LF ‘ ee ay | gs sexs _ AND HEARD 4 ‘4 u i nea ‘ 7 - i we i ose, a Wg - GLVUGLVVY VV GU VGVV VG VTE GV TGV VV VEY VLOV GOODSPEED LAAADADAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADAAADAAOE @ @ @ 4 G @ @ @ ee ee a Se es es ee es Bee es ee Se 8 G @ @ @ @ @ THINGS SEEN AND HEARD Sea THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY NEW YORK THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY SHANGHAI THINGS SEEN AND HEARD | By EDGAR J. GOODSPEED The University of Chicago Press Chicago + Illinois Copyright 1925 By The University of Chicago All Rights Reserved Published October 1925 Composed and Printed By The University of Chicago Press Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. eB Gr Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/thingsseenheard00good ACKNOWLEDGMENT Six of the papers here printed have appeared in the ‘‘ Atlantic Monthly,’ and one was printed in the “‘Chicago Herald.’ Edztorzal permission to reprint them in this volume ts gratefully acknow!- edged. [ vii | TABLE OF CONTENTS Tuincs SEEN AND HEARD Tue Lire or ADVENTURE Do ONE AND ONE Make Two? Tue House or THE Minp Tue Spirits OF Our SIRES Tue New BarsarisM Democracy DELVED INTo Arctic V1iLLAGE LiFe A Hitttor CoLLtEcE Tuink, Abts! Tuer SELF-MADE ARTICLE ORGANIZED CURIOSITY . Tue WEEK-ENDER PERSONS AND THINGS [ ix ] QID| QVOV QD VO QS LIQ KL THINGS SEEN AND HEARD Y academic orbit is not too rigid to | \ permit an occasional deviation into the outer world. At such times I di- rect my steps into the neighboring City of De- struction, where, in a lofty building, is one of those centers of light and leading which punctuate the darkness of the metropolis. The structure is not externally remarkable, but the modest fraction of it assigned to my activities is certainly no ordinary apartment. The extraordinary thing about my class- room is its sides. One is formed by a vast ac- cordion door, loosely fitting, as is the manner of such doors. It faithfully conceals the per- sons behind it and their every action, while it as faithfully transmits all they may have to say. Theirs is an eloquent concealment. From the sounds that well through the ample [x] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD interstices of that door, we gather that it is psychology that is going on in the adjoining room. The fascinating affirmations of that most intimate science break in upon our oc- casional pauses with startling effect. It is thus beyond doubt that theology should always be inculcated; to a psychological obligato, an accompaniment of the study of the mind. Even more unusual is the other side of the room. From floor to ceiling it is all of plate glass, not meanly divided into little squares, but broadly spaced, so that you are hardly conscious itis there. Through it you may be- hold, as in an aquarium, a company of men and women going through many motions but making no sound. A tall, romantic youth, presumably the teacher, stands before them, and they rise up and sit down for no pert- ceptible reason and to no apparent purpose. One of them will get up and stand for a long time, and then will as suddenly and cause- lessly sit down again. At other times, even more distressing, they are all motionless. Lips move, but they give forth no sound. It is [2] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD like a meeting of the deaf-and-dumb society. Worst of all, they will sometimes unan- imously and quite without warning rise in their places, simultaneously adjust their wraps, and silently depart. It is as if they all suddenly realized that they have had enough of it. You know that you have. There is something weird in all this soundless action, this patient, motiveless, mechanical down- sitting and uprising, something far more dis- tracting even than in those disembodied psy- chological voices that murmur in our ears. But much more disturbing than either of these extraordinary neighbors of our reflec- tions is their combination. The sounds that come through the door do not tally with the sights that come through the glass. What you hear bears no relation to what you see. It does not even contradict it. There is a war in your members. Your senses do not agree. And yet you are haunted by the notion that what you are hearing has something to do with what you are seeing. When someone asks a question behind the door at your left [syd THINGS SEEN AND HEARD and someone makes a motion beyond the glass at your right, you instinctively try to relate the two. But in vain; there is no rela- tion. Especially when all the visibles get up and leave, it seems as if it must be because of something the audibles have said. Neverthe- less, the audibles go right on psychologizing, entirely oblivious of the visibles’ departure. Reflection has satisfied me that much con- fusion of the modern mind is due to the in- congruity of what we hear and what we see. The conditions of my quaint lecture-room are typical. You look about upon a community of earnest, hard-working people, soberly do- ing their daily work at business and at home. But you pick up the home edition and read of a vety different world of violence and vice. All its men are scoundrels and its women quite different from those you see, to say the least. You have long been assured that this is the Age of Reason; but observation finds little to support the claim. The Age of Im- pulse would seem as good a guess. You hear that the League of Nations is dead, but on [4] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD visiting the movies you are astonished to see it in session and to find that it yet speaketh. You are told on all hands that everything about the war was a failure, and yet, as-a whole, it seems to have accomplished its immediate end. You hear much lamentation over the sensationalism of the press, but as you fread it, it is its conventionality that of- tener leaves you mourning. The newspapers show you a comfortable view of the steel strike, but the cook’s brother, who was one of the strikers, tells you something entirely different. With a laudable desire to preserve your reason, you do your best to cultivate the virtues of blindness, deafness, insensibility, and unbelief. Yet you are sometimes just a little bewildered. Your universe is not uni- fied. The most disturbing thing is not that things seen and things heard contradict each other: that we might learn to allow for. The great trouble is that they seem to bear no re- lation to each other at all. Most political talk is of this description. It has nothing to isl THINGS SEEN AND HEARD do with the case. It is like the effort of a young friend of mine who, on being asked to translate a well-known passage of Epictetus, produced the following: ‘‘If teachings are no longer the reasons of all things, and who has false doctrines, how much should be the cause, and as such the destruction.’’ That mythical creature, the American of British fiction, so boldly portrayed by Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Buchan, Mr. Oppenheim, and Mr. Doyle, much as we love and enjoy him, is, it must be confessed, little known save by reputation on this side of the sea. He is fiction in the strictest sense. Like Mr. De Quincey’s unfortunate reporter, mon est in- ventus. But he is not the less popular among us for being an imported article. He is so rich, so ready, so unspoiled, so clear-eyed, clean-limbed, nasal-toned, poker-faced, and, best of all (true to the great traditions of his country), so quick on the trigger! The trouble is not merely that the things we hear we never see, but that the things we see we never hear. For how extraordinary is [6] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD the sensation when you hear of something you have seen! Perhaps it is only an accident. Do you not yearn to rise up and cry out, “‘I saw that! I was there’’? It is because, for once, things seen coincide with things heard. Brain-proud men of science sourly say that Greek is dead. But to the Grecian mind it is refreshing to observe that familiarity with Greek is now extraordinarily widespread in this country. This is all the more fascinat- ing at a time when the practical educators have triumphantly excluded the study of Greek from most institutions of learning as an impractical subject, not suited to the training of a materialistic people. As I look about the world in which I live, I observe that every high-school boy or girl knows his Greek letters. He does not have to be compelled to learn them. He wishes to learn them. He would feel humiliated if he did not learn them. He would be looked down upon by his companions as a person without social ideals. His college brothers are equally conversant with the eponym of THINGS SEEN AND HEARD all alphabets. So are their sisters and their sweethearts. They may not know the rule of three or the multiplication table; they may be without a single formula of chemistry or a solitary principle of physics; but, rely upon it, they will know their Greek letters. Their parents will know them, too. They will learn them at their children’s knee, in all do- cility and eagerness, for fear of disgracing themselves and their offspring by not always and everywhere distinguishing the illustri- ous Tau Omicron Pi’s from the despised Nu Upsilon Tau’s. The fact is, it is difficult to be even a successful delivery boy in our com- munity without knowing one’s Greek let- ters. I doubt whether the Greek alphabet was ever more widely and favorably known than now. In our midst the celebrated Cato could not have survived till eighty without learn- ing it. I shudder to think what anguish this must cause the practical educators aforesaid, as they walk abroad and see every house boldly [8] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD and even brazenly labeled with the hated let- ters. Even their own favorite students, who show promise in the use of test tubes and microscopes, insist upon labeling themselves with more of the Greek alphabet. Why will they not be content to call their honor socie- ties by some practical Anglo-Saxon name, like the Bread and Brick Club, or the Gas and Gavel? But no! These rational considera- tions have no force with our youth. Nothing will satisfy them but more Greek letters. I have seen a man use twelve of them, or just half the alphabet, to set forth his social and learned afhliations. Of course, to us Greek professors, sham- bling aimlessly about the streets with noth- ing to do, these brass signs are like the faces of old friends (no offense, I hope), and remind us of the names of the books of Homer, if nothing more. But the Greek renaissance has gone much further than the alphabet. It pervades sci- ence. It is positively nonplusing to hear one’s scientific friends rambling on in the lan- Lo] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD guage of Aristotle and Euclid, with their at- oms and ions, their cryoscopes and cepha- lalgias, their sepsis, diagnosis, and autopsies. The fact is, they really talk very little but Greek, which is one reason why we all ad- mire them so. They are greatest when they are most Greek; and were their Greek vocab- ulary suddenly taken from them, half their books would shrivel into verbs. Three- fourths of them are indeed teaching Greek as hard as they can, though mercifully uncon- scious of the fact. The Greek, on seeing a queer animal, waited until it was dead and then counted its toes. He thus soon knew enough to make a distinction between genus and species, which zoOlogists are still talking about. Whence it comes about that our little Greek friends, the lion, the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus, are household favorites still. Consistent people who object to Greek will expunge these words from their vocab- ulary. The Greek conquest of our social youth [ 10 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD and of our grizzled age is nothing, however, to its triumphs in commerce. Here both let- ters and vocabulary come into their own. It must be admitted that we English-speaking people are poor word-makers. Only in mo- ments of rare inspiration do we achieve a Nabisco or a Mazola. But in this age of new creations one of Adam's chief needs is names for the bewildering things he sees about him. How indispensable to us inarticulate mod- erns is the voluble Greek! Like one who hides a thimble for you to find, he has named everything in advance, and all we have to do is to discover it. From Alpha Beer to Omega Oil, from Antikamnia to Sozodont, the Greek has taught us names. Even automo- bile is half Greek, which is really what makes it desirable. Who would want an ipso- mobile? And Solon and moron, those twin pillars of the journalistic vocabulary, with- out which no newspaper could exist a week, are pure Grecian. When [J attend the funeral of Greek, therefore, as I am con- stantly invited to do, I am comforted to [11] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD observe old Greek himself and his whole family, thinly disguised, heading the chief mourners. Nowhere is the contrast between things seen and things heard more striking than in language. Very conscientious people have observed this and, fearful of seeming some- thing other than they are, have evolved pho- netic spelling. Witty people like Max Beer- bohm and Josh Billings have observed it too, atid made such use of 1t.as) /Y ures tiledethes and Lhe laibrer.iz werthi ov hizihite wan that iz aul.’’ Children are proficient here. One I know recently addressed a letter to his | Dereant UN.) Nitimittenz ar theky adie as they spell at Lake Placid. An intelligent- looking man steps in front of you at the club and murmurs a deferential ‘‘Skewmy,’’ to which you suavely reply, ‘“‘ Doughmeshnit.’’ No one has ever been able to reproduce con- versation in print. The gulf between the words we see and the words we say is too great. Feeble efforts in this direction are sometimes made by ambitious writers, but [12] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD the truth is that, from the standpoint of the printed page, we all speak in dialect. The fact is, almost everything we hear is more or less conventionalized in type or in telling. People exchange fragments of news, or funny stories of a few familiar types. Newspaper items can easily be grouped under five or six thoroughly conventional heads. An observant friend once remarked that the women of literature were mere pallid con- trivances compared to the actual ones we know, and I was really startled to perceive that he was right. Even in books no one will go to the pains of relating things as uncon- ventionally as they really happen. We are accustomed to stereotypes, and we expect and desire them. In reality, of course, things happen much more intricately than anyone will bother to report them, or to hear them reported. This is probably what is meant when we say that truth is stranger than fiction. It is vastly more complex. Take a simple example. As you plod homeward of an autumn morning, fatigued Leg THINGS SEEN AND HEARD by the labors of the professorial day, you are met by a colleague of high degree who de- clares that he has been looking for you. Will you go and meet the Cardinal? Like the Sage of Concord, you like a church, you like a cowl, and you are careful not to say “‘No,’’ as you conceal your gratification and fence for more definite information. You fortify yourself by the reflection that you have en- countered cardinals and dukes before this, and struggle to remember which is His Emi- nence and which His Grace. It seems that the Archbishop ts to bring the Cardinal out from the other end of town, and at one-fifteen they will hesitate at a certain downtown cor- ner long enough to pick you up. All you have to do is to carry your cap and gown, to mark you off from the passing throng. And you would better give the motor-cycle man who will lead the way a memorandum of the route he is to follow. You do not decline. You move on home- ward, thinking quite without effort of some flattering things you will say to the Arch- [14] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD bishop and some observations you will ad- dress to the Cardinal. In particular, you de- cide to ask him if, when the German Cardi- nal condescendingly remarked, ‘‘We will not speak of war,’’ he really did answer, “We will not speak of peace.’’ Your simple preparations are soon made, and you make your way downtown in some preoccupation. Promptness has been said to be the cour- tesy of princes and you do not wish to dis- appoint a Prince of the Church. At one-five you take your stand at the curb beside the streaming boulevard. Traffic is at its high- est. You are less inconspicuous than you could wish, for no one else 1s carrying an academic cap in his hand and a doctor’s gown upon his arm. But to conceal these accouter- ments may defeat the purpose of your vigil. It is precisely by a wave of that Oxford cap that you are to bring the whole proud, sacer- dotal cortége, motor-cycles and all, to a stop. You scan each south-bound car with eager- ness. It becomes one-fifteen. The Archbishop is the soul of promptitude. He should be al- hrs THINGS SEEN AND HEARD most here. You perceive approaching a par- ticularly stately limousine, which conforms to your preconceived ideas of the archiepisco- pal in automobiles. It proves to be empty. You have now scanned hundreds of passing cars. It is one-twenty — one-twenty-five — one-thirty. Great heavens! Have you missed the Cardinal’s car, Archbishop and all? Even in your dawning dismay habits of scientific observation reassert themselves. The stately limousine you had once taken for his reap- pears, from the same direction as before and still empty. You are not mistaken. You rec- ognize the chauffeur. You almost think he recognizes you. It strikes you that these cars that you have been seeing are not all different ones, but are simply circling about before you, like Caesar's army on the stage. It is two o'clock. You despair. The party has eluded you. It has probably already ar- rived at the University, having gone out some other way. After all, why should you have escorted the Cardinal out? He is es- corted everywhere by two archbishops, five [ 16 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD motor-cops, five plain-clothes men, and a civilian guard of honor. This should suffice. He is, indeed, a stranger in the city, but he can hardly go astray. You begin to feel sadly superfluous, yet, following a Casabiancan in- stinct, you stay on. A friend who has ob- served your situation goes into the club and telephones. He returns to inform you that, owing to the Cardinal’s fatigue, the program has been postponed one hour. It 1s two-ten. You observe that it is just time for him now to be appearing. The stately and mysterious limousine, already twice seen, now passes for the third time. It is still vacant. The mystery of it fascinates you. Is it in- extricably caught in the circling current, like some Flying Dutchman on wheels, powerless to make a port? It occurs to you that, if the cars before you are in some instances merely running around in circles, the foot-passengers behind you may be doing the same thing. Two-twenty-five, and again that silent, va- cant, funereal limousine sweeps by, for the fourth time. It is getting on your nerves. Is [17] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD it possible that public-spirited owners send their limousines on idle afternoons to circle showily about the Avenue, hour after hour, to swell the concourse and thus contribute their mite, as it were, to the gaiety of na- tions? Or is this mysterious vehicle, with its hawklike circling, bent on some sinister er- rand of abduction, or worse? But at this instant a police-gong clangs down the thronging street. Five motor-cops appear, and in the car behind them a medieval saint, a modern archbishop, and divers celeb- rities such as one sees in guards of honor. One knows them instinctively by their tall hats, and observes that there are still occasions for such hats—the cardinal points of existence, as it were. But you have scarcely registered this observation and handed the leading motor-policeman his typewritten instruc- tions, when you are aware that one of the hats is pointing you to the second car. You turn swiftly toit. The gentlemen in it spring out with surprising agility and make a place for you among them. The cortége has hardly [ 18 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD stopped. The nimble gentlemen spring in again (the car is an open one), and you ate off. You experience a momentary disappoint- ment that you are not to hobnob with the illustrious prelates, but bend your attention upon their distinguished representatives about you. They are little given to conver- sation. If they are not communicative, nei- ther are they inquisitive. They are of a nega- tive demeanor. They drive at a frightful speed, shepherding all other traffic to the curb out of their way as they advance. They achieve this flattering effect by blowing a siren, sounding a loud gong, and hurling deep-throated objurgations, much deeper than you are accustomed to, at anyone who crosses their path. Who are these supreme autocrats, you ask yourself? Mere money could not behave thus. A suspicion crosses your mind, and you ask what car thisis. You are informed that it is the Police Car! Of course, you do in the end meet the Cardinal and set his feet upon the long carpet [19] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD pontifically stretched for his reception. That is all there is to be said about it. You did meet the Cardinal, and you ‘‘acted’’ (admi- rable word!) as his escort. But as you look back upon that day, that bald statement does not summarize or even adumbrate its impres- sions. In one respect alone that I detect does ob- servation agree with rumor. Both are gener- ally inconclusive. Someone has recently re- marked how frequently one who reads is told the beginnings of things and left to con- jecture the end. It is just as true of life. We are always wondering what ‘“‘finally’’ be- came of this man and that, once of our ac- quaintance, and of this movement or that, once brought to our ears. Life and print are alike full of mysterious fragments, which we have not time to fit into their exact places in the general order. Domestic rearrangements drove me, on a recent winter night, to go to rest ina room at the back of the house, overlooking what I call the garden. Before retiring I put up a [20 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD window, so that a refreshing whiff of the Stockyards might perfume my dreams and reassure me that there was no immediate danger of famine. The night was cold, and my efforts at slumber were frustrated by a strange, steadily recurring sound like a man shoveling coal or clearing frozen slush from a sidewalk. But the hour, between eleven and twelve, seemed an improbable time for such operations. About midnight, however, it ceased and I fell asleep. The next morning I mentioned the sound to a member of the family who had also been sleeping on the garden side of the house, and siesacclarcasthat shes too,had! noticed jit and been much mystified about it. It did not ~ seem a reasonable time to shovel off the hardened snow—for it was, of course, hard- est at night, when the thermometer was low. What was my astonishment, however, when I retired on the following night, to hear the same harsh, grating sound patiently repeated for an hour or two toward midnight. I [21 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD thought again of the possibility that it was coal that was being shoveled. Perhaps some poor, unfortunate neighbor was hoarding coal, and his enjoyment took the form of shoveling his hoard over and over, and gloat- ing over it through the midnight hours. This theory appealed to me strongly as I lay awake and listened to the sound, until I no- ticed that the shoveled stuff, whatever it was, made no sound when it fell. It therefore’ could not be coal. It must, of course, be snow, or at least must fall upon a bed of snow, which made it noiseless. But why this tireless shoveling of hardened snow from the concrete walks night after night in the dead vast and middle of the night? Was it some wretch who had formerly neglected his sidewalks and so wrought an involuntary homicide, who now, sleepless with remorse, must pick away with ringing shovel at the icy crust till midnight came to his relief? I never learned. Should these lines ever meet the eye of an elderly seafaring man, a pigeon-tamer by [22 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD trade, who called upon me last Saturday on his way home to Pittsburgh from his second mother-in-law’s funeral five miles from Madi- son, Wisconsin, which he had attended be- cause he considered a wife the best friend a man has in the world, and his second wife, with whom he had become acquainted through advancing her eight dollars to en- able her to reach Pittsburgh, was one whom he could not surpass if he married a thousand times; but in returning from which to Chi- cago by train, overcome by grief and fatigue, he had been robbed of all his money except fourteen dollars and was forced in conse- quence to seek out his old employer, a pro- fessor variously pronounced Riddle, Griggle, and Gridley, but spelled Lelley, in default of finding whom or the grand master of his fra- ternal order in Englewood, he was reduced to borrowing enough money to make up the price of a ticket to Pittsburgh, or four dollars and eighty-seven cents, from me, a perfect stranger—I should be glad to hear from him again. Until when, I shall continue to reflect [23 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD on the disparity of what I have seen with what I have heard. Perhaps he was an actor out of work. If so, the performance was worth something, and it certainly had a plot. Lee QV DD: QQ QD BW CID LS LO THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE DVENTURES,”’ said the gifted Mr. Disraeli, ‘‘are to the adventurous. Stevenson somewhere recommends the conception of life as a series of adventures, each morning witnessing, as it were, a new embarkation upon some treasure-quest or feat of arms. And I have often observed that my adventurous friends have a knack of report- ing, with all the flavor of genuine adventures, experiences which upon sober reflection seem rather to fade into the light of common day. It would therefore appear that it is they who put the adventurous into life, rather than life which is responsible. In this fact lies much encouragement for one whose life seems set in a routine of commonplace; who lives upon a decent city street, where even burglars seldom penetrate, [25 ] Te THINGS SEEN AND HEARD and nothing more exciting than automobile collisions ordinarily happens. These last are, however, of a gratifying frequency, if it is excitement that one craves. Indeed, we have latterly come to a weary sense of annoyance when the familiar crunch informs us that two motorists have simultaneously claimed the tight of way. The pious duty of sweeping up all that was mortal of these unfortunates sometimes becomes really distressing, and one feels like a modern Tobit, keeping watch o'er man’s mortality. I make it a point never to witness these distressing occurrences; that would be a vo- cation in itself. Only when the fatal crash is heard do I emerge, like Aesculapius from his temple. I was a witness once, but only in a burglary. I had not, of course, seen the bur- glary, but Icould remember seeing the corpus delicti in situ, as it were, later than anyone else; and the proof that the object had existed had, of course, to precede the evidence that it had disappeared. Such is the logic of the law. Twenty several times I accordingly vis- [26 ] THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE ited the halls of justice, and twenty sever- al mornings I sacrificed upon the altar of duty. Months wore on; we witnesses, from our frequent meetings, came to be firm friends. We talked of forming a permanent organiza- tion. We even began to produce a literature, though all I now remember of it is, ©‘ For we re trying Johnny Artzle in the morning.’’ I became so seasoned an habitué of the court building that belated witnesses for other tribunals, on reaching the witness- room, would rush up to me and explain in broken English that they had been detained, that they had come as fast as they could and hoped I would excuse them; showing that there was nothing about me that looked out of place in the precincts of the Criminal Court. But, with all this assiduity, we did not convict our burglar. The kindly judge re- duced his bail, that he might rejoin his family; he seized the opportunity to filch some golden teeth, which a prosperous dentist had destined for his fashionable cli- bey THINGS SEEN AND HEARD ents, and this irate gentleman thrust in his case ahead of ours (though the Statute of Limitations had not yet run against us) and thus snatched from us the satisfaction of im- muring our defendant in his deserved dun- geon. This is why I never witness motor acci- dents. But it is plain that even this unhappy business may take on the glamor of romance when approached from the point of view of adventure. The other morning, when the well-known sound informed us that we were again to function as first aids to broken hu- manity, I rushed into the street, to see a large limousine of the eight-passenger type now usual at obsequies resting comfortably on its port side on the opposite parkway. What might it not contain, in the way of youth, beauty, and interest? Yet in point of fact, when its cargo had been laboriously hoisted up through the main hatch, which was ordi- narily its right-hand door, it proved to be nothing very romantic after all, and we gave it its coffee with a certain vague sense of dis- [28 ] THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE appointment. Some people really are not worthy of adventure, and it is a great pity that many who have adventures refuse to ac- cept them gratefully in an adventurous spirit. War is, of course, the main avenue to ad-, venture, and even so commonplace an affair as military drill has, at least in its early stages, adventurous possibilities. Our cor- poral Gor I have to admit that I am only a private—as yet) being one day kept from duty by a seminar on Plato, an expert on the History of Art, excluding that of war, was set over us. His eagerness exceeded his ex- perience, and it is not too much to say that he led us into places of danger previously un- suspected. The company, though with the gravest misgivings, was called upon to de- ploy as skirmishers, guide left. Placing him- self at our head and crying, ‘‘ Follow me,”’ our gallant leader at once set off at a double- quick in the wrong direction, where a lieu- tenant much out of breath overtook us, cry- ing, ‘Hey, corporal! You belong at the other end of the line!’ “‘Follow me!’’ or- [29] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD dered our leader unabashed; and we double- quicked to the other end, there to meet the other lieutenant, with the cry, ‘‘ Hey, cor- poral! You belong in the middle of the line!’’ But one of our most inflexible deans oc- cupied the middle with his squad, and his conception of military duty would not per- mit him to budge without orders. Perhaps he remembered the Marne and defeat by dis- location. With no place to go, our embar- rassment was relieved by the captain's “’ As you were,’ and we formed again in our fa- miliar column of squads. But in the slight confusion which I have to admit had for a moment prevailed, a metathesis had taken place: from being third squad we had be- come fourth, which position carried with it the responsibility of leading the second pla- toon. When, therefore, the hoarse order, ‘“Platoons column left,’’ rang out, the com- pany plodded placidly on in column of squads. We seemed to have lost our platoon consciousness. Our captain was annoyed; he knew that he had two platoons, but they de- [30] THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE clined to separate. Again the order came, without effect. The company now vaguely felt that some- thing was wrong, and suppressed cries of “Hey, corporal! you’re pivot man!’ “Hey, second platoon! wake up!’’ came to us from front and rear. With a start, our guilty squad awoke to its new responsibilities, and a sense of the eternal watchfulness of the soldier’s life. Quz vive? Qui va? The day before Marshal Joffre arrived, I asked our guide, a Plattsburg veteran, whether the Faculty Company was to par- ticipate in his review of the battalion. His face darkened with apprehension. ‘“Say,’’ said he, “‘that would be a mess! He’s reviewed better troops than we are!”’ Never more desperate ones, though, we agreed. Like all great soldiers, our officers are modest, even about their handiwork. We of the ranks, however, in our eagerness feel some disappointment that we cannot exhibit our newly won proficiency, even to General Barry. Why keep it all for Hindenburg? [31] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD Battalion drill is a great day in the life of the military neophyte, and our favorite evo- lution is the company front double-quick. It would have been a pleasure to perform this for the Marshal of France, but our last exe- cution of the maneuver made our officers re- luctant to exhibit our proficiency in it again to the jealous eye of authority. In company front, we spread in two ranks well across the field, and at the command ‘‘Double time!’’ we inaugurated a really imposing movement before the reviewing officer. For some reason the front rank of the first squad set a rapid pace, which the whole rank nobly strove to imitate. The second rank, in fear of being distanced, came thundering up behind, and the first rank, hearing their onset close upon their heels, regularly ran away. In conse- quence, our alignment, usually so precise, suffered considerably; and it began to look like an interscholastic quarter-mile badly bunched at the finish. Reduced to the more professorial ‘‘ quick time’’ at the end of the race, we soon recovered our breath if not our ie THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE composure, and it was remarked that in the rush it had been the Faculty orators that led the field; both things being after all at bot- tom a matter of wind. Before we were dismissed that morning, the reviewing officer commented favorably on our drill, excepting only the double- quick, and admonished us to try to keep from laughing. Yet is it not well known from the writings of Captain Beith and others that the British Tommies go into action laughing, joking, and singing music-hall ballads? The other day the major’s usual stirring lecture on the art of war was replaced by that threadbare faculty device, a written quiz. The first question C1 believe I am disclosing no military secret in telling) was, ‘‘ Name the fextpook, | lhe tatiswer owas,” 01 course: I.D.R.; but some poor fellows who had plunged into the contents without first mas- tering the cover, were found wanting. The sociability characteristic of Convoca- tion processions naturally tends to pervade our military marching as well. At battalion [33 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD the other day we were trying to catch the captain's far-off orders and then to distin- guish which of several whistles was the “command of execution’ for our company, when a late arrival dropped into the vacant file beside me, and in the most sociable man- ner began to relate an experience on the rifle range the Saturday before. This extended narrative was much interrupted, for I lost him every little while under the stress of those far-off orders, of which he appeared quite unconscious. His method seemed to be to wait for the evolution to be completed and then rejoin me wherever I might be and resume his parable, though he did occasion- ally complain that he had not heard the order. Nevertheless, we learn quickly. The other day the first sergeant, a theologian of a whol- ly unsuspected bellicosity, called upon the squad leaders to report. The first corporal at once glibly cried out, ‘‘All present or ac- counted for’’; whereupon each successive corporal, confident that none of his men had [34] THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE been killed or captured since the day before joyfully answered with the same crisp and comprehensive formula. For all our attempts at militarism, a cer- tain democratic informality still lingers among us. The captain is ordinarily affec- tionately addressed as ‘‘ Henry.’’ Thus while atetest a voice is heard from the rear ‘rank: “Well, Henry, I don’t understand what the rear rank is to do on the order, ‘Company platoons right.’ Now the front rank—”’ ‘“There’s no such command,’’ answers the captain patiently, thus closing the incident. The captain frequently marches back- ward, so that he can face us and enjoy the swift precision with which we carry out his orders. The other day he backed into the east bleacher and sat down abruptly on the bottom step. Fortunately he gave the com- mand to halt, or in our blind obedience we should probably have marched right over him up the bleacher and off the back of it into space. I shall never forget our first review. It [35] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD was with no little reluctance that our captain consented to our participation in it. He seemed to fear that we might shy at the visit- ing officers’ decorations, and runaway. Only the most protracted good behavior on our part carried the day. After marching past the reviewing party, in as straight a company front as we could exhibit, we opened our ranks for inspection, and the visiting colonel prowled about among us. Just before he reached our company, a student major, in a frenzy of apprehension, came up and gave us one final adjuration not to wiggle. The colonel—a fine military figure— marched swiftly up and down our ranks, stopping now and then to address a few crisp questions to one or another of the men. He seemed to select those whose soldierly bear- ing suggested military promise; at least our corporal and I thought so, as we were the men he spoke to in our part of the line.’ Or it may be that we were standing so like statues that he wanted to satisfy himself that those marble lips could speak. Our comrades were [36] THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE of course eager to know what he had said, and we had later to tell them that he had im- parted to us important military information of a confidential character; to which they cynically replied, ‘‘ Yaas, he did!’ We also tactfully let it be known that the colonel was anxious to learn whether our officers were perfectly satisfactory. With more tractable and appreciative inquirers we entered into more detail. He had asked the corporal whether he had ever shot a rifle; corporal blushingly admitted that he had once shot a squirrel. (Corporal is a football hero, and accustomed to meet the enemy at much closer quarters than rifle range. The rest of us, on the other hand, are publicists, and are deadliest at distances of from 500 to 5,000 miles.) Number 2 was asked if he could cook, and claimed that he could. Colo- nel in his haste did not think to ask Number 2 if anyone could eat what he cooked, or he would have learned that Number 2's cookery is best suited to prisoners of war. Colonel had no sooner departed on his in- [37] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD quisitorial way than the student major re- appeared from nowhere, in a fearful rage, to inquire if we couldn't stand still even for two minutes, and to complain bitterly that during the inspection one man had been guilty of rubbing his nose. Murmurs of disapproval ran through the ranks at the mention of this wretched offender, who was probably tre- sponsible for dragging our company down to a tie with the Law School for third place out of nine in the honors of the day. Captain now mercifully ordered, *‘Rest,”’ and a prodigious and concerted sigh rose from the ranks. Each man abandoned his poker-like pose of ‘* ‘Ten-shun’’ for an atti- tude of infinite dejection and fatigue. It was six-fifteen, and I remarked to Number 2 that my, back ached:., He’ said his achedwelena through. Our former corporal asked the cap- tain what a man was to do if he had a dinner engagement. Captain said he had one, but guessed we'd all have to wait for orders to dismiss. Corporal replied that he hadn't one, but just wanted to know. If one is to rise in [ 38 ] THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE the service, one should never lose an oppor- tunity of extracting military information from one’s officers. We have not yet been promoted to uni- forms, but last night after drill we were in- formed that while we could not be provided with the invisible olive-gray now in fashion, some antiquated khaki-colored uniforms of 1910 were being provided for our adornment. This arrangement met with no objection. The fact is, we are not wholly unaccustomed to wearing clothes of the fashion of 1910, and furthermore, while we have no desire to be conspicuous, some of us rather shrink from the idea of wearing invisible clothing, no matter how fashionable. So full of adventure is military life, even in its most elementary form. But after all I am not primarily a soldier: [am a human coral insect—that is to say, a university pro- fessor, before whom life stretches, as Steven- son said of another class, ‘long and straight and dusty to the grave.’’ I should like to be a volcanic being, shouldering up whole [39] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD islands at a heave; or even, if that could not be, perhaps engulfing one or two, reluctantly of course, now and then. Whereas it is my lot in life to labor long and obscurely be- neath the surface, to make the intellectual or historical structure of the universe solider by some infinitesimal increment, about which in itself nobody except my wife and me particu- larly cares. Sometimes, however, I repine a little and wish I were, say, a porpoise, splashing gaily along at the surface, and making a noise in the world. Once ina while, when 1 am going to sleep (for even a coral insect must some- times sleep), dreams float through my mind of sudden achievement, such as might make One a porpoise or better; and once one of these nearly came true. Judge how nearly. I was wandering through a half-subterranean Spanish chapel, fitly set with huge old mis- sals, dark altar-pieces, covered stalls, and quaint curios. Its dim recesses beckoned us on from one rich relic to another. Interest quickened. It seemed a place where anything [ 40 | THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE might be, awaiting only the expert eye of discovery. I had often fancied such a place, and finding in some dim corner of it a certain long-lost work of literature still remembered after a thousand years’ absence; somewhere in such a sleepy treasure-house it doubtless lay, enfolding within its moldering folios, not its quaint contents only, but fame and fortune for its finder. And look! Yonder, un- der a corner staircase, is a shelf of old books, large and small. You approach it with feigned indifference; here, if anywhere, will be your prize, a manuscript whose unique rarity will awaken two hemispheres. It 1s not among the ponderous tomes, of course; so you take them down first, postponing putting fortune to the decisive touch. But these small octavos have just the look of promise; they are thin, too, as it would be; and what period more likely for it than that sixteenth century to which they so obviously belong? Only the other day, a friend of mine who lives on our reef, and on a branch even more [41] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD recondite than mine, found among the un- catalogued antiques of an American museum the one long-lost Tel-el-Amarna tablet, which had disappeared almost as soon as it was discovered, and of which it was only known that it was probably in America. Thus may one be changed in a moment from polyp to porpoise, and be translated from the misty obscurity of the bottom to the stirring, dazzling, delightful surface of things. But after all, the plain truth is that ad- venture consists less in the experiences one ac- tually has than in the indefatigable expectan- cy with which one awaits them. Indeed, I sometimes fear that people must be divided into those who have adventures and those who appreciate them. And between the two the affinity for adventure is greater treasure than the experiencing of it. If we are pos- sessed of the affinity, adventure itself is, at most, just around the corner from us. This opens the life of adventure to all who crave it. What possibilities lie in merely crossing a street, for example! Someone remarked the [ 42] THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE other day as he dodged across among the motor-cars, ‘Why not take a chance now and then and lead a real life for a few minutes?’ I therefore recommend the life of adven- ture. It conceives each day as a fresh enter- prise, full of delightful possibilities and promise, and so preserves the wine of life from growing flat. Here is the secret of youth. The moral of Mr. Disraeli’s epigram is, ‘’ Be adventurous.’ [ 43 ] RY DQ DW DUO W WWD LY DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? even by our improved historical meth- ods, to recover the name of the clever in- dividual who, perhaps in the Stone Age or earlier, arrived at the principle that one and one make two. It is evidently too late to cor- rect him, or even to blame him adequately; and with a handicap of seventy or more cen- turies, one can hardly hope to undo the mis- chief he has done. Yet futile as the effort may prove, it is the purpose of these para- graphs to point out the shallow and delusive character of this hoary axiom, and the pre- carious nature of most of what has been built upon it. Our cave-dweller Newton may have based his epoch-making equation upon that even more erroneous formula, ‘‘One equals one,’’ [44] 1 is now, doubtless, too late to hope, DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? which had doubtless been invented—I will not say discovered—ages before his time. If not, he could have arrived at it by the simple device of subtracting one from each side of his own discovery—an easy achieve- ment for a mind so original and profound as His. Such a performance, indeed, assumes its result before arriving at it; but that is true of not a few of our most logical processes. And it may be true,. speaking quite abstractly, that one equals one. That is, one wholly imaginary unit, of a given size . and sort, equals one just such unit, of just such a sort and size, under identical condi- tions. This 1s what the mathematicians mean. It is only just to them to say so. The danger is that one will forget that one is playing with imaginary values and try to deal with real units on this principle. The cavern professor can have made no such blun- der. He knew that one wife was not equal to another, or one weapon to another, or one enemy to another. If he did not know this, his life was neither long nor happy. [ 45 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD Not that his formula had not a certain limited value. It might help him to keep count of his game, his children, or his day’s journeys. But it had no such value as it claimed. It was too broadly and loosely put. Even now, when men have been trying for millenniums to believe in it and make it true, its range of valid applicability is still very limited. For it carries with it a ficti- tious standardization of units, which breeds a host of misconceptions. In fact, it is pre- cisely as one reduces the application of this equation to narrower and narrower limits that one attains wisdom, culture, and char- acter. Scarcely had I reached this point in my re- flections, when the porter came to remind me that the time changed at Buffalo, and that, if I wished to wake at seven, I must do so at six. So false is it that six and one make seven. But, of course, the equation is valid only if One remains stationary. It is a survival from man’s immobile, semi-vegetable period. I was confiding these heresies to a skepti- [ 46 ] DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? cal friend, as we were passing a potato field. He challenged me at once: Did not one po- tato and one potato make two potatoes? But suppose one potato to be sweet and sound and large, and the other to be small and wilted and Irish. They are numerically, indeed, two potatoes, but only for arithmetical, not for culinary, purposes. And who cares for the arithmetical value of a potato? But if one and one make two, we have at once to ask, Two what? Two of whatever one is, doubtless. But which one? This is the heart of the error. One acre plus one acre makes two acres. But suppose one acre is the Isola Bella and the other is selected from the He du Diable. Or buildings. The Pennsyl- vania station and the Philadelphia city hall make two—large buildings. This forgets that one exhibits genius as well as magni- tude. Or statues: the Adams monument and the Bacchante—two statues certainly, per- haps two masterpieces; but that is not all, or even half. The things are incommensu- rable, and the sum total isa delusion. It has [ 47 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD no meaning or worth unless we are counting pieces for museum vigilance, or in prepara- tion for shipment. Even money, the final type of standardized unit evolved by our race in a last convulsive effort to make the old adage true, for all its failures—even money is not equal to the task. There is a man in California (of course he would be in California) who has to go every quarter to the bank and deposit a dividend of three hundred and fifty dollars, because once, to help a friend, he put five hundred dollars into that friend’s mine. Is the five hundred dollars I lost when my bank failed some yeats ago equal to his five hundred, and how much are they together? Yet my dollars were just as real and just as numerous as his. There was another five hundred dollars which was not in the bank but long since in- vested, in /another mine. \Yeta thatesumean mining stock never sends me toiling to the bank to deposit a quarterly dividend of three hundred and fifty dollars. Indeed, it does not function in my daily life at all, ex- [ 48 ] DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? cept to illustrate poignantly the disparity of dollars and of mining stocks. But financiers will say that this is com- paring dead dollars with living ones. Then let us deal fairly with both. Does the first five dollars I earned for teaching (tutoring a fellow-student in Assyrian, may heaven for- give me!) only equal the five dollars the bank occasionally allows me on an abandoned savings deposit? The former was a bow of promise, radiant harbinger of salary checks to come. The latter was a mere nothing, parsimoniously doled out to me by a soulless financial institution, which had not yet failed. Not even dead and departed dollars are equal each to each. The dollar or two you leave behind you in the dining-car is not equal to the same amount spent on witness- ing a play of Bernard Shaw’s. When I was a boy, I found a ten-cent piece under a bench in a deserted picnic ground. Let no one say that any other dime in my financial history equals that one. It was a symbol, not merely of value, but of romance, of which the find- [49 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD ing of lost treasure is one of the classical types. Dr. John Clifford once remarked that the difference between one man and another is very little, but that little is of very great importance. It 1s just that most important little that the equation loses sight of. It assumes that one man equals another, which is surely the dullest of human blunders. As soon as we identify our units, the equation’s absurdity appears. What is the sum of Mr. Hoover and von Tirpitz? We can only say, Mr. Hoover and von Tirpitz make two liter- ate male human beings. But this is false, for each is more than a literate male human being. What we have been forced to do is to reduce both units to their common terms; and our equation ought, if it is to be true, to read, “Mr. Hoover and von Tirpitz make two liter- ate male human beings, plus all the elements that distinguish each of them from the Othersy There are actually people so convinced that one experience is like another that they [50] DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? have lost that exquisite thing, the capacity for surprise, and go through life in a state of virtual insensibility. Some of us, who be- guiled our wartime evenings by appearing in moving-picture theaters disguised as those prophets of publicity, the Four-Minute Men, know that no two of these adventures are alike. Though all managers be polite and au- diences patient, yet something always marks the evening with distinction. CI do not, of course, refer to our speaking.) It would be a pity to grow callous and lose one’s sense for the variety of these new Arabian Nights. I went into them, indeed, with my senses sharpened by a remark of our publicity chair- man: “If any of you gets heckled or shot,”’ said he, ‘‘notify the Publicity Committee.’’ This personal interest in my fate on the part of a perfect stranger I found very moving. About the same time the London Times glad- dened us by reporting, with pardonable ex- aggeration, that the Four-Minute Men were each to make ten speeches daily! The pow- ers of the American speech-maker are fully [sr] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD recognized abroad; he is the automatic among orators. | I shall not soon forget my emotions as I presented myself at my first appointment and sought the manager’s face. From the dark- ness of the spacious interior I caught the mu- sic of an organ playing a dirge, and I gained the impression that a funeral was in progress. On entering, I perceived that it was in pros- pect only, for the action of the drama seemed to be moving inevitably toward one. I sat down close to the screen, upon which a hun- gry and restless lion alternated with a tooth- some child of the softer sex, in tropic garb. I became at once so absorbed in trying to com- prehend the situation that I straightway for- got the four heads into which my speech, like the river of Eden, was divided. A flash uncompromisingly labeled ‘‘The End”’ awoke me to the realization that I, and not the toothsome child, was the victim of the occasion; and with the first letters of ‘The United States Government Presents’ ’— I was mounting the narrow stair and facing [52] DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? the terrible public. They did not at once at- tack me, and with a conciliatory sentence I began. Scarce was I embarked upon my first river when a star-shell gracefully ascended from the first balcony, and I knew no more. They had turned the spotlight on me. I for- got my second head and desperately snatched up Hiddekel to replace it, trembling to recall that I had promised them four: four heads in four minutes. What if I had lost Number 2 forever? No, it comes back to me: Gihon! What matters the transposition? War tre- makes geography; and so on to Euphrates and my closing volley. Even now the lion did not attack, but spared me, rubbing his paws together in satisfaction. Such was my first escape. I found myself one winter night pushing my way into a theater from which an aco- lyte was expelling arecreant boy. A crowd of people standing before the doors showed that the house was already full. It had room for six hundred spectators, and they were all there. Five hundred of them seemed to be [53] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD little boys, and one hundred of these had their caps on. Little boys compose the one element in an audience which will not brook neglect. If they are present, they insist upon your addressing your remarks to them. I had learned this, and acted accordingly. Little boys are not ungrateful, and they are in a po- sition to acknowledge a kindness, for they are masters of the art of applause. These five hundred little boys recompensed me hand- somely for my brevity, with a storm of cheers and piercing whistles. How different would have been my fate had I overlooked their highnesses and addressed my remarks to the grown-ups; or had I, like a certain Four- Minute Man I wot of, protracted my dis- course to nine minutes! I shudder to think what those little boys would have done to me. We were talking ships that week, and to my great satisfaction I had two inquirers after the meeting was over. One was a me- chanic who wished to enter a shipyard. The other wanted some inside information on [54] DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? whether the following Monday would be heatless, as reported. Yet ours is a Spartan discipline. The other night I descended from the platform with the warm consciousness of having done my best. In the foyer I met the courteous manager. “I want you to meet Mr. Bump- er,’ said he genially. ‘Mr. Bumper is one of your men.’ Mr. Bumper greeted me without enthusi- asm. ‘You spoke six and a half minutes,’’ said he reproachfully. The manager came to my relief. ‘* Well, he put it over,’ said he comfortingly. ‘‘No man, I don’t care who he is, can tell to a min- ute how long he’s talking. But when they talk for nine minutes, I tell you, I lose mon- ey. | I withdrew, crestfallen. They could not realize what an achievement it is for a pro- fessor to close in six and a half minutes. Sometimes we are permitted to speak in theaters of the “‘legit’’ type, and as I was about to appear in one of the largest of these, [55] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD I asked the obliging doorman about the dis- tribution of his audience. He assured me that they were all over the house, but that the calisthenics were so good that speaking in it was easy. This left me in some doubt as to what might be required of me in the acro- batic line. A picturesque youth, in a caftan and afghan, or some such casual arabesques, conveyed me across the stage to a wicket- gate in the steel curtain, through which I was propelled into the presence of the aston- ished public for my brief act. You remember Denry making his first speech—how hun- dreds and hundreds of eyes were fixed pierc- ingly upon him, and after what seemed hours, he heard someone talking. It was himself. There is a third form of dramatic art to which in the plenitude of my powers I finally attained. It is vaudeville. With some anxi- ety I looked over the bill in the evening pa- per, to see what the competition would be, and noted with the greatest interest that it included ‘‘Jenks’s Mules.’’ Solicitous friends warned me not to get behind these animals; [56] DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? but when I arrived in the wings, they were stamping and rolling about the stage, and no sooner had the curtain fallen upon their antics than the stage-manager cried sharply, ‘Come on; this way! You're next!’’ I perceived that he was addressing me, so, while he escorted my predecessors down- stairs, I set about entertaining his public; and I confess to a certain inward exultation when I saw that the really elegant audience gave me the same polite and absorbed attention they had given to Mr. Jenks’s protégés. It is something to know that one can hold the pace even for four minutes with such accom- plished quadrupeds. But could I have matched their Elberfeld cousins as successfully in square root? At our weekly luncheons we exchanged adventures in eloquence and accumulated courage for the week’s engagements. One of our most imperturbable comrades was tfe- cently speaking in a downtown theater when he noticed that the audience seemed to be looking past him at the curtain behind and [57] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD above his head. They next began to point to it, and finally a friend in the audience cried out, Lookout; Jim! He didisomandties came awate that the steel curtain had been silently descending like the bed-canopy in Conrad's story, and had stopped only a few inches above his head. It reminded me of a service on shipboard, when the minister's white tie broke from its moorings and worked gradually up toward the top of his collar, while we were all dreading the moment when it should pass the summit and dangle about his neck. The point of resemblance is per- haps slight. [t must be the speaker’s uncon- sciousness of a peril which all his hearers saw but were powerless to avert. Publicity is, of course, the very breath of our nostrils, and the other day the talk turned upon reaching the magazines. A youthful comrade across the table caught at the sugges- tion. ‘If you will get the names of some that will take our material,’’ said he eagerly, ‘‘I will write the articles myself.’’ I really did not know how to thank him. [58 |] DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? One of our recent subjects was binoculars, which we asked everybody to turn in for the use of the navy. We also requested the loan of telescopes, spy-glasses, and sextants. In response to these appeals countless binocu- lars flowed in to the appointed dépét, and with them a mysterious instrument which our civilian authorities turned over to the chief optician of the city for diagnosis. He unhesitatingly pronounced it a genuine sea- going sextant. So true it is that we do not always recognize the answer to our prayers. One and one make two! It has a mathe- matical sound, but we have in this case dragged mathematics whither it would not. It tacitly reduces all men and events to their lowest common terms and, disregarding their differentia, tranquilly proceeds with its meaningless computation. It is the formula of the inexact, the index of All the world’s coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb. The old vulgar effort to reduce all men to a dead level of uninterest, and all experiences [59] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD to a dead level of commonplace, finds its justification here. We must not lose the varied flavors of life. Above all, we must not lose discrimination of personality. That would be sacrilege. We have snatched up a mathematical abstraction, true in its limited sphere, and applied it far beyond its proper field, to our own misleading. The truth is, we must count less. Count- ing seems a short way to reality. It has its place. But the deeper values of life are not so glibly determined. To this is perhaps due the widespread suspicion of statistics. We distrust these large figures because we know that from every unit covered by them there have been clipped off its distinctive traits, which are not always unessential to the problem. At the bottom of all statistics lies an illusion: that one and one make two. It is precisely when they are combined that this fundamental unlikeness of units has its most far-reaching consequences. Chem- ically, one and one may make an explosion. Socially, one and one may make a scene. - [ 60 | DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? Spiritually, one and one may make a salva- HiOuUMeW DOU wast ititiat said) AY skit) tora skin’’? He thought that one man was like another, and that one and one made two. Hitherto I have reasoned. Let me appeal to authority. The commander of the fortress of Verdun was entertaining some literary visitors. The talk turned upon the Germans. “Ah! the Germans!’’ said he. ‘They are not like us. They think that one and one make two.” [61 ] QDR. QV QV. QY QV QD QI QI QW. LN. QE THE HOUSE OF THE MIND an allegory on the Castle of Mansoul. Houses are more fashionable than castles nowadays, and minds, I fear, than souls, and it is time that someone produced a treatment of the House of Man’s Mind. It must perhaps be reluctantly admitted that not every mind merits description under the figure of a house. For some conventional intelligences the Flat of the Mind would be an adequate symbol. Yet at its best estate the mind is like some spacious mansion with vatied chambers, Victorian or Colonial, but not without a very comfortable modern wing for practical convenience. For the mind is no unalterable house, but a developing struc- ture in which successive historical periods are reflected, just as they are in the material [ 62. | |: was John Bunyan who long ago wrote THE HOUSE OF THE MIND fabrics of old seats of learning, in the remod- eling of whose very buildings one can read the history of their times. Only yesterday, the great collegiate houses of the mind were putting on new fronts and adding new wings, to meet the needs of war. Perhaps a tent would be a fitter symbol of these martial additions, for in the autumn of 1918 the universities were military camps. In hundreds of colleges the first academic as- sembly that year was ‘' At the Flag Pole, at 11:00 A.M., October 1.’ At that hour, in all these little sisters to West Point, the mem- bers of the Student Army Training Corps, one hundred and fifty thousand strong, “‘ pledged their lives to the honor and defense of their country.’’ We felt ourselves in a different world, even from that of last spring. We had given up our favorite courses, our seminars and select groups of graduate students. We were ransacking our past and digging up some less rarefied studies in which we were once, we dimly remembered, counted proficient. The happiest man in this new order was the [ 63 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD one who could turn his back upon the spe- cialty of his mature years and teach the mili- tary Freshman what the army told us he needed most to learn. Our colleagues in law and divinity went about disguised as professors of trigonometry and surveying, to which matters, it now ap- peared, they had devoted their studious youth. Others of us, fearful that such mathematical instruction as we could give might pave the way for military disaster, volunteered for less devious subjects—American history, French, and English composition. One learned doctor of divinity, on under- taking to renew his youth by imparting trig- onometry to the troops, ventured timidly to inquire about the textbook. His mathemati- cal Mentor launched into a glowing account of the work (which it turned out he had written), declaring that it read like a novel and was as simple as a child. My friend has- tened to provide himself with this paragon of textbooks. The first sentence that caught his eye was this: ‘‘The method pursued in [ 64 | THE HOUSE OF THE MIND this book is purely heuristic.’ This had a re- assuring sound, but disclosed nothing definite about the method save that it was clearly no ordinary one. As the paragon contained no glossary, and the large dictionary was not at hand, he took counsel with his erudite neighbors. Some weakly suggested that it must be a misprint. Others, under Gallic in- fluence, hazarded that the method was to study the book only so long as the student found pleasure in so doing. This interpreta- tion tallied with the conviction general among instructors that study is now a much more pleasurable process than it was when they were students. The great reading-rooms of the Library were halls for supervised study for the corps, each presided over by an officer. For this and other duties, an initiated friend informed me, we were to be reinforced with thirty-seven officers. ‘‘Real officers?’ I queried doubtful- ly. “‘Real officers,’’ he replied a shade stern- ly. But he was related to Stonewall Jackson and is not appalled by the atmosphere of war. [65 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD It was a stirring sight of an evening to see the companies marching from their several bar- tracks across the moonlit quadrangles to study-hour in those big reading-rooms, with no sound but the regular beat of marching feet and an occasional sharp word of com- mand. The flag-raising was, indeed, an impres- sive occasion. Together our academic and military chieftains, across a hollow square flanked by serried masses of civilians, con- fronted fifteen of the real officers, backed by the Technical Corps in uniform, while a mixed multitude of prospective S.A.T.C. men brought up the rear. ‘‘ Technical Corps forward—How!"’ shouted the commanding officer. But the Technical Corps for some reason, perhaps for fear of treading on the fifteen real officers, did not advance. ‘‘Come right forward, Technical Corps,’’ continued the major soothingly; and the Technical Corps, thus encouraged, advanced with all soldierly propriety a few steps nearer the seat of authority. The bugler blew ‘‘To the Col- [ 66 ] THE HOUSE OF THE MIND ors,’ the flag slowly rose, the officers saluted, the soldiers stood at attention, the civilians took off their hats. Militarization had set in. The divinity halls were barracks, and so was the football stand. For a time the foot- ball team was without a habitation, and the Old Man was desolate. The men’s clubhouse was turned over to the Y.M.C.A. The wom- en's clubhouse was a hostess-house, and the deans of women, martially dispossessed of their office rooms, sought temporary shelter in Classics. In a corner of one of the quad- rangles is a building modeled on St. John’s garden front at Oxford—a gray stone thing of mullioned oriel windows, half hid in clambering ivies. In our upheaval, this mel- low and solid fabric became a hut, thus re- versing the process applied to ancient Rome by a certain gentleman who found it brick and left it marble. So was our sanctuary violated, so our fair college turned, not to a hospital, perhaps, but to a military school. It was all reflected in our new vocabulary. The clubhouse had [ 67 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD become a hut. The men’s halls were bar- racks. The dining-hall was ‘‘mess,’’ not to say “chow.” We marched to class (now known, alas, as ‘‘school’’) and recited stand- ing at attention. Mess, drill, school, quar- ters—in these four life was comprised. The freedom, leisufe, and idleness of academic days gave place to the fully prescribed rou- tine of military training. Our sole period of repose was night, which began with taps and ended with what a Freshman described to me as ‘revelry,’ thus casting new light upon Byron's famous line, There was a sound of revelry by night. Truly we were upheaved. You rose up blithely in the morning, a mere professor of patristics, with not a care in the world and with very few students. You lay down weari- ly at night, a Y.M.C.A. secretary burdened with the responsibility of a large and crowd- ed hut, with a flourishing canteen, anda staff of three secretaries each more efficient than yourself. And all through no fault of yours; [ 68 | THE HOUSE OF THE MIND but solely because the real secretary’s pass- ports were unexpectedly ready and he had left for France. The military transformation was not, in- deed, wholly free from minor inconveniences. The first night that guards were set about our Campus Martius a surprising number of sus- picious strangers fell into the mulitary net. Library attendants, setting out for home as usual after taps, found their ordinary egress barred by zealous sentries, and were ordered to the other end of the quadrangles. There they encountered an even more resolute senti- nel, who improved the opportunity to ad- minister to them an extended reprimand. A zoOlogist who had worked late over his experiments was not a little astonished to be halted on the confines of the campus, and narrowly missed exchanging the security of his laboratory for that of the guardhouse. To enter the academic. precincts was even more difficult. The janitorial night-shift, coming on for its priestlike task of pure ablu- tion, found the quadrangles like the be- [69 ] pe Pee | er. & ES Y 4950 SPOT a Ete, 2 ame SP f os THINGS SEEN AND HEARD leaguered city of Scripture, straitly shut up; none went out and none came in. With such custodians we were surely in no danger of surprise. But it is not a little disconcerting toward the close of a recitation, when the notes of a bugle float in at the open windows, to see your whole class rise as one man and rush from the room, the hindmost, as he dis- appears, crying over his shoulder, ‘‘He’s _ blowing ‘Retreat’!’’ Not the least benefit of all this upheaval is that it in a measure relieves us from the bondage of books. So short a time ago we cared for nothing but the reading and the writing of books. In this time of war-mak- ing the vanity of such pursuits has become clear. A statistical friend informs me that modern publishers turn out almost a hundred thousand different books a year. One shud- ders to think how many they refuse. The most extraordinary thing about this exces- sive book-production is that we get on with reading so few of them. The fact is, reading books is not the wholly beneficent exercise it [70 ] THE HOUSE OF THE MIND was formerly considered. For one thing, it begets in one a negative and commonplace attitude of mind, and unfits one for free self- expression. I once knew a man who had read so many books that he was quite incapable of independent thought. It is like being led about by the hand until one cannot get around in any other way. But in the presence of war, actions speak louder than words, and practical studies are to the fore. There was little of the familiar casual attitude until lately fashionable with the modern undergraduate. For all the dis- tractions of orderly duty and supervised study, the Freshman of October, 1918, made a serious business of trying to be both stu- dent and soldier. There was a spirit abroad among them which, as one Freshman wrote, ‘put a new face on the old saying, ‘Gott mit Huns.’’’ Nothing better illustrates this new spirit than the behavior of the women stu- dents. They militarized themselves, and in their Woman Student Training Corps formed an organization with drills, officers, uniforms, Bac! THINGS SEEN AND HEARD a wat-service pledge, and a muster-roll almost equal to that of the localS.A.T.C. itself. Never was academic transformation swift- er or more complete, and never did one hold shorter sway. For six weeks to a day this ex- traordinary experiment linked us to history. It was no small satisfaction to be teaching men, some of whom, as we all believed in October, would soon be officers in the new army. Then came the Armistice. But those morning and evening bugles, and those col- umns in khaki which made the college a castle, will not soon be forgotten even in the haunts of ancient peace. If these academic houses have been camps, the individual house of Man’s Mind has been in the way of towering again into its old lofty proportions of the Castle of Mansoul, and marks of this period will long be with us in stouter walls and higher turrets. Others not quite so near the scene of conflict have at least forsaken the rich and quiet chambers of the mind to build and occupy new quarters suited to the hour. [72] THE HOUSE OF THE MIND He can have given little thought to his own mind who does not see in it a complex structure, with many rooms that are far from modern. Everybody, one observes, is orthodox in some phase of his thinking; that isthere ate some! old, rooms in his) mind which he has not yet remodeled. Nor are these older chambers of the mind tenantless. In many a one of them dwells the spirit of some ancestor who added it to our mental establishment. For the mind is in a measure an inheritance, however much we may be responsible for the furniture we put into it. It is partly the society of these old fellows that makes these chambers of the mind at- tractive or otherwise. Who has not felt, in moments of sheer enjoyment, the disapprov- ing presence of some stiff old Puritan fore- father to whom all pleasure was anathema, and has not forthwith fled to some sunnier mental spaces where he could not follow? For these subtenants of ours, as if bedridden, cannot leave the quarters they have be- queathed to us. It would not be possible to [73] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD get them all down to the dining-room to- gether, to devour, say, a good book with you. And if it could be done, probably no single book would hold the interest of all these diversities. What with construction and addition, some minds come to be of palatial propor- tions, richly furnished by reading, travel, and observation, looking out through many windows upon fair prospects and far hori- zons. They are affluent, tranquil, settled abodes, in which the occupant lives busily, yet at ease. Their cupboards and storerooms quickly yield what you are in search of, in the way of fact, opinion, or reaction. It is not alone that they contain much, but their contents seem to be so conveniently and accessibly disposed. These are the palatial minds, the houses of the mental aristocracy. They have many chambers, some looking westward over the fruitful past, but others to the east and the expectant future. For these houses are not mere treasuries of old values. Their occupants will show you many [74] THE HOUSE OF THE MIND a new acquisition, with all the zest of the discoverer. Only these have not destroyed the proportion and perspective of the pos- sessor, or made him forgetful of his other goods of longer standing. In minds like these you can wander for hours, finding new treas- ures, interests, and outlooks. We stay inthem with a sense of luxury, and we leave them with a feeling of deprivation. One sometimes finds his way into minds less spacious and well-ordered. Some are small but exquisitely furnished, and with their one or two rooms make delightful visiting. They have a genial atmosphere that is lacking in many a grander house. Whatever be the origin or extent of the mental habitations that we occupy, for their furniture we are responsible. A common scheme of mental furnishing consists of a few prejudices inconspicuously placed where the chance visitor will stumble over them. Once, as I was playing the fourth hole of a western golf course, a man driving by in a wagon stopped to offer me a golf-ball that he had [75] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD found, and pressed it upon me as a free gift until I could not very well refuse. He then invited me to enter his mind, which I did. It was not large, but it was a busy place, elabo- rately furnished with prejudices of the most substantial sort. He expounded to me the war, which, it-developed, was nothing less than the irrepressible conflict between Ro- manism and Free-Masonry. The war has led to a remarkable airing out of the cupboards of the mind, and some very quaint furniture has incidentally been exposed to neighborly observation. Not only in the amount and arrangement of their furniture, but in its character, minds differ very much. Some admit nothing but the latest thing, and think shame to show anything as old as last season. Others exhib- it only second-hand articles. In the bric-a- brac of such a mind you encounter a host of jokes and anecdotes which bring back your lost youth. One sometimes meets men whose minds are furnished exclusively in the style of the eighteenth century—and unfortunate- [76] THE HOUSE OF THE MIND ly not always with the genuine antiques. And what a treatise might be written upon mental housekeeping: how windows should be kept clean, the furniture frequently shift- ed and overhauled, and grievances aired as little as possible and only when nobody is about. The most gracious aspect of a house is its hospitality. Some guests we admit to certain chambers but never think of entertaining in others. They would not understand or enjoy them. So it comes about that the same mind shows very different sides to different visi- tors. One you admit at once to the living- room; another never gets farther than the re- ception-room. A third has but to show him- self to be ushered into the intimacy of the garden or the study; and a fourth may come in without ringing, and you will cheerfully take him with you over the whole house from attic to cellar. For friendship is to have the latchkey of another’s mind. It is clearly the business of the mind to build it more stately mansions as the swift [77] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD seasons roll. For the mind cannot remain fixed, no matter what the Psalmist thought about the heart. Ourselves, like everything and everybody else, must change. Here we have been misled by what we may call the delusive fixity of art. Art has beguiled us and we have been beguiled. In all its forms it has conspired to create in us the conviction that life, when it has attained a certain es- tate, becomes stationary. Everything about art is calculated to give one that settled im- pression. It has taught us to expect fixity, whereas life shows us only endless process and function, to which in mind and body we must conform. Our minds are filled with these images of att, and upon them we unconsciously frame our thinking. But they are not real. Even the realities for which they stand are con- stantly changing. Your friends and associ- ates of last year are now lieutenants, cap- tains, majors, colonels. They are not the same. The very nations are not the same. What were Ukrainia and Czechoslovakia [78 ] THE HOUSE OF THE MIND when you last went abroad? Can the mind then remain the same? It is a painful busi- ness living ina house that is being remodeled, and doubly so when it is the house of the mind. But in a world of new forces and changed faces, when a new thoroughfare is being opened through the mental property of each of us, it is not enough to withdraw into our mental habitations and shut the door. We must change our minds. [79] QQ? QP. QGPIVWOCO WW WL LY THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES like, profess to find great inspiration in the spirit of their sires. Just as they are fainting under the burdens of life, that mys- terious influence comes to their relief, and rouses their better selves. They seem to have no difficulty in recognizing the spirit, and gather from it just what they want. It is all very simple and practical. My own experience is very different. Not that I am unconscious of the persistent influ- ence of my sires. On the contrary, my difh- culty is in escaping from them. They seem determined to direct my activities as well as their own. Worst of all, there is no unanim- ity among them as to what I am to do in this or that situation. Indeed, my relation to my affairs is often reduced to that of the chair- [ 80 | LE literary persons, poets and the THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES man of a somewhat turbulent committee, each member of which is trying to impose his will upon the rest. If he succeeds, I have the disagreeable duty not only of carrying out his wishes, but of trying to reconcile the disaffected majority to the course adopted. It is this mutual disagreement among my sires that I find so harassing. They are to begin with of the most di- verse types and tastes. I learned the other day that a Dutchman dislikes to do anything in a hurry, and I instantly recognized a lead- ing trait of the Center of my personal Reichs- tag. This consists of a group of quiet but de- termined characters very well satisfied with the world as it is, very reluctant about tak- ing any new steps, and very slow in taking any steps at all. With this extreme conserva- tism about exertion of any sort, these worth- ies combine a fanatically obstinate adhesion to any course they may have entered upon, even when it has shown itself to be unwise and impossible. They do not know how to let go. If they have once begun a thing, they [81] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD will hang on to the bitter end, no matter how clear the folly of such persistence may become even to themselves. These persons are thoroughly Dutch in their aversion for doing things in haste. They prefer to look a piece of work all over before they attempt it. Circumspection, not to say suspicion, 1s their way. There is nothing of the experimentalist about them. They cannot work in a hurry. If they are forced to do so, they usually steal back to the job afterward and do it over. The sire who not infrequently compels these reputable Dutchmen to this humiliat- ing course is the enfant terrible of the whole company. I have often wished I could identi- fy him more definitely, but as I have known so few of these gentlemen personally, I can only conjecture that he was an Irishman who flourished in the state of New York about a century ago. It is he who throws the Dutch contingent into utter confusion by rising very early in the morning (a thing they de- test), and buoyantly beginning some vision- ary but laborious undertaking which they [ 82 | THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES have afterward, thanks to their tempera- mental obstinacy, to carry to completion. This Irish member is, in fact, as hasty and precipitate as his compeers are cautious and slow, and the most painful ructions neces- sarily ensue. He is pliant, sanguine, and credulous. He exercises an influence upon the common counsels out of all proportion to his numbers. When his persuasive loquacity prevails over the sounder sense of the Low Countries faction, I find myself consenting to give lectures, write articles, and even lend money. For these excesses the Dutch after- ward castigate me cruelly, while my Irish friend as often as not absents himself alto- gether from the labors into which he has be- trayed me. I think it must be this same Irish chap who is so negligent about putting away my books, tools, and clothes. He once, coming home in a bad frame of mind, mislaid a valu- able article of mine, which has never been re- covered. The Dutch group generously waived their traditional grievance and joined loyally [ 83 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD in the search; in fact, they are still searching, but the Irishman and I know that it will never be found, and he sometimes gets quite gloomy over it, for he is of course a moody