 
 I kissed the sun and raced the wind, 
 I found immortal strife. 
 
 Out of myself I spent myself, 
 I lost the mortal share, 
 My grave is in the ashen plain. 
 My spirit in the air. 
 
 Good-by, sweet pride of man that flew. 
 Sweet pain of man that bled, 
 I was the lark that spilled his heart, 
 The golden arrow sped. 
 
 [ i66 ] 
 
So endlessly the gray-lipped sea 
 Kept me within his eye, 
 And lean he licked his hollow flanks 
 And followed up the sky. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [ 167 ] 
 
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