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IMAGINARY 
 OBLIGATIONS 
 
 By 
 FRANK MOORE COLBY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 
 
 1904 
 
LIB(?«WV tf OOWQRFSS 
 
 two OfWiW ffM*«»v»0 
 
 SEP 2? 1904 
 ^^Oowrfght Entry 
 
 CLASS ^ XXo. H<x 
 
 * COPY B 
 
 
 Copyright, 1904 
 By DoDD, Mead and Company 
 
 Published September, 1904 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I PRESUME it will not be denied that the Anglo- 
 Saxon conscience is apt to encroach on the zone 
 of moral indifference. We are a hortatory peo- 
 ple, forever laying down the law in a region 
 where diversity is most desirable. Apparently 
 we would rather teach than live ; we count votes 
 even in our dreams ; and we suppress nine-tenths 
 of our thoughts for fear of seeming incorrect. 
 We are sometimes frank in private, but coram 
 populo our souls are not our own. In proof 
 whereof see any magazine or newspaper or almost 
 any current book or play, and mark especially 
 the amazing difference between public speeches 
 and private thoughts. There are the romantics 
 of politics, and the self -concealment of debate, 
 and the duty to the crowd, and the duty to the 
 coterie, and the duty to the time of day, and the 
 
PREFACE 
 
 constraint of success, and the fear of being mis- 
 understood, and the care of the universe, and the 
 hundred other anxieties that make up our chief 
 imaginary obHgation to seem something different 
 from what we are — something wiser or more 
 sententious or more brilliant or more reasonable 
 and educational, something far less human and 
 infinitely less absurd. We cannot even see a man 
 with a book without worrying over the effect it 
 may have on him, and we would turn every critic 
 into a sort of literary legislator. We try to 
 compel good taste and the harmless word "cul- 
 ture" has already acquired a grim and horrid 
 sound. On the lightest of matters we lay the 
 heaviest of hands. At every point our indefati- 
 gable instructors would substitute a formula for 
 a vital process. Our fancied obligations to these 
 little formulas are for the most part the subject 
 of this book, which is made up of certain news- 
 paper and magazine articles, edited and rear- 
 ranged. The topics discussed are transitory, 
 but they are bound to recur, and the writings 
 quoted are evanescent but they are of a kind that 
 
PREFACE 
 
 often return. I have written about them because 
 I enjoyed their absurdity, but incidentally they 
 may show why so many of us grow old rigidly or 
 develop an alarming spiritual pomposity in our 
 middle age. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 I BOOKS WE haven't READ 1 
 
 II A PROBLEM OF CULTURE 7 
 
 III LITERARY BURROWING 13 
 
 IV THE DIFFERENCE OF PRINT 17 
 
 V THE WRITER WHO DOES NOT CARE 25 
 VI THE LITERARY TEMPERAMENT 33 
 
 II 
 
 THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 I THE NATIONAL ANGLE 40 
 
 II "AMERICANISM*' 49 
 
 ni CONCERNING HEROES 54 
 
 IV A "remarkable" man 60 
 
 V OLD AND NEW DEBATERS 64 
 VI ASPERITIES OF PEACEMAKING 70 
 
 VII MEASURING AN AMERICAN REPUTA- 
 TION 77 
 VIII DEMOCRATIC GENTILITY 83 
 
 III 
 
 THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 I SETTING THE PACE gg 
 
 II THE WALK UPTOWN 95 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 III THE READING PUBLIC 99 
 
 IV REFORMERS AND BROOMSTICKS 109 
 
 IV 
 ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 I ON SEEING TEN BAD PLAYS 118 
 
 II THE SPAN OF THE STAGE 128 
 
 III ON CERTAIN "pROBLEm" PLAYS 134 
 
 IV CONVENTIONAL PLAYS 145 
 
 V PRIVATE TASTES AND PRINTED CRITI- 
 
 CISM 151 
 
 V 
 RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 I BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 167 
 
 n THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRESHMEN 172 
 
 ni THE CO-EDUCATION SCARE 178 
 
 IV THE TRAINED WOMAN 182 
 
 V EDUCATIONAL EMOTIONS 189 
 VI INNER CIRCLES 194 
 
 VI 
 
 ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 I THE DRIER CRITICISM 200 
 
 n PAINSTAKING ILLITERACY 205 
 
 m THE HAND OF PROVIDENCE 210 
 
 IV NOTHING NEW 216 
 
 V LITERARY ANALYSIS 221 
 VI OUTDOOR PEDANTRY 226 
 
 Vn A POPULARIZER 234 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 VII 
 MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 I THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT 239 
 
 n THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR 244 
 
 HI THE CHEERFUL GIVER 249 
 
 IV THE SERIOUS WOMAN 254 
 
 V MUSIC AT MEALS 260 
 
 VIII 
 THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 I LITERARY REPUTATIONS 265 
 
 II THE PRAISE OF MINOR AUTHORS 271 ^^ 
 
 III THE PHASEMAKER 279 » \ 
 
 IV THE PURSUIT OF HUMOR 284 
 
 V THE TEMPTATION OF AUTHORS 289 
 VI THE JOURNALIST AND HIS BETTERS 295 
 
 VII RUNNING AN ORACLE 301 
 
 VIII FOR WOMAN AND THE HOME 306 
 
 IX ON BEHALF OF OBSCURE VERSE 315 
 
 X IN DARKEST JAMES 321 
 
PART I 
 
 ON LITERARY COMPUL- 
 SION 
 
 BOOKS WE HAVEN'T READ 
 
 A WRITER on French literature contrasts the cul- 
 tivated Frenchman's definite knowledge of his 
 own classics with the miscellaneous reading of the 
 Anglo-Saxon of the same class. In France there 
 are certain things that people with a taste for 
 reading are supposed to know, and do know. 
 With us there is no safety in this assumption. 
 The greater variety of our literature and the 
 flexibility of our standards account in his opinion 
 for the difference. It is a comfortable way of 
 putting the thing, and we need the suggestion, 
 for we are always setting up standards in this 
 1 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 matter and tormenting ourselves and others for 
 non-conformity. The truth is there are nine and 
 sixty ways of reading our tribal lays as well 
 as of making them. There is no path in reading 
 which we can safely advise another grown-up 
 Anglo-Saxon person to follow, and there is no 
 single book for not reading which he can de- 
 servedly be brought to shame. Yet, for certain 
 neglects of this sort we actually persecute. It 
 is a mild form of persecution, but it causes 
 needless suffering and, what is worse, it begets 
 lies. 
 
 Pride of reading is a terrible thing. There 
 are certain literary sets in which the book is an 
 instrument of tyranny. If you have not read 
 it you are made to feel unspeakably abject, for 
 the book you have not read is always the one 
 book in the world that you should have read. 
 It is the sole test of literary insight, good taste 
 and mental worth. To confess that you have 
 not read it is to expose yourself as an illiterate 
 person. It is like admitting that you have 
 never eaten with a fork. Now, when this social 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 pressure is brought to bear upon a man, what 
 happens? This depends on his moral character. 
 If there is a flaw in it anywhere, it breaks down. 
 Weak, sensitive persons will invariably stammer 
 out a lie. The temptation to escape the ignom- 
 iny is irresistible. The have-reads are hard, in- 
 solent and cruelly triumphant. The haven't- 
 reads feel that they must either tell lies or slink 
 away. Then there are all sorts of miserable 
 compromises. Without actually saying that he 
 has read one of the obligatory books, a weak 
 character will act as if he had. He ven- 
 tures a few of those vague, universal com- 
 ments which he knows are bound to be true of 
 anything, anywhere. But it is a wretched piece 
 of business, and most harrowing to the nerves. 
 The awful fidgetiness of a poor baited unread 
 man, when he thinks he is being cornered, is 
 pitiful to see. Next comes the stage of involun- 
 tary deceit. By talking about books as if he had 
 read them he comes to think that he has. He 
 uses third-hand quotations as if they were his 
 own. At this point humbug enters the heart; 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 the mind, as you might say, becomes encrusted 
 with its own pretence. Finally, there is literary 
 second childishness, oblivion and death. Some 
 choose the more virtuous course by reading books 
 just to say they have read them, thereby saving 
 their souls, perhaps, but certainly swamping 
 their intellects. 
 
 All this in a field where you can do and say 
 exactly what you please, where there is even a 
 premium on a whim. Where is the sanction for 
 these grim obligations ? How big a bibliography 
 goes to make a man of culture ? What course of 
 summer reading would have been equally suitable 
 for Carlyle and Charles Lamb? A list of our 
 unread books torments some of us like a list of 
 murders. Yet it is not they but the books we 
 have read that will accuse us. Just here we find 
 a consolation. Frankly confessed ignorance of 
 a book never bores any one and does no harm. 
 Ignorance of books is not infectious, but sham 
 knowledge of them is. The real offence is read- 
 ing in such a way that it leaves you the worse for 
 it. One would rather hear some men talk about 
 4 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 the vegetables they had eaten than the books they 
 had read. They put more real feeling into it. A 
 small vitality may be smothered by much read- 
 ing, and the book-talk of these people is the 
 author's deadliest foe. The books we have not 
 read may be another way of saying the authors 
 we have not injured. The reader is so often un- 
 worthy of the book. 
 
 We need all the comfort we can get. Small 
 literary ambitions trip up many of us every day. 
 Many a man lives beyond his literary income 
 from an absurd kind of book pride. Why should 
 we not own up like Darwin — change the subject 
 to earthworms if they interest us more? There 
 was more "literary merit" in what he said of 
 earthworms than in what most of us say about 
 belles-lettres. It is not the topic that gives the 
 literary quality. And we never can finish our 
 course of reading. We shall all be tucked 
 away in our graves with a long list of good 
 things still unread. But if we have not lied 
 about these or humbugged ourselves about the 
 others or staled any good man's memory by 
 5 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 feeble-minded repetitions, we may be saved. 
 Otherwise we shall be snubbed by every author 
 across the Styx. And if the only thing a multi- 
 tude of books have done for a man is to enable 
 him to mention them and quote them and appear 
 to be in the "literary swim," he is no fit person 
 for the company of honest authors. He does not 
 belong in Arcadia at all, but behind the counter 
 in a retail book-shop, where there is a good busi- 
 ness reason for plaguing other people about the 
 books they haven't read. By these and kindred 
 reflections we may console ourselves in part for 
 our deficiencies and ward off the temptation of 
 the sham. 
 
 \ 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 II 
 
 A PROBLEM OF **CULTURE" 
 
 Every little while there appears an article on 
 current American literature that takes all the 
 hope and self-confidence out of you — that is, if 
 you had any idea of keeping up with the times. 
 There are so many authors that the writer knows 
 and you do not. Sometimes you never heard their 
 names at all. Sometimes you have heard their 
 names and nothing more. Then comes this ter- 
 ribly well-informed person implying in every- 
 thing he says that greatness in a dozen different 
 fields has wholly escaped your notice. Poets 
 piping the sweetest kind of things at your very 
 doors, and you never hear them. Stupendous 
 "local color" work going on at every railway 
 junction, and you heed it not. I have been read- 
 ing an article of this kind in one of our most 
 serious magazines. It deals with the progress of 
 literature in the southern states, and though the 
 writer says he leaves out many names of equal 
 importance with those mentioned, he goes far 
 
 7 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 enough to convince you that you must always 
 remain illiterate. There is no chance of catch- 
 ing up now. 
 
 Here, for example, is a mere fraction of the 
 literature that is waiting for you in the several 
 states. In Kentucky there is a school of lyric 
 poetry, "quite unique, with Mr. Lane, Mr. Cox, 
 Mr. Johnson and Mr. Perkins as its chief lyrists." 
 Do you know them all? Why not.? "In Ten- 
 nessee Mr. Withers and Mr. B. F. Boole are writ- 
 ing creditable verse." To skip Withers and 
 Boole is to cut out the very heart of culture. 
 Then there is Mr. Bowles of Arkansas, who is 
 doing wonders for that state. Bowles of Arkan- 
 sas has "a polish that suggests some subtle con- 
 nection between cypress groves and the classics." 
 Professor Slope is doing even more for North 
 Carolina, where he is not only "publishing credit- 
 able poetry," but spreading fiction. And "pass- 
 ing softly over South Carolina (very softly, for 
 fear of waking up J. Gordon Coogler of Colum- 
 bia) we find Georgia illuminated by the talent of 
 Mr. Hodges and Mr. Norris." Some of them 
 8 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 you will know, of course. It is not likely, for 
 instance, that Professor Slope's work in North 
 Carolina has been unnoticed, or that you are 
 wholly ignorant of what Miss Beatrice Sim- 
 mons is doing in Alabama. But did you know 
 that Texas had its Bagby.'^ 
 
 If the list were exhaustive one would not feel 
 so much abashed at his ignorance of a part of it, 
 but these are only a few of the very greatest 
 names, and with these the writer feels it safe to 
 assume that every educated person is familiar. 
 He has a hundred others in reserve. A short 
 time before this article was printed, a professor 
 of literature had counted up contemporary Amer- 
 ican novelists, including only those whose work 
 had real significance and was sure to live forever. 
 There were sixty-six of them. In no other class 
 of men do you find such indomitable energy as in 
 these writers on American literature. It is a life 
 of heroic sacrifice and incessant toil, for no man 
 could possibly be so thorough in this field unless 
 he confined himself strictly to it and labored day 
 and night. With sixty-six American novelists 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 to be conscientiously studied and appraised, he 
 cannot fritter away his time with the classics, and 
 if he turns his attention for one instant to what 
 is going on abroad he is bound to skip some one 
 in Nebraska or Oregon. For say what you will, 
 a man's reading power is limited, and thorough- 
 ness nowadays is to be had only by concentration. 
 I do not deny that a man may read occasionally 
 in Shelley or Heine or Browning and at the same 
 time keep his eye on Bowles of Arkansas and 
 Slope of North Carolina. But I do argue that 
 it is a dangerous business to divide his time in 
 this way if he aims at thoroughness. For it is 
 not as if there were merely Slopes and Bowleses. 
 There are Lanes, Booles, Witherses and Bagbys 
 by the dozen, and the mind that shall grasp all 
 these and retain them permanently must not be 
 distracted. 
 
 In regard to "creditable verse" I go even fur- 
 ther. It is safer in this field to specialize by 
 states. No one should try and keep track of the 
 "creditable verse" in the whole country. Unless 
 he has a very remarkable mind he will surely be 
 10 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 superficial and very likely unjust. There are 
 no statistics of "creditable verse," but from com- 
 mon observation I know there is not a state in the 
 Union that does not raise enough of it to take 
 all one man's time measuring it off and ticketing 
 it. And any one who sets himself the task of 
 reading all of it has no right to expect any time 
 to spare for verse that is more than creditable. 
 That is the puzzling thing about these articles on 
 contemporary writers. They present problems 
 of specialization in their most baffling form. 
 Those robust and even-tempered people seem not 
 to be aware of them. Signs of increasing liter- 
 ary activity fill them with the most amazing 
 cheerfulness. There is a poet out in Arizona 
 now, they will say, and he is turning out reason- 
 ably good verse quite rapidly. They speak of 
 him as if he were a new water- works. To our 
 weaker or more indolent minds that discovery 
 would be an embarrassment. It is tantalizing 
 to hear of another fairly good poet. What is 
 to be done with him? There are very few of us 
 who have finished with the other kind of poets. 
 11 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 You must cut somewhere, for life is short. In 
 the long run the choice will narrow down to this 
 alternative: Either you will seek culture by a 
 ;ourse of reading under the direction of these 
 writers and give up your life to it ; or you will 
 grow so callous that the setting up of a new and 
 serviceable poet in a western town will excite 
 you no more than the opening of a new cigar 
 shop. 
 
 12 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 III 
 
 LITERARY BURROWING 
 
 The Iliad is a great symbolical poem, accord- 
 ing to a certain critic, because Homer makes a 
 group of old men, on seeing Helen pass by, re- 
 mark : "After all, she was worth it," or words to 
 that effect. This, according to our commenta- 
 tor, proves that the Iliad contains a great moral 
 idea; in other words, is symbolical. Now, 
 Homer was the most utterly unsymbolical person 
 (if he was a person) that ever enjoyed good 
 health. He never had anything of that kind the 
 matter with him, and his poems are as free from 
 it as they are from germs. The way our sophis- 
 ticated modern critic will read complex innuen- 
 does into what is elemental is enough to wear 
 one's patience to the bone. Must poor old 
 Homer father a lot of esoteric things? Is the 
 Iliad to have four or five layers of meaning, one 
 below the other, like a pile of sandwiches? This 
 digging up of unsuspected meanings goes too 
 far. It spoils a poem to be all the time spading 
 IS 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 it or boring through its imagery with a steam 
 drill. These critics spend too much of their time 
 underground, and they look pale and unwhole- 
 some when they come up. And it often happens 
 that what they bring up is something they have 
 dropped themselves. There are commentators 
 who have been digging all their lives and come 
 up with their own pocket handkerchief. They 
 expect you to be glad about it. They think a 
 poet, like a dog, no sooner happens on a good 
 thing than he wants to bury it. 
 
 A few years ago an inmate of one of our state 
 asylums was taken out for a walk in a pleasant 
 park. As soon as his keeper's back was turned 
 he jumped down a manhole and ran along a sewer 
 main. When dug up at great expense he com- 
 plained of the interference, saying he was "keep- 
 ing store" down there. So of a symbolist when 
 you let him into a poem. One would think 
 Homer might have escaped this. The meaning 
 of the Iliad is so accessible it seems foolish to 
 try and enter it through a gopher hole. But if 
 we must, we must. Helen is divine beauty; 
 14 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 Menelaus is the soul ; Paris the heart of human- 
 ity; Nestor the onlooking, judging thought; 
 Thersites the ego, and Achilles the personification 
 of world energy. And whenever one of them 
 does anything it means six or eight other things, 
 and they never can take a step without leaving a 
 footnote. Then it will amount to something to 
 say you understand Homer. It will rank you 
 among the seven deepest thinkers in the world, 
 and even in regard to the other six you may rea- 
 sonably entertain suspicions. 
 
 That is really the ambitious motive at the root 
 of this kind of criticism. Below every great 
 poem there is a little subterranean aristocracy 
 where rank is measured by its distance from the 
 surface. Each is aiming at the point furthest 
 down. A few years ago a Shakespearian critic 
 showed that when Falstaff was made to babble of 
 green fields he was really quoting from one of the 
 psalms. This proved that he had received a re- 
 ligious education, and was probably a choir boy 
 in his youth. The man who hit upon this illumi- 
 nating thought was for weeks a marvel among 
 15 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 critics. Since then they have no doubt found 
 FalstafF to be nine different kinds of an allegory ; 
 so rapidly does the work advance. Why need 
 every honest poet be suspected of leading a quad- 
 ruple life ? Sometimes the second or third mean- 
 ing is less interesting than the first, and the only 
 really difficult thing about a poem is the critic's 
 explanation of it. But active minds must find 
 employment, and if you cannot burrow how can 
 you be deep? And if you are not deep you are 
 that wretched, vulgar thing, a casual reader, and 
 will be snubbed to the end of your days by these 
 haughty troglodytes. So when one of them 
 comes along, never let him see you feeding on the 
 surface of a poem. Dive to the bottom like a 
 loon. You can bring up queer things from be- 
 low as well as he. Swear you got them from the 
 deepest part. Then he will feel degraded and 
 superficial and blush awkwardly like a casual 
 reader. 
 
 16 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 IV 
 
 THE DIFFIDENCE OF PRINT 
 
 The moralists who are forever discussing the 
 behaviour of newspapers pay no attention to the 
 reader's main complaint. You might think from 
 the criticism of newspapers that it was all a mat- 
 ter of tall headlines, slander and sensation. Start 
 a reform movement, and that is the sort of thing 
 it aims at. But why not own up? Our main 
 grudge is against the most respectable. What 
 if the people you met talked like a newspaper — 
 never made an admission or saw but one side, 
 never retracted except on compulsion or paused 
 in the praise of themselves ? Suppose their cause 
 is a good one, do you like them for licking its 
 boots ? Consider that awful thing they call "the 
 policy." There is nothing more amazing to the 
 reader than the way a mind can be wrapped in a 
 "policy." Many a decorous newspaper is edited 
 by a moral papoose. In private life "the policy" 
 would make you talk in epitaphs of last year's 
 opinions, hook your fancy to a foregone conclu- 
 17 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 sion, turn your mind into a bare card catalogue 
 of the things you used to think. But being a 
 man and not a newspaper, you can blame a work- 
 ingman to-day and a capitalist to-morrow. Rules 
 are good, but an exception is no sacrilege, and 
 there is no fact on earth that a grown man need 
 hide from and no cause in Heaven that is worth 
 his cheating for. 
 
 So it might be with newspapers, but they 
 seem by nature secretive. Are you for Our 
 President? Behold, we are at his feet. Are 
 you against him, kind reader .?* Here, then, 
 are ten more Philippine atrocities of which 
 nine rest on no evidence, but we count them in for 
 the good of the cause. Do the facts seem against 
 us this morning.'^ Then here goes for "Rug- 
 weaving in Armenia," or, "Does a College Educa- 
 tion Pay.?" We trust it will not be suspected 
 that we are dodging the point. Here is the for- 
 lorn little editor, so afraid of things as they are 
 that he is doomed for months to total irrelevancy ; 
 and there is the praiser of corporations who dares 
 not stop ; and this is Mr. Pecksniff's paper with 
 18 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 the luxuriant moral and the little meannesses that 
 destroy the vines. The types are familiar in 
 every large city. Where are the people who like 
 them? Yet they are clean and respectable, and, 
 like most of our pet aversions, are safely within 
 the law. Criticism in private takes these lines. 
 Public criticism — the kind that comes from the 
 pulpit or is engrossed in resolutions — aims only 
 at what is gross and palpable. It blames the 
 license of the press, when our main grievance is 
 its strange constraints and silences. In spite of 
 the great improvement in the news columns, the 
 comment that gives personal character has in the 
 past fifteen years grown so feeble that many talk 
 of giving it up altogether and leaving us alone 
 with the reporters. 
 
 It is a loss to American letters. No matter 
 how well news is gathered or how accurately told, 
 the time will never come when we are content with 
 bare narration. Those frank and inspiriting little 
 newspaper essays were about the best things 
 Americans ever did with their pen, but what with 
 the death of some men and the deliquescence of 
 
 19 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 others, they are now on the level with our books. 
 It is not a matter of premises or principles or 
 morals in the conventional degree. We are 
 friendly and inquisitive little animals, and the 
 man is the main thing, after all, and there is 
 never a moment when we would not rather meet 
 a real one than look at a panorama of world 
 politics or see a gas-tank explode. The newest 
 thing in the world is a new way of looking at an 
 old one, and the greatest thing that ever hap- 
 pened is what somebody happened to think. 
 People read newspapers more for company than 
 for guidance; and their criticism is nine-tenths 
 epicurean. Virtue is safe, but the mind feels 
 lonesome in most things that we read. A re- 
 former never seems to miss anything not men- 
 tioned in a moral code, but it is not so with the 
 rest of us. 
 
 Here we read: "Another saddening proof 
 of the havoc the war spirit has wrought 
 among us is afforded by the shocking scandals in 
 the Jonesville post-office. 'War is hell,' says 
 Burke. It was indeed to be expected that the 
 20 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 poison would spread from the heart to the mem- 
 bers. The government that sanctions a selfish 
 and unholy war cannot avoid the logical conse- 
 quences, and from rapine and torture in the 
 Philippines it is an easy step to knavery at home. 
 'Corrupt the morality at the centre,' said Mil- 
 ton, 'and the devil will ramp on the perimeter.' 
 The return of the proconsul laden with booty 
 affords his fellow-citizen no safer example than 
 he did in the days of Tacitus, and the warning 
 that Sallust sounded to the venal city soon to 
 perish (mature perituram) might well have been 
 meant for us." Academic and in a sense con- 
 scientious, but where is the man on the premises? 
 Or again, let the poor old Job of a public hearken 
 unto the son of Barachel the Buzite : "Once more 
 with characteristic vigor and common sense Presi- 
 dent Roosevelt has utterly confounded the as- 
 sailants of the Administration and vindicated the 
 honor of the nation. Not a shred remains of 
 the charges against the army or the government. 
 No one can now doubt that the headquarters of 
 the Philippine revolt were in Boston, and fresh 
 21 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 reports from Manila daily confirm the belief that 
 but for treachery in this country the insurrection 
 would not have lasted a day. President Roose- 
 velt is not the man to shirk responsibility. As 
 he said in his address to the Yale students, 'What 
 this country needs is men that can bite.' Wise, 
 statesmanlike and courageous, he has the people 
 with him. 'Breathe hard,' said he at the Seattle 
 Young Ladies' Seminary, waving a Rough Rider 
 flag, 'play hard, rest hard, work hard ; up and 
 at it, no matter what it is.' Nothing could bet- 
 ter express his own spirit and that of the Amer- 
 ican people." This is the way men divide in 
 print, but there is nothing like it in nature. No- 
 body's private opinions ever take this form. It 
 is the monochrome of party and the stage neces- 
 sity of debate, the twang of the pen and the 
 hypocrisy of the ink-bottle which make the differ- 
 ence between men and editors. It is not an affair 
 of the heart. 
 
 Men are never so prim and starchy, so deeply 
 dyed and terribly committed in real Hf e. Many 
 an honest fellow-being, full of earnest whims and 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 pleasing foibles, variegated, complex, alive and 
 charming, goes down into print as into a sar- 
 cophagus, and when jou mourn his loss thinks you 
 are trifling with the sound moral sentiment en- 
 graved on the tomb. Perhaps it comes from 
 hearing so much about bringing things "to the 
 bar of public opinion" and all that. Perhaps 
 it is due to an embarrassed sense of the 
 presence of Tom, Dick and Harry. Lowell's 
 theory of it was that the soul had done 
 something in a pre-existent state it was now 
 ashamed of. But the basis of criticism is nega- 
 tive — not the sins committed but the pleasures 
 withheld — and the pleasure of being talked to as 
 an equal is the main thing the readers miss. 
 Suppose somebody does misunderstand, or a few 
 fat gentlemen fall by the wayside or a spinster 
 or two is frightened away, is the thing so grave ? 
 Must one feel as pompous as Cicero? Will his 
 country come to him in a dream and say, "Mar- 
 cus TuUius, what are you doing.?" Let the great 
 mind go crashing forth; the casualties will be 
 surprisingly small. That is the proper advice 
 
 i 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 to give to any American writer. The question 
 before the man is what to do in his neutral in- 
 tervals, in the holidays of his virtues and the 
 pauses of his sin, for there are days and days 
 when the moral character needs nothing done to 
 it and the politics are all in place, when life may 
 be merely lived and the country merely looked at, 
 — a time of secular cravings, a permissibly 
 mundane time, the days of the devil's siesta, the 
 reformer's Saturday nights. But an editor sel- 
 dom knows such intervals, for human nature is 
 a different thing from print. Pen in hand, he 
 believes we do all our thinking in majorities, en- 
 joy by popular consent, make friends on prin- 
 ciple, — doubts if there is even the larva of an 
 imagination or a latent power of pleasant dreams, 
 or a tender side toward any mental temptation in 
 this exceedingly business-like land. 
 
 24 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 THE WRITER WHO DOES NOT CARE 
 
 There is no sign in Kipling's writings that he 
 has ever learned anything from his critics or 
 made any concessions to his public's demands. 
 Take it or leave it, has been his attitude from the 
 first. In his own good time, after people had de- 
 spaired of him, he wrote Kim. We then told 
 him distinctly that was the kind of thing we 
 wanted of him, and asked him to do it again ; 
 whereupon he undertook the conduct of the Brit- 
 ish Government through the agency of bad verse. 
 The Islanders may be true and statesmanlike, 
 and rifle clubs may be founded on the strength 
 of it, and cricketers may hang their heads for 
 shame. Some say poetry is as poetry does ; but 
 not if it save the British Empire shall we ever 
 admit the goodness of this poem or that it is a 
 poem at all. It will be classed in the long run 
 with Kipling's rhymed journalism, eff'ective but 
 transitory, a matter of a few fiery phrases, much 
 overstraining and many flat lines. As mere 
 ^5 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 literary pleasure-lovers, his readers have a right 
 to complain. Bother his prophecies and devil 
 take his reforms and all those ballads with a pur- 
 pose, and letters on South Africa, and allegories 
 on steam engines, and monodies on quartermas- 
 ter's supplies. That is the way they feel 
 about it, blaming not so much the subjects 
 as Kipling's way with them. Critics who 
 praise Kipling's faculty of throwing himself 
 into a subject forget that one unfortunate 
 result has been his total disappearance in it. 
 He paints himself in with his local color. It 
 has happened again and again. A man- 
 among men, but also a piston-rod among pis- 
 ton-rods. Other writers have at one time or 
 another paid some attention to criticism. There 
 was George Meredith, for instance, whom no one 
 would accuse of pliancy. He was swerved en- 
 tirely from his early course by adverse criticism. 
 And Thomas Hardy, the only other living novel- 
 ist of Kipling's rank, was influenced by it to his 
 own and our advantage. But from Kipling, as 
 from a Tammany water main, we must take 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 things as they come, knowing that protests are in 
 vain. 
 
 He will not repent, or conform, or edit himself, 
 or study how to please. But there is about him a 
 sort of surly sincerity even at his worst. He 
 at least is interested if you are not. He is 
 pleased with each sudden new intimacy and ex- 
 asperatingly glib in its jargon and would as lief 
 lose readers as not. Bridge-building or what- 
 ever it may be — down he goes in it with a horrid 
 splash of terminology and remains defiantly unin- 
 teresting for months at a time. It is not as if he 
 tried to please and failed. It is his mood, not 
 yours. He is merely muttering to himself the 
 technicalities of his hobby, and criticism cannot 
 shake it out of him. In the intervals of some- 
 thing like genius he is merely a pig-headed man. 
 But the course has some advantages. He never 
 does what is expected of him, but he sometimes 
 does more. Whatever his sins are, they are not 
 sins of subservience, and meanwhile he lives his 
 own life. Not that his unliterary activities have 
 any value in themselves. Beyond stirring up 
 
 n 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 rows and coming some quotable phrases, what 
 has he done for poHtics these last few years? 
 But looked at as a form of diversion, politics 
 have done something for him. 
 
 At all events, he has escaped some of the fatal 
 consequences of a literary success. Success is 
 usually the result of a sharpened sense of what is 
 wanted. As a general rule, the successful writer, 
 especially the successful American writer, is a 
 man who is disciplined by demand. The vagaries 
 of self-expression may do for a few privileged 
 characters, but the steady, substantial incomes 
 are for those who do what is expected of them. 
 Taking it altogether, it is the line of least resist- 
 ance, the happy level and the golden average, 
 and the best rule for the greatest number, and the 
 only safe course a 'priori if you have a family to 
 support. Not that they say one thing when they 
 particularly want to say another. There is no 
 deliberate heterophemy about it. But people who 
 get on in the world have developed a sort of 
 market nerve and can feel it throbbing in the 
 back of the brain. Of many thoughts it auto- 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 matically thrusts forward the one that is most 
 presentable, and by an instinctive arithmetic 
 counts votes on every sentence before it is written 
 down. This is the general law of successful liter- 
 ary composition, though not so stated in the 
 books. The uniformity of American fiction, 
 about which so many lose their temper, merely 
 shows that our writers have never felt like risking 
 much for self-expression, and there is no good 
 reason why they should. Sic vos non vohis is 
 the motto of all efficient public entertainers. If 
 they had any big peculiar ideas, they would prob- 
 ably let us have a peep at them. Nothing very 
 great is being hidden, we believe. Yet every 
 little while a critic attacks them on the ground 
 that they ought to do better, and that the best 
 selling books are not literature. Aim higher and 
 sell less, he says. It is the theory of concealed 
 gGnius. Kipling's contemptuous non-conform- 
 ity would carry most men straight to the 
 poor-house. Nor does it follow that posterity 
 will like any better the things that the 
 present rejects. The ferocious onslaughts on 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 recent American novels are both illogical and 
 unfair. 
 
 Still, people have their harmless little peculiar- 
 ities, and it has often been noted by observers that 
 American writers of fiction are not nearly so much 
 alike as their books. Natural diversities linger 
 though tucked out of sight by the pen. But it 
 has happened often that once in the public favor 
 they are never quite the same men again. Suc- 
 cess, like a flat-iron, smoothes out the little ir- 
 regularities that might just as well have been 
 left in, and there are whimsicalities about the 
 people that we are apt to miss in their books. 
 Caution and self -repression to the extent of hold- 
 ing back certain matters that might with perfect 
 safety be let go certainly do seem a little over- 
 developed in our writers. What with wondering 
 whether the editor will like it, and whether 
 the public will take to it, and whether the 
 critics will see through it, there is little chance 
 for merely personal preferences of their own. 
 And by the time the habit of pleasing everybody 
 is formed, the soul has caught a color that will 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 not come out in the wash. Our current literature 
 is a literature of suppressed inclinations, some- 
 times to our loss. The saddest thing about 
 our young authors is the exchange of pos- 
 sibilities for dead certainties after they have 
 struck their pace. With Kipling, politics serve 
 the purpose of a rotation of crops. But here, if 
 a writer is silent after his third romantic novel, 
 we always know he is working like a beaver on 
 his fourth. Something to do during the unin- 
 spired intervals is the great need of the calling. 
 Even Shakespeare's nature felt the want of it — 
 "subdued to what it works in," as he says. Kip- 
 ling goes in for prophecy and empire-building 
 as a horse goes to pasture, and comes back 
 greatly refreshed. If it had not been for the 
 intervening years of foolishness he might never 
 have given us Kim. That is a cheering thought 
 that ought to come to any one who reads The 
 Islanders and wonders why such things need be. 
 Years ago he gave fair warning he would not 
 work with an eye to his public, and he never has. 
 Not caring at all how we liked it, he has blundered 
 31 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 into many things — sometimes a tinker, sometimes 
 a counsellor of nations, always certain beyond 
 human certainty, and almost always wrong. But 
 rested by his many irrelevances and exhilarated 
 years of impudence, he comes back to his work 
 finally, like Kim from his illicit wanderings, and 
 does it better than before. 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 VI 
 
 THE LITERARY TEMPERAMENT 
 
 The young heio of Mr. Howell's Letters Home 
 is so literary that he can dine gloriously at a 
 fifty-cent table d'hote, where on Fridays he mis- 
 takes clam chowder for houillabaisse and feels 
 like Thackeray when he is eating it. Every one 
 he meets is a "type" and every emotion is "ma- 
 terial." When consumed by passion he is not too 
 preoccupied to note how that passion would look 
 in print, and when attacked by the influenza he 
 turns his delirium into "copy" that no magazine 
 would refuse. He is not especially gifted. He 
 has the temperament without the gifts. A 
 genius writes in the overflow of life and seems 
 to forget he is writing, but our hero could never 
 do that. With him the phrase must always come 
 first ; his mind is book-bitten and he is doomed to 
 edit his life in advance. Hence he never will 
 altogether live. People of the literary tempera- 
 ment seldom do quite live. They are impeded by 
 a too persistent pen-consciousness which is the 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 spiritual form of writer's cramp, and while others 
 may merely feel, they must be making phrases as 
 well as feeling. So by dividing the mind they 
 lower the pulse, and they are always a little below 
 their vital capacity. If it is a love affair, a part 
 of the creature is taking notes and down goes his 
 temperature ; if it is an agony he must see to it 
 that it bring forth fruit meet for publication. 
 "I was as miserable," says this Wallace Ardith in 
 Letters Home, "as a guilty wretch can be and 
 be conscious of his innocence, but my confounded 
 mind kept taking notes of the situation and in a 
 hideous way rejoicing in it as material." Mr. 
 Howells meant him for a young man, but he 
 might be as old as Mr. Howells himself. He 
 comes from a town in Iowa, but he might as well 
 have been born in Thrums. The essential thing 
 is his ingrained literosity. 
 
 We should have liked to see him hanged in the 
 end like Sentimental Tommy, but Mr. Howells 
 seemed rather fond of him. He showed the clem- 
 ency of introspection. Few authors wish to 
 hang their Sentimental Tommies after confess- 
 34 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 ing them. Mr. Barrie is the only Brutus among 
 noveHsts, and you cannot read that book of his 
 without hearing his self-love groan aloud. To 
 the unliterary reader Tommy is merely a vain 
 young man, who might even be a hero if the 
 author would let him alone, but whenever he is 
 most heroic Mr. Barrie is most incredulous. It 
 was a grand deed, to be sure, he will say, but 
 Tommy would never have done it if there 
 had been no women around; and had there been 
 no public, there would have been no Tommy at 
 all, for he could do nothing for its own sake — not 
 even draw a natural breath — but only for the 
 sake of having it known that Tommy did it. 
 Straightforward inartistic folk cannot make 
 out what all this sarcasm is about, but the liter- 
 ary temperament blushes up to the roots of its 
 hair when it reads it. The book was never ade- 
 quately reviewed. It was too brutally intimate 
 and indelicately true, too terribly authorish for 
 any other author to deal with frankly and retain 
 his self-esteem, and for any one not an author or 
 an observer of authors to understand. Tommy 
 35 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 is practically thrown away on any reader who 
 has not at least a literary temperament in the 
 family. 
 
 The trouble with Tommy was simply that he 
 had no private life. Every motive was forked 
 like the devil's tail and he did nothing without 
 reference to a bystander. The eternal bystander 
 is the peculiar gift of the literary temperament. 
 Stevenson's fancy would have peopled a desert 
 isle, not that he might look at them but that they 
 might see Stevenson. Alone under the sky 
 the literary temperament still hopes it may 
 be discovered, and fancies itself discovered 
 when it has given up hope. In the fifth 
 century a.d. Tommy would have been a 
 pillar saint and stood on one leg and let the 
 other rot off, not at all in the fear of the Lord, 
 but in the sense of the crowd below and the high 
 hope that some day there would be a Saint 
 Thomas of Thrums. If there had been no crowd 
 below, Tommy would have invented one. 
 
