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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2016 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/olympianstributeOOhubb 
 
Compiled from 
 THE FRA Magazine 
 
 Copyrighted by 
 The Roycrofters, 1921 
 
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 w . w . w . w . w . w . w . w . w w 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 HENRY HUDSON . 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 
 
 
 34 
 
 INGERSOLL . 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 49 
 
 Emerson 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 56 
 
 Tolstoy 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 68 
 
 Gustave le bon 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 76 
 
 Victor Hugo 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 87 
 
 Andrew Lang . 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 99 
 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau 
 
 
 
 
 106 
 
 EDGAR ALLEN POE 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 115 
 
 PLUTARCH . 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 121 
 
 Thoreau 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 132 
 
 Aristotle . 
 
 
 
 
 
 143 
 

THE OLYMPIANS 
 

 
HENRY HUDSON 
 
 DISCOVERER 
 
 E belong to the Aryan Race, and the 
 Aryan Race had its beginnings on 
 the uplands of India. There men 
 multiplied The conditions were 
 right — soil, sunshine, water. But 
 the food-supply did not keep pace 
 with the growth of population. And besides, there 
 grew up the leisure class, which showed its power 
 by a conspicuous waste and a conspicuous leisure. 
 This class is made up of two elements — the soldier 
 and the priest. Both are parasites, and when they 
 have their undisputed way, are tyrants. 
 
 To find freedom and bread, men swarmed. 
 
 There were six principal migrations from India, 
 as follows: the Egyptian, the Assyrio-Semitic, 
 the Greco-Roman, the Teutonic, the Celtic, the 
 Norse $•* 
 
 Civilization had its rise in Egypt, where the city 
 of Memphis once ruled the world. Memphis was 
 
 9 
 
the educational, the financial, the artistic hub of 
 the universe. 
 
 When Moses led the children of Israel out of 
 captivity, fifteen centuries before Christ, Memphis 
 was already falling into decay. Civilization had 
 moved on, and younger blood, that carried a redder 
 hue, was in the saddle. Babylon and Nineveh had 
 siphoned the best of Egyptian youth and genius. 
 <[ Note how Egypt grown old, senile and satisfied 
 with her own achievements could not afford Moses 
 room to exercise his powers. He had to go out into 
 the desert in order to find space in which to breathe, 
 and in which to formulate a moral code that had in 
 it enough of the saving formaldehyde of common- 
 sense to make it last thirty-five centuries and more. 
 C Memphis lies buried beneath a hundred feet of 
 drifting sands. 
 
 The broken fragments of Babylon and Nineveh 
 strew the plains. 
 
 C IVILIZATION pushed on and we get the grand- 
 eur that was Greece. The armless and headless 
 marbles in the British Museum symbol the splendor 
 of her dreams. Greece for a time ruled the world, 
 and Athens was the center of art, philosophy and 
 finance. Alexander, captain-general of the Greek 
 10 
 
forces, conquered the world and then died sighing 
 for more worlds to conquer. 
 
 Greece lived her little day; and then the Romans 
 overran her borders and tumbled her priceless 
 marbles from their pedestals, thinking they were 
 gods £©» 
 
 Rome subjugated the world — or at least all she 
 could find of it. And having succeeded she sat back 
 and got lime in her bones, and worshiped the god 
 Terminus, telling of the things she had done in the 
 days agone. 
 
 This gave the barbarian his chance, and the Goths 
 and Vandals played pitch and toss with the things 
 that had brought her fame. 
 
 In the year Five Hundred after Christ, we find 
 Constantinople supreme, with Justinian and Theo- 
 dora dividing the power of the world between them. 
 <[ Then were cast those four bronze horses, which 
 now ornament the portals of Saint Mark’s in 
 Venice 
 
 The marauding Norse, those wolves of the sea, 
 coveted the horses, so they took them by divine 
 right. They also annexed about everything else 
 that was portable. And behold! Venice, throned, 
 on her hundred isles, becomes mistress of the seas, 
 the center of art and light and education. Hers was 
 
 11 
 
the badge of power, hers the pomp and circum- 
 stance of war. 
 
 B UT not forever. Spain is forging to the front, 
 and the Moor and the Jew are combining to 
 construct the Alhambra. Read your Washington 
 Irving £» ^ 
 
 When Venice built her Ghetto she planted the 
 germs of decay. 
 
 Power moved on, and Granada was the capital 
 of the world. 
 
 In that unforgettable year, Fourteen Hundred 
 Ninety-two, we find Columbus, the Genoese, 
 writing to Queen Isabella this letter which is now 
 in our possession: “ Now that you have succeeded 
 in driving the Jews from Spain, I make bold to 
 call your attention to my own petty affairs,” etc. 
 C. Alas, the pretty compliment of Columbus, de- 
 signed for the shell-like ear of Isabella, was true. 
 She had succeeded in driving the Jews from Spain, 
 and already Spain was where Memphis stood when 
 the air got so full of patchouli that Moses had to go. 
 
 Imagine, if you please, some satrap writing a 
 letter to Pharaoh congratulating him thus: “Now 
 that you have succeeded in driving the Jews from 
 Egypt,” etc., etc. 
 
 12 
 
W HEN Torquemada made the gutters of 
 Granada run ankle-deep with the blood 
 of Jews, Holland opened wide her doors to the 
 refugees 
 
 And as Spain declined, Holland grew great. 
 
 The center of the stage shifts to Amsterdam. From 
 Sixteen Hundred for nearly a hundred years 
 Holland was the Schoolmaster of the world. 
 Holland taught England how to read and write, 
 how to print and bind books and how to paint 
 pictures &+■ 
 
 In Sixteen Hundred Nine England was a pioneer 
 country, forging to the front in a rude and crude 
 way. She had the ambition and the restless desire 
 of youth. But Holland had the art, the education, 
 the philosophy — and the money. 
 
 In portraiture Holland struck thirteen. The work 
 done by Rembrandt, Rubens and Frans Hals 
 stands supreme today, even after these three 
 hundred years. 
 
 Art is bom of the surplus that business men 
 accumulate. The business men of Holland were 
 favorable to the portrait-painter. He immortalized 
 many of them on canvas, and they live for us only 
 because some great artist painted their pictures. 
 The Plantins of Antwerp and Amsterdam, the 
 
 13 
 
great bookmakers, were then getting underway. 
 C In those days a printer was somebody. Printers 
 went into the business in order to express their 
 ideas. The very word “ compositor ” carries the 
 thought. The man composed his mind and set up 
 his thoughts in type at the same time. Peter 
 Plantin was a printer. He also was a great geogra- 
 pher. He" made a close and complete map of the 
 world, and wrote a book on the formation of the 
 earth 
 
 T HE Plantin print-shop is now in the Plantin 
 Musee at Antwerp, the property of the state. 
 In this most rare and curious old printery you will 
 get the books and maps of Peter Plantin. And in 
 one of these maps you will see the coast-line of 
 America. The country was very narrow according 
 to this map, which was made in Sixteen Hundred 
 Seven. Piercing the land were inlets leading out 
 into great lakes or bays; and just on the other side 
 was the Pacific Ocean. The whole country was 
 supposed then to be about like the Isthmus of 
 Panama, where Balboa stood and looked over to 
 the Pacific. And across the Pacific, at a distance of 
 less than half the way across the Atlantic, was 
 India — India, the land of silks and teas — India, 
 14 
 
the land of gold and spices, of gems and em- 
 broideries s— 
 
 To reach this land of wealth without going around 
 the Southern point of Africa was the problem. 
 Columbus had discovered land, but had failed in 
 his attempt to find the passage to India, and had 
 died in chains. Americus Vespucius had discovered 
 the continent, but had been unable to pierce it 
 with his ships. The Cabots said that if they had 
 had a few days they could have traversed the woods 
 and stood upon what we call the Alleghany Moun- 
 tains and looked down on the peaceful Pacific 
 beyond. The Indians had told them they could do 
 this. But three difficulties lay in the way of getting 
 valuable information from the Indians — one was 
 that the Indians did not know, the second was that 
 they did not care, and the third was that the white 
 man could not understand them, anyway. 
 
 B UT that the Pacific was just “ over there,” as 
 the Indians affirmed, was the belief of the 
 Plantins, and of the thinking men of the world s* 
 England, young and lusty, was reaching out for 
 this get-rich-quick route to China and India. 
 Holland knew that if England found the route she 
 would claim it by right of discovery, and might 
 
 15 
 
block it against the world. England had just 
 wrecked the Spanish Armada, and her nose was in 
 the air. C. Holland had the art and she had the 
 books, but she had traded brawn for brain, so she 
 lacked the blood that makes an explorer. What 
 then? Why, hire some steeple-jack of the sea to 
 find this quick route. 
 
 On the walls of the Plantin Musee, close by the 
 portrait of Peter Plantin, is a picture of “ Heinrich 
 Hudson, the Dutch Explorer.” Let the fact be 
 noted that Heinrich Hudson was not a Dutchman. 
 He was born in England, of English parents, and 
 his remote ancestry was Danish. 
 
 H E had made two trips to Greenland on a 
 commission to sail around the north end of 
 America and go through to India. He had reached 
 as high a latitude as eighty degrees but had then 
 been turned back by the ice. The man who can 
 sail through the North Pole will reach the Pacific 
 and India, all right. 
 
 Hudson’s feat was a disappointment, but the wily 
 Dutch said, we work by elimination. There is a 
 middle passage. 
 
 When the Indians had told of the sea “ just over 
 there,” they had in mind the Great Lakes. 
 
 16 
 
What more natural than to suppose that these 
 lakes had an outlet on the western side into the 
 Pacific! Indians did not travel far, and they were 
 not interested in India. The name “ Indian ” was 
 given them by a worthy explorer who taught that 
 he had discovered India. 
 
 Several of the rich merchants of Amsterdam made 
 up a purse, and sent a man over to London to hire 
 this man Henry Hudson, who had no fear of the 
 unknown £-®» 
 
 T HEY found him living in a boat-house on the 
 Thames. He was poor in purse, and without a 
 talent for getting on, but he was full of the enthu- 
 siasm of discovery. €[ Out in the Rocky Moun- 
 tains one can find the typical prospector, who 
 prospects all his life and dies at last alone on the 
 mountain-side. He is brave, hopeful, restless, but 
 failure is his fate. It becomes the habit of his life. 
 C. Hudson was living with his wife and children 
 in what would have been absolute want were it 
 not for the kind hearts of the ship-captains whose 
 boats were anchored near. 
 
 These men who skirted the coast were sensible 
 and sane. They sailed only the seas that were 
 mapped, and always were in sight of land. 
 
 17 
 
Hudson craved the unknown. The others respected 
 him — yes, but they touched their foreheads with 
 the tip of a forefinger as he passed. 
 
 Hudson had lost money for everybody who had 
 trusted him. Only a year before this, those merry 
 knights who founded Jamestown had asked him 
 to join them, but Hudson had scorned their in- 
 vitation 
 
 His wife believed in him, because she partook of 
 delusions, as loving women are prone to do. 
 
 UDSON was no longer young. His red beard 
 I was streaked with white, his ruddy face was 
 seamed with lines of care, his blue eyes had lost a 
 little of their luster looking out on the snow and 
 ice of the North. 
 
 He was the typical stubborn, freckled, sandy 
 Englishman who never knows when he is whipped. 
 €1 The English blood carries a mighty persistent 
 corpuscle 
 
 The modem Briton breed is made up of a cross 
 between the Saxon and the Norse, with a dash of 
 the Celt to give it a flavor. 
 
 All of the English names beginning with the letter 
 “ H ” have come down from the Norse, or the 
 Danish, which for us is the same thing. The name 
 18 
 
of William the Conqueror was Hubba, and among 
 his followers were men who bore the following 
 names: Howells, Hume, Howard, Hood, Harkness, 
 Hildebrand, Holman, Hughson, Harding, Holmes, 
 Hudson, Herbert, Henderson, Henry, Hubbard. 
 The ending “ -bert ” is a Saxon ending; but the 
 initial “ H ” is Norse. It was the introduction of 
 this letter “ H ” that threw the English tongue in 
 the air, and the sons of ’aughty Halbion ’ave n’t 
 yet got it straightened out, you know. 
 
 Names beginning with “ E,” like Ellison, Eldridge, 
 Ellsworth, Elbert, Elberta, Ethelred, Ethelbert, 
 Ethelstan, Ensign, Ernest, are Saxon. 
 
 Hudson seemed to be the surviving spirit of those 
 “ wolves of the sea,” who discovered America 
 about the year One Thousand, and built a monu- 
 ment or two along the coast of Rhode Island and 
 then sailed away on adventures new. 
 
 They knew that if they remained they would have 
 to pay taxes to the Irish, and so they moved on. 
 
 E Hollanders liked Hudson, and as he was 
 
 it of a job, waiting for something to turn up, 
 he hired out to the Dutch. This agent was acting 
 for the Dutch East India Company, which was a 
 trust made up of six separate companies, one in 
 
 19 
 
each city, as follows: Amsterdam, Zeeland, Delft, 
 Rotterdam, Koom and Enkhuizen. 
 
 An agreement was drawn up and signed. Hudson’s 
 wife was to be given eight hundred guilders at once, 
 and if her husband did not return in a year she was 
 to get two hundred more. 
 
 Beyond this Hudson got nothing but his expenses. 
 A guilder was what to us would be forty cents; so 
 we see that the price Hudson set upon his own life 
 was eighty dollars. This was the sum of his 
 life-insurance. 
 
 If he found the passage, however — ah, now we are 
 getting it — if he found the passage, it was to be 
 named for him, and he was to be the first governor 
 of the territory. 
 
 So Hudson bade his little family a stolid, sailor 
 good-by, and went over to Holland at once to 
 receive his instructions, the syndic taking close care 
 that the man did not escape. 
 
 A T Amsterdam he met Peter Plantin, the geog- 
 L rapher, and a committee of merchants. Hud- 
 son knew all they knew, and his hope was high 
 that there was a passage through to the Pacific 
 somewhere between latitude thirty-eight and fifty 
 degrees. Captain John Smith had been told of this 
 20 
 
passage by the Indians, and the assurance that the 
 sea was “ just over there ” was strong in all hearts. 
 He was also very sure that there was a way to go 
 clear around America to the North, but he agreed 
 with the Plantins that the passage would always be 
 dangerous on account of the cold and ice. 
 
 A little ship, the Half -Moon, was set aside for 
 Hudson. The craft suited him. It was staunch and 
 strong, and rode the waves like a cockle-shell. 
 
 She only carried a few feet of water, and this was 
 well, for sand-bars were to be counted on in making 
 “ that passage.” 
 
 There were eighteen men in the crew — nine Dutch- 
 men and nine Englishmen. Hudson stood out for 
 all Englishmen, claiming he must have men who 
 could speak his tongue. A two-days’ argument 
 followed, and a compromise was effected. 
 
 O N April Fourth, Sixteen Hundred Nine, the 
 Half-Moon hoisted sail and slipped slowly 
 down the Zuyder Zee. 
 
 The news had gone out, and half of Amsterdam 
 lined the wharves. 
 
 The Weeper’s Tower was filled with relatives of the 
 sailors. No one wept for Hudson. His heart did not 
 beat one throb beyond the normal. 
 
 21 
 
The land faded from view, and the Half-Moon was 
 alone on the waste of waters. 
 
 The log of the voyage still exists. It is written in 
 Dutch, evidently on dictation of Captain Henry 
 Hudson, who now was “ Heinrich Hudson, a citizen 
 of the Netherlands.” All of which was evidently a 
 legal expedient designed to make good all Dutch 
 claims, “ by right of discovery.” 
 
 Hudson did not obey orders to steer straight West 
 for America. He steered for the Land of the Mid- 
 night Sun. He still hoped it was possible to strike 
 here a current that would carry him straight across 
 to the Pacific, d On May Nineteenth, after a sail 
 of forty-four days, the crew came to Hudson in a 
 body and demanded that he turn back. 
 
 One man had died and the sight of the sun that 
 had forgotten how to set was on their nerves. 
 
 T HE Captain parleyed with them, and set an 
 hour the following day to talk it over. The next 
 day the weather had changed for the better, and 
 the spirits of the men rose. Hudson ordered a 
 double ration of grog for all hands, got out his 
 maps, and at great length told them of Captain 
 John Smith’s idea concerning the short inland 
 passage that lay at about forty degrees. 
 
 22 
 
They consented to sail South, but they must get 
 away from the icebergs and the terrible land where 
 the sun never went down, but remained a blood-red 
 ball in the heavens. Hudson started a song and all 
 joined in as the Half-Moon headed South. 
 Sixty-four days they sailed and sailed, when the 
 wooded shores of America came in sight. They 
 entered “ a fine harbor,” which is now believed to 
 be Casco Bay on the coast of Maine. Here they 
 replaced their mainmast, which had snapped off 
 short in a gale. So far as we know this was the first 
 attempt to utilize the spruce pine of New England 
 for the uses of civilized man. 
 
 T HIS beautiful bay was tempting. They put 
 out two small boats and skirted it carefully 
 for signs of an inlet. They killed a deer, which was 
 the first fresh meat they had had excepting fish. 
 CL After a week’s rest, they again put out to sea 
 and skirted the coast slowly down to Cape Cod. 
 A map was made, which reveals the coast-line 
 fairly well; but in some way Boston Harbor was 
 missed, perhaps because the gilded dome of the 
 State House was not there to welcome them. They 
 sailed past Sandy Hook, giving only a casual look 
 at the inlet. 
 
 23 
 
The Half -Moon reached Delaware Bay and entered, 
 but the signs of an inlet were not propitious, and 
 Hudson decided he would go North and examine 
 the coast with greater care. On the morning of 
 September Second, Sixteen Hundred Nine, he 
 dropped anchor in what we now call the Horse- 
 Shoe of Sandy Hook. From here he put out with a 
 small boat and three sailors. 
 
 T HE log reports, “ found a good entrance be- 
 tween two headlands.” A drawing is then 
 given, which beyond a doubt is “ The Narrows.” 
 Hudson was at home on the open sea, but here he 
 moved with great caution. He feared running his 
 ship upon the sands or rocks, and so we find him 
 going ahead in a small boat, with the Half-Moon 
 trailing along slowly, as he swings his hat and 
 signals her. 
 
 He passed Staten Island. Next he reached Manhat- 
 tan. Here he put ashore on the shelving beach. He 
 drew the boat up, and planted the flag of the 
 Netherlands on about what is now Twenty-six 
 Broadway so so 
 
 Then he moved on up the river to a point where 
 “ hills are straight and the waters deep.” This was, 
 beyond doubt, the Palisades. 
 
 24 
 
Beyond, the river widened and ahead was the 
 clear, open, placid waters. They came to the Cats- 
 kills, and two men were sent ashore “ to climb 
 the highest hill and the highest tree they could 
 find, and look for the Pacific Ocean.” 
 
 The men were gone overnight, but came back 
 reporting only mountains and woods beyond. The 
 Pacific Ocean discovered by Balboa twenty years 
 before was not in sight. C. Bill Nye once told us, that 
 Heinrich Hudson had nearly reached Albany before 
 he made the startling discovery that the river upon 
 which he was sailing bore the same name as himself. 
 
 T HIS was a lapse on the part of Bill. The fact is, 
 Hudson knew the name of the river very soon 
 after passing the toe of Manhattan’s Isle, for he 
 had written in plain letters on the map as he 
 sailed, “ Hudson’s River.” 
 
 He felt sure he had found the long-looked-for 
 passage, and remembering the promise of his em- 
 ployers that the passage should bear his name, 
 he wrote it down. C. He reached the present site 
 of Albany and remained a week in the vicinity, 
 carefully exploring the banks of the river for an 
 inlet. Then he sorrowfully turned the prow of the 
 Half-Moon to the South. 
 
