PREJUDICES

THIRD SERIES'

By H. L. MENCKEN

PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI • NEW YORK • BY

ALFRED-A-KNOPF

r-

COPTEIGHT, 1922, BY ALFRED A. KNOPT, INC.

Published, October, 1922 Second Printing, November, 192%

Third Printing, March, 19*S

Fourth Printing, February, 19%U

Fifth Printing, October, 192k

9

f

t 0

Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., BingJiamton, N. Y.

Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington A Co., New York.

Bound lv the Plimpton Press, 'Norwood, Mass.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA

THE WORKS OF H. L MENCKEN

PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES1 PREJUDICES SECOND SERIES1 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES l PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES A BOOK OF BURLESQUES x A BOOK OF PREFACES1 IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN l * THB AMERICAN LANGUAGE1

THE AMERICAN CREDO

[With Gnrgt Jfan Nathan]

OUT OF PRINT VENTURES INTO VERSE GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS THE ARTIST

A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR A BOOK OF CALUMNY

MEN VS. THE MAN

[With R. R. LaMtntt}

HELIOGABALUS *

I With Mr. Nathan}

EUROPE AFTER 8:15

[With Mr. Nathan and W. B. Wright]

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE1

1 Also Published in England

2 Also Published in Germany in tranilttion

TRANSLATIONS THE ANTICHRIST, BY F. W. NIETZSCHE

NEW YORK: ALFRED • A • KNOPF

PREJUDICES THIRD SERIES

CONTENTS

I ON BEING AN AMERICAN, 9 ^

II HUNEKER: A MEMORY, 65

III FOOTNOTE ON CRITICISM, 84

IV DAS KAPITAL, 105

N/V AD IMAGINEM DEI CREAVIT ILLUM, 120

1. The Life of Man, 120

2. The Anthropomorphic Delusion, 121

3. Meditation on Meditation, 125

4. Man and His Soul1, 131

5. Coda, 132

\/VI STAR-SPANGLED MEN, 133 VII THE POET AND His ART, 146

VIII FIVE MEN AT RANDOM, 171

1. Abraham Lincoln, 171 * '

2. Paul Elmer More, 176 "^

3. Madison Cawein, 179

4. Frank Harris, 182

5. Havelock Ellis, 189

V' IX THE NATURE OF LIBERTY,

>/X THE NOVEL, 201

^ XI THE FORWARD-LOOKER, 213

XII MEMORIAL SERVICE, 232

XIII EDUCATION, 238

CONTENTS

>. XIV TYPES OF MEN, 266

1. The Romantic, 266 *

2. The Skeptic, 266

3. The Believer, 267

4. The Worker, 268 '

5. The Physician, 269'

6. The Scientist, 269'

7. The Business Man, 270

8. The King, 271 -

9. The Average Man, 273 r

10. The Truth-Seeker, 274

11. The Pacifist, 274 '

12. The Relative, 275 *

13. The Friend, 276

XV THE DISMAL SCIENCE, 278 /

XVI MATTERS OF STATE, 289

1. Le Contrat Social, 289 ^

2. On Minorities, 292

XVII REFLECTIONS ON THE DRAMA, 299

•"XVIII ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN, 310 i/

1. To Him That Hath, 310

2. The Venerable Examined, 311

3. Duty, 313

4. Martyrs, 314

5. The Disabled Veteran, 318

6. Patriotism, 319

/XIX SUITE AMERICAINE, 320

1. Aspiration, 320

2. Virtue, 321

3. Eminence, 323

PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

I. ON BEING AN AMERICAN

I

APPARENTLY there are those who begin to find it disagreeable — nay, impossible. Their anguish fills the Liberal weeklies, and every ship that puts out from New York carries a groaning cargo of them, bound for Paris, London, Munich, Rome and way points — anywhere to escape the great curses and atrocities that make life intoler able for them at home. Let me say at once that I find little to cavil at in their basic complaints. In more than one direction, indeed, I probably go a great deal further than even the Young Intellectuals. It is, for example, one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs, reached after an inquiry extending over a score of years and supported by incessant prayer and medita tion, that the government of the United States, in both its legislative arm and its executive arm, is ig norant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting — and

from this judgment I except no more than twenty liv-

9

':-iO • ': PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

'• ' 'ihgV^w^akerjs/ancl.no more than twenty executioners of their laws. It is a belief no less piously cherished that the administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity — and from this judgment I except no more than thirty judges, including two upon the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is another that the foreign policy of the United States — its habit ual manner of dealing with other nations, whether friend or foe — is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable — and from this judgment I consent to no exceptions whatever, either recent or long past. And it is my fourth (and, to avoid too depressing a bill, final) conviction that the American people, tak ing one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Chris tendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and that they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more pol troonish, more ignominious every day.

So far I go with the fugitive Young Intellectuals — and into the Bad Lands beyond. Such, in brief, are the cardinal articles of my political faith, held pas sionately since my admission to citizenship and now growing stronger and stronger as I gradually dis integrate into my component carbon, oxygen, hydro gen, phosphorus, calcium, sodium, nitrogen and iron. This is what I believe and preach, in nomine Domini,

BEING AN AMERICAN 11

Amen. Yet I remain on the dock, wrapped in the flag, when the Young Intellectuals set sail. Yet here I stand, unshaken and undespairing, a loyal and de voted Americano, even a chauvinist, paying taxes without complaint, obeying all laws that are physio logically obeyable, accepting all the searching duties and responsibilities of citizenship unprotestingly^in- vesting the sparse usufructs of my miserable toil in the obligations of the nation,\voiding all commerce with men sworn to overthrow the government, con tributing my mite toward the glory of the national arts and sciences, enriching and embellishing the native language, spurning all lures (and even all in vitations) to get out and stay out — here am I, a bach elor of easy means, forty-two years old, unhampered by debts or issue, able to go wherever I please and to stay as long as I please — here am I, contentedly and even smugly basking beneath the Stars and Stripes, a better citizen, I daresay, and certainly a less mur murous and exigent one, than thousands who/gut the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, andjhold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and Anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays "The Star-Spangled Banner," and believe with the faith of little children that one of Our Boys, taken at random, could dispose in a

12 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

fair fight of ten Englishmen, \ .verity Germans, thirty Frogs, forty Wops, fifty Japs, or a hundred Bolshe- viki.

Well, then, why am I still here? Why am I so complacent (perhaps even to the point of offensive- ness), so free from bile, so little fretting and indig nant, so curiously happy? C Why did I answer only with a few academic "Hear, Hears" when Henry James, Ezra Pound, Harold Stearns and the emigres of/- Greenwich Village issued their successive calls to the corn fed intelligentsia to flee the shambles, escape to fairer lands, throw off the curse forever?) The answer, of course, is to be sought in the nature of happiness, which tempts to metaphysics. But let me keep upon the ground. To me, at least (and I can only follow my own nose) happiness presents itself in an aspect that is tripartite. To be happy (reducing the thing to its elementals) I must be:

a. Well-fed, unbounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.

b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the

masses of my fellow-men.

c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my

taste.

It is my contention that, if this definition be ac cepted, there is no country on the face of the earth wherein a man roughly constituted as I am — a man of my general weaknesses, vanities, appetites, pre-

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 13

idices, and aversions — can be so happy, or even one-half so happy, as he can be in these free and independent states. Going further, I lay down the proposition that it is a sheer physical impossibility for such a man to live in These States and not be happy — that it is as impossible to him as it would be to a schoolboy to weep over the burning down of his school-house. If he says that he isn't happy here, then he either lies or is insane. ^ Here the business of getting a living, particularly since the war brought the loot of all Europe to the national strong-box, is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land — so easy, in fact, that an educated and fore handed man who fails at it must actually make, de liberate efforts to that end. Here the general aver age of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly — the unending procession of govern mental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buf fooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and

14 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, iir> becilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances — is so in ordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday- school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows. A certain s«t*gh of rhetoric may be here. Per haps I yield to words as a chautauqua lecturer yields to them, belaboring and fermenting the hinds with his Message from the New Jerusalem. But funda mentally I am quite as sincere as he is. For example, in the matter of attaining to ease in Zion, of getting a fair share of the national swag, now piled so moun- tainously high. It seems to me, sunk in my Egyp tian night, that the man who fails to do this in the United States to-day is a man who is somehow stupid — -maybe not on the surface, but certainly deep down. (Either he is one who cripples himself un duly, say by setting up a family before he can care for it, or by making a bad bargain for the sale of

his wares, or by concerning himself too. much about

„ . ' ;, 0>l&j;*iS r*-»*MJk

the affairs of other men ; piMse-w-eiie who endeavors

fatuously to sell something that no normal American wants. Whenever I hear a professor of philosophy

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 15

complain that his wife has eloped with some moving- picture actor or bootlegger who can at least feed and clothe her, my natural sympathy for the man is greatly corrupted by contempt for his lack of sense. Would it be regarded as sane and laudable for a man to travel the Soudan trying to sell fountain-pens, or Greenland offering to teach double-entry bookkeep ing or counterpoint r\ Coming closer, would the judi cious pity or laugh at a man who opened a shop for the sale of incunabula in Little Rock, Ark., or who demanded a living in McKeesport, Pa., on the ground that he could read Sumerian? JIn precisely the same way it seems to me to be nonsensical for a man to offer generally some commodity that only a few rare and dubious Americans want, and then weep and beat his breast because he is not patronized *\i One seeking to make a living in a country must pay due regard to the needs and tastes of that country. Here in the United States we have no jobs for grand dukes, fand none for Wirkliche Geheimrate\3*d none for palace eunuchs, and none for masters of the buck- hounds, (and none (any more) for brewery Todsaufer-^and very few for oboe-players, meta physicians, astrophysicists, assyriologists, water- colorists, stylites and epic poets^ There was a time when the Todsaufer served a public need and got an adequate reward, but it is no more.) *' There may come a time when the composer of string

16 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

quartettes is paid as much as a railway conductor, but it is not yet.; /Then why practice such trades — that is, as trades? The man of independent means may venture into them prudently; when he does so, he is seldom molested ; it may even be argued that he performs a public service by adopting them. But the man who has a living to make is simply silly if he goes into them ; he is like a soldier going over the top with a coffin strapped to his back. Let him aban don such puerile vanities, and take to the uplift in stead, as, indeed, thousands of other victims of the industrial system have already done.)/ Let him bear in mind that, whatever its neglect of the humanities and their monks, the Republic has never got half enough bond salesmen, quack doctors, ward leaders, phrenologists, Methodist evangelists, circus clowns, magicians, soldiers, farmers, popular song writers, moonshine distillersftorgers of gin labels^ miae ;jnrdnr3Sli^ inmnin f iim

The rules are set by Omnipotence; the discreet man observes them. Observing them, he is safe beneath the starry bed-tick, in fair weather or foul. The boobus Americanus is a bird that knows no closed season — and if he won't come down to Texas oil stock, or one-night cancer cures, or building lots in Swampshurst, he will always come down to In spiration and Optimism, whether political, theologi cal, pedagogical, literary, or economic.

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 17

The doctrine that it is infra digitatem for an edu cated man to take a hand in the snaring of this goose is one in which I see nothing convincing. It is a doctrine chiefly voiced, I believe, by those who have tried the business and failed. They take refuge be hind the childish notion that there is something hon orable about poverty per se — the Greenwich Village complex. This is nonsense. Poverty may be an unescapable misfortune, but that no more makes it honorable than a cocked eye is made honorable by the same cause. Do I advocate, then, the ceaseless, senseless hogging of money? I do not. All I ad vocate — and praise as virtuous — is the hogging of enough to provide security and ease. Despite all the romantic superstitions to the contrary, the artist cannot do his best work when he is oppressed by un satisfied wants. Nor can the philosopher. Nor can the man of science. The best and clearest thinking of the world is done and the finest art is produced, not by men who are hungry, ragged and harassed, but by men who are well-fed, warm and easy in mind. It is the artist's first duty to his art to achieve that tranquility for himself. Shakespeare tried to achieve it; so did Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Ibsen and Balzac. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schumann and Mendelssohn were born to it. Joseph Conrad, Rich ard Strauss and Anatole France have got it for them selves in our own day. In the older countries, where

18 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

competence is far more general and competition is thus more sharp, the thing is often cruelly diffi cult, and sometimes almost impossible. But in the United States it is absurdly easy, given ordinary luck. Any man with a superior air, the intelligence of a stockbroker, and the resolution of a hat-check girl — in brief, any man who believes in himself enough, and with sufficient cause, to be called a journeyman — can cadge enough money, in this glor ious commonwealth of morons, to make life soft for him.

And if a lining for the purse is thus facilely ob tainable, given a reasonable prudence and resource fulness, then balm for the ego is just as unlaboriously got, given ordinary dignity and decency. Simply to exist, indeed, on the plane of a civilized man is to attain, in the Republic, to a distinction that should be enough for all save the most vain; it is even likely to be too much, as the frequent chal lenges of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the Anti-Saloon League, and other such vigilance committees of the majority testify. Here is a coun try in which all political thought and activity are concentrated upon the scramble for jobs — in which the normal politician, whether he be a President or a village road supervisor, is willing to renounce any principle, however precious to him, and to adopt any lunacy, however offensive to him, in order to keep

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 19

his place at the trough. Go into politics, then, with out seeking or wanting office, and at once you are as conspicuous as a red-haired blackamoor — in fact, a great deal more conspicuous, for red-haired blacka- moors have been seen, but who has ever seen or heard of an American politician, Democrat or Re publican, Socialist or Liberal, Whig or Tory, who did not itch for a job? Again, here is a country in which it is an axiom that a business man shall be a member of a Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of Charles M. Schwab, a reader of the Saturday Eve ning Post, a golfer — in brief, a vegetable. Spend your hours of escape from Geschaft reading Remy de Gourmont or practicing the violoncello, and the local Sunday newspaper will infallibly find you out and hymn the marvel — nay, your banker will sum mon you to discuss your notes, and your rivals will spread the report (probably truthful) that you were pro-German during the war. Yet again, here is a land in which women rule and men are slaves. Train your women to get your slippers for you, and your ill fame will match Galileo's or Darwin's. Once more, here is the Paradise of back-slappers, of democrats, of mixers, of go-getters. Maintain ordinary reserve, and you will arrest instant attention — and have your hand kissed by multitudes who, despite democracy, have all the inferior man's un quenchable desire to grovel and admire.

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Nowhere else in the world is superiority more easily attained or more eagerly admitted. The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus. It admired the literary style of the late Woodrow; it respects the theological passion of Bryan; it venerates J. Pierpont Morgan; it takes Congress seriously; it would be unutterably shocked by the proposition (with proof) that a ma jority of its judges are ignoramuses, and that a respec table minority of them are scoundrels. The manu facture of artificial Durchlauchten, k.k. Hoheiten and even gods goes on feverishly and incessantly ; the will to worship never flags. Ten iron-molders meet in the back-room of a near-beer saloon, organize a lodge of the Noble and Mystic Order of American Rosicru- cians, and elect a wheelwright Supreme Worthy Whimwham; a month later they send a notice to the local newspaper that they have been greatly hon ored by an official visit from that Whimwham, and that they plan to give him a jeweled fob for his watch-chain. The chief national heroes — Lincoln, Lee, and so on — cannot remain mere men. The mysticism of the mediaeval peasantry gets into the communal view of them, and they begin to sprout haloes and wings. As I say, no intrinsic merit — at least, none commensurate with the mob estimate — is needed to come to such august dignities. Everything American is a bit amateurish and child-

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 21

ish, even the national gods. The most conspicuous and respected American in nearly every field of en deavor, saving only the purely commercial (I ex clude even the financial) is a man who would attract little attention in any other country. The leading American critic of literature, after twenty years of diligent exposition of his ideas, has yet to make it clear what he is in favor of, and why. The queen of the haul monde, in almost every American city, is a woman who regards Lord Reading as an aristo crat and her superior, and whose grandfather slept in his underclothes. The leading American musical director, if he went to Leipzig, would be put to pol ishing trombones and copying drum parts. The chief living American military man — the national heir to Frederick, Maryborough, Wellington, Wash ington and Prince Eugene — is a member of the Elks, and proud of it. The leading American philosopher (now dead, with no successor known to the average pedagogue) spent a lifetime erecting an epistemo- logical defense for the national aesthetic maxim: "I don't know nothing about music, but I know what I like." The most eminent statesman the United States has produced since Lincoln was fooled by Arthur James Balfour, and miscalculated his public support by more than 5,000,000 votes. And the current Chief Magistrate of the nation — its defiant bstitute for czar and kaiser — is a small-town

22 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

printer who, when he wishes to enjoy himself in the Executive Mansion, invites in a homeopathic doctor, a Seventh Day Adventist evangelist, and a couple of moving-picture actresses.

All of which may be boiled down to this: that the United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men — that distinction is easy here be cause the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgment, of ordinary competence is so low. No sane man, employing an American plumber to repair a leaky drain, would expect him to do it at the first trial, and in precisely the same way no sane man, observing an American Secretary of State in negotiation with Englishmen and Japs, would expect him to come off better than second best. Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards. The land was peopled, not by the hardy adventurers of legend, but simply by incompetents who could not get on at home, and the lavishness of nature that they found here, the vast ease with which they could get livings, confirmed and augmented their native in competence. No American colonist, even in the worst days of the Indian wars, ever had to face s ^cj hardships as ground down the peasants of Central

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 23

rope during the Hundred Years War, nor even such hardships as oppressed the English lower classes dur ing the century before the Reform Bill of 1832. In most of the colonies, indeed, he seldom saw any In dians at all: the one thing that made life difficult for him was his congenital dunderheadedness. The win ning of the West, so rhetorically celebrated in Amer ican romance, cost the lives of fewer men than the single battle of Tannenberg, and the victory was much easier and surer. The immigrants who have come in since those early days have been, if anything, of even lower grade than their forerunners. The old notion that the United States is peopled by the off spring of brave, idealistic and liberty loving mi norities, who revolted against injustice, bigotry and mediaevalism at home — this notion is fast succumb ing to the alarmed study that has been given of late to the immigration of recent years. The truth is that the majority of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants since the Revolution, like the majority of Anglo-Saxon immigrants before the Revolution, have been, not the superior men of their native lands, but the botched and unfit: Irishmen starving to death in Ire land, Germans unable to weather the Sturm und Drang of the post-Napoleonic reorganization, Italians weed-grown on exhausted soil, Scandinavians run to all bone and no brain, Jews too incompetent to swindle even the barbarous peasants of Russia, Po-

24 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

land and Roumania. Here and there among the im migrants, of course, there may be a bravo, or even a superman — e. g., the ancestors of Volstead, Ponzi, Jack Dempsey, Schwab, Daugherty, Debs, Persh- ing — but the average newcomer is, and always has been simply a poor fish.