 The loss of the private life is the chief danger 
 of the literary temperament. Even Shakespeare 
 36 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 feared it when he wrote that his nature was sub- 
 dued to what it worked in Hke the dyer's hand. 
 "The world is too much with us," said Words- 
 worth suddenly aware that the public had grown 
 into him and that his soul had no songs without 
 words and that the primrose on the river's brim 
 a four-line stanza was to him and nothing more. 
 Had it not been for that he would have had 
 glimpses, standing on that pleasant lea, that 
 would have made him less forlorn. But writers 
 of this class are in no real danger. The risk is 
 run on the lower plane, where life, like a maga- 
 zine poem, is written before it is felt and 
 thoughts are tried on like hats to see if they are 
 becoming and the land is only local color and the 
 sea is made of ink. That is where the Tommies 
 are, among the best-selling heroes of the week, 
 the impersonal ghosts of current literature, each 
 trying to pick out a soul that the reading public 
 would like the look of. 
 
 "Now you're looking holy again," said the 
 exasperated Aaron when Tommy was planning 
 some conspicuous nobility and resolving in his 
 37 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 mind to look the part and seeing it all in type 
 and hearing the reader's comments on it. The 
 private life of the two Carlyles must have been 
 full of these little calamities, and it certainly 
 was not genius that made the pair so uncomfort- 
 able. We all love the illusion of spontaneity 
 and like to believe that the poet's eye doth 
 actually glance from Heaven to earth instead of 
 glancing sidewise at the onlooker. It is not 
 pleasant to ascertain that Poe's Raven would 
 not have been written if he had not happened to 
 observe that "Nevermore" would make a musical 
 refrain and "Lenore" rhymed with it and that he 
 brought in the raven only because nothing but a 
 raven would be at all likely to ejaculate "never- 
 more" at regular intervals, except possibly a 
 parrot, and a parrot would not rhyme with Le- 
 nore. Poe's description of his processes set 
 many minor poets working wrong-end-to. Nor 
 do we like to read how Burke generously tinkered 
 poor Crabbe's poem and Johnson lent his heavy 
 hand and Crabbe accepted everything as more 
 likely to beguile the public, forgetting by that 
 
ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
 
 time that he had started out with anything of 
 his own. But while the most gifted sometimes 
 sink to it, the merely clever never rise above it, 
 and they leave you wondering whether there is 
 anything in them that the public did not put 
 there. That is why Miss Emily Dickinson ex- 
 claimed that she liked a look of agony because 
 she knew it was real and why Kingsley advised 
 everybody to be only good and "let who will be 
 clever," and why Hotspur called poetry the 
 "forced gait of a shuffling nag" and why some- 
 times after a brilliant literary meeting where 
 authors read their papers our heart goes out to 
 the simple and spontaneous, natural and single- 
 minded cow who never flourishes her tail for our 
 sakes, but to remove from her actual haunches an 
 authenticated fly. The literary emotions are so 
 seldom authenticated in the secondary ranges of 
 art. 
 
PART II 
 
 THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 I 
 
 THE NATIONAL ANGLE 
 
 People who think we are, as a nation, no longer 
 sensitive to criticism, should have followed the 
 comments upon a certain little volume of essays 
 on American traits dealing with our faults of 
 character in an entertaining way. The author 
 was a German who for several years had been a 
 professor in one of our universities. It is writ- 
 ten, the author tells us, "from a German point of 
 view," though there was not the least need of his 
 mentioning it, and it was not what you would call 
 a serious contribution to political science, but 
 was, perhaps, the better reading on that account. 
 40 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 Like most of these comparative race studies, it 
 drew its material mainly from the writer's pa- 
 triotic heart. He likes his own land better, and 
 emphatically tells us why, as if anybody could 
 not give reasons for a thing like that. It was 
 matter for toasts, poems, flag-raisings, and hochs 
 — a sheer animal preference for one's own; yet 
 critics took it as seriously as if it were an at- 
 tempt in pure philosophy. They blamed him 
 for not having a judicial mind; though why an 
 expatriated gentleman, terribly homesick, no 
 doubt, should be expected to have one, it is not 
 easy to make out. Yet they argued it out with 
 him painfully, as if there were some logical proc- 
 ess for rebutting his German blood. We are still 
 very touchy, and these comparisons of foreigners 
 do still most unaccountably flutter us, and there 
 is invariably a little chorus of tu quoques and a 
 sort of patriotic huff and a long ingenuous 
 wrangle over things no more debatable than a 
 taste in wives and children. No visitor can take 
 notes on us, even now, without starting one of 
 these queer controversies, and (self-esteem being 
 41 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 the most voluble of the emotions) there is no 
 small amount of printed matter taken up with 
 them first and last. Great masses of mankind 
 are weighed one against one another, as in the 
 hand of Allah, and "these to Heaven and I care 
 not, and those to Hell and I care not ;" and the 
 nativity of the umpire determines which is which. 
 German ideals, says the Professor, without the 
 least tremor of indecision, are higher than Amer- 
 ican ideals ; to which an American writer retorts 
 excitedly, "But you must admit in common fair- 
 ness that American ideals are broader at the 
 base." No one knows what they mean exactly, or 
 how they found it out. But we all do know 
 where their hearts are — honest folk, perched 
 each on his national angle and crowing with all 
 his might. Not to say a word against the national 
 angle. Prceter omnes angulus ridet — or ought 
 to, whosoever it is. But why this solemn show of 
 reasons for things that were bred in the bone? 
 
 It is a most beatific bias, and a man ought to 
 be proud of it ; and for my part, were I ever to 
 embark in such a controversy, I should go in 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 singing the battle-cry of freedom, knowing per- 
 fectly well I could never be quite fair-minded to- 
 ward other people's fatherlands, no matter how 
 hard I tried. Nor would I disguise the fisticuffs 
 of self -vindication under any show of compara- 
 tive philosophy ; and in reply to the man who 
 sized up our country in a sentence, I should dis- 
 pose of Germany in four scorching words — that 
 is, if I did anything about it at all, which, on 
 second thoughts, is doubtful. There may be 
 philosophers who fish all their patriotism out of 
 comparative statistics ; but it is not the usual 
 way, and most of our foreign observers bring 
 their conclusions with them as part of their racial 
 physique. So it was with the Professor, whose 
 mind sweeps all history and forms of government 
 and spans two continents in a flash. His book is 
 a series of lover's comparisons, and we are the 
 other girls. Very telling comparisons, some of 
 them. "Whenever a genius is needed, democracy 
 appoints a committee," says he. Ach Gott! the 
 land where geniuses are as common as committees. 
 Liebf Heimat land; liehf Heimat land! 
 43 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 Were the writings on America stripped of all 
 national prejudices and personal whims, they 
 would be about as lively as a school atlas ; and for 
 all our anger at Dickens fifty years ago, we 
 know if he had written fairly we should not have 
 read him at all. A man cannot always be in a 
 battle mood about his country. There is some 
 fun to be had at her expense. The heights of 
 oratorical tradition are not for every-day use, 
 though we can climb up to them after dinner 
 when there is a big enough crowd. They are 
 chiefly for the people who have some vested in- 
 terest in bombast, and it often happens that the 
 gran(^est public tributes are saluted with private 
 grins. Foreigners never make allowance for the 
 great, fatuous platform-change that comes over 
 certain of our people whenever they rise to speak. 
 "Builfl, build," said a Western Senator ; build 
 and expand and plant the flag on all the archi- 
 pelagoes and seize all the canals in this hemi- 
 sphere and turn the Pacific Ocean into an Amer- 
 ican lake. "This," he concluded, "is not enthu- 
 siauth; it is geography." Being used to the 
 44 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 thing, we know, of course, it was neither, but 
 the mere chest notes of a Senator, a harmless, 
 hyperbolical Senator, in a mood of the utmost 
 publicity, in a pause of his private faculties, try- 
 ing his best to please. "We must be cracked up, 
 sir," said Mr. Hannibal Chollop, "this 
 country must be cracked up," and Sen- 
 ators still live in the Chollop tradition. 
 Nor is Mr. Chollop the only type in Martin 
 Chuzzlewit that recent speeches recall. Neither 
 General Choke nor the Hon. Lafayette Kettle 
 could have outdone that speech in Congress, on 
 the occasion of Prince Henry's visit, with 
 its reference to the German prince as "that little 
 Dutchman," and to the "truckle-ency" of foreign 
 courts. It was the very language of Dickens's 
 burlesque Americans. Foreigners judge us by it 
 — all of us. "We have heard," says our latest 
 observer, "through the whole scale, from the edi- 
 torials of the yellow press to the orations of lead- 
 ing Senators, the voice of that aggressive tem- 
 per which waits for an opportunity to show 
 American superiority to the world by battles and 
 45 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 not by arbitration." He notes among our char- 
 acteristics "a bumptious oratory, a flippant 
 superficiality of style, a lack of aesthetic refine- 
 ment ... a constant exploitation on the part of 
 immature young men with loud newspaper 
 voices," and so forth. And he bears down on it 
 all with argument, page after page of it, to 
 prove that Columbia is not really the gem of the 
 ocean and the only land of the free. It is like 
 rebuking a brass band. That is the way with 
 foreigners. They are forever trying to knock 
 the wind out of the national superlative — a thing 
 that the gods could not do. 
 
 Thence come these absurd discussions with a 
 class of people that the rest of us know better 
 than ever to reason with. Private thinking sel- 
 dom takes this line. One's personal friends 
 neither talk like editorials nor feel like Senators, 
 and one may travel all day long without meeting 
 the "typical" American who figures in the books. 
 Foreigners do not realize that the great liturgy 
 of buncombe stops at the private door, and that 
 even its high priests are none too serious about it 
 46 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 after the reporters go. We see the flag too 
 often to be stirred by every flap of it, and we 
 meet too many fellow-citizens to be sentimental 
 about them all, and the Pilgrim Fathers are 
 rarely mentioned, and the guns of Manila never 
 boom in private conversation, and nobody con- 
 gratulates you on freedom of worship, trial by 
 jury, or the mounting exports of steel, and you 
 go to sleep without dreaming of island empires, 
 and you wake up without disparaging Germany. 
 These awful burdens are borne only by public 
 characters aiming at the lowest wit of the great- 
 est number, as practical statesmen will, and under- 
 shooting it often, we are bound to say. Public- 
 ity exacts of them a show of more emotion than 
 they ever privately feel. They must keep their 
 love of country at honeymoon heat, poor things ! 
 And never was a land so complimented down to 
 the last detail. Hosanna to the American po- 
 tato! it is forging ahead each year. Yet it is 
 wasteful to write a serious book against it, for 
 the people who would be likely to read it do not 
 need the reproof. And it is a great mistake to 
 47 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 rouse those tedious patriots who let drive at the 
 writer's country in revenge. And, finally, how 
 do the pundits in race traits manage to gather 
 so quickly the souls of all the peoples in the hol- 
 low of their hands, and why is it that the con- 
 clusions of such detached philosophers invariably 
 follow the flag? It is a whimsical sort of writ- 
 ing, the more whimsical the better, and ought 
 never to be measured by its approach to absolute 
 truth. 
 
 48 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 II 
 
 "AMERICANISM" 
 
 After all, the crowd certainly likes it — ^the 
 kind of speech that a Senator once made at a 
 public dinner, which I happen to recall, and if a 
 man wants quick returns from bursts of elo- 
 quence this is the kind of burst he should carry 
 in his manuscript notes. The five hundred din- 
 ers received it "with great enthusiasm," and he 
 could scarce go on for the "cheers and hand- 
 clapping." With any crowd it would have been 
 the same. The touch of nature.? Not exactly. 
 Only the touch of crowd nature, which rubs off 
 when you are alone. In the meanwhile what has 
 the man been saying.'' Why, that something or 
 other is epoch making; that the situation is in- 
 tense ; that the spirit of Puritanism bids us reach 
 forth, expand, blow up, roar, and, above all, 
 brag that we are God's only this and a heaven- 
 born that till the word Americanism sets the 
 whole world grinning. "The Pacific is the Amer- 
 ican Ocean. The Gulf is an American lake. 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 . . . Our flag floats over the Antilles. . . . And 
 when the Stars and Stripes is hauled down in 
 Cuba, let it hang awhile at half-mast in mourning 
 for the people of Cuba abandoned and the duty 
 of the United States deserted. These are epochal 
 facts. The future of the world is in our hands." 
 This is no one man's view. It is crowd language. 
 It is the echo of that lower harmony, that vulgar 
 confluence of egotisms by which we tell the crowd 
 whether it is washed or unwashed, at a New Eng- 
 land dinner or at an Australian korroboree. Why 
 call it American? Huxley describes the natives 
 of one of the islands visited by the Rattlesnake 
 as trying to impress the strangers by galloping 
 along the shore, "prancing just as boys do when 
 playing horse." It is not peculiar to American 
 senators. 
 
 "The Puritan," said the Senator, "had the 
 logic of geography, and we his children must 
 have it, too. . . . All Atlantic and Pacific canals 
 and the future of Central America so far as af- 
 fected thereby are American questions — we can- 
 not permit a concert of powers in solving them." 
 50 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 But since the greater includes the less, why talk 
 of the future of Central America? It was the 
 future of the world just now. Are we not going 
 to have the whole thing then — we, the God's onlys 
 and the heaven-sent, and the Je suis moi's and the 
 Egomet ipse*s? Only a hemisphere after all? 
 Take care or some other Senator will outflap you. 
 There may be a bigger dinner and a bigger in- 
 spiration and a lower barrier of common sense, 
 and some one who will know how to take advan- 
 tage of the collective mental slump. There is 
 always that danger in these lower appeals. Talk 
 of islands and isthmuses, and the next man may 
 bid continents. Begin with planetary systems, 
 not canals. And though we despise it in private, 
 you are quite apt to find that a herd of us will 
 first endure, then pity, then hooray. 
 
 "There has come a new turn in the world 
 drama," says another orator. "We have taken the 
 centre of the stage. . . . We see the faces of the 
 nations half sneering, half fearing. . . . The 
 world has grown intensely conscious of America." 
 This is no new turn. There has never been a 
 51 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 moment when a world was not watching us, when 
 a continent or two was not amazed by us or a 
 hemisphere provoked, when an orator was not 
 saying just what Europe thought of us, how 
 Asia wondered and Africa winked ; and that man 
 is no true patriot who imphes that even for an 
 instant we were not the centre of the stage. Nor 
 is it a mere matter of nations. It is a cosmic 
 affair, with gosgip going on in the Zodiac and a 
 rumpus in the Milky Way, Mars sneering, and 
 Saturn thunderstruck and an uneasy smile on the 
 face of the firmament that ill conceals its fear. 
 We hate a cautious patriot who talks like a plum 
 when he feels like a pumpkin. It is a generous 
 emotion, and why not let it go.? In this mood a 
 world is not enough for us ; we bump our heads 
 against the sky. 
 
 But the chief danger is the collapse of the 
 emotions when the word American has ceased 
 thrilling through the orator's nose. How in the 
 world can we keep it up? It is not a solitaire 
 game. None of us can go on like that all by 
 himself under the stars. The heavens are too 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 sarcastic. We are soon feeling uncomfortable 
 and hoping nobody heard. Somebody always 
 does hear. That is the worst of it. Dickens 
 heard, and he gave us Martin Chuzzlewit. A 
 few jeer at it as your true Americanism. A few, 
 who are deadly serious, prophesy the end of all 
 things, inhaling odors from their moral vinai- 
 grette. The rest of us understand the oratorical 
 traditions and know that patriotism is not de- 
 stroyed by burlesque. 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 III 
 
 CONCERNING HEROES 
 
 It was interesting to see how the heroes of the 
 South African war weathered the flattery that 
 fell upon them. It was a rather hard test of 
 character. Lord Roberts came through it with 
 all his wits about him and with all his moral 
 qualities in trim working order. So, probably, 
 did some others ; but, reasoning from precedents, 
 it would be surprising if the majority of 
 those heroes were not somewhat damaged. 
 The odds were against them. By the time the 
 public has regained its senses the hero has lost 
 his. It is the usual way the story ends, and there 
 is no means of insuring him against it. You 
 cannot make people moderate toward their heroes 
 just for fear of spoiling them. When a gener- 
 ous emotion is at high tide and the bands are 
 playing and the boys are bellowing through the 
 megaphone, and the variously distorted features 
 of the idol are displayed from every house front, 
 it is not always creditable to be judicious. "He 
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 that hath not a dram of folly in his composition 
 hath pounds of a worse material." A man may 
 hold himself in check at such a time and say only 
 what is wise. It may be that his wisdom domi- 
 nates his impulses. But perhaps he lacks the 
 impulses. It may be that he has a heart like a 
 cash register and a pulse like a cold-boiled ham. 
 We cannot admire him until we know. So far 
 as he himself is concerned, no man need be 
 ashamed of the foolish things he said to or about 
 heroes when the fit was on him. As well regret 
 the intemperate language of his honeymoon. 
 
 Such regret as one feels should be all on the 
 hero's account. He is apt to be in a bad state 
 when we are through with him. The majority 
 of heroes are not praise-proof. It is nothing 
 against a hero that he is not praise-proof. When 
 a whole people set out to spoil a man, he is not to 
 blame if they succeed. We who are not heroes 
 cannot estimate the difficulty of resistance, but 
 we can come somewhere near it by multiplying 
 our own experience. We know how we feel when 
 we are praised. The mind totters under a very 
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 moderate amount of it. It must be a rock- 
 bound kind of person that remains unmoved when 
 a pleasant warm gush of flattery is playing on 
 him. The best of us suspend all critical self- 
 examination at such a moment, and Heaven 
 knows what would happen if the thing lasted. 
 It is a joy that fuddles. Fancy it raised to hero- 
 power and lasting for twelve months ! Would it 
 leave us as it found us.? The chances are we 
 should be no fit company for any man. No one 
 knows how he would turn out — whether like 
 Major GoHath O'Grady Gahagan or like Tour- 
 gueniefF's man who forever afterward had "the 
 air of his own statue done in bronze and set up 
 by national subscription" — ^but something queer, 
 you may be sure, and in all probability ridiculous. 
 For, as the satirist said of poverty, the worst 
 thing about it is that it makes men ridiculous. 
 These things have been freshly brought to mind, 
 and just now the average man one knows would 
 as lief not be a hero. 
 
 What a terrible onslaught was made on those 
 heroic men in khaki. Everything was done to 
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 shatter their minds and undermine their charac- 
 ters. If they were modest about what they had 
 done, it only added to the demoralizing din. They 
 could not disclaim without redoubling the ap- 
 plause. What disgusts at first becomes grad- 
 ually endurable, then pleasant, then indispens- 
 able, then the hero is lost. The small poets begin 
 on him immediately, and the air is soon buzzing 
 with little odes. He shakes off the small poet at 
 first with some annoyance. When an unspoiled 
 warrior is put for the first time into minor verse 
 he hates it. It makes him feel like a pressed 
 pansy. No living man is a fit subject for 
 poetry, and as soon as he feels at home in it that 
 is the end of him. Nothing so saps a hero as 
 persistent odes, and it is to the credit of the Amer- 
 ican people that in spite of their inconsiderate 
 waste of heroes they spared them this. Then 
 there are the kissing women and the flapping 
 orators and the town hall speeches and the free- 
 dom of the city and the comparisons with Beli- 
 sarius, Caesar, Nelson, any of which, if prolonged, 
 will ruin the average hero. It is a cruel thing. 
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 The only hope is to do as Kitchener did, or Mar- 
 chand or our own Lawton — treat the whole thing 
 as a foolish love affair and go back to work. 
 The hero should leave the instant he begins to 
 take it seriously, if possible before the wind dies. 
 A becalmed hero waiting around for more wind is 
 in a bad way. So is one who has contracted the 
 platform habit. A hero has begun to go to 
 pieces when he has learned to like what he ought 
 never to have heard. 
 
 A man does a fine thing that takes our fancy, 
 so we reward him by denying him the privilege 
 of hearing a word of sense for months at a time. 
 Then comes a reaction, and we wonder what is 
 the matter with him. It was all our fault, and 
 the least we can do is to be sorrowfully patient 
 with our handiwork. There may be a way of 
 repairing the heroes we have damaged, though, as 
 Carlyle points out, it is no easy task: "The 
 resuscitation of a soul that has gone to asphyxia 
 is no momentary or pleasant process, but a long 
 and terrible one." A mind ravaged by applause 
 deserves charity from the ravagers, and one 
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 should know beforehand that it is as hard to keep 
 a hero from spoiling on your hands as to keep 
 cream through a thunderstorm. 
 
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 IV 
 
 A **REMARKABLE" MAN 
 
 The mention of the Defeated Candidate's name 
 in the newspapers sets some old memories to stir- 
 ring. So there was such a man, and what a turn 
 he gave some of us in the dark days of a certain 
 November an age or two ago. It makes one feel 
 safe to see the name now; also a little foolish, 
 for was there ever a political contest in which the 
 enemy seemed only life size.? He is no longer 
 "in the public eye," as the magazines say, and 
 for that reason it is no doubt improper to speak 
 of him, which is a pity on some accounts. When 
 a man of this sort is "in the public eye" there is 
 no telling anything about his true dimensions. 
 He is in there like a cinder and seems stupendous 
 till you get him out. Why mention him now? 
 To attack him? No more of that. The neces- 
 sity of being serious about him was the worst 
 hardship of the whole campaign. All that heavy 
 moral artillery and handsome political invective 
 just for him! No doubt the language was appro- 
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 priate to the occasion, but it was not to the man. 
 Napoleon at St. Helena, Boulanger in Belgium — 
 get the man as far away as possible from the 
 occasion if you would se^him as he is. There 
 were some "character studies" of him written be- 
 fore he was defeated, and very queer things they 
 now seem, — mere allegories for the most part, as- 
 suming that he was an incarnate Principle, which 
 no man ever is. It was a time when realism was 
 unsafe. Some would say he compelled the ad- 
 miration even of his foes ; for several of the lat- 
 ter, while duly disapproving of him, pronounced 
 him a "remarkable" man. Publicity always has 
 its flunkeys, deferential to anything that has a 
 crowd behind it. It is the optimism of a democ- 
 racy. The man who carries several states must 
 be great, or at least exceptional in some way. 
 There is no allowance made for accidents in this 
 domain of success. Does the two-spot never 
 come uppermost when a big crowd shuffles the 
 pack ? 
 
 So it chances that there is nothing in all that 
 has been said of the Candidate that in the least 
 
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 applies to the Defeated Candidate, who happens 
 to be publishing a newspaper somewhere in the 
 west. A page of that publication is worth more 
 than all the estimates on either side. In the first 
 place the paper does not suggest any moral issue 
 at all. The editor may be a good man or a bad 
 man — it is hard to realize that it matters which. 
 The main point is that he is not a man who would 
 arrest attention for one instant. It is a school- 
 boy mind that drives that paper, no matter what 
 the political writers say. Call him a brilliant 
 demagogue, an Orson of the young Democracy, 
 an Alcibiades, or whatever you like. His politics 
 may be those of Lucifer, but his mind is of the 
 age of innocence, whether it is innocent or not. 
 That is the striking lesson of it — the amazing 
 exiguity of this public man. How did the coun- 
 try happen to find him ? And when intellects like 
 that are detected, what risks of greatness we all 
 run. 
 
 He has put his whole soul into that paper. 
 He has struck his natural pace. If any man has 
 a partisan grudge against him let him read a 
 62 
 
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 page. Begin, say, with "Not every emperor 
 wears a crown," and end with the passage : "Un- 
 like Julius Caesar and George Washington, Mr. 
 McKinley did not reject the offer of a throne." 
 If you were going to mend this man where would 
 you begin.? Not with his morals, surely, nor 
 even with his politics. What George Eliot called 
 the "taint of commonness," hard to describe as 
 the odor of onions but just as clearly perceived 
 — hangs over the character of this "remarkable" 
 man. That he should have run for president 
 shows how we let things slide. After that no one 
 need despair. Let him push and there is a 
 chance that the crowd will let him through. A 
 commonplace speech at a hospitable moment may 
 be enough for a start, and he, too, may become a 
 personage with a career and with people to invent 
 a character to account for it. And though he 
 may have a hundred thousand duplicates, he will 
 be a "remarkable" man till he winds ua,like Bou- 
 langer in Belgium or publishing a "remarkable" 
 newspaper somewhere in the west. 
 
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 OLD AND NEW DEBATERS 
 
 During the last few years we have plunged 
 from one hot debate into another, and if for a 
 moment the excitement has subsided over here, 
 some other country has been sure to keep our 
 feelings busy. Never in their lives have the gen- 
 eration born since the civil war seen the civilized 
 man so rampant in controversy. One aspect of 
 the thing is rather remarkable. This time of 
 stress has not produced in the United States or 
 England or France a single speech or bit of writ- 
 ing above the ordinary. For all the training of 
 these great debates there have been no great 
 debaters. Other crises have left a legacy of elo- 
 quence, but the man who can recall a single elo- 
 quent passage in all that has been said on the 
 most absorbing topics of the last two years must 
 have a memory like a bonded warehouse. To 
 most of us it is a mere reminiscence of confused 
 noise, the greater part of it inarticulate. The 
 occasion has found its men of action but not of 
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 speech. The lions that have come up out of 
 Judah have not been very impressive in their 
 roars. It is not due to any lack of sincerity or 
 force of feeling. The blowing up of the 
 Maine, the Rennes court-martial, the Boer ulti- 
 matum, even the small tempest of the Puerto 
 Rican tariff have been stirring enough. It is 
 only the art of arguing that has fallen on evil 
 days. 
 
 The arguing man assumes as a rule that any- 
 thing will do if it seems to be travelling his way. 
 He commits himself to all sorts of non-essential 
 points. As a Boer sympathizer, for instance, he 
 found it his duty to show the trail of the serpent 
 in England's entire South African experience 
 since 1814, when fifteen years of black iniquity 
 would serve his turn as well as eighty-five. So 
 he offends the common sense of neutrals. Again, 
 he would have free trade in Puerto Rico, let us 
 say. Instead of merely pointing out that it is 
 preferable, he straightway tells you any course 
 but this is hellish inhumanity. So, when you ner- 
 vously look up the facts and find nothing in them 
 65 
 
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 to bear out comparisons with the Black Death or 
 St. Bartholomew's Day, you are very likely to 
 dismiss the whole thing from your mind. That 
 is the trouble with our latter-day debaters. They 
 breed distrust in the honest doubters. What is 
 the use of raising one's whole vocabulary to the 
 tenth power? It simply inflates the verbal cur- 
 rency. Other people involuntarily extract the 
 tenth root of everything you say. The "traitor" 
 and "tyrant" of our Philippine discussions have 
 weakened debate and lessened the reserve strength 
 of the English language. These things become 
 merely conventional. They go through the same 
 process as profanity, which, as we know, is 
 hardly emphatic on the lips of the habitually 
 profane. It is a most inartistic kind of arguing 
 that gives the impression that you are either talk- 
 ing for eff^ect or a little "hipped" on the subject. 
 Many a good soul throws his chance away by 
 forgetting this. 
 
 The old debaters, whether contending for a 
 good cause or a bad, appreciated the value of 
 mere plausibility. They counterfeited candor 
 
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 and sanity if they had them not. Above all, they 
 tried to ingratiate by admissions, and they never 
 encumbered themselves with big, awkward as- 
 sumptions of incredible villainy. Running 
 through all the great controversial speeches and 
 writings there is a vein of reasonableness and self- 
 restraint. Whether it was Lincoln or Burke, or 
 a Greek general, or Beelzebub in Paradise Lost, 
 or one of Shakespeare's villains, they gave no 
 impression of hypocrisy or hysteria. But the 
 maladroit debater will somehow give this im- 
 pression even though he is as sound in head 
 and heart as one could wish. Stirring oratory 
 is not that in which every sentence has a hectic 
 flush. 
 
 But apart from mere ignorance of the art, a 
 reason for the failure of our present debaters 
 may be their distrust of the public. The public 
 is not thought worthy of being talked to sensibly. 
 There is a mortal terror of giving one's case 
 away. A truth must be swaddled with overstate- 
 ments when it walks abroad. You will find plenty 
 of men who will talk more reasonably in private 
 67 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 than they would think of doing for the press or 
 platform. Intelligent men do not as a rule as- 
 sume, in talking with us privately, that all wis- 
 dom and all virtue are with them. They 
 agree with us in some points, and they try to 
 understand our point of view. But in addressing 
 us collectively they will show the most shocking 
 cynicism as to what we can understand. They 
 prejudge us as altogether foolish, and talk to 
 us accordingly. Many a thought will be held 
 back because it is supposed to be too big for us. 
 Yet, when has the public ever been hurt by 
 breadth of view, and who ever delivered a signifi- 
 cant message when he was tortured every minute 
 by the dread of being misunderstood ? The truth 
 is, the public can stand from any man the best 
 there is in him. No man ever made a deep im- 
 pression who tried to do all his thinking in 
 majorities. Our current controversies are for 
 this reason needlessly dull. One cannot suppress 
 the fanatic. He will be on hand to do his worst 
 for every cause. But it is possible to take a 
 kindlier view of popular intelligence and to aim 
 68 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 a little higher in one's style of arguments. For 
 after all, the good debater, like the good work- 
 man in any other art, finds when he has made his 
 masterpiece, that he has made his public, too. 
 
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 VI 
 
 ASPERITIES OF PEACEMAKING 
 
 Is IT because we are jingoes that we are so 
 little stirred by the sort of things certain earnest 
 writers are saying against war? That is what 
 they would maintain. Goldwin Smith has been 
 attacking the idea that a nation can cure itself 
 of its vices by going to war with another nation. 
 Tolstoi's well-known views have appeared in an 
 English translation, and several other eminent 
 writers have recently denounced war at some 
 length. It has also become what is known as a 
 "timely topic," which means that almost any- 
 thing any one chooses to say about it finds its 
 way into print. So it happens that many grown- 
 up persons have published compositions on the 
 relative merits of love and hate and the impro- 
 priety of bloodshed. With Tolstoi it is only a 
 part of a pretty comprehensive gospel. He 
 would turn us all at once into something pure and 
 primitive and sweet, and, as regards art 
 matters, into something exceedingly stupid, 
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 getting rid of certain intellectual vices 
 by abolishing intellect altogether, it would 
 seem. But there is a holy flame in the 
 old man, and he is really beyond us, and not at 
 all to blame if we never catch up, and it is a pity 
 if literature is to have nothing to do with the 
 things that are not. He is an idealist through 
 and through, and hates war no more than he hates 
 every other curse that our sins bring down on 
 us. The peace advocates of the newspapers are 
 not usually of that stamp. I do not presume to 
 question their motives, but the fine idealism they 
 reveal on that subject does not seem to extend to 
 other things. Truth, for example, is as good a 
 thing as peace, and is needful even in advocating 
 peace. They have steadily assumed that if you 
 do not fall in with them you are an enemy to the 
 cause. Does that follow? 
 
 What is the matter with us that, in spite of a 
 longing for universal peace quite as strong as 
 theirs, they no sooner begin to preach than we 
 hunt for arguments on the other side.^* It may 
 be our weak and sinful natures. It may be some- 
 71 
 
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 thing in the way they do it. One has a right to 
 consider before setting himself down as a mur- 
 derous old war-dog just because he does not en- 
 joy the average peace harangue. In the first 
 place, they make the case too plain. It is an 
 artificial and insincere simplicity, with all the 
 perplexing things left out. Surely there are some 
 perplexing things about man. With the reform- 
 er's man it is always a naked choice between 
 heaven and hell. With God's man it is different. 
 Nine times out of ten the poor devil does not know 
 which is which, for the good and evil have been 
 jumbled together and the colors have run, and 
 even when he really wants to be an angel the re- 
 sults are mixed. How can you prescribe for him, 
 if you do not know what he is like.? It is a bad 
 philosophy that is founded on omissions. Yet the 
 peace talkers expurgate history for this purpose, 
 as the temperance orator expurgates science, feel- 
 ing that somehow the whole truth would hurt us 
 and that the way to save souls is to go sneaking 
 around the facts. And they treat us all as if we 
 belonged to that class of warlike rhapsodists who 
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 regard war as a sentimental tonic — quinine for 
 our bad malarious morals. Not a word for those 
 who are so far gone. 
 
 "War," said the late Dean Farrar, "is a 
 fraction of that Armageddon struggle described 
 in the Apocalypse," and so on in a poetic strain 
 very flattering to war. To which Goldwin 
 Smith retorted that the dean "would touch less 
 lightly on dread of the horrors of war 
 as a motive for avoiding it if he had seen the 
 wreck of a battlefield, the contents of a field hos- 
 pital after a battle, or even the burning farms 
 of the Transvaal, with the women and children 
 turned adrift, as an eye-witness describes them, 
 and desperately trying to rescue something from 
 their homes." So he would, no doubt, and his 
 present language is quite absurd; but the peace 
 enthusiast would "touch less lightly" on the dif- 
 ficulties of keeping out of war if he took more 
 pains to know men as they are. It would be 
 easy enough to put the world to rights if there 
 were so little in it. Preaching against blood- 
 thirstiness in general does not seem to fit when 
 73 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 you are tormented by the circumstances of some 
 particular case, and wondering if war is the 
 worse alternative. But the average reformer will 
 have nothing to do with circumstance. He 
 snubs it, acts as if he had never met it; if he 
 "disapproves of Asia, Asia is no more." 
 
 More of us are with the peace people in their 
 premises than they seem to think. We do not 
 enjoy butchery, and are not gloating over Fili- 
 pino bones or South African ashes. Theirs is not 
 a voice crying in the wilderness. On the ele- 
 ments of morals we are agreed, and we dare go 
 as far as the South Carolina poet : 
 
 The man who thinks God is too iind 
 
 To punish actions vile, 
 Is bad at heart, of unsound mind. 
 
 Or very juvenile. 
 
 Only, one does not feel like saying it very 
 often, because it seems as if people must know. 
 But we are with them at heart — these sparrows 
 on the housetops — and they must make room for 
 us by their side. It is foolish to go on living like 
 a moral hermit when there is no need of it. But 
 perhaps they enjoy it, and we may be de trop. 
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 The chief ob j ection is to the method employed. 
 If the world is already so bad, what is the use of 
 keeping it? If this country is hopelessly cor- 
 rupt and democracy a failure, and conscience 
 dried up, and commercialism rampant, and virtue 
 all gone, why not leave us to go to our own place, 
 like Judas? And what better route is there than 
 war? The truth is, when a man begins to 
 prophesy ruin because his country goes to war, 
 he is apt before long, particularly if he is a little 
 undersized, to pray for what he prophesies, just 
 to punish the country and bring her to her senses 
 — and vindicate him. And he counts up his dead 
 compatriots with an enthusiasm that is not ex- 
 actly pious, and he accepts defeat with a com- 
 placency that is not merely altruistic, and almost 
 any degree of patriotism strikes him as exces- 
 sive, and any kind of national rejoicing as vul- 
 gar. One may see this in him and still be peace- 
 loving, and one may dislike it without being a 
 war-dog. It often happens that what a man of 
 this type sets down as lust for blood on your part 
 is after all only a harmless hankering for com- 
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 mon sense. It is a bad way to grow old. The 
 memoirs of old men are so often full of it — the 
 world winding up in darkness because their light 
 fails. If we discount it a little now and then, it 
 does not follow that we are cutthroats or even 
 lukewarm in the interests of peace. 
 
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 VII 
 
 MEASURING AN AMERICAN REPUTATION 
 
 Some years ago an enterprising American col- 
 lege president conceived the notion of a Hall of 
 Fame for great Americans, with a hundred 
 judges to decide who should be glorified. Where- 
 upon a serious-minded writer declared that to 
 decide the question of fame by the majority vote 
 of a hundred wise men was in some sort impious, 
 because it left "the divine will out of the matter 
 altogether." When people are enjoying them- 
 selves someone with a swollen conscience is sure 
 to come along and complain about it. As if we 
 were going to make Providence feel de trop by 
 guessing about our great men. It is as good a 
 game of chance as was ever thought of. It re- 
 quires skill and knowledge and some searching of 
 the heart, and the subject matter is intensely in- 
 teresting. The results are surprising to the 
 judges themselves and to everybody else. Every 
 group of a hundred men, wise or foolish, would 
 decide differently, and the same group would 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 change its mind in a month if its members were 
 ordinarily progressive. For the longer you think 
 and the further you read, the more reputations 
 you discover, and some of the new are sure to 
 crowd out the old ones. George Washington 
 and a few others are fixtures, but the lesser names 
 go in and out of your mind constantly, and how 
 many you can find there and who they are will 
 depend on what time of day it is. As to names 
 like Elias Howe, your memory merely flirts with 
 them. You have found twenty-nine great men 
 and must have one more. William Morris Hunt 
 is in, and so is Gilbert Stuart. Poe will not do, 
 because he drank, and, besides, poetry is well 
 enough represented as it is. Soldiers are not in 
 your line, and they should be kept down anyhow 
 for fear of militarism. A useful person is needed 
 — an inventor. A sewing machine buzzes in the 
 next room, and Elias Howe comes to mind, and 
 you take him. There is a broad zone of indif- 
 ference where you are lucky if you can find even 
 a whim. In this haphazard region the best and 
 wisest of men is no better than a mob. 
 78 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 What is the unit of measure — the foot-pound, 
 ohm, volt or square milhmeter of glory? Take 
 one of the simpler problems. Here are Hunt, 
 Howe, Stuart and Poe waiting to be graded. 
 First find the common denominator of ? sewing 
 machine and the Lenox Lyceum. This will en- 
 able you to compare the inventive genius of Howe 
 with Hunt's skill as an architect. Then see how 
 many times the answer will go into Poe's Raven 
 and Stuart's paintings of the presidents. Sub- 
 tract five from Poe because he was so dissipated. 
 Add two to Howe because, though he was reduced 
 for years to driving an engine, he never took to 
 drink. Be honest with yourself, but bear in mind 
 that you alone cannot make a reputation. You 
 must consider the point of view of other men and 
 also of the angels. If you have no preference 
 yourself, find one and take its measure. Do not 
 forget that you are to decide not merely where 
 glory is, but where it ought to be. When you 
 have made up your mind do not touch it, but 
 treat an opinion as if you had married it. Find 
 out what you yourself think, what you think 
 79 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 other people are thinking, how the thing is looked 
 at in heaven, and what sort of an influence it 
 may have on the young. Out of it all must come 
 a decision fit to be carved on imperishable stone. 
 It is matter for flashlights and bulletins. But 
 we do not commemorate our dead in that man- 
 ner. To correspond with actual conditions there 
 should be a thousand halls of fame, and in each 
 one a biographical dictionary on a whirligig. 
 It would not do to have the same biographical 
 dictionary. Reputations go up and down like 
 stocks, whether men have been ten years dead or 
 fifty. Yet if you come out with a list of your 
 forty favorites caught on the fly you are charged 
 with departing from absolute truth. There has 
 never yet been a biographical compendium whose 
 editor has not been blamed for leaving out names 
 far more important than those he put in. Never- 
 theless it will be a bad thing for the honored 
 dead if the time ever comes when we agree about 
 them. Settle once and for all their order of 
 merit and hundreds would never be heard of. 
 Now, there is Elias Howe, who has at last got 
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 what he deserved — a decent talking about. It is 
 queer material for carving on stone, but no 
 queerer than much that we put there. There are 
 signs that the city of New York can be pretty 
 frivolous even in bronze. The discussion is the 
 main thing. Gossip responds to a human need, 
 and gossip about dead men cannot hurt them. 
 It clearly shows the stuff that reputations below 
 a certain grade are made of. Many of the 
 smaller glories owe their longevity to the lazy- 
 mindedness of the survivors, for who can afford 
 to be painstaking about such trifles .? 
 