 25 
 
John Smith was wrong; the Indians were wrong; 
 Henry Hudson was wrong — the voyage was a 
 failure £•» 
 
 Already signs of autumn were in the air, and the 
 leaves were turning to gold. It would not do to 
 try to winter here — the Half -Moon must sail back 
 to Amsterdam and frankly report failure. 
 
 On the way down the river there were many 
 Indians to be seen along the banks. The news of 
 the strange ship had evidently gone out and the 
 red men were more than curious. 
 
 T TERE was the first ship to stretch her sails on 
 I X this mighty river, that had existed here for 
 ten thousand years or more. 
 
 Hudson drew in to the shore near the present site 
 of Poughkeepsie, and after much signaling and 
 beckoning the Indians came near enough to be 
 spoken to. But alas! they spoke neither “ Anglaise,” 
 Dutch, nor French. Hudson made the universal 
 sign of hunger, and this was responded to at once, 
 which gives the lie to that popular saying that 
 “ the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” 
 
 The squaws brought parched com, dried venison, 
 beans, pumpkins and wild grapes. They also brought 
 oysters, and “ speckled fish not of a salt-sea kind.” 
 26 
 
These were doubtless brook-trout. €[ Next they 
 cooked a dog in honor of the great White Chief. 
 C In return, Hudson and his men gave the Indians 
 knives, beads and colored strips of cloth. 
 
 There was much attempt at talk and both sides 
 made long orations, but to small purpose, since 
 the interpreter was not yet. 
 
 T Hudson was working for was to get the 
 
 lfidence of the Indians so they would 
 give a clue to the passage to the Pacific. 
 
 Hudson reports that the Indians had no “ aqua 
 vita, nor spiritus frumenti.” When he gave them 
 rum they drank it like water, and “ soon were very 
 merrie and next mad.” 
 
 Evidently Hudson’s men had imbibed, too, for 
 two of his sailors lured a squaw into a smallboat 
 and were about to fetch her aboard the Half-Moon. 
 Hudson saw the commotion among the Indians 
 and headed off his reckless sailors. He broke an 
 oar over the head of one John Coleman before he 
 could get the woman safely back to land. As rep- 
 aration for her injured feelings, Hudson presented 
 her his official red coat with brass buttons and 
 gilt braid, which he had intended to wear on the 
 day the complete passage to the Pacific was made. 
 
 27 
 
The Indians had now lost their respect for the 
 white men, since several of the sailors had stolen 
 all the furs and skins they could lay their hands on. 
 
 H UDSON now saw nothing to do but sail for 
 home. The Indians followed down the river, 
 and along the route arrows occasionally skimmed 
 the air too close to the sailors for comfort. 
 
 Near Manhattan the Mohicans “ put out in a 
 multitudinary swarm in hollow logs, and surrounded 
 the good ship, the Half-Moon, and the sailors had 
 to fight for their lives. Then for the first time they 
 had to use fire-arms. It is feared some Indians were 
 killed. Straightway the Half-Moon put for open 
 sea, having been in land-locked waters for the 
 space of a full month.” 
 
 The Half -Moon had strong breezes from the West 
 and made fast time homeward She dropped 
 anchor in the harbor of Dartmouth, England, on 
 November Seventh. Hudson made haste to go to 
 London and see his family, before he went to 
 Holland to report to his employers. 
 
 In December, we find Hudson again full of hope 
 and sure that “at a point about sixty degrees 
 North of the coast of the New World the passage 
 to India will be found peradventure of a doubt.” 
 28 
 
I T was a gamble — the Dutch vs. Fate. The odds 
 were big. If the passage were found untold 
 fortunes awaited. 
 
 Another ship was fitted out at greater cost. She 
 was called the Discoverie and her “double plank- 
 ings were made so to withstand the strongest 
 crush of ice.” She carried a crew of twenty-nine men. 
 On April Seventeenth, Sixteen Hundred Ten, she 
 sailed away. She reached that marvelous body of 
 water which we know as Hudson’s Bay. 
 
 Inland they sailed for a thousand miles. Here was 
 salt water all the time ; while the puny little Hudson 
 River ran fresh water a day’s journey from the sea. 
 
 Heinrich Hudson was now so sure he had found 
 the prize passage to India that he refused to sail 
 for home when the first nipping frosts arrived. 
 
 The crew went into winter quarters. 
 
 Game was plentiful, but the sailors were afraid to 
 venture far inland “ for fear of sirens whose songs 
 could be plainly heard, and goblins that flitted 
 everywhere over the ice.” 
 
 T HE dark, cold winter dragged its long, slow 
 length past. Ice began to melt and move. 
 
 By May the ship was free, Several of the crew were 
 sick with scurvy. Four had died. Hudson, himself, 
 
 29 
 
had been sick, but with spring his spirits arose and 
 he grew better. There is nothing so hygienic as hope. 
 He announced his intention to press on to the 
 West and explore every inlet until he had found 
 the one that opened out upon the Pacific Ocean. 
 The crew demurred — another winter and they 
 would all be dead. They must make for home at 
 once, for there was doubt as to whether they could 
 now even find the passage out to the Atlantic, 
 much less to the Pacific. Hudson sought to use his 
 authority 
 
 He was disarmed and declared insane. 
 
 He was given the privilege of being put afloat in 
 a boat, or of sailing for home. He chose the open 
 boat. And he and his son John, aged sixteen, and 
 seven others were sent adrift with provisions to 
 last a month. They were given guns and ammu- 
 nition. C The Discoverie hoisted sail, and left the 
 invincible master on that trackless inland sea, 
 skirted by a country that was seemingly desolate 
 and without inhabitants. 
 
 T HE Discoverie reached Amsterdam in October, 
 and the mutineers told their tale. They were 
 arrested, tried, convicted — and pardoned. 
 
 They made it appear that they wished only to 
 30 
 
save the ship and report to the owners. Their frank- 
 ness saved their lives. 
 
 The Discoverie could have been sent back after 
 Hudson, but there was no one to captain the ship, 
 and Heinrich Hudson was left to his fate. The 
 mutineers brought back a map of “ Hudson’s Bay.” 
 Traced across the map in bold letters was the name 
 of the dauntless discoverer. 
 
 What was the fate of Hudson, his son, and the 
 loyal seven who stood by him? 
 
 No one knows — not a sign ever came from them in 
 any way 
 
 Their little craft may have foundered and all been 
 drowned before reaching shore, on the same day 
 the Discoverie sailed. 
 
 They may have lingered on for another winter 
 and died of cold, starvation and disease. 
 
 They may have been murdered by the Indians, 
 They may have fallen in with Indians, been kindly 
 welcomed, settled down to make the best of a bad 
 situation, and grown old, babbling to their neigh- 
 bors of strange sights and scenes they had known 
 years and years before, across a trackless waste 
 of water, to the East. 
 
 No ships came that way from Holland for thirty 
 years 
 
 31 
 
The Netherlands had given up the quest, and the 
 lives of nine men are things too small to disturb 
 a nation, especially if the men be foreigners. 
 
 ND as for England, she had never missed her 
 jLjl Henry Hudson — only his wife and children 
 mourned him. And their grief did not really count 
 in a world where woe is common and the tears of 
 women are nothing strange. Women were bom to 
 weep zo 
 
 But the shrewd Dutch merchants remembered 
 Hudson’s River and Manhattan Isle, and there, 
 where Hudson had planted the flag of the Nether- 
 lands they founded a city. 
 
 And they called it New Amsterdam. 
 
 Henry Hudson sought for one thing. He found 
 another. It is ever so. And the tide of wealth and 
 power ebbed from Amsterdam to London. 
 
 Then from London to New Amsterdam, which 
 we now call New York. 
 
 And behold New York as the financial center of 
 the world, with her storied Wall Street on the very 
 site of the shelving beach where trod the feet of 
 Henry Hudson. 
 
 And the tide of Empire still surges toward the 
 setting sun, with New York as the great central 
 32 
 
gateway to America, the land of Promise. Did 
 Henry Hudson live and die in vain? 
 
 History says, No! 
 
 And the morning sun, smiting the Palisades, and 
 gilding them with his glory, says, No ! 
 
 And a city of four million people, a powerful, rest- 
 less and unfolding city, immense in her possi- 
 bilities, where nothing is, but all things are be- 
 coming, pays her loyal, loving tribute to Henry 
 Hudson, and declares out of his failure sprang 
 success and his memory shall not be as that 
 
 of one whose name is writ in water. 
 
 33 
 
‘ ' *** ' iS!^ * 4.e* ‘ *«u ’ &?* #?* 
 
 w . w . Vfi' , n5j» . w . <w , 'v: • : s* . • •• ■ 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 A GREAT SPIRITUAL SCOUT 
 
 IERE is a fourth dimension of 
 thought. There are rare moments 
 in life when the latencies of the 
 soul converge and blend in a tran- 
 sient state of consciousness; when 
 the trickling stream of thought 
 gushes over the obstructing delta of Space, Time 
 and Circumstance and mingles with the Infinite 
 Sea beyond. It is at such moments that we catch 
 glimpses of things that threaten sanity. We are 
 dazzled by an influx of light, of feeling, of knowl- 
 edge. Personality dwindles to an infinitesimal point. 
 We see ourselves objectively, as independent objects 
 in space and time, like a clock ticking on the shelf 
 or the moon in the sky. We have a feeling that we 
 have been everywhere, but no particular where. 
 We grope back to the terrestrial, rejoicing that the 
 ego has not been lost in that momentary vision 
 of Infinite Being. 
 
 34 
 
In that shining ether-world whose pulsing waves 
 flow through the brain-cells like light passing 
 through crystal, dwell the gods of life, the Fates 
 that dominate our lives. Inflexible, imperturbable, 
 seeing but not feeling, holding within their grasp 
 the threads of human destiny — the silken threads 
 that hold our souls in leash — these mute gods 
 rule for aye. They understand and mock. They 
 hear, but their lips are curled in scorn. The Greeks 
 placed them on Olympus, the Scandinavians in 
 Asgard, and the modem mystic places them in 
 the fourth dimension of thought. C, There are some 
 choice spirits who seem to have lived all their 
 lives in this subtle sphere. They walk the earth 
 and their feet are clay, but their heads are ranged 
 with the stars. Their lungs are forever inflated 
 with a divine ether. We little workaday beings 
 who run around their legs, like mice around the 
 base of the Colossus of Rhodes, draw in the mias- 
 matic vapors of planetary life and are content. 
 We sit in chairs and stare at a blank wall ; they sit 
 before an open door. Our vision is bounded by 
 the horizon; for them there is no horizon. We listen 
 to the guttural of external life; they catch the 
 vibrations of Law, and report the ebb and flow of 
 eons £•» 
 
 35 
 
T HE materialist places his mind in the uni verse; 
 
 the mystic places the universe in his mind. 
 Plotinus, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Maeterlinck, 
 we can hardly think of as ordinary mortals. They 
 seem with us, but not of us. To come under the 
 influence of their clairvoyant gaze, to follow them 
 in their vertiginous flights above the striated world 
 of matter and motion, is to experience simultan- 
 eously those sensations of exaltation and depression 
 which one feels in rising in a balloon — a sinking at 
 the heart, a lightness of the head. There is a 
 sundering of the ligatures that bind us to the 
 familiar. The centripetal forces tug at our feet, 
 and the centrifugal forces tug at our head. The 
 clogging clay wars against the smiling, sneering 
 stars that summon from overhead. The welding 
 Relative is lost in a solvent Absolute. The indi- 
 vidual withers, and his soul is more and more. As 
 a particle of salt is dissolved in water, so is a 
 particular fact dissolved in its eternal Idea in such 
 hours. The succession of days and nights collapses 
 like a portable drinking-cup. Time dwindles to a 
 point, matter runs to fluid wastes, the stable un- 
 moors and drifts away like cloud-fleece over a 
 level summer sea. 
 
 The world is my thought, is the message of 
 36 
 
Wisdom and Destiny. The Belgian’s being has been 
 touched by some divine despair. But he has found 
 surcease within He has diked his soul against 
 the encroaching, flooding days, and reclaimed 
 from the wild and lawless sea of circumstance a 
 verdant land of beauty. Like Kubla Khan, he has 
 decreed a lordly pleasure-house in a mystic Xan- 
 adu. From the granite wall of limitations he has 
 hewn a castle with turrets forever bathed in an 
 opiate moonshine, and around which the eagles 
 circle and call. €[ The world passes through his 
 brain and even the dross is purified. He will see 
 beauty in a beetle on the wall. 
 
 He will catch the days with their griefs and the 
 nights with their lamentations, and extract the 
 beautiful as gold is extracted from the mud in the 
 pan. For the soul of the seer is alchemic. He will 
 turn compost into beaten gold. He will refine 
 smudge and smut. From the lees of the wine of 
 pleasure he will brew a heady wisdom. He has an 
 elfin band at his beck and call. They labor by day 
 and night in the smithy of his unconscious being. 
 There they forge the weapons for his conscious 
 hours. There they mold helmet and shield and 
 panoply. His mind is a dragnet, and all is fish that 
 comes to it. 
 
 37 
 
We are bolder than we know, and our actions 
 ride us to the zenith of the Invisible. We are wiser 
 than we know, and our wisdom outruns the cen- 
 turies. Each man is an epitome of all men. Every 
 bottom is a false bottom. What we call limitation 
 is lack of perception, and when we say we are 
 undone we mean we have capitulated. For the 
 seer — for Maeterlinck, Plotinus and Emerson — 
 there are no limitations, and capitulation they do 
 not know. They build the world anew every day. 
 Each night they slough off a limitation. Each 
 day they build a house, but they move perpetually. 
 They baffle the best-laid plans of demons and gods 
 by meeting demon and god halfway. The slings 
 and arrows of fortune pierce their souls, but the 
 tips are anointed with chrism of wisdom. They 
 dice with life-in-death, as does the grief-crazed 
 mortal, but they play with loaded dice. They have 
 lived imaginatively all men’s lives, and fear no 
 disaster «•* 
 
 M AETERLINCK would have us know we can 
 not escape the predestined. Tomorrow is a 
 curtained seduction, but it stands sure. The last 
 day shall reveal what the first day purposed. The 
 years walk a lockstep. Each thing breeds its own 
 38 
 
manner of death. And the trump of doom shall 
 reveal the meaning of the prelude in Chaos. The 
 individual is held in the rigid grooves of fate, and 
 what is to be will come. Any other doctrine is 
 blasphemous, or worse, ridiculous. We are gib- 
 beted on Law. We are spitted on the Inevitable 
 and our souls dangle over Death. 
 
 It is good that to most of us the future is a 
 sealed book. The past is ever changing in the kalei- 
 doscope of memory; the future alone is irrevo- 
 cable. The day of our passing is appointed; and 
 life itself is but an oblation to death. On the altars 
 of the Hours we offer ourselves up. The soul is 
 but an eddy in the great world-stream, and the 
 eddy has its appointed end as surely as the stream. 
 A mind that could have grasped the links in the 
 chain of causation of which Lincoln, the Civil War 
 and Wilkes Booth were but the shadows, could 
 have predicted, at Lincoln’s birth, the tragedy in 
 Ford’s Theater. 
 
 History is Force dressed up. The curvetings of 
 Law are beyond the individual stay, and the 
 manner of the death of nations is dependent on 
 the manner of their birth. We are puppets on an 
 unknown stage, infusoria gyrating aimlessly in 
 an unsounded sea, midges sporting our day in the 
 
 39 
 
sun of thought, atoms of desire, motes of the 
 Eternal Energy. And Man bloweth where Law 
 listeth. So says Maeterlinck. 
 
 T HE great problem of human evil has con- 
 fronted Maeterlinck, as it has confronted 
 Tolstoy and Ibsen. But the demands of the Sphinx 
 can not ruffle the feathers of the Belgian as it has 
 those of the Norwegian and the Russ. A mild but 
 effulgent serenity swims from the pages of Wisdom 
 and Destiny and The Treasure of the Humble. 
 The misery, the evil, the injustice of the world 
 trouble him as the winds trouble the wave. They 
 may lash the surface into huge, tumbling billows, 
 but in the depths there reigns a tense placidity. 
 Serenity is bom of insight, and insight must beget 
 a contempt of the temporal order — that order 
 begun in desire and which is destined to end in 
 despair 
 
 “ Today, misery is the disease of mankind, as 
 disease is the mystery of mankind,” says Maeter- 
 linck. Man tosses around on his bed of pain, and 
 his prayers are hurled back as echo from the stars. 
 He builds and he builds, and his work is swept 
 away like the beaver’s dam. His soul, is impounded 
 in clay, wriggles toward freedom only to discover 
 40 
 
that it has been wriggling out of a strait-jacket into 
 a winding-sheet. He builds a grandiose tomorrow 
 on the ruins of today, and when tomorrow has come 
 and gone and turned ghost he builds again. His 
 Golden Age always lies in the future. He builds altar 
 and capitol, and dedicates his soul to prayer. He 
 sulks and begs and defies and grovels, and Death 
 circles like a kite above his carrion-clay. He believes 
 he is going straight to his goal, straight to that far- 
 off divine event which Hope has builded in the 
 azure future. But there is no forward or backward 
 in life. Nature has no straight lines. Rhythm, un- 
 dulation, periodicity are the laws that govern 
 motion. The history of one day is the history of 
 all days, and he who builds on the shifting sands 
 of the temporal builds futilely. 
 
 I T is this Heraclitean vision of human life that 
 has obsessed the mind of Maeterlinck. It is this 
 Horla that has gripped his soul in its lean and icy 
 fingers. In those strange little dramas that he has 
 given us, and which are a fitting introduction to 
 his Wisdom and Destiny, we read the rending con- 
 flicts that have cleft the soul of this transcriber 
 of visions ^ 
 
 Are they human, these peaked and emaciated 
 
 41 
 
figures that he has silhouetted on his background 
 of night? The moral world is but a thin crust that 
 has formed over the rolling lava-streams of ele- 
 mental passion. The wan, drawn figures of the plays 
 sport upon this dangerous surface unmindful of the 
 intoning flood beneath. Is it play? Or are the antics 
 of these creatures the death-squirmings of a 
 decadent race? A dank and fetid air blows from 
 the surface of life. Is this endless and purposeless 
 gambol in Being an illusion, a dream in the mind of 
 a fallen god who sates himself with sleep while his 
 brain-puppets play out the farce? The wilful days, 
 that image our despair bring no answer. Those 
 pallid lights set in a naked, frosty heaven have no 
 word for us. The soul of man preserves a crypt-like 
 silence. His heart wreathes Hope with the bay-leaf 
 and crowns Memory with thorns. But it has no 
 answer. Our brain-cells are catacombs where lie our 
 ancestors embalmed in silence. They answer not. 
 d The web of life is woven of contingency and 
 necessity, and the inevitable and the unknown 
 ambuscade us at every turn. This endless willing, 
 this eternal upswirl of souls from the abysms of 
 non-being into the glare of a frowsy day; this 
 ceaseless regalvanizing of corpses; these ambling, 
 jigging mummies that are tossed from Eternity 
 42 
 
into Time and from Time back into Eternity; 
 these sweating pack-mules saddled with the rubbish 
 of decayed cycles and ancient durations; these 
 crumbling tabernacles of clay — some demons, 
 striated with their sins; some saints, dragging ball 
 and chain of ancestral crime up the steep Cordilleras 
 of aspiration; young gods with unexpanded wings, 
 predestined for Walhalla, toiling in the galleys of 
 this Toulon; Calibans wallowing in the gutters 
 that rut their imaginations; and never an end — 
 the same, the same and ever the same — how shall 
 we fend ourselves ’gainst this wreckful siege asks 
 Maeterlinck 
 
 I T is in his soul that he has found the refuge 
 against the world of circumstance. The problem 
 is individual. Social schemes for the regeneration 
 of mankind only aggravate the disease from which 
 mankind is suffering. The deep-rooted ills of man- 
 kind can not be cured by a poultice. “ We suffer 
 little from suffering itself; but from the manner 
 wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may 
 spring.” This is the keynote of his message. Mental 
 attitude is everything. The gale that wrecks the 
 sneak-box fills the sails of the barkentine and 
 drives her toward her goal. The trifles of the day 
 
 43 
 
unnerve most of us. The wise man quietly ignores 
 them. Suffering is one-half self-love and one-half 
 hallucination. Hallucination is the normal state of 
 man. He makes up his mind in youth to whimper, 
 and whimper he does to the end of his days. It is the 
 future that affrights him; he puts into a hypothe- 
 tical tomorrow all the ills that flesh is not heir to. 
 From the murk of his dreams he weaves strange 
 and lurid imps of evil. What is this future we fear? 
 Is it anything but a psychic jack-’o -lantern? The 
 future is the avatar of the past, yesterday resur- 
 rected and expanded, Old Time with a visor on 
 his cap to hide his identity. 
 