Nor is there much soundness in the common as sumption, so beloved of professional idealists and wind-machines, that the people of America constitute "the youngest of the great peoples." The phrase turns up endlessly; the average newspaper editorial writer would be hamstrung if the Postoffice suddenly interdicted it, as it interdicted "the right to rebel" during the war. What gives it a certain specious plausibility is the fact that the American Republic, compared to a few other existing governments, is relatively young. But the American Republic is not necessarily identical with the American people; they might overturn it to-morrow and set up a monarchy, and still remain the same people. The truth is that, as a distinct nation, they go back fully three hundred years, and that even their government is older than that of most other nations, e. g., France, Italy, Ger many, Russia. Moreover, it is absurd to say that there is anything properly describable as youthful- ness in the American outlook. It is not that of young men, but that of old men. All the character istics of senescence are in it: a great distrust of ideas,

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 25

an habitual timorousness, a harsh fidelity to a few fixed beliefs, a touch of mysticism. The average American is a prude and a Methodist under his skin, and the fact is never more evident than when he is trying to disprove it. His vices are not those of a healthy boy, but those of an ancient paralytic escaped from the Greisenheim. If you would penetrate to the causes thereof, simply go down to Ellis Island and look at the next shipload of immigrants*. You will not find the spring of youth in their step ; you will find the shuffling of exhausted men. From such exhausted men the American stock has sprung. It was easier for them to survive here than it was where they came from, but that ease, though it made them feel stronger, did not actually strengthen them. It left them what they were when they came: weary peasants, eager only for the comfortable security of a pig in a sty. Out of that eagerness has issued many of the noblest manifestations of American Kultur: the national hatred of war, the pervasive suspicion of the aims and intents of all other nations, the short way with heretics and disturbers of the peace, the unshakable belief in devils, the implac-v able hostility to every novel idea and point of view. All these ways of thinking are the marks of the peasant — more, of the peasant long ground into the mud of his wallow, and determined at last to stay there — the peasant who has definitely renounced

26 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

any lewd desire he may have ever had to gape at the stars. The habits of mind of this dull, sempi ternal fellah — the oldest man in Christendom — are, with a few modifications, the habits of mind of the American people. The peasant has a great practical cunning, but he is unable to see any further than the next farm. He likes money and knows how to amass property, but his cultural development is but little above that of the domestic animals. He is intensely and cocksurely moral, but his morality and his self-interest are crudely identical. He is emotional and easy to scare, but his imagination cannot grasp an abstraction. He is a violent nation alist and patriot, but he admires rogues in office and always beats the tax-collector if he can. He has immovable opinions about all the great affairs of state, but nine-tenths of them are sheer imbecilities. He is violently jealous of what he conceives to be his rights, but brutally disregardful of the other fellow's. He is religious, but his religion is wholly devoid of beauty and dignity. This man, whether city or country bred, is the normal Americano — the 100 per cent. Methodist, Odd Fellow. Ku Kluxer, and Know Nothing. He exists in all countries, but here alone he rules — here alone his anthropoid fears and rages are accepted gravely as logical ideas, and dissent from them is punished as a sort of public offense. Around every one of his principal

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 27

delusions — of the sacredness of democracy, of the feasibility of sumptuary law, of the incurable sin- fulness of all other peoples, of the menace of ideas, of the corruption lying in all the arts — there is thrown a barrier of taboos, and woe to the anarchist who seeks to break it down!

The multiplication of such taboos is obviously not characteristic of a culture that is moving from a lower plane to a higher — that is, of a culture still in the full glow7 of its youth. It is a sign, rather, of a culture that is slipping downhill — one that is reverting to the most primitive standards and ways of thought. The taboo, indeed, is the trade-mark of the savage, and wherever it exists it is a relentless and effective enemy of civilized enlightenment. The savage is the most meticulously moral of men; there is scarcely an act of his daily life that is not con ditioned by unyielding prohibitions and obligations, most of them logically unintelligible. The mob- man, a savage set amid civilization, cherishes a code of the same draconian kind. He believes firmly that right and wrong are immovable things — that they have an actual and unchangeable existence, and that any challenge of them, by word or act, is a crime against society. And with the concept of wrongness, of course, he always confuses the concept of mere differentness — to him the two are indistinguishable. Anything strange is to be combatted; it is of the

28 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

Devil. The mob-man cannot grasp ideas in their native nakedness. They must be dramatized and personalized for him, and provided with either white wings or forked tails. All discussion of them, to interest him, must take the form of a pursuit and scotching of demons. He cannot think of a heresy without thinking of a heretic to be caught, con demned, and burned. /

The Fathers of the Republic, I am convinced, had a great deal more prevision than even their most romantic worshipers give them credit for. They not only sought to create a governmental machine that would be safe from attack without; they also sought to create one that would be safe from attack within. They invented very ingenious devices for holding the mob in check, for protecting the national polity against its transient and illogical rages, for securing the determination of all the larger matters of state to a concealed but none the less real aristocracy. Nothing could have been further from the intent of Washington, Hamilton and even Jeffer son than that the official doctrines of the nation, in the year 1922, should be identical with the nonsense heard in the chautauqua, from the evangelical pulpit, and on the stump. But Jackson and his merry men broke through the barbed wires thus so carefully strung, and ever since 1825 vox populi has been the true voice of the nation. To-day there is no longer

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 29

any question of statesmanship, in any real sense, in our politics. The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob. A candidate for office, even the 'highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc, or convince it hypocritically that he has done so, while cherish ing reservations injjetto. The result is that only two sorts of men stand any chance whatever of get ting into actual control of affairs — first, glorified mob-men who genuinely believe what the mob be lieves, and secondly, shrewd fellows who are willing to make any sacrifice of conviction and self-respect in order to hold their jobs. One finds perfect examples of the first class in Jackson and Bryan. One finds hundreds of specimens of the second among the pol iticians who got themselves so affectingly converted to Prohibition, and who voted and blubbered for it with flasks in their pockets. Even on the highest planes our politics seems to be incurable mounte- bankish. The same Senators who raised such raucous alarms against the League of Nations voted for the Disarmament Treaty — a far more obvious surrender to English hegemony. And the same Sen ators who pleaded for the League on the ground that its failure would break the heart of the world were eloquently against the treaty. The few men who maintained a consistent course in both cases, voting either for or against both League and treaty, were

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denounced by the newspapers as deliberate marplots, and found their constituents rising against them. To such an extent had the public become accustomed to buncombe that simple honesty was incomprehensible to it, and hence abhorrent!

As I have pointed out in a previous work, this dominance of mob ways of thinking, this pollution of the whole intellectual life of the country by the pre judices and emotions of the rabble, goes unchal lenged because the old landed aristocracy of the colonial era has been engulfed and almost obliterated by the rise of the industrial system, and no new aristocracy has arisen to take its place, and discharge its highly necessary functions. An upper class, of course, exists, and of late it has tended to increase in power, but it is culturally almost indistinguishable from the mob: it lacks absolutely anything even remotely resembling an aristocratic point of view. One searches in vain for any sign of the true Junker spirit in the Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans, Garys, and other such earls and dukes of the plutocracy; their culture, like their aspiration, remains that of the pawnshop. One searches in vain, too for the aloof air of the d9n in the official intelligentsia of the American universities; they are timorous and ortho dox, and constitute a reptile Congregatio de Propa ganda Fide to match Bismarck's Reptilienpresse.

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 31

Everywhere else on earth, despite the rise of democ racy, an organized minority of aristocrats survives from a more spacious day, and if its personnel has de generated and its legal powers have decayed it has at least maintained some vestige of its old independence of spirit, and jealously guarded its old right to be heard without risk of penalty. Even in England, where the peerage has been debauched to the level of a political baptismal fount for Jewish money-lenders and Wesleyan soap-boilers, there is sanctuary for the old order in the two ancient universities, and a linger ing respect for it in the peasantry. But in the United States it was paralyzed by Jackson and got its death blow from Grant, and since then no successor to it has been evolved. Thus there is no organized force to oppose the irrational vagaries of the mob. The legislative and executive arms of the government yield to them without resistance; the judicial arm has begun to yield almost as supinely, particularly when they take the form of witch-hunts; outside the official circle there is no opposition that is even de pendably articulate. The worst excesses go almost without challenge. Discussion, when it is heard at all, is feeble and superficial, and girt about by the taboos that I have mentioned. The clatter about the so-called Ku Klux Klan, two or three years ago, was typical. The astounding program of this organiza-

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tion was discussed in the newspapers for months on end, and a committee of Congress sat in solemn state to investigate it, and yet not a single newspaper or Congressman, so far as I am aware, so much as mentioned the most patent and important fact about it, to wit, that the Ku Klux was, to all intents and pur poses, simply the secular arm of the Methodist Church, and that its methods were no more than phys ical projections of the familiar extravagances of the Anti-Saloon League. The intimate relations between church and Klan, amounting almost to identity, must have been plain to every intelligent American, and yet the taboo upon the realistic consideration of ec clesiastical matters was sufficient to make every public soothsayer disregard it completely.

I often wonder, indeed, if there would be any intellectual life at all in the United States if it were not for the steady importation in bulk of ideas from abroad, and particularly, in late years, from Eng land. What would become of the average American scholar if he could not borrow wholesale from Eng lish scholars? How could an inquisitive youth get beneath the surface of our politics if it were not for such anatomists as Bryce? Who would show our statesmen the dotted lines for their signatures if there were no Balfours and Lloyd-Georges? How could our young professors formulate aesthetic judgments, especially in the field of letters, if it were not for such

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 33

gifted English mentors as Robertson Nicoll, Squire and Glutton-Brock? By what process, finally, would the true style of a visiting card be determined, and the hoflich manner of eating artichokes, if there were no reports from Mayfair? On certain levels this naive subservience must needs irritate everv self- respecting American, and even dismay him./ When he recalls the amazing feats of the English war prop agandists between 1914 and 1917 — and their even more amazing confessions of method since — he is apt to ask himself quite gravely if he belongs to a free nation or to a crown colony. The thing was done openly, shamelessly, contemptuously, cynically, and yet it was a gigantic success. The office of the American Secretary of State, from the end of Bryan's grotesque incumbency to the end of the Wilson ad ministration, was little more than an antechamber of the British Foreign Office. Dr. Wilson himself, in the conduct of his policy, differed only legally from such colonial premiers as Hughes and Smuts. Even after the United States got into the war it was more swagger for a Young American blood to wear the British uniform than the American uniform. No American ever seriously questions an Englishman or Englishwoman of official or even merely fashion able position at home. Lord Birkenhead was ac cepted as a gentleman everywhere in the United States; Mrs. Asquith's almost unbelievable imbecili-

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ties were heard with hushed fascination; even Lady Astor, an American married to an expatriate Ger man-American turned English viscount, was greeted with solemn effusiveness. During the latter part of 1917, when New York swarmed with British military missions, I observed in Town Topics a polite protest against a very significant habit of certain of their gal lant members: that of going to dances wearing spurs, and so macerating the frocks and heels of the fawn ing fair. The protest, it appears, was not voiced by the hosts and hostesses of these singular officers: they would have welcomed their guests in trench boots. It was left to a dubious weekly, and it was made very gingerly.

The spectacle, as I say, has a way of irking the American touched by nationalistic weakness. Ever since the day of Lowell — even since the day of Cooper and Irving — there have been denunciations of it. But however unpleasant it may be, there is no denying that a chain of logical causes lies behind it, and that they are not to be disposed of by objecting to them. The average American of the Anglo-Saxon majority, in truth, is simply a second-rate English man, and so it is no wonder that he is spontaneously servile, despite all his democratic denial of superior ities, to what he conceives to be first-rate Englishmen. He corresponds, roughly, to an English Noncon formist of the better-fed variety, and he shows all the

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 35

familiar characters of the breed. He is truculent and cocksure, and yet he knows how to take off his hat when a bishop of the Establishment passes. He is hot against the dukes, and yet the notice of a con crete duke is a singing in his heart. It seems to me that this inferior Anglo-Saxon is losing his old domi nance in the United States — -that is, biologically But he will keep his cultural primacy for a long, long while, in spite of the overwhelming inrush of men of other races, if only because those newcomers are even more clearly inferior than he is. Nine-tenths of the Italians, for example, who have come to these shores in late years have brought no more of the essential culture of Italy with them than so many horned cat tle would have brought. If they become civilized at all, settling here, it is the civilization of the Anglo- Saxon majority that they acquire, which is to say, the civilization of the English second table. So with the Germans, the Scandinavians, and even the JewTs and Irish. The Germans, taking one with another, are on the cultural level of green-grocers. I have come into contact \vith a great many of them since 1914, some of them of considerable wealth and even of fashionable pretensions. In the whole lot I can think of but a score or two who could name offhand the principal works of Thomas Mann, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Ludwig Thoma or Hugo von Hofmanns- thal. They know much more about Mutt and Jeff

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than they know about Goethe. The Scandinavians are even worse. The majority of them are mere clods, and they are sucked into the Knights of Pythias, the chautauqua and the Methodist Church almost as soon as they land ; it is -by no means a mere accident that the national Prohibition Enforcement Act bears the name of a man theoretically of the blood of Gustavus Vasa, Svend of the Forked Beard, and Eric the Red. The Irish in the United States are scarcely touched by the revival of Irish culture, despite their melodramatic concern with Irish poli tics. During the war they supplied diligent and de pendable agents to the Anglo-Saxon White Terror, and at all times they are very susceptible to political and social bribery. As for the Jews, they change their names to Burton, Thompson and Cecil in order to qualify as true Americans, and when they are ac cepted and rewarded in the national coin they re nounce Moses altogether and get themselves baptized in St. Bartholomew's Church. /

Whenever ideas enter the United States from without they come by way of England. What the London Times says to-day, about Ukranian politics, the revolt in India, a change of ministry in Italy, the character of the King of Norway, the oil situation in Mesopotamia, will be said week after next by the Times of New York, and a month or two later by all

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 37

the other American newspapers. The extent of this control of American opinion by English news mon gers is but little appreciated in the United States, even by professional journalists. Fully four-fifths of all the foreign news that comes to the American newspapers comes through London, and most of the rest is supplied either by Englishmen or by Jews (often American-born) who maintain close relations with the English. During the years 1914-1917 so many English agents got into Germany in the guise of American correspondents — sometimes with the full knowledge of their Anglomaniac American em ployers — that the Germans, just before the United States entered the war, were considering barring American correspondents from their country alto gether. I was in Copenhagen and Basel in 1917, and found both towns — each an important source of war news — full of Jews representing American journals as a side-line to more delicate and con fidential work for the English department of press propaganda. Even to-day a very considerable pro portion of the American correspondents in Europe are strongly under English influences, and in the Far East the proportion is probably still larger. But these men seldom handle really important news. All that is handled from London, and by trustworthy Britons. Such of it as is not cabled directly to the

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American newspapers and press associations is later clipped from English newspapers, and printed as bogus letters or cablegrams.

The American papers accept such very dubious stuff, not chiefly because they are hopelessly stupid or Anglomaniac, but because they find it impossible to engage competent American correspondents. If the native journalists who discuss our domestic politics avoid the fundamentals timorously, then those who venture to discuss foreign politics are scarcely aware of the fundamentals at all. We have simply developed no class of experts in such matters. No man comparable, say to Dr. Dillon, Wickham Steed, Count zu Reventlow or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt exists in the United States. When, in the Summer of 1920, the editors of the Baltimore Sun undertook plans to cover the approaching Disarmament Con ference at Washington in a comprehensive and intel ligent manner, they were forced, willy-nilly, into employing Englishmen to do the work. Such men as Brailsford and By water, writing from London, three thousand miles away, were actually better able to in terpret the work of the conference than American correspondents on the spot, few of whom were capa ble of anything beyond the most trivial gossip. During the whole period of the conference not a pro fessional Washington correspondent — the flower of American political journalism — wrote a single

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 39

article upon the proceedings that got further than their surface aspects. Before the end of the sessions this enforced dependence upon English opinion had an unexpected and significant result. Facing the English and the Japs in an unyielding alliance, the French turned to the American delegation for assist ance. The issue specifically before the conference was one on which American self-interest was obvi ously identical with French self-interest. Never theless, the English had such firm grip upon the machinery of news distribution that they were able, in less than a week, to turn American public opinion against the French, and even to set up an active Francophobia. No American, not even any of the American delegates, was able to cope with their prop aganda. They not only dominated the conference and pushed through a set of treaties that were extrav agantly favorable to England; they even established the doctrine that all opposition to those treaties was immoral!

When Continental ideas, whether in politics, in metaphysics or in the fine arts, penetrate to the United States they nearly always travel by way of England. Emerson did not read Goethe; he read Carlyle. The American people, from the end of 1914 to the end of 1918, did not read first-handed statements of the German case; they read English interpretations of those statements. In London is

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the clearing house and transformer station. There the latest notions from the mainland are sifted out, carefully diluted with English water, and put into neat packages for the Yankee trade. The English not only get a chance to ameliorate or embellish; they also determine very largely what ideas Ameri cans are to hear of at all. Whatever fails to interest them, or is in any way obnoxious to them, is not likely to cross the ocean. This explains why it is that most literate Americans are so densely ignorant of many Continentals who have been celebrated at home for years, for example, Huysmans, Hartleben, VaiMnger, Merezhkovsky, Keyserling, Snoilsky, Mauthner, Altenberg, Heidenstam, Alfred Kerr. It also explains why they so grossly overestimate various third-raters, laughed at at home, for ex ample, Brieux. These fellows simply happen to in terest the English intelligentsia, and are thus palmed off upon the gaping colonists of Yankeedom. In the case of Brieux the hocus-pocus was achieved by one man, George Bernard Shaw, a. Scotch blue-nose dis guised as an Irish patriot and English soothsayer. Shaw, at bottom, has the ideas of a Presbyterian elder, and so the moral frenzy of Brieux enchanted him. Whereupon he retired to his chamber, wrote a flaming Brieuxiad for the American trade, and founded the late vogue of the French Dr. Sylvanus Stall on this side of the ocean.