 How tell which is the greater of two men when 
 neither is great at all.? The best way is to shut 
 your eyes and guess at it. If it were James K. 
 Polk and Julius Caesar it would be one thing. 
 But it is James K. Polk and E. P. Roe, and 
 Hunt, and Howe, and Dolly Madison. Guess, 
 and think no more about it. If you were the 
 editor of a biographical dictionary, part of the 
 work would consist in this very thing. Some one 
 would write in and complain that half a page was 
 given to Jones and Brown was left out alto- 
 81 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 gether. Yet if you aim at the Jones point of 
 thoroughness you should logically include not 
 only Brown, but a hundred others. The grave- 
 yards are choked with men of the Jones degree. 
 It is no doubt true. But what is the harm in 
 guessing Jones? Oblivion will get them all in 
 the long run; the final marks will not be ready 
 till the day of judgment, and in the meanwhile 
 why should we not discuss our taste in dead men ? 
 
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 VIII 
 
 DEMOCRATIC GENTILITY 
 
 A PRETTY row is sure to follow any public refer- 
 ence to good breeding, especially to an alleged 
 criterion or condition precedent of good breed- 
 ing. An Anglo-Saxon community cannot stand 
 it. Once, when an eminent naval officer opposed 
 the promotion of warrant officers on the ground 
 that they lacked social qualifications, a United 
 States senator all aglow with the spirit of Jean 
 Jacques and Robert Burns and the Declaration 
 called him a "snob" and a "coward" and a "con- 
 ceited ass." I am not now concerned with the 
 merits of the case, but only with the heat of the 
 language. There are terrible passions in this 
 field, and they lie very near the surface. 
 
 In England it is about the same, or possibly 
 worse. A few years ago the best behaved of 
 British weeklies quoted with approval in one of 
 its book reviews the remark that a gentleman was 
 a "man who played the game;" that is to say, 
 fitted in well with the company he was thrown 
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 with, did not cheat or interfere or insist on play- 
 ing his own game or the wrong game at the 
 wrong time. That set things going. Gentle- 
 men who felt that this left them out wanted an- 
 other definition. Correspondents squabbled with 
 one another and with the editor, and exchanged 
 volleys of quotations from the dictionary and 
 the Bible and the Elizabethan poets and the 
 Herald's College. Some said it all depended on 
 the great-grandfather's occupation, which, of 
 course, shocked the great-grandfatherless and 
 brought out in rebuttal a host of proverbs on the 
 order of "handsome is as handsome does." The 
 writers sometimes reinforced their arguments by 
 giving their addresses at highly respectable 
 clubs, and one of them crushed his adversary by 
 sheer weight of personal dignity. "Being my- 
 self in business," he said, "albeit a descendant of 
 the princes of Wales of the old race as well as a 
 descendant of that more modern stock, the Nor- 
 man and Plantagenet kings and their alliances, 
 I feel Mr. C.'s definition as a species of insult; 
 but, thank the gods ! the term 'gentleman' is de- 
 84* 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 rived rather from a man's conduct toward others 
 than from any fictitious virtue of ancestry." 
 
 The real cause of these disturbances is the 
 odious nature of the facts themselves. One side 
 says that there are such things as social dis- 
 tinctions; the other side, which is always the 
 more numerous, says that such distinctions are 
 wrong, and it does not want to have them men- 
 tioned. The champion of the "plain people" in- 
 variably has the advantage. He knows that the 
 plain people have a rooted aversion to plain 
 truths, and that each branch of our race has one 
 social code for private use and another for public 
 exhibition. You will never catch him in the in- 
 discretion of a public allusion to social qualifi- 
 cations, though in private he may grade men ac- 
 cording to the kind of cuffs they wear or snub 
 the pure in heart merely because they chew 
 tobacco. Everybody knows that manners, fam- 
 ily, habits, clothes and like irrelevancies down to 
 the smallest details of toothpick and napkin man- 
 agement are the chief bonds or barriers between 
 men and between nations ; that snobbery in one 
 85 
 
 I 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 form or another is eternal and omnipotent, and 
 bigger than humanity itself. Not a herd of 
 cattle without its "consciousness of kind," which 
 implies a certain social hauteur toward every 
 other kind. But it is not a subject to go before 
 the crowd with. It is a principle on which we 
 shape our whole lives, but when we speak above 
 a whisper let us only say : "A man's a man for a' 
 that." The crowd would rather be ill-served 
 than admit for a moment that a man could be 
 socially disqualified for his job, no matter what 
 his job might be. 
 
 Once in a while we hear grumblings from 
 abroad about the characters of our diplomatic 
 representatives. Some one has said that many of 
 them in the past had been "socially impossible." 
 This may be absolutely untrue, but the point is 
 that if it were clearly shown that American rep- 
 resentatives were so regarded and that as a result 
 the service suffered, we should make no open at- 
 tempt to mend matters. A lesson might be 
 learned and changes might be made from behind 
 the scenes, but of one thing we are positive : An 
 86 
 
THE CROWDED FORUM 
 
 American statesman would rise sublimely on the 
 floor of the Senate in the full view of the plain 
 people and say that if a good American was not 
 good enough for a European power that power 
 was a "snob," "coward" and "conceited ass," or 
 words to that effect. 
 
 87 
 
PART III 
 
 THE FRIGHTENED 
 MINORITY 
 
 SETTING THE PACE 
 
 A FEARLESS preacher once reproved the Newport 
 gentry for their worldly ways, and the subject 
 was solemnly discussed in the newspapers for 
 two solid weeks. It was a sort of court sermon. 
 Though uncompromising toward sin, he did not 
 for a minute forget the social position of the sin- 
 ners. In fact, the size of the sin seemed to be in 
 proportion to the importance of that social posi- 
 tion, so there was no doubt a sweet side to the sor- 
 row at the bigness of it. A rebuke like that is 
 always reassuring to an aristocracy that is a little 
 new at the business and, therefore, a little doubt- 
 88 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 f ul of itself. The eyes of fifty million American 
 citizens are upon you, so take care what you do, 
 said he. It is a hard heart that this would not 
 touch. And there is no class of people in the 
 world that needs such recognition more than this 
 aristocracy of ours, and they were grateful even 
 for this polite untruth. The most discourag- 
 ing thing about our fashionable society is that 
 so few people know of it. If there were only a 
 bigger crowd peering over the railing it would 
 be more fun to be inside. Where is the good of 
 being exclusive when so few realize that they are 
 shut out.? It takes something of a specialist to 
 keep track even of their names. There is a fringe 
 of socially ambitious people who know, and there 
 are sporadic cases of an abnormal kind of interest 
 in dry society data on the part of persons who 
 have never met any of the participants and do 
 not expect to meet them. But except for a half 
 dozen or so of egregious persons, and these egre- 
 gious mainly by their wealth, the names of our 
 local leaders of fashion are to the average man 
 as the names of Hindoo gods. 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 We have no loyal peasantry or deferential 
 tradespeople or awestruck middle class. There 
 is no common standard of fashionable values. 
 Social distinctions assume a hundred thousand 
 forms. There are about as many peerages as 
 there are men. What is a leader of a cotillon to 
 the average citizen compared to the Royal Arch. 
 Something of his particular lodge? And there 
 are mighty honors almost within his reach. May 
 he not hope some day to be the Supreme Secre- 
 tary of his order of the Hidden Sanctuary, and 
 wear twelve badges and a red fez ? The cards of 
 invitation which our young Pendennis sticks in 
 his looking glass do not even dazzle his landlady. 
 Social triumphs are too esoteric over here. In 
 general our dollared gentry are envied only for 
 their dollars. Specialists in fashionable matters 
 assume a range of information that does not exist. 
 The details of the society columns are cabalistic 
 to all but a few, and the good or bad effects of 
 what is technically called fashionable example 
 may not reach across the street. And yet there 
 is always some one watching nervously to see if 
 90 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 they drink more than they used to or play for 
 higher stakes, or if the women are taking to cock- 
 tails or smoking cigarettes. If they find out 
 anything they pass the word along, and straight- 
 way a flurried moralist will ask if there is any 
 virtue left among our leisure classes. "Wealth 
 and luxury have changed greatly the atmosphere 
 of American life." We are all in immediate dan- 
 ger of divorcing our wives and floating sinward 
 on a flood of dry champagne. 
 
 By the cockfights of our ancestors I protest 
 against the doctrine that such things are new. 
 What past date have these people in mind? Was 
 it when England's greatest jurist said an occa- 
 sional booze expanded the emotions and mellowed 
 the manners of her growing youth? Or was it 
 when the leading statesmen of the century lived 
 their whole lives out without getting even with 
 their gambling debts? This among a class of 
 people that might well have set the pace. Be- 
 labor us as much as you like, but why let our 
 forefathers off so easily? Making demi-gods of 
 forefathers is an old practice. You would sup- 
 91 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 pose that people who wished to prove us worse 
 than they would be at some pains to show us what 
 manner of folk they were. As a rule they skip 
 all that. They pass over our forefathers with 
 gentle generalities. With us they are terribly 
 concrete. There is no fair basis of comparison. 
 They talk of forefathers as if they were a first 
 wife. The second wife may be just as good, but 
 she happens to be on hand. That is the trouble 
 with us. We are blamed just because we are not 
 dead. 
 
 It is not fair to compare the eighteenth cen- 
 tury as seen in Henry Esmond with the twentieth 
 century as seen on Fourteenth Street. Some- 
 thing should be allowed for stained-glass effects. 
 We have chosen to fit up the past as a playroom 
 for our imaginations. We arrange it pictu- 
 resquely and throw out the things we do not like. 
 It is a good place for a rainy day, but how about 
 spending our whole lives in it? Ruffs and pow- 
 dered periwigs and very low bows, even profanity 
 delighting by the quaintness of it — no better 
 place for an aristocratic outlook on this mean 
 92 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 generation. But the sponging house and the 
 eternal drunkenness and the mean servility of 
 dependent classes, and the polite breakfast on the 
 occasion of the hanging, and the omnipresent 
 illiteracy — why not mention these things and 
 others, if only to show that the real eighteenth 
 century is what you have in mind? As the world 
 moves along there are a lot of people in every 
 generation who are sorry they came. They are 
 instinctive partisans of any kind of forefather. 
 
 But to return to our fashionable exemplars. 
 The truth of the matter is there is no social circle 
 that could stand the scrutiny that is brought to 
 bear upon what society reporters call the elite. 
 There are scandals in Cornville just as bad. Peo- 
 ple write of our fashionable society with a lot of 
 Ouidaesque notions at the back of their heads. 
 Cynical, worldly, epigrammatic and blase — 
 where are all those characters of Mrs. Burton 
 Harrison and the others who have followed her in 
 a troop ? Whatever our aristocracy may be, it is 
 not effete. The novelty of external things has 
 not worn off. In point of simplicity it compares 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 well with any other class, for simplicity is not a 
 matter of cost. Some very expensive pleasures 
 may be almost heartrending in their simplicity. 
 A complex person would soon go mad, and there 
 is nothing in them even for a corrupt heart. But 
 people do not like to write of it as it is (even 
 when they know) for fear of being dull. 
 
 There has grown up a fiction about the morals 
 of this class and about the force of its example. 
 We are badly in need of some one who will em- 
 phasize the unromantic truth. The thing that is 
 ground into a candid mind, making its observa- 
 tions at first hand, is that the morals of those peo- 
 ple are by no means their weakest spot. Like 
 most classes of men and women, they are not so 
 bad as they are painted, and a good deal stupider. 
 And as to the example, he will have discovered 
 this : He may travel fifty miles up and down and 
 across Manhattan Island without meeting a sin- 
 gle person who knows what that example is. 
 
 94 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 II 
 
 THE WALK UPTOWN 
 
 Shall we New Yorkers be damned in the next 
 world if we pause one instant in our warfare with 
 municipal iniquity and take in the view? Is it 
 the sin of Lot's wife for us ever to look around? 
 Surely it is pardonable sometimes to take a vaca- 
 tion from reform and to be frankly pleased with 
 things that are morally indifferent. Corruption 
 will not get away. You will find it waiting to be 
 belabored at the same old place when you come 
 back. One ought not to be bruising the serpent 
 all the time. The most vivacious snake-bruiser 
 sometimes needs a rest. He works the better for 
 it. Some say New Yorkers with the moral aim 
 take too much rest. It is not true. Their hearts 
 are always throbbing with political wrath. Cor- 
 ruption is their constant daily thought. They do 
 not act, it is true, but they think and they talk 
 and they expose without a pause. They never 
 give their city a good word. That is their atone- 
 ment for their ineffectiveness. That much they 
 95 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 are willing to do for reform's sake. They can 
 at least abuse. 
 
 There is no queerer thing in the world than a 
 good New Yorker's conscience. How would he 
 define his city? As the cheerfullest, hopefullest, 
 most vitalizing big spot in a hemisphere or two, 
 which it is in spite of everything.'^ He would like 
 to, but civic duty will not let him. Conscience re- 
 quires that he shall define it as a long, narrow and 
 very corrupt strip of land provided with insuffi- 
 cient facilities for rapid transit, and once the 
 home of the Tweed ring ; bounded on the east by 
 a river over which a set of rascals are planning to 
 build a bridge when what is needed is a tunnel, and 
 on the west by a line of viciously administered 
 docks ; on the south lies New York bay opening 
 widely to let in the scum of foreign races and 
 Richard Croker when he returns from Europe. 
 Conscience insists on accuracy of definition and 
 on infinity of talk, but on not much more, 
 as is shown on election day. A man must 
 swell with rage over municipal corruption 
 day and night, but it is quite proper for 
 96 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 him to dodge jury duty and to stay away from 
 primaries. 
 
 The moral indignation is a good thing, since 
 in time it may lead to action, but there is no rea- 
 son why it should monopolize the soul and be- 
 numb all the faculties. You can fight evil with- 
 out snubbing all the good things in life, and 
 there are some of these good things in New York. 
 Is it the part of a reactionary to say so.'' The 
 New York of the better class of newspapers and 
 of the conversation of its most loyal citizens is 
 about the blackest place under the sun. The old 
 lady who went through St. Louis with a rope tied 
 around her and her six children lest the wicked 
 should grab them would not venture New York 
 in an armored train. It is not that the press says 
 a word too much about our vices, but it never says 
 anything about the other things. Yet who has 
 ever been hurt by seeing more than one side of the 
 truth? Can't a man work for improvement with- 
 out being lopsided or wearing blinders? One 
 would think that for a New Yorker to speak up 
 for his city was to pitch his tent toward Tam- 
 97 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 many or Sodom, and that the only way to cure 
 evil was to acknowledge no good. 
 
 It does not look much like Sodom as you walk 
 uptown. There are street corners where the sin 
 of a little cheerfulness is almost pardonable. 
 Lexow and Mazet revelations and Ramapo and 
 Croker would all roll off the mind for the mo- 
 ment if you would let them. At the risk of moral 
 laxity I say this does no harm. It is not likely 
 the devil could do much in the few minutes you 
 were off guard. It is legitimate sometimes to 
 look down a side street straight to the sunset at 
 the other end without counting the number of 
 gin-mills to the block. Do not confound material 
 well-being with political health, as Mr. Godkin 
 justly warned. But the sky is not upholstered 
 with ward politics, and Tammany Hall is not yet 
 a sign of the zodiac. 
 
 98 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 III 
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 As THE autumn freshet of books comes down 
 upon us the usual discussion of their superfluity 
 promptly recurs. One writer says this century 
 will be known as the century that was always 
 reading about itself, and taunts the present gen- 
 eration with even putting the letters of the alpha- 
 bet in their soup. Another lectures the whole 
 tribe of publishers for giving the public what 
 they want instead of what in the opinion of the 
 lecturer they ought to have, and somebody else 
 lectures him for not suggesting the proper rem- 
 edy. And so it goes until there is a huge pile of 
 printed matter all to the effect that printed mat- 
 ter is in excess. The present century may be 
 known as the one that became panic-stricken at 
 the sight of its own abundance. 
 
 When you come to think of it, there is no more 
 
 reason why we should excite ourselves over the 
 
 superabundance of printed words than over the 
 
 increase in the amount of conversation. Inven- 
 
 99 
 
 l.ofC 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 tions have enabled us to print a part of that 
 which used to be spoken and which perished in 
 the saying. We have always heard that talk was 
 cheap, and printed matter has become almost as 
 inexpensive. Because we read a good deal of our 
 talk now and throw it afterward in the waste 
 basket, it does not follow that we are intellectu- 
 ally going to the dogs. The superfluous book is 
 sometimes annoying, but so is the superfluous 
 man. Every improvement in communication 
 makes the bore more terrible. Nowadays he can 
 get himself published as easily as at one time 
 he could get himself invited out to dinner. So 
 you meet him more frequently in print. But you 
 meet everybody and everything more frequently 
 in print. It is rather absurd to quarrel with 
 print on that account or to blame the publishers 
 exclusively. The more food there is in the world 
 the more fools will be fed. It is not the fault of 
 the food or the food producers. 
 
 When a dull book meets with great suc- 
 cess some one always has a fling at the pub- 
 lishers. Of course, it would be better if 
 100 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 they maintained a high standard. But they 
 are no more to be blamed than you or 
 I for taking the world as they find it. And what 
 would the dull man be doing if he were not por- 
 ing over the dull page ? Would he be drinking in 
 some brilliant table talk, or studying art, or read- 
 ing the Elizabethan dramatists? There is noth- 
 ing in what we know of the dull man's daily life 
 to make us think that he has been tempted to his 
 ruin. Before dull books were printed dull men 
 were probably duller yet. They may keep him 
 from reading the average book, but he would 
 then be doing some other thing equally average. 
 Averageness is a quality we must put up with. 
 And, after all, why is a poor, tawdry piece of 
 writing so much worse than cheap chromos or 
 crude, gaudy ornaments, or the thousand and 
 one other things that machinery multiplies as 
 we all travel up from barbarism? Men march 
 toward civilization in column formation, and by 
 the time the van has learned to admire the mas- 
 ters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from 
 the totem pole. Anywhere in the middle you may 
 101 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 find a veneration for China pug dogs or an en- 
 thusiasm for Marie Corelli — still an advance. 
 Literary people seem to think that every time a 
 volume of Hall Caine is sold Shakespeare is to 
 that extent neglected. It merely means that 
 some semi-savage has reached the Hall Cainc 
 stage, and we should wish him godspeed on his 
 way to Shakespeare. It is only when a pretended 
 Shakespeare man lapses into Hall-Cainery that 
 one need be excited. 
 
 As usual in these equinoctial debates, the line 
 is neatly drawn between the hostile camps of the 
 Scornful Few and the literary Democrats. "As 
 for this vast new reading public," says one of 
 our leading novelists, "it is the vast 'old reading 
 public with more means in its pocket of satisfy- 
 ing its crude, childish taste. Its head is the same 
 empty head." Another, heart and soul with the 
 party of hauteur, and a Coriolanus to the plain 
 people assails the "mechanical reader," meaning 
 by that the person "who makes it a rule to read," 
 whose head no book can fertilize, who borrows 
 his opinions of literature. "To the mechanical 
 102 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 reader, books once read are not like growing 
 things that strike root and intertwine branches, 
 but Hke fossils ticketed and put away in the 
 drawers of a geologist's cabinet; or rather, like 
 prisoners condemned to life-long solitary im- 
 prisonment. In such a mind books never talk to 
 each other." 
 
 On the opposing side there is the complacency^ 
 of numbers and a boundless faith in the average 
 American — the familiar belief that in the long 
 run the people are just about right. "Healthy 
 optimism," I believe, is the technical term — ^land 
 of promise and the goose hangs high, warm 
 hearts and paper collars, beautiful thoughts in 
 frowsy heads, and what is best is also simplest, 
 and "you can't fool the people all the time," and 
 the throbbing pulse of common humanity, 
 and the sterling worth of the man in the 
 street, and the divine right of the thing that 
 gets the votes, for whatever is greatest 
 gets them. It seems as if never a day had 
 passed without a whirl of these rousing senti- 
 ments. 
 
 103 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 Now, I too once fought (as a private of 
 course) on the side of the Scornful and har- 
 pooned the public with all my might, but some- 
 how or other the old hippopotamus never felt it. 
 I too not doubting that I was a first cabin pas- 
 senger stood proudly among the few and let drive 
 at mechanical readers and writers and critics and 
 multitudes and blamed everybody for not being 
 like somebody, and somebody for not being like 
 me, and thought mediocrity would know itself 
 from my description and feel ashamed and per- 
 haps die, and was particularly devastating 
 among fools and could have wept when they did 
 not know it and took me for one of themselves. 
 But the pleasure of it passes and there is never 
 any profit in it to anybody. Of course people 
 are a little exasperating when they talk about 
 books — which seem to go through the mind for 
 the most part like beans through a tube — and so 
 uniform are they and so gregarious, forty feed- 
 ing as one, that it seems as if Nature turned out 
 men's souls as from a waffle-iron. And it is the 
 more disturbing because we know Nature does 
 104 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 nothing of the sort but gives them personal 
 preferences in clothes and food and cigars. Each 
 swears in different language at his toothache and 
 takes a different woman for his wife. Pinch a 
 member of the reading public and you will 
 find that he is real. But his personal taste 
 in books is harder to get at than his secret 
 vices. 
 
 But why need one be so bitter about it.? Be- 
 cause a reader is inarticulate and cannot prove 
 that green things with twining branches grow 
 in his fertilized head, it does not follow that he 
 is mechanical. And suppose he is mechanical 
 and bears the needless burden of other people's 
 tastes and potters away at self-improvement 
 when he has nothing to improve, there is nothing 
 in it so very dreadful. Literary people are for- 
 ever judging the quality of the mind by the turn 
 of expression. Such sniffs at the banal remark 
 and the empty sentence, such holy wrath at un- 
 productive reading; the minute a poor wretch 
 swallows an epic they look at his tongue for a 
 sign. They expect things of people as readers 
 105 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 that they do not expect of them as men. To 
 most men the platitude is as natural as the bark 
 to a dog, and if feeling were measured by elo- 
 quence there would be no family ties. The dull 
 man is not only entitled to his dull book but is 
 privileged to talk of masterpieces in his dull way, 
 and there is no more reason for railing at him in 
 his relation to books than in his relation to his 
 government, and his God, and his green grocer, 
 and his friends, whom perhaps he bores most 
 frightfully, and who therefore have a greater 
 grievance than true literature can complain of. 
 Taking people as they are, considering whom 
 they marry, and what they eat and how they live 
 and what they say and how they say it, we must 
 in common sense conclude that their literary taste 
 is the least thing that is the matter with them. 
 But literary-mindedness sees only the one thing ; 
 it would reduce the universe to a coterie, control 
 the birthrate of this sphere and breed only 
 Browning-readers. The question is not literary 
 but biological. It is not a humane view of us 
 ex-barbarians. Give us time, and meanwhile 
 106 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 thank Heaven that for the present we are at 
 least tailless. 
 
 It is one side of a larger problem, which is 
 rather complex. Another part of it is preying 
 on the vitals of the political economists, and over 
 still another an enthusiastic group of sociolog- 
 ists are rapidly growing mad. If we could tell 
 what the millions ought to have we should be in 
 a fair way to settle the world's future offhand. 
 Nor is there any hope of a general reaction. The 
 society of the future is sure to be more tempted 
 and embarrassed by the multude of its opportun- 
 ities than we are now. 
 
 Critics seem often ill at ease in the bad com- 
 pany of this every-day world. They find no 
 pleasure in what is merely crude and laughable 
 and have only harsh words for a stage of develop- 
 ment. You might as well lampoon a hemisphere. 
 They do not sneer at children with their primers, 
 but for the average man with the average book 
 they have no mercy. Their real grievance is 
 with the number of people there are in the world, 
 but for my part I believe that were it not for the 
 107 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 presence of the unwashed and the half -educated, 
 the formless, queer and incomplete, the un- 
 reasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the 
 delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not 
 wear so broad a grin. 
 
 108 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 IV 
 
 REFORMERS AND BROOMSTICKS 
 
 A FEW years ago a number of our protectors in 
 the press were greatly alarmed by reports of 
 brutal hazing at West Point. Cadets had been 
 made to stand upon their heads, sing songs, ride 
 on broomsticks, and eat tabasco sauce. Congress 
 appointed a committee of inquiry, and finding 
 the reports in part true very properly took steps 
 to improve the discipline, which happy consum- 
 mation would in all likelihood have come about 
 had our moral guardians scared us less. For 
 after all nothing very horrible was disclosed by 
 the inquiry. If those cadets deserve pity, we do, 
 too. Most of us have eaten worse things than 
 tabasco sauce. There was, for example, a cer- 
 tain compound of vinegar and wheel grease which 
 — but that is a fraternal secret. Though not 
 trained for warriors, we, too, have eaten soap. 
 Some of us may not have stood on our heads in 
 bath tubs — bath tubs are not always convenient 
 at the time — but we know from experience of the 
 109 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 higher education that pretty effective things can 
 be done with a pump. And there was a long, 
 hard board in the hands of a strong man — ^hard- 
 est board, strongest man we have ever known — 
 which must have been as well adapted to its pur- 
 pose as anything they had at West Point. 
 Brutal? We thought so then, decidedly. "In- 
 human man, curse on thy barbarous art, and 
 blasted be thy murder-aiming eye." That was 
 the thought that struck us when the board did. 
 It was not the way young Emerson was treated. 
 The other boys seemed to know by instinct that 
 he was going to be a great thinker when he grew 
 up. Of heroes, statesmen and philosophers there 
 are a plenty who never passed through any such 
 ordeal in youth. It was clear to us even then 
 that man may be great without it. On the other 
 hand, there have been many cases of serious and 
 lasting damage done to beings of a fine but 
 fragile mould. Our tormentors, therefore, ran 
 a great risk. In banging us around they might 
 have thumped out a strain of real poetry in us 
 or spoiled us for the ambassadorship at St. James. 
 110 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 But did they? Ask our guardian angels. We 
 only know — and there are some millions of us 
 survivors — that if this blessed land has lost a few 
 frail poets in the process, it has been saved from 
 a far greater number of prigs. Few men who 
 have been through it will tell you it is altogether 
 bad. 
 
 This does not argue any indifference toward 
 the extreme forms of hazing. Nor does any 
 rational veteran feel that all the hardships of his 
 own experience are strictly necessary to those 
 who come later to the test. You can teach man- 
 ners without taking the skin off. To be keel- 
 hauled like the young man in Snarleyow is not 
 the only cure for conceit. But the standard in 
 the matter is not an old man's standard. Nor 
 is it a standard of little French boys with their 
 governesses, or of flabby, contemplative Ger- 
 man youths. We fogies who write for the papers 
 may as well remember that. Each generation of 
 Anglo-Saxons is in an absurd hurry to stretch 
 itself on the rack of this tough world. They must 
 be at self-government from the very start. They 
 111 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 constitute vigilance committees on the frontiers 
 of life to apply lynch law to vices in the germ. 
 It is not thorough, for see what slips through; 
 and it is not just in a nice, respectable sense, but 
 it is not altogether bad for the race, and prob- 
 ably saves more souls than it damns. 
 
 And if it is sometimes carried to excess it is 
 still oftener withheld by lack of early advantages 
 from the people who need it most — the men who 
 cannot take a joke, who must be shielded from 
 reality and double-barred against plain speech. 
 To criticize is to wound; to laugh is to make 
 enemies for life. So you must tiptoe as in a 
 sick room lest some small vanity may take alarm. 
 Meeting them now, we are too late. Middle age 
 is the conventional garden where the little pom- 
 posities are allowed to bloom. Youth is the time 
 for weeding out the little pomposities so that they 
 will not grow again. Caught then and badgered 
 and guyed and "roasted," something might have 
 been done, and with little risk of a broken spirit, 
 for most of us start with a large enough stock 
 of egotism to last through the seige. The 
 112 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 time comes soon enough when people have to 
 keep then' hands off and sneer behind our backs. 
 There should be a season consecrated to the frank 
 and primitive method. Otherwise we might grow 
 up to scratch and bite like French deputies or 
 pull hair like respectable members of the Aus- 
 trian reichstag in their middle age. 
 
 It seems that the committee did not take all 
 the goings on at West Point with equal serious- 
 ness, as the newspapers did. The report admits 
 that "Many of the things done by the upper 
 classmen were boyish pranks." At the same time, 
 in view of the consternation this might cause our 
 nursery governesses, it went on to say that even 
 these boyish pranks "are frequently conducted 
 in such a way as to outrage the noblest feelings 
 of the human heart," and cited as an instance the 
 fact that the son of a distinguished soldier had 
 been compelled to ride a broomstick up and down 
 the company street. It was determined to pre- 
 vent the repetition of these indignities. 
 
 So far so good; but the spirit that prompted 
 the broomstick atrocity is likely to persist, and 
 113 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 without laying a hand on this young gentleman 
 they might have made him just as miserable. 
 That is where the power of the state breaks 
 down. Nothing can save our self-esteem from a 
 coat of tar and feathers, and it gets it frequently. 
 Noble feelings have been outraged even in Con- 
 gress. One legislator has been known to imply 
 that another did not speak the truth. Yet a be- 
 lief that he is not a liar is one of the noblest feel- 
 ings in the breast of a Congressman. He would 
 as lief ride a broomstick as be robbed of it. As 
 a matter of fact, the conditions of this boisterous 
 planet are hopelessly unfit for any soul that could 
 not stand the equivalent of that broomstick test 
 in the days of his lusty youth. If Congress could 
 only hedge him in completely, what a blessed 
 little bijou of a man he would grow up to be. 
 
 But Congress will not hedge him in. Both the 
 committee and the cadets acted with good sense 
 and brought the affair to a reasonable ending. 
 The moral of it has nothing to do with either of 
 these but with us outsiders. How we take on 
 about such matters, we the professional croakers, 
 114 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 who have but one note in our register, the same 
 old solemn bull-frog note for everything that 
 happens. When things are really very bad what 
 shall we have to say to them? 
 
 Our language is rich enough in disapproving 
 adjectives, and it is a pity to use the same set for 
 crimes and trifles. Yet in the apoplexy of our 
 discontent we waste the fiercest of them on some 
 assassin with a crooked pin or tyrant with a 
 broomstick. A case for discipline; young men 
 had broken the rules of an institution and fought 
 and badgered one another and immediately there 
 arose a chorus of Did you evers, and a wagging 
 of fungus heads all over the country. A small 
 but very serious group argued in favor of it, 
 holding that it was part of a scientific plan for 
 the making of officers and gentlemen. Precisely 
 that degree of scuffling and violation of rules was 
 necessary to develop true courage. The rest of 
 us saw in it the impending smash-up of young 
 manhood, and for weeks there was a pest of great 
 moral owls, worse than a plague of Egypt. 
 
 Whether or not a moral can be drawn depends 
 115 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 wholly on the drawer. It is like the rabbit in the 
 juggler's hat. Smoking hot shapes from Tar- 
 tarus were ramping about this country wherever 
 we looked. That West Point affair was not, as 
 you might think, a mere instance of stupid horse- 
 play, calling, perhaps, for the prompt expulsion 
 of the offenders. It was a sign of the times, and 
 a devil's footprint, and it showed how the curse 
 of an unrighteous federal policy has tainted 
 everything. Corrupt the morality at the centre, 
 and this is what you get. Pollute the flag in the 
 Philippines, and our sons shall constrain their 
 schoolmates to ride the contumelious broomstick. 
 And the end of it was just what it would have 
 been if we had not lost a single night's sleep. 
 Such are the blessings of a tutelary and meticu- 
 lous press. But everything has its sermon, and 
 the text of this is to be found not in the doings 
 of the young, but in the comments of their elders. 
 It is, as I take it, that if there is one thing 
 worse than the savagery of youth, it is the 
 pompous rigidity of middle age as exhibited in 
 this discussion. 
 
 116 
 
THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 
 
 But is it not what the people want, and might 
 they not misunderstand any other course? The 
 chances are that they would endure more common 
 sense than we dare to give them. After all it is 
 not a lachrymose people, whatever you may say. 
 You can tell that from their faces and from the 
 air they breathe. A fairly cheerful race, and 
 not without a certain sense of a modus in rebus, 
 it does not require the moral of every small event 
 to be hammered in with a pile-driver. One set 
 of words for the ruin of the state, another for 
 the i:udeness of our children — that is what they 
 expect from us, and even though we should 
 be misunderstood we shall not burn for it. 
 
 117 
 
PART IV 
 
 ADVENTURES OF A PLAY- 
 GOER 
 
 ON SEEING TEN BAD PLAYS 
 
 Had I an artist's soul I should be somewhat 
 soured by what I have gone through. As it is, 
 I have fought down all bitterness of heart by the 
 aid of a little philosophy. A man needs philos- 
 ophy more for the commonplaces of this world 
 than he does for its miseries, ennui being a stead- 
 ier foe than pain. I therefore offer my phi- 
 losophy of the commonplace in the American 
 drama and literature. It is not deep, but it is at 
 least bland, and it may help to allay irritation 
 in certain moods. There is enough of polished 
 sarcasm, and of cynicism there is already too 
 118 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 much. What we need is something that will aid 
 us in matters of routine. 
 
 In the first place I swear by all that is holiest 
 in democracy — by the boiled onions of the plain 
 people, by their even plainer wives, by the fire- 
 sides of Tom, Dick and Harry, by the sanctity 
 of the bigger figure, by the sacred whoops of the 
 majority — ^that the usual man is not to blame for 
 wanting the usual thing. Hallcainery has its 
 place in the world. Indeed, I believe it alto- 
 gether healthy, hopeful, and respectable, and if I 
 thought otherwise I should lose all faith in repre- 
 sentative institutions. There are a few who never 
 weary of saying spiteful things about literary 
 mediocrity. They have no patience with devel- 
 opment or kindliness for beginnings ; they would 
 condemn every tadpole as a sort of apostate frog. 
 Why are they so petulant with majorities.? Hu- 
 manity would pine away on masterpieces; yet 
 many would have you think that the journey 
 from savagery to high art must be made in total 
 silence, with nothing to read on the way. Our 
 plays are relatively good, being no further below 
 119 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 the drama than they are above tomtoms and hu- 
 man sacrifice. Blessed is vulgar "reading-mat- 
 ter," for without it people might eat one another. 
 No race ever sinks from Hallcainery into barbar- 
 ism; it rises from barbarism to Hallcainery, 
 whence in time it may emerge. 
 
 And who shall say that our plays are not as 
 good as our politics, or our writers as our Sen- 
 ators? Do we expect brilliancy in our states- 
 men? We are thankful enough in this country 
 for a good candidate, let who will be clever. If 
 a large city can, after intense intellectual ef- 
 forts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will 
 not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the 
 suffrage. So moderate are our expectations in 
 this field that if ordinary intelligence be super- 
 added, it seems a piece of luck. We are over- 
 joyed at any sign that the nation's choice is up 
 to the nation's average ; and time and again you 
 hear a thing called statesmanlike, which in pri- 
 vate life would be just on the safe side of sanity. 
 Mr. McKinley's refusal of a third term was re- 
 garded as a masterstroke of wisdom, and we have 
 120 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 all read praises of Mr. Roosevelt's achievements 
 which are deserved as well by anybody we ever 
 knew. Nobody praises us when we come home 
 sober of an evening, or speak a good average sen- 
 tence, or draw a good average breath ; and sturdy 
 virtues that keep us out of the police court for 
 weeks at a time are not even mentioned by the 
 family. But by these negative signs you can 
 often tell a statesman, for politics is a place of 
 humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, 
 where all are good who are not criminal and all 
 are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise. Any 
 one who is used to the accidents of majorities 
 should acquire this habit of mind. But the liter- 
 ary and artistic people persist in the most exorbi- 
 tant demands at a point where the least should 
 be logically expected, that is, the tastes of a 
 crowd. And if the majority is against them, 
 they scold it and the thing it chooses, and having 
 lost their tempers and tired their friends, and 
 troubled a number of honest creatures who have 
 not the least idea what it is all about, they feel 
 that they have been doing wonders for what they 
 121 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 call artistic standards. Right enough views, but 
 the wrong occasion. We expect only peace in a 
 cable car; for ectasies we must look somewhere 
 else. 
 
 If high art deserves its ecstasies, low art de- 
 serves its consolations ; and if there is any way of 
 making better terms with humdrum and escaping 
 the spasms of reform, it is our plain business to 
 find it. St. Paul said, keep the body under. I 
 say unto you, keep the mind under on seeing 
 American plays. Be "contentit wi' little and 
 canty wi' mair;" smile though the smile looks 
 sometimes like a rictus ; get the point of view of 
 the original erect ape-man (pithecanthropus 
 erectus) ; and if at any time you are afflicted by 
 a play that is particularly bad and popular, con- 
 sider the growth of our manufactures and sing 
 "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." To express one's 
 own tastes is reasonable, but to worry too much 
 over other people's leads to a useless violence. 
 Some wish to murder Hall Caine. I believe it 
 would be inexpedient to do so, and possibly 
 wrong. I believe Mr. Clyde Fitch as truly repre- 
 122 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 sents New York as Senator PefFer did Kansas or 
 Mr. Bryan the West ; and the more I see of 
 audiences the surer I am that to massacre is the 
 only way to reform. 
 