 For the seer there is only an eternal Present that 
 canopies both the past and the future. What did n’t 
 happen yesterday never can happen. What is not 
 feared never comes. He drains the minutes of their 
 contents as they pass. He substitutes the abstract 
 for the concrete, and splashes in generalizations. 
 No time, nor place, nor circumstance can hold 
 him. He knows that, like Faust, he will be lost if 
 he bid any one thing stay. 
 
 The vision of Maeterlinck is cosmic. He does 
 not contend against evil; he rejects it by ac- 
 cepting it. He lives above the stews. From his 
 citadel of spiritual power he sends forth his doves 
 44 
 
and they come back laden with precious secrets. 
 His soul paces the ramparts of Time and Space. He 
 will partake of all things, but nothing shall claim 
 him. He is receptive, but unallied. There is in the 
 soul of each of us, Maeterlinck tells us, a repellent 
 center, a magic flame ’round which the moths of 
 circumstance circle only to singe their wings or be 
 consumed. Gusty Chance but flings the fire that 
 bums in the chalice of the soul farther and farther 
 into the encircling gloom. The wise man stands 
 upon the marge of the great ocean of life, and fixes 
 this gaze upon the tumbling, seething, undulating 
 waters that stretch away to an illusive horizon. His 
 ear catches the hoarse callings of expectancy and 
 the deep gutturals of defeat, and at his feet there 
 circle and surge the wrack of an endless futile 
 labor. He is not disturbed. He sees as no other sees, 
 the tragedy, the comedy, the inutility of it all. 
 Darkness he sublimes to light, despair he trans- 
 mutes into a stoic defiance. The average person 
 sees from an angle of personality. The sage sees 
 from an impersonal center. This world will fawn 
 at his feet when he calls. 
 
 In the august and significant silences of the soul, 
 says Maeterlinck, is bom the wisdom that baffles 
 destiny. Physical pain itself must cower before 
 
 45 
 
the emancipated mind. Was it not Socrates who 
 discoursed on immortality while he was stiffening 
 in death? Did not Epicurus in his mortal agony 
 preach the summum bonum to his disciples? These 
 silent refuges that disease and death stormed in 
 vain were wrought out in the spirit-sweat of 
 cloistral hours; it is here, in these darkling recesses 
 of the soul, in the encelled silences, that the real 
 work of freedom is done; it is here that rest is won 
 from the clangorous days, and the balm that was not 
 in Gilead is found. We reach these uplands of the 
 spirit by infinite petty exertions, by threading 
 our way through the labyrinthine passes of whim 
 and impulse. All things conspire against the indi- 
 vidual. There is a Nemesis that seeks continually 
 to level us to the mediocre. Those ancients, the 
 vulgar and the familiar, would scythe us to their 
 own standards. We are kneaded in the common 
 image, and our days are gross. We are relics 
 of the dead, effigies of the past, playthings of 
 ancestral tendency. All things pay tribute to the 
 sheeted, slumbering dead. Yet there is within us 
 the spark that will not be snuffed out. It is the 
 I, the resistant center, the undying defiant. It is 
 by developing the Ego, by an insistent coddling of 
 Me, that we attain to a sort of Buddhahood. The 
 46 
 
adolescent Homunculus of Faust was Nietzsche’s 
 Overman in the ovum. The Infinite is hidden in 
 an atom, and the freeman lies quiescent in the 
 slave. Housed and kenneled in our brains there is 
 a cosmic Self, a greater, grander, universal Self, 
 distinct and other than the hallucinated micro- 
 cosm that sulks and whimpers through the bogey- 
 bogus days of life. 
 
 M AETERLINCK gives us no coward’s message. 
 
 Flight is not self-mastery, and the world can 
 not be subdued to the individual’s will by shun- 
 ning its blows. We master fate as the Japanese 
 wrestler bests his opponent — by giving way at 
 every point. We should not battle; we should 
 absorb. There is no way yet found of escaping the 
 ills of life. The world is a counsel of imperfection. 
 The trammel and the bond are not rejected by the 
 seer. He must have ballast. There is no backstairs 
 to the seventh heaven of spiritual complacency. 
 He knows the crepuscular mood, and the whirring 
 pinions of the Black Bird have brushed his soul. 
 Recomposition is the law of life, and from remorse 
 and despair we compound the nectars of wisdom. 
 Fear is a brigand, but he carries a torch. Snatch 
 the torch, and turn it on his face. Beneath the 
 
 47 
 
visor which has frightened you there is a smile. 
 And scuttle the past! In the measure that a man 
 allows the past to dominate his life, in that measure 
 will the future obsess him. To sit down by the 
 stream of Time and weep over the gone-by is 
 worse than tragic ; it’s comic. 
 
 Embalm the past in a smile. 
 
 Spinoza said, “ Nothing shall disturb me,” and 
 nothing did. Pyrrho said, “ Nothing is true; noth- 
 ing is untrue,” and he died in peace. Marcus 
 Aurelius said, “ Nothing matters,” and nothing 
 did. “ The world is divine,” chanted Emerson, 
 and he was right. “ The world is evil and smells of 
 grave-mold,” said Schopenhauer, and he was right. 
 “ Life is like a comedy by Moliere,” said George 
 Meredith. And Meredith was right. 
 
 Each brain is a premise. Everything depends on 
 the point of view. The message of Maurice Maeter- 
 linck, like Walt Whitman’s, is whatever 
 you choose to read into it. We know him 
 for a great spiritual scout. 
 
 48 
 
' £?<* * *.e» 5 46 &W £■?* &+ ' 45* 
 w . w . «5f g* . *afc» , nfc* . w , w . w . w . w 
 
 INGERSOLL 
 
 THE REFORMER 
 
 HE world is really getting better. 
 C. We are gradually growing honest 
 and a few men everywhere, even 
 in the pulpit, are now acknowledg- 
 ing they do not know all about 
 everything. There was little hope 
 for the race so long as an individual was disgraced 
 if he did not pretend to believe a thing at which 
 his reason revolted. 
 
 We are simplifying life — simplifying truth. The 
 man who serves his fellow-men best is the one we 
 should honor most. The learned man used to be 
 the one who muddled things, who scrambled 
 thought, who took reason away, and instead 
 thrust upon us faith, with a threat of punishment 
 if we did not accept it, and an offer of reward if 
 we did £•» 
 
 We have now discovered that the so-called learned 
 man had no authority, either for his threat of 
 
 49 
 
punishment or his offer of reward. Hypocrisy will 
 now not pass current, and sincerity, frozen stiff 
 with fright, is no longer legal tender for truth. In 
 the frank acknowledgment of ignorance there is 
 much promise. The man who does not know, and 
 is not afraid to say so, is in the line of evolution. 
 But for the head that is packed with falsehood and 
 the heart that is faint with fear, there is no hope. 
 That head must be unloaded of its lumber, and the 
 heart given courage before the march of progress 
 can begin. 
 
 N OW let us be frank, and let us be honest, just 
 for a few moments. Let us acknowledge that 
 this revolution in thought that has occurred during 
 the last twenty-five years was brought about 
 mainly by one individual. The world was ripe for 
 this man’s utterance, otherwise he would not have 
 gotten the speaker’s eye. A hundred years before 
 we would have snuffed him out in contumely and 
 disgrace. But men listened to him and paid high 
 for the privilege. And those who hated this man and 
 feared him most went, too, to listen, so as to answer 
 him and thereby keep the planet from swinging 
 out of its orbit and sweeping on to destruction 
 Whenever this man spoke, in towns and cities or 
 50 
 
country, for weeks the air was heavy with the 
 smoke of rhetoric, and reasons, soggy and solid, 
 and fuzzy logic and muddy proofs were dragged 
 like siege-guns to the defense. 
 
 T HEY dared the man to come back and fight 
 it out. The clouds were charged with chal- 
 lenges, and the prophecy was made and made 
 again that never in the same place could this man 
 go back and get a second hearing. Yet he did go 
 back year after year, and crowds hung upon his 
 utterances and laughed with him at the scarecrow 
 that had once filled their day-dreams, made the 
 nights hideous, and the future black with terror. 
 Through his influence the tears of pity put out the 
 fires of hell; and he literally laughed the devil out 
 of court. This man, more than any other man of 
 his century, made the clergy free. He raised the 
 standard of intelligence in both pew and pulpit, and 
 the preachers who denounced him most, often 
 were, and are, the most benefited by his work. 
 
 T HIS man was Robert G. Ingersoll. C[ On the 
 urn that encloses his ashes should be these 
 words: “ Liberator of Men.” When he gave his 
 lecture on “ The Gods ” at Cooper Union, New 
 
 51 
 
York City, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-two, he 
 fired a shot heard ’round the world. It was the 
 boldest, strongest and most vivid utterance of the 
 century «•» 
 
 At once it was recognized that the thinking world 
 had to do with a man of power. Efforts were made 
 in dozens of places to bring statute law to bear upon 
 him, and the State of Delaware held her whipping- 
 post in readiness for his benefit; but blasphemy 
 enactments and laws for the protection of the 
 Unknown were inoperative in his gracious presence. 
 C. Ingersoll was a hard hitter, but the splendid 
 good nature of the man, his freedom from all 
 personal malice, and his unsullied character saved 
 him, in those early days, from the violence that 
 would surely have overtaken a smaller person. 
 
 r JGERSOLL gave superstition such a jolt that the 
 consensus of intelligence has counted it out. 
 Ingersoll did not destroy the good — all that is 
 vital and excellent and worthy in religion we have 
 yet, and in such measure as it never existed before. 
 In every so-called “ Orthodox ” pulpit you can 
 now hear sermons calling upon men to manifest 
 their religion in their work; to show their love for 
 God in their attitude toward men; to gain the 
 52 
 
kingdom of heaven by having the kingdom of 
 heaven in their own hearts. 
 
 Ingersoll pleaded for the criminal, the weak, the 
 defenseless and the depraved. Our treatment 
 toward all these has changed marvelously within a 
 decade. When we ceased to believe that God was 
 going to damn folks, we left off damning them 
 ourselves. We think better now of God and we 
 think better of men and women. Who dares now 
 to talk about the “ hopelessly lost ? ” 
 
 OU can not afford to indict a man who prac- 
 
 tised every so-called Christian virtue, simply 
 because there was a flaw or two in his “ belief ” — 
 the world has gotten beyond that. Everybody 
 now admits that Ingersoll was every whit as good 
 a man as those who denounced him most. His life 
 was full of kind deeds and generous acts, and his 
 daily walk was quite as blameless as the life of the 
 average priest or preacher. 
 
 Those who seek to cry Ingersoll down reveal either 
 density or malice. He did a great and necessary 
 work, and did it so thoroughly and well that it will 
 never have to be done again. His mission was to 
 liberalize and to Christianize every church in 
 Christendom; and no denomination, be its creed 
 
 53 
 
ever so ossified, stands now where it stood before 
 Ingersoll began his crusade. He shamed men into 
 sanity 
 
 Ingersoll uttered in clarion tones what thousands 
 of men and women believed, but dared not voice. 
 He was the spokesman for many of the best think- 
 ers of his time. He abolished fear, gave courage in 
 place of cringing doubt, and lived what he believed 
 was truth. His was a brave, cheerful and kind 
 life. He was loved most by those who knew him 
 best, for in his nature there was neither duplicity 
 nor concealment. He had nothing to hide. We know 
 and acknowledge the man’s limitations, yet we 
 realize his worth: his influence in the cause of 
 simplicity and honesty has been priceless. 
 
 HE dust of conflict has not yet settled; pre- 
 
 judice still is in the air, but time, the great 
 adjuster, will give Ingersoll his due. The history 
 of America’s thought evolution can never be 
 written with the name of Ingersoll left out. In his 
 own splendid personality he had no rivals, no 
 competitors. He stands alone; and no name in 
 liberal thought can ever eclipse his. He prepared 
 the way for the thinkers and the doers who shall 
 come after, and in insight surpass him, reaching 
 
 54 
 
spiritual heights which he, perhaps, could never 
 attain. This earth is a better place, and life and 
 liberty are safer because Robert G. Ingersoll lived. 
 C The last words of Ingersoll were, by a strange 
 coincidence, the dying words of his brother Ebon : 
 “ I am better!” — words of hope, words of assur- 
 ance to the woman he loved. 
 
 Sane to the last! And let us, too, hope that those 
 dear words are true of all the countless dead. 
 
 55 
 
EMERSON 
 
 THE SKEPTIC 
 
 OU are spinning like bubbles in 
 a river, you know not whither or 
 whence, aud you are bottomed and 
 capped and wrapped in delusions,” 
 says Emerson in his essay on 
 Montaigne s— «•» 
 
 The universe at any given moment is but a dis- 
 solving state of consciousness. Behind the arras 
 of dreams there stands a Dreamer, and that there 
 is a Dreamer and a dream are all the skeptic can 
 affirm 
 
 Skepticism is a system of arriving at provisional 
 universals by skipping the particular. It holds to 
 no one thing, but affirms an All. As a particle of 
 salt is dissolved in water, so is a particular fact 
 dissolved in its eternal Idea in the mind of the sage. 
 Your object standing there in space, tangible and 
 movable, has no more substantiality than the 
 gorgeous color-bands woven by sunken Autumn 
 56 
 
suns. They are part and parcel of the cosmic 
 mirage s®» 
 
 All things seen are but projections of the seer; all 
 truths are aspects of the Truth; each brain is a 
 facet of the Universal Mind. The universe itself 
 is but an arc of the uncircled eternal. The skeptic 
 works by elimination. The arch-skeptic is the 
 arch-believer. He may smile indulgently at all 
 your facts ranged neatly in their pigeonholes; 
 but there is a fact at which he will not smile. He is 
 awed by himself. He will not believe his eyes, 
 because there is an unlidded Eye within his soul 
 that sweeps the infinite spaces. He will not believe 
 his ears, because there ring upon the spiritual 
 tympanum the whispered vibrations of a Law that 
 is not dependent on the atom. He believes little in 
 the rule of thumb and finger. Two and two may 
 make four and an eighth on Jupiter. An extra 
 cerebral convolution might have made it so on 
 this planet. 
 
 T HE “ order ” of the world is an order built of 
 chance. Did the reverse hold true of every 
 “ universal ” law, we would as dogmatically assert 
 the “fixed order” of things; and we would get 
 along just as well, or better — or worse. 
 
 57 
 
Our reasonings are expressions of character; our 
 divinations are related to temperament, and our 
 widest scientific generalization is but the orbit of 
 the strongest sun-midge. Processes are eternal; 
 facts are the ephemera of Time. Emerson held to 
 the Processes: what the Processes promulged he 
 spumed. Our speech is mere cavil. No action is 
 whole and completed. Our real thoughts are un- 
 tongued. The heart has no lips. Our passions are 
 but the jagged shards of an earthen vessel broken 
 by too much usage. We are doomed to the unutter- 
 able. There is repetition, but no “ order ” in the 
 universe s— ^ 
 
 Up to the steep Matterhorn of these negations the 
 skeptic soul of Emerson toiled till it reached the 
 pinnacle — the Oversoul that canopies all negation; 
 the Oversoul that is unarithmetical and may not 
 be numbered. There he dwells to this day — like 
 the pinnacle of Mont Blanc, still, snowy and 
 serene 
 
 “ Life is a bubble and a skepticism,” he says in 
 a passionate paragraph. Things reel and sway and 
 pass beyond the senses in the minute. Men lay 
 snares for the Present and are caught in their own 
 traps. Youth girds itself for a battle that is never 
 fought ; manhood dreams of an old age that never 
 58 
 
comes. Childhood is best enjoyed when ’t is past. 
 The descent from anticipation to realization is 
 sheer, and our actions are rounded by a leer. Like 
 Faust, we are damned if we bid the present moment 
 stay, and we are damned if we bid it go. Rest is 
 stagnation; motion is dispersive. We are lost either 
 way. If you are as coarse as Belial, or as ethereal 
 as Shelley, you are doomed to doubt. 
 
 Systems, codes, conventions, moralities are put 
 forth in trust and faith from the larval brain of 
 man, and Time grinds them to smut. As the 
 aspiring flame from Hecla’s crater is lost in the pits 
 of night, so are our highest exaltations lost in the 
 swash of the durations. Nothing is fixed. All things 
 are travailing at birth or are entering on the death- 
 spasm. Nothing that is bom or dies can be final, 
 and that which is not final is not true. The temporal 
 order is apparitional. Governments are organized 
 instincts — and instincts are sexual and stomachic. 
 That which stands through eternal change is the 
 law of change, and is tethered to the inner man. 
 
 T IME melts to shining ether the solid angularity 
 of facts,” says the great Transcendentalism 
 And this applies to moral as well as to physical 
 facts. A proper perspective shatters differences. 
 
 59 
 
Good and evil differ in time and clime. Shall I choose 
 this or this — and how shall I know that that which 
 I choose is true? What is right in Constantinople 
 is wrong in New York. 
 
 Cain and Mary of Magdala are necessary ingre- 
 dients in cosmic economy. Evil and good are 
 spiritual systole and diastole. There is a vice 
 slumbering in every virtue. Comparative sociology 
 tends to weaken the safeguards which conscience 
 imposes. Time melts scruples, and the conscience 
 of twenty is not the conscience of sixty. 
 
 Patriotism depends on the accident of birth. If a 
 man is bom in a stable, is he bound to ride a horse 
 all the days of his life? Theft is a matter of numbers : 
 there are statues to Napoleon, but none to Jack 
 Cade. Civilization is the closet where we hide the 
 racial skeleton. Our vices are ancient virtues; 
 virtues are vices that shall be. Altruism is a subtle 
 mode of achieving egotistic ends. Self-sacrifice is 
 oblation of self to self. Religion is a mood, and 
 philosophy, after all, is but temperament intel- 
 lectualized. Note the Sherman Act! 
 
 A history of human opinion would be a history 
 of mankind’s error. The Galilean system is no 
 whit better than the Ptolemaic. There is an in- 
 crement of mystery — that is all. What difference 
 60 
 
does it make whether the earth goes around the 
 sun or the sun goes around the earth, if we have 
 not solved the mystery of motion? What difference 
 does it make whether matter is an expression of 
 mind or mind an expression of matter, if we can 
 define neither term? The gods of the peoples are 
 metamorphic, and scarab and Jove are but names. 
 The telescope of Galileo increased the distance 
 between us and the stars. Microscope, retort and 
 crucible are not as useful as flint and spear and 
 battle-ax 
 
 Each brain is a premise, and what you believe, 
 that is so. Civilization boasts that it has given us 
 social order and humanized us, when in reality 
 it has but subtilized the various forms of aggression. 
 All things tend to complexity and perplexity. The 
 simpler a thing is, the nearer it is to perfection. 
 The Black Fellow can realize his ideals. Lord 
 Byron could not. Highly elaborated cerebral 
 processes beget highly elaborated aspirations. 
 Simple natures start from simple premises, and a 
 highly complex civilization is but a device for 
 increasing human ills. 
 