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 41

This wholesale import and export business in Con tinental fancies is of no little benefit, of course, to the generality of Americans. If it did not exist they would probably never hear of many of the sa lient Continentals at all, for the obvious incompetence of most of the native and resident introducers of in tellectual ambassadors makes them suspicious even of those who, like Boyd and Nathan, are thoroughly competent. To this day there is no American trans lation of the plays of Ibsen; we use the William Archer Scotch-English translations, most of them atrociously bad, but still better than nothing. So with the works of Nietzsche, Anatole France, Georg Brandes, Turgeniev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi^ and other moderns after their kind. I can think of but one important exception: the work of Gerhart Haupt- mann, done into English by and under the super vision of Ludwig Lewisohn. But even here Lewis- ohn used a number of English translations of single plays: the English were still ahead of him, though they stopped half way. He is, in any case, a very extraordinary American, and the Department of Jus tice kept an eye on him during the war. The aver age American professor is far too dull a fellow to undertake so difficult an enterprise. Even when he sports a German Ph.D. one usually finds on exam ination that all he knows about modern German literature is that a Mass of Hofbrau in Munich used

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to cost 27 Pfennig downstairs and 32 Pfennig up stairs. The German universities were formerly very tolerant of foreigners. Many an American, in prep aration for professing at Harvard, spent a couple of years roaming from one to the other of them with out picking up enough German to read the Berliner Tageblatt. Such frauds swarm in all our lesser universities, and many of them, during the war, became eminent authorities upon the crimes of Nietzsche and the errors of Treitschke,

In rainy weather, when my old wounds ache and the four humors do battle in my spleen, I often find myself speculating sourly as to the future of the Republic. Native opinion, of course, is to the effect that it will be secure and glorious; the superstition that progress must always be upward and onward will not down ; in virulence and popularity it matches the superstition that money can accomplish anything. But this view is not shared by most reflective for eigners, as any one may find out by looking into such a book as Ferdinand Kurnberger's "Der Ameri- •kamude," Sholom Asch's "America," Ernest von Wolzogen's "Ein Dichter in Dollarica," W. L. George's "Hail, Columbia!", Annalise Schmidt's "Der Amerikanische Mensch" or Sienkiewicz's "After Bread," or by hearkening unto the confi dences, if obtainable, of such returned immigrants

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 43

as Georges Clemenceau, Knut Hamsun, George San- tayana, Clemens von Pirquet, John Masefield and Maxim Gorky, and, via the ouija board, Antonin Dvorak, Frank Wedekind and Edwin Klebs. The American Republic, as nations go, has led a safe and easy life, with no serious enemies to menace it, either within or without, and no grim struggle with want. Getting a living here has always been easier than anywhere else in Christendom; getting a secure foothold has been possible to whole classes of men who would have remained submerged in Europe, as the character- of our plutocracy, and no less of our intelligentsia so brilliantly shows. The American people have never had to face such titanic assults as those suffered by the people of Holland, Poland and half a dozen other little countries; they have not lived with a ring of powerful and unconscion able enemies about them, as the Germans have lived since the Middle Ages; they have not been torn by class wars, as the French, the Spaniards and the Rus sians have been torn; they have not thrown their strength into far-flung and exhausting colonial enter prises, like the English. All their foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.

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Even the Civil War, compared to the larger European conflicts since the invention of gunpowder, was trivia] in its character and transient in its effects. The pop ulation of the United States, when it began, was about 31,500,000 — say 10 per cent, under the population of France in 1914. But after four years of struggle, the number of men killed in action or dead of wounds, in the two armies, came but 200,000 — probably little more than a sixth of the total losses of France be tween 1914 and 1918. Nor was there any very ex tensive destruction of property. In all save a small area in the North there was none at all, and even in the South only a few towns of any importance were destroyed. The average Northerner passed through the four years scarcely aware, save by report, that a war was going on. In the South the breath of Mars blew more hotly, but even there large numbers of men escaped service, and the general hardship everywhere fell a great deal short of the hardships suffered by the Belgians, the French of the North, the Germans of East Prussia, and the Serbians and Rumanians in the World War. The agonies of the South have been much exaggerated in popular ro mance; they were probably more severe during Recon struction, when they were chiefly psychical, than they were during the actual war. Certainly General Rob ert E. Lee was in a favorable position to estimate the military achievement of the Confederacy. Well,

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Lee was of the opinion that his army was very badly supported by the civil population, and that its final disaster was largely due to that ineffective support. Coming down to the time of the World War, one finds precious few signs that the American people, facing an antagonist of equal strength and with both hands free, could be relied upon to give a creditable account of themselves. The American share in that great struggle, in fact, was marked by poltroonery almost as conspicuously as it was marked by knavery. Let us consider briefly what the nation did. For a few months it viewed the struggle idly and unintel- ligently, as a yokel might stare at a sword-swallower at a county fair. Then, seeing a chance to profit, it undertook with sudden alacrity the ghoulish office of Kriegslieferant. One of the contestants being de barred, by the chances of war, from buying, it de voted its whole energies, for two years, to purveying to the other. Meanwhile, it made every effort to aid its customer by lending him the cloak of its neutrality — that is, by demanding all the privileges of a neutral and yet carrying on a stupendous whole sale effort to promote the war. On the official side, this neutrality was fraudulent from the start, as the revelations of Mr. Tumulty have since demon strated; popularly it became more and more fraudu lent as the debts of the customer contestant piled up, and it became more and more apparent — a fact dili-

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gently made known by his partisans — that they would be worthless if he failed to win. Then, in the end, covert aid was transformed into overt aid. And under what gallant conditions ! In brief, there stood a nation of 65,000,000 people, which, without effec tive allies, had just closed two and a half years of homeric conflict by completely defeating an enemy state of 135,000,000 and two lesser ones of more than 10,000,000 together, and now stood at bay be fore a combination of at least 140,000,000. Upon this battle-scarred and war-weary foe the Republic of 100,000,000 freemen now flung itself, so lifting the odds to 4 to 1. And after a year and a half more of struggle it emerged triumphant — a knightly victor surely!

There is no need to rehearse the astounding and un precedented swinishness that accompanied this glo rious business — the colossal waste of public money, the savage persecution of all opponents and critics of the war, the open bribery of labor, the half -insane reviling of the enemy, the manufacture of false news, the knavish robbery of enemy civilians, the inces sant spy hunts, the floating of public loans by a proc ess of blackmail, the degradation of the Red Cross to partisan uses, the complete abandonment of all decency, decorum and self-respect. The facts must be remembered with shame by every civilized Amer ican; lest they be forgotten by the generations of the

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 47

future I am even now engaged with collaborators upon an exhaustive record of them, in twenty vol umes folio. More important to the present purpose are two things that are apt to be overlooked, the first of which is the capital fact that the war was "sold" to the American people, as the phrase has it, not by appealing to their courage, but by appealing to their cowardice — in brief, by adopting the assumption that they were not warlike at all, and certainly not gallant and chivalrous, but merely craven and fear ful. The first selling point of the proponents of American participation was the contention that the Germans, with gigantic wars still raging on both fronts, were preparing to invade the United States, burn down all the towns, murder all the men, and carry off all the women — that their victory would bring staggering and irresistible reprisals for the American violation of the duties of a neutral. The second selling point was that the entrance of the United States would end the war almost instantly — that the Germans would be so overwhelmingly out numbered, in men and guns, that it would be impos sible for them to make any effective defense — above all, that it would be impossible for them to inflict any serious damage upon their new foes. Neither argument, it must be plain, showed the slightest be lief in the warlike skill and courage of the American people. Both were grounded upon the frank theory

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that the only way to make the mob fight was to scare it half to death, and then show it a way to fight with out risk, to stab a helpless antagonist in the back. And both were mellowed and reenforced by the hint that such a noble assault, beside being safe, would also be extremely profitable — that it would convert very dubious debts into very good debts, and dispose forever of a diligent and dangerous com petitor for trade, especially in Latin America. All the idealist nonsense emitted by Dr. Wilson and com pany was simply icing on the cake. Most of it was abandoned as soon as the bullets began to fly, and the rest consisted simply of meaningless words — the idiotic babbling of a Presbyterian evangelist turned prophet and seer.

The other thing that needs to be remembered is the permanent effect of so dishonest and cowardly a business upon the national character, already far too much inclined toward easy ventures and long odds. Somewhere in his diaries Wilfrid Scawen Blunt speaks of the marked debasement that showed itself in the English spirit after the brutal robbery and assassination of the South African Republics. The heroes that the mob followed after Mafeking Day were far inferior to the heroes that it had followed in the days before the war. The Eng lish gentleman began to disappear from public life, and in his place appeared a rabble-rousing bounder

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obviously almost identical with the American pro fessional politician — the Lloyd-George, Chamber lain, F. E. Smith, Isaacs-Reading, Churchill, Bottom- ley, Northcliffe type. Worse, old ideals went with old heroes. Personal freedom and strict legality, says Blunt, vanished from the English tables of the law, and there was a shift of the social and political center of gravity to a lower plane. Precisely the same effect is now visible in the United States. The overwhelming majority of conscripts went into the army unwillingly, and once there they were de bauched by the twin forces of the official propaganda that I have mentioned and a harsh, unintelligent dis cipline. The first made them almost incapable of soldierly thought and conduct; the second converted them into cringing goose-steppers. The consequences display themselves in the amazing activities of the American Legion, and in the rise of such correlative organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. It is impossible to fit any reasonable concept of the soldierly into the familiar proceedings of the Legion. Its members conduct themselves like a gang of Methodist vice- crusaders on the loose, or a Southern lynching party. They are forever discovering preposterous burglars under the national bed, and they advance to the attack, not gallantly and at fair odds, but cravenly and in overwhelming force. Some of their enter prises, to be set forth at length in the record I

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have mentioned, have been of almost unbelievable baseness — the mobbing of harmless Socialists, the prohibition of concerts by musicians of enemy na tionality, the mutilation of cows designed for ship ment abroad to feed starving children, the roughing of women, service as strike-breakers, the persecution of helpless foreigners, regardless of nationality.

During the last few months of the war, when stories of the tyrannical ill-usage of conscripts began to filter back to the United States, it was predicted that they would demand the punishment of the guilty when they got home, and that if it was not promptly forthcoming they would take it into their own hands. It was predicted, too, that they would array them selves against the excesses of Palmer, Burleson and company, and insist upon a restoration of that dem ocratic freedom for which they had theoretically fought. But they actually did none of these things. So far as I know, not a single martinet of a lieuten ant or captain has been manhandled by his late vic tims; the most they have done has been to appeal to Congress for revenge and damages. Nor have they thrown their influence against the mediaeval des potism which grew up at home during the war; on the contrary, they have supported it actively, and if it has lessened since 1919 the change has been wrought without their aid and in spite of their opposition. In sum, they show all the stigmata of inferior men

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•whose natural inferiority has been made worse by oppression. Their chief organization is dominated by shrewd ex-officers who operate it to their own ends — politicians in search of jobs, Chamber of Commerce witch-hunters, and other such vermin. It seems to be wholly devoid of patriotism, courage, or sense. Nothing quite resembling it existed in the country before the war, not even in the South. There is nothing like it anywhere else on earth. It is a typical product of two years of heroic effort to arouse and capitalize the worst instincts of the mob, and it symbolizes very dramatically the ill effects of that effort upon the general American character.

Would men so degraded in gallantry and honor, so completely purged of all the military virtues, so submerged in baseness of spirit — would such pitiful caricatures of soldiers offer the necessary resistance to a public enemy who was equal, or perhaps superior in men and resources, and who came on with confidence, daring and resolution — say England sup ported by Germany as Kriegslieferant and with her inevitable swarms of Continental allies, or Japan with the Asiatic hordes behind her? Against the best opinion of the chatauquas, of Congress and of the patriotic press I presume to doubt it. It seems to me quite certain, indeed, that an American army fairly representing the American people, if it ever meets another army of anything remotely resembling

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like strength, will be defeated, and that defeat will be indistinguishable from rout. I believe that, at any odds less than two to one, even the exhausted German army of 1918 would have defeated it, and in this view, I think, I am joined by many men whose military judgment is far better than mine — particu larly by many French officers. /The changes in the American character since the Civil War, due partly to the wearing out of the old Anglo-Saxon stock, in ferior to begin with, and partly to the infusion of the worst elements of other stocks, have surely not made for the fostering of the military virtues. The old cool head is gone, and the old dogged way with difficulties. The typical American of to-day has lost all the love of liberty that his forefathers had, and all their distrust of emotion, and pride in self-reli ance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts ; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word-mongers, up- lifters. I do not believe that such a faint-hearted and inflammatory fellow, shoved into a war demand ing every resource of courage, ingenuity and perti nacity, would give a good account of himself. He is fit for lynching-bees and heretic-hunts, but he is not fit for tight corners and desperate odds.

Nevertheless, his docility and pusillanimity may be overestimated, and sometimes I think that they are overestimated by his present masters. They assume that there is absolutely no limit to his capacity for be-

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 53

ing put on and knocked about — that he will submit to any invasion of his freedom and dignity, however outrageous, so long as it is depicted in melodious terms. He permitted the late war to be "sold" to him by the methods of the grind-shop auctioneer. He submitted to conscription without any of the resist ance shown by his brother democrats of Canada and Australia. He got no further than academic pro tests against the brutal usage he had to face in the army. He came home and found Prohibition foisted on him, and contented himself with a few feeble ob jurgations. He is a pliant slave of capitalism, and ever ready to help it put down fellow-slaves who venture to revolt. But this very weakness, this very credulity and poverty of spirit, on some easily con ceivable to-morrow, may convert him into a rebel of a peculiarly insane kind, and so beset the Republic from within with difficulties quite as formidable as those which threaten to afflict it from without. What Mr. James N. Wood calls the corsair of democracy — that is, the professional mob-master, the merchant of delusions, the pumper-up of popular fears and rages — is still content to work for capitalism, and cap italism knows how to reward him to his taste. He is the eloquent statesman, the patriotic editor, the fount of inspiration, the prancing milch-cow of op timism. He becomes public leader, Governor, Sen ator, President. He is Billy Sunday, Cyrus K. Cur-

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tis, Dr. Frank Crane, Charles E. Hughes, Taft, Wil son, Cal Coolidge, General Wood, Harding. His, perhaps, is the best of trades under democracy — but it has its temptations ! Let us try to picture a master corsair, thoroughly adept at pulling the mob nose, who suddenly bethought himself of that Pepin the Short who found himself mayor of the palace and made himself King of the Franks. There were light nings along that horizon in the days of Roosevelt; there were thunder growls when Bryan emerged from the Nebraska steppes. On some great day of fate, as yet unrevealed by the gods, such a professor of the central democratic science may throw off his em ployers and set up a business for himself. When that day comes there will be plenty of excuse for black type on the. front pages of the newspapers.

I incline to think that military disaster will give him his inspiration and his opportunity — that he will take the form, so dear to democracies, of a man on horseback. The chances are bad to-day simply be cause the mob is relatively comfortable — because capitalism has been able to give it relative ease and plenty of food in return for its docility. Genuine poverty is very rare in the United States, and actual hardship is almost unknown. There are times when the proletariat is short of phonograph records, silk shirts and movie tickets, but there are very few times when it is short of nourishment. Even during the

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 55

most severe business depression, with hundreds of thousands out of work, most of these apparent sufferers, if they are willing, are able to get livings outside their trades. The cities may be choked with idle men, but the country is nearly always short of labor. And if all other resources fail, there are always public agencies to feed the hungry: capital ism is careful to keep them from despair. No Amer ican knows what it means to live as millions of Europeans lived during the war and have lived, in some places, since: with the loaves of the baker re duced to half size and no meat at all in the meatshop. But the time may come and it may not be far off. A national military disaster would dis organize all industry in the United States, already sufficiently wasteful and chaotic, and introduce the American people, for the first time in their history, to genuine want — and capital would be unable to relieve them. The day of such disaster will bring the savior foreordained. The slaves will follow him, their eyes fixed ecstatically upon the newest New Jerusalem. Men bred to respond automatically to shibboleths will respond to this worst and most in sane one. Bolshevism, said General Foch, is a disease of defeated nations.

But do not misunderstand me: I predict no revolu tion in the grand manner, no melodramatic collapse of capitalism, no repetition of what has gone on in

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Russia. The American proletarian is not brave and romantic enough for that; to do him simple justice, he is not silly enough. Capitalism, in the long run, will win in the United States, if only for the reason that every American hopes to be a capitalist before he dies. Its roots go down to the deepest, darkest levels of the national soil; in all its characters, and particularly in its antipathy to the dreams of man, it is thoroughly American. To-day it seems to be im movably secure, given continued peace and plenty, and not all the demagogues in the land, consecrating themselves desperately to the one holy purpose, could shake it. Only a cataclysm will ever do that. But is a cataclysm conceivable? Isn't the United States the richest nation ever heard of in history, and isn't it a fact that modern wars are won by money? It is not a fact. Wars are won to-day, as in Napoleon's day, by the largest battalions, and the largest battalions, in the next great struggle, may not be on the side of the Republic. The usuri ous profits it wrung from the last war are as tempt ing as negotiable securities hung on the wash-line, as pre-Prohibition Scotch stored in open cellars. Its knavish ways with friends and foes alike have left it only foes. It is plunging ill-equipped into a com petition for a living in the world that will be to the death. And the late Disarmament Conference left it almost ham-strung. Before the conference it had

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 57

the Pacific in its grip, and with the Pacific in its grip it might have parleyed for a fair half of the Atlantic. But when the Japs and the English had finished their operations upon the Feather Duster, Popinjay Lodge, Master-Mind Root, Vacuum Underwood, young Teddy Roosevelt and the rest of their so-*willing dupes there was apparent a baleful change. The Republic is ex tremely insecure to-day on both fronts, and it will be more insecure to-morrow. And it has no friends. However, as I say, I do not fear for capitalism. It will weather the storm, and no doubt it will be the stronger for it afterward. The inferior man hates it, but there is too much envy mixed with his hatred, in the land of the theoretically free, for him to want to destroy it utterly, or even to wound it in curably. He struggles against it now, but always wistfully, always with a sneaking respect. On the day of Armageddon he may attempt a more violent onslaught. But in 'the long run he will be beaten. In the long run the corsairs will sell him out, and hand him over to his enemy. Perhaps — who knows? — the combat may raise that enemy to genuine strength and dignity. Out of it may come the superman.

All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements

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from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clown ing which tire me most quidkly — for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut poll- tique, the taking of politics seriously — and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me un ceasingly — for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven. We have clowns in constant practice among us who are. as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic — and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds. Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness — things that seem devoid of exhilarating amusement by their very nature — are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the mid riff almost to breaking. I cite an example: the wor ship of God. Everywhere else on earth it is car-

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 59

ried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in Eng land, of course, the bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at them and enjoy them. Now come home. Here we not only have bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser spe cialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery — tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fan tastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality. Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introduc ing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind-pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are traveling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn — stupendous masters of theological imbecility, con trivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition — Bryan, Sunday, and their like. These are the eminences of the American Sacred College. I delight in them. Their proceedings make me a happier American.