 Unwilling to be dependent longer on the 
 bounty of her rich guardian the high-spirited 
 ingenue in light blue leaves her luxurious home 
 to teach school in a distant village. Being very 
 much of a lady she is obliged to walk as if the 
 stage floor were red hot, and to speak in a high 
 trilling voice with a foreign accent — a course 
 that instantly wins for her the love of every one 
 she meets. But the guardian comes to urge her 
 to return to what, as a gentleman of wealth and 
 refinement, he is obliged to call "me home." They 
 are talking alone, but as soon as she begins to ex- 
 plain that self-respect will not permit her to re- 
 main with him, now that she knows the fortune is 
 not really hers, the violins play softly and from 
 every door and alley the villagers come pouring 
 in. A sentimental conversation between people 
 they barely know will draw villagers to the spot 
 for miles around. So when the heroine and her 
 123 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 guardian are at their saddest everybody is punc- 
 tually in place. It is all very exasperating, and 
 the superior person, who has no business to be 
 there, will ask you if it is Art. It is not Art, but 
 the stout lady in the seat behind you is nearly 
 bursting with sobs, and a large number of pocket 
 handkerchiefs are fluttering in the aisles. With 
 this particular audience Art could do nothing at 
 all. Then comes humor in its more awful forms. 
 Thrice-explained humor, with long waits for the 
 effects; humor accompanied by the hilarious 
 roars of the man who made it. And for half an 
 hour there is as genuine enjoyment as you ever 
 saw, and at the very heaviest of horse-plays the 
 stout lady behind you says, "Isn't that rich.?" 
 Elevate the stage? Perhaps you can, but it will 
 be a good many generations before those people 
 will be ready for it. A quarter of an inch eleva- 
 tion would spoil the whole thing for them. 
 
 There is plenty of room for a good theatre, 
 but there is no use in hoping that it will draw 
 away the crowds from the class of plays that are 
 now successful. These plays will continue, or 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 others just as bad. They are wonderfully 
 adapted to the people who go to see them, and as 
 time goes on this element of the population is 
 bound to increase. There are more below than 
 above them. It is absurd for the superior per- 
 son to ask them if it is Art. He would not take 
 on like that about a ball game or a merry-go- 
 round. And at a country fair or sociable or 
 "sugar eat" he would not be so savage about bad 
 taste. But a simple, hearty New York audience 
 abandoning itself to the innocent, if rude, pleas- 
 ures of the average play has no mercy from him 
 for the amazing reason that it is not Art. As if 
 simplicity required a background of hen roosts 
 and apple orchards and all primitive men tucked 
 their trousers in their boots. He is a child of 
 nature, the New York playgoer, even if he is not 
 picturesque, and he has an honest and wholesome 
 regard for whatever is atrocious in art. Put him 
 on the diet of the superior person and he would 
 soon starve. 
 
 There must be bad plays. You cannot civilize 
 the whole crowd of us at once, and those hideous 
 125 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 early stages of artistic appreciation cannot be 
 skipped. There is much cheerless writing on a 
 subject that from certain points of view is almost 
 cheerful. Compare the worst successful New 
 York play with a war dance or with certain Zulu 
 sports. Things have greatly improved. How 
 did the same class use to amuse themselves.? As 
 to moral lessons, the poorest of successful plays 
 is remarkably vigorous and insistent. No sign of 
 decay there. In fact, the worse the art the more 
 blatant the moral. No New York playgoer is 
 likely to forget for one moment that virtue is an 
 admirable thing. Is it not cheerful to think of 
 the big audiences going night after night to 
 have the same elementary moral lessons pounded 
 in.? You want your moral lesson served artistic- 
 ally or you will not take it at all. Perhaps you 
 would as lief see the wicked triumph for a 
 change. But these people are content with vir- 
 tue in the raw. They are not after new ideas, 
 but want some one to say a good word for those 
 they have already. On no account must you 
 meddle with their minds. 
 126 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 The moral of all this is that one ought to try 
 and see the bright side of the situation, if such 
 a thing is to be found, and suppress those mur- 
 derous feelings toward what after all is a worthy 
 class of citizens and good building material for 
 the state. In spite of artistic merit and intelli- 
 gence good plays may succeed, and some day 
 the experiment will be tried on a large scale ; but 
 in the meanwhile all the philosophy that you can 
 summon and patience with those who like the 
 plays they have. The undiscriminating benig- 
 nity of audiences almost drives you mad. Why do 
 they not rise from their places and burn and 
 slay.? How easy to lynch the manager, if they 
 only knew. But they are having a good time for 
 all your splutter about Art, and if you can see 
 any signs of demoralization in their pleasant 
 moon faces you are a cynic at heart. For what- 
 ever our stage is, it supplies the unseasoned food 
 that is relished in the lusty infancy of Art. 
 
 1£7 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 II 
 
 THE SPAN OF THE STAGE 
 
 Ages ago when we were all young and went to 
 evening parties, there was always, it will be re- 
 called, at least one blase guest who entered with 
 a look of pain and remained with conscious cyni- 
 cism. So the world is still at it, he seemed to 
 say, as if from centuries of experience (most 
 of it dark), looking more bored than mortal man 
 could ever feel — as bored perhaps as Satan might 
 be at an afternoon tea with cherubs. But he 
 went home no earlier than any one else and had 
 you at any time felt his pulse you would have 
 found it pumping away as cheerfully as other 
 people's. It was only that he would not confess 
 his indefensible emotions. It is the same way 
 with some of us playgoers. We profess to enjoy 
 only as we judge, but night after night we can 
 fold up our judgment like an opera hat and con- 
 tentedly sit with it under the seat, though we 
 damn the play with it afterwards. It is just 
 this lenient play-going mood that makes stage 
 128 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 criticism seem unreal. The intellect is detach- 
 able. Sometimes you are happier if you keep 
 it on ; sometimes you feel better without it ; at a 
 certain kind of conventional play it is simply 
 poisonous. 
 
 I have been reading some inappropriately in- 
 telligent remarks on a simple melodrama of In- 
 dian fights and primitive valor, wherein the hero 
 is a Western scout, a noble, athletic creature, a 
 child of nature and of the Leatherstocking Tales, 
 who is full of the moon and stars and the Great 
 Spirit, and does not know how heroic he is when 
 he saves a regiment at the risk of his life. The 
 critic says the character is not life-like, as if it 
 mattered, and adds that he is beneath the stand- 
 ard of Broadway, as if there were one. This hero 
 belongs to the juvenilia of our stage, and if you 
 kill him you will find yourself embarked on a 
 career of slaughter. There have been a dozen 
 like him this year and last. There is no reason 
 why criticism should straighten itself up with 
 this sudden dignity and let the other eleven go 
 through. Classify him and let him alone; enjoy 
 129 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 the moment if you can ; forget your age and edu- 
 cation and everything else; feel on the top of 
 your bald head for sunny curls, and try and won- 
 der how the play will turn out. Will the Indians 
 get him ? It may be his gun will go off and shoot 
 the orchestra. There is always something to 
 wonder at. Where there's a will, there's a way. 
 A play may be seen with two standards: The 
 standard of what you have previously seen or 
 read or studied, and the standard of what you 
 would have been doing if you had stayed at home 
 that evening. The average play does not com- 
 pete with Shakespeare but with the evening 
 papers or a game of cards or the bosom of the 
 average family. 
 
 Despise not the raw virtue, black vice and 
 scalping knives of casual melodrama unless you 
 are ready to despise the society hodge-podge and 
 the merely spectacular historical play. The 
 common defect is the unrealized men and women. 
 We reverse the practice of the Elizabethans and 
 label characters instead of scenery. They asked 
 their audience to believe that this was a wall and 
 130 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 that a gate-post. We do the wall and 
 post to the life, but say, will you please believe 
 that these jumping- jacks are human beings. 
 Yet our audience is well trained, ready to take 
 the will for the deed, and in no hurry to argue 
 itself out of a place to spend its evenings. If 
 you think coolly of the playwright's work, you 
 will turn the stage into a solitude. In a month 
 of play going I found only one play that met the 
 tests of afterthought, but there were very few 
 that did not suffice for the moment. 
 
 We think of the theatre as a great, grinding 
 machine for expressing the obvious, a show-place 
 for large adventures of body and soul, unsuited 
 as a bass-drum to lighter arguments. Some say 
 the theatre can take nothing up till the other 
 arts are through with it. Then a play like Old 
 Heidelberg comes along and succeeds where 
 many poets fail through sheer clumsiness. It is 
 by no means a great play, and it deals with the 
 lightest of themes. An unheroic young prince 
 whom the restraints of a petty court hardly per- 
 mit to draw a natural breath, suddenly finds him- 
 131 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 self free to lead his own life at the university. 
 For the first time he meets people on a common 
 footing and can be foolish and spontaneous and 
 undignified and young, and make a noise and 
 fall genuinely in love with his landlord's pretty 
 daughter. So he comes to life and after his first 
 bewilderment does all these things with a zest that 
 is good to see and resolves to keep on doing them 
 for ever more, but in the midst of it all he is sum- 
 moned back to the court to assume the regency. 
 Being as I have said an utterly unheroic person, 
 he obeys, and takes leave of his sweetheart and 
 his friends in a way that makes you pity all com- 
 monplace human princes. Later he revisits the 
 university thinking to find everything the same, 
 but he has changed and so have the students. 
 Somehow no one can unbend and the meeting is 
 absurdly ceremonious, empty and forlorn. Then 
 the final parting with his sweetheart, for his mar- 
 riage, of course, is an affair of state, and so his 
 holiday ends. After all there was nothing in it 
 worth losing a kingdom for. There was no 
 great sorrow here, nothing tempestuous to wreck 
 132 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 a life. His royal middle age will find it a choice 
 reasonably made. But an epicure of emotion 
 could probably show that the best seasoning for 
 a delightful regret is a prosaic preference for 
 the thing you chose. The imagination has bet- 
 ter sport with what is a little beyond the range 
 of real desire, and I daresay Prince Heinrich's 
 grief was the most agreeable shade of the blues 
 imaginable. 
 
 So the same old stage that plays the passions 
 on a steam piano can be as delicately reminiscent 
 as a violin, and this playwright can make a light 
 regret for outgrown things more poignant than 
 D'Annunzio could the pain of an amputation. 
 
 133 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 III 
 
 ON CERTAIN **PROBLEM" PLAYS 
 
 D'Annunzio in his English translation seems a 
 monotonous and unsmiling young man of re- 
 stricted interests, who, failing in the effects of 
 art, falls back upon the merely horrible. With 
 murder or mutilation or incest in the wind, you 
 will stay on to the end, and there is never a 
 moment when it is not in the wind. Portents and 
 premonitions, fever fits and chills keep the doom 
 incessantly impending, and the unfortunate 
 characters are not human beings at all, but 
 merely foregone conclusions. It fixes the atten- 
 tion as surely as the gong of an ambulance. It 
 is the interest of deferred brutality, the common 
 device of those who seek a short cut to strong 
 writing, for people will often confound the 
 sources of their emotion and define a primitive 
 animal zest in complicated art terms. In an early 
 chapter of one of Zola's novels, a young girl 
 comes to a horrible death from an explosion, and 
 in the remainder of the book he recurs at short 
 134 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 intervals to the mangled body of the fair young 
 girl ripped open by dynamite. A fascinated re- 
 viewer described the expedient as a wonderfully 
 skilful use of the Wagnerian leit mot'w. If the 
 kind of interest does not matter, it should be easy 
 to start a thrill, for people of artistic tempera- 
 ment are as likely as not to mistake their back- 
 bones for their souls, and once a-quiver, they are 
 as indifferent as jelly-bags to the cause of it. 
 The cheats of the artistic temper are seldom 
 caught by self -analysis, and few of d'Annunzio's 
 admirers know how they came by their goose- 
 flesh. In the Dead City the fictitious element of 
 mere ghastliness is so nearly the whole thing that 
 there is nothing left for art to do. In this unin- 
 spired following of the Oedipus, ancient Greek 
 seemliness gives way to modern Latin unreserve, 
 and Nemesis becomes a buzzard, and a little man 
 bustles officiously among horrors which only a 
 genius could discreetly deal with. 
 
 The offence of the plays is not in their sub- 
 jects but in their methods, and the offended part 
 of us is not our morals but our taste. The irk- 
 135 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 some continuity of the passions, the fewness and 
 fixity of the ideas, the unauthenticated emotions, 
 the fatal absence of humor leave us with 
 the sense of humanity unrealized and a 
 world shut out. While there are afflicted people 
 like those in the Dead City, it is cheerful to think 
 that there are at least sanitariums with kind at- 
 tendants and capable house physicians, and that 
 one encounters them singly in the outside world, 
 never a whole troop of them at once. D'An- 
 nunzio measures tragedy by the mere bulk of 
 suffering. If murder is to be done in the end, he 
 sprinkles blood in the first act, gouges out an 
 eye in the second, cuts off a head in the third. 
 He supplements adultery by the amputation of a 
 woman's hands, and enhances incest by a most 
 pathetic case of total blindness and a final drown- 
 ing scene. Not that this is the whole story. 
 There is symbolism, and there are the Herculean 
 efforts of a minor poet to rise to the height of his 
 great argument. And it is well known that 
 minor poetry is of all things the most perishable. 
 Truth may traverse many languages and laugh- 
 136 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 ter may drift around the world, but minor poetry 
 dies on the frontier of its own barnyard. It is a 
 field of endeavor wherein the taste of the words 
 makes all the difference. But Ibsen can hold up 
 his head in English, and so can Sudermann, and 
 it is hard to believe that d'Annunzio, as a play- 
 wright, would so ignominiously disappear if there 
 had been more of him to start with. 
 
 Sudermann's Joy of Living profits greatly 
 by comparison. Those who called it the highest 
 peak of the intellectual drama in modern times 
 were probably measuring Sudermann in units of 
 Mr. Clyde Fitch, but they might safely have 
 said it was one of the largest toads in the sea- 
 son's dramatic puddle. It was certainly the 
 most "literary," the most "psychological," the 
 best presented, and, above all, the most debated. 
 The ancient story of the unfaithful wife and 
 her excuses, the trusting husband who is unde- 
 ceived, the disloyal friend, despair, atonement, 
 suicide, is told again, but in a modern, analytical 
 way. The wife's sin sprang from her higher 
 nature. Her soul, it seems, was fit for better 
 137 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 company. The other man was on her spiritual 
 plane, while her husband, though amiable and 
 worthy, was intellectually several pegs below her. 
 Should she not taste the joy of living? Better to 
 have soared and suffered than never to have 
 soared at all. So Beata soared away from the 
 marriage tie at the behest of the joy of living. 
 But only for a little while, and the three short 
 years of sin were followed by twelve of atone- 
 ment. She made her husband happy, and Rich- 
 ard, her former lover, became his closest friend. 
 She induced her husband to resign his seat in 
 Parliament in order that Richard's brilliant gifts 
 might have a fair field. Michael, the husband, 
 loyal and unsuspicious, and believing with her in 
 Richard's genius, threw himself into the canvass 
 heart and soul. Richard was elected, but in a 
 campaign pamphlet allusion was made to a scan- 
 dal involving Michael's honor, and upon ques- 
 tioning his wife and Richard he learned the 
 truth. All three being of noble birth, it was clear 
 that in these circumstances somebody must die; 
 but a duel would bring public disgrace upon two 
 138 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 families. Richard therefore resolved on suicide. 
 Bombardinian was hit and Hononchroton- 
 thologos must die. One may not see the logic of 
 it, quite; but it is undoubtedly the rule of aris- 
 tocracy or stagecraft. In their last interview 
 Beata reads his intention in his face and makes 
 up her mind to kill herself that he may live. Her 
 sudden death will seem more plausible, for she 
 has heart disease. At a luncheon given by her 
 husband to the chiefs of the party, ostensi- 
 bly in honor of Richard's success, but really 
 to quiet suspicion, she makes an ironical 
 speech in praise of the joy of living and takes 
 poison. After her death the two men read a 
 letter she has left saying that Richard now 
 must live. He agrees to live, and the play is 
 ended. 
 
 Shall we fly to our hearthstones, like the good 
 old-fashioned critic of the stage, and with purple 
 cheeks burst into alliterative wrath and call it a 
 "fetid phantasy".'^ Must we be fierce as fogies 
 and tear the language all to smithereens trying 
 to find things bad enough to say of "tainted 
 139 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 talent" and of "putrid plays" and all the "slith- 
 ering slime" of "poisoned pruriency"? Or dare 
 we at this late day be less robustious? To con- 
 demn the play, as many have done, on the 
 strength of the theme alone would commit one to 
 a ruthless policy. The world has gone too far; 
 too many novels and poems and plays are framed 
 on it ; the classics are still too fresh in our minds ; 
 books are too accessible, even to the young, for 
 any such spinster censorship. The main defect 
 of the play is its limitation of interest. The 
 "problem" that has lately usurped the stage — the 
 only problem, they would have us think, that of 
 husband and wife and a tertium quid, whether 
 male or female — is becoming wearisome even to 
 those who are firmly convinced that monogamy 
 will last of itself though they strike no blow for 
 it. Clever as Sudermann is, he has failed to sug- 
 gest in his naked souls the least variety. He 
 catches a single emotion from life and isolates it. 
 Beata lives and dies with it. You would never 
 guess it was part of her higher life if he did not 
 tell you so. Nor is there anything in Richard 
 UO 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 to explain why she is drawn to him. It is taken 
 for granted that they are spiritual mates, and a 
 great deal results from it. Somehow or other 
 we are to assume that the angels contrived it, and 
 if human institutions stand in the way, they must 
 be swept aside by a noble sin. Their souls are 
 endowed with heavenly humps of the same pat- 
 tern. It is intellectually bare, purely emotional, 
 the mechanics of unlawful love, and though it is 
 most skilfully devised, you watch it only as a 
 game and think what a tight and narrow little 
 place the present stage is. Why should we be so 
 mercilessly confined.? A man is larger than his 
 largest passion ; a woman is better than her love, 
 and souls that run like tram-cars on their rails 
 make for the madhouse in the outside world. But 
 the poor starvelings of the stage must shiver 
 always in their moral barebones, and because 
 their maker could not give them flesh we say. 
 How searching his "psychology"! Those who 
 have a birthright to their art always suggest com- 
 plexity. From them you guess a world of many 
 things, however simple their means may seem. 
 141 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 They never keep you staring stupidly at any 
 single pinwheel of passion. 
 
 Nor do they, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, aim 
 merely to prove something. It is well known that 
 Mr. Shaw does not wish to be regarded as merely 
 brilliant. He demands a fair judgment on the 
 truth of what he has to say apart from his man- 
 ner of saying it. He professes a message and he 
 is not satisfied with a smile of intellectual pleas- 
 ure or a stare of astonishment. Like most sensi- 
 tive and clever men, he hates an attempt to classi- 
 fy him, and he would try to squirm out of any 
 adjective that is at all definite. At a public 
 meeting not long ago, some one having intro- 
 duced him with the remark that his only fault 
 was that he was too talented, he rose and said that 
 his talents were but ordinary and that his strong 
 point had always been his character. But 
 though a very clever man, Mr. Shaw does not 
 understand some of the simplest laws of human 
 nature. He is not even aware of the danger of 
 being amusing. People learn while they laugh, 
 but very few of them know that they are learn- 
 142 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 ing. When the midriff resumes its former place 
 the mind pretty generally goes on as before, per- 
 haps a little repentant. True prophets have 
 sometimes been great humorists (witness Job), 
 but their fame as prophets, I believe, was mainly 
 posthumous. Cervantes laughed Spain's chi- 
 valry away, but meanwhile Cervantes died. If 
 ]\Ir. Shaw were always right, his manner before 
 the world would be sadly against him. The world 
 expects from its serious men a certain degree of 
 dulness. 
 
 Compared with most of our playwrights, Mr. 
 Shaw is not only far more entertaining than 
 they, but sounder. It is only when we compare 
 him (as he expressly demands) with the best of 
 all time, that he goes to pieces. All great play- 
 wrights have seen that every man was something 
 more than a leading motive. They have never 
 used him merely as a pawn; that is, to prove 
 something. They have suggested a thousand ir- 
 relevant things. At times they have almost 
 seemed to forget their purpose. In any true 
 comedy man is a small figure dancing against the 
 14S 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 sky — temporal antics on a background of ulti- 
 mate facts, birth and death and eternity. That 
 is the only joke, and every great writer has per- 
 ceived it. Not one of them has ever been a mere 
 debater of propositions. No writer ever created 
 a man without suggesting a mystery. The 
 plain man has this in common with Shake- 
 speare : He too is aware of unknown things, makes 
 guesses, and is quite unreasonable. His mys- 
 teries begin too soon, but he has them. From 
 merely clever people you might suppose there 
 was no mystery at all. They make things so 
 clear to you. 
 
 144 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 IV 
 
 CONVENTIONAL PLAYS 
 
 On seeing a succession of conventional plays I 
 have often blessed my stars that I was not a 
 technical critic of the stage. For months at a 
 time the condition of the American drama is such 
 that it would seem desirable for any grown-up, 
 serious man to drop the subject altogether. If 
 he went to the theatre during that interval it was 
 simply a frivolous mistake. Surely it is not 
 worth while to express one's self very solemnly 
 about it. That is where the natural man has a 
 great advantage over critics. He may stop 
 talking, if he likes, as soon as his thought ceases, 
 whereas by the strange compulsion of the press 
 they must keep straight on, not only when they 
 prefer not to do so themselves, but when others 
 prefer not to have them. It is a fancied obliga- 
 tion, arising from some sort of a social misunder- 
 standing ; and every one is the worse for it. For 
 truthful comment on ordinary books and plays, 
 give me the private monosyllable, the sigh of a 
 145 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 personal friend, the look of the latest victim — 
 anything, in fact, but the reluctant fluency 
 of professionals. Not that this miserably 
 didactic group of men are in any sense to blame 
 for it. It should not be forgotten that most 
 dramatic criticism is written by persons who 
 would rather be in bed. It is a thought that dis- 
 poses one to charity. It is an inhuman system 
 that requires a man to talk like an Act of Con- 
 gress about every little thing that comes along. 
 Sometimes, like Troilus, in the play, he should 
 be permitted to say: "I cannot fight upon this 
 argument. It is too starved a subject for my 
 sword." Little do we outsiders know of that 
 awful scramble for edifying words on the eve of 
 publication, or those barbarous contracts where- 
 by critics, like hydraulic pumps, are constrained 
 to continuous expression. They account, no 
 doubt, for many things that puzzle us — for the 
 amazing difference between what we see and what 
 we read about, between the living and the writ- 
 ing man. Why this grim little set of duties? 
 Surely one may take his private ease at the play- 
 146 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 house without bothering about teaching people 
 what they ought to Hke or elevating anything. 
 The tastes have no ambassadors, and sometimes 
 the main use of criticism is in showing what man- 
 ner of man the critic is. An attempt at conver- 
 sion in this field is an impertinence. It was in the 
 hope that we should remain in some respects un- 
 like that Nature made so many of us and put us 
 up in separate packages. Yet for one man who 
 expresses his own taste we have a hundred mis- 
 sionaries to other people's. 
 
 When we simple-minded heathen read the 
 elaborate critical reviews of certain society 
 plays we begin to wonder if there is anything on 
 the stage quite so artificial as this criticism. 
 They are harmless little conventional plays, and 
 every one who sees them knows he is more or less 
 pleasantly wasting his time. No one but a critic 
 with a public duty to perform would dream of 
 looking at them in that solemn way. They van- 
 ish upon analysis ; they are built on patterns, and 
 not on plots, and nobody either likes or dislikes 
 them for the important reasons the critics give. 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 On the other hand, there are a hundred small 
 matters of vital importance to us which these 
 guardians of public morals and tastes take no 
 account of. 
 
 No man, unless he were thinking for publica- 
 tion, would give a moment's reflection to the 
 moral effects of the typically wicked little so- 
 ciety play wherein we try to imitate the French 
 from a distance. If he shudders all the way 
 through, it is not a moral shudder. It is only 
 distaste for sheer coarseness. The result of an 
 Anglo-Saxon determination to be French is 
 usually coarseness. Critics confound their re- 
 pugnance for this kind of thing with moral in- 
 dignation. It has no higher source than the dis- 
 like of celluloid cuffs and large paste diamonds. 
 It is the characterstic of the so-called sinful 
 American play that the devil himself has lost 
 all his devilish graces. Why bother our heads 
 about the morals of an enchantress, in the pres- 
 ence of the cold, hard fact that she does not en- 
 chant ? 
 
 It is one of the ironies of this world that we 
 148 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 dislike people most for the qualities they cannot 
 help, and if you were required honestly to select 
 the nine persons whom you would most willingly 
 see hanged, I venture to say that nine entirely 
 blameless lives would be sacrificed. Thence comes 
 it that the admirable objective reasons the critics 
 give for approving or disapproving things on 
 the stage are so unsatisfying. We are the most 
 violent when there is no reason at all, but only a 
 personal distinction. Abstract justice is beyond 
 us, and we may as well frankly admit that we are 
 biased on the subject of every play we have ever 
 seen. 
 
 In all things below the range of genius it is 
 foolish to talk in universal terms. Whim is a 
 just enough god for the small matters of every 
 day, and life has large areas of licensed anarchy 
 where truth cannot reach as far as your next- 
 door neighbor. Yet we approach these subjects 
 with a gravity which has always been the angels' 
 greatest joke — the sort of gravity that the 
 Frenchman meant when he called it "a mystery 
 of the body invented to conceal the failings of 
 149 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 the soul." We are forever laying down the law 
 where there is no law, and setting up a model 
 when it is the greatest of Heaven's mercies to 
 allow all models to be departed from. We Amer- 
 icans are imaginative in business (where our 
 heart is), but businesslike in our imagination. 
 The aim of American playwrights is to be in- 
 stantly comprehensible to every member of a 
 miscellaneous crowd, and criticism, which on cer- 
 tain occasions ought to be merely a matter of 
 good-tempered self -revelation, seeks always to 
 establish a constitution and by-laws for the art of 
 pleasing. That is why the unedited American is 
 so much more delightful than his cautious broth- 
 er with the pen, and why the best things that 
 life has to offer are not yet either printed or 
 staged. But taking it all in all, the critics do 
 not come so near the stage as the stage comes to 
 reality. I can recall several passages in Amer- 
 ican plays, but not one word of the criticism. 
 
 150 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 PRIVATE TASTES AND PRINTED 
 CRITICISM 
 
 After reading many pages of dramatic criti- 
 cism, some of it quite serious and bearing a good 
 French stamp, I am still harassed by doubts as 
 to the limits of the personal equation. Why that 
 air of more than personal certainty? Where is 
 the table of weights and measures by which plays 
 and players are so surely gauged? Many a critic 
 is so sure of his ground that he seems more like a 
 committee framing resolutions than a man writ- 
 ing down what he thinks, and he usually wishes 
 to save or elevate the public, direct, sanctify, and 
 govern it, or hold it on his knee. One of them re- 
 cently remarked that after laboring in the vine- 
 yard for fifteen years without effecting the least 
 improvement in other people's tastes, he had 
 abandoned his didactic mission with a sinking 
 heart. A trained and technical public taster, 
 and yet without a single convert, he now lives as 
 a private person, lonesome but correct. Most 
 critics believe that technical experience gives 
 151 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 them a certain authority, and the worst of their 
 worries is the presumption of discordant and 
 haphazard persons like you and me, who feel 
 that there is a broad zone of dramatic matters 
 where it is unsafe for a minute to take the word 
 of another unless we know his birth, breeding, 
 family history, associations in early life, the 
 books he reads, his manners at table, and the 
 sort of wife he enjoys. What is the foot-pound 
 of gentility and where is the trigonometry of 
 grace, and why take a man's word for the charm 
 of the leading lady unless we know the man? It 
 is delightful to express one's views on these points 
 but preposterous for others to accept them. It 
 is pleasant to argue but hideous to convince, and 
 for my part I should loathe a convert in this field 
 the moment I had made him, as a mere tedious 
 duplicate when one of us was enough. 
 
 Current criticism seems largely an effort to 
 speak impersonally on purely personal affairs. 
 In a region of licensed disorder people still ask 
 for a rule. So the stage critic becomes a priest 
 of prejudice, a little Moses on a Sinai of whim, 
 15^ 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 absolute where everything is relative, sure of a 
 right way and a wrong way where either way 
 will send you fast asleep, a specialist in things 
 that do not matter, and a moral guide through 
 nonsense where the deadly sins seem silly and the 
 devil feels too depressed to tempt. Nothing on 
 the stage is so far removed from human nature as 
 the things we read about it, and the world is not a 
 whit more pompous behind footlights than it is 
 when it takes up its pen. That is why I pause 
 here in a paroxysm of humility to remark that 
 any commentary of mine is not true for any 
 other person under the sun but reports things as 
 they seem exclusively to my round and artless 
 eyes, that I mean to be a mother to no man, that 
 sic vos non vohis is no motto for me but for 
 sheep, bees, pedagogues, and preachers, the Em- 
 peror William, the evening newspaper, and the 
 United States Supreme Court. 
 
 Principles may be had for the asking, but in 
 
 spite of the large population of this planet men 
 
 and women remain to-day the most inaccessible 
 
 things on it. Plays may be true to every drama- 
 
 153 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 tic principle, run like clockwork, have a good 
 idea behind them, fit the audience like an old 
 coat, lack nothing in short that you could give 
 a name to. The playwright may be so clever 
 that you can suggest in him no possible improve- 
 ment except that he be born again. There are 
 dozens of negatively admirable plays and irre- 
 proachable pipy Wrights. They lack only the qual- 
 ities for which there is no formula to make them 
 Shakespearos, every one. It cannot even be ex- 
 plained what makes the difference between such 
 a play as Whitewashing Julia by Mr. Jones, and 
 The Admirable Crichton by Mr. Barrie. Were 
 I writing its prospectus I could make White- 
 washing Julia look the better of the two, or at 
 least the more novel. Mr. Jones takes the prov- 
 erb, The pot calls the kettle black, and by means 
 of it saves Julia from her enemies, but he departs 
 from dramatic usage by leaving us certain that 
 the pot told the truth. The fact that Julia is not 
 whitewashed and that he lets us see her to a final 
 triumph over worse sinners, who are also less at- 
 tractive, than herself makes the play essentially 
 164 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 plausible and new. Besides that, it is, as the 
 critics say, "well built," which means that the 
 playwright has graciously supplied every effect 
 with a cause, believing that the human reason in 
 a debased form may still perdure even in a play- 
 goer. 
 
 Therein also the play is unusual. Contrast it, 
 for instance, with this excellent example of good, 
 every-day dramatic merchandise, where the main 
 point is whether the situations are amusing and 
 not how they came about: A nice woman di- 
 vorces a worthless husband and a nice man 
 divorces a worthless wife. It would be cheerful, 
 thinks the playwright, to make the two good 
 ones pair off, so in comes coincidence, like a fairy 
 godmother, and the thing is done. Though at 
 present unaware of each other's identity, it 
 seems that they have known and loved each 
 other long ago — coincidence No. 1. It seems 
 also that the worthless husband of the one has 
 been misconducting himself with the worthless 
 wife of the other — coincidence No. S. And so 
 from many minor surprises, assumed names, and 
 155 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 mistaken identities, there results the typical 
 "comedy of manners," derived from nothing ever 
 seen outside the theatre, but shrewdly based on 
 long acquaintance with the audience within. No 
 one can say whether it is comedy half -drunk or 
 farce half-sober, and nobody cares, except the 
 clever people who are always waking up at the 
 wrong time. Several critics fretted because the 
 worthless husband shammed fits which they called 
 a low trick for the benefit of the gallery. But 
 there is a gallery, is there not.^^ And it has just 
 as good a right to its fits as the orchestra stalls 
 to their jovial divorces. Something for every- 
 body is the kindly democratic motto of a good 
 market play. If by chance an idiot should stray 
 into the family circle, even he must not be coldly 
 ignored. 
 
 On this plane let us make no class dis- 
 tinctions, and above all let us not be invidiously 
 thoughtful. It is the typical comedy; and the 
 typical comedy is the blindman's bluff of the 
 understanding, and the clever people are the hor- 
 rid little wretches who peep. If we join in the 
 156 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 game let us regard the rules. If we stand 
 apart as public enlighteners, then let us be con- 
 sistently vigilant. Uproot the platitude wherever 
 found. Crucify the comic weekly papers. 
 Perish the political speech and the afternoon tea 
 and the latest novel and the woman's hat. Let 
 there be a total silence to be broken only by bril- 
 liant remarks. "The existing popular drama 
 of the day," says Mr. Bernard Shaw, "is quite 
 out of the question for cultivated people who are 
 accustomed to use their brains." The existing 
 popular anything is also out of the question. In 
 fact, the population itself is no fit company for 
 the clever people. If they ever saw things in 
 their actual relations, what a lot there would be 
 for them to do ! 
 
 But Whitewashing Julia belongs to another 
 class of plays, because it bears traces of the 
 author's effort to set down what is in his own 
 head instead of what he finds ready-made in the 
 heads of his audience. Mr. Jones meant to be 
 artistic. He wished to handle an old theme in a 
 light, graceful, and novel manner. There is, 
 157 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 however, no recipe for that manner, and though 
 the dialogue was strewn with his good intentions 
 we did not see any sign of fulfillment. It was as 
 good a play in outline as any presented during 
 the season, and as well acted. Its construction is 
 undeniably good, and the construction of some of 
 Shakespeare's plays is, as critics have often 
 proven, undeniably bad. But Mr. Jones has a 
 heavy English middle-class way with him and if 
 he steps lightly his joints crack. He has no 
 special pleasure in living, but he is grimly deter- 
 mined that you shall think he knows life. He 
 never knew an individual, but he can gather types. 
 Like the blind man in the Bible, he sees men as 
 trees walking ; and he has learned their botanical 
 names. With a good point he is a little too em- 
 phatic. His amusing things are a little too pro- 
 longed. He is the sort of man about whom you 
 feel instinctively. How like he is to everybody 
 else. It is a deep internal little trouble — no one 
 to blame but Mother Nature — a private matter, 
 a mere accident of birth. 
 
 The elements of The Admirable Crichton are 
 153 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 not all amazing. ]Mr. Barrie merely happened 
 to notice that people have an amusing way of 
 mistaking their luck for their merits, confound- 
 ing circumstances with native gifts, and caste 
 with personal differences. So he wrecked a half- 
 dozen of them on an island and made new cir- 
 cumstances to make new men not to prove any- 
 thing that we did not know before, but just for 
 the pleasure of seeing an old truth freshly. It 
 is a series of elementary propositions. Deduct 
 from a pompous old earl what society gives him 
 and there may be only enough of him left to play 
 on an accordeon. Banish the second son of a 
 peer from his environment and he may just 
 barely make of himself an indifferent carpenter. 
 Lady Agatha may be by natural gifts a fish- 
 woman and Lady Mary just clever enough to 
 wait at table, and it may be that the only person 
 whom nature has well endowed is the butler. And 
 should that distinguished household be stranded 
 on a lonely island its members would soon shake 
 down into their natural places, leaving the butler 
 at the top. On this simple and sure foundation 
 159 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 there would inevitably rise in that lonely isle a 
 butler-monarchy, wherein the subject class would 
 consist of worn-out lords and useless mistresses, 
 who would be as servile under the new conditions 
 as they were pretentious under the old. Then if 
 suddenly restored to their own community, they 
 would fall at once into their old grooves and de- 
 spise the butler and try to forget ; and the butler 
 being a man of sense would expect to be despised, 
 for he knows them by this time for ordinary 
 people, that is to say, inert, custom-made crea- 
 tures, who move only as they are pushed. The 
 idea is as common as air, and many social phi- 
 losophers have made books of it, weighing as 
 much as ten pounds each. If it seems new, that 
 is where the art comes in. The fancy takes its 
 fun with just these familiar things which it car- 
 ries out into little concrete surprises, proving 
 that human nature has no end, and the world no 
 commonplace. Art has no horror of an old fact, 
 but of an old mind to see it with. 
 
 For any artistic enterprise to prosper it must 
 receive a subsidy from on high, and Mr. Barrie 
 160 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 starts with an unfair advantage over Mr. Jones. 
 With him "the httle gods" cooperated, and so he 
 "found a way." That is the thing that makes 
 the difference — the only thing that really mat- 
 ters — and I defy any man to explain. 
 
 These considerations (and a dozen other con- 
 crete instances would serve as well or better) 
 should impel critics now and again to lay aside 
 judicial airs and paternal manners and confess 
 that they are quite ignorant of other people's 
 truth, that the best things are always the least 
 definable, that art fails in proportion as we can 
 state its formulas and that the world is a play 
 that would not be worth the seeing if we knew the 
 plot. And when it comes to the conventional 
 drama, the cheese and garlic in the windmill, 
 mere social peanuts and popcorn, his emotions 
 are not very important. They are for the most 
 part harmless little circus feelings which no 
 words in the critical vocabulary seem to fit. And 
 this, as I take it, is a good safe rule for any 
 critic : No matter how many the swans were in his 
 youth, if he would grow old decently he must cul- 
 161 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 tivate a friendly willingness toward a widening 
 circle of geese. Otherwise he will become that 
 saddest of barnyard reformers, the crusader 
 against commonplace, and the world will squeak 
 as it turns on its axis, and he may find himself 
 too serious a person even for the angels when he 
 dies. 
 