 Emerson tells us that society never advances or 
 recedes. It forever stands. He is skeptical of all 
 “ progress.” In “ Compensation ” he riddles the 
 
 61 
 
Occident’s pet illusion The Eastern sage 
 repeats the syllable “ Om ” a thousand times, and 
 is self-hypnotized. The Western gascon bawls 
 “ Progress,” and is hallucinated by the idea that 
 he is moving in a straight line. There is social 
 dilatation, but progress is an illusion. Mankind is 
 like a blind horse traveling around a circus-ring. 
 To acquire “ knowledge ” — in its Western sense 
 — is a process of sharpening the claws the better to 
 grip your fellow-man’s throat in the competitive 
 struggle *•» £» 
 
 If you pursue things, Time will devour you; if you 
 stand still, you will devour Time. Emerson’s law 
 of compensation tallies with that profound saying 
 of Seneca’s, “ For it is all one not to desire and to 
 have.” This is the essence of skepticism. It denies 
 that any one thing is better than another, and affirms 
 the identity of opposites. Rest in the Oversoul and 
 watch the water-flies flit over the darkling currents 
 of life. Bid no thing go; bid no thing stay; welcome 
 the good and the bad — and stand still. Action is 
 founded on fear — the fear of one’s self, the fear of 
 silence, the fear of being alone. Action is an opiate, 
 not a stimulant — it drugs the introspective self. 
 Those who sleep, dream, meditate, achieve all 
 that action unconsciously aims at and never attains 
 62 
 
— peace, calm, the lustral redemptions. Molt hope 
 and fear and you enter the realm of the sage. The 
 particular no longer usurps, and life in the super- 
 sensible begins. Opinions become brain-myths, 
 and “ forward,” “ backward ” and “ progress,” 
 the patois of fisherwomen. 
 
 T HE skepticism of the mystic is bom of the idea 
 that all things eventually flow back to their 
 sources. The ages have solved nothing. The same 
 fundamental problems that confronted Eschylus 
 confronted Ibsen. The soul of Plotinus is revivified 
 in Maeterlinck. Edipus and Hamlet were undone 
 by the same inscrutable Fate. Job’s piercing 
 shrieks were echoed back from the mouth of 
 Manfred-Byron on the heights of the Jungfrau. 
 The sublime vision that overcame Buddha amid 
 his purple sins sublimated the soul of Tolstoy; and 
 the furies that lashed Orestes with serpent whips 
 scourged Oscar Wilde to his doom. 
 
 Marriage, society, government are still open 
 questions. Imago, or butterfly, the spirit persists 
 forever. You can not leash the spirit of Emerson 
 to a system, nor hitch his star to a benzine-buggy. 
 Pessimism is a sublimated, transcendental opti- 
 mism. The pessimist’s ideals are so high that he 
 
 63 
 
will not, can not, conform his spirit to this world — 
 the drifting cinder of a bumed-up Asgard. Pure 
 optimism is cerebral vacuity tempered by a stomach. 
 
 E MERSON disbelieved in the temporal order. 
 
 Like all the mighty brotherhood, he was at 
 war with the petty and the transitory. In the 
 realm of Space, Time and Circumstance, the worst 
 always happens because the bond-servants of the 
 triple chain are always hoping for the best. 
 
 “ The Transcendentalist ” was a lecture delivered 
 at the Masonic Temple, Boston, in January, 
 Eighteen Hundred Forty-two. It is the great 
 challenge to things as they are. It is not the chal- 
 lenge of the skeptic, but the challenge of the 
 pessimist. It breathes the positiveness of all 
 negations. What is worthy? asks Emerson. Your 
 charities are sycophantic, your governments but 
 organized theft, your civilizations a long train of 
 felonies, and your boasted virtues but sleazy vices. 
 €[ Life is a degradation, and man lives in the 
 slime-pits of lust. “ Much of our labor seems mere 
 waiting; it was not that we were bom for.” His 
 thought is that of Buddha, the Man of Galilee, 
 Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Plato, Amiel, Schopen- 
 hauer, Nietzsche. These have all agreed, in diverse 
 64 
 
ways, on the essential sordidness of practical life. 
 Life on the terms given us is an insult to the soul 
 of man. Hurry us from this “ Iceland of negations” 
 into newer, deeper infinitudes, past these mephitic 
 atmospheres! How came we to Molokai? We are 
 the “ butt-ends of men,” the tailings of gods, 
 celestial sawdust, leavings of past deviltries. I will 
 none of it, cries our Hamlet of the white tunic in 
 sublime disdain. 
 
 Nor could that subtle-seeing eye be deluded by 
 the vesture of things. “ Thou ailest here, and here,” 
 said Goethe, sticking his finger into mankind’s 
 age-long sores. And thou rottest all over, said 
 Emerson. These mechanical inventions — the gew- 
 gaws of a senescent race — shall all be destroyed 
 and leave posterity with as little knowledge of 
 them as we have of the lost arts of Egypt, a civili- 
 zation that is not yet cold in death. The seas shall 
 sob their litanies over the places where you now 
 higgle and haggle for your dole. Your temples and 
 shrines shall become sun-food, and you shall 
 sooner count the stars than number the nothings 
 of daily speech. 
 
 Things will be neither better nor worse in times 
 to come; they will be both The balances 
 are always kept. Evil will never grow less so long 
 
 65 
 
as men cling to the temporal order. Ixion is bound 
 to his wheel, and while the wheel goes round there 
 is no help for man. The things that are tangible are 
 the things that are evil. Good is a negation. Trans- 
 cendentalism is a negative good. It aims to release 
 the individual. In the Spent Dynamic alone there 
 is hope. On the crest of the final equilibration will 
 man find rest. Life is a series of undulations and 
 “ Illusion is God’s method.” Facts are mere bell- 
 buoys on the stream of infinite being. The objective 
 world is gelatinous. Transcendental pessimism 
 seeks another order. 
 
 The equilibration that Emerson dreamed of — is 
 it aught but a wraith on the storm-billows? All 
 motion tends to equilibration; yet a state of 
 equilibration can not be preserved; motion begins 
 again. And so are we played upon. The Pythagor- 
 ean Harmony, the Spencerian Equilibration, the 
 Emersonian Oversoul — are they not identical? 
 C. But we will wait. Patience ! Our work is not 
 here and the sidereal days are not for us. Passion 
 bom of fire, and thought bom of pain, and beauty 
 bom of sex, and death bom of life, mean nothing 
 to us. We smile at your amblings and loathe your 
 chicaneries. We sit with our hands folded waiting 
 a call. If our souls were created for nothing, then 
 66 
 
to nothing we will return. “ If I am the devil’s 
 child, I will live unto the devil.” We will wait for 
 eons; the waves of unguessed cycles shall foam 
 upon unwombed worlds, and spit us forth in vest- 
 ments new and strange; and still we shall wait 
 the call of the Infinite Counselor. And if 
 it come, we shall know; and if it 
 do not come, we shall know, too. 
 
 67 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 THE TITAN 
 
 HE last of the Titans has gone. 
 Tolstoy is dead. The great line of 
 seers and prophets that began with 
 Isaiah and Ezekiel ended with the 
 Great Moujik. In the shadow of 
 that gigantic figure we are all small. 
 Around the Colossus of Yasnaya Poliana we crawl 
 and cringe and fret — little beings of a little day. His 
 bare brown feet rested firmly on the earth. His 
 majestic head was in the constellations. His heart 
 covered and sanctified the race. 
 
 He was a man of sorrows — The Man of Sorrows of 
 the century. Like Buddha and Christ, he believed 
 he carried the burden of humanity. His mighty 
 soul was gashed by the evils of the age. He saw that 
 life and suffering were interchangeable terms; that 
 man here below has been caught like a rat in a trap ; 
 that knavery, force and fraud ruled everywhere, 
 especially in his own land. He was a pessimist, if 
 68 
 
to see the truth and speak it is pessimism. d He 
 died facing a statue of the Buddha. He lived facing 
 the rotten aristocracy of his country, the criminal 
 Grand Dukes and that gigantic Graft called the 
 Greek Church. 
 
 He was the one man that Russia feared. This is a 
 stupendous fact, and Russia feared Tolstoy be- 
 cause she knew that a hand laid on him would have 
 been the signal for an uprising of the whole human 
 race, of which he was the Voice and the Heart, 
 d No matter how large a man looms in the history 
 of his time, he is always a part. No man can be an 
 absolute law unto himself. The Past and the 
 Present stand at his cradle. Each individual is 
 related to an infinite number of things, dead and 
 living. Tolstoy, like Hugo, Savonarola, Luther, 
 was necessary to his time. Russia needed a Man, 
 the World needed a Gospel — and Tolstoy rose and 
 grasped the lightnings. For he was godlike in his 
 majesty — a figure that awes and cows. 
 
 Tolstoy was the most significant figure of the 
 century, because he came at the most significant 
 period in the history of modem civilization. He 
 was a reaction. He was the other half of the eternal 
 law of action and reaction. The times produce the 
 man, and the man reacts on his time. When the 
 
 69 
 
people need a liberator he appears. Secret forces 
 are forever at work molding in mystery the man 
 with the new message in religion, philosophy, 
 morals, business. 
 
 iT the time Tolstoy came the world had no 
 XjLsouI — no insides. It had telegraphs and rail- 
 roads, but no religion — in the spiritual sense of the 
 word. Man can not live by machinery alone. All 
 things exist in nature by the balancing of two 
 forces: the centripetal and the centrifugal. A 
 people who are impelled by the powerful attraction 
 of external things and who have no counterbalanc- 
 ing center within are on the way to extinction. 
 Tolstoy said there is something more than the 
 body. Christ preached the same doctrine at a 
 similar critical epoch in the world’s history. 
 Marcus Aurelius, an emperor, and Epictetus, a 
 slave, had said the same. 
 
 Man gropes today for something better. The old 
 gods are dead; the old beliefs are rotten reeds. 
 Pontifical pretense and theological sleight-of-hand 
 no longer interest. The Church is useful matter in 
 the wrong place. 
 
 When Tolstoy began to thunder in Russia, the 
 Greek Church had still the old pride in her eye. 
 
 70 
 
Vain glory was emblazoned on her brow, and the 
 lips of the priests stank with the grease of the 
 glutton. The Church was a braggart. 
 
 Today, thanks to Tolstoy, the Greek Church is 
 being secretly investigated by every thinking brain 
 in Russia. They have dragged the purple and laces 
 off the old jade, and beneath they have discovered 
 the Eternal Prostitute. And her paramour, the 
 old autocracy, is making shift for its life. For every 
 dart that Tolstoy hurled at that pair of immemorial 
 bloodsuckers was poisoned and stuck in their dugs. 
 
 T HERE was a stupendous rebellion in Tolstoy’s 
 soul : a revolt against the imbecility of merely 
 living, like a rat, for the sake of breathing. A giant 
 brooding sorrow stood in his eyes ; an infinite com- 
 passion filled his soul. C. Thinker? No, he was not 
 that. He was greater than a thinker — he was a Seer, 
 an Announcer, a Liberator, a spiritual John Brown. 
 He chose the company of the peasant, of the 
 lowly and the suffering, because he knew that they 
 held the secret of existence. He sought out the 
 erring, because he knew they were more sinned 
 against than sinning. He was one with all men: the 
 prostitute, the thief, were puppets. They needed 
 help, not Siberia. 
 
 71 
 
And he spumed the complacent Phariseeism that 
 swims in its own lard; he thundered against the 
 smug phrase-makers, the professional optimists, the 
 hypocrites on ’Change, the hypocrites on high. 
 
 He carried about him a transcendental nostalgia, 
 a homesickness bom of sweet memories, a “mansion 
 in the skies,” a divine despair, a somber to-hell- 
 with-your-civilization ! 
 
 He made his appeal directly to the heart of his 
 listeners. That is the secret of his vast power. He 
 went into the homes of the peasants, sitting with 
 them at their meals, meeting them in the fields. He 
 knew that the center of the universe was every- 
 where. So he preferred to look for it under rags 
 rather than under imperial purple. Purple conceals 
 so much that doesn’t exist. He believed all men 
 were made of the same substance — that he, Tolstoy, 
 was a potential drunkard and a possible murderer. 
 C[ The Infinite was in this man. He who has 
 universal sympathy possesses the Divine. He who 
 understands mankind and loves mankind is God. 
 And that is why we call Buddha, Christ, Emerson, 
 Mary Baker Eddy and Tolstoy divine. This is the 
 central conception that illumined the brain of 
 Tolstoy, and this is the substratum of everything 
 he ever wrote: Man Is One. 
 
 72 
 
He depersonalized himself. By a miracle he was 
 the Race. There is no analogy to him in Modem 
 Europe. To find his peers we must go to the Ganges 
 and beneath the Himalayas It is only there 
 among those marvelous Hindus that dreams like 
 Tolstoy’s flourish and spread. It is only there that 
 they understand that wonderful doctrine of Jesus: 
 you shall lose yourself in order to gain yourself. 
 Give all, if you would gain all. He who wants 
 nothing possesses everything. 
 
 M ERCY, charity, self-conquest, renunciation, 
 and finally, through discipline, the extinc- 
 tion of the pain-absorbing and pain-getting person- 
 ality and union with God — that was the essence of 
 Tolstoy’s teaching. Among the forces that direct 
 life, Tolstoy preferred Instinct to Knowledge. The 
 Instinct of the animal is surer than that of man. Is 
 it not that belief which he expounds to us in 
 Master and Servant, when Vassili, having wandered 
 in a sled in the night in a great snowstorm, 
 abandons the reins to his servant Nikiti? The 
 peasant and the horse find the lost road, then the 
 village ^ 
 
 But they are lost again. 
 
 “ What shall we do now? ” asks the master. 
 
 73 
 
“ Let the horse go without guidance,” replies the 
 peasant. And the horse leads them both back 
 home. C. The peasant and the animal have more 
 wisdom than the educated man, says Tolstoy. God 
 is in the heart, not in the head. Reasoning is an 
 “ ignis fatuus,” a false light. Trust the Universal 
 Soul, and you will “ find the way.” 
 
 What attracted and fascinated Tolstoy was that 
 instinct is anterior to the modes of individual 
 knowledge. Instinct is spirit. Knowledge is a 
 vagary. Education is a perversion of life. Abandon 
 yourself and all your gorgeous gewgaws called 
 position — and above all, the gewgaw of Self. 
 
 This was his great doctrine of renunciation. He 
 took direct issue with the Greeks, who taught the 
 joy of life. He was the antithesis of Friedrich 
 Nietzsche, who glorified even evil because it 
 made existence majestic. How strange a doctrine 
 to preach to the world today living its cat-and-dog 
 existence! Give! Give! cried Tolstoy. Give! When 
 you give you expand. Renounce that little thing 
 that you hug in your bosom and you shall be 
 lapped and laved in the Infinite. 
 
 Tolstoy may have been a sublime disease, but he 
 was Sublime. And who amongst us is not diseased, 
 let him cast the first stone at the great Russ. 
 
 74 
 
In the world of mediocrities, fakirs, make-believes, 
 slick-fingers, gabby-jacks and pampered pharisees, 
 Leo Tolstoy stands out gigantic, grand, menacing 
 — a voice crying in the wilderness, may be, but a 
 Voice that reverberates to the stars and shakes the 
 rotting dynasties of Europe to their foundations 
 and sets a-tremble the dome of Saint Peter’s. 
 
 In all Christendom, he was the only Christian. 
 In Russia, he was an apparition of Justice. 
 
 Today, Leo Tolstoy is sitting with Buddha, Christ, 
 Lucretius, Isaiah, Emerson, Goethe and all the 
 other earth-gods who have passed into the Council- 
 Chamber of the Everlasting. 
 
 Yet his religion was not mine, nor yours. The love 
 of man and woman — the resultant love of beauty 
 as manifest in art — was not for him. 
 
 But how vain to picture him by telling what he 
 was not. 
 
 He was great on account of what he was. He 
 asked for nothing, and so he was without fear. He 
 loved humanity — not persons. He was a King by 
 divine right, yet he loved the race too well to wish 
 to rule. 
 
 The days will pass and Tolstoy will be to countless 
 millions as the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
 land, d Hail ! Leo Tolstoy, hail! — and farewell! 
 
 75 
 
GUSTAVE Le BON 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF INSTINCT 
 
 USTAVE LE BON belongs to that 
 high dynasty of impenitent rebels 
 founded by La Rochefoucauld. His 
 The Crowd, Psychology of Social- 
 ism, The Psychology of Races, and 
 his Psychology of Revolution, which 
 latter is his last book, have all been translated 
 into English. 
 
 They are ruthless, unsentimental, and contain 
 no panaceas for sick people. To be a thinker is one 
 thing. To be a propagandist is another. They are 
 antithetical propositions. 
 
 All thought aspires to Nihilism; all propagandism 
 aspires to fixity and permanency. 
 
 And the Thinker and the Propagandist can only 
 effect a reconciliation where parallel lines meet — 
 in the infinite, in the Never-Never Land of cosmic 
 evolution. €1 Bergson and Eucken run drugstores. 
 Gustave Le Bon runs a laboratory. 
 
 76 
 
Le Bon rips curtains, masks and dominoes. He 
 exposes, relentlessly and inexorably, races, indi- 
 viduals and “ movements,” and sets them in the 
 gray light of Reality. 
 
 His analysis of the eternal Instinct-to-Sham is as 
 merciless as is that of Jules de Caultier. He holds 
 no brief for anything. He is not in favor of this or 
 that; nor is he opposed to that or this. He sees; 
 he records. His books fecundate with suggestions. 
 Their style is simple, epigrammatic, fistic. 
 
 His irony lies in his logic, which in his case, as in 
 the case of all of us, is merely the justification of 
 his instinct, his prejudgment. His is the esthetic 
 instinct. Pessimism and optimism are without 
 meaning. They both demand a theory of ends. 
 They imply the finite. The infinite may be con- 
 ceivable. Porphyry, Spinoza and Emerson reached 
 it. But the finite — a thing with a beginning and an 
 end — is plainly inconceivable. Life is a play in- 
 vented for Me. The rest is silence. 
 
 T O Le Bon all intelligence prevaricates. All 
 mental attitudes are poses. All ideals that are 
 called “ intellectual ideals ” are hypocritical. In- 
 stinct is the only psychological reality. And 
 instinct is murderously egotistic. To hide its 
 
 77 
 
inherent malignity it invents millions of masks. 
 These masks are woven of logic and reason. Self- 
 love and instinct are always rummaging about in 
 the wardrobe-rooms of the brain for a disguise. 
 This psychological hypocrisy is itself an instinct — 
 a detail of the instinct of self-preservation. Hence 
 moral codes and philosophical and religious “ justi- 
 fications ” for the most insane, absurd and perverse 
 actions. Hence the ephemeral nature of all reason- 
 ing. Its role is pure expediency and utilitarianism. 
 C. When the instincts have done their work, the 
 masks — or reasons — she wove are thrown away 
 and another mask is substituted. 
 
 The beautiful reasons and theories on which the 
 French people thought they acted during the 
 Revolution were “ faked ” in order to justify their 
 spoliation of the rich. Their right to bread, fuel, 
 light, heat and the “ good things of life ” was 
 inherent 
 
 They sought to starve those who had starved 
 them. They destroyed the things that had de- 
 stroyed them. 
 