and mercurial individual. This untidiness of my Irish relative is in some measure offset by the efforts of those indomitable Hollanders who have a positive mania for picking up and putting things to rights. They go around after him and do all that man can do to gather up his scattered effects and fold and put away his clothes. If he carelessly throws an empty envelope away in the street, they will oblige me to turn back and pick it up. Once in a while, of course, something escapes them. He comes in late and leaves his trousers in a heap on the radiator, to their unspeakable disgust when they find them there next morning. Yet the Irishman is a good-natured, well- meaning chap, and my friends decidedly pre- fer him to his Dutch confréres. He 1s a soci- able, talkative being, and I try to take him along when Iam confronted with a dinner or [84 |] aes EURPUSTORMOUR STRES some less formidable social engagement. He is generally glad to get away from the Dutch- men, whose meticulous methods distress him sorely; and if I can keep him from taking offense at some fancied slight or other dur- ing the soup or fish course (he is fearfully sensitive), and can restrain his loquacity after the roast appears, things go fairly well. Anyway it is better than taking the Dutch- men out in company, for they care nothing about it and seldom do anything but frown stupidly upon the scene. The Irishman, how- ever, is profoundly romantic and sentimen- tal, and loves to relate commonplace experi- ences of mine as if they were his own. He 1s, in fact, decidedly facetious, but if anyone ventures to say so, he is fearfully dashed, and lapses into a moody silence. Between the deadly uniformity of the Dutchmen’s behavior and the complete lack of it in the Irishman’s, I am sometimes wea- ried out, and I take refuge from the strife of tongues in the society of a very different ancestor of mine. He is an Englishman, and [85 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD I am very much afraid he would qualify as a Junker. But he is an easy-going, phlegmatic individual, and he never makes me uncom- fortable. In fact, he seems to know how to make both himself and me very comfortable, indeed. He is a past master at taking his ease; there is nothing he likes so much to take. He never bothers much with the con- tentions of the others; but if either of them accomplishes anything he is as pleased over it as though he had done it himself. In fact, he seems to think he has. He rarely goes out into society; he prefers to have his friends come to see him, and sends the Irishman to return their visits. When he entertains, which is about the only activity he indulges in, he prefers to have the lesser breeds kept in the background, leaving him to do the honors. He has no accomplishments of any sort, except that he is a good listener, and likes to start his guests on what he wants to hear and they want to say. He has a sort of stolid family pride, as though he were de- scended from the Plantagenets, though there [ 86 ] EOS PUK EES ORVOO RI STRES is no evidence at all for any such descent. His highest faculty is that of savoring the good of life. He does not frantically pursue it; he simply knows it when he gets it, and knows how to appreciate it. I hope to spend my time increasingly in his society as I grow old. It may be that some people manage the spirits of their sires less democratically than I do mine; that they domineer over them. At least, [am well aware that most people seem to have no difficulty with them. Perhaps they give little attention to the voices of these worthies, and are satisfied to rule their spirits with an autocratic hand. But anyone who is conscious of the diverse personal strains within him must sometimes feel that he is the seat of a sort of senior republic, over which he is called to preside, and the man- dates of which he is bound to perform. And sO we become each of us, at his best estate, a little parable of democracy. I cannot boast a multiple personality, nor have I ever been of pathological interest to [87 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD psychologists, yet I sometimes wonder if I am any more than just one of my forefathers after another. They are like the Officer of the Day, successively captain of my soul. We know, of course, very little about most of those through whom the gift of life has come down to us. But when we look back upon those of them we have known and through our aunts and uncles dimly see the forms of others, we see enough often to recognize in their behavior somewhat characteristic re- actions of our own. I wonder whether if we could really know our forebears for two hun- dred years back even, we would not find in that goodly company of perhaps two hun- dred and fifty people most of our most valued personal traits. One or another of them, I feel sure, would exhibit the same indolence or energy, the same physical inertia and men- tal activity, or physical energy and mental reluctance, the same readiness or procrastina- tion, the same love of hardship or of ease, the same instinctive propensity to get under the world’s burdens or to let the other fellow [ 88 | THE SPIRITS OF OUR CSIRES walk the floor, the same restless passion for travel or the same dread of removal as of its greatest example, death. The plain truth is we are shockingly like our sires, and not al- ways only the best of them either, and tele- phones and automobiles have altered their fundamental traits far less than we fondly think. Of course, the sheer numerousness of one’s progenitors if one reckons far enough back reduces this to the mere commonplace of human nature. I am a poor statistician, but has not someone remarked that everybody living today is related, distantly, of course, to almost everybody that was living when Troy fell or Rome was founded? But my race memories are not, like Mr. Jack Lon- dons, Of aAtcmotc and yatavistic soft. ble could recall swinging from limb to limb with the tree-people. I am speaking of our more proximate ancestors from whom we may sup- pose that we more characteristically derive. And my contention is that these worthies live again in our behavior, and while we go about [ 89 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD as we suppose thinking our own thoughts and minding our own affairs, we are really most of the time repeating their sacrifices or indulgences, their ambitions or caprices. This must be why we so often, in fancy, glance down long avenues of existence we know we shall never enter ourselves. To this unassimilated complexity of ancestors is due, in part, that interior maladjustment which is the great drawback about being a child. It is partly that we in our untrained youth can conceive a great many things quite beyond our powers of execution; but mainly that our ancestors from Adam to Paterfamilias are still at war in our members, in a sort of spirit- ual Armageddon. It is chaos and revolution, until the warring factions come to an equilib- rium. The more I reflect upon my progenitors and their respective contributions to what I consider my temperament, the more fervent- ly I wish I might have known them more widely and well. Not that I would blame them, still less praise them. But it might [ 90 ] THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES help me to understand myself a little better. I know a man of so ancient a family that his principal ancestors for quite four hundred years are well known to him. Such familiar- ity must make it easy to catalogue every passing trait of the rising generation, not to say of one’s own wayward spirit. ‘““How strange Gwendolen is today!’’ ‘‘ Well, they say the maternal grandmother of the fourth marchioness was always like that.’’ This sort of thing certainly has its dangers. Some- one has explained the genius of Mr. Winston Churchill (Britannicus) for military strategy by his descent from the Prince of Command- ers who went to the War in Flanders. I have even been told that the second Duke of Well- ington believed military genius to be his birthright, although he betrayed no signs of such an endowment. But most of us know most of our lineage chiefly through their inward survivals in our degenerate selves. Perhaps we are freer so, and not less happy. I have read of an an- cient relative of mine who in 1665 offended [91] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD another loyal subject of the crown, by ‘charging him to be a lyer, and that he had stolen his kidd,’’ and he was called upon by a Colonial justice to pay twenty pounds damages or apologize. Now Roger, I doubt not, was a man of spirit, but he apologized. Is not he that-ruleth his spirit greater than he that taketh a city? Why not capitalize our ancestors? Their capability must in essence be at our disposal. We ‘have it in us,’ as we say. Here is our equipment for the exigencies of life. If the day is fair and not a sail in sight, pipe all hands on deck to paint and polish, or aloft to mend the rigging. If a pirate appears on the weather bow, clear the decks for action and call stout Uncle Anthony, who fell in the Indian mutiny, to the quarter-deck. Is Cleo- patra’s barge coming down the river? Get the lubbers below and have the Irishman up to show the gentleman he is. Yes, individu- ally they have their uses. And in propor- tion as we consciously or not get our spiritu- al household disciplined and responsive, so [ 92] THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES that each will instinctively present himself when he is needed, we accomplish our own individuality. It lies in the variations pos- sible for each of us. We differ not so much in character as in our peculiar combinations of characters, and in the ones we let predomi- nantly control us. This is why some people are so kaleidoscopic. The adepts say the mind is like a cake of ice—or shall we more nobly say an iceberg?—mostly submerged in unconsciousness. The more dense of us natu- rally sink lower, floating as it were all but awash in the unconscious. Obviously it mat- ters much which of our characters we wear uppermost, and sometimes it becomes very desirable that the iceberg should topple completely over and expose a fresh surface to the air. Versatility consists in changing guard now and then and occasionally letting our Celtic; Gallic, and Teutonic ancestors out to have their say—within reason. It is not as individuals, however, but collectively that I most prize this garrison of ancestral spirits holding the fortress of [93 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD Mansoul. If you attend a hearing at the City Hall and the assistant corporation coun- sel rebukes you, and the billboard attorneys berate you as a busybody because your muni- cipal interest extends beyond your own door- step, and underlings bellow at you as though you were deaf, and hirelings of monopoly shoot out the lip at you and gnash upon you with their teeth, you wither a little under the universal disapprobation. You feel strangely alone. Such ts the lot of the mere private citizen in the stronghold of his repre- sentatives. You never realized before how private a citizen you were. Now at length you know yourself for a single individual and hardly that. But just as you feel your back is to the wall, reinforcements arrive. Knowledge of your danger has reached the spirits of your sires and up from below they come swarming to your relief. An individual only? You are much more than that. You are a whole tribe. The life of ancient nations is gathered up in you, and this collective con- sciousness Carries annoyance and isolation [94] THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES down before it by sheer weight of numbers. The forces that threatened your spirit dwin- dle to their normal proportions, and their blustering voices sink to a plaintive buzz. Your ancestors have delivered you, not by their renown, but simply by their multipli- city of attitudes and points of view, which puts your momentary panic into its true per- spective. But no reflections upon this subject would be complete which did not include the mat- ter of spiritual disinheritance. We all know those figures in fiction who harshly cut off offending heirs with a shilling. What shall be thought of those forebears of mine who were financiers and money-makers who re- fuse to participate in the activities of my personal Duma and systematically absent themselves from its proceedings? If one of them would but condescend to take his turn at the supervision of my affairs! I would guarantee that no wastrel ne’er-do-weel of the shadowy company should squander the proceeds of his efforts. I remember hearing of [95 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD one of them who at some troubled epoch lost ten thousand pounds in the fall of stocks ina single day. But what a man to have had all those pounds! He must have gotten them somehow. They do not seem so colossal ~ today, but in the days of the Four Georges—! It must have been Napoleon’s activities that beared the market, which reminds me that it was Wilhelm II whose going forth to war broke my bank. There is encouragement in this. Evidently I am in my modest measure in the same financial succession with my an- cestor, at least as far as war losses are con- cerned. Or was it in 1793 when the death of Louis XVI sent consols tumbling that my poor grandsire lost his myriad Louis? At any fate, it is not just to transmit to helpless posterity the credulity which loses money without the Midas touch which conjures it together. But perhaps he did in the days of my in- considerate childhood lift up his thrifty voice in the wilderness of my soul and find no re- sponse, and so subside so far as I was con- [ 96 ] THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES cerned forever. Maybe the fault was mine. Certainly others of our own blood have fal- len heir to qualities we brothers and sisters of theirs are strangers to. We look with won- der at their affinity for responsibility or ac- tion. They are out in the ways of men while we in a chimney corner sit dreaming over a book. What has been left out of our makeup? An ancestor, of course. There is an ances- tor missing. Either he has fallen overboard through our neglect, or he was loitering ashore and never shipped with us at all. Have I seemed to speak lightly of our pro- genitors? But would it become me to detail their finer qualities which I detect at work within my complex ego? Yet one saying of one of them I must approve, and carry with me to my dying day, when I propose more than ever to recall it. He was an old man, dying among the New England hills where he had spent his life, and as he looked forth at them under the summer sun, he said wist- fully, ‘It is a beautiful world to leave. ’’I do not think Homer could have said it better. L 97 | QDR QS. QO. QW LI W WL LO THE NEW BARBARIS:M Tr deviser of the electric bell has probably long since gone where all janglings cease, but his alarming con- trivance is with us still. The evil that men do lives after them, as even Mark Antony ob- served; and sometimes the ingenuity of it blinds us to its darker side. How happy any gong-banging savage would have been, had he been able to rig up an arrangement to keep his gong banging continually while he sat back and reveled in the noise! But would he have been any less a savage for his success? Once, and once only, have I encountered barbarism—that is, if one may say so, bar- barism proper. I left by the first boat, but before it called, I had registered three defi- nite impressions. They were Noise, Odor, and Confusion. Of course, there were other mi- [ 98 | THE NEW BARBARISM nor ones. There was no water even to wash with; and one felt a general insecurity of life and liberty, a certain well-known English resident having been freshly kidnapped and held for ransom. But these were incidents. The others were fundamental. As we dropped anchor off the mole, a crowd of barbarians made their appearance on shore, yelling and gesticulating in the wild, cannibalistic manner well known to readers of Tartarin and Crusoe. If it had not been for the providential appearance of a representative of Mr. Cook, we might have thought twice about landing. The yelling, which had come faintly to us on the ship’s deck, became pandemonium when we ar- rived upon the mole. There seemed to be no method in it, each man merely shouting his loudest in sheer excitement. It was the voice of barbarism upraised in salute to civiliza- tion. But at five o'clock of a dark winter after- noon, when stores and offices are closing, and streets are packed with hurrying throngs, [99 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD you stand on the pavement waiting to cross the crowded street, amid the warning notes of motors, the shrill whistles of policemen, and the rush of clanging trolley-cars, the whole fitfully illumined by an arc light, and the elevated roaring deafeningly overhead— and you ask, Is this civilization? Does the mere fact that all this din and confusion are mechanically produced really make them civilized? Or is it only the big brother of bar- barism? The old barbarism exulted in Noise, Sen- sation, and Slaughter. But how poor were its achievements in these directions beside those of the new. And what, in the name of fair play, could their poor old lungs and tom- toms accomplish against those modern mar- vels, the whistle, the siren, and the cut-out? At a recent dinner of patriotic speakers, the occasion was enlivened by a Jackies’ band. Upon the illimitable spaces of the high seas, its appalling clamor might have melted into music; but in a small dining-room, seating only a thousand or so, the finer effects were [ 100 | THE NEW BARBARISM lost. I was surrounded by great conversers, but against that avalanche of sound they were as impotent as I. We read one anothet’s lips a while, then simply clung to our chairs and waited, till Silence like a poultice came To heal the blows of sound. And odors! Those of barbarism are strong for a mile or two, but they cannot carry like those of civilization. All the scents of Araby and Cologne could not disguise the odor that one beneficent industry daily distills upon one million of my fellow-citizens. My own ex-. perience of it runs back only some fifty years; but it is not new. Only it grows stronger and more analyzable as the years roll by. The poet's leagues of odor puts it none too strong. On summer evenings the train often bears me along a beautiful stream, winding be- tween wooded banks, and breaking now and again into waterfalls and rapids. Beyond it, the sinking sun gilds the fleecy clouds, and [ zor | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD all their sunset glories are mirrored in the brimming hriver.) | The sotty air) oteventme floats in at the windows, fragrant with forest odors. Everything conspires to soothe the jaded senses, until we reach the vicinity of the paper mill, when the fragrance is sud- denly displaced by something quite different, but fully equal to anything I can recall in my brief visit to barbarism. Barbarism rejoices greatly in display, in feathers, beads, and warpaint—which brings us to the delicate and difficult subject of dress and jewels. As respects woman's use of these let us content ourselves with remarking that there are few jewels that seem really to en- hance beauty. But when one sees his fellow- men wearing diamond studs in negligee shirts already equipped with their full com- plement of buttons, one is really at a loss to determine whether this be the new barbarism or the old. And when the weather is raw and unfa- vorable, and the golfers few upon the links, and I hear a shrill chorus of chattering voices [ 102 | THE NEW BARBARISM from the caddie-house; or when the skating- house is full of uproarious boyhood shouting meaninglessly together, I know it for the voice of the old barbarism lifted by our youth in the savage stage of development, through which, according to a well-known theory of social evolution, we all must pass—if so be we do indeed pass through it and emerge safely on the farther side. Barbarism, no doubt, saw more of slaugh- ter than do we; but the old yearning for it will not die, and we certainly make the most of what we have. We film it, headline it, and chart it, until it becomes a staple feature of our daily life. Like Dryden’s Alexander, thrice we slay the slain, and the most Cow- perian of us would feel a haunting void were it withdrawn. There ts still a strain in us that calls for a certain amount of blood- shed, real or imaginary, to be enjoyed, if not experienced. Mere accidents, it is to be ob- served, do not satisfy this craving. How our sensibilities are harrowed by the inexplicable disappearance of a little girl [ 103 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD from some household previously unknown to fame! What has become of her? Has she been eaten ‘by ja beat, or fallem into the lakemwor run away with the butcher? All these prom- ising clues are followed out in turn by the faithful, relentless, and sleuthlike press, but alike in vain. Ef our interest does not wane, we are gratified Cor disappointed) to learn that, in sober fact, she had gone on a visit to her aunt in the country, and had not been seeing the papers there. Fatal omission! One cannot safely refrain from seeing the papers, if only to keep them from getting the idea that one is missing, and investing one with an air of sinister and tremendous mystery before one knows it. For, after such investi- ture, it is useless to explain, protest, or deny. One remains a being of mystery, a person with a past, obstinately carrying one’s hol- low secret with one to the grave. Nor is the new barbarism without its re- ligion. In all great cities it rears its spacious temples, with vast naves rich with bronze and marble. Upon a kind of pulpit high [ 104 | THE NEW BARBARISM above the throng appears at intervals the muezzin of the cult, and intones his litany: ‘The train—is now ready—for De Kalb— Marshalltown — Omaha — Cheyenne — Salt Lake City —San Francisco—and Los Angeles —The Pacific Limited — leaving — at ten- thirty—from Track 3.’’ This is no inconsid- erable art; for he pauses after each measure, until the last great, true note dies away; and he keeps his voice to the last syllable on the same level tone. Not even on “Track 3”' does it descend. The effect is stately, liturgi- cal, worthy of its splendid setting. And the worshipers seated in the pews at once rise up in obedience to his call, and move silently out to Track 3. Even we who are left behind know something of their exalted mood, for has not the muezzin with his chant sent our thoughts hurrying over the plains and Rock- ies to the coast, and conjured up within us many a rich memory and high aspiration? If transcontinental departures are events, still more are such arrivals. You stand at the gate with a throng of expectant sons, moth- [ 105 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD ers, and daughters, and the California train pulls slowly and interminably in. From it emerge in a triumphal procession the hadjis, the devotees of travel, a fanatical gleam in their eyes, the bright light of achievement upon their faces. They have arrived! No religion is worth anything without hardship, and the new one has its share. You will spend hot hours of a July evening, wait- ing in line by the hotter kitchen of the din- ing-car for a chance to sit down and be fed. Or you will dash off at so-called eating-sta- tions, and snatch a hasty meal, or purchase a sodden cake right out of the refrigerator. You will toss restlessly in chilly uppers or gasp in stifling lowers. You will sit for hours on observation platforms, long after observation has ceased to be a pleasure. You will see the frost gather on every bit of metal in your car, and the desert sands will sift in about you unto suffocation. But you will travel. Nothing can stop you. As for these light afflictions, you will glory in them. Such is religion. [ 106 | THE NEW BARBARISM And who does not know the sects and schisms of travel2—how some swear by Flori- da, and some by California, while others find salvation only in Canada, Alaska, or the Orient; but each is forever dinning in your ears the dogmas of his cult. Nor is the new religion without its adepts. I met one of them once—a child not yet in her teens, yet set apart as a devotee of travel. Her sole interest was to inquire how many times one had crossed the ocean. If but six times, one was naught; she had crossed twelve—or was it sixteen? With her, at any rate, it was something more than an annual experience. But that was years ago. Nowadays the question is, how many times have you been round the world? A colonel told me the other day that he had been round twice in one year. I wish he and the little girl, now grown no doubt to fanatical wom- anhood, might meet. Of course, travel has its high days, its pilgrimages, its evangelistic literature, de- signed to implant in the minds of the stay-at- [ 107 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD home public, if such there be, an insatiable yearning for it. It has even its daily exer- cises. I, unfortunately, can walk in three minutes from the garden gate to the museum where I muse for a living. But I have, there- fore, no opportunity to progress in the new cult such as is enjoyed by my neighbors, who travel from eight to twenty-eight miles to business every morning. Still more blest are those whose duties call them every week or two to New York or Washington. A rich store of common experience binds these travel-adepts together. Once, on the ocean, I sat at table with a certain much- traveled man, of large and placid habit, whose wont it was, at dinner, after the stew- ard had conferred upon each of us our ration of six raw oysters, to beckon the man to his side and devour any surplus. He could in- form us just how many of them one was like- ly to get with one order at each of the lead- ing American hotels. I, in my superficiality, had never realized that such inequalities ex- isted. [ 108 | THE NEW BARBARISM Inthe mountains of Kentucky, weare told, if a girl marries and settles twenty miles from | home, her family definitely resigns all ex- pectation of seeing her again this side of heaven. But we less sheltered beings think nothing of journeying that far for dinner, or even tea. To be deterred by an insubstantial consideration like distance would argue a fatal weakness of the modern mind. It would violate the new religion, the purpose of which is the annihilation of distance. An aerial friend assures me that he has taken breakfast and dinner in Fresno, and lunched the same day in Coronado, over three hundred miles away. In one of the chief seats of the new barbarism a favorite afternoon di- version is motoring past forty miles of bill- boards, embodying the very purest traditions of savage art; a sight to gladden the paleo- © lithic decorator of the cavern of Altamira. And the other day, in the seclusion of a west- ern golf-club, one man was telling another how Tom Jones had motored down from San Francisco to Los Angeles in twenty-three [ 109 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD hours; to which the other irreligiously re- plied, “‘ What delayed hime”’ But it is in its ways of trade that barba- rism is most instructive. The street vendor cries his wares through the city, and will pursue you far with his insistent demands that you buy. The shop-keeper will follow for blocks, with his patter of rapidly falling prices. In rural Egypt, in former days, if you wished to hire a donkey, you had first to hire a man to protect you from the rabble of donkey-boys from which you were to choose. With resounding blows of his staff, he would keep them from actually riding you down in their determination to win your trade. The insistence of trade and the violence of com- petition are stable features of barbarism. We do these things a little more subtly, perhaps—or, should we say, more crudely? In effect, if not in person, the peddler hounds us through the town, by day and night. If we ascend into the street cars, he is there. If we motor over the boulevards, he is there. If we Open a magazine or a program, he is there. [ 110 | THE NEW BARBARISM If we look over our morning mail, he is there. If the telephone rings, he 1s there, desiring to take our photograph or clean our rugs and curtains. His hand is under the door with a dodger, and up the telegraph pole with a placard. Night itself does not obscure him. The old barbarism was undoubtedly gos- sipy and scandalous. But it did not gossip and scandalize in editions of half-a-million copies. The old barbarism was hideous, vul- gar, and noisome. But it did not have all the resources of machinery and capital to help keep it so. The old barbarism was noisy and dirty; but the distribution of dirt in barba- tism is nowhere nearly as efficient and con- Stant as in civilization. As a great prima donna remarked the other morning, ‘‘I have washed my hands fifteen times today already, but I love your city.”’ The whole population of the metropolis where I reside is each day evenly and patiently coated with soot, and will certainly end by going over to the pig- mented races which we have so long mis- prized. [ x11 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD I once had occasion to walk across the Nile Valley at Abydos, a distance of some eight miless'tovcateh) the Cairo. trainANsuttenyae market-day, the little winding path across the cultivation was dotted with groups of peasants, old and young, journeying in my direction; and many a courteous old Egyp- tian, seeing me hurrying along, alighted from his camel or donkey to offer me a ride. Perhaps it was their gentle influence that led me the other evening, as | was returning from the City of Destruction in a crowded railway train, to yield to a chivalrous impulse and, at the risk of having to stand up for twelve minutes, offer a young woman my seat. Be- fore she could take it, an old gentleman, surely devoid of all nobler qualities, slipped nimbly, into it, leaving the baffled young woman to languish in the perpendicular, until the neighboring sitters adroitly crowded together enough to make a fractional place for her, in which she continued her journey. But then, of course, Egypt is one of the most ancient seats of civilization. fire] QD QIQI.QV QGP DOW): QY.QY DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO in Libya a man named Apsethus, who cherished the laudable ambition of being considered a god. Being a resourceful person and perceiving that the Libyans like other peoples were a credulous folk, he collected a large number of parrots and taught them to say ‘‘Apsethus is a god.’’ When the parrots had thoroughly mastered this lesson, he set them at liberty, and they dutifully flew all over Libya, crying, ““Apsethus is a god.’’ This indisputable testimony of nature speedi- ly converted the Libyans to his cult, and he found himself the recipient of divine honors. This easy scaling of Olympus came to the attention of one of those marplots of an- tiquity, the Greeks, and he put himself upon the case as a special detective. Whether he [113 |] I is said that in ancient times there lived THINGS SEEN AND HEARD cross-examined one of the parrots I do not know, but he somehow learned enough to take a leaf from the book of the new divinity. He collected a still larger number of parrots and taught them to say, ‘‘ Apsethus caged us and forced us to say he was a god.’’ When the parrots were letter perfect 1n this new lesson the ingenious Greek sent them forth to undermine the faith of the simple Libyans. Whereupon, says the historian, the Libyans having heard the recantation of the parrots, came together and unanimously decided to burn Apsethus. The story of Apsethus often recurs to my mind as I pick up the morning paper and hear the voices of the parrots crying that this one or that one is or is not a god. Who has not in these latter days encountered full many a gullible old fowl which reversed itself with all the swiftness and completeness of Ap- sethus’ missionaries? And of course no one blames it any more than the Libyans blamed the parrots. But no doubt the story has other applications hardly less edifying. The world [114 ] DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO is fairly full of people who go about simply repeating what they have heard or read. How many of us, indeed, do anything else, when an expression of opinion—social, po- litical, or religious—is in order? It is at least evident that there was some- thing very fine and democratic about Libyan religion and theology as illustrated in the cult of Apsethus. Of course, they did too easily accept the testimony of the parrots, but in this they are unfortunately not alone. Indeed, it is precisely here that their experi- ence is modern and representative. The Lib- yans did not stop to inquire how the parrots came by their information. It was enough that they were parrots. The strength of Ap- sethus’ method lay in this, that he appealed to democracy. Vox Papagai, Vox Populi. His error, if he made any, was in forgetting that everybody's believing something does not of itself make it true. Even democracy would not bear the strain he put upon it. It is interesting to look abroad and ob- serve what diverse things are predicated of frre] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD democracy. A distinguished gentleman re- cently declared that a marked characteristic of the late German army was its democracy. In support of this thesis he cited an incident observed and greatly enjoyed by the recent ruler of Germany who, while motoring as usual between fronts, overtook a soldier driving a herd of swine. The Kaiser asked the soldier what his occupation was in time of peace, and the soldier replied that he was a professor in the University of G6ttingen. This was hailed by the Kaiser and his pub- licist as a convincing proof of the thorough- ly democratic character of the German army: the professor a swineherd. This incident and the interpretation there- of suggest a flood of reflections. Does democ- racy indeed mean that every man shall be set to doing something to which he is unaccus- tomed and for which he is unfitted? This view is unfortunately not confined to the Kaiser and his interpreter. To the same school belongs that definition of autocracy put forward in 1917 by a kindred spirit. This Paads] DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO much-talked-of autocracy, said he, is really nothing more nor less than administration by experts. There is, of course, nothing more common than claiming everything in sight for your favorite institution. A very able man of sci- ence once informed me that the whole hope of human betterment lay with the universi- ties. Another declared, in my hearing, that warts and international misunderstandings would never be done with until the science of geography came into its rightful place in human thought. I have heard a prominent representative of trades unionism assert that we owe our free schools, free speech, and free press to the trades unions. I confess I had been accustomed to ascribe these beneficent institutions to other sources, and I was shocked to reflect that if he was so mistaken I might be also. In this horrible reflection lies, I believe, the kernel of democracy. The other party wins the national election. We all know the awful sense of impending disaster that at- pean Al THINGS SEEN AND HEARD tends the defeat of our side at the polls. Shall we at once put an end to this miserable existence then, or shall we linger on to suc- cumb to the inevitable cataclysm? But stay! Democracy whispers, There remains always this possibility, faint indeed and infinitely remote, yet still a possibility: The other man may be right, after all. Elections! Ah, the elections! If war was the sport of kings elections are the sport of democracy. What races at Epsom, Long- champs, or Latonia attract such attention as a presidential election? Think of the night of election day! And think how on far-off Asiatic steppes strange men clad in sheep- skin who never heard of Maude S. or the America’s Cup will inform one another that the great Lord Wilson has beaten the great Lord Hughes and been elected president (as they fondly think) of America. After elections, democracy has no more characteristic feature than the finance cam- paign. Weare told that Turkey, immediately upon being as she supposed liberated by the [ 118 | DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO young Turks and transformed into a democ- racy, entered upon a finance campaign to se- cure by popular subscription a fund to buy two warships from the British government. And what with our Liberty Loans and the Victory Loan and Red Cross drives and all the unofficial ones that have followed in their wake no one in the United States can have escaped this mighty engine of democ- racy. Telephone, telegraph, and mail system run its errands, newspapers and billboards do its bidding. Society, business and reli- gion, the church, the lodge and the grange, unite to further it. It has its union button, which marks its ransomed subscriber off from the outcast residue of mankind, but must be replaced next week with the newer button of the next campaign. It sets us studying one another's financial, social, and philanthropic status as never before. We be- come suddenly interested to know the where- abouts of this man and that. Is he in town? Or is he in Florida or California? When will he return? Heaven send it be not too late. [119 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD But if it be; let him .be wired, and wired again. Who knows him? Who knows him best? Who knows him unrefusably well? How shall he be approached? What are his habits? Does he like to lead, or prefer to fol- low? Shall we strike high or low? Is he gre- gatious, or does he play a lone hand? Truly in a democracy, the proper study of mankind is man. There is something a Naetles too, about democracy. It rejoices in being robbed, and advertises the fact upon the housetops until one wonders why any reasonably observant person should not avail himself of this short and easy way to private affluence and public admiration. No princely act of beneficence, no achievement of sagacity or courage, could possibly win more swift and admiring atten- tion than the theft of a few thousand dollars regularly evokes from the headline artist and the paragrapher. That crime is mostly a manifestation of weakness does not enter the mind of the journalistic interpreter of democ- racy. To him, and we must suppose to the [ 120 | DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO generality of his readers, crime is a cause for thrilling wonder, and nothing more. A young physician whose friends were sympathizing with him on the hardships of night work in his profession reassured them by saying that the day of that sort of thing was really past; people weren't sick at night much any more. This may even more truth- fully be said of burglaries. The old-fashioned inconvenient types of labor are going out. Especially with the daylight-saving arrange- ments now in vogue even the burglar can make his hay while the sun shines. He does not need to be a cracksman even; why dam- age the vault and perhaps the night watch- man when one can enter freely by the front door when the vault is conveniently open to let out the specie and let in the office force? In short, the elements of up-to-date brigand- age are now familiar to every child, while the clumsy, old-fashioned, safe-blowing, dark-lantern style of thing is left to the stage and the movies. This phenomenon of democracy cannot be [aroma THINGS SEEN AND HEARD dismissed as of no significance. It is just pos- sible that we have overrated the rights of property. After all, why worry about mere thefts of money while the grander larcenies of air and light and cleanness, of decency, freedom, beauty, go unchallenged? It is a rough way of thinking, but there is reason in it. Democracy is vaguely unwilling to act as policeman for the rights of the few until it can protect the rights of the many, too. Meantime, the gunman who robs a bank in broad day may contribute more to the public entertainment in so doing than the less pic- turesque but no less predatory person who hides the sun with his smoke, smothers de- cency in his street cars, and blights civic beauty with his billboards, contributes to anything. Democracy will not protect such interests until they change. It vaguely feels that those lesser evils may well wait until the larger wrongs are righted, and it has a well-grounded suspicion that those who are most clamorous against the lesser wrongs are often the beneficiaries of the greater ones. Of [inetd DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO course, this is crude and unsophisticated, but it is not wholly wrong. For the sanctions we frantically appeal to when the burglars in- vade our block, we really know are capable of a far wider application. If life consists largely in emotion, as I suppose we must admit it does, how supreme among human systems must democracy ap- pear! The feelings aroused by autocracy are puny in comparison. What passionate loyal- ties to persons and to parties it can evoke, po- tent long after elections are lost and issues dead. Think of Mr. Blaine! And what whole-hearted, ungrudging, robust hatreds, which honestly see in their object all the qualities of Judas, Lucifer, and Antichrist rolled in one! If to feel strongly is to live deeply then only in democracy is life really to be found. What passes for it elsewhere is mere pallid delusion. In this connection it should be pointed out that in the mere matter of gloom few autocracies can compare with democracy. A few years ago all was gloom because the [ 123 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD allies were so inconceivably blind; then be- cause so few American soldiers were reach- ing France; then because it was no use any- way, for Germany could never be either starved out or worn down. After Germany finally did give way in a catastrophe that amazed even the optimists, new and greater causes for gloom disclosed themselves, in the hopeless problems raised by the winning of the war. It would almost seem that a great mistake was made in winning the war, and that it would really have been wiser to let the Germans have it. That democracy which is neither war- like nor efficient should vanquish autocracy, which is avowedly both, is passing strange. Not less so is the humbleness of democracy, which like the apostle will not boast except of weaknesses. Democracy seems by its own account little more than a tissue of imperfec- tions. On a recent notable literary anni- versary, some of us arranged an exhibit of editions appropriate to the occasion, which in due time attracted the attention of a re- [124 | DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO porter. We imparted to him such facts as seemed suitable, and he went his way. When his paragraph appeared next morning, every several statement it contained was wrong; and yet its total impression was substantially correct. So is it with democracy. Consider it in war. Its air program falls down, its ordnance program is a failure, the soldiers do not get their mail or their pay, the Y.M.C.A. has too many meetings and too little tobacco. And yet the war is won. It makes one think of Michelangelo’s Moses; there is imperfection in every detail, but the statue is sublime. In this gloomy splendor there lies democracy’s hope for art, or at least the artistic temperament, which as everyone knows thrives in an atmosphere of settled despair. When is genius more pro- ductive, when it is young and desperate, or successful and middle aged? Were not Homer and Milton blind, and Dante and Hugo ex- iles? This is not merely American. It is South American, British, French—in a word, it is [125 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD democratic. In a measure it was Roman and Athenian in their semi-democratic days. Think of Alcibiades, Aristides, Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. And the Senate! There was a Senate even then. In a democracy, in short, no one seems to enjoy the full popular confidence until he is dead. Safety first, you know. Indeed, it is freely alleged against democracies that they are ungrateful. They hound a man as long as he lives and then exalt him to the skies. Yet even here, where) democracy, is/atwite worst, appears again a hint of its unfathom- able rightness. Leadership in democracy is a social product, and democracy instinctively recognizes it as such and refuses to be be- guiled by old habits of kings and heroes into a hero worship which is out of date. But when a great man is gone, democracy with its infallible sense of values at once seizes upon his memory and makes of him a living symbol of all the best civic elements that he embodied. Democracy was not al- ways kind to Washington. But she has so [ 126 | _ DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO exalted his memory that most people will not believe that he was not always the idol of his countrymen. Is this hypocrisy? Or is it a kind of deep, elemental honesty which feels that democracy is greater than its greatest individual expressions, and that it is fairly entitled to whatever symbolic value may attach to the memory of their great qualities? Walk any pleasant evening along any im- portant thoroughfare in the poorer part of a great city. Are not the people you meet sur- prisingly well dressed? You may encounter a few queer old peasants, obviously imported from an autocratic land too late for recon- struction. But most of those you see have felt the magic spell of assimilation which is the secret of democracy. Mere economists lament this, and talk of the folly of dressing beyond one’s means. But the student of democracy sees in it a vast, portentous force released by democracy for the elevation of her masses. What does democracy care that you have no savings account and that you have sold your baby-bonds to buy your styl- Pr27 THINGS SEEN AND HEARD ish clothes? Her only concern is that you are struggling to be like the people you consider worth while, for that ferment is worth more than thrift. This evident disposition on the part of democracy to make itself personally present- able gives promise of a better day in city- building, of which democracy has made so dreary a business thus far. For people much concerned for their personal appearance will next be thinking of making their homes at- thactive anid) thenmtheinastrects anamenem their cities. Nor will their minds, tastes, and characters escape the same strong, subtle influence. Democracy says to every man, ieyiourcan be like theibescu Democracy offers men everything. Pre- cisely here is its tragedy. Tyranny opens to the subject no bewildering variety of possi- bilities. Beset by limitation, his choices are few and simple. He may live; he may be fed, clothed, and sheltered; he may even be undisturbed. If so, let him be content, and for the most part he will be. But it is the [ 128 ] DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO glory and the anguish of democracy that it offers the citizen everything; and he cannot possibly take it all. He 1s like a man let into Monte Cristo’s cavern of treasure, to take away as much as he can carry. However much he may take, he will all his life lament all that he left behind. [129 ] QDR: QV.Q QQ QW QI QW. LS VY ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE ALICIOUS provincials from the | \ / periphery of our country like to de- scribe the city we inhabit as an overgrown village. I, too, think of it as the Little Village, but in affection, as Mr. Bouncer thought of London. And it is with London that our village has its chief analogies, in so far as one city may be like another. For our village is built not like New York, upon a chain of islands, but like Lon- don, upon the land. Our Little Village is like London, too, in its cabability—that is, its inability to be navigated except by cabs. Both have parts mutually inaccessible other- wise. As in London, too, our railway sta- tions are skilfully scattered, so that no one may thoughtlessly pass through our midst [130] ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE without having an opportunity to give us a few hours of his attention. It is this location upon terra firma that en- ables the Little Village, like its ancient pro- totype, to sprawl about in all directions, and be informal and comfortable. Like London, too, it is divided by a river, which diversifies city travel with tunnels and bridges, both closed and open, and thus conserves the priceless element of adventure in our village life. But never are we more truly the Little Village than when the snow overwhelms us and the voice of the blizzard is heard in the land. Then, indeed, we are reminded that we are geographically at least still one with the prairies about us. Time turns backward, and we experience again something of the tran- quillity our childhood knew. No automo- biles go by the house. Those delicate crea- tures are all folded soft in their comfortable garages or stalled and abandoned on distant boulevards. The sturdy and humble horse now teappears from his retirement and makes [131] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD his milky way among the alleys. As in one’s youth, one must go to the store for a paper, and the surest way to get one’s groceries is the cash-and-carry system now advocated by economists. The blizzard has packed the snow too hard for the snow plow and the papers call upon all public-spirited citizens to dig them- selves out. “Dig a road”’ is the cry, and no sooner have we read it in the evening papers than my neighbors and I sally forth, man, woman, and child, and shovel snow by lamp- light out of the middle of the street. In the midst of this civic carnival an automobile, one of the last of the species to penetrate these solitudes, comes sputtering along. Over our hundred feet of cleared road it bounds joyously, only to stop abruptly where our labors had ended. A youth leaps out. “If you'd leave the darned stuff alone,’’ he exclaims, “‘we'd get on all right.’’ How patient and docile an hour’s labor has made us! We gather peasant-like about him and gently point out that he hasn’t any chains Hite ay PROG URAGE ETE on. A few minutes’ shoveling and a strong push from three of us rustics and he is on his way for half a block at least, leaving the fra- grance of his gratitude to lighten our noc- turnal toil. The postman is now no such invisible man as Chesterton describes. He is not to be taken for granted. His occasional visits bring us news by word of mouth from the outer world. Awful things are happening. He informs us that a woman was this day overcome by cold on the street and “‘they brought her into the post-office and survived her.’’ We are touched at his simple story. We are sorry about the poor woman, but if she had to go we find comfort in the fact that our postman was among those who survived her. The situation now becomes serious. Fire engines cannot get through the snow, and fire plugs are snowed under. Milk and coal cannot be distributed. The President calls upon students and pro- fessors to dig in a new and deeper sense, and raee| THINGS SEEN AND HEARD we respond. AnR.O.T.C. gentleman in khaki and puttees commands us and leads us forth by tens, shovels in hands, to our appointed block. As we go we invite recruits from our student acquaintance. We offer our patriotic example for their emulation. We wave our shovels in menace or extend them in en- treaty. Our auditors are full of good inten- tions. They are coming out at four o'clock, or they have already been out at eleven o'clock, or this very day before breakfast did they not shovel out their sidewalk? No One joins us. We remain ten. We reach the fatal block. The cowardly horses have evaded the drifts and broken a crooked path worthier of the wayward cow. (Can this be the etymology of “‘coward’’?) We must hew to the line and level the drifts they have escaped. A band of schoolboys with shovels on their shoulders pass along the sidewalk. We hail them. Let them look no further. The work is here. They make light of us. They are going to an engage- ment. We reply that it is no crime to break [134 | AKGLICNVIELAGE LIFE an engagement, and ask them whether they ate a parade or are going to have their pic- ture taken. They evade these questions by asking us what they hire us for and how long we have been at work. We answer, ‘“‘Since five o'clock this morning.’’ Ten minutes have now worn away. A football youth raises the cheerful cry *‘ Hot coffee!’’ as though it would come when | called for, and we instinctively lift our eyes expectantly to the far end of the block. And now comes one of our colleagues, faring along the sidewalk, and we professors see our missionary opening. We offer him our shovels and a share in our civic honors. “Hey! slacker! Come and shovel!’’ He is embarrassed and begins to make ex- cuse. He has already shoveled out his prem- ises, and he has a department meeting at three o'clock. We show the hollowness of these pretexts, and he takes to his heels. School is now out, and a throng of chil- dren descends upon us. One asks if we are all [135 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD soldiers. Another says this is good practice for the trenches, as though we had not been describing our operations for an hour in terms of salients and traverses. A half-grown boy undertakes to boss us. We lend him a shovel and he soon grows much quieter. Two hours have now passed. We are all much quieter. Our time is up, and we march back to headquarters to deposit our shovels. On our way we see a group of laborers dig- ging out an alley. My colleague reflects that even in these social upheavals class distinc- tions persist. The high-brows do the ave- nues, the low-brows the streets, and the pro- letariat the alleys. Going out through the falling snow to see if one could still get downtown by railway, I met our local poet and vaguely drew his attention to the enveloping element. “‘ Beau- tiful snow, and all that sort of thing.”’ He bent a wild eye upon me. “Yes, the weather is full of literary suggestion,’’ said he. He could have handled the storm as it was then with a slight lyrical effort, but as I [ 136 ] ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE look back upon it now he is in for an epic at the very least. Arrived at the railway station, I found a train approaching, and was soon proceeding on what would in ordinary times be an ex- press. It did, indeed, even today follow the express tracks, but halted obligingly at every possible stopping place, the natives of which might then be seen skipping across the tracks and hopping over the drifts to clamber up the steps into the train. Such deportment on the - part of the inhabitants of Kenwood tran- scends the memory of the oldest inhabitant. Scarcely has our community begun to re- sume its normal processes when another bliz- zatd swoops down upon us. This swift suc- cession of embarrassments fairly bowls the Little Village over. The railroads cancel their schedules. One cannot get downtown. The papers do not come. Even the telephone, the chief annoyance of civilization, 1s silent. Our street, usually thick with coursing mo- tors, is for a whole day as quiet as a church- yard. All trackless les the untrodden snow. [137] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD But when the storm is over, behold the revival with redoubled force of our new- found social spirit. It is Sunday. People going to church see the streets filled with neighbors—bankers, magnates, debutantes, and deans—shoveling out the road. The shovel suddenly becomes the badge of civic respectability. Some of us take out time to go to church, and then resume the irrepres- sible conflict. A woman stops to observe us. ‘‘ You ought to see our street,’ she remarks pro- vocatively. We obligingly inquire as to its state. ‘It was all shoveled out this morning.’ We express our fear that she did not go to church. | ‘“No, indeed! We stayed home and shov- eled!’’ she answers without contrition. Thus does the complacency of the old ecclesiasticism give way to that of the new social religion. A car is stalled at the corner. In sheer hu- manity my neighbor and I dig it out. It pro- [ 138 ] ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE ceeds to his door and leaves his laundry. As- sured of a clean shirt for the morrow, he ex- ults over the ways of Providence. I cannot share his elation. Mine came the day before the blizzard. Nothing brought home to me the extrem- ity of the situation like seeing a policeman at work. He was shoveling snow. This hap- pened on the eighteenth of January, 1918, at three o'clock in the afternoon. I was totally unprepared for the shock. I have seen hun- — dreds of policemen, but I had never before seen one perform any unofficial act which might be denominated labor. At least once a year, it is true, I have seen a policeman sell a ticket to the Policeman’s Annual Benefit Ball to a man who did not want it. This is the only thing approaching an exception to the rule that I now recall. I have sometimes speculated upon the reason for this. It cannot be an accident. It is ob- viously a part of police punctilio. This must remain the high point of the triumph of the storm, that it prevailed over [139] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD that inexorable tradition of the Force. Such was the democratizing effect of the blizzard. One can only hope never to be called upon to witness such sights again. Not only did we dig ourselves out. We dug out one another. Here our village con- sciousness showed itself. Neighborliness is not a metropolitan trait, it is a village virtue, and happily it still clings to our village. One hundred thousand strong we got out our shovels after the second snowstorm and went at our streets a block at a time. Never had our village shown its spirit more finely. The snow told us in unmistakable language what is true in a great many things besides snow, that the welfare of one depends on the wel- fare of all. And if these January storms really taught us this, they were worth all they cost in money, suffering, and toil. And yet most of us, I fancy, would not for anything have missed the blizzards and the interruption of our routine, and the thrill of that great, common endeavor to clear the streets, with its good exercise in genial com- [ 140 | ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE pany and its wholesome reminder that after all we are not prim city folk, but good, old- fashioned neighbors in the greatest Little Village in the world. [141 ] RY. QI QW QW OVO QW DW LOW LO A HILLTOP COLLEGE MONG tthe cultural forces powerfully A at work in our college community a generation ago one of the most potent was the Greek professor’s dress-suit. It was the first dress-suit most of us had ever seen. I have since seen many dress-suits, some of them splendidly worn and amply tenanted, but none has ever impressed me as did his. Our supreme social expression was the Wash- ington Banquet, held in the parlors of the Baptist Church, and I shall never forget the sight of our professor, a fine figure of a man on all occasions, as he entered the room and moved among us clad in his dress-suit. We all felt a deep conviction that in any human society, however exalted, that figure would be at home. We instinctively recognized in him the finished man of the world. We did [142 ] Ar Hink TOR, GOLLEGE not utter these convictions. They were too universal and obvious to require expression. I have often felt grateful to my old pro- fessor for introducing me, an impressionable young man of fifteen, to the strange and at first, I think it must be admitted, grotesque sight of a dress-suit on. I do not remember that he taught me much Greek, though he did make me work hard, which is perhaps not quite the same thing. But one thing he | did teach me: to look upon a dress-suit with- out dismay, and it is more than a jest to say that his dress clothes were a real cultural factor in the life of our country college. They soundly guided our dawning social aspira- tions. I cannot honestly omit from the cultural forces of my college life my friend Clark's tennis racquet. Clark had a tennis racquet. I had none. Judge which of us was dili- gent, frugal, and industrious, and which idle, frivolous, and given to play. But even with the responsibilities of an upperclassman, one must sometimes relax, and I did occasionally [143 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD borrow Clark’s racquet. And all that I have since accomplished in lawn-tennis, I owe, as the oak is in the acorn, to the use I then made of that racquet. It shows what one can do, if he but apply himself, with his leisure moments, and somebody else’s prop- erty—which is, if I mistake not, the founda- tion principle of banking. Not that I made no return to Clark for the use of his racquet. I did make a return. It was, broadly speaking, a spiritual one, and hence difficult to set forth in precise terms. But if I explain that when I was a Senior, Clark was a Freshman, it will be realized that as he went about his work, verifying the laws of physics by observing the falling ap- ple, or tinkering with the apparatus in the laboratory, he had the warm consciousness that his, Clark’s, tennis racquet, Freshman though he was, was being used by one of those ornaments of the institution, the mem- bers of the Senior Class. It gives me pleasure to add that Clark is now president of the col- lege, but 1am not so sure he would be where [144 ] AtHiEE LOR COLEEGE he is today if I had not taken his tennis rac- quet off his hands at judicious intervals and thus unobtrusively kept him to his book. Such in every generation are the fatherly re- sponsibilities of the conscientious upper- classman. There was no low commercial instruction given in my college days, but one important way of business I did learn in my Freshman year from the village banker. He was a tall, dignified man of the old aristocratic school. | He lived in a stately and beautiful old house of the southern Colonial type, with lofty Ionic pillars in front and smaller ones at either end; a house, as I lived to learn; as beautiful in its hospitality as in its architec- ture. And when I appeared, a Freshman, at his bank to realize on the first paternal re- mittance, he kindlyand unforgettably showed me how to indorse a check. I can truthfully say that to this day I never pick up a check to indorse it without the stirring of some vague memory of that early lesson. I am now able to discern with a clearness [145 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD then impossible to me the social stratifica- tion of our college community. At the top of it were the young men and women from Dayton. They enjoyed an enviable pre-emi- nence. We all felt that their clothes, their behavior, their savoir faire, were what every- one’s ought to be. I do not mean that they put on airs. Some of them were most engag- ingly democratic. But so well did these young people adorn college life that we all believed that Newport, Lenox, and Bar Harbor could show them nothing. In fact, we vaguely sup- posed that when we withdrew for the sum- mer vacation to the seclusion of our obscure abodes, they naturally gravitated to the sea- shore or the mountains. Perhaps they did. It never occurred to us to inquire. It was, at all events, the prevailing feeling of my con- temporaries that the parents of these young people did the college a great service by send- ing them to it to leaven it with light and leading. If one of these young Olympians asked you down to visit him during spring recess, thirty years have not erased the mem- [ 146 ] A HILLTOP COLLEGE ory; and if one of those divinely fair let her finget-tips touch yours but for one thought- less, fleeting instant, it shall never be for- gotten. At the other extreme of our college society was a little group of youths from Chicago. We, too, were in a small way among the celebrities of the college. We were pointed to, or at, by our fellow-students, as proof of the institution’s far-flung influence. It had, it appeared, been potent enough to search us out amid the rudeness and materialism of our native surroundings and draw us by its gentle influence to the college to soothe our savage breasts with learning. The only persons who in any degree disputed this distinction with us wete two or three extraordinary individ- uals from the mountains of Kentucky. They and we seemed to our fellows to have come from another planet. In the college club in which I used to board for something over two dollars a week, there sat at one end of the table a man of boundless and infectious geniality but of [147 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD Pennsylvania-Dutch extraction. At the other end sat a young German of more recent 1m- portation, a runaway scion of a Prussian Offizier-family, who after incredible hardships in German military schools had fled from what he already perceived to be Prussian tyranny. His social rating in proper German terms was quite different from that of his Pennslyvania vis-a-vis, a truth of which he was by no means unconscious. But the devas- tating fact was that in the no less rigid and about equally authentic social stratification of our hilltop Ohio college this rating was reversed. It meant nothing to us that our Berlin comrade could write v-o-n before his name, but it meant everything that our ge- nial Pennsylvanian could write Phi Omicron Nu after his. In this comparative judgment the modern world has since acquiesced. We entertained, I remember, the most ex- treme and lavish views as to one another’s powers and prospects. It was the inward con- viction of all the thoughtful men in college of my time that certain individuals would [ 148 | ALHIPETOR, COLLEGE inevitably be hanged. It was not that we did not wish them well. It was only that we saw with unerring prevision what lay before them. I will not say that we were wholly wrong, but only that the moral failure of these*young men has not been so marked as we then feared. For some of our contempo- raries, on the other hand, we anticipated a future of extraordinary achievement. It was an open secret that one of the upperclassmen of my day knew mote than the faculty. So atelcastyhissadmiitcts: saids and» no0,one was disposed to gainsay them. We set no limit to his probable achievements. Yet he has never been greater than the day he graduated. Perhaps in outstripping the faculty he over- exerted himself. Some of our forecasts have proved more successful. The great college or- ator of my time was also the boxing cham- pion. He is now a college president. Com- ment seems superfluous. One of my class- mates eatly exhibited the most stupendous disposition to arrange and systematize. He even essayed to arrange the college library [149 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD and the mineral cabinet. He is now a trustee of the institution. The most desperate spirits of our day seem to have become lawyers. But so has the president of the Y.M.C.A. The general tendency of history has been to moderate rather than to negative our judg- ments. Ours was a hilltop college overlooking a pleasant New England village in the Mid- dle West. The college hill was encompassed with other hills, and it and they and the village and the four seasons, especially the spring, and the months of the year, particu- larly June, were perfectly smothered in po- etry of our production. Even a member of the faculty now and then yielded to the spell of the place and lifted up his voice in song. There were strong Pierian elements in our college spring. Our verse was partly humorous, some- times didactic, but the overwhelming ma- jority of it was sentimental. Ours were in- deed Poems of Sentiment and Reflection. If one could recover a tithe of it he could pro- [150] AML OR COLMEG FE duce a poetic manual completely descriptive of that countryside. The college avenue, the village street up and down which we deco- rously walked half-a-dozen times a day, the little valley which was our favorite resort in sentimental moods, the college cemetery whete we wrote our elegies and mused con- tentedly on the mortality of former genera- tions—all these we celebrated in measures only too appropriate. It was indeed the great weakness of this literary movement that it was if anything too correct. We said what we expected ourselves to say, and what eatlier English poets had taught us it was poetic to say, when confronted with a moon, a tree, Or a graveyard. The sentiment, too, with which our meas- ures wete colored, not to say drenched, was impeccable. Especially just after leaving col- lege it was our wont to send back to the col- lege paper lofty lyrics indicative of our un- shakable attachment to its ideals, its ties, and its surroundings. The sentiment of this later, and as it were posthumous, poetic vintage fas 24] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD was even denser than that of the original output. I cannot omit from this unconventional list of the elevating influences of my college days the village livery stable. Do not sup- pose that we vulgarly consorted with the stable-boys; far from it. But it was there that we procured the occasional buggies in which on balmy Saturdays in spring we traversed those pleasant roads over the hills, and con- versed, or exchanged the subtler nuances of silence, with some fair companion. We had our Own convictions as to the speed and en- durance of the animals we drove, and en- gaged our favorite grays and sorrels long ahead. We knew full well how many miles beyond Alexandria or the Welsh Hills we could venture and still deliver our charges at the Seminary by supper time. For that providential practice which used to found a girls’ school under the shadow of a men’s college had generously placed a seminary at each end of our village street and thus brightened the student days of all of us. We rszal A HILLTOP COLLEGE used to see these bright beings from afar at church and on the main street as they and we went to and from the post-office with quite unnecessary frequency, but it was the livery, after all, which most effectually threw us to- gether. Since the time of Aristotle, anyway, music has been regarded as an essential part of a proper education, and of course it was in- cluded in ours. Even in my infancy I had been introduced to the fatiguing study of | the piano, which I had cheerfully relin- quished to take up the lighter subjects of Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In college my music was resumed, but it was no longer instrumental but vocal to which I gave my- self. Not, indeed, under the direction of my professors; they took no interest in our ac- complishments. It was our wont on balmy spring evenings to gather about the steps of the college building, officially known as New Brick, and lifting our young faces to- ward the radiant moon, to join in jocund song. The chief performer on these occasions [ £53] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD was a gifted youth familiarly known as Gummy. His greatest musical accomplish- ment was his yodel, which we all firmly believed could not be surpassed by any Swiss or Tyrolese of the High Alps. Much as we valued this nightly exercise of baying the moon in such accomplished company, it was in private from the lips of old man Brown, the mainstay of the Glee Club, that we learned those interminable darkey and student songs which informed the finished collegian of the period. And when Brown graduated and went west to teach, I found a new Mentor in the Deacon. He at last after much practice put the final indorse- ment upon my musical proficiency by per- mitting me to accompany him on his cele- brated serenades, there to essay a piping obbligato to his amorous warbling. Oddly enough, both my music masters are now presidents of colleges—but not, I should add, colleges of music. It is a strange and even a distressing thing to.observe how many of the harmless, light- [154] AMIE TOR COLLEGE hearted comrades of my college days have become college presidents. In their melan- choly fate I read an admonition from the old- est of schoolmasters that we are all becoming liable to the unwelcome degree of M.A., which every mature etymologist will ac- knowledge stands for Middle Age. Kes pyt QYIQS: OVD CHILD QI QW LI LY. LO THINK, ABIB! RECENTLY conveyed a copy of the King | James Version printed in 1611 and weigh- ing forty pounds a distance of four hun- dred miles, and exhibited it for two hours in full view of an audience many of whom ex- amined it before or after my remarks; only to read in the next morning’s paper that I ‘‘in- sisted that the King James Version was col- loquial Greek.’’ For such gainsayings there is no sufficient answer but a line of the pun- gent Mr. Browning: “Think, Abib!—Dost thou think?”’ If you were born in a Mississippi River town not forty miles from the birthplace of Mark Twain;,’and then: lived to read aia New York newspaper that not much could be expected of you in a literary way because [156 ] THINK, ABIB! of your western origin, would you not won- der? Doubtless the editor had a good case, but he chose a poor argument to suppott it. I think little of aetiology, but if we must be aetiologists, and estimate everything by its source, then let us be so in good earnest. And when you read in a metropolitan editorial that ‘‘If Christ Came to Chicago’’ was written by a Middle Western clergyman, instead of by W. T. Stead, the father of mod- ern journalism, again you find solace in Mr. Browning. And you are tempted to exclaim with the modern psalmist, ‘‘ Lord! What do they understand?’ In a state the name of which would sur- prise no one, on election-day a certain po- litical group invaded the stronghold of an- other, with casualties to the number of four dead and seventeen wounded. The authori- ties became interested, whereupon all con- cerned in the shooting (excepting four, of course) addressed a petition to the county | judge and the state’s attorney, stating that they ‘‘failed to see how any good could re- L571 THINGS SEEN AND HEARD sult from litigation over the matter,’’ and ex- pressing their willingness to ‘let bygones be bygones.’’ To ask these petitioners to think would clearly be too much. Let us rather say, Smile, Abib!—Canst thou smile?”’ But, after all, why should anyone think when there ate so many convenient and amusing substitutes for thought? Such as reading, or letting someone else do your thinking for you. Then there is the ques- tionnaire, by the aid of which you can so quickly assemble a huge mass of statistics, or husks of thought, by which the craving for it may for a time be appeased. The card catalogue is another good substitute, and so is the use of different colors of paper for your notes. There is also the filing system and the radio. These devices and many more occupy our hands and eyes and attention as we potter about the brink of thought and occasionally dip a hesitating foot in its forbidding waters. A seasoned colleague assures me that this is the one thing students refuse to do. They will come regularly, listen patiently, take [158 ] THINK, ABIB! notes diligently, read ravenously, compose voluminously—do everything, in short, but think. Ask whatever else, and they will dare, but never, ah never, require of them the dread adventure of independent thought! From it, they instinctively feel, they might perhaps never return. For my part, I am skeptical about this. But there is no doubt that nothing so be- wilders the student as to see a professor think. A great chemist of my acquaintance — has been known to stop and actually think tight before his class for as much as two or even three minutes. Picture the scene! The Man of Science momentarily silent, a faraway look in his eyes; about him his devoted stu- dents, awestruck and even a little alarmed at the consciousness that the sublime processes of thought are actually going on before them, and haunted by a vague apprehension that their yogi may never emerge from his absorption. But few people have the courage of the great chemist. For to have to stop and think [159] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD is generally regarded as a sure token of in- tellectual bankruptcy. ““He didn’t know what to say; he had to stop and think!’ isa common formula of failure. Only with great reluctance do we look into the recesses of our minds, fearful of what we may find, or fail to find, there, and to have to do it is gener- ally recognized as a last desperate resort. If words fail you, then, and then only, have recourse to thought. For words have somehow taken the place of thought. From being its expression they have become its substitute, until an old thought put in new words strikes the mind as something revolutionary. Which may re- mind us of the final inadequacy of words fully to express thought. Not for nothing do we speak of reducing a thought to writing. . Writing does reduce it, beyond question, as a photograph reduces a landscape. Thought like feeling is too much for the resources of language. It is instructive to observe how even a thought once formulated will ride down the [| 160 | THINK, ABIB! stream of time long after its inner vitality has departed. Like the buttons on the back of a frock coat, they persist among us even when their usefulness has ceased. Laws, institu- tions, clubs, habits, causes, all occasionally fall under this condemnation. Of course, language is sometimes am- biguous, and the thoughts we elicit from others may be quite different from those we intend. A physicist, having asked his class in what three states matter is found, is surprised to learn that one pupil has found it principally in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Upon further inquiring the differ- ence between a red light and a green one, he is informed that a red light means “‘Stop,”’ and a green one ‘Go ahead.’ Which tfe- minds you of asking a group of youths the meaning of ochre, whereon one declared it to be a game; another a cruel monster, and a third a vegetable. All these answers re- flect processes of thought, though not pre- cisely the one the instructor in his blind- ness had foreseen. [ 161 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD If thought be the perception of relations between things known, it is plain that things must first be known in order to be thought about. When such mental possessions are so few and scattered that the mind cannot see from one to another, thought 1s impossible. It is difficult really to think about a single thing; like erecting a bridge upon a single point. It is just here that ignorance becomes a positive obstacle to thought. And so it comes about that many excellent people who have not mental possessions enough to justi- fy setting up lines of communication between them fall back upon their emotions and feel instead of thinking. There is of course not the slightest harm in this, so long as they know what they are doing. The trouble is they usually do not know they are feeling, and actually suppose they are thinking. But the truth is, the absence of informa- tion is less annoying and perilous than its too sudden acquisition. As Epictetus put it, “Where did you so suddenly learn wisdom?’ [ 162. | THINK, ABIB! From the times of Thackeray and Moliére much obliquy has been heaped upon the Nou- veau Riche and his behavior. But little has been said on the far larger subject of the Nouveau Sage. That a little knowledge is a dangerous thing has long been recognized; but the truth is, a great deal of it may be something worse than dangerous. It is not the size but the suddenness of the transition that dizzies him who makes it. And to one who has known a thing for a long time no one is so offensive as one who is puffed up over just having learned it. In days now best forgotten I spent an afternoon on the drill ground mastering what is known as ‘‘squads right.’ That intricate evolution is nothing less than the essential unit of martial science. It is the atom of the military universe. Did it cease to function, the most colossal strategy were vain. Yet tac- ticians make little of it, so confidently do they count on its stability. It is no small thing to learn nevertheless, and we went home from drill that evening [ 163 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD weary but triumphant. We had painfully and laboriously mastered the maneuver, and looked forward with real pleasure to per- forming it the next day. But on that day to our intense annoyance appeared a distin- guished colleague who had missed the previ- ous day’s drill, and had to be put through it, and the whole afternoon was spent by our officer and the entire squad in imparting the necessary mystery to him. And how slowly he absorbed it! It seemed to all us recent initiates that the man was impossibly and incredibly dull. Really, he did not seem to know his right hand, or at least foot, from his left. All the afternoon we stumbled after, over, and around him, and at last about sun- set our labors were rewarded, and he could do it too. This memory should make us kindly dis- posed toward the newly wise. For after all we had learned it only twenty-four hours sooner. But what a colossal sense of superi- Ofity it gave us! A start of twenty-four hours! What is it? Well, psychologically [ 164 |] THINK, ABIB! everything! Why, to arrive at truth a few minutes or even seconds ahead of you may become the ground of extravagant self-felici- tations on the part of your nearest and dearest. | The traveler to antique lands or even to distant parts of our own brings back rare articles of vocabulary with which to delight and amaze his simple neighbors. Mere names of unheard-of mountains, lakes, or rivers, pronounced if possible in the local manner, will do much in that direction, but there is nothing like an occasional phrase of Bantu or Swahili brought into the conversation at intervals in a thoroughly offhand manner and when least expected. An accomplished chauffeur of my ac- quaintance occasionally makes full use of his mind, with surprising results. Being satis- fied, as most people are, that the climate is changing, he cast about for an explanation for it, and soon found it in the recent develop- ment of radio with its attendant static. A professor with more knowledge and perhaps [ 165 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD less imagination was at once consulted, but not convinced. To know, and yet to think; that is the problem. For knowledge conventionally held too often admits only conventional habits of thought and leaves no room for its rightful freedom and audacity. Tame thought, like the caged condor, is a sad spectacle, stripped of its power, originality, and daring. Some people are too well bred to think, and are content to repeat polite formulas of thought. Yet without going so far as to seem rash or ill mannered, we can all use our minds a little more and our memories a little less, and we would all of us do well to in- dulge much more freely in the luxury of in- dependent thought. On a certain Sunday afternoon a year or two ago a little group of white-faced men sat huddled on the stage of a downtown theater, gazing into the expectant faces of a great audience. It was the birthday of Copernicus. Few men have done a more daring piece of thinking for our unthinking race than he. [ 166 | THINK, ABIB! To rethink the arrangement of the solar system within the narrow limits of one small head was a prodigious achievement, and on a stage set with the insubstantial scenery of ‘Shuffle Along’’ we were to interpret his significance in the history of human thought. Our subject was certainly in glaring con- trast with our setting. But, after all, few hu- man performances can boast a proper back- ground. If we waited for that, the play would never begin. And many a very pretty human stage accommodates a show not half good enough for it. How few great houses have witnessed great actions! Some are fa- mous because Queen Elizabeth slept in them. It was the best she could do. It is to the cot- tages and the mangers that our pilgrimages chiefly take us. It is on Main Street, not on Fifth Avenue, that life likes to stage its choicest efforts. Of course, this is not the way we would do these things, but the gods think differently. Thus against the flimsy background of [ 167 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD reality the human spirit works out its im- mortal business, sub specie aeternitatts. But the business of thinking cannot be left altogether to Galileo and Copernicus. Abib must do his share. Even if he have no such massive ideas to deal with, let him whet his wits upon the subject matter of daily life. ‘It is amusing,’’ said the great Erasmus, “‘ to deal with trifles in such a way as to show one’s self anything but a trifler.’’ And only so shall we be ready to understand and fol- low Copernicus when he appears. This is what leads to martyrdoms; a great thinker in the midst of an unthinking mass. Of course, they always kill him, in one way or another. What else is there for them to do? They cannot understand him, for they are completely out of the habit of thought, and in so doing they only defeat themselves. It is not for lack of leadership that society lan- guishes, but for the individual’s reluctance to do his just share of the world’s think- ing, in effect demanding that another, whom he will lazily declare more gifted than him- [ 168 | THINK, ABIB! self, must drag him on. As one looks about him, the whole situation, religious, political, and industrial, seems but asermon on this text. It was thinking upon them that struck the deathblow at dueling and slavery, not so very long ago, when those practices had what seemed to almost everybody an im- pregnable position in modern life. But a few men began to think, and to think differ- ently, and now everyone agrees with them. And those were not the only practices in- human society worth thinking about. Yet some very important people have got so in the habit of thinking what people expect them to think that no other kind of thought is possible for them any more. There is one great disadvantage about printing, that it tends to make us indolent in thought, for it makes it so much easier to get our thoughts ready-made. It is doubtful whether the loud and confident reiteration of other people’s thoughts, usually unveri- fied and hardly even understood, was ever more general. Which makes Mr. Browning's invitation more than ever timely now. [ 169 ] QYD:QIQV'DGP QW. QQ QI WI @ QL THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE HERE come times in the lives of not a few of us when we cry out with the satirist, ‘Semper auditor ego?’’ “Must I always listen?’’ and we write an article. It might be truer to say that it writes itself, for there is a kind of prophetic burden about it that leaves us no peace until it is off our minds. We are undoubtedly better, and for the time being happier, men for having Written it. Upon the exhilaration of this creative act, however, presently ensues a period of depression. For what is to be done with the article? It was indeed much to write it; but surely that is not enough. Others should see it and profit by it. If it was good for you to write it, how much better for them to read it. Obviously, it must be published. [ 170 ] THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE Of course, I do not refer to those lifeless productions manufactured to order upon lines laid down by some overshadowing editorial patron, who tells you what he wants you to write about, and at what length. I have in mind the spontaneous, involuntary, self- made article, which writes itself in accord- ance with the doctrine of predestination, and has in consequence its own way to make in a cold and calculating world. You will of course take stock of such edi- tors as you can think of, and wonder which of them, if any, is wise and great enough to perceive the worth of your article, and, put- ting all lesser articles aside, to cleave only unto it for his next number. To him then, in a letter studiously disinterested, you pres- ently offer the signal opportunity. You do not urge nor flatter. You address him with a reserve comporting with the dignity of the transaction. For you are offering him not a bench or a boot that you have made, but a fragment of your personality. You are ask- ing him to become the guardian of your [171] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD child. And you have an inward conviction that it is not you but he who is to have judgment passed upon him in his decision. When he thinks that he is answering, © This is not good enough for me,”’ he will in effect be saying, ‘‘Iam not good enough for this.’’ It is said that in the West Indies they catch a variety of fish which at certain sea- sons is very poisonous but at other times is perfectly edible. The test is to drop a silver coin into the pot while the fish is boiling. If it turn black there is death in the pot; the fish cannot be eaten. So with your article. When you have caught your idea and have it well a-stewing, cast in your editor. If he turn black, what you have is but a deadly mess; but if he keep his fine, silvery color, your dish is fit for public consumption. But what a singular being is an editor! I have seen one praise an article more in re- fusing it than he would another in accepting it. Of what does this convict him? Is it not unscrupulous thus to accept the worse and refuse the better? Is he merely being over- bag] THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE charitable? Or are some contributions in very sooth too good to print, and must the prac- tical editor bow to the mandate of his de- praved public? I do not know. There are doubtless polite or pious fictions in all pro- fessions. I have myself sat in the seat of the scorn- ful in my time, and with Olympian serenity accepted and refused articles. Whom I would Islew, and whom I would I left alive. And I know full well the bewildering variety of — pretexts to which editors will resort in their extremity. As, that they have already ac- cepted an article on a similar subject. Yet you look month after month for the similar article 1n vain; it never appears. Or, that the printers’ strike makes it impossible for them to accept any more articles with even the remotest prospect of publication. Why do not editors tell us bluntly and frankly the simple truth, that the self-made article is not good enough? Why do they re- sort to these pitiable subterfuges of ‘‘strikes’’ and “‘similar articles’’ and I know not what [173 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD besides? Perhaps from tenderness of heart; they would not hurt our feelings. But some- times, I am sure, this indirectness is due to a haunting apprehension that some day you may produce something that will print, and then you will turn on the too-candid refuser of your earlier efforts and pillory him as one who did not know genius when he saw it and vainly strove to keep a good man down. Some such bitter experience back in the early ages of editorial evolution must explain the instinctive self-protection characteristic of the modern editor. Yet we must all bear with his refusals now and then, for the truth is, everybody is writing for the magazines. With one-third of your subscribers offering you articles in a single year, what are you to do? In three years you may expect to hear articularly from your whole subscribing public. That fine old docile figure, the inarticulate subscriber, is NO more. Of course, not all of this proffered litera- ture can actually be printed in the magazine. [174] THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE But that is a detail. The all-important fact is that we are all writing for it. And with all the editor’s threadbare excuses for send- ing back our lucubrations, as he all but invariably does, how enormously it must buoy him up to feel that we are all, to the last man, woman, and child, back of him. His magazine cannot fail with such a clien- téle of rising authorship. He has but to take fortune at the flood and let us all together bear him on to success. Makeup day can never catch him unprepared so long as we, with untiring diligence, keep the office stocked with six hundred freshly volun- teered articles a week, or enough to fill the magazine for three solid years. What if all his professional writers, wickedly covetous of five cents a word, strike and abandon hime We will not let him fail, but will rise in our awful might and throw into the scale the enormous weight of the self-made article. Hysterical persons frequently inquire what we are coming to. In literature, at least, the answer is easy: democratization. Once few [175 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD read and fewer wrote. But the monopoly of our spirits by those dead but sceptered sov- ereigns is done for. Soon all will read and all write. And this will be no sham democracy in which grown-ups write for helpless child- hood. A day of vengeance has come in these matters, and now children write for grown- ups, and the grown-ups have to read it, for everyone else does, and grown-ups of all people can least afford to be left behind. One thing and one only stands in the way: the cost of printing. It is coming to be about as expensive to publish a book in print as it was in olden time to publish it Gin a smaller edition) in manuscript. But what good books men had to write then to get them published—Iliads and Aeneids and Divine Comedies. Printing costs may yet justify themselves by the salutary selective influence they exercise upon literature. But that millennial dawn when all the ar- ticles of all of us will be accepted 1s still far away. Today almost as many come back as go forth. Like the stars, not one of them is [176 ] THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE missing. With what dismay you behold the unmistakable long envelope projecting from the postman’s paw as he comes up the walk. After such a desolating moment it is at least fitting to permit an interval—a period of mourning, as it were—to elapse before offer- ing another article, and thus turning your cheek to the smiter—no inappropriate figure, I submit, from either point of view. And when your friends inquire solicitously when your next article is coming out, you simply cannot disclose to them the fatal packet which is even now hidden beneath your cloak like the Spartan’s wolf, and similarly occupied. The world is full of magazines and journals of many descriptions, but there is one of extraordinary promise of success that does not, I believe, exist: the Magazine of Re- jected Manuscripts. What a host of contribu- tors would be at once available to crowd its pages. Not all of them indeed distinguished, yet indubitably including in their ranks the literary celebrities of the future, and prob- [SsyeAl THINGS SEEN AND HEARD ably all such celebrities, for who that ever atrived in literature had all his contributions accepted from the first? Many a heart is caught on the rebound, and many a very pretty article that has found its first editorial reader in an indigestive mood would be avail- able for the new journal. And what a host of subscribers it would have! A mighty army of prospective contributors would spring up in a single night to form its subscription list. Nor could the general public stand coldly aloof from the only unique magazine on earth. Curiosity would advertise it through- out the land, and a nation of readers would pluck it from the news-stands, palpitating to learn at last what the oligarchy of editors has so long striven to keep from them. There would be something irresistibly compre- hensive, democratic, and hospitable about such a publication. It would so palpably ex- emplify in literature the great Anglo-Saxon principle of Free Speech. We might not all, indeed, live to see our contributions appear in its beneficent pages, [ 178 ] THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE for of course it would be overwhelmed with material from the start. But we should have at least the soothing sense, even in the hour of dissolution, that if the universe continued to hold together, they would in the course of time be posthumously produced in print. Above all, how easily and amiably would such a magazine be edited! The editor would require only the written rejection of the ar- ticle in question by any other known edi- tor, and he would, ex Aypothesi, accept it without parley. He would not even have to read it over, that having been done (pre- sumably) by the rejecting editor. His rule and canon would be, ‘If it is bad enough for any other editor to refuse, it is good enough for me to print.’’ This would insure the hu- man and really representative character of the Magazine of Rejected Manuscripts. In it the vast, inarticulate majority of patient, sorely tried readers, old men and maidens and little children, the submerged ninety- nine per cent of mankind, who read on and on without being able to lift a pen in self- [179 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD defense, would come at last into their own. In Utopia—perhaps already in Bolshevi- kia—such a magazine must exist. But in our present materialistic civilization the unique distinction about authorship is that it in- volves proficiency in two widely separated arts: the art of writing and the art of selling. You must market your product. I read few articles without admiration, but it is some- times less for them as literary achievements than as triumphs of salesmanship. [ 180 | QQ QV:QI. QV QW QW) QW QL LO ORGANIZED CURIOSITY S one surveys the conversational cosmos A he is tempted to exclaim, ‘‘ How much better is a sheep than a man!’’ It is difficult to be waspish or insinuating when one’s vocabulary is limited to the mono- syllable ‘* Ba,’’ although man has made even that essentially good-natured and harmless word a vehicle of contempt. It is true the gifted and interesting cat can impart an in- finite variety of expression to her meager vocabulary, and she and her family can make the most annoying faces at the objects of their dislike. But animal-kind, in general, has to resort to overt violence if it wishes to be disagreeable. It cannot even tell a lie. Over against this amiable background what a thing is man! He (or she) can swing in a hammock looking like an angel and [ 18x | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD watching the fleecy clouds, and tranquilly say things that will madden you. He can blast your hopes, murder your affections, and poison your soul, simply by manipulating his lips and tongue. He does not even have to taise his voice or make a face. Such is the power of speech. I know that language is im- measurably the greatest of human inventions. Of course it has its uses. But just as certainly it is responsible for most of this world’s woe. Out of these profound reflections rises the query, Would we be better off dumb? Or if not, what is the justification of speech? What good can it show to offset this im- measurable harm? What is its right to be? You sometimes hear people say, ‘If I couldn't talk about it, Ishould burst!’’ Here is the answer. Speech is the exhaust. With- out it we should burst daily. It is the es- capement. It must not be taken too seriously. Few mean all they say. Their nervous sys- tems are just getting their balance by letting off a little pent-up energy in talk. Who does not feel better after sputtering a bit? It is [ 182 | ORGANIZED CURIOSITY usually supposed that man invented speech to communicate ideas. I venture to deny this. He did it to relieve his feelings. Which should make us newly pitiful to all dumb creatures. Beyond all doubt this is the rationale of the questionnaire. A group of restless spirits being assembled together cast about for a vent for their waste energy. Even conversa- tion fails; each already knows all the others have to say. To question one another would © be absurd. They therefore direct their inter- rogations into the air, conceiving them as addressed to vague, distant figures, who may not even exist, for all they know. Off goes a questionnaire, and they experience immediate and complete relief. Returns do not matter in the least. Everyone knows that the one unimportant thing about a questionnaire is the answers to it. Of course, hyperconscien- tious individuals like you and me spend hours guessing out the answers to these crea- tions of idle fancy, but in our hearts we know that the indefatigable minds that [ 183 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD framed these inquiries have forgotten them already. The questionnaire is apparently of royal origin. The first one known seems to have been sent by the king of Syria to the king of Israel, "and it called) forth a classic tetone which should be written at the head of every response to one, ‘Consider, I pray you, and see how he seeketh a quarrel against me!’’ It 1s one of the perversities of human history that this essentially autocratic institution has revived in a supposedly democratic age. For just as the eighteenth century witnessed the perfection of La Guzllotine, the twentieth has seen that of an instrument more dreadful, if less sanguinary, La Questionnaire. There are questionnaires short and ques- tionnaires long. Beyond doubt, the latter are the more dreadful, but the short ones, too, sometimes make flattering demands up- on one’s powers. You are asked to send a western correspondent your latest faculty list, checking on it the positions that are vacant this year ‘‘and those that are to be [ 184 ] ORGANIZED CURIOSITY vacant next year.”’ You are complimented no doubt, but you feel like rending your clothes and exclaiming with an earlier recipi- ent, ‘Am I God that this man doth send un- to me?’ Only the modern questionnaire is not ordinarily accompanied with six thou- sand pieces of gold and ten changes of rai- ment. You are, in fact, fortunate if its gifted senders inclose a stamp, but they do invari- ably ‘‘thank you in advance’ for your reply. The questionnaire is not the only modern © device for arriving at knowledge without threading the dusty paths of toil. The Ouija board is another. Of course those who wor- ship Ouija will think this a flippant and sac- rilegious remark; and so will those who wotr- ship Questionnaire. But is it not true that even as the unsophisticated when in doubt have recourse to the Ouija board, the intel- lectual take refuge in the questionnaire? It may seem to some that Ouija is inter- rogated upon a wider range of topics than Questionnaire, but this is doubtful. The questionnaire serves an amazing variety of [ 185 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD uses, or at least purposes. I have shown how it may be used to forecast the future. But it may be turned with equal success upon the past. I recently expended myself upon an- swering one of middling length—a preamble and six questions—the first being, ‘‘Is the above the proper explanation of the Greek text? If so, why so? If not, why not?’ The inquirer was a lawyer. I hope he won his case. I certainly did my best for him. Psychologists derive great happiness from propounding questionnaires, and bring up their students to do so. If a professor can se- cure material for lectures and articles by scat- tering questionnaires o er a smiling land, ob- serving students can get you and me to write their term papers for them in like manner. Decorous ladies in attendance upon a philan- thropic tea have thrust into their hands by an eager student a list of twenty questions, some with twelve subheads, to answer on the spot about their hopes, fears, aims, thoughts, occupations, and experiences, not forgetting such inflammatory inquiries as “‘Do you [ 186 | ORGANIZED CURIOSITY think women have a fair chance in life? Why?” An aspirant in business psychology, a complete stranger, thus mimeographically addresses you: ‘‘ What is your opinion of the economic wisdom of university professors’ purchasing jointly with other tenants the flat-buildings in which they reside? Should this be done only when there are enough purchasers to occupy all the flats? If not, what proportion of purchasers to flats would — you consider reasonable? Give the reasons for your views.’’ This poor young man did not live to enjoy my reasoned observations on this absorbing subject, for I have never heard from him since, and in view of his unmistakable interest 1n my economic wel- fare, he would hardly have failed to con- tinue an acquaintance he himself had sought. I would not be misunderstood. Iam both professionally and temperamentally addicted to imparting information, and I would wil- lingly labor from dawn until dark guessing out the answers to these ingenious queries, [ 187 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD if that were what was wanted. But it is not. What is wanted is a statistic. My labored contribution, painstakingly worked out with much consultation of reports and mono- graphs, will in the end make a difference of perhaps point two in a finding running much as follows: ‘‘ Your Committee K begs leave to report that sixty-three mimeographed copies of Questionnaire No. 19A were sent out to a representative list of persons chosen entirely at random. Of these nine, or fourteen and two-sevenths per cent, were returned marked ‘Cannot be delivered.’ Of the re- maining fifty-four, eighteen, or thirty-three and one-third per cent, have not been re- turned in time for use in this report,’ and so forth. This, if you ever hear of it, may lead you to wonder whether the first nine, who had the wisdom to hide themselves in the day of visitation, had not chosen the better part. But you will not hear. No one does. Of the questionnaires near and far to which I have made my offering as solicited, I have been [ 188 | ORGANIZED CURIOSITY sent the upshot of but one, and that was from Texas years ago, before the technique of the thing had reached its present perfection. You do not even know whether the thing has ever reached Committee K, unless the chairman writes you to say that it has not. Then you know. I would rise to propose that it be made the law of the land that every contributor to any questionnaire whatsoever receive one copy of the report, findings, or upshot based on — his and all other such answers, within one year from the date of writing and without expense. Even if one cares nothing about the subject per se, yet by the time one has labored over it for an hour or two, one’s in- terest 1s inevitably aroused in it as a sporting proposition, and one cannot help wondering whether he has put his money on the wrong horse. Of course, it does not altogether escape you that what is really being studied in these intimate inquiries about flats and a fair chance in life is not the subject, but the an- [ 189 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD swerer. You are the curious specimen upon whom the microscope is being turned, and you ate being scrutinized, as in a slide, wriggling and twisting before the delighted but impartial eye of observation. And it is you and your ‘behavior’ that they will later judge and classify, and file away in the dust among their precious ‘‘materials.’’ But no one can begrudge you a hurried and not un- revealing return glance at the glowering orb above mentioned, before you are whisked out of the field to make room for another specimen. And does not every subtle ques- tion seem to look loftily down at you and say, Ha! Look at me, my friend! Did you ever think of that before?”’ The friend in Texas, by the way, deserves the passing tribute of a sigh. He was of a nobler disposition than most persons sim1i- larly addicted, but he was evil starred. With the amount of zeal usual with the profession, he drew his bow at a venture and addressed among others no less a personage than the Bishop of Durham. The bishop obligingly [ 190 ] ORGANIZED CURIOSITY replied, but bewildered his interrogator by signing himself by a name known neither in heaven or earth—Dunelm. He signed it, moreover, with a careless elegance which led our friend to decipher it ‘*Dunehm.”’ He had hoped for a weighty scholastic authority, and behold he drew from out the void this less than human thing. How could he know that time out of mind the bishops of Dur- ham have thus quaintly disguised themselves with the Latin epithet reminiscent of ancient Dunholme, and conveniently abbreviated? But “Fear not to touch the best’’ has ever been the questioner’s motto. Did not the first one begin upon a king? The Bishop of Gloucester answered with equal politeness and self-effacement, reducing our poor interrogator to the desolating ad- mission, ‘“‘I cannot decipher his name.’’ Truly their sorrows shall be multiplied who seck after bishops, with the covert intention of harnessing them up to a questionnaire. But let us be just. I confess to a certain thrill of joy at the sight of each new ques- [ 19 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD tionnaire, and though I count that day lost which does not bring two fresh ones under my observation, I own I open each one with more curiosity than I feel for the morning paper. “What will they be after asking now?’’ I say to myself, and I am seldom disappointed. How flattering to be asked, “‘as a man of discression,'’ as one questioner puts it, how many acres there should be in a col- lege campus, and how many buildings per acre! How tefreshing to be called upon to state the number of members in the German Reichs- tag, and above all to reveal that most esoteric mystery, the exact post-office address of the former Kaiser! One is reminded of being asked, amid a string of similar inquiries, what verse of Ecclesiastes expresses the theme of the Iliad—clearly a problem with two un- known quantities, leaving one in doubt whether first to read the epic in question to find out its theme, or to read the Scripture in the hope of chancing upon the suitable verse. [192] ORGANIZED CURIOSITY It is at least evident that much informa- tion may be gratuitously secured by this simple device, upon economics, religion, education, psychology, history, politics, and other subjects, not to mention the future and the past. I do not say that the use of the questionnaire has gone too far. It has hardly begun. I can see much further development before it. Why should anyone in need of legal advice resort to the precarious method of engaging some eminent practitioner in» casual conversation on the suburban plat- form, and incidentally bringing up the sub- ject, still less of going out and hiring a law- yer? All that is necessary is to send out a short questionnaire to a dozen or twenty leaders of the American bar, being careful to append to each the searching words of my own legal inquirer, ‘‘If so, why so? If not, why not?’ When the answers are all in, a few minutes’ computation should lead to valuable results. If Galileo had only thought to issue a questionnaire on the movement of the earth and other problems that disturbed [193 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD him, how different the history of modern science might have been! I have little patience, however, with mere cynical divagations unrelieved by practical suggestion. What is to be the outcome of this extraordinary recrudescence of the vener- able questionnaire? A new vocation is to emerge. Iam more and more convinced that we are to witness an addition to Mr. Chester- ton’s Queer Trades. For as the moon will draw the sea, the questionnaire will have its answerer. Let it not be carelessly assumed that any- body can do this. There is a technique in answering these affairs just as surely as there is in contriving them. I observe in myself a growing facility in distributing precise an- swers— | Yesy% “No,’7 Yes and) Nowe have no means of knowing,’’ and the like— judiciously among the dotted lines so gener- ously provided. But of course a professional- ly trained expert with a World’s Almanac and a running hand could answer them in half the time. [194] ORGANIZED CURIOSITY Some people fear to prophesy, but I have answeted too many forward-looking ques- tionnaires for that, and the time is coming when every institution must have an encyclo- pedic authority solely concerned with an- swering these questions, if what Mr. Bentley calls the spirit of aimless inquiry prevailing in this restless day is to be satisfied. | No one should lose a questionnaire. At no distant day museums will be provided for their accommodation, and a mellow archa- eological radiance will cluster round these quaint devices for sounding the shallows of truth. And finally, when the new profession is scientifically equipped and the museum ma- terial is of sufficient bulk, we shall have the satisfaction of subjecting the questionnaire and its creators to a rigorous scientific scru- tiny. The worm will turn. We shall reverse the microscope and from its lower end glower back upon our self constituted investiga- tors. Every questionnaire that flutters down like autumn leaves upon our desk will at [195 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD once be assigned to its proper place in the new ology. By turning to an alphabetical filing case close at hand the answers to all their supposedly novel inquiries will at once be found. The character, motives, indirec- tions, and carefully hidden weaknesses of its mysterious perpetrators will be revealed, and we shall return to them not only the obvious answers to their easy questions, but an impartial and benevolent diagnosis of their psychological symptoms with some simple remedies sure to be within the reach of all and likely to produce a permanent CULC: QI RY LS: QW QW WW LW LH THE WEEK-ENDER there lived in Swaffham Market, in Nor- folk, a peddler named John Chapman. Having dreamed one night that, if he went up to London, on London Bridge he would meet a man who would bring him good news, and being unable to get this dream out of his mind, he presently betook himself to Lon- don, and all day long walked to and fro on London Bridge. At length a shopkeeper, noting his strange behavior, asked him the meaning of it, and the honest peddler told him his dream. “Ah!” said the shopkeeper, “‘had I taken account of dreams, I might have seemed as much a fool as you; for only the other night I dreamed that in a place called Swaffham Market, in Norfolk, there lives a peddler [197] l the times of Henry VII, the story runs, THINGS SEEN AND HEARD named John Chapman, who has a tree in his backside, under which is buried a pot of gold.”’ The peddler humbly acknowledged the folly of such behavior and forthwith re- turned home. There he lost no time in dig- ging under the tree in his backside, and in very truth found just such a pot of gold as the shopkeeper had dreamed of, whereby he lived in plenty the rest of his days. It must be evident that, under some subtle influence—a dream, an invitation, or a pro- spectus—John Chapman went off for a week- end, and came back from it with his eyes opened to new possibilities at home. Every week-ender knows that many a problem in- soluble on a Friday will yield to treatment on a Tuesday. Just as the provincial peddler turned for his holiday to the metropolis, the metropo- lite naturally seeks his in remote rural soli- tude. It is my hard lot to spend a part of my summer breadwinning in the stifling city, and to have only the week-ends with my [ 198 ] THE WEEK-ENDER family in the country. Between the scene of my labors and the bosky isle which they inhabit lie four hundred miles of rail, with which my weekly journeys have now made me reasonably familiar. And what with four days and three nights in town, and four nights and three days out of it, I sometimes hardly know which is the week and which the week-end. I write this memoir on the way back from one of these tranquil retreats from the bus- » tling world. This morning I did nothing at all that I remember, except rise at six, help anchor and beflag the stake-boat and the finish-boat for a regatta, act as announcer for the opening events, drive a launch in the procession, compete in a boat-race, and pad- dle violently in three hot canoe-dashes, be- sides communing with nature in the inter- vals. We had just time for lunch before I left for the train; and now, rested and refreshed, I am returning to the busy city, eager to par- ticipate again in its fervid life. It is no great inconvenience for the island [199 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD household to have me ply between it and the marts of trade, and I sometimes prove very useful indeed as a sort of pony express. Week-enders, I believe, always carry candy, melons, or green corn; but my supreme ex- ploit in transportation was the night I stag- gered backward off the steps of a moving station bus, with a large suitcase, a box of candy, and a seven-foot beach umbrella in my otherwise empty hands. Of course, I added a basket of fruit before venturing on the train. John Chapman himself can hardly have returned from London heavier laden. I went week-ending once in Egypt, years ago, with a plum cake, and a basket of vege- tables—the leeks and onions of Egypt—so huge that it and I occupied an entire com- partment of the Fayum train. Something like this happened last summer, when I was escorting north a wooden ash-stand perhaps two feet high, in the form of a negro waiter. The person who sold him to me asked me where he was to stand; and when I said on the porch of a summer cottage, she answered [ 200 | THE WEEK-ENDER brightly, ‘‘ Then this will be just the thing. You know you want a touch of color.’’ But when packed and boxed, my touch of color proved too bulky to go under the berth, nor could his congener, the porter, find room for him in his closet or in the vestibule; and in the end he did in simple fact occupy an upper all by himself, even as I. Why is it that the week-ender, no matter how high minded, thus unfailingly degener- ates into a beast of burden? Are there not ex- | press companies and parcel posts? Yet who cares for what they bring? A commonplace- looking bundle is pushed at you over the post-office counter: it must be those bathing- shoes come at last, when the interest felt in ordering them has evaporated. But to ar- tive at the island before breakfast, bringing out of one’s pack things ordered, or, better, unexpected—this has about it something of Santa Claus and the Swaffham peddler com- bined. The things you bring are the spoils of your hunting; you have somehow wrung them out of the vast, impersonal city, and [201 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD you come bringing them in an elemental sort of triumph. Your arrival becomes an event. There is also another reason for this pack- horse phase of week-ending: you forgot to get the things until the last minute, and you had to carry them, or arrive ingloriously, bringing nothing more welcome or substan- tial than explanations. Besides, shopping for the paraphernalia of sport through the week helps to keep one in a holiday frame of mind. And was not John Chapman, that patron of week-enders, himself a peddler by profession? The beach umbrella was for the Fourth of July; but lesser occasions, like regattas, have their uses for the week-end express. All I brought up last Friday night, that I now re- call, besides my personal luggage, was two paddles, three boxes of candy, a boat-hook, a navy anchor, and six rope fenders for the launch. The boat-hook, I remember (some- one else won it and now rejoices in it), was of a peculiar elegance, being tipped with brass. As I was buying it in a sporting-goods store, a boy and a man looked on. “We [ 202 | THE WEEK-ENDER ought to have one of those,’’ said the boy, and added with fine inconsequence, ‘‘ What's it for?’ “It’s to open and close windows with,’ said the man; thus betraying his nar- row utban horizon. The picturesqueness of our island remote- ness is accentuated by the railway which con- nects us with the great world. For more than twenty years it has stood like a rock against the encroachments of fashion and our too mechanical age. On it one finds none of the » freakish contrivances of modern travel. Its fine old sleepers go back to the Victorian period. I have made some study of archae- ology, but I must confess that in the dim pillared aisles of some of these ancient coach- es I stand in awe, not to say dread. What wassail of thirsty fishing-clubs have these venerable vehicles not witnessed! They are as redolent of antiquity as Dickens’ ghostly stage-coaches, only these hoary conveyances are still awheel. The porters are of an ap- propriate maturity. They are like old fami- ly servants. The same old darky year after [ 203 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD year greets you at the steps of your Pullman, and the dining-car conductors are old family friends, to whom fathers introduce their children. The locomotives, too, have their distinc- tive traits. Most engines start slowly and re- luctantly, but in this ozone-laden air, the very engines jump forward eagerly to their task, and the whole train starts with a thrill- ing jerk. Strangers misunderstand this, but the sympathetic and reflective week-ender sees deeper into it, and comes to find the lazy ways of city locomotives tedious and annoy- ing by contrast. It is an experience to see one of these quaint engines, with its spark- atrester, sO suggestive of afternoon tea, jauntily perched upon its smokestack, rico- cheting along the rails, or, in more pensive mood, stealthily pushing its way through the thick shrubbery that overhangs the track. Our railroad has a system of power- ful locomotives, each eighty cubits long and capable of six thousand horse-power. But it has never profaned our forest solitudes by the [204 ] THE WEEK-ENDER admission of these monsters. They would wreck the mossy old bridges, frighten the timid creatures of the wood, and put the wayside golfer off his game. But what a thing it is, in the dewy fresh- ness of early morning, having again survived the perils of travel, to descend from the train upon the very shores of a certain friendly lake! The launches from the scattered cot- tages that dot the points and islands are pic- turesquely clustered at the landing just be- yond the trees. In a moment they are filled and scatter, and proud is he who gets away first with his load. In a minute or two they are strung out ina gallant line, making each for his particular breakfast-table, about which will soon gather the gayest breakfast- party of the week. News of the city and the lake will be exchanged, and plans discussed for the three days that make up a proper week-end. It is now that the week-ender Opens his capacious pack and draws out a new rug for the living-room and a six-foot flag to fly in the regatta. He has also a new [205 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD fire-screen, a can of paint for the boathouse, and a pair of wading boots for the general good. Of a truth, there is no morning like Saturday morning, and the week-ender is its prophet. If it be true that habitual week-ending imparts to existence a hectic hue (and hectic, if I remember, began by meaning habitual), it has its sanative properties as well. There is nothing like a change of air, and to change it twice a week all summer should restore any appetite. How much the stable native popu- lation which ministers to our summer migra- tions would be profited by a little judicious week-ending! How it would disorganize their factions and rearrange their prejudices! It would recharge their spiritual batteries and air out the cupboards of their souls. It would set local rivalries in a more tolerant perspective, and ease the cruel friction of rural life, which is so real to them and to us migrants so like a stage play. An occasional holiday on London Bridge, or its American equivalent, might send them home again [ 206 | THE WEEK-ENDER with eyes to find the pot of gold under the tree in their backside. Yet much week-ending might blur the piquant outlines of personality, dull imagina- tion, and conventionalize speech. The other day, as we were gathering minnows from a creek, the forester’s boys came down the road. With bucolic courtesy we asked where they were going. They answered without emotion that they were after their colt: ‘The blame shrimp swum the lake.’’ Mark © the passionless restraint of the reproach, and the fine propriety of the figure. From the hotel-keeper, who is our local eponym, we later learned the climax of the colt’s exploits. The spirited creature had effected a landing at the hotel, and seizing the bell-rope in his teeth, had roused the slumbering establish- ment with wild alarm. Evena colt will have his holiday on London Bridge, and if there is no bridge where one should be, will swim for it perforce. So deep is the week-ending instinct. On a peaceful evening, summer before last, [ 207 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD the semi-weekly freight brought a certain long-expected launch; and as the next day was the Fourth of July, it seemed very neces- sary to get the boat into the water that night. Half the men of our village had been retained to help in this, and a boat-wagon, especially designed for such ceremonies, was in attend- ance. The locomotive obligingly left the car with its end to the road, so that the boat might be shoved from its fastenings upon the wagon, and the waiting cohort immediately swatmed over car and launch, tearing off crating, wrenching away supports, and heav- ing the hull laboriously out of its cradle. The other half of the villagers looked on and helped with interested advice. Among them appeared one of our neighbors, a veri- table Captain of Industry, who had come down to the train to meet a cow. Instinc- tively he took command, and instinctively we all obeyed. It almost restored one’s faith in the industrial order. ‘‘ Here, Bill! get your back into this,’’ he cried to the mightiest of the onlookers. Bill only wanted to be called [ 208 | THE WEEK-ENDER on. He sprang upon the car, his brothers close behind him. The scene became Homer- ic. The car was thick with straining men. There was a clamor of voices. The horses be- came frightened and had to be taken from the wagon. A judge of the state Supreme Court sprang in to take their place, and held the tongue. What an allegory! Justice Holding the Tongue of Transportation! The Captain of Industry moved about, adjusting the pack- ing and giving crisp directions. The twilight ~ faded, and night was falling. At length, a final heave, and the hull slid down upon the wagon. The supreme justice was relieved, the horses were put in, the preferred half of the villagers scrambled upon the hull, and as the wagon cteaked away toward the lake and the moon mounted above the pines, we dispersed with a friendlier understanding for a half-hour’s common toil. Sometimes, of a Saturday night, the tran- sient and the permanent elements of our sparse population meet for a dance at the so- called rink. The big, bare room is dimly [209 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD lighted with a few oil-lamps, and in the corner the burly forest-ranger, with his fid- dle, leads the orchesttal trio. The. station agent, the inexorable custodian of our tele- grams and express parcels, attends thinly dis- guised as a German peasant, and all make a diligent show of enjoyment. For this is a truly decorous affair, and you may find more real gaiety at many a prayer-mecting. The music belongs to the epoch of the waltz, and the Virginia Reel and the old reliable Lancers are seen again. Then, before the hour of mid- night checks the patriot’s use of pleasure gas, we scatter to our Fords and launches, and speed homeward under a glorious autumn aurora, just like the picture in the dictionary. My week-ending will run into some six thousand miles this summer, and as Steven- son says of voyaging in the South Seas, it seems strange to travel so far and see so little. But what people one meets and what narratives one hears! Once in a while you may encounter that rare old species of ra- conteur, the Lion of the Smoking-Room. As [ 210 | THE WEEK-ENDER soon as he begins to talk, that luxurious re- treat quickly fills up with an attentive group. It was from a superb specimen of this van- ishing race that I heard the legend of the Camels of Arizona. It would seem that long ago, before the Civil War, when Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War, it was observed that the Government Mule was not adapted to use on the American Desert. The resource- ful strategists of that epoch bethought them of the oriental camel, the Ship of the Desert, and the War Department accordingly 1m- ported a number of these animals to carry supplies and ammunition to the waterless parts of the West. This picturesque experi- ment was not, however, successful. The loads were too heavy; the camels were less amenable to military discipline than their pictures had led Mr. Davis to suppose; and a rapprochement between them and the mule-drivers proved difficult to effect. At all events, the stately creatures soon died or de- serted, and the military phase of the experi- ment was over. But on clear nights, more [271 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD especially after pay-day, the belated rancher has often seen the weird forms of them or their posterity, swinging off across the moon- lit sands among the mesas. I have not been able to substantiate this legend in any particular, and I shudder to think what .a wreck historical criticism might make of it. It is not as fact that it in- terests me, but as imagination; as the finest example I know of the Smoking-Room Leg- end; or, shall we say, the Pipe Dream? In my adventurous youth, I stood one eve- ning on the WielandshGdhe overlooking the rivet Neckar and the little city of Tiibingen. It was a peaceful scene. Far below me a cavalcade of students, booted and spurred, rode two and two across the bridge to some distant rendezvous among the hills. Sud- denly, around a bend in the river there swept into view a long raft of logs, steered down the swift stream by a little crew of lumber- men, on its way from the Black Forest to the Rhine. Instantly in all the Verein-houses that crowned the heights, windows were [foat24)| THE WEEK-ENDER thrown up, heads were thrust out, and a chorus of hoots and cries filled the evening air. One corps vied with another in shouting derision at the little band of raftsmen, and the storm of sound pursued them until the raft disappeared from sight behind a hill be- low the town, when the uproar ceased as suddenly as it had begun. So does the cloistered student, like the London shopman, cry out in mingled envy and derision upon the free adventurer in his quest for the pot of gold which is the week- ender’s exceeding great reward. [213 ] QI QI. QB. QQ LI: QW QS. DY PERSONS AND THINGS ing us to look facts in the face, and to see things as they are. They would have us focus our attention upon the reali- ties of life and act accordingly. This is well; but it is quite as important to bear in mind that this is not simply a world of fact and reality, but something rather more intricate and interesting, in which persons are often as important as things, and feelings, as facts. It is perhaps sad that we must allow for senti- ment, but the truth is most people suffer from it in some form or other, and their giv- ing and even their buying will be to some extent affected by it. We live in an age that is all but over- whelmed by a flood of new facts, and old facts seen in new lights, and both of these [274 | Pires people are constantly tell- PERSONS AND THINGS everyone should welcome. Science and his- tory have given them to us in an amazing measure, and yet they have evidently only begun. We shall be periodically inundated with new bodies of fact, at least for a long time tocome. And this should be a veritable gospel for mankind. What better news could we have than that new fountains of informa- tion are opening to the human mind, to bet- ter our lot and clarify our vision? I would not, for a moment, be one of those who ° would turn away from this new knowledge with doubt or disdain. What does need to be said, however, in the presence of much of it and the prospect of more is that facts are not everything. This flood of facts must not sweep us away from those values in personality and sentiment which are after all fundamental. The world still consists of people quite as much as things, and nothing has happened to make them really any more negligible than they ever were. Indeed, the importance of people seems in a fair way to be enhanced instead [215 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD of being diminished by this new mastery of facts. How it enlarges their sphere of influence for one thing! I remember with gratitude a certain plumber who when our radius rod broke in the Bad River Reservation gener- ously replaced it with his own and sent us on our way rejoicing. He was, like us, from Chicago, and was just camping in the Indian village while he built himself a motor-boat to descend the Mississippi for a vacation. A most improbable situation, truly! Yet it is with just such improbabilities that the new age constantly confronts us, and I for one am in no mood to complain. What Indian of the Bad River could have done for me what that exotic Chicago plumber did? But what had brought him there? The gas engine, which was also to bear him thence. No, the individual need not wither while the world is more and more. He may expand, and fill the earth, meeting you this week on the Bad River and next week at Biloxi, or the Pass. 2161) PERSONS AND THINGS Doubtless plumbers are born for emer- gency; a young pupil of mine once defined plumbing as a set of pipes in need of re- pair. But the widened horizons of the new age are not theirs alone. A young man at a Christmas party offers to take your cousin home to Columbus in an airplane, with no more perturbation than you used to feel in inviting a girl to go bicycling; and off they float next day in a huge biplane and make Columbus in an hour and a half. Who says the individual withers? The poet was mis- taken. The old Hebrews with their exultant forecast of man’s dominion over nature were much nearer the truth. All the more, then, are men and women to be reckoned with in making up the new ac- count. The ancient, with no implement bet- ter than a hoe, might perhaps for purposes of argument be discounted. But the modern man who flies over the continent from sea to sea, looking down like an eagle into the Yellowstone, and the Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley, is certainly as [217] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD important as the plane he flies in. And his character and ambitions, his hopes and fears, increase in importance with his powers. What are we but bundles of experiences and acquisitions, sentiments and resolutions? And the more we have seen and felt and been and done, the more considerable bundles we become. It will be strange indeed if per- sonality cannot keep pace with the advanc- ing revelation of fact, however magnificent that revelation may be. Not simply facts, things, and realities, then, but people, wishes, and sentiments must enter into all our serious practical esti- mates. In a remote village in South Dakota you will find a community-house with din- ing-room, kitchen, and assembly-room, and not far away a municipal swimming-pool, to evidence the spirit of the place. A like pro- portion of civic devotion would work won- ders in many a bigger place much nearer the Atlantic Coast. You stopped there for a half-hour to mend a tire, and you found a [218 | PERSONS AND THINGS shrine of pure democracy, with an enthusias- tic citizen for its high priest. People seem perfectly mobile, but they have a curious way of striking unseen roots into the soil. A young woman desiring to bring her parents from Sweden to America slaved and saved to get them here, only to find out that they could not bear the change and positively pined away until she sent them back to their native land. They were too old to transplant, and she had seen the change with her eyes instead of theirs. Some efforts to transplant institutions of learning have been just as promising and just as futile. What is really a good thing may be very bad for the actual people it would involve. It may seem very desirable to substitute the atmosphere of a factory for that of an office, until it occurs to one that people are in- volved, who may see the matter quite differ- ently. Whether things are of more conse. quence than persons may be disputed, but it is safe to say that the personal equation can never be entirely overlooked. [219] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD And yet many excellent men persist in acting as though they lived in a world of facts, realities, and things. Perpetually com- ing to grief on this theory, they mourn over the intractableness of the materials on which they imagine they are called to work. They have fallen into the way of thinking that everyone else belongs to the category of things for them to manipulate. They be- long in an impersonal universe—a universe of things. What desolations they make in in the earth! Yet the greatest loss is theirs, for they never become really conscious of the world they live in—in so far, at least, as they may be (said to live-in it.) The ‘betteralegan life, which is one’s relations to persons, is closed to them. To think of all other persons as things carries with it its own sufficient penalty. What could be blanker than to go through life unconscious of all the people around you—their hopes, fears, and aspirations? I would even go so far as to raise the ques- [ 220 | PERSONS AND THINGS tion whether things have much of any value except in relation to persons—as desired, feared, acquired, used by them. Gold and diamonds, for example. Or oysters. A Sioux Indian of my acquaintance tells me that his first impressions on getting a raw oyster into his mouth were indescribable. He really did not know what to do with it. Yet Sioux and oysters have existed side by side on this continent for generations. But they had never met, and so the oyster had no value to the Sioux. Rude Africans who part with rough diamonds for a trifle are making no mistake. They cannot grind or set them, or wear them to the opera, and they find more use and enjoyment in a piece of calico or a handful of beads than in the white pebbles which the white man so prizes. But the white man has no use for them; he must pass them on from hand to hand until they reach the select and limited group which values them. It may be otherwise far away in the interstellar spaces, but among mankind things take their value from what man or fe 4| THINGS SEEN AND HEARD woman can do with them. And this, in turn, depends very largely upon the degree of de- velopment of man or woman. A gentleman with a good salable article called upon a dealer to stock up with it. “I will,’’ replied the dealer, ‘‘ provided you will first go out into my territory and create a de- mand for it.’’ It was a good article, but that was not enough. People had to be shown this. Its own mere excellence would not alone sell it. So constantly are we brought back to people—their wants, real or imagi- nary, their desires and attitudes. This is what makes markets, literatures, cults, and poli- tics. To find the truth is not enough. We must persuade men, or the truth will slip back into the obscurity from which we have dragged it. It is not enough that it has worth; we must make people see the worth of it. Hence the deluge of advertisements that smothers us. They are one vast testi- monial to the necessity of persuading people of the worth of things. It remains to consider those extraordinary pee PERSONS AND THINGS beings who think they understand people in general, although unable to make anything of them in particular; who cannot get on with their wives or their office force, but feel competent to expound the art of living to the world at large. They may be politicians, preachers, editors, educators, or even essay- ists; but if they cannot succeed in the small, how can they expect to achieve the great? Yet there are many people who think that there is some essential difference between © dealing with a few persons and with a great many persons, and even that failure with the few promises success with the many. They have indeed learned that the beings immedi- ately around them are persons, but they still cling to the idea that the remoter circles of mankind are only things. Journeying once through South Dakota We spent a night at a ranchhouse, and in the evening sat in front of it and held converse with the rancher and his neighbors, who had been helping him with his threshing. Their talk, shrewd, humorous, practical, kindly, [223 ] THINGS SEEN AND HEARD at once peopled those great plains for us with men and women not at all unlike ourselves, except that they were perhaps busier, pluck1- er, and more indomitable. Since when, the idle table-talk of cities and of newspapers about Dakota and its people sets us smiling to remember. that night under the western stars. And in a small town in Montana, in a restaurant so well kept that it surprises you in a land of individual platter service and unforgettable‘ merchant's lunches,’ you fall into conversation with the proprietor and learn what men like him have been through in recent years, with prolonged winters, dry summers, crop failures, bank failures, and all the ruinous adjustments in their wake; and how he had contrived to save his ranch and some cattle, and becoming possessed of a small restaurant in the town had seen how to combine the two and make a living. That story of the failure of the short grass so neces- sary in Montana grazing, and of what came of it, was a little epic of western hardship [224 ] PERSONS AND THINGS and courage. The world is certainly full of people, and a great many of them are great people, too. Not a few excellent people feel the direst misgivings about the world of humanity be- yond their immediate ken. In their own kind of people they feel the greatest satisfaction and confidence, but of all other kinds they ate ready to despair. As they reflect upon the indolence, improvidence, extravagance, and decadence of artisans, laborers, and most © wage-earners, a settled melancholy possesses them. They sincerely believe that all such people squander their leisure and their sub- stance, and that high wages and short houts ate worse than wasted on them. These gloomy spirits are laboring under the old delusion that this is a world of things, and that things are worth more than people. So with all our flooding tide of facts and things, we may find comfort in the reflection that man has not yet, like Frankenstein, produced his dreaded master, but remains, 225 | THINGS SEEN AND HEARD for the present at least, a bigger thing than all his cinemas and phonographs, yes, even than his airplanes and radios; indeed all the bigger perhaps for having made them. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. [226 ] PRC, ev Sab y ae ) yet 4 ‘> Hy Ay 4 ‘ : ¥ a Gy PS3513 .059T4 Things seen and heard. Princeton Theological Seminary—Speer Library 1 1012 00145 8423