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Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic — a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sgan- arelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook — the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceiv able? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least in telligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole •combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum powder, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this ele vation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that nowhere else on this dis reputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness. Two experiences are in point. During the Harding-Cox combat of bladders an article of mine, dealing with some of its more melodramatic phases, was translated into German and reprinted by a Berlin paper. At the head of it the

ON BEING AN AMERICAN 61

editor was careful to insert a preface explaining to his readers, but recently delivered to democracy, that such contests were not taken seriously by intelligent Americans, and warning them solemnly against get ting into sweats over politics. At about the same time I had dinner with an Englishman. From cock tails to bromo seltzer he bewailed the political lassi tude of the English populace — its growing indiffer ence to the whole partisan harliquinade. Here were two typical foreign attitudes: the Germans were in danger of making politics too harsh and implacable, and the English were in danger of forgetting politics altogether. Both attitudes, it must be plain, make for bad shows. Observing a German campaign, one is uncomfortably harassed and stirred up; ob serving an English campaign (at least in times of peace), one falls asleep. In the United States the thing is done better. Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordi nate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.

But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to com fort, above all, to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoon-

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ery never stops. What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines that any or all of the carnal joys that it combats. Always, when I contemplate an uplift er at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire, in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comedian, rushed to her aid. As he stooped pain fully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Re public fit for Y. M. C. A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of inten tions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am naturally sinful, and such spec tacles caress me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei. As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps to get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Heureux serez-vous, lorsquon vous outragera, quon vous persecute™, and so on. As for me, it makes me

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a more contented man, and hence a better citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.

That cost, it seems to me is very moderate. Taxes in the United States are not actually high. I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in ihe White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that it costs $3 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a girl's arm. The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record, about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing. For $4 less than nothing I am thus en tertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers. Col. George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler free. Finally, there is young Teddy Roose-

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velt, the naval expert. Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a month. More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as naval expert, and secondly as a -walk ing attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition. We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human equality — and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an ab surdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach. Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy — here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty!

II. HUNEKER: A MEMORY

THERE was a stimulating aliveness about him always, an air of living eagerly and a bit recklessly, a sort of defiant resiliency. In his very frame and form something provocative showed itself — an insolent singularity, obvious to even the most careless glance. That Caligukm pro file of his was more than simply unusual in a free republic, consecrated to good works; to a respectable American, encountering it in the lobby of the Metro politan or in the smoke-room of a Doppelschrauben- schnellpostdampfer, it must have suggested inevitably the dark enterprises and illicit metaphysics of a Heliogabalus. More, there was always something rakish and defiant about his hat — it was too white, or it curled in the wrong way, or a feather peeped from the band — , and a hint of antinomianism in his cravat. Yet more, he ran to exotic tastes in eating and drink ing, preferring occult goulashes and risi-bisis to hon est American steaks, and great floods of Pilsner to the harsh beverages of God-fearing men. Finally, there was his talk, that cataract of sublime trivialities : gos sip lifted to the plane of the gods, the unmentionable

65

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bedizened with an astounding importance, and even profundity.

In his early days, when he performed the tonal and carnal prodigies that he liked to talk of afterward, I was at nurse, and too young to have any traffic with him. When I encountered him at last he was in the high flush of the middle years, and had already be come a tradition in the little world that critics in habit. We sat down to luncheon at one o'clock; I think it must have been at Luchow's, his favorite refuge and rostrum to the end. At six, when I had to go, the waiter was hauling in his tenth (or was it twentieth?) Seidel of Pilsner, and he was bringing to a close prestissimo the most amazing monologue that these ears (up to that time) had ever funnelled into this consciousness. What a stew, indeed! Berlioz and the question of the clang-tint of the viola, the psychopathological causes of the suicide of Tschai- kowsky, why .Nietzsche had to leave Sils Maria be tween days in 1887, the echoes of Flaubert in Joseph Conrad (then but newly dawned), the precise topog raphy of the warts of Liszt, George Bernard Shaw's heroic but vain struggles to throw off Presbyterianism, how Frau Cosima saved Wagner from the libidinous Swedish baroness, what to drink when playing Chopin, what Cezanne thought of his disciples, the defects in the structure of "Sister Carrie," Anton Seidl and the musical union, the complex love affairs

HUNEKER: A MEMORY 67

of Gounod, the early days of David Belasco, the varying talents and idiosyncrasies of Lillian Russell's earlier husbands, whether a girl educated at Vassar could ever really learn to love, the exact composition of chicken paprika, the correct tempo of the Vienna waltz, the style of William Dean Howells, what George Moore said about German bathrooms, the true inwardness of the affair between D'Annunzio and Duse, the origin of the theory that all oboe players are crazy, why Lowenbrau survived expor tation better than Hofbrau, Ibsen's loathing of Nor wegians, the best remedy for Rhine wine Kotzenjam- mer, how to play Brahms, the degeneration of the Bal Bullier, the sheer physical impossibility of getting Dvorak drunk, the genuine last words of Walt Whit man. . . .

I left in a sort of fever, and it was a couple of days later before I began to sort out my impressions, and formulate a coherent image. Was the man al lusive in his books — so allusive that popular report credited him with the actual manufacture of author ities? Then he was ten times as allusive in his dis course — a veritable geyser of unfamiliar names, shocking epigrams in strange tongues, unearthly phi losophies out of the backwaters of Scandinavia, Transylvania, Bulgaria, the Basque country, the Ukraine. And did he, in his criticism, pass facilely from the author to die man, and from the man to his

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wife, and to the wives of his friends? Then at the Biertisch he began long beyond the point where the last honest wife gives up the ghost, and so, full tilt, ran into such complexities of adultery that a plain sinner could scarcely follow him. I try to give you, ineptly and grotesquely, some notion of the talk of the man, but I must fail inevitably. It was, in brief, chaos, and chaos cannot be described. But it was chaos made to gleam and corruscate with every de vice of the seven arts — chaos drenched in all the colors imaginable, chaos scored for an orchestra which made the great band of Berlioz seem like a fife and drum corps. One night a few months before the war, I sat in the Paris Opera House listening to the first performance of Richard Strauss's "Josef's Leg end," with Strauss himself conducting. On the stage there was a riot of hues that swung the eyes 'round and 'round in a crazy mazurka ; in the orchestra there were such volleys and explosions of tone that the ears (I fall into a Hunekeran trope) began to go pale and clammy with surgical shock. Suddenly, above all the uproar, a piccolo launched into a new and saucy tune — in an unrelated key! . . . Instantly and quite naturally, I thought of the incomparable James. When he gave a show at Liichow's he never forgot that anarchistic passage for the piccolo.

I observe a tendency since his death to estimate him in terms of the content of his books. Even Frank

HVNEKER: A MEMORY 69

Harris, who certainly should know better, goes there for the facts about him. Nothing could do him worse injustice. In those books, of course, there is a great deal of perfectly sound stuff; the wonder is, in truth, that so much of it holds up so well to-day — for example, the essays on Strauss, on Brahms and on Nietzsche, and the whole volume on Chopin. But the real Huneker never got himself formally between covers, if one forgets "Old Fogy" and parts of "Painted Veils." The volumes of his regular canon are made up, in the main, of articles written for the more intellectual magazines and newspapers of their era, and they are full of a conscious striving to qual ify for respectable company. Huneker, always cu riously modest, never got over the notion that it was a singular honor for a man such as he — a mere diurnal scribbler, innocent of academic robes — to be pub lished by so austere a publisher as Scribner. More than once, anchored at the beer-table, we discussed the matter at length, I always arguing that all the honor was enjoyed by Scribner. But Huneker, I believe in all sincerity, would not have it so, any more than he would have it that he was a better music critic than his two colleagues, the pedantic Krehbiel and the nonsensical Finck. This illogical modesty, of course, had its limits; it made him cautious about expressing himself, but it seldom led him into down right assumptions of false personality. Nowhere in

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all his books will you find him doing the things that every right-thinking Anglo-Saxon critic is supposed to do — the Middleton Murry, Paul Elmer More, Glutton- Brock sort of puerility — solemn essays on Coleridge and Addison, abysmal discussions of the relative merits of Schumann and Mendelssohn, horrible treatises upon the relations of Goethe to the Romantic Movement, dull scratchings in a hundred such ex hausted and sterile fields. Such enterprises were not for Huneker; he kept himself out of that black coat. But I am convinced that he always had his own raiment pressed carefully before he left Liichow's for the temple of Athene — and maybe changed cravats, and put on a boiled shirt, and took the feather out of his hat. The simon-pure Huneker, the Huneker who was the true essence and prime motor of the more courtly Huneker — remained behind. This real Hun eker survives in conversations that still haunt the rafters of the beer-halls of two continents, and in a vast mass of newspaper impromptus, thrown off too hastily to be reduced to complete decorum, and in two books that stand outside the official canon, and yet contain the man himself as not even "Iconoclasts" or the Chopin book contains him, to wit, the "Old Fogy" aforesaid and the "Painted Veils" of his last year. Both were published, so to speak, out of the back door — the former by a music publisher in Philadel phia and the latter in a small and expensive edition

HUNEKER: A MEMORY 71

for the admittedly damned. There is a chapter in "Painted Veils" that is Huneker to every last hitch of the shoulders and twinkle of the eye — the chapter in which the hero soliloquizes on art, life, immor tality, and women — especially women. And there are half a dozen chapters in "Old Fogy" — superfici ally buffoonery, but how penetrating! how gor geously flavored! how learned! — that come com pletely up to the same high specification. If I had to choose one Huneker book and give up all the others, I'd choose "Old Fogy" instantly. In it Huneker is utterly himself. In it the last trace of the pedagogue vanishes. Art is no longer, even by implication, a device for improving the mind. It is wholly a magnificent adventure.

That notion of it is what Huneker brought into American criticism, and it is for that bringing that he will be remembered. No other critic of his gen eration had a tenth of his influence. Almost single- handed he overthrew the aesthetic theory that had flourished in the United States since the death of Poe, and set up an utterly contrary aesthetic theory in its place. If the younger men of to-day have emancipated themselves from the Puritan aesthetic, if the schoolmaster is now palpably on the defensive, and no longer the unchallenged assassin of the fine arts that he once was, if he has already begun to compromise somewhat absurdly with new and

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sounder ideas, and even to lift his voice in artificial hosannahs, then Huneker certainly deserves all the credit for the change. What he brought back from Paris was precisely the thing that was most suspected in the America of those days: the capacity for gusto. Huneker had that capacity in a degree unmatched by any other critic. When his soul went adventuring among masterpieces it did not go in Sunday broad cloth; it went with vine leaves in its hair. The rest of the appraisers and criers-up — even Howells, with all his humor — could never quite rid themselves of the professorial manner. When they praised it was always with some hint of ethical, or, at all events, of cultural purpose; when tkey condemned that purpose was even plainer. The arts, to them, con stituted a sort of school for the psyche ; their aim was to discipline and mellow the spirit. But to Huneker their one aim was always to make the spirit glad — to set it, in Nietzsche's phrase, to dancing with arms and legs. He had absolutely no feeling for extra- aesthetic valuations. If a work of art that stood before him was honest, if it was original, if it was. beautiful and thoroughly alive, then he was for it to his last corpuscle. What if it violated all the accepted canons? Then let the accepted canons go hang! What if it lacked all purpose to improve and lift up? Then so much the better! What if it shocked all right-feeling men, and made them blush

HUNEKER: A MEMORY 73

and tremble? Then damn all men of right feeling forevermore.

With this ethical atheism, so strange in the United States -and so abhorrent to most Americans, there went something that was probably also part of the loot of Paris: an insatiable curiosity about the artist as man. This curiosity was responsible for two of Huneker's salient characters: his habit of mixing even the most serious criticism with cynical and often scandalous gossip, and his pervasive foreignness. I believe that it is almost literally true to say that he could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress, or at all events a good photograph of her. He thought of Wagner, not alone in terms of melody and harmony, but also in terms of the Tribschen idyl and the Bayreuth tragi comedy. Go through his books and you will see how often he was fascinated by mere eccentricity of personality. I doubt that even Huysmans, had he been a respectable French Huguenot, would have in terested him; certainly his enthusiasm for Verlaine, Villiers de 1'Isle Adam and other such fantastic fish was centered upon the men quite as much as upon the artists. His foreignness, so often urged against him by defenders of the national tradition, was grounded largely on the fact that such eccentric personalities were rare in the Republic — rare, and well watched

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by the PolizeL When one bobbed up, he was alert at once — even though the newcomer was only a Roosevelt. The rest of the American people he dis missed as a horde of slaves, goose-steppers, cads, Methodists; he could not imagine one of them be- % coming a first-rate artist, save by a miracle. Even the American executant was under his suspicion, for he knew very well that playing the fiddle was a great deal more than scraping four strings of copper and catgut with a switch from a horse's tail. What he asked himself was how a man could play Bach decently, and then, after playing, go from the hall to a soda-fountain, or a political meeting, or a lecture at the Harvard Club. Overseas there was a better air for artists, and overseas Huneker looked for them.

These fundamental theories of his, of course, had their defects. They were a bit too simple, and often very much too hospitable. Huneker, clinging to them, certainly did his share of whooping for the sort of revolutionist who is here to-day and gone tomorrow; he was fugleman, in his time, for more than one cause that was lost almost as soon as it was stated. More, his prejudices made him somewhat anaesthetic, at times, to the new men who were not brilliant in color but respectably drab, and who tried to do their work within the law. Particularly in his later years, when the old gusto began to die out

HUNEKER: A MEMORY 75

and all that remained of it was habit, he was apt to go chasing after strange birds and so miss seeing the elephants go by. I could put together a very pretty list of frauds that he praised. I could concoct another list of genuine arrives that he overlooked. But all that is merely saying that there were human limits to him; the professors, on their side, have sinned far worse, and in both directions. Looking back over the whole of his work, one must needs be amazed by the general soundness of his judgments. He discerned, in the main, what was good and he described it in terms that were seldom bettered after ward. His successive heroes, always under fire when he first championed them, almost invariably moved to secure ground and became solid men, challenged by no one save fools — Ibsen, Nietzsche, Brahms, Strauss, -Cezanne, Stirner, Synge, the Russian com posers, the Russian novelists. He did for this West ern world what Georg Brandes was doing for Continental Europe — sorting out the new comers with sharp eyes, and giving mighty lifts to those who deserved it. Brandes did it in terms of the old academic bombast; he was never more the professor than when he was arguing for some hobgoblin of the professors. But Huneker did it with verve and grace; he made it, not schoolmastering, but a glorious deliverance from schoolmastering. As I say, his influence was enormous. The fine arts,

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at his touch, shed all their Anglo-American lugu- briousness, and became provocative and joyous. The spirit of senility got out of them and the spirit of youth got into them. His criticism, for all its French basis, was thoroughly American — vastly more American, in fact, than the New England ponder osity that it displaced. Though he was an East erner and a cockney of the cockneys, he picked up some of the Western spaciousness that showed itself in Mark Twain. And all the young men followed him.

A good many of them, I daresay, followed him so ardently that they got a good distance ahead of him, and often, perhaps, embarrassed him by taking his name in vain. For all his enterprise and icono- clasm, indeed, there was not much of the Berserker in him, and his floutings of the national aesthetic tradition seldom took the form of forthright chal lenges. Here the strange modesty that I have men tioned always stayed him as a like weakness stayed Mark Twain. He could never quite rid himself of the feeling that he was no more than an amateur among the gaudy doctors who roared in the reviews, and that it would be unseemly for him to forget their authority. I have a notion that this feeling was born in the days when he stood almost alone, with the whole faculty grouped in a pained circle around him. He was then too miserable a worm to be

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noticed at all. Later on, gaining importance, he was lectured somewhat severely for his violation of de corum; in England even Max Beerbohm made an idiotic assault upon him. It was the Germans and the French, in fact, who first praised him intelli gently — and these friends were too far away to help a timorous man in a row at home. This sensation of isolation and littleness, I suppose, explains his fidelity to the newspapers, and the otherwise inex plicable joy that he always took in his forgotten work for the Musical Courier, in his day a very dubious journal. In such waters he felt at ease. There he could disport without thought of the dignity of pub lishers and the eagle eyes of campus reviewers. Some of the connections that he formed were full of an ironical inappropriateness. His discomforts in his Puck days showed themselves in the feebleness of his work ; when he served the Times he was as well placed as a Cabell at a colored ball. Perhaps the Sun, in the years before it was munseyized, offered him the best berth that he ever had, save it were his old one on Mile. New York. But whatever the flag, he served it loyally, and got a lot of fun out of the business. He liked the pressure of newspaper work; he liked the associations that it involved, the gabble- in the press-room of the Opera House, the exchanges of news and gossip; above all, he liked the relative ease of the intellectual harness. In a newspaper

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article he could say whatever happened to pop into his mind, and if it looked thin the next day, then there was, after all, no harm done. But when he sat down to write a book — or rather to compile it, for all of his volumes were reworked magazine (and sometimes newspaper) articles — he became self- conscious, and so knew uneasiness. The tightness of his style, its one salient defect, was probably the result of this weakness. The corrected clippings that constituted most of his manuscripts are so be- laden with revisions and rerevisions that they are almost indecipherable.

Thus the growth of Huneker's celebrity in his later years filled him with wonder, and never quite con vinced him. He was certainly wholly free from any desire to gather disciples about him and found a school. There was, of course, some pride of author ship in him, and he liked to know that his books were read and admired; in particular, he was pleased by their translation into German and Czech. But it seemed to me that he shrank from the bellicosity that so often got into praise of them — that he disliked being set up as the opponent and superior of the professors whom he always vaguely respected and the rival newspaper critics whose friendship he es teemed far above their professional admiration, or even respect. I could never draw him into a dis cussion of these rivals, save perhaps a discussion of

HUNEKER: A MEMORY 79

their historic feats at beer-guzzling. He wrote vastly better than any of them and knew far more about the arts than most of them, and he was undoubtedly aware of it in his heart, but it embarrassed him to hear this superiority put into plain terms. His intense gregariousness probably accounted for part of this reluctance to pit himself against them; he could not imagine a world without a great deal of easy comradeship in it, and much casual slapping of backs. But under it all was the chronic underes timation of himself that I have discussed — his fear that he had spread himself over too many arts, and that his equipment was thus defective in every one of them. "Steeplejack" is full of this apologetic timidity. In its very title, as he explains it, there is a confession of inferiority that is almost maudlin: "Life has been the Barmecide's feast to me," and so on. In the book itself he constantly takes refuge in triviality from the harsh challenges of critical par ties, and as constantly avoids facts that would shock the Philistines. One might reasonably assume, reading it from end to end, that his early days in Paris were spent in the fashion of a Y. M. C. A. secretary. A few drinking bouts, of course, and a love affair in the manner of Dnbuque, Iowa — but where are the wenches?