 All of which sounds rather devil-may-care, 
 but it is not. It holds true in larger matters 
 than the present stage. There are things on 
 which we ought all to agree : The Binomial For- 
 mula, that kind hearts are more than coronets, 
 the law of diminishing returns, monogamy, the 
 exiguity of American literature, the Ten Com- 
 mandments, and that Shakespeare is greater than 
 Alexander Pope. There are things in which it 
 is desirable forever to disagree : The meaning of 
 life, the proper way to boil an egg, choosing a 
 wife, which of Shakespeare's plays is the best, 
 and the real reason for disliking Jones and ad- 
 miring a sunset. No critic whose work has en- 
 dured ever wished to impose on others the precise 
 hierarchy of his enjoyments. He never was 
 162 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 mainly a fisher of men, and if now and then he 
 seems to land some of them body and soul, they 
 are mostly the little ones. John Ruskin, bent 
 on rescue though he was, knew in his heart that 
 he would never have made people think at all if 
 he had not made them think differently. Had he 
 ever met his spiritual twin he would certainly 
 have trumped up some excuse for a fight with 
 him. Every true critic is academic, impression- 
 istic, a hermit, a leader of men, an epicure, a 
 missionary, and at the last analysis a human be- 
 ing more in need of company than disciples. He 
 expounds the law and loves the diversity within 
 the law ; writes sometimes for the good of men 
 and sometimes for the fun of it. And if he is 
 not all this, and a good deal more, his books are 
 buried with him. We lesser folks are not to 
 blame if we betray an equal laxity. 
 
 Whenever an academic writer reads a book he 
 thinks at once of his duty to man and hunts for 
 a useful lesson. When a phrasemaker reads it, he 
 thinks, Here is my chance for a perfectly stun- 
 ning stage entrance. One weighs a ton and the 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 other weighs nothing at all. The critics of the 
 chair, prosectors in literary anatomy, Casaubons, 
 commentators, biologists of books divide the field 
 with the harlequins. Neither class shows any lik- 
 ing for the thing itself. They sweat with pur- 
 pose and descant on pleasure with a gritting of 
 teeth. Mr. Bernard Shaw would die of shame if 
 caught with a platitude upon him. Professor 
 Junk would die of fear if caught without one. 
 Mr. Shaw, hot on the trail of paradox, will show 
 that Shakespeare never conceived a human char- 
 acter. Professor Junk, author of "Hybridisa- 
 tion of Fiction Forms," classifies all novels by 
 their "central thoughts," counts the nouns in 
 "Paradise Lost," shows how Poe's "Raven" was 
 anticipated twenty centuries ago by Kia Yi, the 
 Chinaman. In a solemn voice they bid you 
 choose, like Hercules at the road-forks. Are you 
 academic? Then you must never smoke your 
 pipe except for what it teaches. Are you "im- 
 pressionistic" ? Then you will never light a pipe 
 when there are Roman candles. 
 
 After living for a while among these old der- 
 164i 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 ricks of the academic world you grow very tired 
 of the uplift. Is there to be no talk among 
 equals? When you meet a man must you im- 
 mediately heave yourself up alongside and try 
 to hoist him? Pen and ink and a sleepless pur- 
 pose either to instruct or amaze, vigilant self- 
 omission, the habit of talking down, a close 
 reckoning on the public (how high this sentence 
 will hft it, how much it will be tickled by that), 
 give to our critical writings the look of a steam 
 roller flattening out the angle of variation. A 
 good deal of the work should be transferred to 
 the government at Washington, where it could 
 easily fit in under the Secretary of Agriculture, 
 be attached perhaps to the Bureau of Animal In- 
 dustry. Leave out the man and the rest is as easy 
 as crop reports. Leave the man in and there is 
 not only the danger of deviation, but of a guilty 
 pleasure in other people's diversity. For in 
 private life we allow ourselves great unconcern 
 and many irrelevances. We are never exclusively 
 gymnasts, wits, anti-imperialists, or crowbars of 
 the higher plane. There is a large region wherein 
 165 
 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
 
 we are glad to see our neighbors going their 
 own way. In private life we insist on having 
 our own latch key and dying a separate death. 
 It is only in print that people are less than their 
 propaganda and that the desire of making a 
 proselyte underlies every word. Print is the only 
 place where men are merely pattern-makers, and 
 where, if you say that patterns are not your 
 sole interest night and day, you are set down as 
 a debauchee, careless how many rascals may es- 
 cape between your sentences. 
 
 But if you cannot guide the public aright, 
 why address it.? It is like saying. If you can- 
 not reform a man, why speak to him.'' Somehow 
 or other, the words must come out and when a 
 man has more to say than people will submit to 
 face to face, it is customary now to print it. 
 Should the day ever come when the world will 
 neither listen nor read, there will still be a roar 
 of soliloquies. Strike us dumb and we shall carve 
 our thoughts upon the trees or tattoo our bodies 
 with them. 
 
 166 
 
PART V 
 
 RIGOURS OF THE HIGHER 
 EDUCATION 
 
 BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 
 
 In the month of roses the newspapers are full of 
 unwise quotations from the baccalaureate ser- 
 mons which have been given in various parts of 
 the country. The quotations are unwise because, 
 when unaided by the voice or presence of the 
 speaker, a random passage from a pulpit oration 
 is apt to seem ineffective. And when you see a 
 dozen such passages in parallel columns, you suf- 
 fer a little from a sense of uniformity. It would 
 be indelicate to say weariness, for you know those 
 exhorters to be good men and true, and you honor 
 their motives and respect the occasion and the 
 167 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 practice. Your doubts have to do with the style 
 of the address and that only. It is the extreme 
 usualness of this style that is most striking. To 
 be sure, the speakers are addressing the same 
 class of men on the same sort of an occasion, and 
 you would not expect any great variations in 
 essentials. Nor is a usual style necessarily a bad 
 style. Witness the liturgies. Still there is a 
 limit beyond which the same phrase or turn of 
 thought will not serve, in spite of the vast store 
 of moral earnestness behind it. 
 
 Now the graduates addressed are very young 
 men, and most gloriously blessed with inexpe- 
 rience, but they have as a rule gone far enough in 
 their lives to have made the acquaintance of the 
 obvious. There are some things which a bacca- 
 laureate sermon should take for granted. It is 
 indiscreet, for instance, to tell the young grad- 
 uates that they stand on the threshold of life in 
 the presence of golden opportunities. The truth 
 of that statement is unimpeachable, but the time 
 has now come when it should be conveyed in some 
 other way. It can never reach any human mind 
 168 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 in its original package. Besides, there is no risk 
 in assuming that the young graduate knows he is 
 standing on the threshold of life or is in a fair 
 way to guess at it. Youth is very simple and 
 beautiful, but the mind is not a virgin forest 
 even at twenty-one. And the "moral uplift" 
 parts of the baccalaureate sermon are in especial 
 need of revision. The "battle of life" should 
 be approached with caution by the speaker as 
 well as by the graduate. When he turns solemnly 
 on him and makes his voice shake and says, 
 "Young man, gird on the armor of righteousness 
 and go forth. Go forward and not back ; up and 
 not down ; choose the better instead of the worse ; 
 aim high and not low," there is no young man's 
 mind within range. Moral uplift is a splendid 
 thing, but this particular derrick is worn out. 
 That is all. 
 
 A common feature of baccalaureate sermons is 
 the advice to go forth and purify politics. It 
 is rarely any more specific than this. Carry high 
 ideals into public life and purge away iniquity. 
 Is there a young man living who does not know 
 169 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 he ought to do it? They would wake up ivith a 
 start if the speaker told them how to do it, but 
 he never does. Perhaps it is too much to expect 
 that a man should specify. But he can at least 
 omit the generalities, for they do no good. 
 "Gentlemen of the graduating class," said a 
 baccalaureate speaker, "I sympathize with you 
 in the problems that are facing you. Choose 
 well, choose wisely, choose conscientiously, live 
 under the influence of high ideals. Live, my 
 brothers, an unselfish life." It will never do. 
 It is a case of youth, not of arrested development. 
 There are specific shams to be peeled off and 
 specific lies to be nailed, and they know it. Hack- 
 neyism is hackneyism, whether it is the work of 
 saint or sinner, and the eff^ect of it is to put to 
 sleep every particle of truth that it touches. 
 
 It should be assumed that a college student 
 knows in a general way that a high moral plane 
 is preferable to a low moral plane. If he goes 
 wrong it will not be from ignorance of this broad 
 truth. When he steps across the threshold he is 
 not likely to meet any one who will tell him in so 
 170 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 many words that the low ideal is the better. 
 Every one is most deferential to the high moral 
 principle. In politics he will find purifiers every- 
 where. So long as he confines himself to the gen- 
 eral principle he will have the whole world with 
 him. In "the battle of life" both sides have the 
 same moral war whoop. That is a troublesome 
 point about which baccalaureate sermons are not 
 explicit. 
 
 171 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 II 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRESHMEN 
 
 Now THAT September has come again freshmen 
 are the fruit in season, and the colleges through- 
 out the land are fast gathering in the crop. 
 Within the next few days the returns will all be 
 in and the seven hundred and ninety odd institu- 
 tions that divide the harvest will be drawing les- 
 sons of hope or discouragement from their re- 
 spective shares. Meanwhile the palpitating 
 freshman takes his last desperate dig at the 
 "horse" quite as if he were not the most coveted 
 of objects. Nor is it likely that you could con- 
 vince him that he is so yearned after. He is 
 prone rather to believe that he is the victim of a 
 discriminating exclusiveness. Did he know that 
 out of those same seven hundred and ninety odd 
 institutions in these United States a probable two 
 hundred would not have the heart to reject him 
 for anything short of dementia or debauchery, he 
 might take courage. For there is in certain 
 quarters a most unappeasable hankering after 
 
 m 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 freshmen, as our commissioner of education well 
 knows. Freshmen must be had on any terms. 
 With a falling off in freshmen down goes the 
 pulse of the institution, down go the president's 
 reputation and the treasurer's receipts and the 
 professor's salaries, and the alumni's hopes and 
 about everything else that it is the purpose of 
 the institution to keep up. This being so, is it 
 not better that the bars at the entrance should go 
 down instead? Thus reason a fair number of 
 the seven hundred and ninety at the behest of 
 self-preservation in the stress of competition. 
 
 Does the rejected and discomfited freshman 
 think nobody loves him? Let him listen to this: 
 "One of the most discouraging features in our 
 system of higher education is the lack of any 
 definite, or, in fact, in a large number of states, 
 the lack of any requirements or conditions ex- 
 acted of institutions when authorized to confer 
 degrees." It is our commissioner of education 
 who says it. He calls it discouraging. That is 
 his way of looking at it. When a commissioner 
 of education is discouraged, the unfortunate 
 173 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 freshman may come by his own. Discouraging, 
 indeed! It means the warmest and most wide- 
 spread hospitality to freshmen of every shade of 
 incapacity, a very carnival of licensed flunking. 
 There are scores of colleges that are fairly starv- 
 ing for the sight of them. 
 
 So those apparently irrelevant figures showing 
 the size of the freshman class as compared with 
 last year and the year before, and the year before 
 that have quite a dramatic import in certain 
 cases. In these cases the criterion of the presi- 
 dent's policy is the size of the freshman class. 
 If larger than last year, it is taken to mean the 
 progress of the college, more gifts for dormi- 
 tories and athletic fields ; in other words, physical 
 growth, and that is the only kind of growth that 
 a good many of the seven hundred and ninety 
 really care for. To ask what kind of freshmen 
 they are, whether they are well qualified students 
 or belated children, argues a suspicious mind. 
 In these cases it is taken as the index figure of 
 advancing culture. It is the result of a well- 
 planned and well-advertised campaign for fresh- 
 174. 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 men ; and if the beaming president can rise at 
 the alumni dinner and report the number bigger 
 than last year, there is joy intense and men will 
 tell you he is a "hustler and no mistake." And 
 under present conditions to be pronounced a 
 "hustler" by members of the alumni is for cer- 
 tain of our college presidents not merely a matter 
 of pride and pleasure but a sine qua non of their 
 official life. 
 
 He is a familiar figure, this educational 
 "hustler." You will find him in the last report of 
 the Commissioner of Education slightly exagger- 
 ating the figures of attendance for his own par- 
 ticular university. You will see him again in the 
 newspapers next summer when extracts from the 
 baccalaureate addresses begin to trickle in. 
 "Young men, you are standing on the threshold. 
 Go forward and not back." That is he, gentle- 
 men of the alumni, and you will meet him at your 
 annual dinner, where he will urge you to "keep in 
 touch" with university ideals, and congratulate 
 you on the completion of the new grand stand 
 and on the size of the entering class. Great 
 175 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 things have happened under him — an era of ex- 
 pansion, he will say — as you can see from any 
 recent catalogue. Twice as many students as 
 last year and half as much Latin and Greek, and 
 but for him there would be no summer school of 
 horseshoeing, no butter class or dental depart- 
 ment, no marble natatorium, brownstone dormi- 
 tory, fish-hatchery or cremation plant. It was 
 he who said the other day that the university 
 should aim at nothing but the training of special- 
 ists. On no other plan can the university grow 
 big so fast, and rapid bigness is of course the 
 key to him and the key to educational progress — 
 the football key — and why the trustees keep him 
 and the papers print him and the millionaires en- 
 dow him, and the faculty waits for a chance to 
 prick him, which sometimes comes. Then down 
 he goes, but not for long. It is a land of blessed 
 chances with many things waiting for expansion. 
 Out of nearly eight hundred universities surely 
 some would like to swell. And the popularis aura 
 is always blowing somewhere (and is especially 
 fresh upon the prairies ) and to all punctured and 
 176 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 deflated "hustlers" democracy is kind. He will 
 rise again if only to run for Congress. 
 
 All of which contains a moral for any one that 
 wants it. The freshman crop per se has no more 
 to do with the higher education than the water- 
 melon or the pumpkin crop. In the case of a 
 well-established college, able to hold to its stand- 
 ards through thick and thin, a large freshman 
 class is a hopeful sign for the college and the 
 community and the freshmen. But wherever the 
 big class is due to methods appropriate to the ex- 
 ploitation of certain brands of soap or cigarettes 
 there is no comfort in it at all. It is a mere rally- 
 ing of customers and can be done any time by 
 marking down the goods. The commercial test 
 applied to things of the spirit does not hold, and 
 a boom in freshmen taken by itself is sadly am- 
 biguous. For the freshman, like truth and good 
 fortune and human happiness, is altogether a 
 relative matter. 
 
 177 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 III 
 
 THE COEDUCATION SCARE 
 
 Protests of certain college students against the 
 spread of coeducation have for some reason 
 aroused very little sympathy outside those insti- 
 tutions, and there has not been a single serious 
 attempt to rescue those beleaguered young men. 
 It is no longer possible to stir people up about 
 this matter. If it means that the male sex is go- 
 ing to be dashed to pieces, it cannot be helped. 
 The great majority of American men are fatal- 
 ists in all that regards the woman's movement. 
 They have no sex-patriotism, and they feel noth- 
 ing but an idle curiosity when they see a brother 
 struggling against odds. Such of our universi- 
 ties as have let young women in must take the 
 consequences. Whether the men organize and 
 fight, or take to the woods, or stay and fraternize 
 with the enemy to the eternal undoing of their 
 manly characters, makes not the slightest dif- 
 ference to the community at large. Things have 
 come to such a pass that not one of us would lift 
 178 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 a finger on their behalf. It was not so very long 
 ago that a good many of us were seriously 
 alarmed. What has so brutalized us ? 
 
 Recently, when a university professor began 
 to bleat most piteously over the danger to his 
 manliness from the fact that there were so many 
 women near him, the comments of the press 
 were not only unsympathetic ; they were actually 
 derisive. Their general tone was, Let his virility 
 go. Who cares .f^ It sounds unfeeling, but it 
 fairly expresses the views of most people toward 
 this side of the coeducation question to-day. No 
 one wants to see the undergraduate courses of 
 all men's or women's colleges thrown open to 
 both sexes, but in those which are already co- 
 educational the male students will never touch 
 our hard hearts by referring to their endangered 
 manhood. You cannot make a man by hiding 
 him from women; and supposing you did suc- 
 ceed in keeping a small flame of manly vigor in 
 him, what good would it do? As soon as you let 
 him go, along would come some rough and bois- 
 terous female and blow it out. 
 179 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 This is too hard a life with too many calls on 
 our energies for us to be forever chaperoning our 
 own sex. If a man says he does not want women 
 in the room with him when he recites at a quiz 
 or listens to a lecture, let him plead shyness or 
 savagery, or the decay of college spirit, or any- 
 thing under the sun except this matter of im- 
 perilled manhood. Even if it were frankly said 
 that it was unpleasant to have women outranking 
 the men in scholarship or carrying off the class 
 honors, there would be a better chance 
 of gaining sympathy. Every one can under- 
 stand the feeling. But you might suppose 
 from certain appeals that as soon as women 
 broke into a college the men all took to piling 
 up fruits and flowers and birds on their hat 
 brims. Damaging as woman is, she is not 
 contagious. And sooner or later she must 
 be encountered as she steams along. It may 
 be a good thing ,for the male to see the 
 woman's movement at close range when he is 
 very young, so that he will become used to it — 
 like a colt to a railway train. For life has no 
 180 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 safeguards in this matter, and the world is not 
 adjusted to its softest denizens. 
 
 It is these considerations mainly that have 
 made us so indifferent toward those of our 
 brothers who are afraid of becoming our sisters. 
 Of this much we may be certain : The true con- 
 servative is not the man whose teeth take to chat- 
 tering at every change. And as to the danger of 
 feminization either in college or out, there are a 
 thousand and one worse things to worry over. 
 The system will never be given up out of regard 
 for the jeopardized male. The important thing 
 is its effect on the women themselves, but that is 
 another story. 
 
 181 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 IV 
 
 THE TRAINED WOMAN 
 
 "No LONGER a debatable question," said the new 
 president of a woman's college in an inaugural 
 address on the propriety of a college education 
 for women. Nevertheless they were debating it. 
 Indeed only a short time before a writer on the 
 womanly woman had inquired fiercely, "Are wo- 
 men to be flowers or vegetables ?" and for months 
 afterwards had his eye on the sex, bursting out 
 in print at short intervals. Is woman growing 
 gentler, sweeter.? he kept asking. Or will she spoil 
 on our hands ? He watched her as if she were a 
 watermelon. And even now, debatable or not, 
 a debate is going on somewhere at every hour 
 of the day or night. Still most of us have quieted 
 down, believing that thought is not intrinsically 
 bad for women though it may seem at present 
 a trifle bizarre. The only trouble with college 
 women is their pioneering air. It seems queer 
 that such a commonplace thing as a college edu- 
 cation should confer any sense of intellectual at- 
 182 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 tainment, but there are still some strange beings 
 with whom the consciousness of graduation en- 
 dures through life. As well expect Stanley to 
 forget that he had been to Africa. But this is 
 fast diminishing, and soon a girl will be able to 
 go to college without the risk of thinking that 
 she is doing anything remarkable. That sense 
 of being remarkable when she really was not is 
 what did the mischief a few years ago. 
 
 The issue between peach-bloom and the higher 
 education does not seem vitally important when 
 we look back on it now. Either extreme was dis- 
 agreeable, but taking them all in all there was 
 not much choice between the portentous new wo- 
 man and the fussy old man — the sort of man who 
 trembled for the peach-bloom every time a woman 
 left her house, and piped away at the sad old 
 warning, No charm, no husband. It must 
 have been exasperating to a woman to hear his 
 constant, "Steady there, not too rough. Be sweet 
 if you would be married," when she was doing 
 nothing worse than working for a baccalaureate 
 degree, one of the most moderate of human 
 183 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 achievements. The man who urged women to be 
 flowers, not vegetables, feared for some reason a 
 reversion to the feminine type of ancient Gaul, 
 and quoted Motley's description as showing how 
 hard it must be to manage her, "especially when 
 she begins gnashing her teeth, her neck swollen, 
 brandishing her vast and snowy arms, and kick- 
 ing with her heels, to deliver her fisticuffs, like 
 bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult." 
 Women of this sort, he said, "are never womanly, 
 and certainly not delightfully feminine." It was 
 a voluminous body of writing, and as serious as 
 anything we ever had. There was a cartography 
 of woman's sphere and a metric system for 
 feminine charm and a lot of men were doing 
 picket duty on the frontiers of their own sex for 
 fear women would steal their beards ; and when- 
 ever an old dry twig of a convention snapped 
 they said it was the breaking down of nature's 
 wall. It carried the "problem" into places where 
 it did not belong, and by meeting absurdity with 
 absurdity encouraged the queer leaders of the 
 "movement" to be queerer yet, and meanwhile it 
 184 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 would have had us all huddled together in mortal 
 dread of an irruption of unsexed giantesses. 
 
 Since then most of these timid protestants 
 have perished, crushed to death by their huge 
 wives, some say (and I hope it is true), and the 
 prevailing mood nowadays is not only acquies- 
 cent but patronizing. 
 
 Under cultivation, they will say, women often 
 show uncommon presence of mind and sagacity. 
 Feats of this nature are recorded with great care 
 in the leading periodicals as proof that the ex- 
 periment was worth making. The following is 
 not only typical of its class, but is so significant 
 in itself that I must present it at some length. 
 Two trained women were talking about the con- 
 tinuous advancement of a mutual friend, when 
 one of them remarked that the reason why she 
 succeeded was "because she is always prepared 
 for emergencies however great " 
 
 "Or small," I added. 
 
 "You are thinking of the magnet," was the 
 quick reply. 
 
 "The magnet.?" I questioned. 
 
 "Yes," my acquaintance explained. "One day 
 
 185 
 
 Hi 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 at college, one of the other girls dropped her eye- 
 glasses in a narrow opening between two walls. 
 She couldn't reach them, and had very nearly 
 decided that they must remain permanently out 
 of reach." 
 
 "But they didn't.?" I asked with interest. 
 
 "No," answered my acquaintance. "Our suc- 
 cessful friend happened to remember that their 
 frame was made of steel. She went to the phy- 
 sical laboratory, borrowed a magnet, tied a string 
 to it, and lowering it carefully into the opening, 
 gravely drew up the eye-glasses." 
 
 Happily, this delicious story was recounted 
 to me before, in the course of my investigation, 
 I had visited any colleges. At each one of the 
 many girls' colleges in all parts of the country 
 to which I went during the winter and spring, I 
 repeated it to some person connected with the 
 particular institution; and invariably that per- 
 son exclaimed, "How exactly like a college girl !" 
 
 The significant thing, of course, is the writer's 
 surprise at it, and this undercurrent of cynical 
 astonishment runs all through that large and 
 peculiar portion of the press which is devoted to 
 women's interests. Groups of women who un- 
 aided have earned enough to pay their board, 
 who can support themselves by their pen, who 
 have weathered education without loss of good 
 186 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 looks, who have sat on platforms, but are now 
 sitting in charming homes, who hold offices in 
 clubs, successful mothers, and efficient wives, 
 who can write novels nevertheless, women who 
 have led "the literary life" and still are by no 
 means shattered, form a necessary part of any 
 illustrated periodical. It would seem that intelli- 
 gence had never come to beings who less ex- 
 pected it. How must they have rated themselves 
 in the past? When a woman achieves an3i:hing 
 nowadays, the others seem to v/rite of her as if she 
 were a gorilla eating with a spoon. Yet I could 
 tell tales of cunning far ahead of the anecdote 
 above quoted — deeds of the barbarous and un- 
 trained, deeds of the woman with pins between her 
 teeth, deeds of any woman, things done with a 
 man, with a hat, with an income, with no income, 
 proving that if this college girl was remarkable, 
 the doings of every other girl are almost incredi- 
 ble. It is held, and rightly held, that this useful 
 friend to man should be educated, but that is no 
 reason for disparaging what nature had already 
 done all by herself. Sex patriots should remem- 
 187 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 ber that even at the very start she was human, 
 cephalic index 77 to 88, cranial capacity consid- 
 erable, mistress of herself, and feeling more or 
 less at home with the law of gravitation. 
 
 188 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 EDUCATIONAL EMOTIONS 
 
 The discussion of educational topics in the press 
 presents some interesting contrasts. Here, for 
 example, are two college presidents who simul- 
 taneously express their views as to the present 
 state of the higher education in this country. 
 One sees nothing but progress and the other noth- 
 ing but decline, and each makes out a pretty 
 good case for his own temperament. Toward the 
 close of the last century, says the buoyant one, 
 there were only nine colleges, and now we can 
 scarcely count them. Though some of them are 
 small, "most of them are eager and enthusiastic 
 to serve humanity." There are fifteen million 
 students in school and college and half a million 
 teachers. Millions upon millions of dollars are 
 spent each year in education. Studies are now 
 pursued that were never heard of in the old times. 
 Everywhere you turn there is something to glory 
 in, and the "bare recitals of the barest facts are 
 full of meaning." Put in your thumb and pull 
 189 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 out a plumb and spend the rest of your days in 
 hurrahing. The other man soon puts a stop to 
 chat. Things are worse than ever, he says. Col- 
 lege education is on the wrong track and only 
 breeds athletes and spendthrifts. Literary am- 
 bitions are no longer entertained. "Academic 
 distinction has become a matter of brawn and 
 bulldog courage rather than Greek and calculus." 
 "Harvard freshmen cannot write English, and 
 every college president meditates an article on 
 the growing illiteracy of the college student." 
 "You can hardly pick up a paper without finding 
 items headed 'College Ruffianism,' 'Academic 
 Sluggers,' etc." "College luxury is parasitic and 
 non-educational." "The undergraduate who 
 cannot be made to pay for good instruction is 
 lodged like a prince, indulges in expensive pleas- 
 ures and wastes far more than would suffice to 
 give his instructor the livelihood which he de- 
 serves." In the meanwhile, "the full professor 
 in a New York State college gets an average 
 salary equal to that of a railroad engineer; an 
 assistant professor the same as a fireman, while 
 190 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 an instructor is rewarded equally with a brake- 
 man." 
 
 The greater part of what has been published 
 on educational subjects for some time past is of 
 this character, and we outsiders who would like to 
 get at the truth are having a bad time of it. 
 But this much we know: Whatever the system 
 may be, if it is responsible for making men talk 
 like this there is something the matter with it. 
 There is little to choose between these two views. 
 It is not good for a generation's health to think 
 too much about its enormous strides. For whose 
 sake are we advertising ? The educator is apt to 
 catch this trick from the writer on industrial 
 progress. He counts up heads as if they were 
 steel rails for export, and computes the cost of 
 plant to tickle us with the sound of millions. 
 While under his spell we forget that it makes the 
 least difference what kind of heads they are or 
 what they are filled with. A larger entering 
 class than ever before, gentlemen of the alumni, 
 and a new endowment for the swimming tank, 
 to be known as the John Henry Jones swimming 
 191 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 tank. What can these preoccupied persons do 
 for education? They lead nowhere. They are 
 behind with the band reporting progress on a big 
 trombone. If there were a dead silence on these 
 points for the next ten years the higher educa- 
 tion would not slow up in the least. There are 
 other ways of growing than of growing fat, and 
 the over-emphasis on mere size has been carried to 
 absurd lengths. 
 
 But if wealth and numbers are no fair test in 
 this matter of outdoing ancestors, it is just as 
 unwise to spread the belief that we are breeding 
 out into illiterate prize-fighters and luxurious 
 parasites. The questions of college athletics 
 will never be answered by a man who sees items 
 on "College Ruffianism, etc.," in almost every 
 newspaper he takes up, for these items are very 
 rare. It is a strictly personal hallucination. 
 And as for luxury, the man who has money to 
 spend will spend it at college. There is no reason 
 why social differences should stop at the college 
 grounds. We impose no vows of poverty. It is 
 just as well that the college should not be too 
 192 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 unlike the world, since the graduate is bound to 
 go there. If we would make it a monastery we 
 should not let him out. And were the universities 
 of sixty years ago so very different? Men had 
 less to spend, but they let fly what they had, and 
 from the sad tales of Oxford which date from that 
 time, did the princeliest kind of things on credit. 
 Talking along these respective lines is not help- 
 ful. It is less the result of thought than of two 
 sets of antithetic emotions. With one class of 
 writers the human being is lost in the machinery. 
 The others merely feel badly and pick out a few 
 things to account for it. 
 
 193 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 VI 
 
 INNER CIRCLES 
 
 There was an inner circle, I understand, within 
 which the late Professor Max Miiller was re- 
 garded as a very cheap person. Your truly 
 learned man looked on him as an epicure might 
 look on a quick-lunch counter. No doubt his 
 critics have taken the right measure of him. 
 Truth for its own sake was not always the 
 master of his motives. Yet he was to blame 
 not for popularizing but for sometimes popu- 
 larizing in the wrong way. Inner circles 
 often lose sight of this difference, and 
 throw out a member the minute they catch him 
 meeting the world half way. Huxley is not 
 thought much of in some inner circles, though 
 the stimulus he gave probably did more for 
 science in the long run than the labors of the 
 very inmost and least intelligent drudge that 
 ever snubbed a layman. It is well enough to 
 distrust the general run of popularizers — the 
 men who no sooner learn a commonplace of 
 194 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 science than they dilute it and pass it around — 
 but to taboo a man merely because he has a word 
 for us outsiders is hardly fair. People who have 
 had anything to do with inner circles know them 
 to be beset with awful spiritual dangers, of 
 which a certain unworldly snobbery is not the 
 least. "Here's to Mathematics ; may she never 
 be prostituted to any human use." Shall a man 
 dig all his days and still be in plain sight of the 
 crowd? It is not for the like of us to hobnob 
 with a scientist on the suface. It is enough to 
 stand reverently at the mouth of the hole and 
 know that Professor So-and-so went down thirty 
 years ago and has never since been seen, or at 
 most put an ear to the ground on the chance of 
 hearing him root. It may be a necessary isola- 
 tion, but sometimes it is not. That is the dark 
 side of this question of the inner circle. 
 
 There are degrees of technicality, and within 
 certain limits there is a choice. Some of the least 
 important members of the inner circle are the 
 greatest sticklers for exclusiveness. They want 
 to make the profanum vulgus scuttle at the sight 
 195 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 of them, and if they ever throw a word to a poor 
 ignorant outside body it almost fells him to the 
 earth. A recent writer on criminology, for ex- 
 ample, has some common-sense ideas on the sub- 
 ject of Lombroso's criminal type, holding that 
 what Lombroso cited as marks of the criminal 
 temperament were merely characteristics of the 
 race and the social class to which the criminal 
 belongs. But this is how the critic states his 
 conclusion: "Thus each exceptional subject ac- 
 centuates himself along lines of transmissible race 
 eccentricities to which he alone proves true, and 
 not to any exceptionally vague physio-psycholog- 
 ical archetype." An enterprising sociologist 
 will take the simplest kind of a notion, and so pile 
 on the socio-politico, psycho-physico, zoo-biolog- 
 ico, pseudo-scientific adjectives that no one will 
 dare look for it. Scientific terms there must be, 
 but why use them in speaking of familiar mat- 
 ters for which plain words will do as well.? 
 Whenever you can turn one of these tremendous 
 socio-bio-psychical passages back into simple 
 phrases without sacrificing the sense, it is a 
 196 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 pretty sure sign that science is not to blame for 
 it, but the vices of the inner circle. To give 
 another illustration from the science of crim- 
 inology. Historical criminology, the writer tells 
 us, "is bio-zoological in inception and detail, and 
 historical as to data and outline, allying itself 
 with predisposing causes inherent in the race and 
 linking itself with primal conditions through a 
 long chain of antecedent biological and anthro- 
 pological sequences, following the well-known 
 law of homogeneous to heterogeneous, but with 
 ever-increasing distinctness." 
 
 It is not science that makes a man write like 
 this. It is the hauteur of the inner circle. The 
 thought does not come to him in that way, and 
 there is not the least need of these terrible words. 
 Science puts up no barriers of preciosity. It 
 is not the object of science that thought should 
 baffle its pursuers, even though these pursuers be 
 of low degree. It is the same old thing that 
 Shakespeare and Moliere used to joke about. We 
 hear little of it now, chiefly because there are no 
 Shakespeares or Molieres to see the diff*erence 
 197 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 between truth for truth's sake and technicahty 
 for the sake of the inner circle. It would do no 
 harm if members of an inner circle were a little 
 more tactful in dealing with the outsider. There 
 are times when common humanity requires that 
 a tomato shall be called a tomato, and not a 
 Lycopersicum esculentum. That is all we mean, 
 and it is no insult to science to say so. Mr. 
 Darwin acted on that principle without losing 
 caste. To that extent he was a popularizer, 
 though he was as far removed from Professor 
 Max Miiller as he was from the snobs of the 
 arcanum or the ordinary young Eleusinian dude. 
 Not to breathe a word against those good men 
 who have worked so hard and specialized so long 
 that they have forgotten the language. They 
 have planted telegraph stations on the frontiers 
 of science, but the wires are down and they can 
 only make signs to their brethren. That is a 
 matter of natural limitations, not of professional 
 pedantry. But inner circles abound in euphuists 
 who use words as if they were insignia of rank, 
 queer little masters of ceremonies and court eti- 
 198 
 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 
 
 quette whose services to science are not worth the 
 price of their humanity. They should take a 
 course in Mother Goose. Bigger men than they 
 have been quite generally understood. The 
 native idiom is worth any man's while, and it is 
 a mistake to assume that it is intended for liars 
 alone. As to the popularizer, a democracy must 
 have him ; but any neo-bio-psychical person who 
 has never sinned against simpHcity is entitled to 
 throw the first stone. 
 
 199 
 
PART VI 
 
 ON CERTAIN FORMS OF 
 PEDANTRY 
 
 THE DRIER CRITICISM 
 
 There is a certain unfortunate class of persons 
 who, whenever a new novel of any importance 
 comes out, must fall to and examine it for germs 
 and seeds and variations, and classify it accord- 
 ing to purpose, structure and philosophic trend. 
 Five or six of them broke out all at once not long 
 ago, some of them writing books and others 
 magazine articles. As a usual thing they have a 
 theory of development to prove. One of them 
 will tell you the exact relation between the modern 
 novel and the mediaeval fabliaux, on what date 
 the novel of purpose started, and how romanti- 
 ^00 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 cism and realism alternately rose and fell. An- 
 other proves by a hundred instances that the 
 development of the novel follows the usual law 
 of human expression, proceeding from the simple 
 to the complex, the physical and external to the 
 spiritual and invisible. A third says the whole 
 thing is a department of biology, and is very 
 enthusiastic about the study of hybridization and 
 "that blending of slightly divergent individual- 
 ities which takes place whenever a new genera- 
 tion is launched." By these means, he says, you 
 can explain Landor, Heine and Rossetti. Fancy 
 leaving those three men unexplained. A fourth, 
 who, though a woman, is made of the same stern 
 stuff, has studied a thousand novels in which the 
 story is told in the first person — "I-novels" she 
 calls them, on the authority of Spielhagen's Ich- 
 Roman — and is thus able to make some perfectly 
 trustworthy generalizations. Her conclusion is 
 that the structural importance of the narrator is 
 a most noteworthy characteristic of the I-novel. 
 This is what is known as the objective or 
 scientific literary criticism. The dryness of it is 
 ^01 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 the dry light of truth. No ordinary man dare 
 question the facts or principles that it sets forth, 
 for the learning and industry that go to make it 
 are beyond all doubt. But there is one thing 
 about it that must strike any one who now and 
 then takes pleasure in a book. These people 
 lose a good deal of fun. Perhaps they were never 
 the kind of people to have fun ; but if they 
 started with a capacity for it it certainly is all 
 gone now. Books to them are not the means of 
 enjoyment as we understand the term. They are 
 just so much material to tabulate and classify. 
 A new book, if it is good for anything, is merely 
 a new job, and they are overworked already. 
 They cannot simply read it, but must wearily in- 
 quire (1) "What relation does it bear to other 
 forms of human expression.''" (S) "What are its 
 specific claims to eminence.?" and (3) "What 
 tendencies does it markedly reveal.?" Where we 
 common folk may go a-fishing they have to 
 hold some kind of an ichthyological inquest. 
 I do not mean that the scientific interest neces- 
 sarily shuts out the other kind. Some men are 
 ^02 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 big enough for both. But it happens that a good 
 many of these scientific novel readers are not. 
 
 You cannot attribute it altogether to the 
 method. If a man's work leaves him with no more 
 bowels than a logarithm it is likely he was not 
 very well endowed at the start. Taine chased 
 theories of development and betrayed the scien- 
 tific motive in many ways. Yet his writings 
 bore on them the distinctive marks of an indi- 
 vidual mind. He had enthusiasm, prejudices and 
 other human flaws. He caught the spirit of what 
 he wrote about, and he was ten times as literary 
 as he was biological. So he wrote literary criti- 
 cism. You need not be an expert in structure, 
 descent and hybridization to be a judge of books 
 any more than you need be an anthropologist to 
 be a judge of human nature. In the school of 
 drier criticism anything like a pleasant intimacy 
 with a book is unknown. It is as if one should 
 come near enough to his friends only to ascertain 
 what their facial angles were and whether they 
 were dolichocephalic. And when you think over 
 the books you like you will find that what these 
 203 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 scholiasts note in them are precisely the things 
 that do not count. They are pleased (if we may 
 apply the term pleasure to their scholarly emo- 
 tion) by the resemblances, while it is the unlike- 
 nesses that fascinate you, unless, perhaps, you 
 mean to make your doctor's degree by a disserta- 
 tion on the structural unity of the Ich-Roman. 
 Yet it is a safe bit of practical advice to any man 
 that if he has in his possession a book whose ele- 
 ments can all be thoroughly classified and traced 
 to their sources he should at once burn it. 
 
 How does it happen that these men are on such 
 formal, even strained relations with literature.? 
 Perhaps there was a time when they liked it, but 
 they had to teach it or show their knowledge of it, 
 and a grim pedagogical sense of duty now drives 
 them to their task. They bother with no ele- 
 ment of it which they cannot thoroughly ex- 
 plain. It is only the obvious that they are after. 
 They are bound forever to the abominable drudg- 
 ery of establishing an inductive basis for the well 
 known. And literary criticism is not literary at 
 all. It is compounded of science and system and 
 evolution and ennui. 
 