 Here they were moral, sublime, right, and the 
 Reign of Terror was a superb celebration of the 
 instinct to seek one’s own at any cost. “ Liberty, 
 Equality and Fraternity ” had nothing to do with 
 78 
 
the Revolution. They were merely the moral 
 tarpaulins that the Instinct-to-Vengeance put on 
 when it went forth to do its work. 
 
 And it is the Instinct-to-Vengeance that is at the 
 bottom of the war movement in Europe today. 
 This spirit is always seeking an excuse to fight. 
 Along the highways of the world the Instincts 
 hurry with fagot and sword; but they send ahead 
 an army of pamphleteers which distributes tracts 
 that formulate and justify the everlasting urge. 
 This army is Mind. 
 
 The Instinct-to-Lie, the irrational, the chimeric, 
 the mystical — these are the bases of all human 
 action. They are all, however, upon analysis, 
 absorbed into the vital Instinct-to-Vengeance. This 
 instinct is even metaphysical. “ Vengeance is mine 
 saith the Lord.” This, taken in a popular sense, 
 means that vengeance is alone the prerogative of 
 God, and not of man. In its profounder sense 
 it means that vengeance is at the heart of life, 
 that vengeance is the dynamic principle in all 
 motion 
 
 The word “ redress ” is the shibboleth of the 
 ages: redress against Nature, redress against the 
 gods, redress between man and man. That word 
 is forever on the lips of man. In legend and in fact 
 
 79 
 
it is The Word. Redress is the idealization of ven- 
 geance, and justice is its logical mask. 
 
 The desire to “ get even ” explains Moses, Mo- 
 hammed, Ferrer, John Brown, Robespierre, Wash- 
 ington, Robin Hood, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Karl 
 Marx, Roosevelt and William the Second. 
 
 It explains every battle from Salamis to Vera 
 Cruz. It was to “ get even ” that the lowly followed 
 Christ. It was the instinct to “ get even ” that made 
 Luther nail his proclamation on the church-door 
 at Wittenberg. It was to “ get even ” that the 
 North punished the South in the American Civil 
 War s— 
 
 The I. W. W. is an attempt to get even. Does 
 Upton Sinclair, or Doctor Reitman or Alexander 
 Berkman know anything of “ justice ”? Gentleman 
 adventurers, all! Militants in England will never 
 be satisfied with the vote. They want to get even 
 with the male, this beast has been seducing them 
 with a dream of love in a cottage, all down the 
 centuries. C It is to get even that Socialism has 
 come into the world. 
 
 In a mystical age the Instinct -to -Vengeance will 
 wear a religious mask. 
 
 In a sentimental age it will wear a humanitarian 
 mask $+> 
 
 80 
 
In a scientific age it will wear the mask of logic. 
 Bibles go out of fashion, like everything else. 
 C[ The “ Holy War ” of the Reformation, the 
 “Holy War” of the French Revolution, the “Holy 
 War ” of Socialism — each has its bible, its paged 
 and illuminated euphemisms to cover the naked 
 intent of Instinct. 
 
 The Wittenberg proclamation, The Declaration of 
 the Rights of Man and Das Kapital are the para- 
 bles of humanity on the lips of Social Vengeance. 
 Chimera! Another word that Gustave Le Bon 
 insists on. Man has been defined variously. One 
 called him a metaphysical animal, another a practi- 
 cal marauder. Le Bon insists that he is a sort of 
 mystical beast. Man is a bom poet. For a Euclid, 
 a Newton, a Darwin, he cares not a rap. 
 
 But let him catch a glimpse of a Peter the Hermit, 
 a Joseph Smith, a Mirabeau, a Napoleon, a Mary 
 Baker Eddy, a Katherine Tingley, and he will 
 desert office, field and wife, and follow where the 
 sacrosanct one leads him. 
 
 That is because man is a poet. He is a mystical, 
 irrational being, and not a practical, reasoning 
 animal 
 
 The impossible, the supernatural, the absurd, 
 move him to the depth of his being. 
 
 81 
 
He follows Chimera over corpses, temples, crowns. 
 Truth for the crowd lies in the emotions. Emotions 
 are the brain of its instincts. 
 
 Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Spencer, mean nothing to 
 the masses; but preach to them a New Utopia, or 
 tell them a tale of a mystical year to come by a 
 simple “ Be it enacted,” and a hundred million ears 
 are instantly a-prick. d That all trails to Utopia 
 lead to an Armageddon where the Prince of Jest- 
 ers is always the victor, means nothing to the race, 
 d There is always another Beyond, always another 
 Promised Land, always another Sawdust Trail *•» 
 The Vulcans of Mystical Belief never sleep in the 
 Smithy of the Unconscious where the chimeras are 
 fabricated. 
 
 Gullibility is a means of survival, and “ social 
 progress ” is accelerated by the wonderful cock- 
 and-bull romances of Rousseau, Marx and Bergson. 
 
 I E BON’S theory of the French Revolution is 
 J that it was a mystical, sexio-religious crusade, 
 d Blood-letting and saturnalias are incidental to 
 all crusades of a mystical, religious type. 
 
 The anciently associated ideas of God and human 
 sacrifice will never become wholly dissociated in 
 the human mind. 
 
 82 
 
All forms of worship, all forms of ecstasy, all 
 notions of “ social progress,” smell of blood. 
 Something must die, something must be “ offered 
 up,” in order that man may continue his antics on 
 a fussy little star. 
 
 During the French Revolution this ancient rite- 
 instinct came to life in the Reign of Terror. The 
 heads of thousands of aristocrats were offered up 
 to the “ progressive ” gods of Liberty, Equality 
 and Fraternity. C In the reign of terror which in- 
 ternational socialism in its infinite wisdom will 
 soon inaugurate, the offering will consist of those 
 who belong to the capitalistic class. 
 
 We are still Egyptians and Aztecs, and we sacrifice 
 before, during and after every battle. 
 
 The first “Progressive” of whom we have any 
 knowledge was Cain, whose sacrifice was rejected 
 by the Lord and who in revenge slew his heaven- 
 petted brother; Cain, the real progenitor of the 
 French Revolution; Cain, the first Socialist. 
 
 When we get enough Cain voters, they will elect 
 a Cain president, and a Cain Congress. 
 
 Thomas Jefferson’s democracy was founded on 
 the fallacy that all men are industrious by choice, 
 economical because they love to be, and truthful 
 because it is their nature. 
 
 83 
 
I E BON has the greatest contempt for the 
 j crowd, for the people. Democracy is the 
 anonymous tyranny — more terrible, more vin- 
 dictive, more vengeful than any absolute monarchy, 
 where a head or heads may be reached with a bomb. 
 
 Democracy is the divinization of Opinion, and 
 Opinion is always a Caligula. 
 
 The Crowd is the hydra that the Strong Man, the 
 Superior Man, must either slay or cajole — or be 
 slain by it. There is no incompetency like the 
 incompetency of the majority. 
 
 There is no ignorance equal to mob ignorance. 
 The great masses of mankind have not even risen 
 to the level of being good servants. 
 
 They have never learned the first step that points 
 to dominion — service. 
 
 Bom to be graceless flunkeys, the People aspire 
 to Olympus. 
 
 Holding within themselves the seed of every 
 tyranny, every absurdity, every hypocrisy, every 
 diabolism, every form of slavery, they seek, by 
 amalgamating and a closer herding, the miracle 
 of transfiguration. 
 
 Bottom believes that a million million Bottoms 
 will make him one of the elect. Vox populi, vox 
 Dei / — was there ever a greater libel on the Lord! 
 84 
 
Democracy, which is the aspiration to medioc- 
 rity, must always fail, because there is a psycho- 
 logical hierarchy as well as a physical, geological 
 and esthetic hierarchy. Bad worships Better, and 
 Better is enamored of Best. 
 
 This is written in the tissues and the corpuscles of 
 man £» 
 
 Democracy must always fail because man is a 
 religious animal — he worships instinctively what 
 is above him — that which equals him has no power 
 over him. 
 
 The ideal of the People is to be ruled and petted — 
 but ruled at any cost. Hero-worship is vital. It is 
 the esthetic escape of the illiterate and heavy-laden. 
 C If the Hero does not rise at the bidding of the 
 people, it will manufacture a god — sometimes it 
 will be called Jupiter, sometimes Mohammed, 
 sometimes Public Opinion. 
 
 There is the eternal necessity to divinize in some 
 form the Instinct-to-Dependency. 
 
 But abstract formulas, like abstract deities, do not 
 satisfy man for long. His gods must have a local 
 habitation and a “ record.” 
 
 A democracy begins to totter at the very moment 
 it seems to be successful. C The great undertow 
 toward the concrete ruler is felt. 
 
 85 
 
Every Feast of Reason ends in a Napoleon. Suc- 
 cessful democracy means destruction of values — 
 vast numbers of men out of work — and a Roosevelt 
 as a relief! 
 
 Every “ free people ” fosters a Porfirio Diaz. 
 Every aspiration to throw off the yoke of authority 
 ends in a Caesar. 
 
 It is because each one of us is secretly a Caesar, a 
 Diaz, a Napoleon. Each of us is separately what 
 we fear to create collectively. Democracy is as 
 totally unsuited to human nature as is the Chris- 
 tianity taught by Christ. 
 
 Democracy as applied by the beneficent Strong 
 Man — a Frederick the Great, a Cromwell, a 
 Marcus Aurelius, an Abraham Lincoln 
 — well, is quite another thing. 
 
 86 
 
^ ^ 
 
 ^ ^ ^ W W.W.W W 
 
 VICTOR HUGO 
 
 THE SUPREME GLORIFIER 
 
 AVE perhaps Walt Whitman and 
 Shakespeare, no poet of any century 
 possessed a vaster imagination than 
 Victor Hugo. Shelley’s imagination 
 was subtle, tenuous and gained in 
 luster and glory through its very 
 limitations. With Shelley one may die of ecstacy 
 and be blasted by light from etheric suns, but one 
 is never lost. In Shakespeare, Whitman and Hugo, 
 one may be lost utterly. In these titanesque minds 
 the Infinite puts its sightless logic. With them, 
 you are lost, drowned, unlodged — unless you know 
 the highways over the constellations. 
 
 The brain of the scholar, of the savant, absorbs the 
 culture of men. It is fed in libraries and museums. 
 The brain of the poet absorbs the culture of the 
 Time-Spirit itself The imperial imagination 
 of Victor Hugo penetrated the pores of the Infi- 
 nite, and on the finite world it acted like a giant 
 
 87 
 
suction-valve. His culture, like the culture of the 
 greatest geniuses, was a miracle of transubstan- 
 tiation. Until it reaches the alembical imagination 
 of the poet and seer, the universe is vegetative $•* 
 He seethed; and he made all Nature seethe with 
 him. Whatever Leconte de Lisle looked at, died; 
 whatever Victor Hugo looked at, lived. The 
 academic tape-measure failing to reach round his 
 form, they have said that he lacked unity, restraint, 
 measure. He had the unity of Niagara, the restraint 
 of lightning and the measured motion of the 
 earthquake. When the capon looks at the eagle it 
 no doubt believes the eagle insane. The only limit 
 that the mind of Victor Hugo knew was death, 
 and that, too, was to him a limitless limit, a lure, 
 a promise. Whoever believes that chaos has its 
 laws will understand Victor Hugo. Whoever be- 
 lieves that there is a discoverable unity in existence 
 will never understand him. 
 
 HE passion for unity is a symptom of fatigue. 
 
 Hugo never grew tired of diversity. He reveled 
 
 in difference. Life with its torrential and eternal 
 multiplication of forms satisfied, and would have 
 satisfied throughout an eternity, that gluttonous 
 soul; and his passion for God was a craving for 
 
 88 
 
partnership. He sought out God to find out His 
 secret. He, Victor Hugo, craved to make atoms, 
 stars, hurricanes, Utopias, Hells, and Shakespeares. 
 C Since Prometheus, had Man ever such a glorifier? 
 Was genius ever so worshiped? Hugo’s hero is the 
 human soul. The evolution of the human mind was 
 the evolution of God. Mind was the pontoon that 
 carried man from age to age. The Ideal was the 
 aeroplane that carried man to the mystical Mansion 
 in the Skies. Hugo’s brain was a portable universe. 
 He was always big with God and Man. He con- 
 stituted himself the knight-errant of the race. All 
 his life he stood sword in hand at some moral 
 Thermopylae. His arrogance was the arrogance of 
 a Jupiter. He was melodramatic; but so is God. 
 He raved and stormed and ranted; but so does the 
 Jehovah of the Jews, in whose likeness he was 
 uttered. His books are a carnival of words, but 
 they have at their best the sovereign solemnity of 
 the “ I am ” of the Lord. 
 
 The flaming veil of day, the somber drop-curtain 
 of night — all are glorified. He is Pantheist, Deist, 
 Pagan and Christian. He marshals atoms and 
 epochs, thunders and Caesars, battlefields and 
 hovels before our eye with the gesture of a man 
 who was the director-general of a Cosmos. 
 
 89 
 
In his hands language became incandescent. Words 
 were fennel-rods whence this Titan drew a creative 
 fire. Words explain everything. The poet is Na- 
 ture’s sacred syllable Om. All thoughts and feelings 
 aspire to be words. No thought or emotion can be 
 completely realized until it becomes crystallized 
 into a word, a phrase, an epigram, a poem. To 
 name a thing is to isolate it, confer on it a soul, 
 give it entity. If names, words, languages did not 
 exist, it is doubtful whether number would exist. 
 Words are worlds and Hugo sat down and wept 
 because there were no new verbal assonances to 
 conquer *•» 
 
 CL From sound he squeezed blood and light and 
 tears. With the cymbals of syllables he struck 
 crashing preludes, passionate intermezzos, and 
 tortuous postludes. There are sentences in Hugo’s 
 pages that are trumpet-calls from trans-stellar 
 Sinais. There are paragraphs that are fulgurant 
 fanfares of sound — nothing more. Sound turning 
 somersaults and becoming light and lightning. 
 Vibrations changed into auroras and sibillant 
 twilights, fused into sulphurous anathemas, dis- 
 solved into vaporous innuendoes. Victor Hugo was 
 the Wagner of words. 
 
 Had Victor Hugo a religion? Had Shakespeare? 
 
 90 
 
Had Goethe? Had Wagner? «•» Genius needs no 
 religion as that word is used generally. It is 
 sufficient unto itself. It sees into hell; it sees 
 through hell. It sees into heaven; it sees beyond 
 heaven. The plummet of its thought sounds all 
 bottoms. It penetrates the soul of the atom, weaves 
 itself into the mystery of the sea, and, vicariously, 
 lives the life of seer and murderer. What dogmas 
 shall genius hold when all dogmas come to it for 
 interpretation? What has genius to do with belief, 
 when it is conscious of miracle and mystery only? 
 Has God a religion? Does He believe in Himself? 
 God falls from grace at each minute. He repented 
 of Adam and lost faith in Himself on the cross — 
 “ My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken 
 Me? ” The religion of genius, like that of God, is 
 to participate in whatever is, to partake of existence, 
 to vitalize life. Genius can not sin; it can do no 
 wrong. The passion for experience knows no 
 morality. It absorbs and it emits. Goethe said, “ I 
 understand the murderer, for I am he.” The mind 
 of the genius is a matrix. Verlaine and Christ, 
 Hugo and Napoleon, are equals in the realm of the 
 imagination. 
 
 The great tragedy of genius is its essential god- 
 likeness. It has the instinct for omnipotence, 
 
 91 
 
ominipresence and omniscience. It has the vision 
 of God, but not the attributes. It absorbs the 
 Infinite, but it can only create the finite. It is 
 homunculus with the will to be Jupiter. Shake- 
 speare, Byron, Christ, Wagner, Nietzsche, Flau- 
 bert, Rodin, Michelangelo, had the passion for 
 Creation. They remained artificers in words, 
 sounds, marble, paint. Sublime cobblers ! Samsons of 
 comprehension, they strained at the pillars that 
 sustain the Temple of Life — and the temple budged 
 not. Brazen, inexorable granite! Unbreakable fet- 
 ters of our eternal finitude ! 
 
 In the cosmic carnival of chance, the brain of 
 genius, by its art, fabricates order and harmony. 
 Beethoven and Shelley and Spencer unified their 
 dreams. But genius can never fabricate the supreme 
 thing, the one thing needful to be God. It can not 
 create diversity without unity, it can not create 
 a chaos, it can not strike from the keys of matter 
 and motion that stupendous note of discord pro- 
 longed throughout an eternity that we call life. 
 
 CK in his impotency, Victor Hugo, in a divine 
 
 rage, bespattered his God. The poem is called, 
 “ Dieu Eclabousse par Zoile.” He accuses Omni- 
 potence of monotony. The words are put into the 
 
 92 
 
mouth of Zoilus, but the thought — and the words 
 — is the thought of Hugo. 
 
 Charlatan! Have done with this game of blind 
 man’s buff. We are sick of the eternal humbug 
 called life. For once and all let us tell the Almighty 
 some facts about Himself. His work has neither 
 beginning, end nor middle. His imagination is 
 exhausted. He repeats Himself eternally. He wrote 
 Himself out after the first seven days. Winter and 
 Summer; night and day; birth and death; storm 
 and sunshine. Eternal renewal! the poet chants. 
 Eternal repetition! Eternal boredom! says the 
 thinker. Each thing is made in the pattern of 
 some other thing. The moon looks like an orange. 
 The tree looks like a hedgehog. The river looks like 
 a serpent. No invention anywhere. Sterility and 
 stagnation everywhere. Motion itself is an illusion. 
 Human beings invent strange perversions of natural 
 instincts to bless themselves with new sensations. 
 They die of ennui. The eternal blue of heaven is 
 setting us crazy. We know hope to be a liar, and 
 despair is as stupid as death. Still, we must do one 
 or the other. In history God creates nothing new. 
 From Herodotus to Carlyle it is the same scoundrel 
 that holds the center of the stage and the same 
 humanity that is mulct, revolts and is mulct again. 
 
 93 
 
He does over a Tiberius, replasters a Nero, regalva- 
 nizes a Robespierre. Since Cain not a new crime 
 has been invented. His butchery at Kishineff is an 
 old story in the Old Testament. The disaster at 
 Messina was of no more importance than that of 
 Pompeii. The same clay, the same men. The same 
 natural causes, the same tiresome consequences. 
 
 The normal look on the face of every being over 
 twenty-five is one of fatigue. All other looks are 
 counterfeit. After twenty-five nothing new can 
 happen; before that our acts repeat our ancestral 
 acts; after that we repeat ourselves. We are highly 
 organized parrots and apes. We have the capacity 
 to enjoy newer sensations, newer worlds, newer 
 combinations on the old barroom checkerboard 
 where we are the checkers. The human being is 
 passionately in love with the unknown; but we 
 have exhausted life. We are still young; life is 
 stale, worn out, as commonplace as light, as weari- 
 some as love. God is defunct. 
 
 HERE is, indeed, only one puzzle: Why is any- 
 
 thing? And if God exists, of what use is He? 
 Why does He exist? There are only three dimen- 
 sions for us. Two and two — will they forever make 
 that stale four? God, if Thou wouldst divert us, 
 
 94 
 
invent ten more dimensions for us. Point us the 
 way to some marvelous planet hidden beyond our 
 telescopes in your wrinkled ether, that we may 
 emigrate there bag and baggage and refresh our 
 bored brains and hearts. Or, fabricate for us the 
 unimaginable, the unguessable, the new macrocosm 
 and the microcosm. Even we have invented 
 marvelous myth and fairy stories. Canst not Thou 
 do as much in Thy omnipotence? 
 
 If not, raffle off Thy stale wonders to the monkeys, 
 O God! We have outgrown Thy nursery wonders. 
 Have done! Have done! 
 