More than once, indeed, the book sinks to down right equivocation — for example, in the Roosevelt

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episodes. Certainly no one who knew Huneker in life will ever argue seriously that he was deceived by the Roosevelt buncombe, or that his view of life was at all comparable to that of the great demagogue. He stood, in fact, at the opposite pole. He saw the world, not as a moral show, but as a sort of glorified Follies. He was absolutely devoid of that obsession with the problem of conduct which was Roosevelt's main virtue in the eyes of a stupid and superstitious people. More, he was wholly against Roosevelt on many concrete issues — the race suicide banality, the Panama swindle, the war. He was far too much the realist to believe in the American case, either before or after 1917, and the manner in which it was urged, by Roosevelt and others, violated his notions of truth, honor and decency. I assume nothing here; I simply record what he told me himself. Never theless, the sheer notoriety of the Rough Rider — his picturesque personality and talent as a mounte bank — had its effect on Huneker, and so he was a bit flattered when he was summoned to Oyster Bay, and there accepted gravely the nonsense that was poured into his ear, and even repeated some of it without a cackle in his book. To say that he actually believed in it would be to libel him. It was precisely such hollow tosh that he stood against in his role of critic of art and life; it was by exposing its hollowness that he lifted himself above the general. The same

HUNEKER: 'A MEMORY 81

weakness induced him to accept membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The offer of it to a man of his age and attainments, after he had been passed over year after year in favor of all sorts of cheapjack novelists and tenth-rate compilers of college textbooks, was intrinsically insulting; it was almost as if the Musical Union had offered to admit a Brahms. Bu* with the insult went a certain gage of respectability, a certain formal forgiveness for old frivolities, a certain abatement of old doubts and self -questionings and so Huneker accepted. Later on, reviewing the episode in his own mind, he found it the spring of doubts that were even more uncom fortable. His last letter to me was devoted to the matter. He was by then eager to maintain that he had got in by a process only partly under his control, and that, being in, he could discover no decorous way of getting out.

But perhaps I devote too much space to the elements in the man that worked against his own free de velopment. They were, after all, grounded upon qualities that are certainly not to be deprecated — modesty, good-will to his fellow-men, a fine sense of team-work, a distaste for acrimonious and useless strife. These qualities gave him great charm. He was not only humorous; he was also good-humored; even when the crushing discomforts of his last ill ness were upon him his amiability never faltered.

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And in addition to humor there was wit, a far rarer thing. His most casual talk was full of this wit, and it bathed everything that he discussed in a new and brilliant light. I have never encountered a man who was further removed from dullness; it seemed a literal impossibility for him to open his mouth with out discharging some word or phrase that arrested the attention and stuck in the memory. And under it all, giving an extraordinary quality to the verbal fire works, there was a solid and apparently illimitable learning. The man knew as much as forty average men, and his knowledge was well-ordered and in stantly available. He had read everything and had seen everything and heard everything, and nothing that he had ever read or seen or heard quite passed out of his mind.

Here, in three words, was the main virtue of his criticism — its gigantic richness. It had the dazzling charm of an ornate and intricate design, a blazing fabric of fine silks. It was no mere pontifical state ment of one man's reactions to a set of ideas ; it was a sort of essence of the reactions of many men — of all the men, in fact, worth hearing. Huneker discarded their scaffolding, their ifs and whereases, and pre sented only what was important and arresting in their conclusions. It was never a mere pastiche: the selection was made delicately, discreetly, with almost unerring taste and judgment. And in the summing

HUNEKER: A MEMORY 83

up there was always the clearest possible statement of the whole matter. What finally emerged was a body of doctrine that came, I believe, very close to the truth. Into an assembly of national critics who had long wallowed in dogmatic puerilities, Hun- eker entered with a taste infinitely surer and more civilized, a learning infinitely greater, and an ad dress infinitely more engaging. No man was less the reformer by inclination, and yet he became a re former beyond compare. He emancipated criticism in America from its old slavery to stupidity, and with it he emancipated all the arts themselves.

III. FOOTNOTE ON CRITICISM

NEARLY all the discussions of criticism that I am acquainted with start off with a false assumption, to wit, that the primary mo tive of the critic, the impulse which makes a critic of him instead of, say, a politician, or a stockbroker, is pedagogical — that he writes because he is possessed by a passion to advance the enlightenment, to put down error and wrong, to disseminate some specific doctrine: psychological, epistemological, historical, or aesthetic. This is true, it seems to me, only of bad critics, and its degree of truth increases in direct ratio to their badness. The motive of the critic who is really worth reading — the only critic of whom, indeed, it may be said truthfully that it is at all possible to read him, save as an act of mental discipline — is something quite different. That motive is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist. It is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them dramatically and make an articu-

84

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late noise in the world. It was for this reason that Plato wrote the "Republic," and for this reason that Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony, and it is for this reason, to drop a million miles, that I am writ ing the present essay. Everything else is after thought, mock-modesty, messianic delusion — in brief, affectation and folly. Is the contrary conception of criticism widely cherished? Is it almost universally held that the thing is a brother to jurisprudence, ad vertising, laparotomy, chautauqua lecturing and the art of the schoolmarm? Then certainly the fact that it is so held should be sufficient to set up an over whelming probability of its lack of truth and sense. If I speak with some heat, it is as one who has suffered. When, years ago, I devoted myself dili gently to critical pieces upon the writings of Theo dore Dreiser, I found that practically every one who took any notice of my proceedings at all fell into either one of two assumptions about my underlying purpose: (a) that I had a fanatical devotion for Mr. Dreiser's ideas and desired to propagate them, or (6) that I was an ardent patriot, and yearned to lift up American literature. Both assumptions were false. I had then, and I have now, very little interest in many of Mr. Dreiser's main ideas; when we meet, in fact, we usually quarrel about them. And I am wholly devoid of public spirit, and haven't the least lust to improve American literature; if it ever came

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to what I regard as perfection my job would be gone. What, then, was my motive in writing about Mr. Dreiser so copiously? My motive, well known to Mr. Dreiser himself and to every one else who knew, me as intimately as he did, was simply and solely • to sort out and give coherence to the ideas of Mr. Mencken, and to put them into suave and ingratiat ing terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song, into the dense fog that blanketed the Republic.

The critic's choice of criticism rather than of what is called creative writing is chiefly a matter of tem perament — perhaps, more accurately of hormones — with accidents of education and environment to help. The feelings that happen to be dominant in him at the moment the scribbling frenzy seizes him are feel ings inspired, not directly by life itself, but by books, pictures, music, sculpture, architecture, religion, philosophy — in brief, by some other man's feelings about life. They are thus, in a sense, secondhand, and it is no wonder that creative artists so easily fall into the theory that they are also second-rate. Perhaps they usually are. If, indeed, the critic con tinues on this plane — if he lacks the intellectual agil ity and enterprise needed to make the leap from the work of art to the vast and mysterious complex of phenomena behind it — then they always are, and he remains no more than a fugelman or policeman to

FOOTNOTE 0.\ CRITICISM 87

his betters. But if a genuine artist is concealed within him — if his feelings are in any sense pro found and original, and his capacity for self-ex pression is above the average of educated men — then he moves inevitably from the work of art to life it self, and begins to take on a dignity that he formerly lacked. It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men. Did Goethe, or Carlyle, or Matthew Arnold, or Sainte-Beuve, or Macaulay, or even, to come down a few pegs, Lewes, or Lowell, or Hazlitt? Cer tainly not. The thing that becomes most obvious about the writings of all such men, once they are ex amined carefully, is that the critic is always being swallowed up by the creative artist — that what starts out as the review of a book, or a play, or other work of art, usually develops very quickly into an inde pendent essay «pon the theme of that work of art, or upon some theme that it suggests — in a word, that it becomes a fresh work of art, and only indirectly related to the one that suggested it This fact, in deed, is so plain that it scarcely needs statement What the pedagogues always object to in, for ex ample, the Quarterly reviewers is that they forgot the books they were supposed to review, and wrote long papers — often, in fact, small books — expound-

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ing ideas suggested (or not suggested) by the books under review. Every critic who is worth reading falls inevitably into the same habit. He cannot stick to his task: what is before him is always infinitely less interesting to him than what is within him. If he is genuinely first-rate — if what is within him stands the test of type, and wins an audience, and produces the reactions that every artist craves — then he usually ends by abandoning the criticism of spe cific works of art altogether, and setting up shop as a general merchant in general ideas, i. e., as an art ist working in the materials of life itself.

Mere reviewing, however conscientiously and com petently it is done, is plainly a much inferior busi ness. Like writing poetry, it is chiefly a function of intellectual immaturity. The young literatus just out of the university, having as yet no capacity for grap pling with the fundamental mysteries of existence, is put to writing reviews of books, or plays, or music, or painting. Very often he does it extremely well; it is, in fact, not hard to do well, for even decayed pedagogues often do it, as such graves of the intel lect as the New York Times bear witness. But if he continues to do it, whether well or ill, it is a sign to all the world that his growth ceased when they made him Artium JBaccalaureus. Gradually he becomes, whether in or out of the academic grove, a professor, which is to say, a man devoted to dilut-

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ing and retailing the ideas of his superiors — not an artist, not even a bad artist, hut almost the antith esis of an artist. He is learned, he is sober, he is painstaking and accurate — but he is as hollow as a jug. Nothing is in him save the ghostly echoes of other men's thoughts and feelings. If he were a genuine artist he would have thoughts and feelings of his own, and the impulse to give them objective form would be irresistible. An artist can no more withstand that impulse than a politician can with stand the temptations of a job. There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton. His difference from other men lies precisely in the superior vigor of his im pulse to self-expression, not in the superior beauty and loftiness of his ideas. Other men, in point of fact, often have the same ideas, or perhaps even lof tier ones, but they are able to suppress them, usually on grounds of decorum, and so they escape being art ists, and are respected by right-thinking persons, and die with money in the bank, and are forgotten in two weeks.

Obviously, the critic whose performance we are commonly called upon to investigate is a man stand ing somewhere along the path leading from the begin ning that I have described to the goal. He has got beyond being a mere cataloguer and valuer of other

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men's ideas, but he has not yet become an autono mous artist — he is not yet ready to challenge atten tion with his own ideas alone. But it is plain that his motion, in so far as he is moving at all, must be in the direction of that autonomy — that is, unless one imagines him sliding backward into senile infan tilism: a spectacle not unknown to literary pathol ogy, but too pathetic to be discussed here. Bear this motion in mind, and the true nature of his aims and purposes becomes clear; more, the incurable fal sity of the aims and purposes usually credited to him becomes equally clear. He is not actually trying to perform an impossible act of arctic justice upon the artist whose work gives him a text. He is not trying with mathematical passion to find out exactly what was in that artist's mind at the moment of creation, and to display it precisely and in an ecstasy of appre ciation. He is not trying to bring the work discussed into accord with some transient theory of aesthetics, or ethics, or truth, or to determine its degree of depar ture from that theory. He is not trying to lift up the fine arts, or to defend democracy against sense, or to promote happiness at the domestic hearth, or to convert sophomores into right-thinkers, or to serve God. He is not trying to fit a group of novel phe nomena into the orderly process of history. He is not even trying to discharge the catalytic office that I myself, in a romantic moment, once sought to force

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upon him. He is, first and last, simply trying to express himself. He is trying to arrest and chal lenge a sufficient body of readers, to make them pay attention to him, to impress them with the charm and novelty of his ideas, to provoke them into an agreeable (or shocked) awareness of him, and he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis attained which Wagner achieved when he wrote "Die Walkiire," and a hen achieves every time she lays an egg.

Joseph Conrad is moved by that necessity to write romances; Bach was moved to write music; poets are moved to write poetry; critics are moved to write criticism. The form is nothing ; the only important thing is the motive power, and it is the same in all cases. It is the pressing yearning of every man who has ideas in him to empty them upon the world, to hammer them into plausible and ingratiating shapes, to compel the attention and respect of his equals, to lord it over his inferiors. So seen, the critic becomes a far more transparent and agreeable fellow than ever he was in the discourses of the psy chologists who sought to make him a mere appraiser in an intellectual customs house, a gauger in a distillery of the spirit, a just and infallible judge upon the cosmic bench. Such offices, in point of fact, never fit him. He always bulges over their con-

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fines. So labelled and estimated, it inevitably turns out that the specific critic under examination is a very bad one, or no critic at all. But when he ii thought of, not as pedagogue, but as artist, then he begins to take on reality, and, what is more, dignity. Carlyle was surely no just and infallible judge; on the contrary, he was full of prejudices, biles, naivetes, humors. Yet he is read, consulted, at tended to. Macaulay was unfair, inaccurate, fanci ful, lyrical — yet his essays live. Arnold had his faults too, and so did Sainte-Beauve, and so did Goethe, and so did many another of that line — and yet they are remembered to-day, and all the learned and conscientious critics of their time, laboriously concerned with the precise intent of the artists under review, and passionately determined to set it forth with god-like care and to relate it exactly to this or that great stream of ideas — all these pedants are forgotten. What saved Carlyle, Macaulay and com pany is as plain as day. They were first-rate art ists. They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true.

Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastnesses and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men — men who always receive it at second-hand. Peda-

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gogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered ; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human in quiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber- stamp thinking of the world always makes the assump tion that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth — that error and truth are simple opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole his tory of the intellect in brief. The average man of to-day does not believe in precisely the same imbe cilities that the Greek of the fourth century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does be lieve in are often quite as idiotic. Perhaps this statement is a bit too sweeping. There is, year by year, a gradual accumulation of what may be called, provisionally, truths — there is a slow accretion of ideas that somehow manage to meet all practicable human tests, and so survive. But even so, it is risky to call them absolute truths* All that one may safely say of them is that no one, as yet, has demonstrated

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that they are errors. Soon or late, if experience teaches us anything, they are likely to succumb too. The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school-teachers.

In the department of aesthetics, wherein critics mainly disport themselves, it is almost impossible to think of a so-called truth that shows any sign of be ing permanently true. The most profound of prin ciples begins to fade and quiver almost as soon as it is stated. But the work of art, as opposed to the theory behind it, has a longer life, particularly if that theory be obscure and questionable, and so can not be determined accurately. "Hamlet," the Mona Lisa, "Faust," "Dixie," "Parsifal," "Mother Goose," "Annabel Lee," "Huckleberry Finn" — these things, so baffling to pedagogy, so contumacious to the cate gories, so mysterious in purpose and utility — these things live. And why? Because there is in them the flavor of salient, novel and attractive personal ity, because the quality that shines from them is not that of correct demeanor but that of creative passion, because they pulse and breathe and speak, because they are genuine works of art. So with criticism. Let us forget all the heavy effort to make a science of it; it is a fine art, or nothing. If the critic, retir ing to his cell to concoct his treatise upon a book or

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play or what-not, produces a piece of writing that shows sound structure, and brilliant color, and the flash of new and persuasive ideas, and civilized man ners, and the charm of an uncommon personality in free function, then he has given something to the world that is worth having, and sufficiently justified his existence. Is Carlyle's "Frederick" true? Who cares? As well ask if the Parthenon is true, or the G Minor Symphony, or "Wiener Blur." Let the critic who is an artist leave such necropsies to pro fessors of aesthetics, who can no more determine the truth than he can, and will infallibly make it un pleasant and a bore.

It is, of course, not easy to practice this absten tion. Two forces, one within and one without, tend to bring even a Hazlitt or a Huneker under the cam pus pump. One is the almost universal human sus ceptibility to messianic delusions — the irresistible tendency of practically every man, once he finds a crowd in front of him, to strut and roll his eyes. The other is the public demand, born of such long familiarity with pedagogical criticism that no other kind is readily conceivable, that the critic teach something as well as say something — in the popular phrase, that he be constructive. ' Both operate pow erfully against his free functioning, and especially the former. He finds it hard to resist the flattery of his customers, however little he may actually esteem

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it. If he knows anything at all, he knows that his following, like that of every other artist in ideas, is chiefly made up of the congenitally subaltern type of man and woman — natural converts, lodge joiners, me-toos, stragglers after circus parades. It is pre cious seldom that he ever gets a positive idea out of them; what he usually gets is mere unintelligent ratifi cation. But this troop, despite its obvious failings, corrupts him in various ways. For one thing, it enormously reenforces his belief in his own i' and so tends to make him stiff and dogmatic—in brief, precisely everything that he ought not to be. And for another thing, it tends to make him (by a cu rious contradiction) a bit pliant and politk: he be gins to estimate new ideas, not in proportion as they are amusing or beautiful, but in proportion as they are likely to please. So beset, front and rear, he sometimes sinks supinely to the level of a professor, and his subsequent proceedings are interesting no more. The true aim of a critic is certainly not to make converts. He must know that very few of the persons who are susceptible to conversion are worth converting. Their minds are intrinsically flabby and parasitical, and it is certainly not sound sport to agitate minds of that sort. Moreover, the critic must always harbor a grave doubt about most of the ideas that they lap up so greedily — it must oc cur to him not infrequently, in the silent watches of

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the night, that much that he writes is sheer buncombe. A* I have said, I can't imagine any idea — that is, in the domain of aesthetics — that is palpably and incon- trovertibly sound. All that I am familiar with, and in particular all that I announce most vociferously, •66P1 to me to contain a core of quite obvious non sense. I thus try to avoid cherishing them too lov ingly, and it always gives me a shiver to see any one else gobble them at one gulp. Criticism, at bottom, is indistinguishable from skepticism. Both launch themselves, the one by aesthetic presentations and the other by logical presentations, at the common human tendency to accept whatever is approved, to take in ideas ready-made, to be responsive to mere rhetoric and gesticulation. A critic who believes in anything absolutely is bound to that something quite as help lessly as a Christian is bound to the Freudian gar bage in the Book of Revelation. To that extent, at all events, he is unfree and unintelligent, and hence a bad critic.

The demand for "constructive" criticism is based upon the same false assumption that immutable truths exist in the arts, and that the artist will be improved by being made aware of them. This notion, whatever the form it takes, is always absurd — as much so, indeed, as its brother delusion that the critic, to be competent, must be a practitioner of the specific art he ventures to deal with, i. e., that

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a doctor, to cure a belly-ache, must have a belly-ache. As practically encountered, it is disingenuous as well as absurd, for it comes chiefly from bad artists who tire of serving as performing monkeys, and crave the greater ease and safety of sophomores in class. They demand to be taught in order to avoid being knocked about. In their demand is the theory that instruction, if they could get it, would profit them — that they are capable of doing better work than they do. As a practical matter, I doubt that this is ever true. Bad poets never actually grow any better; they invariably grow worse and worse. In all his tory there has never been, to my knowledge, a single practitioner of any art who, as a result of "construc tive" criticism, improved his work. The curse of all the arts, indeed, is the fact that they are constantly invaded by persons who are not artists at all — per sons whose yearning to express their ideas and feel ings is unaccompanied by the slightest capacity for charming expression — in brief, persons with abso lutely nothing to say. This is particularly true of the art of letters, which interposes very few techni cal obstacles to the vanity and garrulity of such in vaders. Any effort to teach them to write better is an effort wasted, as every editor discovers for him self; they are as incapable of it as they are of jump ing over the moon. The only sort of criticism that can deal with them to any profit is the sort that em-

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ploys them frankly as laboratory animals. It can not cure them, but it can at least make an amusing and perhaps edifying show of them. It is idle to argue that the good in them is thus destroyed with the bad. The simple answer is that there is no good in them. Suppose Poe had wasted his time trying to dredge good work out of Rufus Dawes, author of "Geraldine." He would have failed miserably — and spoiled a capital essay, still diverting after three- quarters of a century. Suppose Beethoven, dealing with Gottfried Weber, had tried laboriously to make an intelligent music critic of him. How much more apt, useful and durable the simple note: "Arch-ass! Double-barrelled ass!" Here was absolutely sound criticism. Here was a judgment wholly beyond chal lenge. Moreover, here was a small but perfect work of art.