 204 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 II 
 
 PAINSTAKING ILLITERACY 
 
 We are careless enough in our use of words, 
 Heaven knows, but the efforts of a recent writer 
 to set us right only make us hug our sins the 
 tighter. He is a sarcastic person who is alter- 
 nately amused and dismayed by the slips of other 
 people. Here are some of the things that he 
 considers slips. Speaking of someone who used 
 a wrong word on a certain occasion, he says: 
 "The incident occurred in a 'suburbs' of a large 
 Pennsylvania city, but the people out there are 
 calling it a 'suburb' yet." Again, on running 
 across the expression "a case of horse sense" in a 
 newspaper, he said he tried "to think of some 
 instance where horse sense had ever been put up 
 in a crate, box or other package that is usually 
 understood to be a 'case.' " Another newspaper 
 said something about the responsibility of editors 
 in the conduct of their journals. Their conduct 
 would be improved, he thought, if the editors 
 "were more cautious in conduct-ing them." "The 
 205 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 government of the tongue" was another expres- 
 sion that puzzled him, but after reading down 
 the page he found that the author referred to 
 the *^ govern-ing^' of the tongue. In conclusion, 
 he says he has a notebook full of similar in- 
 stances. 
 
 There is no need of mentioning the man's 
 name. He bore traces of respectability, and may 
 have been already punished enough by a return- 
 ing sense of shame. But could anything be 
 worse? "Suburb" has been in good standing for 
 hundreds of years before and since Milton wrote 
 of "the suburb of their straw-built citadel." The 
 pedant cannot forget his Latin primer and that 
 "s" in "^^r&s." The race has chosen to forget. 
 The race is always doing things to shock the 
 pedant. As to "conduct" and "case," you would 
 not suppose the long-established ambiguities of 
 those two words could come as a surprise to any 
 one. But here is an instance of it, and it finds its 
 way into print. Suddenly it dawns on this man 
 that "conduct" sometimes means something be- 
 sides behavior, and that "case" does not always 
 206 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 refer to a packing box. He is ready at any time 
 to crush a lawyer who speaks of his "conduct of 
 a case" with a satirical inquiry as to whether he 
 has in mind the demeanor of twenty-four bottles 
 of beer. And why not "government of the 
 tongue" as well as "government of colonial de- 
 pendencies," or anything else? It would be ab- 
 surd to say anything about this foolish matter if 
 it did not represent the attitude of a rather for- 
 midable class of persons. The fine flagrancy of 
 this particular instance is, to be sure, somewhat 
 exceptional in print, unless it be among the let- 
 ters to the editor. But it is not at all unusual 
 in conversation. In fact, nothing speaks so well 
 for the kindly forbearance of the race as the 
 number of these people and the large proportion 
 of them that die natural deaths. 
 
 If in talking with a man like this you said 
 something about a "standpoint," he would ask 
 you if you meant a "point of view." If you 
 asked, "Is to-morrow Tuesday?" he would say, 
 "To-morrow will he Tuesday." Some members 
 of his family would probably pronounce "pretty" 
 207 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 to rhyme with "petty." All would no doubt take 
 infinite pains to make "tyoors" of all their 
 "tures," and if any of them were colloquial 
 enough to say, "Don't you know," the "t" in 
 "don't" would be spat out so earnestly that you 
 would dodge. But "don't" and "can't" are con- 
 cessions to the lax manners of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race. "Do not you" is the thing for true refine- 
 ment. It is a very gold toothpick of a phrase, a 
 sort of literary pocket comb. 
 
 The incorrect pedantries of conversation 
 would fill many volumes. They are not the least 
 among the numerous annoyances of education. 
 For the verbal prig is something of a tyrant, 
 and the triple-plate armor of his self-compla- 
 cency makes him assassin-proof. There is no con- 
 vincing him that his is a special case of illiteracy, 
 all the worse for being so deliberately wrought 
 out. His quarrel is with the luxuriance of the 
 language. He hates the liberality of our en- 
 dowment. The activities of words must be cur- 
 tailed. They must be disembowelled, salted, 
 skinned and dried. And if we unbend a little in 
 208 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 pronunciation or elide our words, as did the 
 Greeks, or fall in with the sanctioned careless- 
 ness of the leaders of our race, he is for keeping 
 us in after school. He is a cold-blooded disin- 
 heritor of words, an apostle of rigidity and a 
 traitor to the best traditions a people has. The 
 language needs no beadle — not even on the Bow- 
 ery. Order is not maintained by these trivial re- 
 straints. They incite, rather, to open rebellion 
 aU along the line. 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 III 
 
 THE HAND OF PROVIDENCE 
 
 Here is a thoughtful and apparently pious 
 writer who is disturbed by what he calls the 
 naturalistic method of interpreting history, 
 meaning by this the reference of great historical 
 movements to natural causes. It seems to him 
 that Providence is not receiving his fair share of 
 credit for what has come to pass. "Has the bark 
 of human civilization sailed so swiftly and pros- 
 perously without a steersman?" he asks. He in- 
 stances the Greeks. Suppose they had been 
 placed in Scandinavia or Iceland, "would not 
 their genius have been wholly wasted.?" and 
 Rome — placed "just in the precise situation 
 where it had the greatest scope for the exercise 
 of its gifts." Then the timeliness of certain men 
 and things. Philip and Alexander "appeared 
 precisely at the fitting moment in Greek and 
 Macedonian history" ; Rome's power developed at 
 exactly the right time, late enough to avoid in- 
 terfering with the original culture of Greece, 
 210 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 early enough to be on hand for the administra- 
 tion of the east; the fall of the eastern empire 
 "was timed with the nicety of clockwork, to take 
 place at the very hour when it could unfailingly 
 give rise" to certain momentous consequences ; 
 and race after race were constantly appearing 
 on the stage at the "precise period when they 
 were required." There is much more to the same 
 effect. 
 
 What can a man be thinking of to tax his- 
 torians or anybody else with remissness in this 
 respect ? As if we lacked for human explanation 
 of the plans of Providence ! It is about the most 
 copious thing in the language. Our school books 
 on history are full of it, and as to the hand of 
 Providence in current politics, there is hardly an 
 orator who is not versed in this colossal palmis- 
 try. If Mr. Bryan had been elected, would there 
 not have been hundreds to show the hand of 
 Providence running through all creation with a 
 Populistic plan ? If the better class of historians 
 to-day say less about the hand of Providence 
 than their predecessors it is a thing to be thank- 
 211 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 ful for. It argues a becoming modesty and a 
 kindlier view of the intelligence of their readers. 
 The method followed by the writer I have quoted 
 is common enough. Great Britain and Russia, 
 he says, are to be the main channels through 
 which the civilization of Europe is to be spread 
 over most of the world. This was in the plan, 
 and if anything in the past had turned out 
 differently it would have spoilt the whole scheme. 
 Under other conditions England could never 
 have become the powerful state she is. He adds : 
 
 "Familiar facts are always liable to be taken 
 as matters of course, and the fact that England 
 is an island is one of these. But if we consider 
 the physical causes which have made the island, 
 we shall perceive how easily everything might 
 have been other than it is. The narrow strait 
 that separates France and England is geologi- 
 cally of recent origin, and it is not, so to speak, 
 a permanent feature. . . . The elevation of the 
 land is very moderate and ... a slight further 
 depression would leave only a few scattered 
 mountain islets of these kingdoms. Again the 
 situation was exactly the right one. Farther 
 south, off the coast of Spain or north or west in 
 the Atlantic, the history must have been wholly 
 different." 
 
 212 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 There is no stopping these people when the 
 wondering fit is on them. Providence, to their 
 minds, is always having hairbreadth escapes. 
 Suppose Remus had killed Romulus. Remus, be- 
 ing a difFerent sort of man, might not have 
 founded the city. There would have been no 
 Roman empire, and the face of history would 
 have been changed. The thing is endless. The 
 best way is not to begin, or if there must be 
 speculation about what would have changed the 
 face of history, to do it all up at once by suppos- 
 ing there were no human race at all. Why try 
 and catalogue all the things that did not happen? 
 Surely Providence was no more thoughtful when 
 he made Great Britain of just the right size and 
 shape than when he made men right side up. 
 Yet writers who would never think of marvelling 
 at the beneficent design that kept us from going 
 through hfe head downwards feel the deepest 
 emotion because the Angles and Saxons did not 
 take ship for Patagonia, and the Greeks were 
 not exposed to a set of influences that would have 
 turned them out Dutchmen. Some writers go 
 2W 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 almost as deep in this philosophy as their Mother 
 Goose prototype — "if the moon were made of 
 green cheese, and the sea were made of ink." It 
 is almost an automatic philosophy and the least 
 shove makes its wheels go round. For what is it 
 but the proclamation of the present as the 
 product of the past and the damnation of a lot 
 of might-have-beens that you invent yourself? 
 
 Besides, it is bad manners to be constantly 
 praising Providence because he knew what he 
 was about. Some things should be taken for 
 granted. It was meant that man should walk, 
 but he need not be forever thanking Heaven for 
 putting legs on him, though these legs are ad- 
 justed "with the nicety of clockwork" and are 
 as neat an adaptation of means to end as the 
 appearance of Julius Cffisar just in the nick of 
 time and the planting of the Phoenicians by the 
 seashore. There is no sense in selecting just one 
 set of things to compliment. Nor does the plan 
 need any apologists. And it is a merciful thing 
 that we know less than they do about the plot, 
 since we are bound to read the story. The moon 
 214 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 was still there, though the donkey drank it up in 
 the puddle. And it is the same way with the 
 mystery when it has been all cleared up or cut 
 and dried by the people who know about Provi- 
 dence. 
 
 215 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 IV 
 
 NOTHING NEW 
 
 A YOUNG literary student, rushing bravely along 
 a well-worn path, has referred in a learned essay 
 to the great antiquity of new ideas, quoting, of 
 course, the proverb about the lack of novelty 
 under the sun and citing, like all the rest, his 
 modern instances. What did Darwin do but un- 
 fold the thought of the ancient Heraclitus, and 
 what would John Stuart Mill have been without 
 Hippias of Keos? Nietzsche's philosophy came 
 straight from oriental antiquity via Aristotle 
 and Carlyle, and Poe's "Raven" was written 
 twenty centuries ago by Kia Yi, the Chinaman, 
 and Ruskin spoke up for the manual arts because 
 St. Paul was a tentmaker. Every respectable 
 thought, like every valuable trotting horse, has 
 its pedigree. And yet readers still persist in 
 looking for novelty and writers are apparently 
 able to supply it. Why is this? asked the stu- 
 dious writer, the veins on his young brow standing 
 out like whipcords. It is to be explained, he 
 216 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 thinks, by the fact that the ideas, though old, are 
 often forgotten. This quest for originality, he 
 concludes, is not a bad thing, and the French 
 critic who called it the "worst disease of our 
 time" was wrong. 
 
 Now the ins and outs of this matter do not con- 
 cern us every-day people at all. It is essentially 
 the collegiate view of literature, and springs from 
 the necessity of saying to young men the sort 
 of things that they could pass an examination in. 
 Passing an examination in the pedigree of the 
 central thoughts of great authors seems a hid- 
 eous thing to most of us alumni. To be learned 
 in literature is such a different thing from liking 
 it. It is characteristic of these discussions to 
 leave out the one thing we care about ; that is, 
 the distinctive, personal marks by which we can 
 tell men apart. "A writer must know how to 
 write. This is in a sense the very first condition 
 of success. But so far as the present discussion 
 is concerned, this phase of the question must be 
 left entirely aside," etc. And, mercy on us, what 
 remains? Why, a grouping of great central 
 ^17 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 ideas, whereby Darwin looks like the twin brother 
 of Heraclitus and Kia Yi and Poe are indistin- 
 guishable, and St. Paul is mixed up with Ruskin, 
 and Plato leads Marie Corelli by the hand. For 
 literary purposes it is better to classify men by 
 their noses than by their great central ideas. 
 
 Apply this test of novelty to Tolstoi's message 
 to the American people during the war with 
 Spain. The thoughts on the nationalization of 
 land are Henry George's ; the doctrine that prop- 
 erty is robbery is Proudhon's ; the plea for the 
 socialization of the means of production is an 
 echo of commonplace socialist manifestoes; and 
 every one of these notions is not only familiar 
 but flattened out and dog-eared by thousands of 
 ilHterate thumbs. Then there is his reference 
 to the paganization of Christianity, which is 
 fully described in the books, and his appeal to 
 the primitive and uncorrupted Christianity, 
 which is the foundation stone of about every new 
 sect that is started and the substance of more 
 sermons than you could count. Not much would 
 be left of the originality of Tolstoi after a text 
 S18 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 book of the drier criticism had duly classified 
 his thoughts. Yet somehow he is new enough to 
 startle and true enough to make you forget his 
 errors and impossibilities and the genealogy of 
 his general notion is the last thing you care 
 about. This is for the scholars of the drier crit- 
 icism, who of all the chapters of inspiration like 
 best the first of Matthew: "And Zorobabel be- 
 gat Abiud; and Abiud begat Eliakim; and 
 Eliakim begat Azor ; and Azor begat Sadoc." 
 
 The blessed thing about this world is that, 
 however old the general notions may be, some of 
 the people in it are new, and they have a way of 
 saying and doing things the like of which you 
 would swear you never saw before. And you 
 never did. For no formula ever yet told the 
 whole story, and no man ever yet felt and spoke 
 the truth without creating it, and no work of art 
 that was worth anything could ever help being 
 novel. What a disagreeable job it must be, this 
 classifying of books according to a principle by 
 which you cannot even tell whether they are real 
 books or not. How much of Zola can be found 
 219 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 in Zoroaster? — compare the good and evil of 
 Zola's trilogy with Ahriman and Ormuzd. It is 
 a terrible industry. Why not own up that 
 books, like people, do not make friends in this 
 way? Powerfully disagreeable people may have 
 your own general notion, and if a man and his 
 wife stood on precisely the same platform of 
 principle they would be a most wonderful and un- 
 comfortable pair. By the time literature is made 
 ready for the classroom, with all its elements ex- 
 plained, what is left of it? The lecturer has 
 descended upon his subject like the tortoise that 
 the eagle dropped on iEschylus's bald head. 
 
 220 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 LITERARY ANALYSIS 
 
 An author, like a bicycle, ought not to be taken 
 to pieces by people that do not understand the 
 business. In a recent paper an American novel- 
 ist is analyzed by a French critic, and when the 
 thing is done all the king's horses and all the 
 king's men couldn't put that novelist together 
 again. His most admiring friends would not 
 recognize these colossal sections as fragments of 
 his being. There is a good deal of this kind of 
 analysis going on in the literary journals, and it 
 is sometimes as irritating as certain jointed fish- 
 ing rods in wet weather. It is a common thing to 
 take some minor literary man and divide him up 
 as neatly as if he were a stick of chewing gum 
 already half cut through with grooves and then 
 give his qualities such big names that when re- 
 combined they would build Julius Caesar. There 
 is a lavishness of language at these times that 
 leaves nothing over against the day when the 
 critic may run across a man of real significance. 
 221 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 Besides "virile fascination," the critic finds in 
 this harmless novelist philosophies and trends of 
 thought and social dogmas and Zeitgeists beyond 
 all count or measure. 
 
 Now, the truth is the philosophy of this au- 
 thor, or of any other literary man of equal rank, 
 matters very little, and if we had a label and a 
 pigeon-hole for every section of his intellect we 
 should be none the richer. The great point is 
 how well he knows his art. One reason why lit- 
 erary criticism is so unfruitful in this day is that 
 it insists on grubbing among these irrelevant 
 matters. It does not say of a man. Granting his 
 premises, is the thing well done.'' but What are 
 his premises? For what great principles does 
 he stand .f' I have known a poem to be con- 
 demned because its political economy was wrong, 
 and a novel to be placed on a pinnacle because its 
 author was a Populist at heart. What has this 
 to do with literary analysis? Chemical analysis 
 would be as much in place. This is the spirit 
 that makes such dreary schoolmen of our critics. 
 They ransack an author for his moral purpose. 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 They rattle off his qualities as a palmist tells 
 jour character. They weigh his work by politi- 
 cal science, psychology and social economics. 
 They could grade each part of him on the scale 
 of ten like a schoolboy's recitation. And they 
 think this scientific thumbing is literary analysis. 
 The man's power to please, his skill in that cu- 
 rious magic we call art, the only thing that mat- 
 ters, is left out. 
 
 There was poor old Ruskin. Suppose we 
 judged him by this standard, what would be left 
 of him? No man could count the blunders that 
 he made. He built on false premises, reasoned 
 like a child, painted as if he were a political 
 economist, taught political economy as if he were 
 a painter. Yet on that cracked and battered in- 
 strument of his he somehow managed to play a 
 tune that will sing in men's ears so long as there 
 is leisure left for music. Our Alexandrians know 
 this, too ; but a man has to be dead or shelved for 
 many years before they act on it. For living 
 authors they have a different test. They judge 
 them by their creeds or schools or party plat- 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 forms, by anything except their power to write. 
 They would have us believe that it is a matter of 
 supreme importance what Mr. Kipling thinks of 
 England's imperial mission, what are M. Zola's 
 views of heredity, where Mr. Howells stands on 
 social questions, and whether Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward is sound in economics, and they go on an- 
 alyzing deeper and deeper, like a dog at an 
 empty woodchuck hole. And when it is all said 
 and done we merely learn that in addition to 
 some artistic work that gives us pleasure these 
 writers have produced some text-book matter of 
 an indifferent sort. Some superfluous didactic 
 stuff that we do not much care for has been 
 thrown in, and this is what the analyst fishes out 
 as if it were the one precious thing. Perhaps 
 the authors think so, too, but notoriously they 
 love their worst works best. 
 
 A man may be almost crazy and still write 
 well. Some excellent ones have been, in fact, 
 maniacal. He may be the soundest, sanest, best- 
 informed of all his race and fail completely. He 
 may have all the gifts or just this one. Scoun- 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 drels and saints and sages, sometimes fools, have 
 all contributed to literature. It is with the qual- 
 ity which they have in common that literary 
 analysis is alone concerned. And if you would 
 see a writer at his worst take him when his phi- 
 losophy is uppermost. The worst thing that M. 
 Zola ever wrote is Dr. Pascal, which gave a mas- 
 terly summing up of his philosophy. The dark- 
 est days of Mr. Kipling have been those on which 
 purpose got the better of him. One sleeps most 
 soundly when the social philosopher in Mr. How- 
 ells is most wide awake. Yet all this is the 
 special field of current literary analysis. The 
 chief harm it does is in misleading the subject of 
 the analysis. The author is encouraged to chase 
 strange gods. As for the rest of us, if there 
 were nothing more in literature than these men 
 dream of, we should be reading text-books if we 
 read at all. 
 
 2^5 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 VI 
 
 OUTDOOR PEDANTRY 
 
 Nature-lovers have found their way into print 
 with rather unusual frequency of late and every 
 little while a reviewer has had to dispose of a 
 dozen volumes or so of their publications all at 
 once. The success of this kind of writing is a 
 healthy sign and ought to be a comfort to the 
 prophets of decay as indicating that there are a 
 few sound spots left in us. A people cannot be 
 far removed from innocence when books of this 
 sort are widely read and when even the daily 
 newspapers drop wars and politics, as they some- 
 times do, for a wholly irrelevant editorial rhap- 
 sody on cock-robin or autumn leaves. The Lon- 
 don papers, especially, are given to these rustic 
 interludes. Some time ago one of our magazines 
 gathered up the names of our outdoor writers 
 and published an article on them. It is a good 
 showing so far as numbers are concerned. There 
 are more "rambles" and "bird-notes" than you 
 would ever have supposed, and, if reviewers are 
 226 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 to be believed, they are all written in the most 
 charming style. But reviewers are not to be 
 believed. No one ought to take time for many of 
 these books if there are passages of Thoreau 
 which he has not yet learned by heart. These 
 writers are serviceable only when they give infor- 
 mation. As interpreters they are of no use. For 
 this business we must still rely on the masters, 
 and how few of them there are! The real gift 
 was imparted to a handful so that we should not 
 be tied to our indoor libraries. Providence or- 
 dained that most of their works should fit into a 
 knapsack. 
 
 A clergyman goes a-fishing and comes home 
 well browned and ten pounds fatter. So he sits 
 down and writes a book full of trite compliments 
 to nature interspersed with a good deal of self- 
 congratulation. He lays claim to the most re- 
 fined and exquisite emotion you ever heard of — 
 not one particle of which he succeeds in passing 
 along. He says he found "sermons in stones, 
 books in the running brooks" (it is a pity Shake- 
 speare ever wrote the thing), but you get no ink- 
 %%1 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 ling of what they were. And because it is a good 
 sort of thing for a clergyman to do and shows 
 a fine appetite for wholesome fare the critics are 
 absurdly easy on him. "Such a subtle sym- 
 pathy with nature in her varying moods," they 
 say. How do they know he has it? Just because 
 he swears he has. So they run him in with a 
 dozen others whom they are praising and tell us 
 we must not "neglect the lessons that are to be 
 gained from so charming an assortment of books 
 as have been provided for summer instruction and 
 entertainment." There is no question of the 
 man's sincerity or of the worth of what he writes 
 about, but unfortunately these two are not the 
 only elements of good writing. Here is a beau- 
 tiful object, and there a genuine admirer. Yet 
 the net result of bringing them together may be 
 merely twaddle so far as a third person is con- 
 cerned. The critics forget this. All the world 
 loves a lover, but it usually runs away from him 
 when he talks. And so it is with some of the 
 people who make such an ado about nestling in 
 nature's bosom. 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 It is a rare man who can be agreeably articu- 
 late in these matters. They are hardly more com- 
 municable in speech than music is. Yet there 
 are many who will bully you for not making the 
 attempt or for not being deeply interested in the 
 attempts of others. Some of these books are full 
 of a sort of outdoor snobbishness, an air of hav- 
 ing an especially fine make of soul and being 
 proud of it. The writer will pity people who 
 do not penetrate this or that of nature's secrets 
 or participate in certain intimate joys. As if a 
 few banalities about a rhododendron were an evi- 
 dence of spiritual good form ! And he will tell 
 you what these things do for him — how they 
 strengthen him and uplift him and keep his 
 heart pure and his mind clear. "I am a part of 
 nature and nature is a part of me. Tear us 
 apart, and nature is robbed and I am ruined." 
 It may be true, but there should be some other 
 evidence than his word for it. It is indelicate to 
 be forever harping on nature's partiality for 
 you. To the open-air pharisee, half the fun of 
 it is in the feeling that there are so few like him. 
 229 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 You cannot fancy his enjoying a thing quietly 
 and for itself, but taking notes on each emotion 
 in order to write it up afterward ostentatiously. 
 How much of it is delight in objective nature and 
 how much is satisfaction with the trim little in- 
 tellectual outfit he surveys her with? Yet if 
 there is one lesson she is supposed to din into 
 every one who comes close enough it is humility. 
 In England there are signs that in certain 
 highly respectable magazines and newspapers 
 Nature is even worse treated than with us. Ap- 
 parently they have a staff correspondent whom 
 they never let indoors — a literary bird-dog for 
 whom the house is no place. If they catch him 
 in the ofBce they shoo him out with the broom to 
 flush some small game for the next number. I 
 gather from one of them that "the winter wind, 
 unlike the entrancing night breezes of summer, 
 is one of the few sounds that please even more 
 when listened to indoors than out. ... It 
 sighs in the chimney, it moans round the walls ; 
 it whistles sometimes, at others it roars." From 
 another I have learned that as a result of the bad 
 230 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 weather of the week before the birds were "thor- 
 oughly worn out and uncomfortable," and "went 
 to bed an hour before their time," though some 
 of the partridges may have sat up somewhat 
 longer. Some say it is the Englishman's love of 
 nature, and would have you think it spontaneous. 
 It is nothing of the sort. It is a clear case of 
 compulsion. The wretches hate what they write 
 of in nine cases out of ten. You can tell that 
 from their style, and it is a pity they should be 
 so tormented. Why try and squeeze a great, 
 wild, forest joy out of a little cockney heart.? 
 
 How the sense of obligation in this matter has 
 increased. You could follow Thackeray's fancy 
 in a cab. Dickens, though the sense of locality 
 was as strong in him as in a cat, used nature only 
 to emphasize pathos or punctuate joy. To Bul- 
 wer all outdoors was only stage carpentry and 
 paint. Nowadays the least essay or short story 
 must be trimmed with conventionalized scraps of 
 nature, like a woman's hat. Once if a writer did 
 not wish to do it he did not have to try ; but there 
 is no getting out of it in these days, and the 
 231 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 rarest gift of the generations is aped by every 
 one who writes. We, too, have our hypocrites 
 who go and live among the pine trees in order 
 that they may afterward lie about the thoughts 
 they had there — Fourteenth Street imaginations 
 struggling with the great north woods. But 
 venal Yankees though we are, we have not yet 
 established outdoor clerkships like these British 
 magazines. To be sure, in the pages of most of 
 our novelists the sunrise is a memory of insomnia, 
 and Pan wears a high hat, but the feeling for 
 nature is not so dead in us that we turn her over 
 to regular correspondents for the daily press. 
 As countrymen of Thoreau, it will be some time 
 before we are ready for those weekly letters about 
 the "wren so full of jollity and the redbreast so 
 companionable to man." Occasionally, per- 
 haps ; once a month if we go on sinking ; but not 
 once a week, unless we have a crop of geniuses. 
 For you might as well require a weekly epic 
 or a weekly tragedy in blank verse. There is no 
 middle class in this kind of writing, and no pos- 
 sibility of making over the unfit. Only queer 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 effects come from the attempt, such as those of 
 a serious young romancer of Indiana who de- 
 scribed a yellow sunset in terms of custard pie. 
 Better an equal quantity of zoology or botany 
 with all the technical terms than this constrained 
 recourse to nature with poetical intent. The 
 man of whom it was written: 
 
 Primroses on the river's brim. 
 Dicotyledons were to him, 
 And they were nothing more, 
 
 was at least honest, and might have done better 
 at natural description than any literary man of 
 merely secondary inspiration. The writers above 
 quoted should, if they behave themselves, be al- 
 lowed indoors, for that is evidently where their 
 heart is, and not in the highlands a-chasing the 
 deer. 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 VII 
 
 A POPULARIZER 
 
 The Life and Letters of Huxley show clearly the 
 worry and grief that he caused his friends by 
 pausing so often in the search for truth to spread 
 the knowledge of it. Stick to pure science, dig 
 deeper, let the world alone, and, above all, keep 
 out of rows — ^that was the spirit of most of their 
 advice to him. But having rather more than his 
 share of human nature, and having also a mind 
 which he justly described as "constructed on the 
 high-pressure tubular-boiler principle," he kept 
 bobbing up on the surface of the earth to set 
 matters straight there. By thus dividing his 
 time he may have spoiled his chance as a special- 
 ist, whose post mortem nimbus, I understand, is 
 not apt to last unless the man is sunk in the 
 monograph. They say he will be forgotten be- 
 cause he tried to do two things for truth — first 
 find it and then get it accepted. Had he tried 
 only one thing we might remember him, as long, 
 say, as Charles the Fat or Didius Julianus. But 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 whatever trick time may play on him — and we 
 know very well that some of the silliest names live 
 the longest — it does not seem now as if his 
 friends need have worried so. For the present 
 at least we believe he did as much for the world 
 as the best of them. 
 
 In a specialist's heaven he may not have a high 
 seat. Some of the brief biological reviews of the 
 century barely noticed him, and one of them ig- 
 nores altogether the work with which his name is 
 identified. But measuring greatness by depth 
 of research is not wholly satisfactory, since there 
 are other ways of serving the truth than by dig- 
 ging for it. If a man can popularize without 
 cheapening, if he can find for the law and the 
 cause precisely the words for them, it is hard to 
 see why he should be shut out from the best so- 
 ciety in our graveyards. And that was where 
 Huxley's talent lay — not in cutting the truth to 
 fit current demands nor in diluting it, but in 
 stripping it for action that it might the sooner 
 prevail. He was for hurrying things up, and he 
 did hurry them up, perhaps, by a generation. An 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 impatient propounder is sometimes as good for 
 the health of the world as a patient investiga- 
 tor. He believed that the better the cause the 
 better should be the expression of it, so he pegged 
 away till he found the words that would carry it 
 farthest. Thus he became a popularizer, but in 
 a different sense from the type of man who makes 
 little journeys into science in order to peddle 
 what he finds there, different even from the late 
 Max Miiller, if we may trust the critics, since 
 that worthy man seems sometimes to have con- 
 founded truth with confectionery. But the 
 specialists are very severe, and likely as not they 
 will dock a man's glory for the time he lost in 
 fighting their battles for them. It seems a pity 
 in Huxley's case. It was such a splendid and 
 honorable truancy. He may have served 
 science as well by living among men as if he 
 had spent his whole life among the Labyrintho- 
 donts. 
 
 Most popularizers being of the other sort, the 
 whole breed bears a bad name among specialists, 
 as if the knowledge of things must be forever 
 236 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 divorced from the ability to say them. Mr. Mor- 
 ley was censured not long ago for writing a 
 readable work on history. It was true and well 
 done, said his critic, but it wasted time that should 
 have been spent in searching for facts. Just how 
 much of the man must be filed away in making 
 the specialist.? Huxley or Bagehot, or even 
 Macaulay, is a better example for a democratic 
 age than Dr. Casaubon. For while the learned 
 are gathering their private hoards, a lot of de- 
 based coin is circulating. Suppose economic 
 science to-day should find its Huxley. He would 
 carry it as far as the doctrines of Henry George 
 or the Marxists. As much has been done in the 
 last fifty years as in the fifty before them, but 
 Smith and Ricardo and Bastiat and Mill knew 
 how to state it. We have as many good reser- 
 voirs of thought, but less irrigation. A man may 
 be a Bryanite with ridiculous impunity ; yet evo- 
 lution should be no easier to teach than common 
 sense about the currency. For that reason the 
 artistic clubbing that Huxley gave the enemy 
 may place him as high in the world's esteem 
 237 
 
ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 
 
 as if he had stayed in his laboratory, there 
 being a need of the very part he accused himself 
 of playing, that "of something between maid-of- 
 all-work and gladiator-general for Science." 
 
PART VII 
 
 MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 I 
 
 THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT 
 
 The family will soon be coming back, and there 
 is about an even chance that the head of it will 
 announce her firm determination never to go to 
 that place again. Trying new places is a matter 
 of hazard save for the rich, whose choice is un- 
 restricted, and the fatuous, who are happy any- 
 where. The rest are likely to blunder in and out 
 of summer places, engaging prison cells in ad- 
 vance and facing dreadful odds in the matter of 
 food. There is naturally a large proportion of 
 failures. The unlucky ones may, as the seasons 
 roll past, exchange discomforts at the seaside for 
 2Sd 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 pain among the hills, but while there are degrees 
 of failure, they seldom report anything like a 
 positive success. Wounds heal in the winter and 
 hope springs up again in May, showing itself 
 first in a conviction that there "must be nice 
 places if you only knew," and later in a willing- 
 ness to believe lies. And the lies gather thick 
 and fast, coming not only from their natural 
 sources, but from people with whom your rela- 
 tions had been of the kindest and from friends 
 whom you had always supposed stanch and true. 
 Their worst treachery is in that matter of the 
 food. The lies about the people do not matter 
 so much, because as time goes on one learns the 
 ratio of "charming people" to the rest of the 
 population. Buoyant natures find nests of them 
 wherever they go, but experience has chastened 
 most of us into a reasoned calculation of chances 
 and we know how seldom "charming people" are 
 found in coveys, the keenest sportsman being 
 lucky if he can flush two of them in a year. But 
 the hope of good food constantly renews itself. 
 The mind is eager to believe, and the beginning 
 240 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 of each season finds us as trustful as a little child. 
 Not a great variety, says the betrayer, but on the 
 whole an excellent table; good, plain, sensible, 
 simple, hearty, wholesome, nourishing things, 
 and plenty of them, at which the castigated pulse 
 gives the same old foolish wallop every year. 
 Good meats and vegetables, fresh eggs and fault- 
 less butter, the full menu of a fool's paradise, 
 and under the spur of an excited imagination the 
 contract is signed. Shall we never learn the 
 worthlessness of other people's views of food? 
 There is no authoritative body of comment on 
 food. Like all the deeper personal problems of 
 life, you must face it alone. A chance acquaint- 
 ance is no more fitted to decide for you a ques- 
 tion of butter than to pick you out a wife. It is 
 not a matter of absolute merit, but an intimate 
 and personal affair, and the butter which in- 
 vites him daily for three months may seem to 
 you to breathe a curse. It no more supplies a 
 universal criterion than mother's love, the worst 
 case of butter ever known being no doubt some- 
 body's darling, as you might say. 
 241 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 Lying on the one hand, and credulity and a 
 total disregard of personal equations on the 
 other, account for many failures in experimental 
 summering. To be sure, there is Nature, and we 
 admit that the life is more than food and the 
 body than raiment, but even a poet would be bet- 
 ter if he had better things inside him — "so might 
 he, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses 
 that would make him less forlorn." And the 
 family must take a different view of Nature from 
 either the poet or the woodsman and place a limit 
 on her compensations. If it did not, it would not 
 live to grow up. Hardships go with a wild, free 
 life, hunting grizzlies and the like of that, but 
 the family are doing nothing of the sort. So it 
 seems illogical that they should fare like moose- 
 hunters in the mountain boarding-house or be 
 treated like old salts in the hotel by the sea. 
 They argue with a show of reason that they 
 ought not to be pelted with all the hardships of 
 the wild, free life when they are not leading it. 
 But landlords often reason differently, holding 
 that where Nature does so much for the family 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 less is required of the bill of fare. These are 
 some of the things that sometimes bring back the 
 family after the summer experiment with stern 
 lines showing beneath the tan. 
 
 US 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 II 
 
 THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR 
 
 Outwardly you may be on friendly terms with 
 the people next door, but, if the truth were 
 known, you do not think much of them. Their 
 ways may be well enough, but they are not your 
 ways. It is not hatred, far less envy ; neither is 
 it contempt exactly. Only you do not under- 
 stand why they live as they do. You account 
 for some things by the differences in social 
 traditions. They were not brought up 
 as you were — not that they are to blame 
 for that, but certain advantages that you 
 had were denied them. Rude noises come from 
 that house next door that you would not expect 
 from people in their station. There is nothing 
 that so reveals the breeding of the inmates as the 
 noises that come from a house. Laughter late 
 at night, when you want to sleep — how coarse it 
 sounds! That is what the strong writer prob- 
 ably means by ribald laughter. Then there is 
 that young woman who sings. What voices the 
 244 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 people next door always have, and what a reper- 
 toire of songs! Why do they never try a new 
 one? There must be new songs from time to 
 time within the means of any one, but you never 
 hear them next door. Years after a song is for- 
 gotten elsewhere it goes on next door. A popular 
 song never dies. The people next door rescue it 
 after it is hounded off the street and warm it into 
 eternal life. Girls begin on it in their teens and 
 worry it away on into womanhood. Even after 
 they are married off they do not get over it, and 
 when they come home to visit you hear it again — 
 "Eyes so balloo and tender," or whatever it may 
 be. Fancy the kind of people that would let a 
 young woman sing "Eyes so balloo and tender" 
 all through life, even if she wanted to. It must 
 injure her mind. 
 
 And so it goes. Everything they do shows 
 just what sort of people they are. Look at the 
 things they hang out in their back yard — and 
 is there ever a day when some of their old traps 
 are not hanging out or standing around there.? 
 If your things looked like that you would at 
 ^45 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 least keep them indoors. It is not that they are 
 so old, though for the matter of that you should 
 think they would be afraid of germs, but they 
 were chosen with such monstrously bad taste in 
 the first place. What in the world do people want 
 to furnish a house with things like that for? 
 They must have cost enough, too, and for that 
 amount of money they could have bought — but 
 what is the use of talking? There are distinc- 
 tions that you never can make people feel. 
 
 That cook of theirs you would not have in 
 your house five minutes. It must surely be un- 
 safe to eat what a person like that would cook. 
 A certain degree of neatness is indispensable, 
 and people who were used to things would insist 
 upon it. That is the trouble with the people 
 next door — ^they are not used to things. It is 
 easy enough to put a stop to certain matters if 
 you take them in hand, such, for instance, as 
 those awful Irish whoops that issue every even- 
 ing from their kitchen windows. But the people 
 next door do not mind — that is the sum of it — 
 they simply do not mind things that would drive 
 246 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 you stark mad. They can sleep through their 
 own hideous noise, eat their own ill-prepared 
 food, put up with anything, just because it is 
 theirs. Content is a good thing and family af- 
 fection is laudable, but in this particular case 
 each goes too far. It annoys you to think of the 
 narrow basis on which it subsists. What can the 
 wife see in the husband or the husband in the 
 wife, or either of them in those young ones ? 
 
 Yesterday a correspondent wrote to a news- 
 paper complaining of the carpet beating that 
 went on next door. Hitherto he had thought 
 those people were gentlefolk. He doubts it now. 
 The people next door are always doing things 
 that enable you to "size them up." You size 
 them up ten or fifteen times a day. The women 
 in your family size them up much of tener. That 
 doubt of next-door gentility is universal. It is 
 no accident that brings that kind of people next 
 door to you. It is the working of a mighty so- 
 cial law. You are charitable in the matter. You 
 admit their virtues — that is, the big ones, which 
 nobody uses more than once a year. They are 
 
 U7 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 respectable people and well-intentioned. But 
 they always lack one indefinable thing which you 
 have, whatever may be your faults. It is very 
 important. The social plane always slants down 
 toward the people next door. One should not be 
 snobbish about it, but the slant is there, neverthe- 
 less, and you cannot help knowing it. If we 
 created a nobility over here the people next door 
 could never get in. If you ever mention these 
 things you do so with the utmost delicacy and 
 you explain over and over again that you do not 
 mean anything against the people. You would 
 not for the world let them know you felt as you 
 do. This is all wasted. This is the land of sub- 
 jective aristocracy. 
 
 248 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 III 
 
 THE CHEERFUL GIVER 
 
 The "economic man," that bloodless hero of 
 scientific fiction, will drop out of sight in a few 
 days, and personal property will be flying about 
 in wild disregard of the ordinary laws of ex- 
 change. Christmas must have been a bad time 
 for the old school of economists. It must have 
 struck them as a sort of saturnalia of benevo- 
 lence, a period of economic anarchy when capital 
 flowed into pendent stockings instead of its most 
 productive channels, and enlightened self-inter- 
 est was not admitted into decent society. It took 
 the starch out of logic and scandalized some very 
 respectable premises. It was an annual reminder 
 of the world's complexity and the difficulty of 
 putting all humanity into a few neat proposi- 
 tions. Most of this particular group of doctrin- 
 aires have since died off*, some of them of a broken 
 heart, it is said. The suspension of the economic 
 law of grab and the suspicion that that cheer- 
 ful philosophy is not always applicable does not 
 249 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 trouble us any more. In fact, in our reaction 
 against it, at this season we think it is a virtue to 
 suspend common sense and to treat givers as if 
 they were above all laws of reason. This is a mis- 
 take. The superb ethical position of the giver 
 may be abused. The adages in regard to him 
 need revision. That one about looking the gift 
 horse in the mouth makes him careless and some- 
 times injurious, and the statement that the Lord 
 loves a cheerful giver needs qualification. Peo- 
 ple will do idiotic things in the cheerf uUest kind 
 of way. 
 