 Pose ! Pose ! Pose ! That is the cry that has eternally 
 assailed the savage incursions of genius into the 
 empire of the forbidden and its assaults upon the 
 ramparts of the conventional God. Swine, cows, 
 hens and goslings never pose. But they believe that 
 the eagle perched upon its rock for a flight into the 
 azure and the lion erect, expectant, do. The critical 
 Poloniuses dispose of the satanism of Baudelaire, 
 the trumpetings of Hugo, the Don Juanism of 
 Byron, the protean attitudes of Heine, the kaleido- 
 scopic multi-incarnations of Wilde, with the word 
 “ pose.” It is the judgment writ in Lilliput. 
 Genius without pose is not genius. All grandeur 
 becomes self-conscious. All superior beings seem 
 
 95 
 
to be acting a part. What is called pose in genius 
 is the manifestation of multiple and contradictory 
 personalities. The simple, logical, cut and dried 
 minds whose thoughts, emotions and life-develop- 
 ment have been surveyed by their ancestors, and 
 of whom they are merely a sparkless increment and 
 not a vital development, are puzzled before the 
 myriad masks that genius wears; they have the 
 look on the face of a cow before the changing 
 colors of the dawn. 
 
 Genius is both Cain and Abel, Lucifer and God, 
 Hamlet and Falstaff, Munchausen and Euclid. 
 Hugo had multitudes locked up in him. As Leonardo 
 da Vinci struck every mental attitude, so Hugo 
 struck every imaginative attitude. He was the 
 sincerest man of his age. Did Francois Villon pose 
 when he turned housebreaker? I believe he did. It 
 was a splendid piece of irony. Sometimes the poses 
 of genius are a sacred sport. To amaze the bour- 
 geois, to flabbergast the galvanized masterpieces 
 of routine, to turn somersaults over the social Ark 
 of the Covenant, to do the supremely absurd and 
 indecorous thing before the eyes of owl-like Com- 
 monsense: this is the sinister irony with which 
 genius confronts stupidity. Jupiter turned himself 
 into a cow to astound the groundlings. 
 
 96 
 
G ENIUS is said to be morbidly egoistic. It 
 assumes, in fact, a still higher form of 
 psychological development than egotism. It is im- 
 personal. It not only believes in itself utterly, but 
 it subdivides itself ad infinitum, that it may 
 worship itself under a myriad forms and revel in 
 its own luminous magnificences. It worships itself 
 in the third person plural. The brain of a Hugo, 
 a Goethe, a Whitman has a gigantic mirror at the 
 top of it. Against it there are flashed all the attitudes 
 of its diurnal physical, moral and cerebral exist- 
 ences. Before that mirror congregate for rehearsal 
 the embryos of the things they dared not do and 
 the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the things 
 they have dared to do. Before that passionless, 
 incorporate reflector the countless selves of a 
 genius are always on parade. It is the marvelous 
 phenomenon of self-consciousness, at the zenith 
 of its earthly evolution. It is the Self reviewing its 
 own protean poses. It is the consciousness of a 
 mighty Sun that holds within its monstrous grip 
 a countless number of satellites. 
 
 Against Hugo as against Shelley they have hurled 
 “Blasphemer!” As though the mind could blas- 
 pheme! As though a thought could be impious! 
 As though the brain could ever do wrong! The 
 
 97 
 
human mind invented God; the human mind is 
 privileged to kill Him whenever it pleases. There is 
 only one blasphemy of which the human mind is 
 capable — that is, to exclude from it any thought 
 that knocks for entry. Genius is never so sublime 
 as when hurling its anathemas against the walls 
 of heaven. Lucifer marshaling his hosts against 
 the Lord, Prometheus launching his thunderbolts 
 from the Caucasus against Jupiter, Cain with 
 imprecatory fist pointed at the stars, Lucretius 
 canceling God in the soulless atom, Flaubert ram- 
 ming the snouts of all the credulous into the 
 trough with Saint Anthony’s pig, Nietzsche trying 
 to drag Dionysius on to the throne of God until 
 the blood-vessels in his brain burst, Baudelaire 
 placarding the courtyard of Heaven with litanies 
 in praise of Satan, Victor Hugo, posing as Zoilus, 
 bespattering his God ! How does this compare with 
 the sanctimonious buttoned-up air of a Peck- 
 sniffian race? 
 
 Since commandments are always to be made, I 
 venture this one: Thou shalt not blaspheme against 
 genius. Only genius may say with authority, “ Noli 
 me tangere!” All geniuses are incarnate gods. 
 They may bespatter all things; but thou shalt not 
 bespatter them ! 
 
 98 
 
4% ‘ •».* ' ^ ' •s* * «s> * a 4V 4V •$& 
 
 w.w.w.^.w.w.w. w. w.w 
 
 ANDREW LANG 
 
 THE HUMANIST 
 
 NDREW LANG is dead; but his 
 spirit abides, and that gaiety, in 
 which there was no bitterness, is 
 a priceless legacy to us. Few men 
 think sharply, crystallinely. This 
 man did. His verse always fetches 
 up. He tells us something because it is too good to 
 keep 
 
 The name of Andrew Lang adds another to the 
 long list of Scotchmen who have dowered the world 
 with ideas. Lang was bom at Selkirk, in Eighteen 
 Hundred Forty-four, and was therefore sixty- 
 eight when he died — an age at which most men 
 are just beginning to rest on their oars and take 
 things easy after “ life’s fitful fever.” 
 
 Old Ursus Major, it will be remembered, nursed a 
 time-honored and utterly inexplicable grudge 
 against the Scotch. 
 
 Yet, had it not been for one Scotchman, James 
 
 99 
 
Boswell, it is fairly certain that the name and fame 
 of Doctor Johnson would have suffered partial, if 
 not total, eclipse. For, as Macaulay aptly observed, 
 most authors are known and read because of what 
 they have written, whereas Johnson’s personality 
 is familiar to us even when, as is the case, his 
 sonorous productions have been dumped into the 
 capacious ragbag of old Father Kronos, and lost in 
 the shuffle. 
 
 Boswell’s famous Life is a brilliant portraiture of 
 Johnson that can never fade. 
 
 As a boy, Andrew Lang attended school at the 
 Edinburgh Academy. 
 
 Later he studied at Saint Andrew’s University, 
 and Balliol College, Oxford. 
 
 He was a Classical scholar of profound erudition, 
 and the wealth of literary and historical allusions 
 in his writings reminds us of nothing so much as 
 a page from Macaulay, who wrote things which, 
 as he lightly averred, “ every schoolboy ” would 
 recognize at once. 
 
 And probably not since Macaulay have we had 
 the unusual example of a man whose literary 
 interests were so unlimited and well-inclusive. 
 Lang could not rest content with one widening 
 vista, one horizon, one narrow sphere of activity; 
 100 
 
his vision must be bounded only by the univer- 
 sal horizon — he must touch life at all points and 
 understand all its aspects. 
 
 Andrew Lang had drunk deep from the Pierian 
 spring. His was true culture , if there is such a 
 thing, and we believe there is. 
 
 By some he has been accused of arrant dilettan- 
 teism, a charge implying what Lamb was pleased 
 to call “ superficial omniscience.” 
 
 To others Lang represented a “ syndicate,” and 
 the implication is a genuine compliment to the 
 man’s versatility. 
 
 Andrew Lang was thoroughly at home in a wide 
 multiplicity of literary fields. 
 
 As an all-around litterateur he had, perhaps, no 
 peer among modem writers. 
 
 He was a poet of marked ability, a first-class critic 
 and book-reviewer, a graceful essayist, a faithful 
 and charming translator, and an enthusiastic 
 Classicist. 
 
 Not essentially and primarily a stylist, in the sense 
 in which Walter Pater and Edgar Saltus, for in- 
 stance, are stylists, he yet possessed an easy, 
 fluent style which radiates through all his works 
 and renders them eminently readable and enter- 
 taining. He commanded the Midas literary touch, 
 
 101 
 
and transmuted into purest gold whatever he 
 committed to paper. 
 
 Despite the fact that he was a prodigally prolific 
 penman, his works were endued with unfailing 
 freshness and novelty of treatment, and were never 
 tinctured with the odor of midnight oil. 
 
 I once attended a banquet in London where 
 Andrew Lang had been announced as the principal 
 speaker. The chairman had introduced him. He 
 arose. But before he could loosen up his oratorical 
 batteries, the band started to play Auld Lang Syne. 
 It was a “ bromide,” but Lang laughed with the 
 rest of us, as if it were all new. 
 
 F OR years Lang contributed to the London 
 Daily News signed reviews and editorials, 
 quite equal in their way to the essays with which 
 Addison and Steele popularized The Spectator in 
 Queen Anne’s time. 
 
 As a translator, Lang did notable work. His prose 
 version of the Iliad, done in collaboration with 
 Walter Leaf and E. Myers, and of the Odyssey, 
 with Professor Butcher, are among the very finest 
 translations with which Homer has been honored; 
 and it was Matthew Arnold who declared that in 
 the last analysis Homer was really untranslatable. 
 102 
 
Lang also translated the Idyllic Poets — Theoc- 
 ritus, Bion and Moschus — preserving the spirit 
 of the originals most admirably. Likewise, his 
 rendering of the old folk yam, Aucassin and Nico- 
 lette, is a classic. 
 
 His Letters to Dead Authors remind one somewhat 
 of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversa- 
 tions, although they are free from the gross anach- 
 ronisms that of necessity characterized the Imagi- 
 nary Conversations. 
 
 Andrew Lang was always interested in anthro- 
 pology and folk lore. He compiled a series of fairy 
 story books for children, named after the primary 
 colors; as, the Blue Fairy Tale Book, the Red 
 Fairy Tale Book, the Green Fairy Book, Olive 
 Fairy Book, the Red Book of Animals, and so on. 
 C[ In this work of compilation and editing he was 
 ably assisted by his wife. It really takes two to do 
 anything. Lang’s work in this fascinating field, 
 however, was not all in the nature of research. He 
 wrote first-rate fairy stories himself, such as Prince 
 Prigio, Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia, and Gold of 
 Fairnilee so so 
 
 Andrew Lang was an ardent admirer of Joan of 
 Arc, and he defended her reputation with might 
 and main in his controversy with Anatole France. 
 
 103 
 
M ERRY Andrew was an able controversialist. 
 
 He loved a goodly war of words as well as 
 a Bull Moose — almost. 
 
 On any righteous occasion his hat was in the ring, 
 but it was n’t a sombrero — and it never needed 
 reblocking at the conclusion of a bout of verbal 
 fisticuffs so* 
 
 Doctor Johnson could never brook rhetorical 
 opposition. His friend Goldsmith used to say that 
 Johnson was sure to get the better of an argument 
 even if he had to resort to a knotted bludgeon to 
 do it so* so* 
 
 Lang was scarcely that kind of a controversialist. 
 His particular delight lay in vanquishing an adver- 
 sary with the adversary’s own favorite weapons — 
 roasting him on his own gridiron, so to speak. 
 Throughout his life Lang retained the Scotch- 
 man’s fondness for outdoor life and the healthful 
 habit of recreation. He was devoted to cricket, 
 golf and fishing. 
 
 His classic introduction to The Compleat Angler 
 would have delighted the heart of good old Izaac 
 himself sc sc 
 
 “ For my part,” he writes, “ had I a river, I would 
 gladly let all honest anglers that use the fly cast 
 in it.” so* sc 
 
 104 
 
Some idea of the extent and variety of Lang’s 
 published works can be had by running through 
 the following list of titles, which, by the way, 
 does not begin to exhaust the number of books 
 bearing the impress of his genius: Ballads and 
 Verses Vain; Rhymes a la Mode; Books and Book- 
 men; Letters to Dead Authors; The Politics of 
 Aristotle; Myth, Ritual and Religion; Letters on 
 Literature; Lost Leaders; Life, Letters and Diaries 
 of Sir Stafford Northcote; Angling Sketches; 
 Essays in Little; Homer and the Epic; Cock Lane 
 and Common Sense; The World's Desire; With 
 H. Rider Haggard; The Companions of Pickle; 
 The Homeric Hymns; A History of Scotland from 
 the Roman Occupation; Magic and Religion; 
 Alfred Tennyson; The Mystery of Mary Stuart; 
 The Valet's Tragedy; John Knox and the Refor- 
 mation; Homer and His Age; The Book of Dreams 
 and Ghosts; Ballads and Lyrics of Old France; A 
 Defense of Sir Walter Scott; The Border Min- 
 strelsy; and many others, an enumeration of which 
 would, in the language of an old chronicle, be “too 
 tedious to mention.” 
 
 105 
 
WV w w.w w w.w.w. w w 
 
 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU 
 
 THE PSYCHIC SEISMOGRAPH 
 
 WO hundred years ago a man was 
 born who was the father of the 
 Nineteenth Century, the Grand- 
 father of the Twentieth Century 
 and the godfather of all revolutions. 
 C He was Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
 In many respects Rousseau was the most extra- 
 ordinary man that ever lived — a man of whom 
 Disraeli said, “ If history had no Rousseau we 
 should have to invent one.” 
 
 Rousseau is one of the few men whom nobody 
 cares to believe in, but whom everybody must 
 believe in. He is one of the few men whose writings, 
 with the exception of the Confessions, are obsolete, 
 but to whose pen nearly every philosopher and 
 thinker pays tribute. 
 
 This is because Jean Jacques Rousseau, like 
 Voltaire, Paine, Ingersoll, John Brown and Lincoln, 
 was not a man but an incarnation, a fatal event 
 106 
 
in the evolution of the race, a Voice that had to be 
 promulged s— 
 
 Men who are wrong are just as necessary to the 
 world as those who are right. What a man thinks 
 does not count, but the time, place and manner 
 of his thinking do. 
 
 ' HREE-FOURTHS of Rousseau’s opinions and 
 doctrines are rubbish in the right place. He 
 was generally wrong, but he smashed what needed 
 smashing. He unriveted chains, he unlocked bolts, 
 he dissolved a whole aristocracy, he blew in the 
 ramparts of the Bastile, and he wrote the history 
 of his life, which founded a literature entirely new 
 in the world. 
 
 And he did all this as every great man does what he 
 is ordered to do — grabbed the things nearest to 
 him and used them. 
 
 Sentimentalist, educationist, communist, lady- 
 killer, baby-killer, gentleman, woman suffragist, 
 mollycoddle, dreamer, a cash-down spender and 
 borrower, democrat, aristocrat, and sociological 
 faker par excellence, this extraordinary man stands 
 in history with Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto 
 Cellini. He, like they, epitomized the aspirations 
 and the humbugs of the race. 
 
 107 
 
But his work, his achievement in thought and in 
 the movement for human liberty which must 
 immortalize him forever, was his denial of the 
 divine rights of kings. He completed in France what 
 Cromwell began in England. The divine rights of 
 kings! It was Rousseau who in his Social Contract 
 compounded the political “ 606 ” that forever 
 drove that worm-eaten belief from the human 
 mind so so 
 
 Society is a contract, said Rousseau, a sacred 
 contract entered into by every peasant at his birth 
 with the ruling power, and woe betide the ruler 
 that breaks the contract. Rousseau, of course, was 
 wrong, but he was right then and the doctrine is 
 still legitimate to use today when the Kaiser starts 
 to pull the old bunk, and tie the bull in the parlor. 
 C Society progresses by handing out buncombe 
 for buncombe. It is bunk off the hick for bunk out 
 of the Bible. Rousseau handed out to the rulers of 
 his day bunk off the hick — and sure enough, Louis 
 the Sixteenth had to peel his collar. 
 
 In society there is no contract. As in Nature, the 
 fittest survive and the weakest go to the wall. And 
 that is right and good. But Rousseau, of course, had 
 never heard of Darwin — and Darwin said he did n’t 
 care a tinker’s tink for Rousseau so Some day 
 108 
 
somebody is going to say the same thing of 
 Darwin, times change. 
 
 R OUSSEAU’S cardinal contention was that man 
 , in a state of nature is a benevolent animal. 
 Today we know that Rousseau was wrong. In 
 primitive societies the strong man took by natural 
 right the leadership of the tribe. The craftiest, the 
 most intelligent, man in the tribe became a priest, 
 a medicine-man, a lawyer. No man is any better 
 than it is necessary to be. As society evolved, and 
 incalculable number of changes and readjustments 
 took place, but the law of deference to strength 
 and brains never was obscured. 
 
 Rousseau’s benevolent savage is a myth. His 
 psychology was bad. It is a fundamental instinct 
 of the individual to award to the superior man — 
 morally, mentally or physically — the highest prizes 
 of life 
 
 Rousseau’s democracy came out of his fundamental 
 principle that all men are originally good and equal. 
 But today we know that democracy is only a word. 
 It has never been practised or practicable. The 
 people rule — through rulers. And the man who 
 has the most to say about the rule of the people is 
 a tyrant with false whiskers. 
 
 109 
 
In America, instead of Grand Rulers, we have 
 Bosses. An aristocracy of mind, an aristocracy of 
 character, an aristocracy of craft and graft — we 
 will never get beyond the aristocracy principle. 
 Socialism itself would become an aristocracy of 
 office holders and the boss would be supreme. 
 Rousseau was thus a sentimental democrat. He 
 was all feeling. He thought with his nerves. He 
 was a superb creator, but he could not think. A 
 sublime egomaniac, he was the incarnation of the 
 will-to-produce through the emotions. The will- 
 to-produce, to create, has never been affirmed with 
 greater tenacity and with so much energy as by 
 Rousseau. He was always in a condition of feverish 
 exaltation 
 
 He was an elementary force, like Hugo, Wagner 
 and Whitman, and dazzles the imagination like 
 a volcano in eruption or like a geyser lashing 
 Antaeus. Victor Hugo said Rousseau was a new 
 kind of genius, for he created a new way of feeling, 
 d, To create naturally, to create spontaneously 
 in the empyrean of thought and action, to create 
 new sensations, to create in his own interior of 
 life by incessant flagellations a la Saint Augustine 
 and Tolstoy — that was the secret of Rousseau, of 
 why he carried in him the germs of a thousand 
 110 
 
revolts, a thousand poems, a thousand fantasies 
 and a thousand bitter memories. 
 
 Creation! Creation! It is that passion that makes 
 man a god. The world is forever in gestation, and 
 so is the brain. The brain is a matrix. In Rousseau 
 not to create was to die. There was nothing serene 
 or coldly intellectual about him. Emotions and 
 images, feelings that moved like lightning, a frantic 
 mental rhyme, a passion that hurried like mad- 
 dened waters — all this produced great crises in 
 his life when he appeared insane — was insane no 
 doubt so so 
 
 G ENIUS scorns its own safety. Parturition is 
 the neighbor of death. Those who are normal, 
 sane and healthy see clearly. Rousseau was insane, 
 and so have been the great minds of all time, from 
 Buddha to Nietzsche. Insanity in genius is a super- 
 abundance of health; while the perfectly sane man 
 is invariably stupid, and always uninteresting. 
 Rousseau’s life itself was a romance written by a 
 mad demon. Bom with an infirmity, strangely 
 sensitive and clairvoyant even as a baby, he was 
 at seven years abandoned by his father who had 
 allowed him to stuff his head with romances. Put 
 into a boarding-school of a Protestant pastor in 
 
 ill 
 
Geneva; taught Latin, history, geography; bat- 
 tened, crammed and rammed with learning, at 
 nine he began the study of Euclid. 
 
 At eleven years he was an engraver. The man to 
 whom he was apprenticed beat him. Here, according 
 to himself, he learned to steal, to lie and to give 
 lectures. At twelve he poses as a stoic between 
 erotic dreams. 
 
 At sixteen years he fled from Geneva and became 
 a tramp. In Savoy he encountered Madame de 
 Warens. She sent him into an asylum in Turin, 
 where he goes over to Catholicism. And so it runs 
 to the end of his life. 
 