Upon the low practical value of so-called con structive criticism I can offer testimony out of my own experience. My books are commonly reviewed at great length, and many critics devote themselves to pointing out what they conceive to be my errors, both of fact and of taste. Well, I cannot recall a case in which any suggestion offered by a construc tive critic has helped me in the slightest, or even ac tively interested me. Every such wet-nurse of letters has sought fatuously to make me write in a way dif fering from that in which the Lord God Almighty,

100 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES in His infinite wisdom, impels me to write — that is, to make me write stuff which, coming from me, would 'be as false as an appearance of decency in a Con gressman. All the benefits I have ever got from the critics of my work have come from the destructive variety. A hearty slating always does me good, particularly if it be well written. It begins by enlist ing my professional respect; it ends by making me examine my ideas coldly in the privacy of my chamber. Not, of course, that I usually revise them, but I at least examine them. If I decide to hold fast to them, they are all the dearer to me thereafter, and I expound them with a new passion and plau sibility. If, on the contrary, I discern holes in them, I shelve them in a pianissimo manner, and set about hatching new ones to take their place. But construc tive criticism irritates me. I do not object to being denounced, but I can't abide being school-mastered, especially by men I regard as imbeciles.

I find, as a practicing critic, that very few men who write books are even as tolerant as I am — that most of them, soon or late, show signs of extreme discomfort under criticism, however polite its terms. Perhaps this is why enduring friendships between authors and critics are so rare. All artists, of course, dislike one another more or less, but that dislike seldom rises to implacable enmity, save between opera singer and opera singer, and creative

FOOTNOTE ON CRIf^KM: "101

author and critic. Even when the latter two keep up an outward show of good-will, there is always bitter antagonism under the surface. Part of it, I daresay, arises out of the impossible demands of the critic, particularly if he be tinged with the constructive madness. Having favored an author with his good opinion, he expects the poor fellow to live up to that good opinion without the slightest compromise or faltering, and this is commonly beyond human power. He feels that any let-down compromises him — that his hero is stabbing him in the back, and making him ridiculous — and this feeling rasps his vanity. The most bitter of all literary quarrels are those between critics and creative artists, and most of them arise in just this way. As for the creative artist, he on his part naturally resents the critic's air of pedagogical superiority and he resents it especially when he has an uneasy feeling that he has fallen short of his best work, and that the dis content of the critic is thus justified. Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. Under it all, of course, lurks the fact that I began with: the fact that the critic is himself an artist, and that his creative impulse, soon or late, is bound to make him neglect the punctilio. When he sits down to compose his criticism, his artist ceases to be a friend, and becomes mere raw material for his work of art. It is my experience that artists invariably

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resent this cavalier use of them. They are pleased so long as the critic confines himself to the modest business of interpreting them — preferably in terms of their own estimate of themselves — but the moment he proceeds to adorn their theme with variations of his own, the moment he brings new ideas to the enterprise and begins contrasting them with their ideas, that moment they grow restive. It is pre cisely at this point, of course, that criticism becomes genuine criticism; before that it was mere reviewing. When a critic passes it he loses his friends. By becoming an artist, he becomes the foe of all other artists.

But the transformation, I believe, has good effects upon him: it makes him a better critic. Too much Gemiltlichkeit is as fatal to criticism as it would be to surgery or politics. When it rages unimpeded it leads inevitably either to a dull professorial stick ing on of meaningless labels or to log-rolling, and often it leads to both. One of the most hopeful symptoms of the new Aufklarung in the Republic is the revival of acrimony in criticism — the renaissance of the doctrine that aesthetic matters are important, and that it is worth the while of a healthy male to take them seriously, as he takes business, sport and amour. In the days when American literature was showing its first vigorous growth, the native criticism was extraordinarily violent and even vicious; in the

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days when American literature swooned upon the tomb of the Puritan Kultur it became flaccid and childish. The typical critic of the first era was Poe, as the typical critic of the second was Howells. Poe carried on his critical jehads with such ferocity that he often got into law-suits, and sometimes ran no little risk of having his head cracked. He re garded literary questions as exigent and momentous. The lofty aloofness of the don was simply not in him. When he encountered a book that seemed to him to be bad, he attacked it almost as sharply as a Chamber of Commerce would attack a fanatic preaching free speech, or the corporation of Trinity Church would attack Christ. His opponents replied in the same Berserker manner. Much of Poe's surviving ill-fame, as a drunkard and dead-beat, is due to their inordinate denunciations of him. They were not content to refute him; they constantly tried to dispose of him altogether. The very fero city of that ancient row shows that the native litera ture, in those days, was in a healthy state. Books of genuine value were produced. Literature always" thrives best, in fact, in an atmosphere of hearty strife. Poe, surrounded by admiring professors, never challenged, never aroused to the emotions of revolt, would probably have written poetry indis tinguishable from the hollow stuff of, say, Prof. Dr. George E. Woodberry. It took the persistent

104 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES (and often grossly unfair and dishonorable) oppo sition of Griswold et al to stimulate him to his high est endeavors. He needed friends, true enough, but he also needed enemies.

To-day, for the first time in years, there is strife in American criticism, and the Paul Elmer Mores and Hamilton Wright Mabies are no longer able to purr in peace. The instant they fall into stiff professorial attitudes they are challenged, and often with anything but urbanity. The ex cathedra manner thus passes out, and free discussion comes in. Heretics lay on boldly, and the professors are forced to make some defense. Often, going further, they attempt counter attacks. Ears are bitten off. Noses are bloodied. There are wallops both above and below the belt. I am, I need not say, no believer in any magical merit in debate, no matter how free it may be. It certainly does not necessarily establish the truth; both sides, in fact, may be wrong, and they often are. But it at least accomplishes two important effects. On the one hand, it exposes all the cruder fallacies to hostile examination, and so disposes of many of them. And on the other hand, it melodrama- tizes the business of the critic, and so convinces thousands of bystanders, otherwise quite inert, that criticism is an amusing and instructive art, and that the problems it deals with are important. What men will fight for seems to be worth looking into.

IV. DAS KAPITAL

AFTER a hearty dinner of potage Creole, planked Chesapeake shad, Guinea hen en casserole and some respectable salad, with two or three cocktails made of two-thirds gin, one-third Martini-Rossi vermouth and a dash of ab sinthe as Vorspiel and a bottle of Ruhlander 1903 to wash it down, the following thought often bubbles up from my subconscious: that many of the acknowl edged evils of capitalism, now so horribly visible in the world, are not due primarily to capitalism itself but rather to democracy, that universal murrain of Christendom.

What I mean, in brief, is that capitalism, under democracy, is constantly unde'r hostile pressure and often has its back to the wall, and that its barbaric manners and morals, at least in large part, are due to that fact — that they are, in essence, precisely the same manners and morals that are displayed by any other creature or institution so beset. Necessity is not only the mother of invention; it is also the mother

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106 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES of every imaginable excess and infamy. A woman defending her child is notoriously willing to go to lengths that even a Turk or an agent of the Depart ment of Justice would regard as inordinate, and so is a Presbyterian defending his hell, or a soldier defending his fatherland, or a banker defending his gold. It is only when there is no danger that the average human being is honorable, just as it is only when there £5 danger that he is virtuous. He would commit adultery every day if it were safe, and he would commit murder every day if it were necessary. The essential thing about democracy, as every one must know, is that it is a device for strengthening and heartening the have-nots in their eternal war upon the haves. That war, as every one knows again, has its psychological springs in envy pure and simple — envy of the more fortunate man's greater wealth, the superior pulchritude of his wife or wives, his larger mobility and freedom, his more protean capacity for and command of happiness — in brief, his better chance to lead a bearable life in this worst of pos sible worlds. It follows that under democracy, which gives a false power and importance to the have-nots by counting every one of them as the legal equal of George Washington or Beethoven, the process of government consists largely, and sometimes almost exclusively, of efforts to spoil that advantage ar tificially. Trust-busting, free silver, direct elections,

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Prohibition, government ownership and all the other varieties of American political quackery are but symptoms of the same general rage. It is the rage of the have-not against the have, of the farmer who must drink hard cider and forty-rod against the city man who may drink Burgundy and Scotch, of the poor fellow who must stay at home looking at a wife who regards the lip-stick as lewd and lascivious against the lucky fellow who may go to Atlantic City or Palm Beach and ride up and down in a wheel chair with a girl who knows how to make up and has put away the fear of God.

The ignobler sort of men, of course, are too stupid to understand various rare and exhilarating sorts of superiority, and so they do not envy the happiness that goes with them. If they could enter into the mind of a Wagner or a Brahms and begin to com prehend the stupendous joy that such a man gets out of the practice of his art, they would pass laws against it and make a criminal of him, as they have already made criminals, in the United States, of the man with a civilized taste for wines, the man so at tractive to women that he can get all the wives he wants without having to marry them, and the man who can make pictures like Felicien Rops, or books like Flaubert, Zola, Dreiser, Cabell or Rabelais. Wagner and Brahms escape, and their arts with them, because the great masses of men cannot understand

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the sort of thing they try to do, and hence do not envy the man who does it well, and gets joy out of it. It is much different with, say, Rops. Every American Congressman, as a small boy, covered the fence of the Sunday-School yard with pictures in the manner of Rops. What he now remembers of the business is that the pictures were denounced by the super intendent, and that he was cowhided for making them; what he hears about Rops, when he hears at all, is that the fellow is vastly esteemed, and hence probably full of a smug aesthetic satisfaction. In consequence, it is unlawful in the United States to transmit the principal pictures of Rops by mail, or, indeed, "to have and possess" them. The man who owns them must conceal them from the okhrdna of the Department of Justice just as carefully as he conceals the wines and whiskeys in his cellar, or the poor working girl he transports from the heat and noise of New York to the salubrious calm of the Jersey coast, or his hand-tooled library set of the "Contes Drolatiques," or his precious first edition of "Jurgen."

But, as I say, the democratic pressure in such directions is relatively feeble, for there are whole categories of more or less aesthetic superiority and happiness that the democrat cannot understand at all, and is in consequence virtually unaware of. It is far different with the varieties of superiority and

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happiness that are the functions of mere money. Here the democrat is extraordinarily alert and appreciative. He can not only imagine hundreds of ways of getting happiness out of money; he devotes almost die whole of his intellectual activity, such as it is, to imagining them, and he seldom if ever imagines anything else. Even his sexual fancies translate themselves instantly into concepts of dollars and cents; the thing that confines him so miserably to one wife, and to one, alas, so unappetizing and depressing, is simply his lack of money; if he only had the wealth of Diamond Jim Brady he too would be the glittering Don Giovanni that Jim was. All the known species of democratic political theory are grounded firmly upon this doctrine that money, and money only, makes the mare go — that all the conceivable varieties of happiness are possible to the man who has it. Even the Socialists, who profess to scorn money, really worship it. Socialism, indeed, is simply the degenerate cap italism of bankrupt capitalists. Its one genuine object is to get more money for its professors; all its other grandiloquent objects are afterthoughts, and most of them are bogus. The democrats of other schools pursue the same single aim — and adorn it with false pretenses even more transparent. In the United States the average democrat, I suppose, would say that the establishment and safeguarding of liberty

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was the chief purpose of democracy. The theory is mere wind. The average American democrat really cares nothing whatever for liberty, and is always willing to sell it for money. What he actually wants, and strives to get by his politics, is more money. His fundamental political ideas nearly all contemplate restraints and raids upon capital, even when they appear superficially to be quite free from economic flavor, and most of the political banshees and bugaboos that alternately freeze and boil his blood have dollar marks written all over them. There is no need to marshal a long catalogue of examples from English and American political history: I simply defy any critic of my doctrine to find a single issue of genuine appeal to the populace, at any time during the past century, that did not in volve a more or less obvious scheme for looting a minority — the slave-owners, Wall Street, the rail roads, the dukes, or some other group representing capital. Even the most affecting idealism of the plain people has a thrifty basis. In the United States, during the early part of the late war, they were very cynical about the Allied cause; it was not until the war orders of the Allies raised their wages that they began to believe in the noble righteousness of Lloyd-George and company. And after Dr. Wilson had jockeyed the United States itself into the war, and the cost of living began to increase faster

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than wages, he faced a hostile country until he restored altruism by his wholesale bribery of la bor.

It is my contention that the constant exposure of capitalism to such primitive lusts and forays is what makes it so lamentably extortionate and uncon scionable in democratic countries, and particularly in the United States. The capitalist, warned by ex perience, collars all he can while the getting is good, regardless of the commonest honesty and decorum, because he is haunted by an uneasy feeling that his season will not be long. His dominating passion is to pile up the largest amount of capital possible, by fair means or foul, so that he will have ample reserves when the next raid comes, and he has to use part of it to bribe one part of the proletariat against the other. In the long run, of course, he always wins, for this bribery is invariably feasible; in the United States, indeed, every fresh struggle leaves capital more secure than it was before. But though the capitalist thus has no reason to fear actual defeat and disaster, he is well aware that victory is always expensive, and his natural prudence causes him to discount the cost in advance, even when he has planned to shift it to other shoulders. I point, in example, to the manner in which capital dealt with the discharged American soldiers after the war. Its first effort was to cajole them into its ser-

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vice, as they had been cajoled by the politicians after the Civil War. To this end, it borrowed the machine erected by Dr. Wilson and his agents for debauching the booboisie during the actual war, and by the skillful use of that machine it quickly organ ized the late conscripts into the American Legion, alarmed them with lies about a Bolshevist scheme to make slaves of them (i. e., to cut off forever their hope of getting money), and put them to clubbing and butchering their fellow proletarians. The bus iness done, the conscripts found themselves out of jobs: their gallant war upon Bolshe vism had brought down wages, and paralysed or ganized labor. They now demanded pay for their work, and capital had to meet the demand. It did so by promising them a bonus — d. e., loot — out of the public treasury, and by straightway inventing a scheme whereby the ultimate cost would fall chiefly upon poor folk.

Throughout the war, indeed, capital exhibited an inordinately extortionate spirit, and thereby re vealed its underlying dread. First it robbed the Allies in the manner of bootleggers looting a country distillery, then it swindled the plain people at home by first bribing them with huge wages and then taking away all their profits and therewith all their savings, and then it seized and made away with the impounded property of enemy nationals — property

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theoretically held in trust for them, and the booty, if it was booty at all, of the whole American people. This triple burglary was excessive, to be sure, but who will say that it was not prudent? The capitalists of the Republic are efficient, and have foresight. They saw some lean and hazardous years ahead, with all sorts of raids threatening. They took measures to fortify their position. To-day their prevision is their salvation. They are losing some of their ac cumulation, of course, but they still have enough left to finance an effective defense of the remainder. There was never any time in the history of any country, indeed, when capital was so securely in trenched as it is to-day in the United States. It has divided the proletariat into two bitterly hostile halves, it has battered and crippled unionism almost beyond recognition, it has a firm grip upon all three arms of the government, and it controls practically every agency for the influencing of public opinion, from the press to the church. Had it been less pru dent when times were good, and put its trust in God alone, the I. W. W. would have rushed it at the end of the war.

As I say, I often entertain the thought that it would be better, in the long run, to make terms with a power so hard to resist, and thereby purge it of its present compulsory criminality. I doubt that cap italists, as a class, are naturally vicious; certainly

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they are no more vicious than, say, lawyers and poli ticians — upon whom the plain people commonly rely, in their innocence, to save them. I have known a good many men of great wealth in my time, and most of them have been men showing all the custom ary decencies. They deplore the harsh necessities of their profession quite as honestly as a judge de plores the harsh necessities of his. You will never convince me that the average American banker, during the war, got anything properly describable as professional satisfaction out of selling Liberty bonds at 100 to poor stenographers, and then buying them back at 83. He knew that he'd need his usurious profit against the blue day when the boys came home, and so he took it, but it would have given him ten times as much pleasure if it had come from the re luctant gizzard of some other banker. In brief, there is a pride of workmanship in capitalists, just as there is in all other men above the general. They get the same spiritual lift out of their sordid swin dles that Swinburne got out of composing his boozy dithyrambs, and I often incline to think that it is quite as worthy of respect. In a democratic society, with the arts adjourned and the sciences mere concu bines of money, it is chiefly the capitalists, in fact, who keep pride of workmanship alive. In their principal enemies, the trades-unionists, it is almost Lextinet. Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power

DAS KAPITAL 115

as it has to insure better work; almost always it de votes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work. A union man who, moved by professional pride, put any extra effort into his job would prob ably be punished by his union as a sort of scab. But a capitalist is still able to cherish some of the old spirit of die guildsman. If he invents a new device for corralling the money of those who have earned it, or operates an old device in some new and brilliant way, he is honored and envied by his colleagues. The late J. Pierpont Morgan was thus honored and envied, not because he made more actual money than any other capitalist of his time — in point of fact, he made a good deal less than some, and his own son-, a much inferior man, has made more since his death than he did during his whole life — but because his operations showed originality, daring, coolness, and imagination — in brief, because he was a great vir tuoso in the art he practiced.

What I contend is that the democratic system of government would be saner and more effective in its dealings with capital if it ceased to regard all capi talists as criminals ipso facto, and thereby ceased to make their armed pursuit the chief end of practical politics — if it gave over this vain effort to put them down by force, and tried to bring them to decency by giving greater play and confidence to the pride of workmanship that I have described. They would be

116 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES less ferocious and immoderate, I think, if they were treated with less hostility, and put more upon their conscience and honor. No doubt the average demo crat, brought up upon the prevailing superstitions and prejudices of his faith, will deny at once that they are actually capable of conscience or honor, or that they have any recognizable pride of workmanship. Well, let him deny it. He will make precisely the same denial with respect to kings. Nevertheless, it must be plain to every one who has read history at tentively that the majority of the kings of the past, even when no criticism could reach them, showed a very great pride of workmanship — that they tried to be good kings even when it was easier to be bad ones. The same thing is true of the majority of capitalists — the kings of to-day. They are criminals by our democratic law, but their criminality is chiefly arti ficial and theoretical, like that of a bootlegger. If it were abolished by repealing the laws which create it — if it became legally just as virtuous to organize and operate a great industrial corporation, or to com bine and rehabilitate railroads, or to finance any other such transactions as it is to organize a trades- union, a Bauverein, or a lodge of Odd Fellows — then I believe that capitalists would forthwith abandon a great deal of the scoundrelism which now marks their proceedings, that they could be trusted to police their order at least as vigilantly as physicians or

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lawyers police theirs, and that the activities of those members of it who showed no pride of workmanship at all would be effectively curbed.