 The gaucheries of givers are very saddening, 
 and say what you will, gratitude is the most 
 practical minded of all the virtues. A few years 
 ago Lord Kitchener gave the queen an iron-gray 
 donkey twelve hands high and with ears a foot 
 long, and the Duchess of Cumberland received 
 from him a like token of regard at the same time, 
 though, as befitted her lower station, her donkey 
 was much smaller than the queen's. Lord Kitche- 
 ner is a blunt, soldierlike person, and nothing of 
 a ladies' man, and the Soudan is a wretched place 
 ^50 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 to shop in. But there would be no excuse even 
 for him if he were in London within range of 
 feminine counsel and should allow his Christmas 
 good will to take the form of sending donkeys 
 to all the women of his acquaintance. Yet that 
 is just the sort of thing some people are always 
 doing, and we are told that it is a sin not to beam 
 on them afterward. Think of their warm hearts ? 
 You can't do it — at least not until your first fine 
 rage is spent. Take the silver-plated ice pitcher 
 abuse for example. It is not very common now, 
 but there was a time when groups of benevolent 
 persons organized behind a man's back and gave 
 him a great gleaming water tank that would 
 yield its contents only to the mighty. Corporate 
 kindness always took the forms of an ice pitcher 
 or a gold-headed cane. No one ever thought of 
 anything else. This was because givers were 
 not taught to think at all. They had only to be 
 cheerful. The recipient did the thinking in 
 these instances — a hard, blighted kind of think- 
 ing about the exchange power of ice pitchers and 
 gold-headed canes in general. 
 251 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 The golden rule is a false guide in giving. 
 Observe the motto about putting yourself in 
 his place, but in applying this don't project all 
 your peculiar whims into people whom they can- 
 not fit. Here is a man with a penchant for taxi- 
 dermy, and his way of doing as he would be done 
 by is to give the stuffed carcass of a great golden 
 eagle with wings outspread to a young couple 
 living in a small way in an uptown flat. Out of 
 regard for this cheerful giver it hangs over the 
 centre table, drawing bugs and scaring strangers 
 till gratitude relaxes its grip on the conscience. 
 Then it goes into the junk room. Givers have 
 things too much their own way and receive too 
 delicate consideration. They are bolstered up 
 by partisan proverbs in a belief that they have 
 no responsibilities and can do no wrong. The 
 harm they often work is none the less for the 
 polite concealment of the victims. They can fill 
 a man's house with abominations and secret 
 misery. There are ironies of benevolence beyond 
 all dictates of courtesy or sentiment. Sentiment 
 must not be allowed to wreck the home life. A 
 252 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 man is not to be blamed for not wishing to live 
 amid burlesque surroundings, and that is what 
 it would amount to if givers persist in treating 
 him as if he were the curator of a museum or 
 lived in the rotunda of a national capitol. In 
 time there may be text books on the art of giving, 
 but in the meanwhile observe the following prov- 
 erbs as amended: 
 
 ( 1 ) The Lord loveth a cheerful and intelligent 
 giver. 
 
 (2) A gift horse may not be looked in the 
 mouth, but don't lose your temper if he is stabled 
 in the attic. 
 
 253 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 IV 
 
 THE SERIOUS WOMAN 
 
 If women are really anxious for equal oppor- 
 tunities with men they should not make such 
 terrifying threats as to what they will do when 
 they get them. At an important meeting of the 
 Woman's Society for the Promotion of Politi- 
 cal Conversation, not long ago, one of 
 the arguments for coeducation was that 
 under present conditions the average girl is 
 apt to see a halo around the head of a young 
 man with a blond moustache, and that if 
 she were associated with him in classroom work 
 the halo would not be there. This is bad 
 strategy, and yet women are always practising 
 it, whether their aim is coeducation or the right 
 to vote or equality of opportunity in the profes- 
 sions. They always talk as if, when they had 
 gained these things, there was going to be a 
 general searching into man, to detect the creature 
 as he really is and then expose him. 
 
 Is this politic ? Is a man likely to stir himself 
 254i 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 in their behalf if by so doing he stands to lose 
 all the safeguards of his self-complacency ? This 
 practice of referring to the emancipation time as 
 a sort of judgment day for the other sex is no 
 way to help it on even in half -won fields like co- 
 education. The blond man's halo is no great 
 matter, of course, because blond men are com- 
 paratively rare, but it is typical of all sorts of 
 little halos that it would be pleasant to keep. It 
 is not easy to keep them, as things are, and when 
 women begin to look at them in that steely way 
 they will be as rare as the tall white hat. 
 
 Cold-blooded remarks like this do more to keep 
 history from opening its woman's page than is 
 commonly supposed. It is a cry of no quarter 
 to a struggling self-esteem, and makes it des- 
 perate. It hurst awfully to lose a halo, and if 
 women mean to abolish them they had better say 
 nothing about it. 
 
 Then there is the woman's club movement. If 
 
 there is any man left who is disposed to take a 
 
 light view of it he should be made to read, as I 
 
 have done, the official organ of the Cause. It will 
 
 255 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 prove to him at once that this movement is the 
 most serious thing on earth. The most striking 
 feature of it is the immense amount of purpose 
 that a woman must have about her when she joins 
 a club. "What is your aim to be in club life 
 this winter?" asks the editor of the official organ. 
 And here are a few of the questions that each 
 member is supposed to ask herself : "What is the 
 club going to be to me this winter?" "Shall we 
 enter the club to seek and perhaps find an 
 office? To dawdle the time away? To work 
 ourselves to death ?" "Or shall we enter our club 
 life once more with the determination to take 
 things calmly and not overwork or overworry in 
 the matter?" It is almost sacramental. Along 
 with intense exaltation of spirit must go perfect 
 self-control. Cool, steady hands are what they 
 need for this grim business — none of your alarm- 
 clock women that buzz for a little and then run 
 down. No man's club ever saw the like of it. 
 Cromwell's Ironsides are the nearest thing to it in 
 history. It is a gigantic but not necessarily a 
 hostile force. "And then let us try to make the 
 ^56 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 average man see the value of the club movement. 
 He will if he does not have to eat too many cheer- 
 less dinners and spend too many lonely evenings 
 in consequence of it." Toss a word to the lonely, 
 red-eyed husband now and then. 
 
 Finally there is that insistent question, What 
 shall we do about woman? Some of us shirk it 
 from sloth, and others dodge it from cowardice, 
 but there is a grim little band of women that 
 neither flag nor flinch. And there is no end to 
 the number of the problems or their complexity. 
 "There is not space," said one of them, "in the 
 course of this present article to make out a com- 
 plete list of the problems which woman will help 
 to solve," but she had such a list in mind, and 
 knew that if she once could publish it, it would 
 greatly enhance the value of this already service- 
 able sex. "Marriage," she said, "is a problem in 
 the solution of which woman must assist," and 
 this was only one among many. "The relatively 
 minor but still most important problems of 
 motherhood are so interwoven with those of 
 fatherhood," she went on, "that the former can- 
 257 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 not be solved without a parallel solution of the 
 latter." Up, nevertheless, and at them, as they 
 come out in the magazines. But for us the prob- 
 lem of problems, the question that bums and 
 baffles, the damnably difficult rebus, the great 
 corrosive conundrum is, Why do they talk like 
 this.? 
 
 What shall we do about woman? Need we do 
 anything just now.? The hardest thing about 
 the woman problem is to realize that it exists. 
 Is there any serious danger that she will not suc- 
 ceed as a sex.? Apart from this slight risk it 
 would seem in most cases to be a mere human- 
 being problem after all. People are so used to 
 this large, loose language that nothing seems to 
 amaze them, and when a woman exclaims, "Come 
 let us solve motherhood and then expose father- 
 hood, clearing up the marriage question en 
 passant, ^^ it is taken as a matter of course. I 
 hold that intrinsically it is supremely queer, and 
 that age cannot wither or custom stale its infinite 
 absurdity. And may the time never come when 
 there will not be a plenty to answer these ques- 
 258 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 tions ofFhand, with the stars all winking above 
 them, and the horizon grinning around them, 
 and underfoot that ancient, ironical planet which 
 loves each new snapshot at its mystery as the 
 best of its little old jokes. 
 
 259 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 MUSIC AT MEALS 
 
 There seems to be an increase in the number of 
 our hotels and restaurants that provide music at 
 meals. Bands are playing where they never 
 played before, and the new places are pretty sure 
 to open with an orchestra. During the past ten 
 years the city's restaurants have prospered ex- 
 ceedingly, but no more than they ought. What- 
 ever may be said of public morals, cooking has 
 certainly advanced, and it has been the ideal form 
 of progress, affecting all ranks ; for not only 
 have the best improved, but, what is more im- 
 portant, hundreds once sunk in savagery now 
 show rudiments of art. Hence it happens that 
 the pilgrim may stop by the wayside at unwonted 
 places at far less risk. The zone of edible steaks 
 has widened with the progress of the suns. But 
 the music — ^that is a more doubtful matter. No 
 one ought to dogmatize about it, but whether 
 the spread of it is for good or evil is a question 
 to be calmly reasoned out. 
 ^60 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 To judge from appearances, the majority of 
 those who eat to music are in no wise embarrassed 
 by this combination of their joys. Soups and 
 sonatas, mutton and nocturnes strike them less 
 as rival candidates for notice than as fellow min- 
 ist rants to wants. And there is warrant for it 
 among the most musical people in the world, 
 many of whom will absorb the most spiritual 
 music and the largest sausage at the same mo- 
 ment and with perfect ease. But the Germans 
 have nothing to teach us in the art of dining, 
 and it is that, not music, that is in question. For 
 men fall obviously into the two groups of 
 the eaters and the diners. The eater can 
 divide his attention with almost anything 
 at dinner. He can read, write, watch a dog- 
 fight through the window, or foot up his ex- 
 pense account for the week. If he had a nose- 
 bag, like a truckman's horses, he would not at 
 meal time lay down his golf clubs or his pen. It 
 is a mere mechanical process like whittHng or 
 folding an umbrella. On the other hand the far 
 smaller class of diners have learned by experience 
 261 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 or tradition that it is an independent art, and 
 though they may not practise it proficiently they 
 recognize its existence and respect its rules. The 
 least epicurean among them is hurt by certain in- 
 congruities. He does not want his favorite poem 
 with his roast. It is no time for a high spiritual 
 appeal. Charles Lamb went so far as to object 
 even to saying grace at a good dinner, holding 
 that it suited only a meagre or precarious meal. 
 If not a poem, why a musical composition.? 
 The more distractingly beautiful it is, the worse 
 it is for the business in hand. It is a ridiculous 
 sort of person that wants much sentiment at 
 meals. Joseph Sedley is the type. All this is 
 on the assumption that the music and the cookery 
 are both good. The man who would serve both 
 masters either closes his ears and eats merely or 
 spills things and half chews, to say nothing of 
 the various accessories of dining which are neg- 
 lected or botched. 
 
 But if the music is bad, which at present is 
 
 generally the case, then there is no defence save 
 
 that old one of giving the public what it wants, 
 
 262 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 and this has nothing to do either with morals or 
 with the principles of art. Things have come 
 to a pretty pass if there is to be no more talking 
 at meals. People do it better then than at any 
 other time, and even if they do not do it well 
 you can stand more from them. It could be ar- 
 ranged easily enough, if the restaurants pro- 
 vided one or two muffled or sound-proof rooms. 
 At present the blasts of the band not only domi- 
 nate every nook and corner, but they have a 
 devilish way of concealing the thing so that you 
 are as likely as not to sit down in its very jaws. 
 Henceforth the intimacies of private conversation 
 must compete with merciless things in rag-time 
 accentuated by a horn, for some restaurants have 
 introduced wind instruments, though as yet there 
 are no drums. These may come in time, along 
 with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery and 
 dulcimer, if nothing is done. 
 
 Not to imply that the combination of music 
 with dining is theoretically impossible, but com- 
 posers have not had that in view. They 
 have applied their genius to love, war, re- 
 263 
 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 
 
 ligion, seafaring and the dance, but as yet 
 there is nothing that can be called distinctively 
 meal music. It comes to us, therefore, re- 
 plete with other associations which are necessa- 
 rily out of place. It is as absurd to eat to a war 
 song as to dance to a requiem mass. Simple, un- 
 obtrusive meal songs are what we need, a little 
 potato cantata, say, or a fugue that will go with 
 the beans. 
 
 264 
 
PART VIII 
 
 THE BUSINESS OF WRIT- 
 ING, AND ITS GLORY 
 
 LITERARY REPUTATIONS 
 
 I ONCE read an article on "Disappearing Au- 
 thors" chiefly because the title caught me, but to 
 my disappointment I found that the writer had 
 nothing to say beyond a mere expression of won- 
 der at the disappearance of certain authors 
 from the popular view. A genuine attempt to 
 find out why certain once popular authors have 
 disappeared would be most interesting, but there 
 is a line of inquiry which is still better worth 
 while. 
 
 Suppose a man of rich literary experience 
 would frankly tell what he knows about the non- 
 ^65 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 disappearance of certain authors who really 
 ought to disappear. How do they keep from 
 disappearing? There's a thing worth knowing. 
 How to make a reputation work for you and 
 pay your coal bills and seat you high in pleasant 
 places where you don't belong ; how to create the 
 illusion of importance and keep it up at the least 
 cost — that is a royal art whose secrets are worth 
 digging for. For some reason we moralize about 
 such cases, and, having caught an author at the 
 trick, we feel it our duty to be indignant or at 
 least contemptuous. We take this duty too se- 
 riously. 
 
 We sneer at a certain type of author because 
 he keeps himself before the public as if he were 
 a soap. But why in the world should he not.f* 
 Why is it so much worse to work directly on a 
 reputation than to work indirectly for it? We 
 have no right to blame people just because they 
 have not an ascetic ideal and are not bound up in 
 their art, with no grosser earthly wish than a 
 faint hope of some day having a handsome tomb. 
 To take a spindling reputation, and by watering 
 266 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 it and spading the roots and killing the bugs on 
 the vines, turn it into a fat garden esculent for 
 the nourishment of yourself and family, is some- 
 thing of a feat. There is no use in affecting to 
 despise it. The man who can do it has a rare 
 skill and a certain hardiness of character that 
 appeal to one's respect. They are not literary 
 qualities, but they are mighty in their way, and 
 the rewards are fairly won. To coddle a young 
 reputation is one of the most tiresome and ex- 
 acting jobs in the whole world. A man with a 
 real fondness for his work will not bother with it. 
 Any one who does bother with it surely earns his 
 pay. Think what it means. 
 
 A literary reputation without much to go 
 upon — and that is the kind I have in mind — is 
 the most rickety, balky, ill-balanced thing im- 
 aginable. It needs incessant care to keep it from 
 running down or falling over or having holes 
 punched in it by the critics. A man must live 
 with every sense on the stretch for opportunities 
 to advance it. No means are too humble or labo- 
 rious or remote. Do you suppose it is pleasant 
 267 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 always to be delivering addresses on birds before 
 distant kindergartners' meetings or travelling 
 through the middle west of a hot June in order 
 to figure on commencement platforms and ad- 
 dress graduating classes on the superiority of 
 high ideals over low ideals? That is a part of 
 the work. So is the reading from your own books 
 and the being interviewed about the influences 
 that made you the man you are, and the com- 
 mittee work, and the secretaryships, and the long 
 talk at the ladies' afternoon club, and the insti- 
 gation of the paragraph, and the praise of 
 kindly reviewers, and the heading ofl^ of critics, 
 and the writing of timely letters to the press, 
 and the admiring of other people's books so that 
 they will admire yours. A man does not do all 
 this for the fun of the thing or for the mere 
 gratification of conceit. It is business — a grim, 
 inexorable business — and precisely the kind that 
 is most irksome to the man of literary tastes. 
 The artist in publicity has no easy time. 
 
 Why, then, begrudge him what he earns .f* 
 There is nothing more unreasonable than the tone 
 268 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 of bitterness with which men with some real gift 
 for their calling refer to the successful persons 
 of this class. As well grow angry at the success 
 of a green grocer. Yet from Virgil to Pope, and 
 from Pope to Byron, there is an unbroken chain 
 of sarcasms about these exasperatingly indus- 
 trious people who have earned good wages and 
 filled unmarked graves. And nowadays it is the 
 commonest thing in the world to hear people say 
 with an aggrieved air, "Look at So-and-so. 
 There is absolutely nothing in him. Yet 
 see how he keeps himself before the public, and 
 see how he gets on." As if the fact that there 
 isn't anything in him didn't make it all the more 
 wonderful and interesting that he should get on. 
 The acrimonious comments upon the methods of 
 Miss Marie Corelli and Mr. Hall Caine and who- 
 ever may be their analogues for the moment over 
 here are absurdly out of place. People like that 
 are not toiling for literary ends, and they do not 
 have the pleasure of their craft. To them the 
 dull grind of literary work is never alleviated by 
 the consciousness that the work is good. As a 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 compensation they should be allowed to possess 
 in peace the objects that they seek by such as- 
 siduous and irksome methods. The man who likes 
 to write has no quarrel with them. On the other 
 hand, the curious art that these people have mas- 
 tered is worthy of his dispassionate study. 
 
 270 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 II 
 
 THE PRAISE OF MINOR AUTHORS 
 
 The queerest kind of writing we have nowadays 
 is that of the men who burst out every httle while 
 and say sweet things about every living Amer- 
 ican writer they can think of. I have read an 
 account in a magazine of an imaginary journey 
 from Indiana to the gulf, in which the writer 
 pays a compliment to every local colorist on 
 either side of the railway. "I kiss my hand to 
 the whole genial and lovable lot," he says, as he 
 takes leave of some district where the tracks of 
 minor writers are particularly fresh and thick. 
 And here is J. L. Jones's land, and there shines 
 R. B. Smithson's country, and yonder loom the 
 mountains sacred to J. Cox, Jr., and this valley 
 is where W. T. Smiles "blows his flute-tunes." 
 Beyond the sky-line is the home of a magazine, 
 while far to the southward the young author of 
 certain wondrous stories "lives quietly unspoilt 
 by sudden and well-deserved fortune." And 
 "dear Uncle Remus" peeps at him from Atlanta, 
 271 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 and S. M. Pike warbles at him from Tuskaloosa, 
 and here is a nest of "low-country geniuses," and 
 there is where he met a "charming poet" years 
 ago, then "a bright-eyed boy full of dreams and 
 rhymes." This sort of thing happens, as I said 
 before, every little while. No matter how minute 
 the bard or how imponderable the novelist, his 
 greatness is found out. 
 
 Some say it is a kind of bribery, a lie for a 
 lie and a gush for a gush. This theory, like that 
 of most motive-diggers, goes too deep. It is 
 oftener a mere outburst of miscellaneous affec- 
 tion, the writer actually having a heart in which 
 everybody is made welcome like the lobby of an 
 American hotel. And the chances are that he 
 would tell you that he is encouraging literature, 
 as if literary appreciation consisted in swallow- 
 ing everything whole. Of course there is noth- 
 ing bad about it, but the American reader is apt 
 to feel as he does when he sees Frenchmen kiss 
 each other. And it is not good for any class of 
 men to have too much of it, even when they like 
 it, least of all writers, who become idiotic under 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 flattery sooner than any other set of people in 
 the world. Probably they do not care so much 
 about it as is generally supposed, for one does 
 not value even a dog if he wags his tail for every- 
 body, and it is the same way with a critic. But 
 it is not a safe practice in the present state of the 
 arts. We see the effects of it in the number of 
 American writers who reach a certain level of 
 attainment and then stop. Why should they go 
 on when there are hundreds telling them that they 
 have reached the top ? Should not a writer take 
 it easy when he is already "superb" ? There is a 
 long stretch in a writer's career where the mo- 
 mentum of his past successes will carry him 
 along. His muse is coasting, as you might say. 
 That is the time when the critic should do any- 
 thing to wake him up — throw stones at him and 
 make him pedal. It looks unfeeling, but it is 
 really for his good. There are so many ways of 
 capitalizing a reputation that the temptation to 
 knock off work is almost irresistible. When a 
 man reaches the point at which he can live hand- 
 somely by reading from his poems or signing 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 advertisements for soap, gentle treatment will not 
 suffice. The old-fashioned rawhide of Macaulay 
 or Jeffreys may be the only thing that can save 
 him from himself. Mistaken softness, like that 
 of the writer quoted, is bad for us and for them. 
 Sixty-five living American novelists all destined 
 for posterity, said a critic not long ago; hardly 
 a state in the Union without a superb poet, said 
 another; every corner of the country provided 
 with a gifted local colorist, said a third. And 
 each was a respectable, middle-aged person with 
 private preference in the matter of friends, wives, 
 tobacco and a host of other things. It is a 
 strange habit of mind. 
 
 There must be a point beyond which the praise 
 of an author cannot go without making him 
 doubt the truth of it or the worth of it. In 
 defiance of many great authorities on human 
 nature I hold that most men do discern a divid- 
 ing line between appreciation and gush and feel 
 vaguely uncomfortable when that line is passed. 
 The limit may be indefinitely remote, but there 
 is a limit. Present literary usage ignores it alto- 
 274 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 gether. It is in thorough accord with this usage 
 that a hterary journal will say of a new book 
 that even before opening the covers you may be 
 sure one of the wonders of the world awaits you. 
 "Here will be no blurred or slighted words. . . . 
 Here will be the finest and best of which the au- 
 thor is capable. Nature herself will be here. 
 Here will be supreme artistry of style, little 
 miracles of observation," and so forth. You may 
 parallel it in almost any column of literary com- 
 ment. It is the way the literary people lay it 
 on nowadays when they like a man. They some- 
 times do it just because they like his publishers. 
 In this instance the subject happens to be a 
 writer who deserves well of us, but that only 
 makes the matter worse. The intelligence that 
 fits him for the work he does must sharpen his 
 disgust at this absurd overrating of it. It is no 
 compliment to an author to throw away all stand- 
 ards and abrogate all common sense in talking of 
 him, and whatever we may think of literary van- 
 ity the most self-esteemed of writers does make 
 distinctions as to the source of praise. He values 
 275 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 most the kind that is accompanied by some evi- 
 dence of a sound mind. 
 
 It is probable that sense persists in an author 
 longer than it is supposed to be. I do not share 
 in that low view of authors which is so prevalent 
 in the literary periodicals. It is seldom that an 
 author shows his claws and spits when you stroke 
 him, but it does not follow that he is totally in- 
 different to the personality of the stroker or to 
 the kind of stroking. That is where he differs 
 from other kinds of pets. A cat would as lief 
 be fondled by an idiot boy if he were good to it. 
 An author would not. This may sound elemen- 
 tary, but it is a fact that is utterly unknown to 
 hundreds of contributors to current literary com- 
 ment. We sometimes hear the matter discussed 
 from the point of view of the reader who may be 
 disappointed or misled, and may complain that 
 criticism has fallen on evil days. But no one 
 opposes it for the author's sake. He is supposed 
 to be pleased by it. He is a man and a brother, 
 and we have no right to assume that he is not 
 above it. When we write of him as if he were a 
 276 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 new make of motor car and we owned stock in the 
 company, it does not always make him happy. 
 
 If possible one should rid himself of that 
 cynical view of human nature as always and 
 everywhere at the mercy of the flatterer, however 
 unskilful he may be. Tell any plain friend of 
 yours that his beauty makes you glad and he 
 will lose patience with you. Compliment any 
 cross-eyed girl on her lovely orbs and she will 
 fly out at you. To a certain extent this rule ap- 
 plies to authors, though the limits are more elas- 
 tic and it is rare that they openly revolt. Here 
 and there an honest author is made to feel very 
 sheepish by those gorgeous offerings of praise. 
 "Supreme artistry of style," "miracles of obser- 
 vation," "rapture," and "pure dehght" must give 
 modest merit something of a turn. What is left 
 over for the out-and-out divinities? One should 
 keep a few hosannas for the next world. Au- 
 thors are not all Bunthornes, and they have some 
 sense of relative values. They know the differ- 
 ence between the critic with a standard of his 
 own and the reviewer whose sole outfit is a vocabu- 
 S77 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 lary like a billboard. They know it, and many 
 of them suffer under certain kinds of eulogy. 
 But the pity of it is that they suffer in silence. 
 They reply to their critics often enough, but to 
 the men who praise them foohshly they say 
 never a word. If they would burst out on some 
 rapturous appreciator once in a while and shake 
 him in the full public gaze, it would be a good 
 thing all around. It would help to remove some 
 misconceptions. 
 
 278 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 III 
 
 THE PHRASEMAKER 
 
 An admirer of M. Emile Faguet quotes a string 
 of his phrases to illustrate his epigrammatic 
 style. Some of them are worth repeating as 
 types of what are sometimes considered spark- 
 ling or incisive sayings. Of Gautier, M. Faguet 
 says, "He sets out from nowhere and just there 
 he arrives ;" of Voltaire, "The prince of wits be- 
 came the god of imbeciles ;" of Balzac, "He has 
 no wit at all." It is especially hard to see why 
 the last one should have been picked out, but it 
 appears to be highly prized by connoisseurs, 
 and, for that matter, none of them will seem won- 
 derful to the ordinary mind. There is a queer 
 standard for quotable sayings just now among 
 critics, and the simplest sort of statement may 
 turn out to be an epigram. France has always 
 been apt to sacrifice too much to her guilty love 
 of phrases, but of late these phrases seem to have 
 deteriorated like her alcoholic drinks. A couple 
 of phrases still intoxicate a Frenchman, as 
 279 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 Chateaubriand complained in his day, but he is 
 content with a cheaper brand. And ever since 
 a knot of English playwrights and authors be- 
 gan some years ago to imitate this trick of 
 Frenchmen at their worst, the phrasemaker has 
 done considerable damage over here. Many 
 honest reviewers have been set gaping by simple 
 little verbal shifts that should be as easy to learn 
 as punctuation. Any writer who turns out a fair 
 number of brief cynical sentences, chiefly about 
 love and marriage, is sure to be pointed out as 
 the possessor of a brilliant style. 
 
 Why is it that the phrasemaker so often miser- 
 ably fails of eff'ect? He is an industrious per- 
 son, and industry ought to tell here as well as 
 anywhere else. You cannot explain exactly that 
 impression of artificiality, but it is as unmis- 
 takable as blondined hair. For one thing, the 
 phrasemaker betrays an undue consciousness of 
 words, which is quite as fatal as an undue con- 
 sciousness of clothes. When a well-known writer, 
 lecturing on the stage, said that the modern play 
 was a compound of "devil, drivel and snivel," 
 ^80 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 everybody knew that he worked like a Trojan 
 for that phrase and valued it very highly, and 
 hoped it would be noticed and perhaps envied a 
 little by other phrasemakers who had not said it. 
 For any one who has seen much of phrasemakers 
 knows how they smack their lips over their own 
 good things and how a shade of regret passes 
 over their faces before they give the successful 
 rival his deserved applause. One knows, too, that 
 those airy little cynicisms that are tossed off on 
 the spur of the moment have been hammered out 
 most painfully long before. 
 
 But the labor spent on them is not the main 
 thing. It is the fact that something about them 
 lets you know the labor has been spent. You can 
 not cherish any illusion of spontaneity. Yet that 
 is just what one wants to do with a work of art. 
 It may be that a man of real gifts as a writer 
 will toil four days and a night for a fit word ; but 
 that does not mean a fit word for his audience, 
 but only for his own idea. This process the 
 phrasemaker exactly inverts. He does not care 
 a rap for the thought or the fact or the real look 
 281 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 of the thing he is trying to describe. He will 
 sacrifice any part of it to a phrase that sounds 
 well. So every sentence is a sort of compromise, 
 and never really means all it seems to. He is con- 
 stantly changing his mental route in order to 
 take in catchy phrases. Then the best half of 
 his mind is always on the public, wondering if 
 this or that thing will not strike them as being 
 pretty good. Worse than that, he stores up in 
 his head a lot of little antithetical jingles or in- 
 verted truisms, thinking he will some time use 
 them as impromptus, and he does use them, too, 
 the cold-blooded old humbug. 
 
 It is the most insidious vice of the literary 
 temperament, and critics generally do not suffi- 
 ciently warn people of the danger. Mr. How- 
 ells makes one of his heroes jot down his happy 
 phrases in a note book in the hope that they will 
 figure in some future work of his as literary 
 gems. Mr. Barrie makes one of his characters 
 do the same. Neither of these people ended 
 badly, as they ought to have if the writers had 
 been conscientious. They were represented as 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 merely taking a legitimate step in their literary 
 career, and they were fairly successful. It was a 
 bad moral. Outside books they would have be- 
 come phrasemakers and would have attained no 
 higher place than that which Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes sank to a few times in an otherwise blame- 
 less life. What a difference between the phrase- 
 maker and the man whose thought insists on the 
 words and gets them and who has no clot of ink 
 on his brain. 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 IV 
 
 THE PURSUIT OF HUMOR 
 
 While we Americans can never have too much 
 humor, we can hear too much about it. I once 
 followed a long controversy on the subject in the 
 newspapers, especially on the question whether 
 women ever possess this quality in their own 
 right. It was a very solemn affair and a little 
 tedious. Running through it all was an under- 
 current of irritability, for these people would 
 insist on citing cases in point, and just as soon 
 as any one is rash enough to illustrate what he 
 means by humor all hope of a peaceful discus- 
 sion is gone. It is a rule alike for man and au- 
 thor never to illustrate in this matter. Disap- 
 pointment is sure to follow, and sometimes hate. 
 Even George Meredith becomes an object of 
 scorn when he gives us samples of Diana's jokes. 
 A definite promise of humor is always irredeem- 
 able. Then there was an extreme jealousy among 
 the disputants lest any one should seem to be 
 claiming more than his share. First one would 
 284 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 come out with a scientific definition of it and a 
 general air of mastership. Then another would 
 show him up as an impostor, and in so doing try 
 and give the impression that he had a rather neat 
 turn for it himself. Like all discussions of hu- 
 mor, it was strenuous and was accompanied by 
 the sound of heavy blows. 
 
 Now it is the commonest thing in the world to 
 hear people call the absence of a sense of humor 
 the one fatal defect. No matter how owlish a 
 man is, he will tell you that. It is a miserable 
 falsehood, and it does incalculable harm. A life 
 without humor is like a life without legs. You 
 are haunted by a sense of incompleteness, and 
 you cannot go where your friends go. You are 
 also somewhat of a burden. But the only really 
 fatal thing is the shamming of humor when you 
 have it not. We have praised it so much that 
 we have started an insincere cult, and there are 
 many who think they must glorify it when they 
 hate it from the bottom of their hearts. False 
 humor-worship is the deadliest of social sins, and 
 one of the commonest. People without a grain 
 ^85 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 of humor in their composition will eulogize it by 
 the hour. Men will confess to treason, murder, 
 arson, false teeth or a wig. How many of them 
 will own up to a lack of humor.? The courage 
 that could draw this confession from a man would 
 atone for everything. No good can come from 
 the mad attempts to define humor, but there 
 might be some advantage in determining how 
 people should behave toward it. The first law is 
 that humor is never overtaken when chased, or 
 propitiated when praised. It is the one valuable 
 thing which it is worth no man's while to work 
 for. If this could only be learned, one of the 
 gloomiest and most nefarious of industries would 
 be banished from the world. 
 
 So, whether it is a man or a woman, or a 
 weekly paper or a department of a magazine, the 
 best advice in case of a deliberate attempt in this 
 field is to give it up altogether. No one with any 
 tenderness of heart wants to be the witness of that 
 awful struggle. When the laborers in this vine- 
 yard take pains they always give them. That 
 is the unhappy result of these discussions and of 
 286 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 our indiscriminate praise. Heavy-footed per- 
 sons start off in pursuit and the underbrush of 
 light literature is always crashing with the noise 
 of their unwieldy bodies. What is gained by 
 these periodical battues? No one ever bags any- 
 thing, and the frightened little animal is more 
 seldom seen than ever. People should be more 
 cautious in what they say about humor. If there 
 were less said about it there might be more of 
 the thing itself, for the anxious seeker ransacks 
 these discussions for guiding principles and 
 starts grimly off on the trail. He becomes a 
 quasi-humorist with a system. Is there any- 
 thing worse? In spite of the service which real 
 humor renders, one may honestly doubt whether 
 it offsets the injuries committed in its name. 
 There are people whom nature meant to be 
 solemn from their cradle to their grave. They 
 are under bonds to remain so. In so far as they 
 are true to themselves they are safe company for 
 any one; but outside their proper field they are 
 terrible. Solemnity is relatively a blessing, and 
 the man who was born with it should never be 
 S87 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 encouraged to wrench himself away. A solemn 
 mind out of joint — that is what happens when 
 the humorous ambition o'erleaps itself. It is the 
 commonest of accidents in this hunting field. 
 
 And another rule worth observing is that 
 humor never works well when harnessed to a 
 grudge. A writer tried to put it to this use only 
 the other day. His resolute attempt to make fun 
 of his political enemies took the form of mention- 
 ing them one by one and remarking in each case 
 that they were "positively funny." People often 
 refer to others as "positively funny" when what 
 they really want to do is to garrote them ; as if a 
 thing conceived in darkness and shapen in malig- 
 nity became humor by the invocation of the name. 
 This is worse than the ordinary style of pursuit. 
 It is the press-gang method. 
 
 288 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 V 
 
 THE TEMPTATION OF AUTHORS 
 
 The devil does not have to take the author to 
 any mountain top in order to tempt him. It is 
 much simpler. He merely sends around a smooth 
 agent with orders to make a contract with that 
 author on any terms — on no account to come 
 away without the promise of an article or a book. 
 We seldom hear what really goes on at these in- 
 terviews, but their general results appear plainly 
 enough from the publishers' lists and the files of 
 the magazines. It does not seem as if the success- 
 ful American author could refuse many jobs. 
 The bulk of what he writes and the nature of the 
 topics he writes on indicate that by the proper 
 means he can be urged to a pretty smart pace in 
 the matter of turning out copy. The beginner 
 always dreams of the blessed day when the pub- 
 lisher will have to seek him, not he the publishers, 
 and he usually pictures himself as repelling 
 many of them with some sternness, for of what 
 use is success if it does not enable you to choose 
 ^89 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 your own time and your own subjects and break 
 away from the odious bondage to the pot-boiler? 
 Obscure merit glows all over at this view of him- 
 self repulsing great crowds of publishers and 
 editors with a few trenchant words about his ar- 
 tistic integrity. The chances are he has quite 
 a collection of polite sarcasms stored up 
 against that day — things which would look 
 rather well in print in case the newspapers 
 should report them, as they undoubtedly 
 would, in spite of his reticence about the 
 affair. 
 
 But the temptation is too subtle and too many 
 good men have succumbed to it to warrant this 
 high confidence. The constant draining of our 
 well-known authors is one of the saddest things 
 in current literature. Apparently there is no 
 age and no degree of success that is safe from it. 
 You might think that toward the close of a long 
 and honorable literary career a man would feel 
 entitled to the luxury of writing only when and 
 what he pleased. Yet no sooner does he reach 
 that point than he pours out a perfect flood of 
 290 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 articles and interviews on subjects that it must 
 bore him to death to think of. You find him dis- 
 coursing in any kind of newspaper or magazine 
 about things that no unfettered human mind 
 would linger on for five minutes. The success- 
 ful author is like the department store. There 
 is no corner of periodical literature where you do 
 not see his delivery wagon, and there is no end 
 to the variety of goods delivered. Sin, free sil- 
 ver, mother's love and the books that helped him, 
 success, football and the fear of death — any- 
 thing under the sun seems successively to at- 
 tract that serviceable mind. That he really 
 would write on those things if left to himself few 
 are so cynical as to believe. Good authors are 
 not by nature rapid-firing. If they become so, 
 you may be sure somebody has been tampering 
 with them. An author is like a clock. Let an 
 editor fool with him and set him to striking all 
 the hours at once and he is out of order forever 
 afterward. 
 
 An enterprising editor once took it into his 
 head that the public would be much interested in 
 291 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 reading the answers of a number of persons, each 
 eminent in his line, to the question, What do you 
 fear most? So he arranged a "symposium" of 
 milHonaires, dancers, actresses, railway mag- 
 nates, politicians, authors and other worthies, 
 each of whom contributed an essay or an inter- 
 view on this subject. Thus the eager public had 
 a chance to compare the fears of the successful 
 politician with the fears of the man who had 
 made his fortune in steel. The author who took 
 part in this brilliant affair — and he was one of 
 the best we have — supplied an essay to the ef- 
 fect that young people feared death more than 
 old people, and that old people feared the loss 
 of money more than young people, and that fear 
 was an attitude of mind that tended to produce 
 cowardice. What did it mean.^^ Merely that 
 something had to be written. No mind, how- 
 ever strong it may have been at the start, can 
 hold out when it is treated like that. A man's 
 whole soul is in danger of being waterlogged 
 when he dilutes his thoughts to that ex- 
 tent. 
 
 293 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 The danger in spreading one's self thin is that 
 the time surely comes when it is done uncon- 
 sciously. A man thinks it is his thought that is 
 flowing on like that when it is only his ink. 
 There are few people to warn him because there 
 are few that know the diff*erence. People gen- 
 erally do not realize that authors are deliquescent 
 and should be kept in a dry place. Then the 
 temptation to the author assumes such virtuous 
 form. There is thrift, for instance. It is a vir- 
 tue which we humble folk may safely strive for. 
 But thrift ruins more authors than all the vices 
 put together. As a man he may have as hand- 
 some a set of private morals as you ever saw, 
 and yet as an author be going to the dogs at 
 lightning speed. Journeywork does the thing 
 oftener than either opium or absinthe. Can the 
 "muse" fill orders every day? If it does, how 
 does it differ from that despised thing, jour- 
 nalism.? That the majority of writers should 
 do this sort of thing implies no waste at all. If 
 they waited all their lives probably nothing bet- 
 ter would occur to them. But that the mind of 
 293 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 an estimable author should be for rent for every 
 purpose is a wicked and incongruous thing. It 
 is like the chartering of a United States battle- 
 ship for every clam bake. 
 