 He lives whole lives in a single day. No feeling, no 
 crime, no sensation is foreign to him. Life for 
 Rousseau was an experiment. Living was an expe- 
 rience 
 
 All experience after it has filtered through and 
 refined itself in the mind of the first order is good. 
 In the perspectives of memory the solid angularity 
 of all our pains and “ sins ” is melted in a shining 
 ether. The ego puts an aureole on everything. Even 
 penance and remorse are luxurious; they are 
 methods of glorifying our transgressions. In the 
 great menstruum of the emancipated mind, in 
 spite of that terrible bleat from his heart, every 
 112 
 
thing is fashioned into gold. The real philosopher’s 
 stone is the brain. 
 
 Rousseau was unscrupulous. So was Caesar, Bacon, 
 Bismarck and Webster. A man who makes a 
 promise has blasphemed. He sneers at Fate and 
 Destiny. Every promise is kept for an ulterior 
 purpose, just as every debt is paid in order to 
 contract another. Rousseau was elemental. He 
 did what was expedient. Like Bismarck, Rousseau 
 might have said, “ If I lied I meant it.” In Rous- 
 seau’s Confessions there are a thousand and one 
 lies. It is the liar’s Arabian Nights — not lies in the 
 usual sense of the word, but feats of the imagi- 
 nation, a record of the things Rousseau was going 
 to do, thought he did, or ought to have done. 
 
 And these things are just as important as the things 
 he did. The practical has no greater importance 
 than the imaginary, and what I intend doing is 
 more important than what I have done. 
 Unaccomplished purpose is a promise of immor- 
 tality 
 
 Rousseau with Voltaire was the reservoir and the 
 alembic of all the past world. To those two minds 
 the past massed itself for judgment — and got it. 
 His brain was, in fact, a universal brain. 
 
 The Baltimore and Chicago Conventions talked 
 
 113 
 
Rousseau, whether they knew it or not. Rousseau 
 was latent in Cromwell. He was there as instinct, 
 as tendency. In the dullest brain this Call is buried 
 but it lies so deep under strata of custom and con- 
 vention that its stirrings are never felt. 
 
 Rousseau was a lock-picker of inner doors. He was 
 a psychic seismograph. He registered in his sensi- 
 bility the earthquakes in the souls of muted 
 millions 
 
 In France today the school -children chat about 
 “ Jean Jacques.” Two hundred years from now 
 he will still be the mighty “ Jean Jacques.” 
 
 France never forgets her great. And the world can 
 never forget France. With all her vagaries, she is 
 the Torch of the World. Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, 
 Millet, Rodin — we can do without the rest ! 
 
 114 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 MYSTIC, PESSIMIST, POET 
 
 AINE tells us that all genius can be 
 explained by environment. As a 
 certain soil only will produce lemon- 
 trees, so a certain social and racial 
 soil only will produce a certain type 
 of poet, musician or painter. C[ But 
 Poe upset this interesting theory. His work is 
 exotic in America. He came from Mars, where 
 people do not have to work, economize and keep 
 sober $+■ 
 
 Terror and beauty were the twin goddesses that 
 baptized the soul of this strange genius, Poe. His 
 life was an excursion into the weird. And the weird 
 is the beautiful, plus the strange. He dwelt on the 
 borderland that divides sanity from insanity. He 
 caught gleams of a remoter, super-lunar world that 
 blasted him when he looked or listened. He fumbled 
 with the keys to strange doors; he haunted the 
 corridors of white temples set in dreams; he held 
 
 115 
 
conference with strange creatures of air and light 
 that no one else could see; he saw behind the veils 
 of matter into the ghost-world. 
 
 Poe is unanalyzable. He was the victim of an 
 obscure mood that lies beyond the experience of 
 ordinary men. In reading his tales or poems we 
 are shot into a terra incognita. We feel an Atmos- 
 phere, but we see nothing plainly. We verge on the 
 lunacy that legends say lurks in mountain moon- 
 shine. We have the sense of being haunted. We feel 
 lost in a giant Nightmare that fascinates like the 
 beautiful, sinister eye of a snake. We lay down The 
 Fall of the House of Usher, Elegia, or The Raven 
 to touch the furniture or listen to the ticking of 
 the clock and thank God that we are still real and 
 sane «•» 
 
 The victim of an obscure mood, his soul was 
 stroked by subtle fingers on ghostly bodies. His 
 heart pumped into his brain the most pathetic 
 figures that ever haunted the cells of a brain — 
 those brain-cells that entombed a million prenatal 
 despairs that were the catacombs of his Lenores 
 and Helens. 
 
 What were those “ sheeted memories of the past ” 
 that squeaked and gibbered at his heels all his 
 life? His face as depicted by Valloton is the 
 116 
 
ghastly face of a man who has seen the forbid- 
 den. Whence these gnawed and upturned dead 
 faces that drifted past on shoreless seas of sinister 
 green? And those cunning, black eyes that flashed 
 on him from their sunken sockets? Hallucinated! 
 Hallucinated! we say — but all great art is the 
 product of hallucination, of a vivid, violent, inner 
 vision that passes before the mind’s eye like a bolt 
 of lightning over the mountain-tops. 
 
 Like Hecla’s torch that flames in an imperial 
 solitude did this strange visitor to earth, Edgar 
 Poe, live and die among men. 
 
 One night, many years age, in Philadelphia, the 
 celebrated painter, John Sartain, was sitting in 
 his library, when Poe, wild, disheveled, bruised, 
 ran into his room and declared he had seen on the 
 walls of the prison, where he had spent the previous 
 night, a host of angels clad in moonlight, that blew 
 from wreathed trumpets wild blasts toward the 
 heavens. Has not the poet, too, his Via Dolorosa? 
 c; His poems take us to one region only — “ bottom- 
 less vales ” and “ boundless floods ” and “ chasms 
 and caves and titan woods.” They are excursions 
 in No-Man’s Land. Had he discovered the El 
 Dorado of the spirit? Had he forced the Northwest 
 Passage from matter to the supermaterial? 
 
 117 
 
We wonder in what ethereal sphere his soul had 
 been molded, and why it got itself flesh and came 
 here to this prison-house to chant and get buried 
 after forty-four pitiless years of life. The glamour 
 of another world hung over his soul. He seemed 
 out of place in the flesh. A strange brotherhood 
 are these hallucinated beings. They come into life 
 laden with inextinguishable griefs, and stand at 
 but one remove from death. They are gray of 
 heart and ashen-hued of brain; they are tethered 
 to the unseen, and you shall sooner dissever the 
 sun from its fires than see them walk the ways 
 of men £•» 
 
 P OE’S soul was cradled in a filmy ecstasy. All 
 reality was a blasphemy. He preferred half- 
 lights, doors ajar, curtains that swung in what he 
 believed to be a mystic unison with the breeze 
 flames that flickered in ebon censers, waters dyed 
 in shadows. The mystery of man ! And the mystery 
 of the world ! They are hieroglyphs, and no one will 
 ever decipher them, d, The dark tarn of Auber, in 
 the Misty Mid-Region of Wier, was to Poe a real 
 place. Stagnant pools and fetid heaths were the 
 places where his spirit delighted to linger He 
 could see in darkness better than in light. 
 
 118 
 
His poem, Silence , tells of a region where he kept 
 tryst with “ corporate silence.” Corporate silence! 
 What a thought! Is not the universe itself silence 
 that has found a body? And is not silence the 
 ghost of noise? Somber, sinister, brooding silence! 
 Silence that can never be silent, murmuring its 
 drowsy secrets in the ear, forging the minutes into 
 the eternal, forever-recurring hours, weaving its 
 arras of dreams! 
 
 Poe trod strange Jungfraus of silence. There are 
 deep lethean lapses, lustral silences in which the 
 soul seems to rest from its Sisyphean labors. 
 Ulalume is his most remarkable and characteristic 
 poem. It haunts like an unremembered thought. 
 Here at last are the Blessed Isles, here the lotos- 
 land of the distraught — star-dials and the alley 
 titanic, and the realms of the boreal pole. Ulalume 
 is the last word in poetic mysticism. It is the soul 
 of Poe cadenced. 
 
 The bitter pessimism of the man! To him the 
 universe was an epic scrawled by a bug. The Con- 
 queror Worm is a vision of the world and all the 
 nothingness of it. There is the same philosophy at 
 the bottom of it that penetrates El Magico Pro- 
 digioso of Calderon. It is life viewed from the 
 trenches of despair. Men build their houses of 
 
 119 
 
dreams, and the worm gnaws at the foundation. 
 As life grows longer it grows shorter. We travel 
 from mother to mother-earth; and the flesh that 
 we love so well is spun into dust. Man has his 
 banquet, and is banqueted upon in turn. C Mystic, 
 pessimist, poet, mathematician, a man drunk with 
 beauty and love, a bringer of strange tidings — 
 Edgar Allan Poe signals and beckons from his tomb. 
 
 120 
 
PLUTARCH 
 
 A COMMONSENSE WRITER 
 
 F all the writers who lived in Rome 
 in that wonderful time which we 
 call the Age of Augustus, none 
 now is so widely read as Plutarch. 
 Plutarch was a farmer, a lecturer, 
 and a Priest of Apollo. On investi- 
 gation, I find that the office of Priest of Apollo 
 corresponded about with that of an American 
 Justice of the Peace. 
 
 Between pasture and palaver, Plutarch became rich 
 and owned an estate on the Isle of Malta. And 
 there he lived when Paul was shipwrecked on his 
 way to Rome. 
 
 Plutarch never mentions Paul, and Paul never 
 quotes Plutarch. What a pity they did not meet! 
 C. Plutarch wrote the lives of twenty-three Romans 
 and compared each with some noted Greek, usually 
 to the slight advantage of the Greek; for although 
 Plutarch lived under the rule of Rome, he was bom 
 
 121 
 
in a province of Greece, and his heart was true to 
 his own 
 
 It is quite probable that no sure-enough literary 
 man — who knew he was one, and acknowledged 
 it — would mention all of the many trifles which 
 Plutarch brings to bear, shedding light on the 
 subject «•» 
 
 Whether Plutarch gathered some of these airy, 
 fairy, pleasing tales of persiflage from his imagi- 
 nation or from the populace, is a question that is not 
 worth while discussing. Practically all we know 
 of the great men of Greece and Rome is what 
 Plutarch tells us. 
 
 It is Plutarch’s men who live and tread the Board- 
 walk with us. The rest are dead ones, all. 
 
 The only men who endure are those whose lives 
 are well launched on the inky wave. Heave ho! 
 Such trifles as Caesar’s remark that he was deaf in 
 one ear; that Pericles had a head like an onion; 
 that Cleopatra employed a diver to attach a salt 
 codfish to the hook and line of Mark Antony ; that 
 Socrates made pastoral calls on Aspasia; that 
 Aspasia was very well acquainted with Cyrus, 
 King of Persia, and from him gained her knowledge 
 of statecraft — these are the things that endear 
 Plutarch to us. 
 
 122 
 
The things that should n’t be told are the ones we 
 want to hear. And these Plutarch discreetly gives us. 
 n Shakespeare evidently knew Plutarch by heart 
 and it was the only book he knew. He was inspired 
 more by Plutarch than by any other man who put 
 pen to paper. It was the one book in which he 
 dived and swam, in the days of his budding and 
 impressionable youth; and most of his plots are 
 those of Plutarch. 
 
 Lives of great men all remind us — of a great many 
 things that we would do if we were able. 
 Biography broadens the vision and allows us to 
 live a thousand lives in one ; for when we read the 
 life of a great man we unconsciously put ourselves 
 in his place, and we ourselves live his life over again. 
 CL We get the profit without the risk, the experi- 
 ence without the danger. It is Plutarch himself 
 who says that tragedy is always pleasing to the on- 
 looker, for the reason that he is inwardly congrat- 
 ulating himself that he is out of reach of danger. 
 
 M ARK Twain said there are only six original 
 stories, and four of these were unfit for 
 ladies’ ears, and that all six of these stories trace 
 back to Rameses the Second, who had the felicity 
 to live ninety-six years. 
 
 123 
 
This remark of Mark Twain traces a direct pedi- 
 gree to Plutarch, who said the Egyptians lived 
 life in its every phase; and anything that could 
 happen to any man or woman happened in Egypt, 
 therefore all stories of misunderstandings, tragedies, 
 comedies and such can be traced to Egypt. 
 
 Herbert Spencer was once beaten at billiards by a 
 smart young man. Spencer proved his humanity 
 by making a testy remark to this effect: “ Young 
 man, to play billiards well is an accomplishment, 
 but to play billiards too well is proof of a misspent 
 youth.” s* so* 
 
 In Plutarch’s life of Pericles he has King Philip 
 say to Alexander, “ Are you not ashamed to sing 
 so well? ” 
 
 And Antisthenes, when he was told that Ismenias 
 played excellently upon the flute, answered, “ Well, 
 he is good for nothing else ; otherwise he would not 
 have played so well.” 
 
 The simple, plain commonsense of Plutarch is 
 revealed in almost every page in such phrases as 
 this: “ Superstition causes nervous fear and much 
 trembling of the limbs, and mental agitation. From 
 signs and wonders seen in the skies, and the 
 thunders and lightnings and eclipses and certain 
 movements of the heavenly bodies, fear follows, 
 124 
 
but when understood these are found to be the 
 harmonious workings of Nature. Therefore, the 
 cure for fear and superstition is a love of all natural 
 objects.” 
 
 Could we now express the matter better? 
 
 Plutarch’s writings have passed into the current 
 coin of language. His works are literary legal 
 tender, wherever thinkers meet. Whoever writes, 
 and writes well, is debtor to Plutarch for much 
 wit, wisdom and gentle philosophy. 
 
 Academic writing dies and is forgotten. Information 
 about men, women and events, and that which 
 relates to practical life, lives on and on. 
 Nine-tenths of all personal stories of the great 
 Greeks and Romans trace to Plutarch. For instance 
 when the mother of Themistocles was taunted with 
 being an alien, she replied, “ True, I am an alien, 
 but my son is Themistocles.” 
 
 When Themistocles was asked what he could do, 
 he answered, “ I can take an insignificant village 
 and make of it a great city.” 
 
 This sounds like the remark of Augustus, “ I found 
 your city mud, and I left it marble.” 
 
 The words of a man do not necessarily live; but 
 the words put into his mouth by a ready writer 
 often do «•» 
 
 125 
 
T HE breezy, epigrammatic, friendly style of 
 Plutarch appeals to people of every grade of 
 intellect. <[ Note the following quotations from 
 Plutarch, and see how this man has ingrained his 
 words into all literature: 
 
 It was the saying of Bion that, though the boys 
 throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not 
 die in sport, but in earnest. 
 
 For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of 
 wise men, is at least human. 
 
 Philip being arbiter betwixt two wicked persons, 
 he commanded one to fly out of Macedonia and 
 the other to chase him. 
 
 These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people, 
 that call a spade a spade. 
 
 Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, 
 answered that it was the soul of this world. 
 
 After Caesar routed Phamaces Ponticus at the 
 first assault, he wrote thus to his friends: “ I came, 
 I saw, I conquered.” 
 
 126 
 
Cato said, “ I had rather men should ask why my 
 statue is not set up, than why it is.” 
 
 Pythias once, scoffing at Demosthenes, said that 
 his arguments smelled of the lamp. 
 
 It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame 
 man you will learn to halt. 
 
 It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended 
 but the glory belongs to our ancestors. 
 
 Demosthenes overcame and rendered more dis- 
 tinct his inarticulate and stammering pronuncia- 
 tion by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. 
 
 Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and 
 said of Plato’s Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to 
 speak, it would be in a language like theirs. 
 
 He said that in his whole life he most repented of 
 three things: one was that he had trusted a secret 
 to a woman; another, that he went by water when 
 he might have gone by land ; the third, that he had 
 remained one whole day without doing any busi- 
 ness of moment. 
 
 127 
 
For my part I had rather be the first man among 
 these fellows than the second man in Rome. 
 
 Go on, my friend, and fear nothing; you carry 
 Caesar and his fortunes in your boat. 
 
 Zeno first started that doctrine that knavery is 
 the best defense against a knave. 
 
 Lysander said that the law spoke too softly to be 
 heard in such a noise of war. 
 
 Agesilaus being invited once to hear a man who 
 admirably imitated the nightingale, he declined 
 saying he had heard the nightingale itself. 
 
 When Alexander asked Diogenes whether he 
 wanted anything, “ Yes,” said he; “I would have 
 you stand from between me and the sun.” 
 
 Whenever Alexander heard Philip had taken any 
 town of importance, or won any signal victory, 
 instead of rejoicing at it altogether, he would tell 
 his companions that his father would anticipate 
 everything, and leave him and them no oppor- 
 tunities of performing great and illustrious actions. 
 
 128 
 
Even a nod from a person who is esteemed is of 
 more force than a thousand arguments or studied 
 sentences from others. 
 
 To conduct great matters and never commit a 
 fault is above the force of human nature. 
 
 Archimedes had stated that, given the force, any- 
 given weight might be moved; and even boasted 
 that if there were another earth, by going into it 
 he could remove this. 
 
 A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly- 
 blamed by his friends, who demanded, “Was she 
 not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful? ” 
 holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was 
 not new and well made. “ Yet,” added he, “ none 
 of you can tell where it pinches me.” 
 
 Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus 
 that there was an infinite number of worlds; and 
 his friends asking him if any accident had befallen 
 him, he returns this answer: “ Do you not think it 
 a matter worthy of lamentation that when there 
 is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet 
 conquered one? ” 
 
 129 
 
The old proverb was now made good, “ The 
 mountain hath brought forth a mouse.” 
 
 Pompey bade Sylla recollect that more worshiped 
 the rising than the setting sun. 
 
 When Demosthenes was asked what was the first 
 part of oratory, he answered, “ Action;” and which 
 was the second, he replied, “ Action;” and which 
 was the third, he still answered, “ Action.” 
 
 Geographers crowd into their maps parts of the 
 world which they do not know about, adding notes 
 in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies 
 nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts and 
 unapproachable bogs. 
 
 Anacharsis coming to Athens knocked at Solon’s 
 door, and told him that he, being a stranger, was 
 come to be his guest, and contract a friendship 
 with him; and Solon replying, “It is better to 
 make friends at home,” Anacharsis replied, “ Then 
 you that are at home make friendship with me.” 
 
 Simonides calls painting silent poetry, and poetry 
 speaking painting. 
 
 130 
 
The people of Asia were all slaves to one man, 
 merely because they could not pronounce the 
 word, No. 
 
 Like the man who threw a stone at a bitch, but hit 
 his stepmother, on which he exclaimed, “ Not so 
 bad! ” $•* 5^ 
 
 When asked why he parted with his wife, Caesar 
 replied, “ I wished my wife to be not so much 
 as suspected.” 
 
 For water continually dropping will wear hard 
 rocks hollow. 
 
 Themistocles said that he certainly could not make 
 use of any stringed instrument; could only, 
 were a small and obscure city put into 
 his hands, makeit great and glorious. 
 
 131 
 
THOREAU 
 
 THE MYSTIC REBEL 
 
 i* Emerson and Poe were America’s 
 two most significant writers, Whit- 
 man and Thoreau were her two 
 most significant figures. 
 
 Thoreau was the perfect rebel. He 
 began the “spiritual revolution” 
 long before Ibsen preached it to Brandes. 
 
 Without bitterness, without a touch of melan- 
 cholia, without the slightest evidence of regret he 
 retired from the little world of “ practical life ” to 
 the infinite universe of Mind and Nature. 
 
 His cosmic nonchalance was as sublime as the 
 faith which engendered it; his mysticism was the 
 mysticism sprung from the deeps of wonder; his 
 unsociability was not misanthropic, but arose 
 from the fact that he had found another kind of 
 sociability; he had become the crony of the Great 
 Comrade. He chummed with Night and Day, and 
 found much to say to the Oversoul. 
 