The legal war upon them under democracy is grounded upon the false assumption that it would be possible, given laws enough, to get rid of them alto gether. The Ur- Americanos, who set the tone of our legislation and provided examples for the legislation of every other democratic country, were chiefly what would be called Bolsheviki to-day. They dreamed of a republic wholly purged of capitalism — and taxes. They were have-nots of the most romantic and ambi tious variety, and saw Utopia before them. Every man of their time who thought capitalistically — that is, who believed that things consumed had to be paid for — was a target for their revilings: for example, Alexander Hamilton. But they were wrong, and their modern heirs and assigns are wrong just as surely. That wrongness of theirs, in truth, has grown enormously since it was launched, for the early Americans were a pastoral people, and could get along with very little capital, whereas the Americans of to-day lead a very complex life, and need the aid of capitalism at almost every breath they draw. Most of their primary necessities — the railroad, the steamship lines, the trolley car, the telephone, re frigerated meats, machine-made clothes, phonograph records, moving-picture shows, and so on — are

118 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES wholly unthinkable save as the products of capital in large aggregations. No man of to-day can imagine doing without them, or getting them without the aid of such aggregations. The most even the wildest Socialist can think of is to take the capital away from the capitalists who now have it and hand it over to the state — in other words, to politicians. A century ago there were still plenty of men who, like Thoreau, proposed to abolish it altogether. But now even the radicals of the extreme left assume as a matter of course that capital is indispensible, and that abolish ing it or dispersing it would cause a collapse of civili zation.

What ails democracy, in the economic department, is that it proceeds upon the assumption that the con trary is true — that it seeks to bring capitalism to a state of innocuous virtue by grossly exaggerating its viciousness — that it penalizes ignorantly what is, at bottom, a perfectly natural and legitimate aspiration, and one necessary to society. Such penalizings, I need not argue, never destroy the impulse itself; surely the American experience with Prohibition should make even a democrat aware of that. What they do is simply to make it evasive, intemperate, and relentless. If it were legally as hazardous in the United States to play a string quartette as it is to build up a great bank or industrial enterprise — if the performers, struggling with their parts, had to

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watch the windows in constant fear that a Bryan, a Roosevelt, a Lloyd-George or some other such preda tory mountebank would break in, armed with a club and followed by a rabble — then string quartette players would become as devious and anti-social in their ways as the average American capitalist is to day, and when, by a process of setting one part of the mob against the rest, they managed to get a chance to play quartettes in temporary peace, despite the general mob hatred of them, they would forget the lovely music of Haydn and Mozart altogether, and devote their whole time to a fortissimo playing of the worst musical felonies of Schonberg, Ravel and Strawinsky.

V. AD IMAGINEM DEI CREAVIT ILLUM

The Life of Man

THE old anthropomorphic notion that the life of the whole universe centers in the life of man — that human existence is the supreme expression of the cosmic process — this notion seems to be on its way toward the Sheol of exploded delusions. The fact is that the life of man, as it is more and more studied in the light of general biology, appears to be more and more empty of significance. Once appar ently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. A blacksmith making a horse-shoe produces something almost as brilliant and mysterious — the shower of sparks. But his eye and thought, as we know, are not on the sparks, but on the horse-shoe. The sparks, indeed,

constitute a sort of disease of the horse-shoe; their

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AD IMAGINEM DEI CREAVIT ILLUM 121 existence depends upon a wasting of its tissue. In the same way, perhaps, man is a local disease of the cos mos — a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis. There are, of course, different grades of eczema, and so are there different grades of men. No d&ubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the doctor. But a cosmos infested by prohi bitionists, Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and the moon is so diabetically green!

The Anthropomorphic Delusion

As I say, the anthropomorphic theory of the world is made absurd by modern biology — but that is not saying, of course, that it will ever be abandoned by the generality of men. To the con trary, they will cherish it in proportion as it becomes more and more dubious. To-day, indeed, it is cher ished as it was never cherished in the Ages of Faith, when the doctrine that man was god-like was at least ameliorated by the doctrine that woman was vile. What else is behind charity, philanthropy, pacifism, Socialism, the uplift, all the rest of the current sentimentalities? One and all, these sentimen talities are based upon the notion that man is a

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glorious and ineffable animal, and that his continued existence in the world ought to be facilitated and in sured. But this notion is obviously full of fatuity. As animals go, even in so limited a space as our world, man is botched and ridiculous. Few other brutes are so stupid or so cowardly. The common est yellow dog has far sharper senses and is infinitely more courageous, not to say more honest and depend able. The ants and the bees are, in many ways, far more intelligent and ingenious; they manage their government with vastly less quarreling, wastefulness and imbecility. The lion is more beautiful, more dignified, more majestic. The antelope is swifter and more graceful. The ordinary house-cat is cleaner. The horse, foamed by labor, has a better smell. The gorilla is kinder to his children and more faithful to his wife. The ox and the ass are more industrious and serene. But most of all, man is deficient in courage, perhaps the noblest quality of them all. He is not only mortally afraid of all other animals of his own weight or half his weight — save a few that he has debased by artificial inbreed ing — ; he is even mortally afraid of his own kind — and not only of their fists and hooves, but even of their sniggers.

No other animal is so defectively adapted to its environment. The human infant, as it comes into the world, is so puny that if it were neglected for

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two days running it would infallibly perish, and this congenital infirmity, though more or less concealed later on, persists until death. Man is ill far more than any other animal, both in his savage state and under civilization. He has more different diseases and he suffers from them oftener. He is easier exhausted and injured. He dies more horribly and usually sooner. Practically all the other higher vertebrates, at least in their wild state, live longer and retain their faculties to a greater age. Here even the anthropoid apes are far beyond their human cousins. An orang-outang marries at the age of seven or eight, raises a family of seventy or eighty children, and is still as hale and hearty at eighty as a European at forty-five.

All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man. As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all; put beside him, even a salmon or a staphylococcus is a sound and efficient machine. He has the worst kidneys known to com parative zoology, and the worst lungs, and the worst heart. His eye, considering the work it is called upon to do, is less efficient than the eye of an earth worm; an optical instrument maker who made an instrument so clumsy would be mobbed by his customers. Alone of all animals, terrestrial, celes tial or marine, man is unfit by nature to go abroad in the world he inhabits. He must clothe himself, pro-

124 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES tect himself, swathe himself, armor himself. He is eternally in the position of a turtle born without a shell, a dog without hair, a fish without fins. Lack ing his heavy and cumbersome trappings, he is de fenseless even against flies. As God made him he hasn't even a tail to switch them off.

I now come to man's one point of unquestionable natural superiority: he has a soul. This is what sets him off from all other animals, and makes him, in a way, their master. The exact nature of that soul has been in dispute for thousands of years, but regarding its function it is possible to speak with some authority. That function is to bring man into direct contact with God, to make him aware of God, above all, to make him resemble God. Well, con sider the colossal failure of the device! If we as sume thatjnan actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder. And if we assume that man, after all these years, does not resemble God, then it appears at once that the human soul is as inefficient a machine as the human liver or tonsil, and that man would probably be better off, as the chimpanzee undoubtedly is better off, without it.

Such, indeed, is the case. The only practical effect of having a soul is that it fills man with an thropomorphic and anthropocentric vanities — in brief with cocky and preposterous superstitions.

AD 1M AGIN EM DEI CREAVIT ILLUM 125 He struts and plumes himself because he has this soul — and overlooks the fact that it doesn't work. Thus he is the supreme clown of creation, the reductio ad absurdum of animated nature. He is like a cow who believed that she could jump over the moon, and ordered her whole life upon that theory. He is like a bullfrog boasting eternally of fighting lions, of flying over the Matterhorn, and of swimming the Hellespont. And yet this is the poor brute we are asked to venerate as a gem in the forehead of the cosmos! This is the worm we are asked to defend as God's favorite on earth, with all its millions of braver, nobler, decenter quadrupeds — its superb lions, its lithe and gallant leopards, its imperial elephants, its honest dogs, its courageous rats! This is the insect wre are besought, at infinite trouble, labor and expense, to reproduce!

Meditation on Meditation.

Man's capacity for abstract thought, which most other mammals seem to lack, has undoubtedly given him his present mastery of the land surface of the earth — a mastery disputed only by several hundred species of microscopic organisms. It is responsible for his feeling of superiority, and under that feeling there is undoubtedly a certain measure of reality, at

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least within narrow limits. But what is too often overlooked is that the capacity to perform an act is by no means synonymous with its salubrious exercise. The simple fact is that most of man's thinking is stupid, pointless, and injurious to him. Of all animals, indeed, he seems the least capable of arriv ing at accurate judgments in the matters that most desperately affect his welfare. Try to imagine a rat, in the realm of rat ideas, arriving at a notion as vio lently in contempt of plausibility as the notion, say, of Swedenborgianism, or that of homeopathy, or that of infant damnation, or that of mental telepathy. Try to think of a congregation of educated rats gravely listening to such disgusting intellectual rub bish as was in the public bulls of Dr. Woodrow Wilson. Man's natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious

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AD 1MAGINEM DEI CREAVIT ILLUM 127 realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most in sane. This has been true since the first "advanced" gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci.

No doubt the imagination of man is to blame for this singular weakness. That imagination, I dare say, is what gave him his first lift above his fellow primates. It enabled him to visualize a condition of existence better than that he wras experiencing, and bit by bit he was able to give the picture a certain crude reality. Even to-day he keeps on going ahead in the same manner. That is, he thinks of some thing that he would like to be or to get, something appreciably better than what he is or has, and then, by the laborious, costly method of trial and error, he gradually moves toward it. In the process he is often severely punished for his discontent with God's ordinances. He mashes his thumb, he skins his shin; he stumbles and falls; the prize he reaches out for blows up in his hands. But bit by bit he moves on, or, at all events, his heirs and assigns move on. Bit by bit he smooths the path beneath his remaining

128 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

leg, and achieves pretty toys for his remaining hand to play with, and accumulates delights for his remain ing ear and eye.

Alas, he is not content with this slow and san guinary progress! Always he looks further and further ahead. Always he imagines things just over the sky-line. This body of imaginings constitutes his stock of sweet beliefs, his corpus of high faiths and confidences — in brief, his burden of errors. And that burden of errors is what distinguishes man, even above his capacity for tears, his talents as a liar, his excessive hypocrisy and poltroonery, from all the other orders of mammalia. Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and more particularly by himself — by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.

The capacity for discerning the essential truth, in fact, is as rare among men as it is common among crows, bullfrogs and mackerel. The man who shows it is a man of quite extraordinary quality — perhaps even a man downright diseased. Exhibit a new truth of any natural plausibilty before the great masses of men, and not one in ten thousand will suspect its existence, and not one in a hundred thousand will

AD IM AGIN EM DEI CREAV1T ILLUM 129 embrace it without a ferocious resistance. All the durable truths that have come into the world within historic times have been opposed as bitterly as if they were so many waves of smallpox, and every individ ual who has welcomed and advocated them, abso lutely without exception, has been denounced and punished as an enemy of the race. Perhaps "abso lutely without exception" goes too far. I substitute "with five or six exceptions." But who were the five or six exceptions? I leave you to think of them; myself, I can't. . . . But I think at once of Charles Darwin and his associates, and of how they were reviled in their time. This reviling, of course, is less vociferous than it used to be, chiefly because later victims are in the arena, but the underlying hostility remains. Within the past two years the principal Great Thinker of Britain, George Bernard Shaw, has denounced the hypothesis of natural selec tion to great applause, and a three-times candidate for the American Presidency, William Jennings Bryan, has publicly advocated prohibiting the teach ing of it by law. The great majority of Christian ecclesiastics in both English-speaking countries, and with them the great majority of their catachumens, are still committed to the doctrine that Darwin was a scoundrel, and Herbert Spencer another, and Huxley a third — and that Nietzsche is to the three of them what Beelzebub himself is to a trio of bad boys.

130 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES This is the reaction of the main body of respectable folk in two puissant and idealistic Christian nations to the men who will live in history as the intellectual leaders of the Nineteenth Century. This is the imme morial attitude of men in the mass, and of their chosen prophets, to whatever is honest, and important, and most probably true.

But if truth thus has hard sledding, error is given a loving welcome. The man who invents a new imbecility is hailed gladly, and bidden to make him self at home; he is, to the great masses of men, the beau ideal of mankind. Go back through the history of the past thousand years and you will find that nine- tenths of the popular idols of the world — not the heroes of small sects, but the heroes of mankind in the mass — have been merchants of palpable nonsense. It has been so in politics, it has been so in religion, and it has been so in every other department of human thought. Every such hawker of the not-true has been opposed, in his time, by critics who denounced and refuted him; his contention has been disposed of immediately it was uttered. But on the side of every one there has been the titanic force of human cre dulity, and it has sufficed in every case to destroy his foes and establish his immortality.

AD IM AGIN EM DEI CREAVIT ILLUM 131

Man and His Soul

Of all the unsound ideas thus preached by great heroes and accepted by hundreds of millions of their eager dupes, probably the most patently unsound is the one that is most widely held, to wit, the idea that man has an immortal soul — that there is a part of him too ethereal and too exquisite to die. Absolutely the only evidence supporting this astounding notion lies in the hope that it is true — which is precisely the evidence underlying the late theory that the Great War would put an end to war, and bring in an era of democracy, freedom, and peace. But even arch bishops, of course, are too intelligent to be satisfied permanently by evidence so unescapably dubious; in consequence, there have been efforts in all ages to give it logical and evidential support. Well, all I ask is that you give some of that corroboration your careful scrutiny. Examine, for example, the proofs amassed by five typical witnesses in five wridely separated ages: St. John, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, Emanuel Swedenborg and Sir Oliver Lodge. Approach these proofs prayerfully, and study them well. Weigh them in the light of the probabilities, the ordinary intellectual decencies. And then ask

132 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES yourself if you could imagine a mud-turtle accepting them gravely.

5

Coda

To sum up:

1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.

2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was de signed and set spinning to give him the ride.

i

VI. STAR-SPANGLED MEN

OPEN the memoirs of General Grant, Volume II, at the place where he is describing the sur render of General Lee, and find the following:

I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horse back on (sic) the field, and wore a soldier's blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was.

Anno 1865. I look out of my window and observe an officer of the United States Army passing down the street. Anno 1922. Like General Grant, he is without a sword. Like General Grant, he wears a sort of soldier's blouse for a coat. Like General Grant, he employs shoulder straps to indicate to the army who he is. But there is something more. On the left breast of this officer, apparently a major, there blazes so brilliant a mass of color that, as the sun strikes it and the flash bangs my eyes, I wink, catch my breath and sneeze. There are two long strips, each starting at the sternum and disap pearing into the shadows of the axillia — every hue in the rainbow, the spectroscope, the kaleidoscope —

133

134 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES imperial purples, sforzando reds, wild Irish greens, romantic blues, loud yellows and oranges, rich maroons, sentimental pinks, all the half-tones from ultra-violet to infra-red, all the vibrations from the impalpable to the unendurable. A gallant Soldat, indeed! How he would shame a circus ticketwagon if he wore all the medals and badges, the stars and crosses, the pendants and lavallieres, that go with, those ribbons! ... I glance at his sleeves. A simple golden stripe on the one — six months beyond the raging main. None on the other — the Kaiser's cannon missed him.

Just what all these ribbons signify I am sure I don't know; probably they belong to campaign medals and tell the tale of butcheries in foreign and domestic parts — mountains of dead Filipinos, Mexicans, Haitians, Dominicans, West Virginia miners, per haps even Prussians. But in addition to campaign medals and the Distinguished Service Medal there are now certainly enough foreign orders in the United States to give a distinct brilliance to the national scene, viewed, say, from Mars. The Frederician tradition, borrowed by the ragged Continentals and embodied in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, lasted until 1918, and then suddenly blew up; to mention it to-day is a sort of indecorum, and to-mor row, no doubt, will be a species of treason. Down with Frederick; up with John Philip Sousa! Im-

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agine what General Pershing would look like at a state banquet of his favorite American order, the Benevolent and Protective one of Elks, in all the Byzantine splendor of his casket of ribbons, badges, stars, garters, sunbursts and cockades — the lordly Bath of the grateful motherland, with its somewhat disconcerting "Ich dien"; the gorgeous tricolor bal drics, sashes and festoons of the Legion d'Honneur; the grand cross of SS. Maurizio e Lazzaro of Italy; the sinister Danilo of Montenegro, with its cabalistic monogram of Danilo I and its sinister hieroglyphics; the breastplate of the Paulownia of Japan, with its rising sun of thirty-two white rays, its blood-red heart, * its background of green leaves and its white ribbon edged with red; the mystical St. Saviour of Greece, with its Greek motto and its brilliantly enameled figure of Christ; above all, the Croix de Guerre of Czecho-Slovakia, a new one and hence not listed in the books, but surely no shrinking violet! Alas, Per shing was on the wrong side — that is, for one with a fancy for gauds of that sort. The most blinding of all known orders is the Medijie of Turkey, which not only entitles the holder to four wives, but also absolutely requires him to wear a red fez and a frozen star covering his whole fagade. I was offered this order by Turkish spies during the war, and it wab bled me a good deal. The Alexander of Bulgaria is almost as seductive. The badge consists of an eight-

136 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES pointed white cross, with crossed swords between the arms and a red Bulgarian lion over the swords. The motto is "Za Chrabrost!" Then there are the Prus sian orders — the Red and Black Eagles, the Pour le Merite, the Prussian Crown, the Hohenzollern and the rest. And the Golden Fleece of Austria — the noblest of them all. Think of the Golden Fleece on a man born in Linn County, Missouri! ... I begin to doubt that the General would have got it, even sup posing him to have taken the other side. The Japs, I note, gave him only the grand cordon of the Paul- ownia, and the Belgians and Montenegrins were sim ilarly cautious. There are higher classes. The highest of the Paulownia is only for princes, which is to say, only for non-Missourians.