 294. 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 VI 
 
 THE JOURNALIST AND HIS BETTERS 
 
 How FOND people are of trying to define the 
 boundary between journalism and literature. 
 There is never a time when some writer is not 
 pegging away at it. Failure cannot discourage 
 or reiteration stale, and we may as well expect 
 to see the same thing tried in almost the same 
 language every day for the rest of our lives. 
 In one of the recent attempts the investigator 
 decides that the difference between journalism 
 and hterature is that, while journalistic work is 
 done with the expectation that it will soon perish, 
 literary work is done "in the high hope that it 
 might be eternal." This definition has the merit 
 of perfect clearness as well as ease of applica- 
 tion by squarely dividing the two according to 
 the self-confidence of the writer. If he is the 
 kind of man who is tolerably sure that he and 
 eternity were made for each other, he is a literary 
 person. If he suspects that the eternal may have 
 no use for him, he is a journalist. Now, there is 
 295 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 no use in a newspaper man's trying to debate this 
 matter. He is bound to get the worst of it. It 
 is a reckless thing to stand up against a man 
 who knows he is eternal and all that. Still there 
 are a good many light literary characters who 
 may have some misgivings about their eternity, 
 and these he dares address, though, of course, 
 with deference, for he cannot conceive of any- 
 thing nearer eternity in his own case than the 
 intervals between stations on the elevated road. 
 
 To these literary persons he feels drawn by the 
 consciousness of a common destiny. Apart from 
 the natural enthusiasm of their respective widows, 
 oblivion in each case will set in about four days 
 after death. There are no class distinctions in 
 the land of the forgotten. As between the lum- 
 ber room and the waste basket there is little 
 choice. But while the doom is precisely the same 
 for the majority of each profession, the news- 
 paper man has this great advantage. He knows 
 what this doom will be, and is ready for it, and be- 
 does not waste five minutes of his life in worrying 
 about it one way or the other. At least he is not 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 laying up for himself a disappointed ghosthood, 
 and it is pretty certain that the shades of some 
 exceedingly literary persons will be terribly an- 
 noyed by what is going to happen to their works 
 after death. And there is another burden that 
 the newspaper man is free from. He does not 
 have to talk in such a very large way about his 
 work as art, or to feel oppressed with that sense 
 of responsibility for nature's priceless gifts. Be- 
 ing without worries of this kind, he has more 
 chance to meet people on equal and agreeable 
 terms. That is the great thing about being un- 
 literary and uneternal. You do not have any of 
 those dreadfully serious duties toward yourself. 
 You are not obliged to sing psalms to the holy 
 things inside you or to act as if you were a special 
 little ark of the covenant for something that no 
 one but yourself knows the value of. That leaves 
 you leisure and a light heart — a low level, but 
 with its humble joys. A newspaper man does not 
 envy the general run of authors. He would be 
 scared to death by the consciousness of all that 
 talent. Indeed, if he should ever feel inside him 
 ^97 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 what certain literary characters sometimes call 
 their "muse," he would see a doctor and take 
 something for it. 
 
 For if there is one thing in the world that 
 would embarrass an honest journalist it is the 
 obligation to exhibit a handsome diction with 
 never a single fact or thought to hang it on — 
 to keep a sort of show window of word millinery 
 as a sign that first-rate literary work is done 
 inside. But people who say they have the 
 "muses" do not seem to mind this sort of thing 
 in the least. Thought is only a clothes-line to 
 them, anyhow. It is not wise for the people who 
 are just across the border to sniff so at the news- 
 paper man, lowly though he be. What is the 
 use in their rigging things out for eternity when 
 they cannot reach the middle of next week.'' 
 The newspaper man cannot make his words sing, 
 as Stevenson said, but at least he is spared the 
 awkwardness of being the only person who 
 knows that they are singing. And since words 
 will not always sing, why is it not a good plan 
 even in light literature to have an idea or two 
 298 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 to fall back upon ? And if you have not an idea, 
 find a fact. Literature should not be so light that 
 you do not feel it. Surely there are many au- 
 thors who are merely journalists of a slower 
 breed. The journalist is not as a rule sensitive, 
 but he does not believe that there is an aristocracy 
 of failure. What has eternity to do with the rank 
 and file of either class.? 
 
 When the two professions have so much in 
 common it seems foolish to be bothering about 
 boundaries. It would be better to unite against 
 the common enemy of both. There is a kind of 
 man who has no business in either. He is the 
 man with the inveterate vice of having nothing 
 to say. He is superfluous even in a Sunday issue. 
 He confounds tenuity with refinement, and pub- 
 lishes a volume on the strength of one etiolated 
 idea. Say what you will about style, mere gram- 
 mar will not make an author, even if the gram- 
 mar is superb. A literary aspirant once wrote to 
 a publisher that she could write well if she only 
 had ideas. This idea of style is as injurious in 
 what is classed as literature as in the daily papers. 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 Those smoothly rounded sentences, each one the 
 assassin of a thought, those pastels in prose 
 which are nothing but prose, and those extremely 
 emaciated essays are neither journalism nor 
 literature. Dilution is the one thing that is 
 fatal, whether it is "literary" or not, and a high 
 hoping for the eternal only makes it worse. No 
 matter where the line be drawn, it should not in- 
 clude this, for things perish quicker for lack 
 of substance than for lack of form. The real 
 dread of the honest followers of either craft 
 should be the dread of spreading themselves thin, 
 and if the year's production of books could be 
 piled up alongside its periodicals it would be hard 
 to say which class had sinned the more. But this 
 thing is certain. No member of either would be 
 a whit the worse for the good qualities of the 
 other. 
 
 300 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 VII 
 
 RUNNING AN ORACLE 
 
 One of the pleasantest lines of newspaper work 
 is the composition of those editorial articles on 
 foreign politics which unmask the designs of the 
 great powers and explain what is known as a 
 "world movement." It is work that confers dig- 
 nity on the writer from the impressive nature of 
 the material with which it deals. It is not scruti- 
 nized as sharply as other kinds of work, because 
 it takes one's breath away at the start. Very few 
 people, for example, distinguished between the 
 articles on the Chinese situation which the news- 
 papers were obliged to publish every other day. 
 They like to see such articles on an editorial page 
 as a sign that the paper is keeping up with the 
 times ; but so long as they all have the air of cer- 
 tainty they are all equally able and authoritative. 
 The man who can speak familiarly as to what the 
 "Russian Colossus" is up to, and what France 
 thinks about it, has everything in his own 
 hands. Nobody thinks of checking him off. That 
 301 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 familiar tone does the business. World politics 
 afford the one sinecure in the newspaper profes- 
 sion. In general these articles conform to one of 
 two types. There is the solemnly judicious ar- 
 ticle, which, though masterly, is found, on analy- 
 sis, to be somewhat non-committal. And there is 
 the article of mysterious sources. 
 
 Here is a model article of the former type 
 on the future of China. "It looks very much 
 indeed as if an acute crisis were impending in 
 China," says the writer in the sure, firm style 
 with which these experts approach their subjects. 
 But the true spirit of this kind of writing ap- 
 pears in the following sentence: "Anything may 
 happen in China in the next six months, or noth- 
 ing may happen." That shows the practiced 
 hand. The soundest editorial articles on world 
 politics are built on these imperishable founda- 
 tions. What, then, is China's future.? That will 
 depend on the issue of the next six months. If 
 nothing happens, there is no reason to expect any 
 very radical changes. If, on the other hand, 
 things do happen, then changes of the deepest 
 302 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 and most far-reaching importance are almost 
 certain to occur. These things being so, the 
 writer says : "It may be well to look dispassion- 
 ately at general conditions and at future pros- 
 pects." What do we find? We notice first that 
 the forces at work in China "are both internal 
 and external;" there is a force that makes for 
 progress and a force that does not. The rest is in 
 keeping with this. The significant thing about 
 it is permanence and universality. It will apply 
 as well to the future of Austria-Hungary and 
 the German empire when the occasion arises. The 
 result of its success is the saying of obvious 
 things with the air of having all the powers at 
 the other end of a private wire. 
 
 To run these oracles all any one needs is a 
 war rumor and a copy of the Statesman's Year 
 Book and a solemn manner. If the news is true, 
 then it is indeed serious. There are some aspects 
 of the situation which you cannot but view with 
 grave anxiety. Will the Russian bear show his 
 claws .f* "It is not generally known that" and 
 "People who look beneath the surface of things 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 say" are good and well-tried expressions. You 
 should also own a few "undercurrents of political 
 opinion." These are to be found at any time in 
 a single article in a foreign review, but it is 
 wiser not to quote the author, as it sounds better 
 to say, "In certain quarters the view is held." 
 The quickest way to get at the very core of 
 world politics is through the pages of one of 
 these articles. Some of the weightiest inside in- 
 formation articles, whose writer you might sup- 
 pose had been hiding under the table at every 
 cabinet meeting in Europe, are made in this way. 
 We have, of course, men who are well versed in 
 these subjects, and who put their own brains into 
 their work. But the point is that these qualifica- 
 tions are not necesary for the running of an 
 oracle on foreign politics. With the weighty 
 manner one fares quite as well. The man who 
 says "Anything may happen in China in the next 
 six months, or nothing may happen" has as large 
 an audience. He is respected and liked. It is 
 a comfortable and an honorable life, and in spite 
 of competition the earnings are enormous in pro- 
 304 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 portion to the labor involved. As a people we 
 may be suspicious about some things and not bad 
 hands at a bargain, but the man who runs an 
 oracle is apt to find us a good thing. 
 
 305 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 VIII 
 
 FOR WOMAN AND THE HOME 
 
 An article published some time ago in an im- 
 portant London magazine shows what a serious- 
 minded British editor sometimes thinks of his 
 public. The writer tells us that woman should 
 be womanly, that she should be intelligent and at 
 the same time kind; that, "above all, nothing 
 should be done to diminish the immense fund of 
 affection stored up in women's hearts." "We 
 might possibly spare science and philosophy," 
 says he ; "we might certainly spare many inven- 
 tions, but we could not spare from the world a 
 mother's love." And lest some of his readers may 
 still be unconvinced, he adds that while it is bet- 
 ter that woman should know "how to cook an 
 appetizing dinner for the tired husband than 
 how to chatter about Shelley," she ought not to 
 be entirely untaught. He is radical on that 
 point, arguing with much earnestness against 
 leaving her in her wild native state, for she "is 
 not likely to love husband, brother or child the 
 306 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 more because she is ignorant and helpless." But 
 he advises caution in applying this principle. 
 The wild woman who cooks may lose something 
 in transition, just as strawberries lose flavor when 
 cultivated, or gallinaceous birds when domesti- 
 cated. How domesticate the partridge without 
 diminishing the gamy flavor; how teach woman 
 to read Shelley without loss of true womanhood? 
 That is the problem. While opposed to any- 
 thing like overeducation,he believes that the mind 
 of woman should receive some attention for two 
 reasons : First, she is a companion to man. He 
 approves of this and thinks it ought to be en- 
 couraged. "Let the idea of companionship be- 
 tween man and woman prevail more," he says. 
 Secondly, her education will be useful to the 
 children. On this point, and in finally summing 
 up, he says : 
 
 "Nothing could be more delightful, more help- 
 ful, both to mother and child, than a common 
 interest in things of the mind. The children 
 should not look on the mother as a kind of house- 
 hold slave who looks after the dinner and who 
 packs them off to school; nor should the mother 
 
 307 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 think of the children as so many little faces and 
 hands to be washed or so many little mouths to be 
 fed. . . . Indeed, we suggest that a new and 
 brighter meaning might be given to home by a 
 judicious education and a wise liberty to her by 
 whose loving activity and goodness home is 
 made." 
 
 The article is unsigned, but it was probably 
 written by a man. Most of this kind of writing 
 is done by men, and there is a great deal of it. 
 The significance of this particular case is that 
 the thing appears in a magazine meant for full- 
 grown men and women of this world, not for a 
 constituency of apple-cheeked cherubs. But 
 there is this much to be said for the writer: Of 
 all subjects in current literature woman is the 
 one that draws out the worst there is in man. An 
 odd change comes over him when woman is his 
 theme — a sort of sea-change, judged by the 
 wateriness of the results. And does it please wo- 
 man.? Does the mother heart glow at the sight 
 of the strong man simpering in his beard, and is 
 there no mother head to take offense at him.'^ 
 Surely more things might be taken for granted 
 308 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 by the writer on women and the home. Let him 
 try talking hke this to her face and see what hap- 
 pens. That is a fair test. One thing that makes 
 man write of woman as he does is the knowledge 
 that she cannot get at him. Certainly you may 
 read your Shelley, and even a little thinking will 
 not hurt, but not too much, mind, and do not for- 
 get to beam on the tired husband. Heat his slip- 
 pers for him, wash the children, cook the din- 
 ner ; then crouch behind the storm door to spring 
 out and beam the minute you hear him scuffling 
 on the door mat. Beam thoroughly, then out 
 with a blast of Shelley at him. There you have 
 the true woman, though educated: mother heart 
 true as steel, affections sound, husband fed, chil- 
 dren washed, and yet the savage bride now reads 
 light literature. Thus is the sex problem solved 
 and civilization may go on with perfect confi- 
 dence. 
 
 Woman is unfortunate in her advisers. What 
 
 a time of it we should have if she deliberately set 
 
 out to make home happy by the rules laid down 
 
 for her. What with the routine beaming and the 
 
 309 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 scheduled companionship and the memorized 
 home thoughts, where would the tired husband 
 be? You would find that haggard refugee nest- 
 ing in a tree-top. But there is no danger of it. 
 The only serious question is that of journalistic 
 standards. Why do we dedicate to woman and 
 the home the most demented portions of our 
 periodicals ? 
 
 Not in a spirit of chivalry, but of common 
 fairness, I hold that there is no such intellectual 
 disparity between the sexes as would appear from 
 these writings. The women one ordinarily meets 
 are not at the level of the usual woman's page 
 or of the average magazine for women. Women 
 read these things, of course, but chiefly for tech- 
 nical information, for suggestions as to pickles 
 or finger bowls, or things to put on hats — which 
 occult and complicated matters have as much 
 right to a literature of their own as entomology 
 — and no one can despise the intellect that follows 
 them in all their abstruse windings. But what 
 I have in mind are the non-technical articles in 
 regard to which man and woman are on an equal 
 310 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 footing. Why write so very far down just be- 
 cause you are writing for women? And why do 
 women not resent the practice? 
 
 Here is a typical passage from a typical lit- 
 erary article in a woman's magazine. The writer 
 explains for the benefit of women's clubs how 
 Browning should be studied and what blessings 
 result from the study. He says : "When one has 
 mastered Browning's conception of the nature of 
 love and of the ends of art and its spiritual sig- 
 nificance, he is well on the way to the poet's view 
 of life." Fancy a string of similar passages run- 
 ning through three or four pages, and you have a 
 fair picture of what the woman of culture is sup- 
 posed to like. It is true with the truth of the first 
 spelling book. It is as irreproachable as regular 
 breathing. But why are women thought to need 
 it? That is the baffling part of the thing. Do 
 not women know that the way to study a poet is 
 to read his poems thoughtfully, and are there any 
 of them that need be told that art has its inner 
 meaning, Hfe its deeper joys? Take this, for 
 example: "Browning is primarily a poet and 
 311 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 should be approached as a poet." Why tell a 
 woman that? Could she not guess it? Would 
 she be likely to approach him as a plumber? 
 And this suggests the general question that 
 always troubles the male reader of these articles : 
 If adult human beings who have had a fair 
 chance in life still remain at the stage which this 
 kind of writing implies, why bother with them at 
 all? You cannot save them, certainly not by 
 these means, for if they had in them a spark of 
 affection for books they would rebel against this 
 way of writing about books. That is the trouble 
 with the woman's writer. There is nothing left 
 of a good thing when he has once adapted it. 
 And where is the benefit in knowing about books 
 when you do not care for what is inside them? 
 It is meritorious only in a librarian. It is no 
 one's duty to be literary. 
 
 It seems a waste of time to blame people for 
 writing platitudes, but that is not the point. 
 The platitude must always be. What I protest 
 against is that it should be so unevenly distri- 
 buted between the sexes by our periodicals. And 
 312 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 why pretend that reading this kind of an article 
 does anything to the mind? As well advise peo- 
 ple to sleep with a volume of poems under their 
 pillow in order to wake up "cultured" in the 
 morning. 
 
 Women, of course, are themselves in part to 
 blame for the woman's writer. They take him 
 more seriously than men do, and when they do 
 not take him seriously they are more patient with 
 him than men would be. There is no doubt that 
 those molluscous writers who fasten themselves to 
 the reputations of dead geniuses, and say amiable 
 things about books which they do not understand, 
 have a disproportionately large feminine con- 
 stituency. By merely praising Homer, Plato, 
 Dante and Shakespeare, and by laying claim to 
 certain large, vague sensations when they read 
 them, it is possible to establish a literary stand- 
 ing. If they follow this up with an occasional 
 good word for high ideals and the ends of art 
 and the true conception of life, they may attain 
 quite a high place in contemporary estimation. 
 The thing has been done. And though the 
 313 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 woman's writer may have known at the start that 
 what he said did not mean anything, this self- 
 knowledge does not last. In his final stage he 
 believes in himself. That is the last and lowest 
 point he reaches. 
 
 After all, is he not harmless and even useful 
 as an educator? There is this much harm in him : 
 In so far as people read him they are kept from 
 doing other things. That of itself is bad. They 
 reach those absurd, straggling suburbs of litera- 
 ture, and there they stop. They read articles 
 about books which describe other books, and so 
 cultivate a sort of third cousinship to literature. 
 Then the woman's writer is an awful example of 
 what literature may do to a man. If association 
 with masterpieces all his days leaves him in such 
 a state, it must scare people away from master- 
 pieces. There are dangers involved in his exist- 
 ence from whatever point you view him, though 
 I admit that at first thoughts there is nothing in 
 all nature that seems more innocuous than he. 
 
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 IX 
 
 ON BEHALF OF OBSCURE VERSE 
 
 It is a tame little affair, to be sure — the average 
 poem of the magazines, and when I say average 
 poem, I mean almost every poem that appears 
 in them, for rarely does one venture to differ 
 much from every other one. But it is easy to be 
 too pessimistic about them, and if anyone will 
 take the trouble to run through the old files he 
 will arise feeling fairly cheerful in regard to the 
 minor verse of his own generation. It is better 
 than it used to be because it has a larger supply 
 of antecedent verse to draw upon for imitation. 
 It is a fuller and more composite echo. There is 
 more of it than there used to be, but there is noth- 
 ing depressing in that, because it has not outrun 
 the increase in population. Another consoling 
 thought is that a large part of the humdrum 
 verse of to-day affords more training to the 
 reader's wits. As between the commonplace verse 
 that is perfectly intelligible and the commonplace 
 verse that is obscure, the latter has this disciplin- 
 315 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 ary advantage. At least you work your minii, 
 and even if you find nothing, the exercise has 
 done you good. The mere value of a metrical 
 rebus, you will say. Well, even that is some- 
 thing. 
 
 And this leads to the point I wish to empha- 
 size. So long as the kernel of magazine verse re- 
 mains what it is, I would not have it easier to be 
 got at. I put in a plea for the continuance of 
 this obscurity, and I do so with the more haste 
 and earnestness because I have lately noticed a 
 tendency to complain of it. "Now what in the 
 world does she mean by that?" asks a reviewer 
 with bitterness as he quotes two complicated sen- 
 tences without verbs addressed by a young lady 
 to one of her emotions. Mercy on us! The 
 meaning is just what was meant to be withheld. 
 Such a question ignores the rules of the game. 
 If reviewers begin to act like that, they will soon 
 destroy the industry altogether. The composi- 
 tion of this kind of magazine verse consists in 
 this very secretiveness as to meanings. The per- 
 former takes a fairly simple and fairly obvious 
 316 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 thought and first writes it down in direct, cold 
 prose. This done, it is carefully examined to see 
 how well it lends itself to verbal entanglements. 
 If it seems to have possibilities in this respect, 
 the work of ensnarling is begun. Words are 
 wound around it phrase by phrase till just the 
 faintest suggestion of the thought peeps out 
 through a crack in the verbiage. Then it is the 
 reader's turn to guess what is inside. If it takes 
 a good deal of time and worry, so much the bet- 
 ter. He feels something of a sportsman's zest. 
 He is rather glad to get it, even if it does not 
 amount to much. To illustrate, let us take a 
 concrete case. You want to say something about 
 the dread of separation — whether of the soul 
 from the body or the lover from his mistress, it 
 matters not what. Take just that one situation. 
 You snatch at many paraphrases and discard 
 them one by one for lack of subtlety. Finally, 
 after mousing around among words and mutter- 
 ing things like "foregleam of the ache of ab- 
 sence" and "ill-seeming shade of otherwhere" 
 (which you see at a glance would never do in the 
 317 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 world as synonyms for incipient bereavement), 
 let us suppose you hit on something rather queer, 
 such, for example as "the germ of alibi." It 
 sounds foolish at first, but upon consideration 
 may seem worth while, for it is an unusual col- 
 location of words and hides the thought almost 
 beyond chance of detection. Now if for every 
 other simple phrase you can find so successful a 
 substitute, if every turn of your thought can be 
 made to twist itself into such remotely suggestive, 
 such slenderly related language, you may pro- 
 duce a poem in the modern magazine manner. 
 But it means work. 
 
 The "germ of alibi" may not be a very con- 
 vincing illustration, though I may say in pass- 
 ing that it is taken from the collected verses of 
 an excellent and very, very serious writer. Still 
 in a measure it represents the aspiration of maga- 
 zine verse. It betokens an eagerness for enig- 
 matic charm. It is an elaborate tucking away 
 of the humdrum, an obscuration of the insignifi- 
 cant, and that I believe is the characteristic of 
 this sort of verse. And in saying so I wish to reg- 
 318 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 ister my hearty approval. Obscurity of style 
 in these cases is a merciful thing. Not only that, 
 but it gives a positive pleasure to two classes of 
 readers. First, there are those who find excite- 
 ment in the difficulties of the quest, who like to 
 track the elusive thought to its lair. Secondly, 
 there is the larger class that love the vague merely 
 because it is vague and looks the bigger for its 
 vagueness. 
 
 Therefore I am disturbed by the brutal stand- 
 and-deliver attitude of certain reviewers who are 
 forever holding up poems and demanding their 
 meanings. And there is a special savagery in the 
 prevailing practice of reviewing six or seven little 
 volumes of collected magazine poems all in a 
 bunch under the title of "Some Recent Verse." 
 A review like that is a potter's field of poets. 
 Again and again you will find a half dozen poets 
 huddled together under a collective title and dis- 
 posed of all at once, as a housemaid might kill 
 flies with a twisted newspaper. Obscure maga- 
 zine verse is not rightly appreciated. Review- 
 ers do not remark the stress and strain that go to 
 319 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 its production. It represents fierce and unre- 
 mitting toil, and its murkiness is not accidental, 
 but deliberately and painfully wrought. A 
 magazine versifier of to-day would never write : 
 
 ** I saw the hole myself," he cried. 
 
 ** 'Twas four feet long and two feet Made." 
 
 He would never exclaim: 
 
 ** Twelve, didst thou say ? Curse on those dozen 
 villains." 
 
 He would never fall with Wordsworth into 
 such lines as: 
 
 O mercy, to myself I said. 
 What if Lucy should be dead ? 
 
 He is more likely to reproduce the melody 
 
 of Meredith's much-quoted line : 
 
 The friable, and the grumous, dizzards both. 
 
 And for my part I prefer the latter model, 
 for at least it stirs the curiosity. 
 
 320 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 IN DARKEST JAMES 
 
 Some time ago, when Henry James wrote an 
 essay on women that brought to my cheek the hot, 
 rebelhous blush, I said nothing about it, thinking 
 that perhaps, after all, the man's style was his 
 sufficient fig-leaf, and that few would see how 
 shocking he really was. And, indeed, it had been 
 a long time since the pubhc knew what Henry 
 James was up to behind that verbal hedge of his, 
 though half-suspecting that he meant no good, 
 because a style like that seemed just the place for 
 guilty secrets. But those of us who had formed 
 the habit of him early could make him out even 
 then, our eyes having grown so used to the deep- 
 ening shadows of his later language that they 
 could see in the dark, as you might say. I say this 
 not to brag of it, but merely to show that there 
 were people who partly understood him even in 
 The Sacred Fount, and he was clearer in his es- 
 says, especially in that wicked one on "George 
 321 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 Sand : The New Life," published in an American 
 magazine. 
 
 Here he was as bold as brass, telling women 
 to go ahead and do and dare, and praising the 
 fine old hearty goings-on at the court of Augus- 
 tus the Strong, and showing how they could be 
 brought back again if women would only try. 
 His impunity was due to the sheer laziness of the 
 expurgators. They would not read him, and 
 they did not believe anybody else could. They 
 justified themselves, perhaps, by recalling pas- 
 sages like these in the Awkward Age: 
 
 "What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless 
 strangely irrelevant " 
 
 *'But she fixed him with her weary penetration. ..." 
 
 "He jumped up at this, as if he couldn't bear it, pre- 
 senting as he walked across the room a large, foolish, 
 fugitive back, on which her eyes rested as on a proof of 
 her penetration " 
 
 "My poor child, you're of a profundity " 
 
 "He spoke almost uneasily, but she was not too much 
 alarmed to continue lucid." 
 
 "You're of a limpidity, dear man ! " 
 
 "Don't you think that's rather a back seat for one's 
 best?" 
 
 " 'A back seat ? ' she wondered, with a purity." 
 
 "Your aunt didn't leave me with you to teach you the 
 slang of the day." 
 
 " 'The slang?' she spotlessly speculated." 
 
 Arguing from this that he was bent more on 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 eluding pursuit than on making converts, they 
 let things pass that in other writers would have 
 been immediately rebuked. He had, in fact, 
 written furiously against the proprieties for sev- 
 eral years. "There is only one propriety," he 
 said, "that the painter of life can ask of a sub- 
 ject : Does it or does it not belong to life?" He 
 charged our Anglo-Saxon writers with "a con- 
 spiracy of silence," and taunted them with the 
 fact that the women were more improper than the 
 men. "Emancipations are in the air," said he, 
 "but it is to women writers that we owe them." 
 The men were cowards, rarely venturing a single 
 coarse expression, but already in England there 
 were pages upon pages of women's work so 
 strong and rich and horrifying and free that a 
 man could hardly read them. Halcyon days, 
 they seemed to him, and woman the harbinger of 
 a powerful Babylonish time when the impro- 
 prieties should sing together like the morning 
 stars. Not an enthusiastic person generally, he 
 always warmed to this particular theme with 
 generous emotion. 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 His essay on George Sand discussing what he 
 calls the "new life," cited the heart history of 
 that author as "having given her sex for its new 
 evolution and transformation the real standard 
 and measure of change." It was all recorded in 
 Mme. Karenine's biography, and Mme. Karenine, 
 being a Russian with an "admirable Slav super- 
 iority to prejudice," was able to treat the matter 
 in a "large, free way." A life so amorously pro- 
 fuse was sure to set an encouraging example, 
 he thought. Her heart was like an hotel, occu- 
 pied, he said, by "many more or less greasy 
 males" in quick succession. He hoped the time 
 would come when other women's hearts would be 
 as miscellaneous: 
 
 "In this direction their aim has been, as yet, 
 comparatively modest and their emulation low; 
 the challenge they have hitherto picked up is but 
 the challenge of the average male. The approxi- 
 mation of the extraordinary woman has been, 
 practically, in other words, to the ordinary man. 
 Madame Sand's service is that she planted the 
 flag much higher; her own approximation, at 
 least, was to the extraordinary. She reached 
 him, she surpassed him, and she showed how, with 
 
 324 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 native, dispositions, the thing could be done. 
 These new records will live as the precious text- 
 book, so far as we have got, of the business." 
 
 This was plain enough. Any other man would 
 have been suppressed. In a literature so well 
 policed as ours, the position of Henry James was 
 anomalous. He was the only writer of the day 
 whose unconventional notions did not matter. His 
 dissolute and complicated Muse might say just 
 what she chose. Perhaps this was because it 
 would have been so difficult to expose him. 
 Never did so much "vice" go with such sheltering 
 vagueness. Whatever else may be said of James 
 at this time, he was no tempter, and though the 
 novels of this period deal only with unlawful 
 passions, they make but chilly reading on the 
 whole. It is a land where the vices have no bodies 
 and the passions no blood, where nobody sins be- 
 cause nobody has anything to sin with. Why 
 should we worry when a spook goes wrong ? For 
 years James did not create one shadow-casting 
 character. His love affairs, illicit though they 
 be, are so stripped to their motives that they seem 
 325 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 no more enticing than a diagram. A wraith 
 proves faithless to her marriage vow, elopes with 
 a bogie in a cloud of words. Six phantoms meet 
 and dine, three male, three female, with two 
 thoughts apiece, and, after elaborate geometry 
 of the heart, adultery follows like a Q. E. D. 
 Shocking it ought to be, but yet it is not. 
 Ghastly, tantalising, queer, but never near 
 enough human to be either good or bad. To be 
 a sinner, even in the books you need some carnal 
 attributes — lungs, liver, tastes, at least a pair of 
 legs. Even the fiends have palpable tails ; wise 
 men have so depicted them. No flesh, no frailty ; 
 that may be why our sternest moralists licensed 
 Henry James to write his wickedest. They saw 
 that whatever the moral purport of these books, 
 they might be left wide open in the nursery. 
 
 To those who never liked him he is the same 
 in these writings as in those before and since. 
 They complain that even at his best he is too apt 
 to think that when he has made a motive he has 
 made a man. Nevertheless, though the world of 
 his better novels is small, it is always credible — 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 humanity run through a sieve, but still humanity. 
 During this dark period his interests seemed to 
 drop off one by one, leaving him shut in with his 
 single theme — the rag, the bone and the hank of 
 hair, the complicated amours of skeletons. They 
 called it his later manner, but the truth is, it was 
 a change in the man himself. He saw fewer 
 things in this spacious world than he used to see, 
 and the people were growing more meagre and 
 queer and monotonous, and it was harder and 
 harder to break away from the stump his fancy 
 was tied to. 
 
 In The Wings of the Dove there were signs 
 of a partial recovery. There were people who 
 saw no difference between it and The Sacred 
 Fount or The Awkward Age, but they were no 
 friends of his. By what vice of introspection he 
 got himself lashed to that fixed idea it is impossi- 
 ble to say, but it was clear that neither of those 
 books was the work of a mind entirely free. In 
 one aspect it was ridiculous ; but if one laughed, 
 it was with compunctions, for in another aspect it 
 was exceedingly painful. This only from the 
 327 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 point of view of his admirers. It is not forgotten 
 that there is the larger class (for whom this world 
 in the main was made) to whom he is merely ridic- 
 ulous. They do not see why thoughts so unwill- 
 ing to come out need be extracted. 
 
 To be sure in The Wings of the Dove there is 
 the same absorption in the machinery of motive 
 and in mental processes the most minute. 
 Through page after page he surveys a mind as a 
 sick man looks at his counterpane, busy with little 
 ridges and grooves and undulations. There are 
 chapters like wonderful games of solitaire, 
 broken by no human sound save his own chuckle 
 when he takes some mysterious trick or makes a 
 move that he says is "beautiful." He has a way 
 of saying "There you are" that is most exasper- 
 ating, for it is always at the precise moment at 
 which you know you have utterly lost yourself. 
 There is no doubt that James's style is often too 
 puffed up with its secrets. Despite its air of im- 
 mense significance, the dark, unfathomed cave of 
 his ocean contain sometimes only the same sort 
 of gravel you could have picked up on the shore. 
 328 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 I have that from deep sea thinkers who have been 
 down with him. But though this unsociable way 
 of writing continues through The Wings of the 
 'Dove, it came nearer than any other novel that 
 he had pubHshed for some years to the quality of 
 his earlier work. It deals with conditions as well 
 as with people. Instead of merely souls any- 
 where, we have men and women living in describa- 
 ble homes. It would be hard to find in those other 
 novels anything in the spirit of the following 
 passage, which is fairly typical of much in 
 this: 
 
 "It was after the children's dinner 
 and the two young women were still in the pres- 
 ence of the crumpled tablecloth, the dispersed 
 pinafores, the scraped dishes, the lingering odour 
 of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony, 
 if she might put up a window a little, and Mrs. 
 Condrip had replied, without it, that she might 
 do as she liked. She often received such inquiries 
 as if they reflected in a manner on the pure 
 essence of her little ones. . . . Their mother 
 had become for Kate — who took it just for the 
 effect of being their mother — quite a different 
 thing from the mild Marian of the past; Mr. 
 Condrip's widow expansively obscured that im- 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 age. She was little more than a ragged relic, 
 a plain prosa^'c result of him, as if she had some- 
 how been pulled through him as through an ob- 
 stinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and 
 useless and with nothing in her but what he 
 accounted for." 
 
 Not that the passage shows him at his best, but 
 it shows him as at least concerned with the set- 
 ting of his characters. 
 
 It is not worth while to attempt an outline of 
 the story. Those who have done so have disa- 
 greed in essentials. It is impossible to hit off in 
 a few words characters that James has picked out 
 for their very complexity ; and the story counts 
 for little with him as against the business of 
 recording the play of mind. One does not 
 take a watch to pieces merely to tell the 
 time of day ; and with James analysis is the end in 
 itself. 
 
 If the obscurity of the language were due to 
 the idea itself, and if while he tugs at an obsti- 
 nate thought you could be sure it was worth the 
 trouble, there would be no fault to find, but to 
 him one thing seems as good as another when he 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 is mousing around in a mind. It is a form of 
 self-indulgence. He is as pleased with the mo- 
 tives that lead nowhere as with anything else. 
 It is his even emphasis that most misleads. He 
 writes a staccato chronicle of things both great 
 and small, like a constitutional history half made 
 up of the measures that never passed. And in 
 one respect he does not play fairly. He makes 
 his characters read each other's minds from clues 
 that he keeps to himself. To invent an irreverent 
 instance, suppose I were a distinguished author 
 with a psychological bent and wished to represent 
 two young people as preternaturally acute. I 
 might place them alone together and make them 
 talk like this: 
 
 "If " she sparkled. 
 
 "If!" he asked. He had lurched from the meaning 
 for a moment. 
 
 "I might" she repHed abundantly. 
 
 His eye had eaten the meaning — "Me !" he gloriously 
 burst. 
 
 "Precisely," she thrilled. "How splendidly you do 
 understand." 
 
 I, the distinguished author, versed in my own 
 psychology — ^the springs of my own marionettes 
 331 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 — I understand it perfectly. For me there are 
 words a-plenty. But is it fair to you, the 
 reader? 
 
 Nevertheless — and this is the main point about 
 Henry James — by indefinable means and in spite 
 of wearisome prolixity he often succeeds in his 
 darkest books in producing very strange and 
 powerful effects. It is a lucky man who can find 
 a word for them. Things you had supposed in- 
 communicable certainly come your way. These 
 are the times when we are grateful to him for 
 pottering away in his nebulous workshop among 
 the things that are hard to express. Even when 
 he fails we like him for making the attempt. We 
 like him for going his own gait, though he leaves 
 us straggling miles behind. We cannot afford at 
 this time to blame any writer who is a little reck- 
 less of the average mind. 
 
 Consider the case of Browning and all that 
 his lusty independence has done for us. Brown- 
 ing was quite careless of the average mind; he 
 would as lief wreck it. He was careless of any- 
 body else's mind, so bent was he on indulging his 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 own. His question was not, What will you have ? 
 but What do I feel like doing? and readers had 
 to take their chances, some to give him up as too 
 deep, and others to beat their brains for inner 
 meanings where there were none. He liked life 
 so well that he prized its most vapid moments 
 and expressed his mind at its best and at its 
 worst, wrote sometimes as other men drum on win- 
 dow-panes, catalogued a lot of objects he liked 
 the look of, relaxed in verse, ate in it, sometimes 
 slept in it, used it, in short, for so many strange 
 little personal purposes, that reading it some- 
 times seems an intrusion. Hence, he is quite as 
 much a puzzle to the too thoughtful as he is to 
 those who prefer not to think, for a great man's 
 nonsense is sure to drive his commentators mad 
 looking for a message. Browning differed from 
 others not so much in the greatness of his mind as 
 in the fact that he showed more of it. He seems 
 obscure sometimes because people are unprepared 
 for that degree of confidence. Then, there are 
 certain preconceived notions as to the limits of 
 literature, an expectation of large, plain things, 
 333 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 of truth with a door-knob, of smooth, symmetri- 
 cal thoughts, not at all in the shape they come to 
 the mind, but neatly trimmed for others to see 
 when they leave it. No living man understands 
 Browning ; but for that matter, few men under- 
 stand their wives. It is not fatal to enjoyment. 
 People who are perfectly clear to each other are 
 simply keeping things back. Any man would be 
 a mystery if you could see him from the inside, 
 and Browning puzzles us chiefly because we are 
 not accustomed to seeing a mind exposed to view. 
 It is the man's presence, not his message, that we 
 care for in Browning's books ; his zest for every- 
 thing, his best foot and his worst foot, his deep- 
 est feelings and his foolishness, and the tag-ends 
 of his dreams. They are not the greatest poems 
 in the world, but there was the greatest pleasure 
 in the making of them. It is just the place for 
 a writer to go and forget his minor literary 
 duties, the sense of his demanding public, the 
 obligation of the shining phrase, the need of mak- 
 ing editorial cats jump, the standing orders for a 
 jeu d^esprit. 
 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 
 
 It is also the place for a reader to go who is 
 a little weary of the books which are written 
 with such patient regard for the spiritual limita- 
 tions of the public. And part of the obscurity of 
 Henry James springs from the same pleasing 
 and honorable egotism. 
 
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