 132 
 
The law of adaptation to environment — that an 
 organism can survive only on condition that it 
 makes peace with the hostile forces that envelop it 
 and that tend to its destruction — is contradicted 
 absolutely in the case of a mental original like 
 Thoreau. Genius must adapt itself to its heredities, 
 to its instincts, to its inner urgings, and stand for 
 ever opposed to its physical, social and religious 
 milieu s— £» 
 
 Revolt is dissent from environment. All geniuses — 
 seers, poets, prophets — are revolutionists, and 
 from the moment of their birth they are engaged 
 in a constant war to conserve for their own interests 
 the things that are in them. Their greatness is 
 determined by non-adaptation to their environ- 
 ment. For this reason geniuses are shy and retiring. 
 It is their instinct of fear. Once they become molded 
 by their environment they are lost. All things con- 
 spire against them. When they mingle with the 
 herd they put on the mask of mediocrity — often 
 the mask of vulgarity — to throw the hounds off 
 the scent. They insulate themselves in non-conduc- 
 tors, and so pass over the deadly coils in perfect 
 safety 
 
 Thoreau would not herd. The come-and-go of life 
 he recognized as a kind of issueless migration and 
 
 133 
 
hibernation. Life in large cities to him was merely 
 the delirium of momentum. People in cities move 
 like fish — little fish — in water or like rats in a cage : 
 guts and gulleys that lead nowhere. These great 
 spectacular cities are a whirl of drunken maenads — 
 a fine study in the propulsive power of delusions. 
 Christ, Heraclitus and Thoreau took to the Desert; 
 the Best finally break into silence. Color, variety, 
 odor, the rise and fall of gladiators battling for the 
 nickel that one of them has dropped in the gutter, 
 the cavalcades of the commonplace — these interest 
 for a little while; but the cry of the Best is for 
 harmony, expansion, and so they take to Dreams — 
 the delirium of contemplation. Here Thoreau was 
 king £» £«• 
 
 W E say dreams are fantastic and absurd; 
 
 hence they mean nothing. But our daily 
 life must seem absurd, nonsensical, inutile, comic, 
 to one looking on from a higher sphere. A dream 
 is no more irrational than is life as De Maupassant, 
 Heine and Thoreau found it. As absurd as the 
 gestures of harlequins are the deeds we do in 
 dreams ; and just as absurd are the deeds we do in 
 this dream called life, wherein mere sequence is 
 confounded with rationality. 
 
 134 
 
As to traveling — who had traveled more than 
 Thoreau? He had been in places that few people 
 could visit. He had seen things that could not be 
 seen in Europe. 
 
 The illusion of traveling — that I can escape my- 
 self by moving from point to point — arises from 
 the belief that when you move the body you move 
 the mind. The earth is in perpetual movement 
 around the Sun, and in a year’s time it has been in 
 millions of different points in space, but it is always 
 enveloped in its own atmosphere ; it can not escape 
 its character. All much-traveled people are blase — 
 they have discovered the illusion of movement. 
 You think stoicism cowardice when it is the 
 greatest of all affirmations. If you refuse to move, 
 evermore you will find yourself flinging off satel- 
 lites, even universes. Create, watch, understand. 
 Of all fallacies, none is greater than “ Seek and ye 
 shall find.” Seek NOT and ye shall find. Resign 
 yourself to your demon. Sit still and listen and 
 receive. Men live most in sleep. You are always in 
 your atmosphere — like the earth, you are always 
 swathed in your genius. Little people must travel. 
 I travel. Kant and Thoreau did not have to. 
 Thoreau conceived the Soul to be a kind of infinite 
 static eye. The soul was everywhere, partook of 
 
 135 
 
all things, was the eucharistic wafer. Thoreau 
 moved from center to center, not from place to 
 place $— 
 
 His great Truth: drop anchor anywhere, and it 
 will drag — that is, if your soul is a limitless, 
 fathomless sea, and not a dog pound ; never mind 
 your sails — furl them, and bank the fires in the 
 engine-room; sit in the crow’s-nest and follow the 
 anchor — from this flowed his nonchalance. Nothing 
 evil could possibly befall him. 
 
 T HE soul should be agile — always prepared to 
 move. No retreat in the mind is safe against 
 the sudden incursions of the great ancient fatali- 
 ties that lurk in our unfathomable being. Rather, 
 the deeper we build in the soul our mansions the 
 more we lie open to those things that lie deeper 
 than all dreams, deeper than all conceivable 
 depths. You may make your citadel proof against 
 the hurricanes from without and the lightning-bolt 
 above, but there is no art yet found to frustrate 
 the forces that work from beneath. Beware of the 
 fatalities that lie depth on depth within you. 
 
 The drowning man by his frenzied struggling only 
 beats the waters still higher above his head and 
 so makes his fate more certain. So in our struggle 
 136 
 
against circumstance we set up newer and newer, 
 higher and higher, waves of emotion and of passion 
 that but submerge the understanding and the 
 soul’s eyes all the quicker. Lie still and float. 
 Assent to the order of things smashes the tyranny 
 of that order. Approve all that comes to your hand 
 — then cast it away and think no more of it. 
 Thoreau knew of these fatalities ; so he set his soul 
 as one sets a steel trap. 
 
 The active man hunts for his destiny — literally, 
 he “ pursues his calling.” It is as though the motes 
 that float in the sunlight were to hunt for the sun. 
 Utopia is here and now — it is a condition. If you 
 wait you shall be claimed by your rightful owner; 
 move ever so slightly toward your destiny and you 
 move from a higher to a lower level. You may seek 
 all your life for the things you need, but if those 
 things you seek do not need you, you will end 
 lamed and mutilated. The man who forces the 
 Northwest Passage will be forced through it seek- 
 ing something else or while seeking nothing in 
 particular. They who “ pursue their calling ” 
 pursue the echo of it. 
 
 Like Spinoza, Thoreau was an adept in cosmic 
 mathematics. Dissolution is a backyard view of 
 evolution — the mathematics of growth and decay 
 
 137 
 
are the same. Growth adds two to two, and makes 
 four; decay divides four by two and makes two. 
 The evolution of a pimple, the involution of a bud, 
 the dissolution of a sun follow one law. 
 
 Accident is always perfect, thought invariably 
 bungles. You are carried to port by currents that 
 are on no chart. 
 
 If the effects of all our acts could be followed out 
 in all their ramifications for one hundred years, it 
 would be found that the day-long idler had done 
 less harm to his fellow-men than the most indus- 
 trious man in the community. 
 
 T HOREAU reached for nothing. Success always 
 satirizes our dream of success. Possession 
 leaves us startled — to have a thing is to have it 
 not. The very rich and the very poor always look 
 bored — disillusioned — for their states of mind are 
 exactly the same. They both circle about the same 
 flame. But there is a mind that circles about its 
 own light — its parallax, aphelion and perihelion. 
 Whether it appears in Benares or Walden, Athens 
 or Weimar — now or not now — the place where it 
 stands is the center of duration, the core of all 
 values. It possesses, but has no possessions; it 
 succeeds, but has no definite successes. 
 
 138 
 
Drowned in the infinitude of space, clamped be- 
 tween -times, crawling from straitjacket of cir- 
 cumstance to another straitjacket of circumstance 
 — howbeit we view it — no matter in what terms 
 we apprehend our mortal state, the one tremendous 
 fact remains that we are conscious of this state, 
 that there is that Consciousness which is not 
 drowned in the infinitude of space, clamped be- 
 tween-times, and does not crawl from circum- 
 stance to circumstance. It is that which sees our 
 mortal state! This was the basis of Thoreau’s riant 
 mysticism. 
 
 He laid traps for himself; found himself to be the 
 Divine Adventurer. Man’s whole life from the 
 cradle to the grave is only a partial history of 
 himself. The whole of Self is never circled. There 
 are crypts and vaults that have never been forced 
 by the boldest, peaks that have defied the bravest, 
 and possibilities that have forever remained im- 
 possibilities. Our dreams are an arc of the Ego; 
 our waking another arc, and the adventure after 
 death another arc. But who shall piece these arcs 
 together and calmly view his own completion 
 from that Center which stands inviolate to all 
 change and motion? 
 
 Thoreau’s soul wending its way leisurely along the 
 
 139 
 
highways of reveries was sometimes suddenly jostled 
 by a great Personage that vanished and was lost 
 in the crowded mental thoroughfares before, 
 startled and amazed, he could turn full upon It. 
 
 I\ /fYSTICISM is to feel the mystery of a thing 
 XVX before you have examined the thing. The 
 sense of mystery was Thoreau’s first and also his 
 last sense. The five material senses were but the 
 tentacles of that original sense, tentative guesses 
 at a solution of the Enigma. 
 
 Wonder rises with insight. The characteristic of 
 the superior mind is amazement, while the inferior 
 intellect is only capable of worship. Amazement 
 begets poets, seers, philosophers. A lifelong wonder 
 at everything that is presented to consciousness is 
 a life-long growth, the soul’s candidature for un- 
 seen, undreamed-of modes of existence; while 
 worship, being essentially a moral attitude toward 
 that which knows not us, professes, impliedly at 
 least, to have found a solution to the Great Mys- 
 tery. Hence, this solution is a stoppage, an end, 
 decay — stagnation, senescence. 
 
 If I fly to the zenith I am still at a nadir; if I fly to 
 the nadir I am still at a zenith. And the law that 
 holds in the physical universe holds in the mental 
 140 
 
universe. My good may be an evil; my evil may 
 be a good — for neither term has anything to do 
 with discoverable ultimates. The bottom of the 
 sea is the top of a mountain; the top of a mountain 
 is the bed of a sea; my highest thought is only a 
 stalactite in this Mammoth Cave of wonders which 
 the glow-worm of consciousness has illumined for 
 a moment. We may have as many ideas about a 
 single object as that single object is capable of 
 change — which is an infinite number. Who can 
 put his finger on the top or the bottom of a cylinder 
 that revolves quicker than any eye can follow? 
 The mystic of Walden never was foolhardy enough 
 to put his finger there. He watched it go round 
 with delight. 
 
 To him it was not so wonderful to be immortal as 
 it was to be alive. To be after death is no miracle; 
 to be at all is. If I can not unriddle myself in this 
 Now, how can I hope to do it in a Then? Merely to 
 find myself consciously thinking Here is more 
 extraordinary than merely to go on thinking for- 
 ever somewhere else. 
 
 Truth is a matter of perspective; it is a relation 
 of distance, not of “ fact ” and conception 
 At a certain point geometrical axioms will seem to 
 be absolute truths; move a pace higher and they 
 
 141 
 
become relative truths; move still higher, into the 
 supersensuous world, and they are seen not to be 
 valid at all. Imagination demolishes logic. Before 
 I can speak of Truth I must first find out where I 
 stand, whether I am standing anywhere, and 
 whether the thing I call my truth is not a passing, 
 necessary illusion, whether it is merely a tool or 
 a “ find,” whether it is a thing I really see or 
 merely part of a perspective. 
 
 Culture is not to be measured by book-learning 
 nor yet by experience. It is the manner in which we 
 confront books and experience. It is a frame of 
 mind. It is an attitude. Thoreau would have been 
 a highly cultured mind had he never left his native 
 town or had he never read a book. C The soul 
 awaits the Great Event, the Great Romance — 
 the Unique Adventure. It never comes to pass, for 
 it has missed it in the expectation. Thoreau expected 
 nothing. Here and now was the Great Event. 
 
 Life was the Unique Adventure. 
 
 142 
 
ARISTOTLE 
 
 THE WORLD’S FIRST SCIENTIST 
 
 RISTOTLE lived four hundred years 
 before Christ. He was a native of 
 Macedonia, which was then a prov- 
 ince of Greece. When a boy of 
 seventeen he walked to Athens, a 
 distance of over two hundred miles, 
 in order to attend the School of Plato. Aristotle had 
 been a mountain guide, and a mountain climber, 
 so a little walk of two hundred miles was nothing 
 to him. All his life he was an out-of-doors man. 
 He was a lover of animals, especially of horses. 
 He wrote a book on the horse — a book of three 
 thousand pages. In the book he said all there is to 
 say on the subject, and any man who now writes 
 on the horse, quotes Aristotle, knowingly or not. 
 C. Plato and Aristotle were associated as pupil and 
 teacher and then as fellow teachers for over thirty 
 years. They finally separated on the relative value 
 of poetry versus science. 
 
 143 
 
The world needs its poets, but it needs the scientist 
 more s«* 
 
 Science is the classified knowledge of the common 
 people. Science shows us how to make our poetry 
 practical, working it up into life and using it to 
 irrigate the waste places of our lives. 
 
 Poets are plentiful — especially on Boston Common 
 — but scientists are rare as white blackbirds. 
 Aristotle was the world’s first scientist. He made 
 the world’s first geological collection; the first 
 herbarium; and the first zoological garden, barring 
 that of Noah. 
 
 Very much of our present scientific terminology 
 goes back to Aristotle. We call the plants by the 
 names that Aristotle gave them. 
 
 We have busts in bronze of Aristotle, modeled in 
 wax from life, by his pupils. 
 
 His head was not remarkable for size, neither were 
 his features handsome. He was always a country 
 man, always a workingman. His form was lean and 
 bony, his hands large and strong. And while his 
 face was seamed with deep lines, his mood was one 
 of happiness and sweet content. 
 
 The plan of teaching adopted by Aristotle was so 
 simple that the School Board of Athens could not 
 understand it, and finally Aristotle was exiled from 
 144 
 
Athens. He taught by setting his pupils to work; 
 they collected natural specimens, and talked about 
 them. He was the friend and companion of his 
 pupils. Instead of disciplining them, he loved them. 
 <1 People in the best society of Athens said that 
 Aristotle lacked dignity, hence their displeasure 
 and the suggestion that he move on. 
 
 I want here to quote simply one remark of Aris- 
 totle’s. It is this, “ The land that produces beautiful 
 flowers, and luscious fruits, will also produce noble 
 men and women.” 
 
 That is to say, man is a product of soil and sun- 
 shine, just as much as is the tree. Man’s body is 
 over seventy per cent water. Man gets his strength 
 from the food evolved from the ground, and more, 
 perhaps, from the electricity in the atmosphere. 
 C Now Aristotle loved horses. He trained horses 
 to do his bidding. And he argued with Alexander, 
 his pupil, that a horse wa§ a product of nature, and 
 as a man could train horses, so could he also 
 train trees and flowers. And while man himself is a 
 product of Nature, he yet has the power to fashion 
 and form Nature and utilize the forces of Nature. 
 Thus does man make, in great degree, his own 
 environment. 
 
 The climate of Greece is the climate of California. 
 
 145 
 
There are towering mountains, and wide stretching 
 arid plains. The snow falls upon the mountains, 
 and man through his scientific skill can water the 
 land which Nature has neglected. 
 
 Thus did Aristotle make the waste places provide 
 flowers and fruits. 
 
 And then it was he said, “ The land that produces 
 beautiful flowers and luscious fruits will also pro- 
 duce noble men and women.” 
 
 Alfred Russel Wallace says that man’s first edu- 
 cation came through the domestication of animals. 
 Through the responsibility of caring for animals, 
 and the exercise of forethought for their protection 
 he evolves himself. Friedrich Froebel, who was a 
 forester before he was a school-teacher, said that 
 through the care of flowers and trees, men evolved 
 their own spiritual natures. Years after he had 
 said this, Froebel was surprised to find that Aris- 
 totle, twenty-three centuries before, had said the 
 same thing. 
 
 Prayers for rain are good, but an irrigating ditch 
 is more reliable. Providence has to be re-inforced 
 by intellect before we get the highest good. God 
 certainly needs man, for God’s fruits and flowers 
 can not compare with those where man has brought 
 human system, science and love, to bear. 
 
 146 
 
Darwin does not say that man descended from 
 the monkey. He does say, however, that man and 
 the monkey had a common ancestor. Long centuries 
 ago there were two brothers that lived in the woods. 
 One took to the plains and became a man. The 
 other one remained in the woods, and is a monkey 
 yet £#> 
 
 Where Nature is too lavish in her gifts man does 
 not grow. In order to evolve and advance man 
 must do his part, meeting the Dame at least half- 
 way t>+ £•» 
 
 If Nature does too much for you, it is exactly the 
 same as if your parents supplied all of your wants. 
 That monkey in the woods lived on nuts and ber- 
 ries, and a hollow tree was his house. 
 
 The brother on the plains had to build a house. He 
 exercised his ingenuity and worked. He passed 
 through the savage stage where he lived on the 
 wild products of Nature. Then he caught a cub 
 wolf and it grew up and lived with him, helping 
 him catch game. Then to domesticate goats and 
 sheep and cattle was to make food and skins for 
 clothing reasonably sure. 
 
 So man passes out from the savage stage to that of 
 the nomad who herds his cattle and sheep in the 
 valleys where there is water and pasturage. 
 
 147 
 
To ride an ox, horse or camel comes along as a 
 natural result. 
 
 Then to plant seeds and sow grain in order to feed 
 the horses and cattle, and incidentally to make 
 bread for himself, rather than depend upon the 
 chance bounty of Nature, follows in due course. 
 
 So man evolved from a shepherd into a farmer: 
 from the nomad into an agriculturist. 
 
 To depend upon the rainfall for water to make the 
 grain grow and flowers blossom is the first and only 
 way of which man knows. Then in times of drought 
 he will carry water to moisten the parched ground. 
 €L Next it occurs to him to make an irrigating 
 ditch and divert a stream. 
 
 Then it is, and not till then, that flowers and fruits 
 of the finest forms become possible. 
 
 And the thought and labor required to provide the 
 water, evolves the man. 
 
 So Nature lures men on to the struggle for things 
 and eventually it comes to the worker that he 
 himself has grown and evolved through the struggle. 
 C. Well did Aristotle say, that “ the land that pro- 
 duces beautiful flowers and luscious fruits, will 
 also produce noble men and women.” And in the 
 production of the finest flowers and fruits, man 
 finds his own soul. 
 
 148 
 
The nations that have made the greatest impress 
 have been those that lived in dry and arid districts 
 and not those located amid the bounteous natural 
 gifts that exist along the coast and near the swamps 
 and jungles where things grow lush and lusty. 
 Wild animals, venomous serpents and poisonous 
 plants are there also, to neutralize the natural 
 advantages. 
 
 But on the arid plains the dangers of miasma and 
 disease are minimized. By the aid of irrigation 
 man controls the supply of moisture. He plants the 
 things he cares for. He selects, rejects, crosses, 
 breeds and devotes his talents to scientific culti- 
 vation 
 
 Egypt was a land of canals. Assyria grew great, 
 prospered and ruled the world because she knew 
 how to apply water to desert land, where God 
 supplied the sunshine. 
 
 Egypt and Assyria went, down to their death when 
 their citizens forsook the gardens and flocked to 
 the cities to have a good time, leaving the land 
 where grew the flowers and fruits, to slaves. 
 
 Greece grew great on the tax collected from men 
 who knew how to irrigate. The climate and soil of 
 Greece are the same as that of California — vast 
 mountains and arid plains. 
 
 149 
 
Through the garden of Plato ran a diverted stream 
 whose waters were cold and sparkling from the 
 mountains. 
 
 Plato was under the ditch; for Academus who 
 owned the ranch had banked his all on a canal, 
 which finally made him one of the millionaires 
 of Athens. 
 
 Here it was that Aristotle lived, where the sky was 
 blue three hundred days in the year, amid the 
 lavish and laughing luxuriance of land, where God 
 supplied the sunshine and man the water. And 
 here it was that he wrote, “ The land that produces 
 beautiful flowers and luscious fruits, will 
 also produce noble men and women.” 
 
 150 
 

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