Pershing is the champion, with General March a bad second. March is a K. C. M. G., and entitled to wear a large cross of white enamel bearing a litho graph of the Archangel Michael and the motto, "Auspicium Melioris Aevi," but he is not a K. C. B. Admirals Benson and Sims are also grand crosses of Michael and George, and like most other respectable Americans, members of the Legion of Honor, but they seem to have been forgotten by the Greeks, the Montenegrins, the Italians and the Belgians. The British-born and extremely Anglomaniacal Sims refused the Distinguished Service Medal of his adopted country, but is careful to mention in "Who's

STAR-SPANGLED MEN 137

Who in America" that his grand cross of Michael and George was conferred upon him, not by some servile gold-stick, hut by "King George of England"; Benson omits mention of His Majesty, as do Pershing and March. It would be hard to think of any other American officer, real or bogus, who would refuse the D. S. M., or, failing it, the grand decoration of chivalry of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. I once saw the latter hung, with ceremonies of the utmost magnificence, upon a bald-headed tinner who had served the fraternity long and faithfully; as he marched down the hall toward the throne of the Supreme Exalted Pishposh a score of little girls, the issue of other tinners, strewed his pathway with roses, and around the stem of each rose was a piece of glittering tinfoil. The band meanwhile played "The Rosary," and, at the conclusion of the spectacle, as fried oysters were served, "Wien Bleibt Wien." It was, I suspect, by way of the Odd Fellows and other such gaudy heirs to the Deutsche Ritter and Rosicrucians that the lust to gleam and jingle got into the arteries of the American people. For years the austere tradition of Washington's day served to keep the military bosom bare of spangles, but all the while a weakness for them was growing in the civil population. Rank by rank, they became Knights of Pythias, Odd Fellows, Red Men, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, Knights Templar, Patriarchs Militant,

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Elks, Moose, Woodmen of the World, Foresters, Hoo- Hoos, Ku Kluxers — and in every new order there were thirty-two degrees, and for every degree there was a badge, -and for every badge there was a yard of ribbon. The Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, chiefly paunchy wholesalers of the Rotary Club species, are not content with swords, baldrics, stars, garters and jewels; they also wear red fezes. The Elks run to rubies. The Red Men array themselves like Sitting Bull. The patriotic ice-wagon drivers and Meth odist deacons of the Ku Klux Klan carry crosses set with incandescent lights. An American who is forced by his profession to belong to many such orders — say a life insurance solicitor, a bootlegger or a dealer in Oklahoma oil stock — accumulates a trunk full of decorations, many of them weighing a pound. There is an undertaker in Hagerstown, Md., who has been initiated eighteen times. When he robes him self to plant a fellow joiner he weighs three hundred pounds and sparkles and flashes like the mouth of hell itself. He is entitled to bear seven swords, all jeweled, and to hang his watch chain with the golden busts of nine wild animals, all with precious stones for eyes. Put beside this lowly washer of the dead, Pershing newly polished would seem almost like a Trappist.

But even so the civil arm is robbed of its just dues in the department of gauds and radioactivity, no

STAR-SPANGLED MEN 139

doubt by the direct operation of military vanity and jealousy. Despite a million proofs (and perhaps a billion eloquent arguments) to the contrary, it is still the theory at the official ribbon counter that the only man who serves in a war is the man who serves in uniform. This is soft for the Bevo officer, who at^ least has his service stripes and the spurs that gnawed into his desk, but it is hard upon his brother Irving, the dollar-a-year man, who worked twenty hours a day for fourteen months buying soap-powder, canned asparagus and raincoats for the army of God. Irving not only labored with inconceivable diligence ; he also faced hazards of no mean order, for on the one hand was his natural prejudice in favor of a very liberal rewarding of commercial enterprise, and on the other hand were his patriotism and his fear of Atlanta Penitentiary. I daresay that many and many a time, after working his twenty hours, he found it difficult to sleep the remaining four hours. I know, in fact, survivors of that obscure service who are far worse wrecks to-day than Pershing is. Their reward is — what? Winks, sniffs, innuendos. If they would indulge themselves in the now almost universal American yearning to go adorned, they must join the Knights of Pythias. Even the Amer ican Legion fails them, for though it certainly does not bar non-combatants, it insists that they shall have done their non-combatting in uniform.

140 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES

What I propose is a variety of the Distinguished Service Medal for civilians, — perhaps, better still, a distinct order for civilians, closed to the military and with badges of different colors and areas, to mark off varying services to democracy. Let it run, like the Japanese Paulownia, from high to low — the lowest class for the patriot who sacrificed only time, money and a few nights' sleep; the highest for the great martyr who hung his country's altar with his dignity, his decency and his sacred honor. For Irving and his nervous insomnia, a simple rosette, with an iron badge bearing the national motto, "Safety First" ; for the university president who pro hibited the teaching of the enemy language in his learned grove, heaved the works of Goethe out of the university library, cashiered every professor unwill ing to support Woodrow for the first vacancy in the Trinity, took to the stump for the National Security League, and made two hundred speeches in moving picture theaters — for this giant of loyal endeavor let no 100 per cent. American speak of anything less than the grand cross of the order, with a gold badge in polychrome enamel and stained glass, a baldric of the national colors, a violet plug hat with a sunburst on the side, the privilege of the floor of Congress, and a pension of $10,000 a year. After all, the cost would not be excessive; there are not many of them. Such prodigies of patriotism are possible only to

STAR-SPANGLED MEN 141

rare_and^ifted meiu. For the grand cordons of the order, e. g., college professors who spied upon and reported the seditions of their associates, state presi dents of the American Protective League, alien property custodians, judges whose sentences of con scientious objectors mounted to more than 50,000 years, members of Dr. Creel's herd of 2,000 Amer ican historians, the authors of the Sisson documents, etc. — pensions of $10 a day would be enough, with silver badges and no plug hats. For the lower ranks, bronze badges and the legal right to the title of "the Hon.," already every true American's by courtesy. Not, of course, that I am insensitive to the services of the gentlemen of those lower ranks, but in such matters one must go by rarity rather than by intrinsic value. If the grand cordon or even the nickel- plated eagle of the third class were given to every patriot who bored a hole through the floor of his flat to get evidence against his neighbors, the Kraus- meyers, and to every one who visited the Hof- brauhaus nightly, denounced the Kaiser in searing terms, and demanded assent from Emil and Otto, the waiters, and to every one who notified the catchpolls of the Department of Justice when the wireless plant was open in the garret of the Arion Liedertafel, and to all who took a brave and forward part in slacker raids, and to all who lent their stenographers funds at 6 per cent, to buy Liberty bonds at 41/4 per cent.,

142 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES and to all who sold out at 99 and then bought in«again at 83.56 and to all who served as jurors or perjurers in cases against members and ex-members of the I. W. W., and to the German-American members of the League for German Democracy, and to all the Irish who snitched upon the Irish — if decorations were thrown about with any such lavishness, then there Would be no nickel left for our bathrooms. On the civilian side as on the military side the great rewards of war go, not to mere dogged industry and fidelity, but to originality — to the unprecedented, the arrest ing, the bizarre. The New York Tribune liar who in vented the story about the German plant for convert ing the corpses of the slain into soap did more for democracy and the Wilsonian idealism, and hence de serves a more brilliant recognition, than a thousand uninspired hawkers of atrocity stories supplied by Viscount Bryce and his associates. For that great ser vant of righteousness the grand cordon, with two silver badges and the chair of history at Columbia, would be scarcely enough; for the ordinary hawkers any precious metal would be too much.

Whether or not the Y. M. C. A. has decorated its chocolate pedlars and soul-snatchers I do not know; since the chief Y. M. C. A. lamassary in my town of Baltimore became the scene of a homo-sexual scandal I have ceased to frequent evangelical society. If not, then there should be some governmental recog-

STAR-SPANGLED MEN 143

nition of those highly characteristic heroes of the war for democracy. The veterans of the line, true enough, dislike them excessively, and have a habit of denouncing them obscenely when the corn-juice flows. They charged too much for cigarettes; they tried to discourage the amiability of the ladies of France; they had a habit of being absent when the shells burst in air. Well, some say this and some say that. A few, at least, of the pale and oleaginous brethren must have gone into the Master's work because they thirsted to save souls, and not simply because they desired to escape the trenches. And a few, I am told, were anything but unpleasantly righteous, as a round of Wassermanns would show. If, as may be plausibly argued, these Soldiers of the Double Cross deserve to live at all, then they surely deserve to be hung with white enameled stars of the third class, with gilt dollar marks superimposed. Motto : "Glory, glory, hallelujah!"

But what of the vaudeville actors, the cheer leaders, the doughnut fryers, the camp librarians, the press agents? I am not forgetting them. Let them be distributed among all the classes from the seventh to the eighth, according to their sufferings for the holy cause. And the agitators against Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss, all the rest of the cacophonous Huns? And the specialists in the crimes of the German professors? And the collec-

144 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES tors for the Belgians, with their generous renuncia tion of all commissions above 80 per cent.? And the pathologists who denounced Johannes Muller as a fraud, Karl Ludwig as an imbecile, and Ehrlich as a thief? And the patriotic chemists who discovered arsenic in dill pickles, ground glass in pumpernickel, bichloride tablets in Bismarck herring, pathogenic organisms in aniline dyes? And the inspired editor ial writers of the New York Times and Tribune, the Boston Transcript, the Philadelphia Ledger, the Mo bile Register, the Jones Corners Eagle? And the headline writers? And the Columbia, Yale and Princeton professors? And the authors of books des cribing how the Kaiser told them the whole plot in 1913, while they were pulling his teeth or shining his shoes? And the ex-ambassadors? And the Nietzsche fresser? And the chautauqua orators? And the four-minute men? And the Methodist pul pit pornographers who switched so f acilely from vice- crusading to German atrocities? And Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis? And Dr. Henry van Dyke? And the master minds of the New Republic? And Tumulty? And the Vigilantes? Let no grateful heart forget them!

Palmer and Burleson I leave for special legisla tion. If mere university presidents, such as Nich olas Murray Butler, are to have the grand cross, then Palmer deserves to be rolled in malleable gold from

STAR-SPANGLED MEN 145

head to foot, and polished until he blinds the cosmos — then Burleson must be hung with diamonds like Mrs. Warren and bathed in spotlights like Gaby Deslys. . . . Finally, I reserve a special decoration, to be conferred in camera and worn only in secret chapter, for husbands who took chances and refused to read anonymous letters from Paris: the somber badge of the Ordre de la Cuculus Canorus, first and only class.

VII. THE POET AND HIS ART

A

44 A GOOD P^se style," says Prof. Dr. Otto Jerpersen in his great work, "Growth and Structure of the English Language," "is everywhere a late acquirement, and the work of whole generations of good authors is needed to bring about the easy flow of written prose." The learned Sprachwissenschaftler is here speaking of Old Eng lish, or, as it used to be called when you and I were at the breast of enlightenment, Anglo-Saxon. An inch or so lower down the page he points out that what he says of prose is by no means true of verse — that poetry of very respectable quality is often written by peo ples and individuals whose prose is quite as crude and graceless as that, say of the Hon. Warren Gam aliel Harding — that even the so-called Anglo-Saxons of Beowulf's time, a race as barbarous as the modern Jugo-Slavs or Mississippians, were yet capable, on occasion, of writing dithyrambs of an indubitable sweet gaudiness.

The point needs no laboring. A glance at the his tory of any literature will prove its soundness.

146

THE POET AND HIS ART 147

Moreover, it is supported by what we see around us every day — that is, if we look in literary directions. Some of the best verse in the modern movement, at home and abroad, has been written by intellectual adolescents who could no more write a first-rate para graph in prose then they could leap the Matterhorn — girls just out of Vassar and Newnham, young army officers, chautauqua orators, New England old maids, obscure lawyers and doctors, newspaper re porters, all sorts of hollow dilettanti, male and fe male. Nine-tenths of the best poetry of the world has been written by poets less than thirty years old; a great deal more than half of it has been written by poets under twenty-five. One always associates poetry with youth, for it deals chiefly writh the ideas that are peculiar to youth, and its terminology is quite as youthful as its content. When one hears of a poet past thirty-five, he seems somehow unnatural and even a trifle obscene; it is as if one encountered a graying man who still played the Chopin waltzes and believed in elective affinities. But prose, obvi ously, is a sterner and more elderly matter. All the great masters of prose (and especially of English prose, for its very resilience and brilliance make it extraordinarily hard to write) have had to labor for years before attaining to their mastery of it. The early prose of Abraham Lincoln was remarkable only for its badness ; it was rhetorical and bombastic, and

148 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES full of supernumerary words; in brief, it was a kind of poetry. It took years and years of hard striving for Abe to develop the simple and exquisite prose of his last half-decade. So with Thomas Henry Huxley, perhaps the greatest virtuoso of plain English who has ever lived. His first writings were ' competent but undistinguished; he was almost a grandfather before he perfected his superb style. And so with Anatole France, and Addison, and T. B. Macaulay, and George Moore, and James Branch Cabell, and 1E.9 and Lord Dunsany, and Nietzsche, and to go back to antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero. I have been told that the average age of the men who made the Authorized Version of the Bible was beyond sixty years. Had they been under thirty they would have made it lyrical; as it was, they made it colossal. The reason for all this is not far to seek. Prose, however powerful its appeal to the emotions, is al ways based primarily upon logic, and is thus scien tific ; poetry, whatever its so-called intellectual content is always based upon mere sensation and emotion, and is thus loose and disorderly. A man must have ac quired discipline over his feelings before he can write sound prose; he must have learned how to subordi nate his transient ideas to more general and perma nent ideas; above all, he must have acquired a good head for words, which is to say, a capacity for resist ing their mere lascivious lure. But to write accept-

THE POET AND HIS ART 149

able poetry, or even good poetry, he needs none of these things. If his hand runs away with his head it is actually a merit. If he writes what every one knows to be untrue, in terms that no sane adult would ever venture to use in real life, it is proof of his divine afflation. If he slops over and heaves around in a manner never hitherto observed on land or sea, the fact proves his originality. The so-called forms of verse and the rules of rhyme and rhythm do not offer him difficulties; they offer him refuges. Their pur pose is not to keep him in order, but simply to give him countenance by providing him with a formal orderliness when he is most out of order. Using them is like swimming with bladders. The first lit erary composition of a quick-minded child is always some sort of jingle. It starts out with an inane idea — half an idea. Sticking to prose, it could go no further. But to its primary imbecility it now adds a meaningless phrase which, while logically unre lated, provides an agreeable concord in mere sound — and the result is the primordial tadpole of a son net. All the sonnets of the world, save a few of mir aculous (and perhaps accidental) quality, partake of this fundamental nonsensicality. In all of them there are ideas that would sound idiotic in prose, and phrases that would sound clumsy and uncouth in prose. But the rhyme scheme conceals this nonsen sicality. As a substitute for the missing logical

150 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES plausibility it provides a sensuous harmony. Read ing the thing, one gets a vague effect of agreeable sound, and so the logical feebleness is overlooked. It is, in a sense, like observing a pretty girl, compe tently dressed and made up, across the footlights. But translating the poem into prose is like meeting and marrying her.

II

Much of the current discussion of poetry — and what, save Prohibition, is more discussed in America? — is corrupted by a fundamental error. That error consists in regarding the thing itself as a simple entity, to be described conveniently in a picturesque phrase. "Poetry," says one critic, "is the statement of over whelming emotional values." "Poetry," says an other, "is an attempt to purge language of everything except its music and its pictures." "Poetry," says a third, "is the entering of delicately imaginative pla teaus." "Poetry," says a fourth, "is truth carried alive into the heart by a passion." "Poetry," says a fifth, "is compacted of what seems, not of what is." "Poetry," says a sixth, "is the expression of thought in musical language." "Poetry," says a seventh, "is the language of a state of crisis." And so on, and so on. Quod est poetica? They all answer, and yet they all fail to answer. Poetry, in fact, is two quite distinct things. It may be either or both. One is a

THE POET AND HIS ART 151

series of words that are intrinsically musical, in clang- tint and rhythm, as the single word cellar-door is mu sical. The other is a series of ideas, false in them selves, that offer a means of emotional and imagi native escape from the harsh realities of everyday. In brief, (I succumb, like all the rest, to phrase- making), poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music — a slap on the back in waltz time — a grand release of longings and re pressions to the tune of flutes, harps, sackbuts, psal teries and the usual strings.

As I say, poetry may be either the one thing or the other — caressing music or caressing assurance. It need not necessarily be both. Consider a familiar example from "Othello":

Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owed'st yesterday.

Here the sense, at best, is surely very vague. Prob ably not one auditor in a hundred, hearing an actor recite those glorious lines, attaches any intelligible meaning to the archaic word owed'st, the cornerstone of the whole sentence. Nevertheless, the effect is stupendous. The passage assaults and benumbs the faculties like Schubert's "Standchen" or the slow movement of Schumann's Rhenish symphony; hear-

152 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES ing it is a sensuous debauch; the man anaesthe tic to it could stand unmoved before Rheims cathedral or the Hofbrauhaus at Munich. One easily recalls many other such bursts of pure music, almost meaningless but infinitely delight ful — in Poe, in Swinburne, in Marlowe, even in Joaquin Miller. Two-thirds of the charm of reading Chaucer (setting aside the Rabelaisian comedy) comes out of the mere burble of the words ; the mean ing, to a modern, is often extremely obscure, and sometimes downright undecipherable. The whole fame of Poe, as a poet, is based upon five short poems. Of them, three are almost pure music. Their intel lectual content is of the vaguest. No one would ven ture to reduce them to plain English. Even Poe him self always thought of them, not as statements of poetic ideas, but as simple utterances of poetic (i.e., musical) sounds.

It was Sidney Lanier, himself a competent poet, who first showed the dependence of poetry upon music. He had little to say, unfortunately, about the clang-tint of words; what concerned him almost ex clusively was rhythm. In "The Science of English Verse," he showed that the charm of this rhythm could be explained in the technical terms of music — that all the old gabble about dactyls and spondees was no more than a dog Latin invented by men who were fundamentally ignorant of the thing they discussed.

THE POET AND HIS ART 153

Lanier's book was the first intelligent work ever pub lished upon the nature and structure of the sensuous content of English poetry. He struck out into such new and far paths that the .professors of prosody still lag behind him after forty years, quite unable to understand a poet who was also a shrewd critic and a first-rate musician. But if, so deeply concerned with rhythm, he marred his treatise by forgetting clang-tint, he marred it still more by forgetting con tent. Poetry that is all music is obviously relatively rare, for only a poet who is also a natural musician can write it, and natural musicians are much rarer in the world than poets. Ordinary poetry, average poetry, thus depends in part upon its ideational mate rial, and perhaps even chiefly. It is the idea ex pressed in a poem, and not the mellifluousness of the words used to express it, that arrests and enchants the average connoisseur. Often, indeed, he disdains this mellifluousness, and argues that the idea ought to be set forth without the customary pretty jingling, or, at most, with only the scant jingling that lies in rhythm — in brief, he wants his ideas in the alto gether, and so advocates v ers libre.

It was another American, this time Prof. Dr. F. C. Prescott, of Cornell University, who first gave scien tific attention to the intellectual content of poetry. His book is called "Poetry and Dreams." Its virtue lies in the fact that it rejects all the customary mysti-

154 PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES cal and romantic definitio